LAST ASSAULT ON OAK ISLAND 2
Chapter 2
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They landed at the small Mahone Bay airport and were met by a Captain Maruso who took them by boat, the Second Wind, to Oak Island, unaware of the pair of eyes that watched every move.
“Welcome!” Maruso called as they approached the 42-foot boat bearing the fanciful lettering of Second Wind tethered to the dock. “Come aboard, Doctor, Lauren!”
He tipped his hat, giving Lauren a good-natured grin. She found it a little friendlier than needed, especially coming from someone built more like he should be hauling in industrial fishing nets single-handedly than trawling the bay. He was in his mid- to late-twenties, she guessed, with dark hair and eyes. She returned a small smile as he grabbed her bags from her hand.
Carlos cleared his throat and stepped aboard the boat, eyes on the island in the bay. “Thank you, Captain. This is Lauren, my student assistant. Lauren, Captain Maruso of the Second Wind.”
Before Lauren could move, Maruso prodded her along short gangplank that moved with the boat’s bobbing on the water.
“...Thanks. Nice to meet you,” she said, tripping down the few steps from the dock at low tide.
“Settled in?” Maruso asked, not waiting for a reply as he brushed past his new passengers and untied the ropes tethering the boat to the dock. “Off we go.”
Lauren thought the use of the boat a little odd, considering the causeway that breached the short distance to the island. She grabbed a railing as the Second Wind was suddenly loosened from the dock.
She glanced from Maruso to Carlos, who was still looking out across the brilliantly blue water.
The boat gained speed and headed out to circle around the opposite side of Oak Island.
Carlos and Maruso exchanged a few words as they made the bend in the eastern shore of the island moments later and Lauren could see the brick lighthouse on-land. The island itself wasn’t large and was just a dot on most maps of Nova Scotia. Maruso had a map of the bay it was on that he showed them, issued by a tourism group, but other than that, the island was too small to matter to many people. It was only one of the nearest to the mainland of over 350 scattered in the bay.
Nor did it occur to Lauren Captain Maruso was to be provisional in capacities other than transportation.
When they docked the Second Wind down shore from the lighthouse and piled their luggage into a waiting Jeep she realized that he, too, was going to play a role in what she was beginning to think of as the Maddock-Sheldon expedition.
Why else, she wondered, would they need a private transport? She found herself studying him from the back seat of the Jeep as he drove. He glanced to the rearview mirror to see her, grinned, and took the vehicle down the dirt road to the lighthouse. The noise of earth drills was loud around them.
On the way from the mainland and to the lighthouse Maruso hadn’t mentioned the pit in any personal manner, only commenting how the 200th anniversary of the mysterious hole brought more new business for the summer. Most of these were vendors and concession stands, converted trailers for the most part. Nothing permanent.
Maruso pointed to the interior of the island as they passed a slight bend in the road. “You’ll get used to the racket,” he said over the noise.
Lauren nodded, watching Carlos’ gaze focus on the direction of the unseen drilling rigs. She looked back to Maruso. He was a few steps above the fishermen she’d seen at the docks, but in no way yacht-owning material.
They turned the round of single-lane road to meet the house for the lightkeeper. It was small, but well-kept, finished in a dark red brick to match the tower that rose a hundred feet from it, glass panes at the top clear and unlit in the daylight. A small garden was left of the house and even lines of green shoots were visible.
“Well, well,” a voice greeted them from the porch of the cottage as Maruso parked the Jeep. A short man of Carlos’ age with a belly stood there, standing akimbo at the door. He raised a hand. “Good to see you, Carlos! Thanks, Captain Maruso!”
Carlos climbed out of the Jeep more limberly than his 70 years should have allowed. “Rudy! You look well, my friend.”
Lauren watched Carlos and Rudy as she got out and snagged her bags before Maruso could open her door.
Maruso looked slighted as she moved down the cobble path with her bags. “You’re making it look bad, you know?”
She turned and gave him a confused look as she hitched one of her bag straps over her shoulder. “I am?”
He shot a look at Carlos, who was already at the porch with Rudy, and then back at her. “Yeah. You are.”
". . . Sorry," she mumbled, uncertain.
They went inside the small cottage and Carlos made hasty introductions to the lightkeeper as they sat at the tiny kitchen’s table. The suitcases and bags were stowed in the sitting room nearby as Rudy kept a lively banter with Carlos over the noise of the drilling from the operations working the island.
"The anniversary this year has led to a riotous attraction," Rudy said with a thick French accent. He bustled around the room, wedging his potbellied-self between the backs of chairs and the walnut hutch behind him. "But that won’t concern us. Tea for everyone? That’s why I agreed to enlist Captain Maruso."
Lauren looked to the man sitting across the table from her. He smiled, taking off his cap and running a hand through his dark hair.
"Transportation is essential," Rudy added. "So is silence. Already Clemens is suspicious."
Lauren was about to ask for details on Clemens, wondering if he was the same man who had written the article a few years ago, when she took a sip of her tea Rudy placed before her. It was more than the heat that scorched her throat.
Maruso chuckled. "Watch out for Rudy. He spikes everything."
She gave her tea a suspicious look. "Thanks."
Rudy closed the curtains over the small windows at the sink and counter.
"Where is it?" Carlos wanted to know, tapping the table with his fingers.
"Safe." Rudy smiled in a taunting manner. "First let me tell you more about how I got it." He sat down in the remaining chair. "My nephew Phil is quite an auction-goer and he got it in Sussex at the Brielle estate sale about six months ago. The Brielles were once a prominent British family until late in the eighteenth century. They lost credibility with the Crown in 1780 or so when their foremost member of the Royal Navy, Admiral Claude Brielle, somehow lost or stole a payroll destined for the troops in Virginia during the American Revolution. According to the family’s accepted history, Admiral Brielle claims to have been attacked by privateers and the bankroll stolen."
"How much?" Carlos asked.
"A little over two million pounds." Rudy smiled. "No one believed Brielle’s story for several reasons. According to habit, privateers take everything of value when they attack, and Brielle’s ship, the Lady Grey, had silver flatware aboard when she returned to Britain. Another oddity is that the ship’s log placed the vessel off the coast of what is now Black Island Sound, New York, at the time of the attack." He sat back, shaking his head. "The Lady Grey was to take troops and the payroll to Virginia—part pay and part bribe during the war—and never should have been that far north. She departed in September of 1776 and returned in 1777.
"Brielle tried to blame the tardiness on the privateer incident and getting lost," he said, downing half his tea in a gulp. "Also onboard was a man from the Royal British Engineers. His name was Stuart and he was sort of an unofficial observer or advisor from Parliament that Brielle was supposed to drop off with troops in Virginia. Unfortunately, he was killed in the fight with the privateers."
"Conveniently," Carlos added.
"Exactly."
Lauren watched the three men looked at each other for several long moments as if a conspiratorial note had suddenly been passed among them that skipped her.
"You have the ship’s log?" she asked. She couldn’t wait for Carlos to elaborate.
"No," both Carlos and Rudy said in unison.
"We have Brielle’s personal account of the war," Rudy admitted modestly. "A journal written in his own hand."
She smiled a little. "Really?"
Everyone nodded.
"Debatable now is not the authenticity of the diary—to us," Rudy continued as he stood and filled everyone’s cup with tea again, "but if Brielle did indeed bury anything on Oak Island. The timeframe is right, and so is the amount of money missing. As for the opportunity, motive, and resources, Brielle had them all. Two million pounds can foster greed in anyone, especially a man halfway across the world, carrying government money. The Lady Grey had a crew of ninety - more than enough to carry out an operation like the Money Pit. Stuart could have supplied the technology. Maybe he even got a split from Brielle at a later date."
Lauren was still skeptical. "But what makes you think the journal has anything to do with the pit? Is it mentioned?"
"I can’t read it; that’s why Carlos is here," Rudy said with no real regret as he sat back in his chair. "In 1803, a stone was found in the pit with a coded inscription. It was deciphered by a computer cryptologist as reading ‘Forty feet below two million pounds are buried’. That’s where the amount two million comes from. The journal uses a similar code in several places."
Rudy stood and found a paper in the sitting room secretary and returned. He put it on the table before Carlos. A series of dots, slashes, triangles, and squares formed two lines.
"That’s a copy of the original inscription. The rock itself has long-since disappeared." Rudy leaned over his tea, adding an extra shot of brandy from a bottle beside the centerpiece of ketchup and hot sauce. "Brielle had an interest in history, mainly that of his own family, and an affection for the Old English and French dialects. The ship’s log was written in Modern English, but his personal diary is entirely in old text."
Lauren looked to Carlos. She resented being the odd man out in this venture, especially when a stranger like Maruso knew more than she did.
Time for that issue later, she decided. Her eyes rested on the paper Carlos was fingering.
So it was a treasure hunt.
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