Trouble & Treasure, Dave Moyer [ebook reader wifi txt] 📗

dammit if I wasn't going to do it better.

With a sniff I reached out my hand and gently ran my fingers across the inscription carved into the plain gravestone. I didn’t know what I was looking for. There’d been a passage in my great-uncle's journal that had suggested that 'the stone which lay under the sky god's tree holds the key.' I knew from my studies that oak trees were the tree most often struck by lightning, and therefore had been associated in ancient times with gods of the sky. I assumed this gravestone was the stone the passage referred to, being, as it was, under an oak tree.

“Hey, do you possibly want to give me the journal, so we can, I don't know, get this over with before Maratova and his men find us?” Sebastian looked up at the sky, possibly checking that helicopters or nasty soldiers weren’t jumping down from the clouds above.

While I had no doubt Sebastian was right, and that Maratova and more were after us, for some reason I didn’t feel as if we were about to be disturbed any time soon. Plus, although I didn’t know how these things went down, I assumed getting my hands on the next Stargazer Globe would at least give us some leverage. Plus, it was something to keep busy with, and I needed to keep busy.

Sebastian leaned down, setting his gun into the back of his pants and grabbing my elbow. He yanked the book out from underneath it, despite my protestations.

“You jerk,” I complained as I fell against the gravestone.

He grinned, picked up his gun, and started to leaf through the book. I resisted the urge to lash out and kick him in the shins. I stood up, dusted off my skirt, and swore at him. “You keep on going on about how quick we need to be, but you don't appreciate that not only am I the great-niece of the guy that wrote that book, but I've read it, as well as most of his other notes.” I crossed my arms tightly in front of my chest.

It was Sebastian’s turn to ignore me, and he did a sterling job, one eyebrow raised as he flicked through the journal.

“You know, you are an insufferable jerk,” I continued with another sniff.

“I didn't see you complaining about me when I saved you from the guy outside the library,” he said without looking up as he gently turned the pages of the journal.

I snorted. “I didn't see you complaining when I saved you from that guy outside the library, or have you forgotten it was me who pulled up in front of him, opened the door, and got you out of there before he could shoot you to pieces?”

He smiled, but it wasn't a nice smile, and it wasn't a smile that suggested he was giving in to me. He did, however, look up. “I imagine what we'll be looking for is in the dead center of the church,” he gave a yawn as he closed the journal with a snap. “I think you will find all that junk about clues is to confuse us. I'll bet you that the only place structurally secure enough is the center of the church.”

Jesus Christ, he had such a sanctimonious look on his face. Seriously, not even his mother could like this guy. There was something so exquisitely arrogant about him, something so.... Well, let's put it this way: all I wanted to do was slap him.

Without saying where he was going, or suggesting I follow, he turned and walked back to the front of the church. He could get stuffed if he thought I was going to follow him. He might have thought he was the world's greatest treasure hunter, but that didn’t mean that he knew my great-uncle. Arthur Stanton had loved clues, he had loved games too. Every Saturday when I’d gone to visit him as a child, he would always hide things around the house for me and would leave me clues written on scraps of paper hidden beside the fridge or behind the couch. Sebastian could think what he wanted, but honest to god it was wrong and fueled more by his testosterone than his reason.

I turned back to the gravestone, sticking my tongue firmly behind my teeth as I tried to think. The inscription on the gravestone was simple, and it didn’t seem like a clue.

“The stone under the tree,” I mumbled under my breath. I repeated it several times as I walked around the gravestone, careful not to walk over the grave itself. Unlike Sebastian, I had respect for the dead.

I checked the back of the gravestone, running my hand all the way across its length in case there was a mark to indicate a message had worn off over the years. There wasn’t anything. I then decided that perhaps the stone under the tree indicated something else, and I turned to survey the old oak behind me.

I stared up into its gnarled, many-branched trunk. There wasn't a stone lodged anywhere, not that I could see. If the stone was buried at the roots of the enormous tree, then I was stiff out of luck, because I didn't have a spade and I didn't fancy asking Sebastian for one. It was at that moment I started to hear loud banging noises emanating from the church behind me, interspersed with even louder and irritatingly manly grunts.

Muttering to myself about how annoying that man was, I tried to think of what else a stone could be. Whenever my great-uncle had posed me a riddle, or begun a game which I couldn’t end, he had always told me to think of at least 10 possibilities of what I could do next. He called it fluid thinking, and had muttered something about how he had learned it from a great priest in Peru. Basically, when you are stuck, try to think of 10 possible solutions, and force your mind to finish the task, no matter how hard it gets, and no matter how much your mind wants to wander away.

So I held out my fingers in front of me and waggled them for a bit. “The stone could mean the gravestone.” I held up a thumb. “The stone could mean a stone buried under the roots of the tree.” I held up another finger. “It could mean a name, like John Stone or something.” I held up another finger, smiling as my answers were starting to become more creative. “It could mean a gem or some other precious stone, perhaps in a ring, and perhaps the inscription is on the inside of the ring.” I held up another finger, my answers coming quicker. “It could mean a characteristic, perhaps something that is stone-like, concrete, solid, but not technically made of stone.” I began to bite at my lip harder, turning around as I stood there, staring up at the church, the rest of the graveyard, the oak, even the woods beyond, as I tried to think of yet more possibilities. “What else does stone mean?”

I blinked, smiling with surprise as a fantastic thought popped to mind. “Stone as in the unit of measurement.” I couldn't keep the smile off my face. I turned back to the tree and wondered how a clue could be found in a unit of measurement that was somehow meant to be under a tree.

I remembered another snippet of my great-uncle's advice: if you are having trouble seeing a solution, take 10 steps back. Arthur Stanton, bless his soul, always did things in groups of 10. It was another reason that the rest of my family, especially my Great-Aunt Imelda, had thought him batty.

Considering how crazy my current situation was, adding some more crazy to it didn't seem like it would make a difference. So I took 10 steps back from my situation, my hands clasped behind me as I inched my way through the graveyard, keeping my eyes on the oak tree.

The solution didn't pop out at me, and I stared at the oak tree, head on the side, waiting for inspiration to strike.

That would be when I heard the guffaws of laughter behind me.

“You are fucking mad,” Sebastian said between even harsher laughs.

I turned, cheeks irritatingly flushed at being disturbed so rudely. “Shut up,” was all I could manage.

He had a spade slung across his shoulder, one arm resting on it easily. He had taken that ridiculously expensive-looking jacket off, and had rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, the first several buttons undone. I noticed the deep marks on his wrists – no wonder he’d been so well dressed this morning. I wondered to myself what had happened to him last night – perhaps he was into S&M? I noticed also that somehow, despite the fact that the end of his spade was covered with dust and clogged with dirt, his shirt was still as pristine as it had been first thing that morning – so he was a neat freak too.

He must have caught my gaze as it lingered over his arms. “Staring again?” he questioned.

I shot him an irritated look. I tapped my hands on my legs and tried to raise my head up until I was staring down my nose at him, despite the fact that he was a fair bit taller than me. “Well, so have you found it then?”

I could tell by the less-than-triumphant look on his face that the answer was no. That didn't stop him from offering me one of those awful, excessively-arrogant smiles. “No, have you fallen over and broken your neck from walking backwards in a graveyard yet?” He brought the spade down in an easy arc and let it sink into the soft ground below him.

I sucked in my lips, trying hard to think of something more dignified and witty than shut up.

“Excellent comeback,” he said after a while. His expression hardened. “How can you be so sure,” he grabbed the journal that had been tucked into the pocket of his pants and gestured with it, “That your great-uncle wasn’t lying?”

“Are you suggesting that because you haven't been able to find the globe after two minutes of digging, in a place that you arbitrarily decided was the right one, that the globe isn't here?”

His lips pulled back over his teeth and he snorted out a laugh. “Listen to me, lady, I have been in this business a lot longer than you have. This,” he gestured to the church and the graveyard with the journal, “Doesn't feel like a treasure trove to me.”

I crossed my arms and stared back at him. “Well, it isn't meant to be a treasure trove, is it? It's meant to be the location of a treasure map. The map is meant to lead us to treasure,” I said each word clearly, as if I was talking to the densest of children.

He shook his head, lips pulling up even further over his perfect teeth.

“Did you find anything in there?” I didn’t uncross my arms, and nor did I tone down the harsh edge to my voice; this guy deserved it. “Or did you just find dirt?”

He raised his eyebrows and dipped them again. “You are showing far too much attitude, and not nearly enough gratitude. Or have you forgotten that I saved you last night? Would you have preferred I left you to the less-than-kind activities those mercenaries and criminals could have dished out to you?”

I hated the fact I shook at that. I might have been holding it together, even going toe-to-toe with this irascible and pompous idiot, but that didn’t mean that I had forgotten what happened last night. Nor did it mean that I had gotten over it. I was going full steam ahead here, in the hope that I didn’t have the chance to truly appreciate how much trouble I was in.

Sebastian kept his gaze stony, his stance tense and macho. I fancied, as my