Annie nodded. “Our attic is big. I’ll take this end if you take the other end.”
“That sounds like a plan. We’ll meet in the middle. With any luck we’ll be out of here before sunrise.”
Chapter 7
“I’m not proud of my past, Arcadias. I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life, but I’ve never committed a felony until now,” Iris said. She sat tensely in an easy chair in the parlor, her back rigid and straight. Colette and Damien sat nearby on an antique sofa. Arcadias paced back and forth in front of the marble hearth. His boots squeaked with each anxious step.
“We’ve hardly started our search. It’s too early to say whether things are going well or not. There’s a lot of house left to explore,” Arcadias replied. “We’ll find it, Iris.”
“But then what do we do? Where will we go? We’ll be on the run the rest of our days.”
“You can go wherever you want. You’ll have the means to do it.”
“I’ve never had any money to speak of. But the way you talk, it sounds as if you’re not coming with me,” Iris said.
“They’ll be looking for couples, Iris. When we find the treasure we should settle up and go our separate ways to increase our chances at evasion.”
“But how do we convert the gold into money?”
“There are all kinds of rare coin and gold buyers out there. It’s also easy to melt the coins down into bars. You’ll need to get you a graphite crucible, an acetylene torch, and an ingot mold. Put the gold into the crucible, sprinkle a little boric acid onto the gold and melt it with the torch. Then, using the tongs, you pour the molten gold into the ingot mold. That’s what I’m going to do. The melted gold will attract less attention.”
“I don’t mean to be a wet blanket, Arcadias,” Damien interjected, “but have you considered that Lafitte may have come back and dug up his treasure? You showed me the note. It looked to me like Lafitte wrote down the coordinates so he could find it later.”
Arcadias stopped pacing and faced his younger brother. Looking at Damien was almost like looking in a mirror. Same hair, same height, and nearly identical weight, the only noticeable physical difference between them was the color of their eyes. Damien sported blue eyes instead of gray ones like Arcadias. Two years younger, and a longtime construction worker, Damien possessed as many sun-induced wrinkles as Arcadias.
“Your point is valid, Damien. But I don’t think Lafitte would have had time. The treasure came from a Spanish galleon he plundered late in 1816. Not long thereafter Lafitte agreed to be a spy for Spain and left his Barataria Bay smuggling port in April of 1817 and settled on Galveston Island in Texas.”
Damien shook his head, still unsure. “Why would he leave that much money lying around in the ground? It seems foolish.”
“There wasn’t much of a banking system back then. The ground was as good a place as any for safekeeping.”
“Except that much of Louisiana is below sea level and the soil is unstable.”
Arcadias nodded. “I think this is why Lafitte buried the loot this far inland. He had to find a stable place where it would stay put.”
Damien sighed. “That sounds logical, Arcadias. We just need to find it.”
Colette patted Damien’s knee. “Yes, you do need to find it, honey. If you don’t find it I’ll haunt you from the grave. You’ve made me a criminal. So if I am to be a lawbreaker I better be a rich one.”
Arcadias looked at Colette with hidden antipathy. Colette was the laziest person he’d ever met. She and Damien maintained a more traditional relationship, while he and Iris were simply friends with occasional benefits. “Then we need to get busy if we are to find the treasure,” Arcadias said. “Damien, you should continue scanning the grounds. And maybe the carriage house as well. Iris, you and Colette search all the rooms in the house with the handheld scanners. I’ll go under the crawlspace and search there. Keep your two-way radios handy and set to channel 1. We’ll convene back here in two hours.”
Chapter 8
Grand Isle, Louisiana
Lorelei and Alisha Charbonneau stood in front of the small treasure hunting shop and peered into the storefront window. A “Closed” sign hung on the locked door. “I’m sorry, honey. But it looks as if your father isn’t here,” Lorelei said to her daughter.
“It’s just as well, Mom. He probably doesn’t want to see me anyway.”
Lorelei placed an arm around her daughter’s shoulder. “It doesn’t matter whether he does or doesn’t. I’m just so proud of you that you want to reach out to your father. You’re only fifteen approaching sixteen, but you’re already more mature than Arcadias is at forty-seven.”
“Something the pastor said at youth group convicted me. He quoted scripture from the Bible. Matthew 6: 14-15 says, ‘For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.’”
“That’s not easy to do, Alisha. We all struggle to forgive someone who has wronged us.”
“Do you think you can ever forgive, Dad?”
“I don’t know. I hope at some point I can. But he abandoned us. And I begrudge him so much for that. Maybe on my deathbed I’ll forgive him. But right now my heart is too hard. It’s not soft like yours, Alisha.”
“I just don’t understand. Why did Dad leave us, Mom? Doesn’t he love us?”
“I’d like to think Arcadias loves us. But if he does it’s not nearly as much as his treasure hunting. When you were small he doted over you. You were his little princess. But then his obsession with Jean Lafitte took over. It’s all he can think about now.”
“He chose a pirate and a legend of buried treasure over us?”
Lorelei sighed. “I’m afraid so. At one time everything was perfect. Your father was a respected professor. His students enjoyed his classes. We were always asked to attend faculty parties. And we had a stable income and lived in a nice home. But then the lure of gold enticed him, and he couldn’t resist its pull.”
“Do you think he’ll ever find the treasure?”
Lorelei shrugged. “Arcadias often said he’d one day hold Lafitte gold in his hands or die trying.”
“I hope he finds it. Maybe his obsession will end when he finds it.”
Lorelei scowled. “And maybe he’ll finally realize his real treasure was at home all along.”
“Mom, someday I hope to get married. Who will walk me down the aisle? My grandpas are both dead.”
“You don’t need to worry about that, honey. That’s a ways off. I’m sure we’ll figure something out by then. I’ll start praying right now that God will bring a virtuous man into our lives that will count it an honor to walk you down the aisle.” Lorelei took her daughter’s arm. “Since Copeland is hosting the town hall debate tonight, let’s skip all the traffic and news crews and stay here in Grand Isle tonight. We’ll buy some food and have supper on the beach. The sunsets are so beautiful here.”
Alisha smiled. “That sounds fun.”
“Great, let’s do it,” Lorelei said, handing the keys to Alisha. “You might as well drive. You have your learner’s permit now.”
Alisha smiled and grabbed the keys. “Thanks, Mom. You’re the best.”
Mother and daughter descended a set of steps to the ground—every building in Grand Isle sat on stilts to combat flooding from hurricanes—and climbed back into their faded Honda. Driving carefully, Alisha chauffeured her mother toward the other end of the island, leaving Charbonneau’s Treasure Shack far behind them.