“ So what?” Granny asked.
“ That’s what I stuck my hand in. They filled that big mama with papier-mache and coated her with a thin layer of silver!”
“ So write a story for the National Geographic. What’s it got to do with you?”
“ The one-ton nugget has never been accounted for. I searched all the records. Every big event in the mines was duly recorded. It would have been major news if the nugget had been melted down or sold or put on display, but it simply dropped off the face of the earth.”
“ Or back into someone’s mine,” Charlie offered.
“ Exactly. Maybe the same someone who filched the Silver Queen from the museum put the nugget back in that mine, too. Or maybe it’s in the Mollie Gibson, or who knows where.”
Granny had reeled in and found her hook missing its chunk of squid. “Don’t tell me you’re going to go look for it. Not after all you’ve been through.”
“ I’ve got the maps, the charts, the old mining logs,” I said.
“ How’d you manage that?”
“ Bought ‘em. Bought Cimarron’s stock actually.”
“ Of all the damn fool…”
“ No, listen, Granny. The court divided the company’s cash up among all the investors, about thirty cents on the dollar. Cimarron’s stock passed to Jo Jo, who owned it at the time of her death.”
“ You mean she killed her husband and gets his assets?” Granny demanded, her sense of justice offended.
“ She got them and never lost them because she wasn’t prosecuted for killing Cimarron. The probate court in Colorado put the stock up for sale. Nobody wanted it, so I bought it-seventy percent of the company-for a hundred bucks. I already had ten percent.”
“ You’re not serious, Jacob. What do you want it for? It’s cursed.” Granny only called me by my given name when she was perturbed.
“ Hey, it’s not for the money. It’s like a game, a scavenger hunt. You have these old maps and diaries from a hundred years ago, and you know somewhere under the ground is this treasure. Well, it just starts to take hold of you.”
“ Uh-huh,” she said, not sounding convinced.
“ So I thought maybe Kip would come up there with me. He already feels comfortable in school there, and who knows, maybe we’ll find the nugget just like Cimarron found the Silver Queen.”
Granny and Charlie seemed to chew it over for a while. Then Granny said, “No use trying to talk Jacob out of anything. Boy’s got a stubborn streak inherited from Lord knows who.”
Charlie took off his hat, cleared his throat, and pulled a pipe out of a pocket on his fishing vest. He tamped cherry tobacco into the bowl and struggled to keep a match lit in the breeze. “What about the other twenty percent?”
“ Blinky’s share,” I said. “It’s being held in trust by the court until he’s declared dead. There was no way to find his body in the rubble.”
“ Uh-huh.”
When Charlie’s brain cells are cranked up, he usually stays quiet a while. Off the bow, an osprey dive-bombed the water just off the reef and came up with a parrot fish.
After a moment, Charlie said, “Other than Kip here, you doing this treasure hunting by yourself?”
“ I might find some help.”
“ From whom?”
“ I thought I should get someone with a little experience.”
“ There’s something you’re not telling us.”
I put on my innocent face. “Like what?”
“ Where’s Baroso?”
Granny growled at that one. “Dead, ain’t he? If he was shot in the leg, he never could have gotten out of the cavern, and even if he did, he couldn’t have climbed all the way up. Isn’t that right, Jake?”
“ That’s the way I figure it,” I said.
Granny nodded her approval.
“ Unless he took the elevator,” I added.
They both gave me a look.
“ Blinky had this old elevator working off a couple of twelve-volt batteries. I missed it on the way in, but I found it on the way out, just before I got to the stone ladder. It’s the way I got back to the top.”
“ You left that part out.”
“ Not when I told the cops. That’s how I explained the blood.”
Again, the look from both of them.
“ There were fresh drops inside the cage. I added a few with my bleeding shoulder. The cops had no reason to test it because they figured it was all mine, and I mostly told the truth: The last time I saw Blinky he was in the cavern, and a couple of seconds later, it was a tomb.”
Charlie made a tsk-tsking sound. “Misleading the police, I’m surprised at you.”
“ I didn’t mislead them. I just didn’t go out of my way to help them.”
“ Where’d he go?” Granny asked. “How’d he get away?”
“ When I got out of the tunnel, Jo Jo’s pickup was still there, but the Jeep was gone.”
“ So he contacted you,” Granny said, prompting me to continue.
“ In a manner of speaking,” I said.
“ Jacob, don’t be difficult.”
“ When I got to my rental car, I almost missed it, but on the windshield, somebody had used a finger to write a note in the fresh snow.”
“ Lordy, do go on!” Granny shouted, excitedly.
“ Please do,” Charlie pleaded.
I didn’t answer.
“ Jacob!” Granny demanded.
I still didn’t answer.
Kip joined the chorus. “C’mon, Uncle Jake. What’d he say? I’ll bet it wasn’t ‘Rosebud.’ “
“ You know, the three of you are the only people in the world I love with all my heart,” I said.
“ So?” Granny demanded.
“ So, I m sorry.”
“ What in hell’s fire is that supposed to mean?”
“ Attorney-client privilege,” I said, and then I felt a tug on my line.