One tree leads to the money, the second leads to the killers and the third leads to the dead. In your search for me you may find the truth. Be careful you don’t share my fate.
Was he about to learn Lee Fisher’s fate? He hefted the shovel and approached the tree. Along the clearing’s perimeter, the moss-covered rocks gave way to thin topsoil and wispy meadow grass. He stood at the roots and touched flaking patches of tan and gray bark with his fingertips. This was the sycamore’s third trunk. Or maybe the first, he thought, since it was closest to the clearing. Did it lead to the money, the killers or the dead? He squinted at the roots fanning out beside his feet, then assessed the trunk up to eye level and beyond. It seemed completely normal, bearing nothing that could be interpreted as a sign.
I may be buried along with the others, at the base of three joined sycamores at the edge of a clearing.
He drove the shovel blade straight into the earth, feeling the grind of small roots and stones transmitted to his hands. The digging would be slow work here. He freed the blade and circled counter-clockwise around the tree.
Of the three trunks, the next was closest to the Maryland shore. He aimed the headlamp’s glow at its base. Raising the light steadily up the trunk, he scanned for a mark or sign. Just above the level of his eyes he found one, and his fingers reached to trace it. Two parallel diagonal slashes. The surrounding bark had scaled away and the slashes were blistered scars on the smooth skin of the trunk. What did they mean? The second tree leads to the killers? If so, this was the trunk he cared least about.
He continued to the trunk nearest the Virginia shore, then aimed his headlamp at the roots and guided the glow upward. At eye-level he saw a smooth patch where the bark had skinned off, and he felt a surge of vindication as a symbol slid into view. The mason’s mark! This was its fifth appearance. First on the plank of siding in the Pennyfield shed. Then on the photo in Kelsey Ainge’s studio, where he had learned its name. Then carved in stone on Bear Island – the mark Kelsey had photographed. And again just yesterday, traced in the dust of his rear window at Sharpsburg.
Like the slashes, the mark in front of him was scabbed and coarse, discolored with decades of aging. He ran a finger along its C-curve, then along the three rays. Was this Lee Fisher’s symbol? Did he chisel it on the Bear Island stop-gate? If not, what did it mean?
He steered the lamplight further up the trunk, where he’d sensed the presence of another mark, then stepped back and took a deep breath. Not one, but a string of them, rising from the mason’s mark along the axis of the trunk. Initials. The lowest read KE. Next LF. K. Elgin? Lee Fisher? His throat tightened. The third tree leads to the dead. The top-most initials seemed to be carved in a different hand. MG. They were aged and gray but less blistered than the prior pair. As if they had seen fewer rings of growth.
He took a deep breath and set the shovel blade an arm’s length from the base of the trunk. This was Lee Fisher’s unfulfilled wish, he reminded himself. “In your search for me you may find the truth.” He slammed his heel down, driving the blade into the earth. What did he need to find? Whether Lee’s fear of being killed and buried along with the others had been realized. He could never identify a decomposed corpse, so he would settle for any sign of human remains… a femur or an ulna, a finger or a skull. He turned the first shovelful and studied it under his headlamp but found only pebbles and mud.
Expanding the hole from the center, he examined more shovelfuls, working around a snake-sized root. Then a strike caught something solid. Not another root, because he was able to work the blade beneath it and scoop it out. A small rock? He dumped the shovel’s contents onto the growing dirt pile to his right and directed the light onto it.
A rectangular shape caught his eye. He picked it up, scraping away the caked mud that covered it. A knob emerged on one end, with a dark cord wrapped around it. Near the neck, the dull glitter of dirty glass. The shape was a flask, encased by a black, rotting holster that may have once been leather. He scraped more mud away, then stopped for fear of destroying the holster. Did this discovery mean anything? Maybe the killers had been drinking during the burial and tossed the flask on top of the bodies as they filled in the grave.
There was something inserted between the holster and the flask, and he tried to work it loose with his fingers, unwrapping the cord from the bottleneck to pull it free. Under the glow of his headlamp, it looked like a leaf-shaped pendant of some kind, made of stone. One face was dirt-stained but unmarked, as far as he could tell. As he cleaned the other face, dirt held inside an etching and the emblem emerged again – a sixth sighting of the now-familiar mark. He gently dislodged the dirt with his fingernails. There was no mistaking the C-curve and converging rays; they had become shorthand for his search and the symbol of things beyond his grasp. He laid the pendant down on the dirt pile and raised the shovel again.
More barren shovelfuls before the blade stabbed something solid. He stopped to illuminate and probe the hole, scraping away loose dirt to reveal a root wider than his thigh. He sighed and wiped his dripping forehead against his sleeve. This was no place to dig a grave. Flat rocks covered most of the clearing and the tree’s perimeter was laced with impenetrable roots. It would have been a chore to bury a dog here, so it was hard for Vin to imagine skeletons lying beneath his feet. Maybe he’d misinterpreted the words in Lee’s note. Was there another way the trunks of the joined sycamores could lead to the money, the killers and the dead? Maybe the flask and the pendant provided the path. But the note had specifically said, “I may be buried…”
He rested against the shovel. There were two more trunks – one with the parallel slashes, the other unmarked. If not bodies, maybe there was more evidence like the flask and the necklace buried there. Or maybe, he reminded himself, the money is buried there. He retreated to the trunk on the Maryland side, angled the shovel blade to the slashes, and drove it into the dirt. Five minutes of digging was unimpeded by large rocks or roots. Maybe they were cleared away by the killers, he thought. He spread each new shovelful carefully onto the pile, alert for small objects he might uncover, but found only earthworms and stones. He widened the hole from the center, then dug deeper.
A thrust was met by a hard surface that stopped the blade with an audible thump. It didn’t seem to bite into a root or clang off a rock. He straightened to study the hole, then struck again. Another thump. There’s something there!
He scraped dirt away until he could see the object. It looked flat, slick and black, like decaying canvas or rubber laid on top of a board. The skin on his forearms tightened. Could it be a coffin? That wouldn’t make sense. What killers would go to the trouble of using a coffin at a remote site like this? He dug and scraped to find the borders of the object. It wasn’t large at all – maybe eighteen inches long, half as wide, and less than a foot tall. It seemed like a box covered with a canvas mat or tarp of some kind.
He dug to expose its sides, then worked the blade beneath it to pry it loose. He strained over the hole to find purchase on the box. The canvas mat was filthy, and his arms were smeared with mud as he freed it from its resting place. He heard a metallic rattle when he set the object down beside the hole.
He fixed his headlamp on the covered box. Too small for a coffin… and too opaque to just be a pointer to the killers? Unless it was full of guns and knives, he guessed this might be Lee Fisher’s buried fortune. The mat encasing the box didn’t seem to be fastened or tied, just scrolled and tucked on each side. He worked the ends loose and unfurled the scroll. It didn’t fall apart, and he realized the mat had been coated with wax or rubber for waterproofing. Flattening it out, he heard the sound of a snapping branch.