Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 84102 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 421(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84102 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 421(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
Eddie shrugged. “He might have been thinking about it. Why else would he have done all those treasure hunts with me? It was his final mystery. A way to keep his island relevant.”
“I don’t think he cared about this island being relevant.” He wasn’t sure what Eddie was thinking. “I think he wanted to leave something for you.”
“Then he could have left me cash.” There was a bitterness that dripped from Eddie’s lips. He seemed to shake it off. “That would be so much easier than a treasure hunt, but then my father was a complex man.”
“You can’t sell the island?” Tessa asked. “I mean, I assume if you needed cash, the island would bring some in.”
“No. It’s in a trust and the board members wouldn’t dream of selling it,” Eddie said. “My father made sure the trust is full of conservationists and scientists.”
“You want to sell the island?” David had wondered, but they hadn’t talked about it before beyond the legalities.
“I don’t know. I didn’t in the beginning. You know I spent time out here when I was growing up. I became a part of this community, but circumstances have changed,” Eddie said with a long sigh. “My business keeps me in the city most of the time, and then there are the treasure hunters.”
“I thought you controlled a lot of that.” Because the island was private, he controlled who could and couldn’t come out. It was one of the reasons the tourist situation could be so lucrative. They could charge to even get on the island and provide private experiences.
“There’s a management group based here on the island that controls tourism,” Luis explained. “I interviewed the head of the board as background for the book. They control the flow of tourism to ensure it doesn’t harm the ecosystem, but I think they had a couple of instances of treasure hunters sneaking onto the island or coming in to stay at the beach and then sneaking into the interior without permission.”
“Maybe what you need are some park rangers.” Tessa sat back, studying Eddie with that look in her eyes that let him know she was thinking. Probably about something he wouldn’t like. His lady was on the paranoid side, and she wasn’t the glass-is-half-full type. She seemed to believe the glass was actually a bomb and it would kill them all.
“I’ll have to consider that, but you can see there are unique problems that come with the island,” Eddie replied. “Problems I don’t need. Life seems far more complex now.”
Because they were adults. It would get even more complex as they found partners and started families. It had been easy when they were kids at university, studying and partying and debating the world’s problems without having to solve them.
He could see himself starting a family with Tessa. It was way too early, and she wasn’t even ready for a date with him much less letting him put a ring on her finger.
But it had felt so right to dance with her. He didn’t dance. He was awkward and weird, and it had been okay to dance with her. No one in the world could pull him out of his work like she could. He’d dreamed of this trip, thought he would do nothing but sit in the library and then go tour the places where the “treasure” was rumored to be found.
He’d hauled ass out of here the minute he’d realized she might be in trouble, and when he’d decided she wasn’t, he’d convinced her to spend the afternoon with him. They’d sat on that rooftop bar and had a couple of glasses of Malbec and some empanadas, and they’d talked. She’d talked about her years in the military while he’d given her stories about trying to teach undergrads history.
“Well, a lot of your problems could go away if the professor here can solve the mystery.” Luis gestured David’s way. “He’s got some theories I think are interesting. He definitely thinks it’s on the island. If he can find the treasure, everyone wins.”
“And if there is no real treasure?” He hadn’t thought the treasure would be his primary focus this week. He viewed it as an amusing diversion. “The question is what Ricardo was able to do before he died. From what I’ve been able to discern, he wasn’t capable of hauling some box of treasure into the jungle in the last year of his life.”
“He could have done it sooner,” Luis said with a nod. “He was a complicated man, and sometimes he could be paranoid. Perhaps he thought his treasure could be stolen.”
“That would be exactly like my father,” Eddie agreed. “I never saw the gold he bought from the shipwreck. I know he purchased the items. There’s a log of what was brought here, but I can’t find the actual items in the house, and I’ve certainly looked. Everything from that shipwreck is somewhere on this island.”