Page 16 of Whispers of Fortune (Golden State Treasure Book #1)
S IXTEEN
“Boys, we’re going on a treasure hunt this weekend.”
Lock leapt so high and shouted so loud, Brody hoped the neighbors didn’t run over to see who was hurt.
Thayne laughed. It was pure glee.
Brody hated to say it, but they’d been patient. For them at least. Twitchy and pestering him nonstop, but they hadn’t run away from home again, so that counted for something.
“The clinic is quiet.” They were upstairs after a long day of work. The boys went to school, of course, but they’d come home and there’d been so much to do, yet they’d both helped so willingly and with increasing skill. Thayne might be halfway to becoming a doctor soon.
Lock didn’t quite have the right attitude for it, but at least he was kind to the patients. He had a special knack for soothing any babies that tagged along with flustered mamas. And the boy fetched and carried for Brody without complaint.
They’d earned this weekend of chasing their dreams.
“I told Ellie that if anyone has to have a doctor’s care this weekend, they’d just have to ride into town.” Brody waved the boys over to the table. “Now, let’s sit down and study the book one more time. Why did you decide to head for the mountain last time? You said you were going around it on your other searches. What clue did you see?”
The three of them pondered the journal. There were about twenty pages of notes in Grandpa’s scrawled handwriting.
“Miss Ellie says she’s found no evidence of a Los Pinos Bay.” Lock tapped on the strange sentence. “A bay’s got to be part of the ocean, right?”
Brody considered that. “Lakes can have bays too, but there are no large lakes around here. There’s one over in the Sierra Nevada Mountains that straddles the state line between California and Nevada, but I don’t think Grandpa went that far east. I think it must be talking about a bay on the Pacific Ocean. The California coast has one after another. None of them named Los Pinos, according to the maps I saw.”
“But if this is really old...” Thayne ran his hand over the open page, thinking. Both boys were treating the journal much more gently now that they knew it was so old.
“This page here.” Lock flipped the page to one with a sketch on it, a roughly drawn map. Ellie had a good map in the house, and she’d let Brody and the boys look it over. The two looked nothing alike. “Why did he sketch such a worthless map? It might make sense if we knew where he was when he drew it. But it doesn’t set the map in a specific location. It could be anywhere.”
“We know he came out here with the gold rush. That’s Sutter’s Mill, and that area became Sacramento. If Grandpa made it to Sacramento, why did he end up down here so far south?”
“He sounded like he thought Sacramento was a madhouse,” Lock said, staring down at the sketch, “and he wanted no part of it.”
“Could be,” said Brody. “Not that many people got rich hunting gold. The Harts did well once they started raising cattle and selling the beef to hungry miners. Michelle’s father, Liam Stiles, became wealthy when he abandoned gold mining and went into the lumber business. Maybe Grandpa saw some opportunity like that. Maybe he washed his hands of gold mining and set off to start a ranch or cut timber. He doesn’t say it, but he sounds discouraged.”
Brody had taken his own notes while reading through the journal and had them in front of him. There were five sentences that Ellie said were Spanish. Brody had them all printed out before him. “Los Pinos means The Pines . Ellie says the pine trees are much thicker and much taller in Northern California, so based on that clue, she thinks Captain Cabrillo was sailing up the California coast and came ashore somewhere and named the bay himself. This journal is old enough that the name may have no meaning beyond whoever saw it and named it.”
Lock’s excitement drained out of him.
Thayne said, “I read that Lewis and Clark named all sorts of things on their expedition, but they didn’t get the names sent to others right away. By the time they did, other people had already named a lot of the same things, and those names got recorded first.”
Thayne looked up from the journal. “How old do you think this is?”
Shaking his head, Brody said, “Most of the bays on the map I studied aren’t newly named. San Francisco Bay was named before Ellie’s father came out here. And he came about the same time as Grandpa did. Here Grandpa writes, ‘Looking for gold where others might not find it. It’s beautiful here. Might build a home and own a piece of the old sod for my family.’ And over here he says, ‘Might find a place in the mountains to the east and settle down. Find the treasure a man needs.’”
“He mentions the Sierra Nevada Mountains in at least one place,” Lock said.
Nodding, Brody wondered why his family couldn’t have been more like the Harts—working, building something real, something lasting. Why had the journal so haunted their lives? After thinking it over, Brody decided that Ellie was right: The journal was something Grandpa had found. Or it was part of what he’d found.
“That’s why we came here to the Two Harts.” Lock closed the journal and sighed. “He seemed to be heading back east and probably keeping to the California Trail. The only trail Grandpa would have known about.”
“That would be true when he was coming out. But he’d been here a while. Maybe he found something else.”
“But he mentions that mountain we were headed for—or what sounds like that mountain.”
“His description does sound like that one peak. It’s the highest around these parts. And only a few pages further, while he talks of the land and his exploring, he first mentions treasure. His writing becomes more puzzling from then on.”
A knock on the door had Brody rising.
“May I come in?” It was Ellie.
He hurried to the door and swung it open.
“I’ve come to help you plan our trip.” Ellie smiled brightly.
Brody blinked. “ Our trip?”