Too Much Stuff Read Free

smiled. “Gentlemen, Florida was born with graft, corruption, whorehouses, and gambling saloons. Like the Old West, this was cattle country and railroad country. Cowboys and construction workers are the same wherever you go.”
    “So the gold was never found.”
    “It disappeared. There were those who thought it washed out to sea, but I would think that the sheer weight of it would have prevented that.”
    I had a vision of James and me diving for sunken treasure, swimming back up with a gold bar clutched in my hand.
    “And your great-grandfather?” I already knew the answer.
    “His body was never recovered. Neither was the security guy’s.”
    “But,” James stated, “most of those bodies weren’t ever identified. You told us that they burned hundreds of them before the rotting corpses started an epidemic.”
    “That’s true. Apparently some of the workers wore gas masks. The stench was terrible and when they burned them in funeral pyre-style, it was even worse.”
    “Must have been a very nasty experience.”
    “I’ve seen pictures,” she said. “Heads torn off bodies, tree limbs buried in people’s chests, bloated bodies twenty feet up in the trees.”
    Information overload.
    “So,” I walked to the balcony edge and drained my drink, hoping she’d offer another, “you think you know where the gold is.”
    “I have some direction.”
    “If they never identified his body and never found the gold, then how would you have a clue?” James just blurted it right out.
    Mary Trueblood smiled, a thin-lipped smirk. “Because my great-grandmother got a letter.”
    “Okay.”
    “I found it in an old jewelry box when we cleaned out my mother’s home after she died. There was no signature and the whole thing was very cryptic.”
    I glanced at my partner and saw that gleam in his eye. “Who was it from?”
    I added, “So what did it say?”
    “Oh, I’ll go you one better.” She walked inside to her open suitcase that was sitting on a bench and pulled out an envelope. “It was from Matthew Kriegel to his wife, my great-grandmother, and I made a copy. This is for you.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    The letter was two paragraphs long. Short and sweet, the flow of the dark blue ink was like a work of art. Thick, luxurious swirls of letters that are lost in today’s computerized world. I mean, why would you?
    My Dear Mary
,
    Upon receiving this, you can assume that something has happened to me. By following our aforementioned guidelines, I leave you with this
.
    From that point on it was a jumble of letters spelling words I couldn’t even pronounce.
    Sohdvh frph wr lvodprdgd dqg—
    We both stared at the letter. Code. The only thing close to code I’d ever used was lemon juice. As kids, James and I, along with a handful of neighborhood buddies, would write messages using citric acid. When it dried on the paper, it was invisible. When you held it up to a candle or a hot lightbulb, the message would materialize. Of course our messages were not quite asimportant as the location of forty-four million dollars worth of gold. We wrote things like, “Meet you at my house after school.”
    “Do you want us to figure this out? Is that part of the job?”
    Mary Trueblood smiled, then licked salt from the rim of her glass. “No. I’ve already figured out the code.”
    “So? What does it say?”
    “It’s what it doesn’t say.”
    By definition, a code is cryptic. The Trueblood lady had solved the code and now
she
was being cryptic.
    “So,” I tried to bring some common sense into the conversation, “what doesn’t it say?”
    Holding the copy she pointed to the jumble of letters.
    “Every letter is three letters off in the alphabet.”
    James stood up and walked over to her, taking the paper from her. She touched his arm and gave him a very sweet look.
    “So if the letter is
A
, it’s really
D
?”
    “Exactly, James.”
    I interrupted the intimate moment. “Mary—Mrs. True-blood—excuse me, but what is the