Cradle of Solitude (15 page)

Annja pretended to listen to it, a grave expression on her face, and then turned to the Realtor.

“Thank you so much for your time, Catherine, but I'm afraid Mr. Boucher has decided to pass on the property. He's an eccentric sort, as you can imagine—most people with his level of money are, I've found—and he's just informed me that he can't possibly live in a home that was built in an odd-numbered year. I'm sure you understand.”

Garin kept up the act, alternating waving his hands in the air and letting loose a fresh burst of French. The fact that he seemed to be spouting off his grocery list was completely lost on the poor woman, who looked confused and even a bit unsettled by her would-be client's sudden animation.

Annja took advantage of her hesitation to offer their excuses, blaming it all on herself and suggesting that she get Mr. Boucher away from the property before his anxiety levels grew too high and he had a fit or, heaven forbid, a heart attack.

As Catherine stood there and stared after them in stunned amazement, Annja dragged the ranting Garin back to the car and quickly drove away.

I bet they're sleeping together, Catherine Daley thought as she watched Mr. Boucher and his agent drive off down the street. There just wasn't any other explanation. After all, she'd given him the look more than once, and Lord knew that was all it usually took to reel them in like a catfish on a line. The fact that he'd basically ignored her in favor of that annoying woman was infuriating.

Look what she'd been wearing, for heaven's sake!

And that crazy fit he threw. Whoever heard of such a thing? What difference did it make if the house was built in an even-numbered year or an odd one? Such nonsense!

Yes, that would explain it. He had to be crazy. It certainly made much more sense to believe that he was nuts, than to entertain the thought that a man of Mr. Boucher's obvious sophistication and financial status wouldn't be interested in a woman of her caliber and breeding.

Feeling better about herself now that she understood
her worldview wasn't so drastically challenged, Catherine turned her attention to closing down the property.

As they were her last clients scheduled for the evening, she went through the house checking windows, turning off lights and locking up for the night. It took her some time and night had fully come by the time she was finished. She was walking out to her car when she saw the lights of a vehicle come down the road and pull into the drive.

For a moment she was hopeful that Mr. Boucher had reconsidered, but then she saw that the vehicle was an SUV and knew she couldn't be correct. Mr. Boucher had arrived in a Mercedes.

Another potential client? she thought, then quickly changed her mind. Not the way her week was going. People looking to spend just shy of a million dollars didn't just drop in off the street. It's probably just some tourist who got lost and needed directions.

She took a step toward the vehicle and then stopped as she saw the doors open and three men stepped out. She couldn't see them clearly, as the headlights created a glare, but that was solved a moment later as they moved toward where she was standing at the base of the wide veranda.

“Ms. Daley?” the lead man asked.

His accent was French, much like that of Mr. Boucher. As he came closer she could see that he was dressed similarly, too, in a sharply cut European suit. He was shorter than Mr. Boucher, and cut a less imposing figure, but there was the same assured confidence and expectation that others would do as they were asked.

He had money, that much was clear, and Catherine began to think her day might be looking up, after all.

She took a few steps closer to the newcomers, the
professional salesperson's smile already plastered across her face.

“Yes, I'm Catherine Daley. How can I help you? Have you come to see the plantation?”

Blaine Michaels smiled. “Indeed, I have, Ms. Daley. I'm particularly interested in the wine cellar.”

Catherine frowned as the first inklings that all might not be well began to filter into her consciousness. The man's smile seemed off somehow, as if there was another expression lurking beneath it, one with decidedly less invitation. In fact, Catherine was starting to feel like a crippled deer in front of a hungry wolf and she wasn't sure what to do.

She caught a motion out of the corner of her eye and turned to find one of the other men standing close on her left. She started, taking a step away from him, only to bump into his companion, who had come out of the shadows on her right, effectively hemming her in between them.

Alarms began to sound in the depths of her mind and she spun, intent on locking herself in one of the back bedrooms and calling the sheriff on her cell phone, but her efforts were too little and far too late.

Almost languidly, the big man on her left reached out, sank his fingers into her carefully coiffed hair and yanked backward, pulling her off her feet.

He let go as her feet flew out from under her and the back of her head hit the wooden surface of the veranda with a loud
thunk
. Dazed, she could only struggle feebly as the man who'd grabbed her by the hair took some kind of restraint out of his pocket and quickly secured her hands and feet.

That was it. Just like that she was in their control
and Catherine Daley trembled in fear as she considered what these three men would do to her.

For the second time that evening, she simply didn't understand the dynamics of the situation in which she found herself. The three men who'd come to see her had far more on their minds than that which she feared.

As she stared up at them in horror, the leader of the group leaned in so that his face was only inches from hers.

“My name is Blaine Michaels, Ms. Daley, and if you want to get out of this alive, I suggest you answer all of my questions as truthfully as possible. Do you understand?”

Unable to find her voice due to the fear coursing through her body like a flood, she could only nod.

Michaels smiled again and this time there was no mistaking the malevolence beneath that expression. “Good. Now tell me everything you know about the key without a lock.”

Unable to answer his question due to the fact that she didn't have the faintest idea what he was talking about, Catherine Daley finally understood the true depths of the trouble she was in.

Excited by their early success but exhausted from the long day's travel, Garin and Annja decided to make the short drive back into the town of Washington to find a place to get some dinner and a hotel to stay for the night.

Soon thereafter they were seated in a booth at Jenny's Barbecue Palace with racks of ribs in front of them, discussing what to do next.

“So what's the next stanza of the riddle?” Garin asked.

Annja recited it from memory. “‘There you'll find the Lady, left alone and in distress. You must secure her when you're able, and take Ewell's Rifle from her crest.'”

“Which means what?”

Annja wasn't sure. She shared her thoughts aloud as she worked through it. “Captain Parker was fairly circumspect with the first clue, sort of talking around what he wanted to say, so I'd guess he did the same thing here. Which means the lady in question isn't really a
lady, but something you might refer to in the feminine form.”

“Like a boat,” Garin said. “Since we're talking about the meeting place of two rivers, a boat's the obvious answer, I'd think.”

Annja agreed. “And since the word
lady
was capitalized, I'd guess that's the name of the boat, or at least part of it. Lady something or other, maybe.”

“Right,” Garin replied, taking another bite of barbecued ribs in the process. He carefully chewed, swallowed and then said, “Left alone and in distress might indicate that it was abandoned, damaged in some way.”

It seemed like they were on the right track to Annja. “So we're looking for a boat named
Lady
or with the word
lady
in the name that either ran aground or was damaged near the junction of the two rivers back in 1864.”

“Right,” Garin said, with more than a hint of sarcasm. “You make it sound so easy, Annja.”

“Nothing wrong with being confident.”

“Okay, so what about the rest? Who's this Ewell character and why is his rifle so special?”

That one Annja could answer easily enough. “Confederate Major General Richard Ewell. Took over command of Second Corps after the death of Stonewall Jackson. Perhaps most famously known for failing to take the heights at Gettysburg, which contributed significantly to the Confederate defeat there.”

As for the rifle, Annja didn't know. “Perhaps the clue has been carved into the stock or hidden in the rifle barrel. We won't really know until we find it, now will we?”

They finished their meals and then made their way down the street to a family-owned hotel the owner of
the restaurant had suggested. It turned out to be a decent, serviceable place and they got two rooms for the night, agreeing to meet for breakfast in the morning to continue their search.

That night, Annja used the hotel's internet connection to try and find any information on a Confederate-era boat or naval vessel that might have gone aground during the Civil War. She was able to log into the Atlanta public library and search through old issues of the
Columbus Enquirer, The Augusta Chronicle
and even
The Atlanta Constitution,
though that didn't begin publication until Georgia rejoined the Union in 1868. Unfortunately, none of them contained anything that was helpful to her search.

General searches through various publications and websites produced quite a few Confederate vessels that had run aground or been forced to do so in order to keep from sinking, including the CSS
Atlanta
and the CSS
Chattahoochee,
but none that were anywhere near the site of the two rivers.

Knowing she had to get some sleep if she was going to be at all useful in the morning, Annja decided to leave a question on her favorite newsgroups, hoping some Civil War buff out there in cyberspace might have the information she needed. She logged onto alt.archaeology and alt.archaeology.esoterica and left the same message on each.

With that accomplished, she spent a few minutes looking into the issue of Ewell's Rifle. By the time she was finished, it was after midnight. Knowing she had a long day ahead of her, Annja shut down the laptop and tried to get some sleep.

Unfortunately, rest didn't come easy, as her thoughts kept wandering to Bernard and whether or not he was being treated properly by those who'd taken him. She fervently hoped Garin was right, that they needed Bernard in good health in order to help them find the treasure, which of course put more pressure on her to figure out the puzzle before they did.

Eventually, restless sleep finally came.

 

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, when checking her accounts online, Annja found a response from someone with the screen name SouthernRising in the alt.archaeology newsgroup.

I knew it! Annja thought.

It wasn't a big leap to think that Parker would have considered a grounded vessel as being in distress; he was a Navy man, after all. Depending upon how long the ship was used as a temporary headquarters, it also
stood to reason that he would have set foot inside it at some point when the remains of the treasury were under his control, giving him the time he needed to leave a clue behind for those who were to come after him.

That was all well and good, except for the fact that expecting the remains of a Confederate ironclad, one of only thirty such ships ever built, to still be sitting on the side of the river after all this time was ridiculous, even to someone with her sense of optimism. She'd been witness to some strange miracles in the past few years, but that was asking too much. The historical value of the vessel alone would have resulted in its being salvaged in the modern era, if it had even lasted that long.

She wasn't willing to give up without looking into it, however. Bernard's life might depend on it.

Maybe it's in a museum somewhere, she thought.

A quick search in Google brought up some information on the subject.

The ship had, indeed, run aground in 1864, just as SouthernRising's message had indicated. After the war, the Union Navy made plans to free the
Marietta
from its inglorious beaching in mid-1894, intending to use what scrap iron they could salvage from the wreck on other reconstruction projects. The salvage crew managed to raise the hull from the clay it had been mired in over the years, but a lack of funding kept them from transporting it north until later that fall.

Once the money had been raised, the crew returned to the site, only to be delayed once more as a category-four hurricane came roaring out of the Atlantic and rushed across most of Georgia in early October.

After several days the hurricane eventually blew over, but the damage had been done. The hulk of the
Marietta
had been carried away by the flooding waters of the Savannah River, never to be seen again.

“Damn it!” Annja said.

Without the ship, and Ewell's Rifle, they were dead in the water, no pun intended.

With no better idea of what to do next, Annja sent a message to SouthernRising via the email address he'd left at the end of his newsgroup posting.

 

Would you happen to know if any trace of the
Marietta
was uncovered after the hurricane?

 

To her surprise, his reply was almost immediate. She must have caught him at the computer.

Check this out, he suggested, including a link to an article from
The Atlanta Constitution
dated six months before. The article was in reference to a University of Atlanta–funded expedition to try and locate the
Diamond Jim,
a famous twin-wheeled paddleboat that had sunk in 1952 in the Savannah River. During the search, the university crew had chanced upon an area of the river bottom that had “an unusually high concentration of iron.” There was some speculation in the article that the wreck might be that of a cargo barge that had gone down several years before during another period of flooding.

Annja looked at that article and in her gut she knew.

It wasn't a barge at all.

It was the missing
Marietta.

But when she suggested as much to Garin at breakfast a half hour later, he laughed.

“You can't be serious, Annja!” he said. “A single reading of a mysterious metal anomaly in the middle of the river is your proof that the ship we're looking for,
one that vanished over a hundred years ago, is sitting there waiting for us to come and get it?”

Annja nodded. “Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.” She caught his gaze with her own and stared back at him with complete confidence in her conviction. “Think about it, Garin. When have you known me to be wrong about this kind of thing?”

She'd been good at tracking down lost tombs and ancient civilizations before she'd taken up the sword and ever since she'd done so she'd only gotten better. It was as if the sword helped her focus in some strange way, made her better at those things at which she already excelled.

Grudgingly, he had to admit she could be right.

“Even if that is the
Marietta,
” he said, “how is that going to help us? It's been underwater for more than a century and that's not taking into account that it was put there by a hurricane. We'll be lucky if it isn't scattered into a thousand pieces across the river bottom.”

“We won't know until we look and see, now will we?” she replied.

The question was, how were they going to manage that?