Swept Away (The Swept Away Saga, Book One)

Chapter Six

One whole month had passed and not a single thing was found on Oak Isle. While banging my head on a rock repeatedly sounded like a good idea, instead I quietly started to look for flights home. Dad didn't know what I was doing—I didn't want to upset him any more by adding my departure to his Treasure Pit stress—and it felt like I was betraying the whole group. We went out to work several days a week, concentrating on the weekend so the twins could come as well. But, the six of us weren't enough to solve the mystery it seemed. Something always went wrong, whether it was the pumps stopped working, hoses burst, or the pit just flooded faster than we could empty it.

Then there was always the nagging feeling that this wasn't what Mom had meant when she said I should spend more time with Dad. Was she somewhere thinking I was a fool as well? Was she rolling her eyes at me for agreeing to help? Were there hauntings in my future when she would appear to me and condemn me for taking her advice too far? Suddenly, I imagined her ghost appearing to me in bed, waving a finger in my face as she condemned my soul for searching for treasure. Rolling my eyes, I grimaced, not comfortable thinking of her as a ghost somewhere, lost in space. But what else could she have meant? Surely, she didn't want us to just have coffee together and then part after thirty minutes, set for the next few years.

No, most of all, what was bothering me was hearing all of the crazy ideas about what was under the ground. Templars, pirates, and even the Revolutionary War had been mentioned in passing. How did grown men, all of which having had at least graduated high school, actually believe that these outlandish things had happened? And then there were the myths surrounding the island. Apparently, there were ancient Indian spirits who watched over it in animal form and would sabotage workers if they got too close to figuring it out. I was also informed that the Devil's dog lived here, with its fiery red eyes and deathly bite. Mark swore up and down that he saw the ghosts of two pirates row up to the shore and carry a trunk into the woods. A person in town told me that no one was going to find anything until all of the oak trees had been pulled up and the island was as it used to be. Perhaps the most disturbing of all the myths, though, was that the pit required a "blood sacrifice" before any treasure would be found. Not just one sacrifice either, but seven. That one scared me the most—six people had already died here in their attempts to solve the islands riddle.

"What are you thinking about?" Scott asked, interrupting my grim thoughts as we stood on the beach of Pirate's Cove, metal detectors in hand. There was an odd piece here and there, but so far nothing of value.

"Nothing really," I sighed, waving the device over the spot in front of me.

"Flights back home are expensive?" A small grin graced his face for a second as he glanced at me, before returning to his work.

"Does everyone know?" That would be just great if Dad knew and wasn't saying anything. I'd feel like an even bigger jerk.

"Oak Isle isn't an easy place to work," he replied in a contemplative tone. "For more than two hundred years, no one has found anything that would prove there's treasure here. And yet, we keep going. Why? It's hard to say. It could be stubbornness, faith, or even downright stupidity. But everyone wants to quit at some point, I believe. Some of us have become accustomed to the look a person gets when they're ready to throw in the towel."

"I don't know how you do it. You spend all of your time out here, or thinking about this place, and you have nothing to show for it." The confession hung in the air for a moment as he examined something on the ground his detector had registered.

"The pit is here, isn't it? That alone is enough for me to know that someone did something at this place. There may not be a treasure, but I would like to understand it. I don't think of my time spent here as wasted. Instead, I think of each day as one step closer to finding out the truth."