“You want to sell the island?” David had wondered, but they hadn’t talked about it before beyond the legalities.
“I don’t know. I didn’t in the beginning. You know I spent time out here when I was growing up. I became a part of this community, but circumstances have changed,” Eddie said with a long sigh. “My business keeps me in the city most of the time, and then there are the treasure hunters.”
“I thought you controlled a lot of that.” Because the island was private, he controlled who could and couldn’t come out. It was one of the reasons the tourist situation could be so lucrative. They could charge to even get on the island and provide private experiences.
“There’s a management group based here on the island that controls tourism,” Luis explained. “I interviewed the head of the board as background for the book. They control the flow of tourism to ensure it doesn’t harm the ecosystem, but I think they had a couple of instances of treasure hunters sneaking onto the island or coming in to stay at the beach and then sneaking into the interior without permission.”
“Maybe what you need are some park rangers.” Tessa sat back, studying Eddie with that look in her eyes that let him know she was thinking. Probably about something he wouldn’t like. His lady was on the paranoid side, and she wasn’t the glass-is-half-full type. She seemed to believe the glass was actually a bomb and it would kill them all.
“I’ll have to consider that, but you can see there are unique problems that come with the island,” Eddie replied. “Problems I don’t need. Life seems far more complex now.”
Because they were adults. It would get even more complex as they found partners and started families. It had been easy when they were kids at university, studying and partying and debating the world’s problems without having to solve them.
He could see himself starting a family with Tessa. It was way too early, and she wasn’t even ready for a date with him much less letting him put a ring on her finger.
But it had felt so right to dance with her. He didn’t dance. He was awkward and weird, and it had been okay to dance with her. No one in the world could pull him out of his work like she could. He’d dreamed of this trip, thought he would do nothing but sit in the library and then go tour the places where the “treasure” was rumored to be found.
He’d hauled ass out of here the minute he’d realized she might be in trouble, and when he’d decided she wasn’t, he’d convinced her to spend the afternoon with him. They’d sat on that rooftop bar and had a couple of glasses of Malbec and some empanadas, and they’d talked. She’d talked about her years in the military while he’d given her stories about trying to teach undergrads history.
“Well, a lot of your problems could go away if the professor here can solve the mystery.” Luis gestured David’s way. “He’s got some theories I think are interesting. He definitely thinks it’s on the island. If he can find the treasure, everyone wins.”
“And if there is no real treasure?” He hadn’t thought the treasure would be his primary focus this week. He viewed it as an amusing diversion. “The question is what Ricardo was able to do before he died. From what I’ve been able to discern, he wasn’t capable of hauling some box of treasure into the jungle in the last year of his life.”
“He could have done it sooner,” Luis said with a nod. “He was a complicated man, and sometimes he could be paranoid. Perhaps he thought his treasure could be stolen.”
“That would be exactly like my father,” Eddie agreed. “I never saw the gold he bought from the shipwreck. I know he purchased the items. There’s a log of what was brought here, but I can’t find the actual items in the house, and I’ve certainly looked. Everything from that shipwreck is somewhere on this island.”
The question was where. He’d mapped out the possibilities based on the poem, what he knew about Montez, and what he’d read about the treasure-hunting theories out there. Luis also had a whole list of possibilities. “I only have a couple more days here. I’ve been thinking we should probably skip the camping so I can spend more time here in the library. It’s a small island, but there is still a lot of ground to cover, and the probability of me finding it is pretty low.”
“But that’s why you came here.” Eddie leaned forward. “You came here to find the treasure.”
“I came here to research a book.” He wasn’t sure why this was going sideways. “To honor your father and his life.”
Eddie pushed back from the table and stood up. “It would be nice if you honored our friendship and did what I asked you to do. I can’t have these bloody idiots sneaking onto the island and getting hurt. They disrupt everything. I thought you would help.”
He turned and walked out.
Shit. What had that been about? Eddie had never exploded on him like that before. He didn’t have a big temper. Eddie was a laid-back guy. He looked to Luis. “What’s wrong with him? What do I not know?”
“He’s been stressed about something,” Luis replied. “I don’t know. He doesn’t talk to me. I’m nothing more than your assistant to him. He orders me around like the rest of his staff. But I do know he’s been having trouble with people sneaking onto the island. He believes you’re the one who can crack the code. He’s certain there’s some kind of code because no one’s found it yet. He doesn’t think taking the poem literally works, and no one has decoded the metaphors.”
“That’s because I think they’re not understanding that the metaphors have to do with Montez’s private life. I’m not entirely certain this wasn’t meant as one last great quest for his son. I think the poem is full of references to their life together as well as Montez’s own. I certainly don’t think that poem was meant for public consumption, and that means neither was the treasure.” He’d been over that poem a couple thousand times, but it was only through being here that he’d started to make the connections.
“Then why wouldn’t the poem say ‘This is for you, son’?” Luis challenged. “He says the treasure is for the one who finds it.”
“Have you looked at how he wrote the clues for the hunts he gave Eddie as a kid? They were written the same way, but there’s no question those were only meant for Eddie, and therefore their personal history has to be taken into account,” David countered. He sat back with a sigh. This was something between father and son, and while he could help Eddie, he rather thought Eddie should be the one to find it. “It’s a four-page document. It could take me weeks to decipher it. I would rather spend the time I have on the background. Looking through those notebooks has been a revelation. I think they really give me insight into what Montez was thinking. This is exactly what I need to get started on the book.”
Luis’s brows rose. “But the hook for the book is finding the treasure.”
“What makes you think that?” Tessa asked. “He’s not writing some thriller. He doesn’t need a hook. This is a scholarly work, not pop culture.”
He loved that part of her that tried to protect him, that was comfortable defending him. “She’s right. I’m not trying to make millions. I want to write a good biography. I want to write about the man I admire. The treasure is a minor blip in his personal history. This was a man who brought the Dalai Lama and the leader of the communist party together for a secret meeting. It didn’t fix anything, but they had a conversation. You know almost no one knows that happened right here on this island. I only know about it because Eddie was there. Montez never spoke about it publicly. That is a little gem of history. I have the notes Montez took from the meeting. I wish there were photographs, but I’ve got plenty of eyewitnesses. I was thinking of that meeting as the centerpiece of the biography. I frame everything around that small miracle.”