Read The First Chapter Of 'Triad of the Islanders' by Wesley Stein

Triad of the Islanders

 by Wesley Stein 

Chapter One

They were all naked. The woman’s breasts were all I could see. I tried to avert my eyes, but that seemed creepier somehow. There were only five of us, and the two couples in the natural hot springs knew each other. I was the odd man out, and it didn’t take long for one of them to ask about me. 

“Where are you from?” a man wearing a baseball cap, and only a baseball cap, asked. They knew I wasn’t a local. 

I had a home in Florida, where I based my research. But lately I’ve been spending most of my time at the vacation home of my financier, near Santa Fe. That seemed like a more folksy answer than Florida so, “Up from Santa Fe,” is how I replied.

“Far out,” they said, nodding their heads. “What brings you here?”

I knew that would be their next question, it always is. I hated that question because it was always being asked of me. I didn’t want to tell them the truth. I never liked telling people what I did for a living, so I gave the standard response. 

“Oh, just enjoying nature,” I said. They didn’t nod, didn’t fully buy it. I knew I needed to add more. “My old lady’s been giving me shit,” I fibbed. “I just needed to get away for a day or two. I saw the sign at the road and thought I’d come to soak.” 

They smiled and now nodded with vigor. The other woman raised herself out of the water a little, and her breasts were exposed too. The man beside her, not wearing a baseball cap or anything else, leaned over and placed an arm around her.

“We come out here to get crazy,” the man said. His partner playfully patted a palm to his jaw.

“Stop it,” she said and shot me a look of feigned embarrassment.

“There’s nothing out here,” baseball cap man said. “You can do whatever you want, there’s no one around to see.”

To illustrate his point, he raised a hand to the woman next to him and cupped her breast. The other couple laughed.

I knew there were plenty of hippies in New Mexico, and I had been warned about them the first time I came out west. But I hadn’t expected to run into four of them on my final big day in the backcountry. It was the late 1960’s, and the Great Southwest was rife with back-to-the-earth flower children. I smiled and nodded, and pretended to be impressed by their sexual liberties.

“Maybe I’ll bring the wife down here,” I said. I wanted to play along. I needed information, and these locals could provide it. “Maybe that’d loosen her up.” Everyone laughed. “But she’s not the outdoor type,” I said. 

“Bring her to this warm water, man,” one of the women said. “It’s like a hot bath.”

“Yeah,” the other woman agreed. “And the minerals keep us fresh.”

She laughed, a horrible stuttering laugh as if she were embarrassed to laugh. If you're going to laugh, just laugh already, I thought.

“Oh, yeah?” The man next to her put his hand under the water, presumably between her legs, and then placed his fingers in his mouth. “Wow, you’re right,” he said. Everyone cackled. 

Damn dirty hippies, I thought. 

“My wife loves waterfalls,” I said. “She’s obsessed with them.”

Before I could go on, the four of them began talking at once, pointing downriver. 

“There’s a seasonal waterfall down there,” was the gist of what they were collectively saying. Also, “it only runs for a few days each year.” This was music to my ears.  

As I stood from the native hot pool, I glanced downstream. The ice-cold water of the Rio Grande was flowing past, on the other side of a rock wall barrier. The hiking trail down which I had come was visible on the steep slope behind me, zig-zagging up the hill in a series of switchbacks. Across the river, the walls above the banks rose even steeper. Here at the springs a tall box canyon was forming, and further downstream was already formed. 

“Is there a trail to get to the bottom?” I asked. “If I go around?”

My fellow soakers laughed again. One of them reached for a pack of cigarettes lying near the black pool and passed out a smoke to everyone. I declined with a raised palm.

“Hell no man,” baseball cap guy said. “It’s a scenic overlook, brother.”

Gotcha, brother. 

I thanked them and got the hell out of there. I dried off and got dressed, feeling somewhat silly that I had worn my swimming trunks. Oh well, let them judge. If not wanting to bathe nude with a bunch of dirty hippies made me a square, then I was happy to be one.

Back at my truck, I changed into a new t-shirt and laced up a set of lightweight hiking boots. Then I donned a wide-brimmed hat to keep the sun out of my eyes. Finally, I took an inflatable inner tube and a hand-pump from the bed of the pickup and began to pump air into my watercraft. 

As I came hiking back down the steep trail, inner tube over my shoulder, I could see the two couples in the hot springs below. Except they had switched partners. They ignored me at first but as I got closer, they recognized me. 

“Ah, you changed clothes, man,” one of them said.

“We didn’t know who the hell you were,” another added.

They were passing around a joint and offered me a hit. I politely declined.

My mid-length hair and beard sometimes gave the impression that I was a hippie myself, but the style was only to keep my morning routine to a minimum.

I turned toward the river, its banks sandy and soft just next to the rock wall. 

As I placed my floatation device into the shallow current, I heard a cheer from the pool. With bleary eyes, all four of the hippies were watching me launch my maiden voyage upon the tube. I smiled at them, then sat back into the cold water with a heave. 

The four spectators laughed and applauded as I splashed along with the current, past the rock wall which separated the river from the springs. They waved in wonder as I left them behind, floating along slowly but steadily like a piece of driftwood. 

The canyon walls got steeper. The first bend in the river gave way to calm and deep waters. I silently floated past like a cloud, once reaching out a hand to touch the steep passing wall. I floated another ten minutes like this, around one bend after another, until I began to hear the faint sound of splashing water.

The seasonal waterfall was a marker. Because it only flowed for a few days each year, it would be a difficult landmark for anyone to use as a search tool. But that is just what the man who’d led me here had intended. When I finally spotted it, the white vertical line looked just like a giant blaze mark, a symbol I would use to map my way in a dense forest. It was the final clue.

I used my hands to paddle the inner tube toward the shore and stood as soon as my feet could gain purchase. The river turned sharply at the falls, and a large pool had formed in the bend. The rim of the canyon was at least thirty feet above, its seasonal runoff pouring over the edge at this one point. I climbed up the slope of black rocks, around the pool toward the falls. I needed to look behind it. 

It was easy enough to get behind, and no big secret. One could see daylight at the bottom of the cascade, between the water and the wall of the steep canyon. Here the rocks were slick and dangerous. The old man must have come here during the dry season when the waterfall was no more than a cloud high above the gorge. I carefully climbed over them and ambled up the slope, to the base of the cliff wall, just behind the cascade of white and brown water coming down.

An enormous flat boulder sat in the center of the wall, jutting outward like a shelf. I bent at my knees and could see a dark hole beneath it. Years ago, the waterfall had pooled here and carved this miniature cave. I knew the chest was in there before I even looked.

In the treasure hunting world, I had a reputation for two things, big finds and my distinct reaction to them. I tried to act like I had done it before, and would do it again. I tried not to, as they say, freak out. I did my celebrating alone, long after the job was done, with a bottle of whiskey and the cleared check from my employer. But this discovery was different. I wasn’t in this one for the money. I was in it for the gold, and not just any gold. 

I could feel plastic, like thick lawn bags. I got on my belly and reached in with both hands. The chest was small, only about nine by twelve inches and less than ten inches tall. It had been wrapped in a trash can liner and duct tape. I pulled it toward me and backed out of the hole.

The chest weighed nearly forty pounds, which I knew from the note left by its former owner. I had come into possession of the note in the same way everyone else did, by photocopying it from the book containing his memoirs. 

Apple Dowd was a wealthy art collector and eccentric who lived in Santa Fe. He had built his gallery after years of excavating a Pueblo near his home. He’d been a fighter pilot in World War II and had got his start in art collecting around that time. In his memoirs he claims to have found gold in the South Pacific, rare pieces given to him by a mysterious man he met there. When Dowd became terminally ill with cancer, he took his most valued pieces and hid them away in a bronze chest, leaving behind clues for someone like me to come find. Dowd was an adventurer, and he wanted his legacy to embody the notion of discovery. That’s why he left the clues in his memoirs.

The gold pieces had belonged to the conquistador Coronado and had been intended to use as proof of the existence of El Dorado, the fabled city of gold. But the pieces never made it back to the Queen of Spain, and Coronado would die without ever realizing his dream of returning to the place he’d claimed to have found. This was a legend, of course, and only a fool believed in legends. The real story was told by the gold pieces themselves.  

I tore open the plastic and cut the duct tape. I opened the small chest to find gold bars, jade carvings, a turquoise bracelet, and other artifacts. Finally I spotted three gold coins. They were each nearly the size of my palm, much bigger than most gold pieces of that era. I took them out, wrapped them in a cloth, and stuffed them into the thigh pocket of my safari trousers. 

Leaving the remaining treasure inside the chest, I wrapped it back up in the plastic as best I could, and tucked it into the center of my inner tube. I would have to swim this river back upstream, at least until I was through the box canyon. The old man had done it, so I could too. But of course, he had gone back upstream without the chest, whereas I was planning to take it back with me. All I needed were the three gold pieces, the chest was just a bonus. But if I could make it back out of the canyon with the whole treasure, it would be well worth it. 

Swimming across the river and upstream through the gorge, a rope tied around my chest, was the easy part. I pulled my claim across the deep water, a half-million-dollar inner tube, which I discarded after grabbing the chest from its center and rendered it worthless. The hard part came when I had to carry the forty-pound prize over a mile of jagged onyx boulders, fallen from the cliff sides eons ago. Eventually, I was able to wade along the shallow edge of the riverbank, to avoid both the boulders and the sweeping undertow of the river. 

By early evening, I was back at the hot springs and approaching the stone wall which separated it from the river. There were only three people in the steaming pool now, and they were different hippies than the ones who’d been there before. I must have shocked them, approaching from the direction I did, and without warning. They started. 

“Whoah, man!” Someone cried, and there was splashing. 

“It’s okay,” I assured. “I’m just hiking out from the falls.” The hippies soon calmed down and smiled at me.

“Far out,” one long-haired man said. “That’s a long way.” 

I nodded and stepped up the slope, toward the zig-zagging trail that would lead to my pickup. 

“Whatcha got there?” Another of the strangers asked, noticing my awkward gate and the strangely wrapped object in my arms. They probably thought it was marijuana, a giant brick of it, wrapped in plastic and duct tape, left by someone for me to find. I said nothing.

As I walked away from them, I could hear their criticism of my social skills. I didn’t care. I could feel the weight of the three gold coins in my pocket.

I smiled as I topped the trail and spotted my small truck in the distance. This expedition had gone as smoothly as I could’ve hoped. I’d been able to reclaim the entire chest, which was great for my financier. But these three gold pieces were more valuable than all the contents of that chest combined. I knew their true nature. And if everyone else knew what I knew, these coins would be considered among the most valuable artifacts in the world.

Grab Your Copy Of Triad of the Islanders