“You’ve met a few times?” Isaac said.
Ashwood smiled. “Maybe more than a few.”
Murchison’s office was big, nearly a thousand square feet. The room they walked into had a huge oak desk, a table and chairs and was lined with bookshelves and artifacts. An adjoining room had a workbench, glass tanks where Frank cleaned his numerous finds, and various archeological equipment.
Ashwood pulled out a NOAA chart from a cardboard tube, unrolled it on the table, then pinned it down with marble coasters. It was the Upper Keys, from Card Sound up to the middle of Biscayne Bay.
“All right,” he said. “Now where are these gold bars?”
“Well, according to our sources,” Scarlett said, leaning over the chart and stabbing a finger, “here, in Jones Lagoon.”
Ashwood pulled a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket and inspected the area. Pulling out his laptop, he brought up Google Maps.
“Low-lying islands, covered in mangroves, and sheltered by the outlying reefs,” he said to himself. “It’s a fascinating area because it’s mostly untouched by man. Not uncommon in the Keys, as most of the seventeen hundred islands that make up the archipelago are uninhabited. But the islands of Islandia are some of the largest untouched islands in the Keys, and they’re also barrier islands, with shores facing the Straits and the open Atlantic, and shores facing Biscayne Bay.”
He pulled up his coastline analysis program. “And approximately when would these bars have been dropped into the water?” he asked.
“1862,” Scarlett said.
“During the Civil War. Interesting.”
“The bars were taken by the Key West Avengers,” Isaac said. “A ragtag group of Key Westers who’d joined up with the Confederates. They took the bars from Fort Taylor in the middle of the night, then threw them overboard when they ran into Union ships.”
Ashwood paused, thinking over his words. “How do you know where they dropped the bars?”
“Well, an artifact from one of the Avengers was recovered recently in Jones Lagoon,” Isaac said. “A Confederate belt buckle.”
Ashwood rubbed his chin, then performed a quick online search. “Like this?” he said, pointing to an image on the screen of an oval-shaped buckle with CS in the middle.
“Yeah, that’s what it looked like,” Scarlett said.
Ashwood performed a few more searches.
“The Jones Lagoon we see today is vastly different than the one of 1862. In fact, early maps of the region show that the lagoon was once a bay, not fully enclosed. As you two know from my presentation, coastlines, if left to their own devices, are constantly changing. Molded by waves, tides, wind, and storms.”
Ashwood fell silent for a minute, thinking everything over and reading pages on his laptop.
“The buckle would’ve been made of brass,” he finally said. “Though more dense than most rocks, brass has less than half the density of gold.”
“So gold is heavier?” Scarlett asked.
“A cubic centimeter of gold would have over twice as much mass as the same volume of brass. And if we’re talking about gold bars, then we’re dealing with objects of significant mass. If this brass buckle and the bars were dropped into the water at the same place and time, we could expect the buckle to have been moved to a much greater degree than the gold bars.”
“Makes sense,” Isaac said.
Ashwood punched in a few numbers, then let his program run through a simulation. After a few seconds, his eyes focused and he bobbed his chin.
“Based on this model, the time frame, and what we know about the properties of the objects in question, I’d say that the bars and buckle would’ve originally been dropped in this area.” He pointed at the screen and shifted over, allowing the others to see. “And today, based on modern charts, I’d say that the bars would be somewhere around here.”
He pointed to a spot on the eastern side of the lagoon, near the mangrove shoreline.
“That’s almost half a mile from where the buckle was found,” Scarlett said.
Then she fell silent, thinking about the white supremacists who’d murdered John Ridley. They’ve been searching in the wrong place, she thought.
They thanked Professor Ashwood for taking the time to help them.
“A friend of Frank’s is a friend of mine,” he said. “Plus, I love things like this. Just do me a favor and send me a few pictures of the gold when you find it.” He smiled and added, “Just watch out for pirates. They still exist, you know. Just not in sloops and schooners, or with parrots and eye patches.”
He printed out his findings, put them in a folder, and gave them to Scarlett so that she could have a hard copy of where to look for the bars. Then he shook their hands and told them to shoot him an email if they had any more questions. Leaving him in the office, Scarlett and Isaac headed down the stairs and out of the building, striding into the hot afternoon sun.
“Jackpot!” Scarlett exclaimed. She jumped for joy like a senior who’d just aced their finals. She hugged Isaac, squeezing tight and nearly lifting the skinny kid off his feet. “You’re a genius, Rube.”
She finally let go of him and the two made their way across campus.
“This was fun, but I’ve got another class,” Isaac said. “You can hang out in the library, though. Maybe do a little more research on your side project.”
As the words left his lips, Scarlett’s phone buzzed to life in her pocket. She slid it out and saw that she’d received a message.
“Crap!” she said, not realizing how late it was. “I just got
