I sort of liked the old-fashioned way the woman spoke. I commented, "Many a modern-day fortune has corporate piracy behind it."
"Well, I wouldn't know about that, but I do know that these drug runners today are much like the old pirates." She added, "When I was a girl, we had the rum runners. We're law-abiding people here, but we're on the sea routes."
"Not to mention the Atlantic Coastal Flyway."
"That's for birds."
"Right."
After another minute of chat, I introduced myself as John, and she introduced herself as Mrs. Simmons. I asked her, "Does the Southold Historical Society have any information on pirates?"
We do. Though not much. There are some original documents and letters in the archives. And even a reward poster in our little museum."
"Would you happen to have an authentic pirate treasure map I could photocopy?"
She smiled.
I asked her, "Do you know Fredric Tobin?"
"Well, doesn't everyone? Rich as Croesus."
Who? I asked, "Does he belong to the Southold Historical Society? Mr. Tobin, not Croesus."
"No, but Mr. Tobin's a generous contributor."
"Does he visit your archives?"
"I understand he did. Though not in the last year or so."
I nodded. I had to keep reminding myself that this wasn't Manhattan, that this was a community of about twenty thousand people and that while it wasn't literally true that everyone knew everyone else, it was true that everyone knew someone who knew someone else. For a detective, this was like walking knee-deep in pay dirt.
Anyway, at least one of my searches was over, and I asked Mrs. Simmons, "Could you recommend something for Ms. Whitestone?"
"What is your price range?"
"Nothing is too good for Ms. Whitestone. Fifty dollars."
"Oh… well…"
"A hundred."
She smiled and produced a porcelain chamber pot with a big jug handle, decorated with painted roses. She said, "Emma collects these."
"Chamber pots?"
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. She uses them as planters. She has quite a collection."
"Of course. I've been holding this for her to see. It's late Victorian. Made in England."
"Okay… I'll take it."
"It's actually a bit over a hundred dollars."
"How big a bit?"
"It's two hundred."
"Has it ever been used?"
"I imagine so."
"Do you take Visa?"
"Of course."
"Can you wrap it?"
"I'll put it in a nice gift bag."
"Can you put a bow on the handle?"
"If you'd like."
Transaction complete, I left the antique store with the glorified bedpan in a nice pink and green gift bag.
Okay, off I went to the Cutchogue Free Library, founded in 1984 and still paying the same wages. The library was at the edge of the village green, a big clapboard building with a steeple that looked as if it had once been a church.
I parked and went inside. There was a tough-looking old bird at the front desk who peered at me over a pair of half specs. I smiled and breezed past her.
There was a big banner hung at the entrance to the stacks which read: "Find Buried Treasure-Read Books." Excellent advice.
I found the card catalogue, which, thank God, wasn't computerized, and within ten minutes I was sitting in a reading alcove with a reference book in front of me, titled The Book of Buried Treasure.
I read about a John Shelby of Thackham, England, who in 1672 was thrown from his horse into a thicket where he found an iron pot containing more than five hundred gold coins. According to the treasure trove laws of England, all hidden or lost property belonged to the Crown. However, Shelby refused to give the gold to the king's officers, and he was arrested, tried for treason, and beheaded. This was probably a favorite story of the IRS.
I read about the treasure trove laws of the United States government and of the various states. Basically, all the laws say, "Finders keepers, losers weepers."
There was, however, something called the Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities, and it was pretty clear that anything found on federal land came under the jurisdiction of the secretary of either Agriculture, Defense, or the Interior, depending on the land in question. Furthermore, you needed a permit to dig on federal land and whatever you found belonged to Uncle Sam. What a great deal that was.
If, however, you found money, valuables, or any sort of treasure on your own land, it was pretty much yours, as long as you could prove that the original owner was dead, and/or the heirs were unknown, and that the property wasn't stolen. And even if it was stolen, you could claim it if the rightful owners were known to be dead or unknowable, or enemies of the country at the time the money, goods, or treasure was obtained. The example given was pirate treasure, plunder, bounty, and all that good stuff. So far, so good.
And to make a nice situation even nicer, the IRS, in some unbelievable lapse of greed, required that you pay tax only on the portion you sold or otherwise turned into cash each year, as long as you weren't a professional treasure hunter. So, if you were a biologist, for instance, and you owned a piece of land, and you found buried treasure on it by accident, or as a result of your archaeological hobby, and it was worth, say, ten or twenty million, then you didn't pay a dime in taxes until you sold some of it. What a sweet deal. It almost made me want to go into treasure hunting as a hobby. On second thought, that's what I was doing.
The book also said that if the treasure has historical value or is associated with popular culture-and here, lo and behold, the book gave the specific example of Captain Kidd's lost treasure-then the value of the treasure would be greatly enhanced, and so forth.
I read for a while longer, learning about the treasure trove laws and reading some interesting examples and case histories. One particular case caught my eye-in the 1950s, a man was going through some old papers in the Admiralty Section of the Public Records Office in London. He found a faded letter written in 1750 by a famous pirate named Charles Wilson, addressed to Wilson's brother. The letter had originally been found on a pirate ship that was captured by the British navy. The letter read, "My brother, there are three creeks lying one hundred paces or more north of the second inlet above Chincoteague Island, Virginia, which is the southward end of the peninsula. At the head of the third creek to the northward is a bluff facing the Atlantic Ocean with three cedar trees growing on it, each about one and a half yards apart. Between the trees I have buried ten iron-bound chests, bars of silver, gold, diamonds, and jewels to the sum of 200,000 pounds sterling. Go to the woody knoll secretly and remove the treasure."
Obviously, Charles Wilson's brother never got the letter since it was captured by the British navy. So, who found the treasure? The British navy? Or maybe it was the man who found the letter in the Public Records Office two hundred years later. The author of The Book of Buried Treasure didn't finish the story.
Point was, there is a place called the Admiralty Section of the Public Records Office in London, and God knew what you could find there if you had time, patience, a magnifying glass, a knowledge of old English, and a little greed, optimism, and sense of adventure. I was sure that now I understood the Gordons' lost week in London last year.
I had to assume the Gordons had read what I was reading now and knew the treasure trove laws. Beyond that, common sense would tell them that anything they found on Plum Island belonged to the government-no fifty-fifty split or anything-and that anything they claimed to have found on their rented property belonged to the owner, not the tenants. You didn't need a law degree to figure out any of that.