Читать книгу Topsail Island - Paul Boardman - Страница 6

The job of going below and checking the connections and battery levels had already become repetitive and Langdon’s mind wandered.

That was one helluva story Cynthia told, he mused to himself as he puttered around in the engine room.

I wonder if I could attract fourteen wives by growing a massive beard and sticking some slow burning matches under my hat.

Langdon was fairly certain he was having a discussion with the multiple Margaritas but he answered his own question anyway.

No, I’d probably have better luck if I just kept my hair short and my credit card topped up.

Nevertheless, there was something gnawing at his craw about the odd things that had been happening to Cynthia, He rationalized that she had recently lost her husband and that now she was imagining ghosts behind every corner but an alternative thought nagged away.

It could also be that someone is encouraging her to sell her house … along with the Gold Hole that goes with it.

That idea made a bit of sense but he was more than a bit skeptical that Cynthia’s Gold Hole ever held an ounce of gold. That whole part of her story went back to the late 1930’s. Technology wasn’t that great back then. He doubted that a machine then existed that could penetrate forty feet of sand to locate a stash of gold and silver. He was leaning more in the direction that the entire expedition was a hoax, set up to lure in investors. The whole thing, locating the gold, digging a pit, building a coffer damn, pumping out sand …. Everything …. It could have been nothing more than a Ponzi Scheme.

He recalled what he knew about the famous benchmark scheme to which all other cons had been compared.

1921, New York City, a man by the name of Ponzi started promoting a plan involving postal money orders and foreign currencies. He promised huge returns and sure enough, he delivered. At least his initial investors received huge dividends. They bragged about their astute investment-making capabilities and sure enough, more investors lined up for a quick buck. Of course the investment was totally bogus and was never made. It was nothing more than a pyramid. The investors themselves became the venture’s sales force, convinced with dividends that they were making money and encouraging other investors to join in. The pool of capital swelled. For Ponzi, the only cost of doing business was paying the dividend checks. Ponzi finally decided he had enough and took off with the balance of the capital. He swindled millions, and left his investors with absolutely nothing.

Was the Gold Hole just another elaborate hoax? It seemed very likely.

Blackbeard might well have buried his treasure on Topsail Island but Julian S Jacobs claimed he had discovered an entire ship. Blackbeard would never have abandoned a ship, hoping it would sink in the sand. He tried to look at the situation logically. Blackbeard’s career as a pirate lasted less than two and a half years. Given that he seized over fifty ships and sailed from the Caribbean to Canada, stopping to celebrate with fourteen wives along the way ….. exactly when did he have time to bury treasure so deep in wet sand that his engineering marvel could defeat even 1930 technology. Maybe some other pirate with more time on his hands buried treasure that deep …. But not Blackbeard! He either hid his someplace that was easy to get to, or sank it in shallow water in a location he knew he could return to later. No one would leave treasure in an abandoned ship, in water so shallow that the ship would still be visible.

Centuries ago, the difference between the crew and the captain of a ship was that the captain had the ability to navigate. That skill was a safely guarded secret. If Blackbeard did bury his treasure on a remote beach, it was extremely likely that he was the only person who could reasonably return to the exact spot. There are thousands of miles of shoreline along the eastern seaboard and from out at sea, they all look fairly similar. Chances are good that Blackbeard was the only person on board his ship who ever knew exactly where he was. He sure as hell would never leave his treasure in a ship, run aground on a beach. Even if he ran aground by accident, he would have salvaged the treasure and loaded it onto another ship.

Perhaps some other ship was washed ashore. Nothing to do with Blackbeard at all.

That seemed more realistic. Maybe Jacobs did find a shipwreck of part of a Spanish flotilla carrying its treasure back to Spain. Perhaps the crew and officers drowned as the ship broke up against the shore. That was far more plausible. But most likely, he found nothing.

Langdon realized how accurate Cynthia had been when she said that although she really didn’t believe in the treasure, it was a constant source of hope. He acknowledged that at least part of him had been drawn into the trap. Whatever the real source of undiscovered treasure was, nothing stimulates the juices the way pirate’s gold does. Walt Disney knew that! There was no denying that Langdon was intrigued. He wondered if he was developing a Peter Pan and Captain Hook complex. He knew instinctively that Cynthia’s grain of belief in the Gold Hole had, at the very least, caused her to study the history of Blackbeard and probably the history of a multitude of shipwrecks on the Outer Banks.

The batteries were charging exactly as they should but Langdon lingered in the engine room letting thoughts of Blackbeard bounce around in his mind a bit longer. Blackbeard had been a con man of a different era. The way he had befriended Bonnet and offered him a partnership only to run off with both shares of the loot. A simple, unsophisticated con. When he saw the topsails of another ship above the horizon he would have enacted another con. His modus operandi would have been sailing up to his mark under a friendly flag. Then he would have opened his gun ports and run up his own personal Jolly Roger. At effective cannon range his opponents would have seen a fearsome giant of a man dressed up like the devil himself with smoke roiling out from below his hat. What an act! What a con artist Blackbeard must have been. It was a logical step to surmise that Julius S Jacobs had followed in the same footsteps.

Con artists had been around since the beginning of time. History was full of them.

Ponzi, in New York, was just one of many. Cynthia’s Gold Hole …. A probable swindle. Langdon began to think of more recent fiascos. Pyramids built on mergers and acquisitions until companies like Enron and Lehman Brothers collapsed. The collapses left behind some very rich people. Not much different. Bre-X, the largest gold swindle in history. Bernie Madoff, the philanthropist who looted charities. Swindlers, all of them. Just different flavors. Cons! They made the world go ‘round. They caught people unaware. The problem was that most people will happily believe a lie …. if they want it to be the truth.

His mental meanderings were ended abruptly by Cynthia calling down to see if everything was all right. He climbed out of the engine room assuring her that all was well, already forgetting his more serious thoughts of cons, swindles and misadventure.

There was only an hour of daylight left when Langdon motored through the swells, leaving the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean and entering the narrows of New River Inlet. The ocean waves had been problematic as Cynthia’s cruiser approached the entrance with Langdon’s fishing boat in tow. Not wanting the fishing boat to surf down the waves and ram the stern of the cruiser Langdon had let out a fairly long tow line as they motored through the surf but immediately upon entering the narrows with their ever-changing sand bars he was forced to scramble to shorten the tow line to navigate the channel. The plan had worked well with no small credit going to Cynthia who had been in charge of the tow line as Langdon maintained the wheel. If you overlooked the fuel gauges, she was a very competent deck hand.

After a hectic few minutes, the two boats rounded the northern tip of Topsail Island and the water calmed to a river-like stillness in the Intra-Coastal Waterway. At slack tide, with almost no wind, the short trip back to Cynthia’s private dock on a backwater channel of Topsail Island was as calm as a sunset cruise could be.

As the two boats approached the dock, Cynthia took the wheel allowing Langdon to step off her boat and tie up. She had come in at dead slow and there was no difficulty controlling Langdon’s boat, still in tow behind the cruiser.

Langdon was impressed with Cynthia’s abilities.

“You did that to perfection,” he exclaimed. “How much fuel do you have left?”

Cynthia studied the gauges. “One tank is nearly empty and the other is about an eighth full.”

Langdon laughed. “Now you know where to find that invaluable information.”

Cynthia accepted the jibe good-naturedly.

“Tie up your boat and we’ll go up to the house. I’m starving and I have real food in the freezer.”

Langdon hesitated but decided that he would not feel right until he knew Cynthia was all the way home. They were on the inland side of Topsail Island and Cynthia’s home was on the ocean side. He looked around and noticed a golf cart.

“Is that your ride? I thought you said you ran down to your boat.”

“I’m too damn old to run in anything but a golf cart. Hurry up with those dock lines,” she answered impatiently.

Langdon grinned and got back to his task.

The house was a modest, open-concept two storey, built in the early seventies when Californian architecture was beginning to spring up in different locales. It was not run-down, but it looked like the blistering summer sun and salt water had gotten a bit of an upper hand on the local painter. Inside, it was clean and neat but the kitchen cabinets were the original ones with plywood doors and the appliances looked a good fifteen or twenty years old. A peninsula bar separated the kitchen and the dining room, doing double duty as both a breakfast nook and a cocktail bar. Liquor bottles were lined up neatly on an open shelf and Langdon remarked that it was far better stocked than the galley in the boat.

“That was a full day, for me. I need a Scotch and then I’ll heat up some homemade lasagna,” stated Cynthia.

Langdon nodded. He had stopped drinking Margaritas at four in the afternoon and it was now almost nine o’clock. Cynthia’s menu for supper sounded perfect.

Cynthia may have claimed hunger but she lingered over her Scotch before she even set foot in the cooking part of the kitchen. Langdon sat opposite her at the bar and kept up banal conversation while Cynthia prepared supper. The homemade lasagna might have been frozen but the salad Cynthia was making was all fresh vegetables, not pre-packaged lettuce, cut up and bagged in cellophane. She even made her own salad dressing with olive oil, vinegar, garlic and other spices. Then she reverted to the freezer and baked up a few dinner rolls, courtesy of the Pillsbury Dough Boy. Everything was timed to perfection, table set, salad, fresh rolls and lasagna was all served at once so that Cynthia would not have to get up during the meal. The simple meal warranted and received huge praise from Langdon.

It was now ten-thirty and Langdon was looking at, at least midnight by the time he motored back to Wilmington. Cynthia caught him yawning and promptly offered him the guest room. Langdon began to decline but Cynthia reached for the Scotch and topped up his drink. Given the choice of refusing the drink and motoring back on the ICW half asleep, or accepting another drink and hitting the hay much sooner, Langdon opted for the nightcap and the bed.

X X X X X

Cynthia was an early riser. Langdon heard her banging around in the kitchen and decided it was time to get up. He had barely said good morning when a coffee cup appeared.

“Thank you for staying last night. I can’t tell you how much I appreciated it. I didn’t tell you the whole story yesterday but I thought about it last night before I fell asleep and I decided to fill in a few blanks. That’s if it’s all right by you.”

Langdon nodded. Over a pot of strong coffee she began her personal tale.

Cynthia’s husband had been retired for three years and the two were comfortable when he was diagnosed with cancer. They had about ten acres of land beside their home. The Gold Hole was on their lot which was higher up than most properties on Topsail Island. This was undoubtedly the result of tons of sand being dumped in the surrounding area when the hole was dug. The other explanation was that an ancient ship had been sunk in the ever moving sand and over the centuries a dune had built up, over and around the obstacle. Perhaps nature had helped Blackbeard hide his treasure deeper than he ever intended.

Regardless, Cynthia’s husband had refused to sell the house and the Gold Hole but decided that Cynthia would need additional money and fewer headaches when he died. He had willingly sold the nine remaining acres to a developer who wanted to build ocean-view and ocean front homes. The developer, a young, ambitious man from Florida, had previously built some very fine, custom homes but was still “just getting started.” Her husband met the young man and had liked him immediately. That seemed more important to him than cash. They agreed on a modest down payment because her husband claimed the young man needed most of his cash to secure the development rights. The deal he had struck with the developer was that he would hold the mortgage on the property and receive balloon payments each time a lot or a house was completed and sold. Her husband planned it well. Cynthia would be left with plenty of money for her immediate needs and the balance was safely invested and earning interest from the mortgage. At the time, before the recession, it seemed like a good deal.

The developer started off well, getting the necessary legal work, applications for subdivision and building permits properly in place but as he roughed in the roadways the recession hit full blast and work came to a virtual standstill. Even those who wanted to build, and they were few and far between, had incredible difficulty obtaining financing, despite the federal government subsidizing huge bailout loans and packages to the banks to facilitate borrowing.

The lack of sales and the resultant lack of balloon payments really didn’t matter much to Cynthia. Her husband’s cancer had been mercifully quick and he had really suffered badly only in his final two months. He left her with enough savings that she had no financial worries. The mortgage she now owned on the nine acres meant little to her. Her lawyer told her she could take back the land if the mortgage went into default but at present everything was in good standing. Cynthia was coping with the loss of her husband as well as could be expected but there was no doubt that it was never far from her mind.

Then one day, a UPS truck had pulled up and delivered an envelope to her. Inside there was an offer to purchase her home and the remaining land which included the Gold Hole. It came through an out of state law firm, no purchaser named. All clouded in secrecy. It wasn’t a great offer but it was probably a realistic one. Over the years they had been approached by a dozen realtors, all of whom wanted to list the property for considerably more money. But that was all before the recession. Regardless, Cynthia had not even considered selling and refused the offer without so much as countering it. Two weeks later there had been a massive explosion in the middle of the night. Cynthia felt the whole house shake and was sure it was going to collapse. Then she saw, out a window that had been broken by the blast, what was left of a construction shack out on the new subdivision. It was burning fiercely. A propane refrigerator had started a fire and the tank had exploded. That was what the firemen and police said. They all said she was lucky she was in bed and not in the living room where the window had shattered.

Truth be told, it was really her nerves that had been shattered by the blast. There was a propane furnace in her house and she had always been afraid of propane.

For the first time she considered selling the place and moving to a condo. Her husband would have rolled over in his grave if he was watching. Eventually she had spoken to her lawyer. He advised her that as part of the deal with the developer, Cynthia and her husband had also signed a “Right of First Refusal” on the house. After accepting the offer, if that was what she wished, she would have to notify the developer thereby giving him the right to purchase the house at the same price as the accepted offer. She thanked the lawyer and left his office, saying she was not prepared to sell. Not yet, anyway.

A few weeks passed. Then, again in the middle of the night, she heard a construction machine start up. It was a backhoe. She heard it rolling toward her house. It drove right by her newly repaired window, started up a sand dune, teetered for a moment and rolled over with a crash. She was certain that no one had been in the cab as it passed her window. This time the police and firemen blamed the episode on teenagers based only on footprints in the sand around where the machine had been parked.

Shaken by event, she visited her doctor who prescribed sleeping pills but she was afraid to take them because both incidents had occurred at night.

The third incident happened at eleven o’clock the previous morning. She answered the phone but there was no one on the line. She kept saying hello, three or four times, then there was a terrible bang. She was convinced it was a gunshot. When she saw the look in Langdon’s eyes she apologized for telling him yesterday that it was probably a truck tailgate.

That was the last straw. She ran from the house but stopped short of piling into the Buick. There weren’t many roads on Topsail Island and she could never drive fast enough to win in a car chase. Instead, she hopped into the golf cart, raced down to the dock and untied the boat even before she started the engines. It hadn’t run in three months but it fired up immediately and she had charged out the inlet, not thinking about tides or fuel or anything. When the fuel ran out, she tried again and again to start the engines until the batteries died. Then she just sat there for a while, far enough offshore that there was no danger in just drifting. Eventually she mixed a pitcher of Margaritas with no particular plan beyond having a drink. When she saw Langdon approaching she had topped up her drink and flagged him down as he got closer.

Now, in retrospect, that gunshot on the phone could have been anything. Perhaps the police were right. Her nerves were frayed and now she was creating explanations in her mind that were miles away from reality. As much as she hated to admit it, she was acting like a silly old woman.

“No. Those incidents really happened and they could rattle anyone,” said Langdon kindly. To himself, he was already questioning why the offer from out of state had been from an un-named party. The fact that it had coincided with two accidents and an apparent threat was disturbing. It was more than mere coincidence. He was fully aware that he was falling into a trap himself. It was his nature and there was no point denying it. At times he thought he was a magnet for other people in trouble. He had helped more than a few people caught up with a variety of problems and he was already considering investigating this situation further.