Spartan Gold
Sam Fargo rose from his crouch and glanced over at his wife, who stood up to her waist in oozing black mud. Her bright yellow chest waders complemented her lustrous auburn hair. She sensed his gaze, turned to him, pursed her lips, and blew a wisp of hair from her cheek. "And just what are you smiling at, Fargo?" she asked.
When she'd first donned the waders he'd made the mistake of suggesting she looked like the Gorton's Fisherman, which had earned him a withering stare. He'd hastily added "sexy" to the description, but to little effect.
"You," he now replied. "You look beautiful -- Longstreet." When Remi was annoyed at him she called him by his last name; he always responded in kind with her maiden name.
She held up her arms, coated to the elbows in slime, then said with a barely concealed smile, "You're crazy. My face is covered in mosquito bites, and my hair is flatter than paper." She scratched her chin, leaving behind a dollop of mud.
"It simply adds to your charm."
"Liar."
Despite the look of disgust on her face, Sam knew Remi was a trouper without peer. Once she set her mind on a goal, no amount of discomfort would dissuade her.
"Well," she said, "I have to admit, you do look rather dashing yourself."
Sam tipped his tattered Panama hat at her, then went back to work, scooping mud from around a length of submerged wood he hoped was part of a chest.
For the past three days they'd been plodding through the swamp, searching for that one clue that might prove they weren't on a wild-goose chase. Neither of them minded a good goose chase -- in treasure hunting it came with the turf -- but it was always better to catch the goose in the end.
In this case, the goose in question was based on an obscure legend. While the nearby Chesapeake and Delaware bays were said to be home of nearly four thousand shipwrecks, the prize Sam and Remi were after was land based. A month earlier Ted Frobisher, a fellow treasure hunter who'd retired not long ago to concentrate on his antique shop in Princess Anne, had sent them a brooch with an intriguing provenance.
The pear-shaped gold and jade brooch was said to have belonged to a local woman named Henrietta Bronson, one of the first victims of the notorious outlaw Martha "Patty" (a.k.a. Lucretia) Cannon.
According to legend Martha Cannon was a tough, ruthless woman who in the 1820s not only stalked the wilds of the Delaware-Maryland border with her gang, robbing and murdering the wealthy and poor alike, but who also ran a hostel in what was then called Johnson's Corners, today Reliance.
Cannon would lure travelers into her establishment and feed, entertain, and tuck them in to bed before murdering them in the middle of the night. She would drag the bodies into the basement, take anything of value, then stack them in the corner like cordwood until she'd accumulated enough to warrant a wagon trip to a nearby forest, where she would bury them en masse. Horrific as that was, Cannon would later commit what many considered her most heinous crimes.
Cannon established what many local historians had dubbed a "reverse underground railroad," kidnapping freed southern slaves and keeping them bound and gagged in the inn's many secret rooms and its makeshift earthen dungeon before sneaking them in the dark of the night to Cannon's Ferry, where they would be sold and loaded onto ships headed down the Nanticoke River bound for Georgia's slave markets.
In 1829, while plowing a field on one of Cannon's farms, a worker uncovered several partially decomposed bodies. Cannon was speedily indicted on four counts of murder, found guilty, and sentenced to prison. Four years later she died in her cell by what most agreed was suicide by arsenic.
In subsequent years both Cannon's crimes and her ultimate demise grew in myth, ranging from the claim that Cannon had escaped from prison and went on murdering and robbing far into her nineties, to tales that have her ghost still roaming the Delmarva Peninsula, waylaying unsuspecting hikers. What few people disputed was that Cannon's loot -- of which she'd reportedly spent only a fraction -- had never been recovered. Estimates put the treasure's present-day value somewhere between $100,000 and $400,000.
Sam and Remi had of course heard the legend of Patty Cannon's treasure, but lacking solid leads they'd consigned it to the "someday" file. With the emergence of Henrietta Bronson's brooch and an exact datum with which to begin their search, they'd decided to tackle the mystery.
After spending the past eight hours first roasting in the hot sun and then navigating a shark's mouth of a reef break, the shaded lagoon felt like paradise. Roughly one hundred feet in diameter, it was sheltered to the north and south by curved thumbs of land choked with scrub pine and palms. The cliff, which rose thirty vertical feet from the water, was blanketed in vines, foliage, and overhanging banyan trees -- the two most prominent ones forming the goat's horns. To the left of the cliff lay a crescent of white sand roughly the size of a standard house deck. With the sun on its downward arc toward nightfall, the lagoon was cast in deep shade. The water was glass calm. In the canopy came a symphony of squawks and buzzes.
"Not a bad place to spend the night," Remi agreed. "Not the Four Seasons, but it does have a certain charm. The question is, are we in the right place?"
"I don't know the answer to that, but one thing's for certain: We've got a cave." Sam pointed, then turned the rudder and steered toward the cliff face, throttling down as he drew alongside it.
The water here, moving in a barely perceptible clockwise rotation, gave off a faint iridescent shimmer, which generally indicated an outflow of fresh water. Sam dug out his dive goggles from the duffel bag at his feet, pressed them to his eyes, and dipped his face into the water, which, despite being warmed by the sun all day, felt cool on his skin. Dozens of fish darted this way and that, squabbling over invisible bits of nutrients being stirred up by the freshwater current.
Sam lifted his head out. He dipped his fingertip into the water and brought it to his lips. It tasted only about a third as salty as true seawater.
"Underground river?" Remi asked.
"Has to be," Sam replied, shaking the water from his hair.
Though it was an uncommon phenomenon, sea caves in this area did on occasion link up with both solutional and fracture-guided caves, which in turn joined underground inland streams.
"I'll have to look at a map. I think we're only a couple miles from Lake George. I wouldn't be surprised if this system dumps out there. Or even down to Salt Lake."
"Neither would I, but if you don't mind I'd prefer we put that adventure on our 'someday' list."
"Deal." Sam checked his watch. High tide was thirty minutes away. If they were going to explore the cave, they'd have to do it within the next hour lest they find themselves fighting the full force of the outflow. Ideally, they would enter at the end of the inflow, use the forty-five- to sixty-minute window of relatively calm current to explore the cave, then ride the outflow back out. The problem was, this was not a typical closed sea cave. The source of the underground river inside would create volatile currents that could either trap them inside or suck them into fracture tunnels that led into the bowels of the island. Neither option appealed to Sam.
He put the question to Remi, who replied, "I'd rather we wait, but I know that look in your eye: You want to go in."
"Better we find out now if we're on the right track. We've got seventy-five feet of rope. We tie one end to a banyan root out here, the other end to my weight belt. If I get into trouble, I can haul myself out."
"And if you bonk your head and are out cold?"
"Every sixty seconds I'll give the line three tugs. I miss one of those and you haul me out using the dinghy."
"Time limit?"
"Ten minutes, not a second more."
Remi considered this for a few moments, narrowed her eyes at him, then sighed. "Okay, Jacques Cousteau. Remember what I said, though: If you die, I'll never forgive you."
Sam smiled and gave her a wink. "Deal."
The water enveloped him, so cold it momentarily stunned him like an electrical charge. Fighting his natural instinct to surface for air, Sam instead did the opposite. With the man still wrapped in a bear hug, he rolled over, flipped his legs straight up, and kicked, driving them deeper. The man was stunned, and with his shattered nose he'd hopefully been unable to snatch a last-second breath.
The man thrashed, punched wildly with his right arm. Sam took the blows and held on. The man suddenly stopped punching. Sam felt his arm between them. He looked down. Through the dark water and froth he saw the man's hand reaching under his jacket. The hand came out clutching a knife. Sam grabbed the forearm, tried to shove it sideways. The knife arced upward. Sam pushed off. The blade sliced through his shirt; he felt a sting as it sliced across his abdomen. The blade kept rising. Sam released his grip on the man's other wrist, clamped it around the man's knife hand. He sensed rather than saw the blade nearing his throat. He jerked his head back, turned it to one side. The tip of the knife skipped over the point of his jawline beneath his earlobe, pierced the upper curve of his ear, and sliced cleanly through.
A dozen years of judo had taught Sam the power of leverage. The man, having extended his more powerful right arm above his head, was at that moment at his weakest. Sam wasn't about to let the advantage pass. Left hand still gripping the man's knife wrist, Sam reversed his right-hand grip, cupped the back of the man's hand, then jerked down and twisted at the same time. With a dull pop, the man's ulna tore free from his wrist. The man's mouth flew open and he let out a muffled scream amid a stream of bubbles. Sam kept twisting, heard the grating of bone on bone. The knife fell away and dropped out of sight.
Sam rolled again, kicked downward. They thumped into the bottom. The man clawed at Sam's eyes with his left hand. Sam clenched his eyes shut, turned his head away, then drove his right hand up and palm-butted the man in the chin. The man's head snapped backward. Sam heard a sickening crunch. The man jerked once, twice, then went still. Sam opened his eyes. The man's own eyes, fixed and lifeless, stared back. Behind the man's head a jagged, triangular-shaped rock jutted from the sandy bottom. Sam let him go and he floated away, trailing tendrils of blood as he bumped along the bottom. After a few moments he disappeared into the gloom.
Sam coiled his legs and pushed himself off the bottom. He broke the surface beneath one of the plank walkways and laid his head back and gulped air until his vision began to clear.
"Sam!" Remi called. "Here, this way, come on!"
Sam paddled toward her voice. Draped in soaked clothes, his arms felt as if they were stroking through molasses. He felt Remi's hands gripping his. He grabbed the gunwale and let her help him aboard. He rolled onto the deck and lay still, panting. Remi knelt beside him.
"Oh, God, Sam, your face ..."
"Looks worse than it is. A few stitches and I'll be back to my devilishly handsome self."