“Dillon! Oh God, is it really you, Dillon? I remember you! Sherlock? Oh, thank God—you guys look wonderful. I’m Ruth Warnecki, and I remember! I can’t believe you’re actually here.”
Savich quickly stepped forward into the entry hall as Ruth leaped at him and he caught her in his arms. She was laughing, kissing his cheek, letting him hold her close, her feet off the ground. She reared back in his arms, tears in her eyes. “It was so horrible. I didn’t remember who I was and all these strange things just popped out of my mouth. This is Sheriff Dixon Noble, and he’s been taking care of me. And Rob and Rafe, who’ve been taking care of me, too. The sheriff just heard from IAFIS, just this minute told me my name is Ruth Warnecki, and then I saw you both and everything came back again. It was real scary, Dillon. Sherlock, you look so beautiful all in black. You guys match so well. I am so glad to see both of you.” And she kissed Savich’s ear and his left eyebrow and held him like she’d never willingly let him go. Dix and the boys stood back, Dix still holding a straining Brewster, who, oddly, wasn’t barking wildly anymore, just seemed anxious to join all the hugging.
The big man, Dillon Savich, let Ruth down, but still held her against him as he turned to say, “Forgive us, Sheriff, but we were very worried when we heard Ruth hadn’t checked in.”
“Checked in with whom?” Dix asked.
Ruth said, “Oh, Luther Hitchcock called you, right, Dillon? He’s a major-league worrier, for which I am profoundly grateful, this time,” Ruth said, grinning like a loon at all of them impartially. “He couldn’t come with me because he had that gallbladder attack and—” She broke off, her face suddenly slack and pale.
“What, Ruth? What happened?”
“Dillon, someone’s trying to kill me and it must be because of the treasure in Winkel’s Cave.”
“Winkel’s Cave?” Dix asked. “What treasure? Who are you, Ruth?”
Sherlock smiled at the tough-as-nails-looking man holding a little white ball of fluff under his right arm who was trying hard to jump at them, a teenage boy on either side of him, standing real close. “We’re all FBI, Sheriff.”
Ruth stuck out her hand. “Special Agent Ruth Warnecki, Sheriff Noble. A pleasure to meet you.”
Dix took her hand, Brewster licked it. She shook his hand up and down, she was that excited. He said, “
So that’s why you shoot a SIG.”
“I also have a Glock seventeen.”
“You’re really an FBI agent, Madonna?” Rafe asked. “I mean, Ms. Warnecki, er, Special Agent Warnecki? A real FBI agent like they have on TV? Boy, it must have burned your butt when Dad told you to hide behind the dresser.”
She laughed. “Not really, at least at the time. I’m sure he wouldn’t ask me to do that now, he’s not like that idiot sheriff in North Carolina. Come on, you guys, call me Ruth.” Brewster started barking frantically. Ruth plucked him from Dix’s arms and hugged him. “It’s so good to be me again,” she said, “
as in back in my own brain. Much better than being Madonna.”
Brewster licked her face, barking wildly between licks as he peed on Rob’s sweatshirt.
CHAPTER 10
RUTH SAT BETWEEN Savich and Sherlock. She didn’t want to let go of their hands.
“Tell us what you can,” Savich said, “we’ll help you fill in all the blanks, don’t worry.”
“The last thing I remember clearly is crawling through that low arch in the cave wall and into that chamber. Then everything starts to get confused and, well—black. I remember the feel of that blackness; it was exactly like in the dream I had last night—so maybe the dream reflects what happened to me.”
“Then tell us about the dream,” Sherlock said as she lightly squeezed Ruth’s hand.
“You’d think it would have gone all blurry by now, but it hasn’t. It’s still as clear to me as when I was in the middle of it. Okay, in the dream I was standing in this dark pit of a place, alone, I couldn’t even see my own hand, but I wasn’t scared about that. I was waiting for a man to bring me a million dollars in gold bars. I know now I was dreaming about the treasure I was looking for in Winkel’s Cave. I heard him coming but then I realized it wasn’t his footsteps I was hearing, and I jerked awake. I’d heard those two guys outside my window. That was all the dream was, nothing more than that.”
Dix was shaking his head. “I still can’t believe there’s a treasure hidden in Winkel’s Cave. I’ve never heard anything like that.” He looked up to see Rob and Rafe standing in the living room doorway, all bundled up and ready to take off for Breaker’s Hill, their eyes focused on Ruth. Rob said, “You know about a treasure in Winkel’s Cave, Ruth? Is it pirate’s gold? Doubloons?”
She smiled at both boys, shook her head. “Nope, it’s better—a stolen gold shipment intended for General Lee in Richmond.”
“Wow,” Rafe said, taking three steps into the living room. “A treasure, here, nearly right where we live and we didn’t know anything about it.”
“But why Winkel’s Cave?” Rob wanted to know. He took a matching three steps into the living room. Ruth said, “Did you guys know that the main ingredient in black gunpowder is potassium nitrate? That comes from niter, or saltpeter, which is formed in cave deposits. During the Civil War, they mined a whole bunch of caves in western Virginia for niter. I’m betting that’s how the soldiers who stole the gold knew about Winkel’s Cave. Maybe they even did some mining there, found the cavern, and decided it was the perfect hiding place. That’s where they hid the gold bars.”
“A million dollars in gold?” Rob asked, moving to stand beside his brother. “How much gold is that?”
“It must have been a great deal since they went to all that trouble.”
Both boys were nearly on top of Ruth now, their sledding forgotten. Brewster hopped onto the back of the sofa and barked at them until Rob picked him up. Ruth said, “Hey, guys, I’ll keep you posted, I promise.”
Dix broke in. “Okay, we need to talk to Ruth now, so off with you. Be careful. I don’t want any more stitches.”
The boys dragged out of the living room. “I wondered if they’d leave without a fight,” Dix said, watching them go. “You really got their juices going, Ruth.”
When they heard the front door open and close, Savich said, “Okay, Ruth, back up. Tell us all about this treasure map, where you found it.”
“Okay. Last month I bought a collection of really old books at an estate sale in Manassas. The books were all over a hundred years old, on every conceivable subject, as you might expect in an old home library. In a skinny little songbook with all the popular songs of the day, I found a map of a cave that clearly had to be Winkel’s Cave. It showed what was labeled as gold bars hidden there by rebel soldiers who were supposed to escort it from the rail hub of Manassas Junction to General Lee in Richmond, like I told the boys. On July twenty-first, 1861, there was mass confusion when McDowell attacked at Bull Run—or Manassas, as it’s called here in the South—and the soldiers must have taken advantage of the confusion and stolen the gold bars, brought them here to store temporarily.
“When the dust settled, there were reports of over a hundred pounds of gold missing from Harpers Ferry. Many believed Union soldiers had captured it. The rebel soldiers who secreted the gold bars in a niche in the cave drew the map so they could come back for the gold after the war, but I guess none of them survived since the map was still in that book. I had the feeling it could have been the only one made, left for safekeeping in that little songbook, maybe when one of the soldiers left the battlefield to visit his family. Obviously he didn’t tell any of his family what he’d done, or about the map. Anyway it looked legitimate, the right age, at least the paper looked old enough, and the handwriting was appropriate for the time.”
Dix said, “There could have been more maps. That would be too much trust among thieves.”
Ruth shrugged. “Maybe. Anyway, it was sure worth a try.”
“But since it looks like others were ahead of you in that cave,” Savich said, “the gold is probably long gone.”
“You’re right, Dillon. And my map is gone. If they didn’t have it before, they’ve got it now.”
Savich said, “We’ll go back to the cave tomorrow. We’re going to find out what happened to you.”
Ruth clutched at his hand. “The thought of going back there scares me, way down to some primal part of me. You know, like there are saber-toothed tigers prowling outside and I’m huddled next to a fire, but it’
s not enough to protect me.”
Sherlock shivered, despite herself. “I wish I didn’t understand, Ruth, but I’ve felt the same way about a
