Dourado

CHAPTER 12

“I can’t get any of them.” Dane snapped his phone closed and slammed it down on the table. “I don’t know what’s going on!”

“We’ve notified the authorities in Singapore. There’s nothing else we can do,” Kaylin said. “Besides, if you smash your cell, they definitely won’t be calling you anytime soon.”

“I shouldn’t have left them,” he muttered, the feeling of helplessness was driving him crazy. Her assurances didn’t make him feel any better. He stood up and walked across the room they had rented under a false name in a rundown roadside inn. Reaching the far wall, he turned and stalked back to the window. “I need to do something. I can’t stand waiting around like this.”

“You’re not accomplishing anything by walking around the room. Sit down and help me with this letter.” She sat at a small table, rickety and badly stained, comparing the letter Dane had found against a Portuguese-English dictionary they had picked up at a local bookstore.

“I don’t know any of that stuff,” he grumbled. He slumped down in the cheap, fake leather chair across from her, feeling every bump against his back. He folded his arms across his chest, and stared. He knew he was acting childish, but the frustration he felt at being unable to help his friends, or even know what was wrong with them, was almost more than he could bear. But he also realized it was pointless to sit and complain about something over which he had no control.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Here. See what you can make of these.” Kaylin slid her notebook across the table to him.

He flipped it open to her copies of the sketches they had found in Covilha’s books. His eyes took them in with only moderate interest. He exhaled long and loud, sighing impatiently.

“I don’t know what we’re going to learn from these,” he complained. They were just doodles, after all.

“And you never will if you don’t shut up and get to work,” Kaylin snapped, not looking up at him.

“Fine.” She was right, but he did not like to be reminded of it. He looked them over again, this time more slowly. The sinking ship was probably the Dourado. But what to make of the others? A wrought iron fence, an old house, a river, an oak tree, a tombstone… He turned the page. There were more on this sheet, but nothing caught his eye as being of particular significance. What could they mean, if anything? And why were they all written on page one hundred twenty-five? After mulling it over for a few long, boring minutes, he flipped the notebook closed and pushed it back toward Kaylin.

“How’s your translation coming?” he asked, more to fill the silence than because he expected her to have discovered anything of significance so soon.

“Slowly,” she replied. “If I’ve got this right, it’s an unfinished letter to his mistress. He mentions someone named Domenic, and talks about his regrets.”

“Maybe they had a son together?” Dane asked.

“Could be. The mention of the Dourado isn’t of much significance. He just talks about how his life changed when the Dourado went down ‘on that January night.’” She bit her lip and looked up another word.

Something in her statement seemed to trip a switch in Dane’s subconscious.

“Say that again.”

“What?” She looked at him with a blank expression.

“That last part about the Dourado,” he said, closing his eyes and pressing his hands to his temples. “Read it back to me.”

“All right. ‘I tell you, darling, my life was forever changed when the Dourado went down that dark January night.’”

“What date, exactly, did the Dourado sink?” His heart beat faster as a wave of adrenalin surged through him.

Kaylin picked up another notebook and turned to one of the first pages. “January twenty-fifth. Why do you ask?”

“That’s it!” He pounded his fist on the table. “January twenty-fifth! One-twenty-five.”

“Page one twenty-five!” she cried with delight. “You’re right. That’s got to be it!” She pushed the letter away, grabbed the notebook, and scooted her chair around the table so that she could look at the sketches along with him.

“Now that we’re fairly certain these symbols are tied in with the Dourado, we need to figure out what he was trying to tell us.” Dane said, feeling confident for the first time since getting Corey’s cry for help.

“Could it be a cipher of some sort?” Kaylin asked.

“I don’t think so. There aren’t enough icons to cover much of the alphabet, and nothing repeats.”

“Perhaps it’s more complicated than that. Maybe we take the words for these different things, combine all the letters, and rearrange them to spell out a message?”

Dane turned and stared at her, his eyes wrinkled in a frown. “How in the world do you think of these things?”

She shrugged. “Ciphers were common back then, and some of them were pretty complicated.”

“I hope that isn’t the deal,” Dane said. “It would be hard enough to unscramble in English, but if he did the cipher in Portuguese…” He left the rest unsaid, as understanding dawned on her face.

“Does your friend have access to a computer program that could decrypt a message like this?”

“First of all, we aren’t sure that there is a message to decode.” He was growing frustrated again, and with the feeling came renewed concerns about Bones and the crew. He pushed away from the table. “I want to get out of here. Let’s get a drink.”

“I’m really not in the mood for a drink,” she said.

“Fine, you can watch me.” He grabbed his jacket and keys, and left the room without waiting to see if she was following.

“Maddock, wait a minute!” she called.

Something in her voice, some underlying tone of revelation, made him turn around.

“What if we’re making this too complicated? What if it’s just a simple map?”

Maps he understood. Curious, he returned to the table and stood looking down over her shoulder.

“The sinking ship is probably the Dourado, so that’s most likely the first symbol in the sequence. Maybe these other images represent real places. Put the clues in the right order, they lead us to the sword!” Her eyes were bright, her face positively aglow. Dane stared at her for a moment, admiring her fresh, youthful beauty.

“Are you still with me?” she said, waving her hand in front of his face.

“Oh, sorry, just thinking.” Dane shook his head, trying to get his thoughts back on to the subject. Guilt soured in his stomach as he thought of Melissa. “If they’re real places, what is this thing?” He pointed to a drawing of four arrows emerging at right angles to each other from a central point, pointing up, down, left, and right. Another smaller arrow pointed down and to the right at an odd angle.

“What’s the matter, sailor boy? Never seen a compass before?” She smiled up at him, and he grinned in spite of himself.

“Fine, you got me on that one.” He settled back into the chair he had vacated moments before. “The problem I see is that so many of these drawings are too generic. How many streams are around here? Or wrought iron fences? Where do we even start?”

“How about the house? It’s a little more detailed than the other images.”

Dane looked at the sketch. It was certainly distinctive, with a large porch running across the front and wrapping around the right side. An odd, tower-like architectural feature graced the front left corner. Chimneys peeked up from either side of the steeply pitched roof. Two second-floor windows extruded Cape Cod-style from the front of the roof. Ornamentation had been sketched in to the porch rails and posts. It might be possible to locate the house. It was as good a way as any to pass the time until he could find out what happened to Bones and the crew.