This is a residential tower down at the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, with every apartment on the beachside overlooking the ocean.

There could almost be a Die Gard scenarion going on here, but I like the idea of a drama unfolding in the penthouse, like

The husband comes home and finds the wife with her personal trainer, who is getting too personal, and he is about to thrown him over the balcony. That’s a long way down.

Uber eats arrive at the door, but it’s really two wannabe ransomers who take the daughter, tie her up, then start making absurd demands, and the daughter almost throws the two of them over the balcony.

But, not one to miss an opportunity, or get her stepmother, who is younger than her, into all sorts of trouble.

The brother of the owner, a single father is killed in a freak accident, and his son has to be taken in, brought back to the penthouse, and thinks he’s struck it rich. The conniving brat is about to be taught a lesson he’ll never forget when he discovers all is not what it seems.

Or my absolute favorite, I win the lottery, move into the apartment, and so do the other 27 layabout members of my family.

Don’t laugh, it happens…

Here’s the thing…

Every time I close my eyes, I see something different.

I’d like to think the cinema of my dreams is playing a double feature but it’s a bit like a comedy cartoon night on Fox.

But these dreams are nothing to laugh about.

Once again there’s a new installment of an old feature, and we’re back on the treasure hunt.

Whilst Boggs took the time to get over his assault, I went back to my job at Benderby’s because there was no reason not to.  Benderby himself had checked several times on how I was, and I was beginning to think he called just to see my mother. 

And the notion of those two together was not painting a pretty picture, knowing who he was.  But we were being treated better than we had and that was a good thing, or so my mother said.  She too was surprised at Benderby’s interest, but she was not writing anything into it.  She had a different perception of him that most others had.

I was careful to avoid Alex, not that it was difficult because he was rarely in the warehouse office, or anywhere on the factory site most days, except for a few hours in the morning, and to close up at night.  No one else seemed to miss his presence, but I was a little more suspicious as to what he was doing with the rest of his time, to the extent that once I went looking for him.

The only conclusion I’d come to, now that he had his own map, it had to have something to do with the treasure.

Getting a version of the treasure map to Alex via Nadia had been a logistical nightmare, and constantly fraught with the expectation that Alex might think he was being set up.  The fact it was Nadia doing it was not lost on me and I realized later we had played right into her, and her family’s, hands in fitting the ongoing feud between the families.  Nor was it lost on me the enthusiasm which she showed in carrying out the plan.

If it wasn’t for the fact both Boggs and I benefited from it, I would have had second thoughts about employing her.  And Boggs was right, a girl like that could never like a boy like me.  She would always be the province of the likes of Alex Benderby, and I told myself that it was going to be business only from now on.

She set up the meeting with Alex and arranged for me to be nearby to witness the transaction, though what her reason was for that I had no idea and I really didn’t want to be there.  For some reason, I didn’t like the idea of Nadia getting close to Alex, but it was necessary, she decided, in order to sell the story.

She had cajoled him into believing firstly his map was the real map mainly because she had used her feminine wiles on Boogs, talking him into showing her the real map, and, then, while he was away for a few minutes, she had copied it.

Then it was a matter of keeping the map a secret because firstly it would ruin the rapport she supposedly had with Boggs should they need him again, and as far as she was aware, Vince thought he also had the real map and which Boggs said was not, and to mess with Vince would immediately make him suspicious about the authenticity of his map and that would be the last thing Alex would want.

It was a treat to see how manipulable Alex was when she was making offers she knew she’d never keep.  Or at least not in front of me.  I didn’t expect that I meant very much to her and watching her with Alex was much like how she handled me, so I guess we were all manipulable in her hands.  She was a Cossatino, and in that regard, no end of trouble.

With Alex handled, she left him with so much promise and so little substance I was surprised he fell for it.  But, there again, even in school, Alex wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box.  I think the notion that he could pull off the treasure hunt might just get the monkey on his back his father had put there many years before.

Then there was Nadia.

Seeing her in action put her in a different light.  Whilst those midnight rendezvous at the motel may have given me a sense of false bravado, seeing her with Alex, and playing her games, I had to wonder if my feelings were just an infatuation.  Did I like Nadia all that much?  I guess I must a little, to be feeling angry when Alex touched her.  

I had to remind myself that I could never live in her world, that her first and last instinct would always be to lie and manipulate.  She was, after all, a Cossatino, and leopards, as they say, never changed their spots.  She might want to escape from her family, but saying it and doing it were two entirely different things,

I doubted her father, no matter how much he liked or hated her, should ever let her go, simply because as a beautiful woman, she could do so much for the family business.

Whether she wanted to or not.

I left once he agreed, and before she did anything with him.  Clearly, Alex was expecting them to work as a team, but she had declined on account of her father, who was as mad as a hatter, and might just start killing Benderby’s if he found out she was working with him.

Best to leave well alone and appear to go their separate ways.

Until the treasure was found.

I didn’t hear from Boggs for a week.  I’d decided that I was going to leave him alone until he called or sent a text.  Boggs and idle time were a bad mix so I knew when I next heard from him, he would have formulated a half-baked grandiose plan for us to go on our treasure hunt.

And I was busy working out how I was going to tell him he had to take a step back and watch and wait till the Benderby’s and the Cossatino’s had launched their campaigns.  It wouldn’t take long.  Both sons of self-made men, Alex and Vince had a lot to prove to their fathers, and there was no doubt they were going to use the lost treasure as the means of getting back into favor.

That brought a problem to the table, not immediately, but down the road, when neither would be able to find it.  Their first port of call would be Boggs, the one who had supplied them with ‘faulty’ maps.  It would never be their fault, that they were too stupid to realize they were being played, or, even if it was the right map, still couldn’t follow the instructions.

But even I had that problem.  I’d seen quite a few variations with notations, diagrams and cryptic messages.  I was not sure how they were going to fare.  Perhaps he had been thinking of just that because I received a text message, asking me to come over the next morning.  

As Sherlock Holmes would say, ‘the game’s afoot’.

© Charles Heath 2019-2020

This case has everything, red herrings, jealous brothers, femme fatales, and at the heart of it all, greed.

See below for an excerpt from the book…

Coming soon!

An excerpt from the book:

When Harry took the time to consider his position, a rather uncomfortable position at that, he concluded that he was somehow involved in another case that meant very little to him.

Not that it wasn’t important in some way he was yet to determine, it was just that his curiosity had got the better of him, and it had led to this: sitting in a chair, securely bound, waiting for someone one of his captors had called Doug.

It was not the name that worried him so much, it was the evil laugh that had come after the name was spoken.

Doug what? Doug the ‘destroyer’, Doug the ‘dangerous’, Doug the ‘deadly’; there was any number of sinister connotations, and perhaps that was the point of the laugh, to make it more frightening than it was.

But there was no doubt about one thing in his mind right then: he’d made a mistake. A very big. and costly, mistake. Just how big the cost, no doubt he would soon find out.

His mother, and his grandmother, the wisest person he had ever known, had once told him never to eavesdrop.

At the time he couldn’t help himself and instead of minding his own business, listening to a one-sided conversation which ended with a time and a place. The very nature of the person receiving the call was, at the very least, sinister, and, because of the cryptic conversation, there appeared to be, or at least to Harry, criminal activity involved.

For several days he had wrestled with the thought of whether he should go. Stay on the fringe, keep out of sight, observe and report to the police if it was a crime. Instead, he had willingly gone down the rabbit hole.

Now, sitting in an uncomfortable chair, several heat lamps hanging over his head, he was perspiring, and if perspiration could be used as a measure of fear, then Harry’s fear was at the highest level.

Another runnel of sweat rolled into his left eye, and, having his hands tied, literally, it made it impossible to clear it. The burning sensation momentarily took his mind off his predicament. He cursed and then shook his head trying to prevent a re-occurrence. It was to no avail.

Let the stinging sensation be a reminder of what was right and what was wrong.

It was obvious that it was the right place and the right time, but in considering his current perilous situation, it definitely was the wrong place to be, at the worst possible time.

It was meant to be his escape, an escape from the generations of lawyers, what were to Harry, dry, dusty men who had been in business since George Washington said to the first Walthenson to step foot on American soil, ‘Why don’t you become a lawyer?” when asked what he could do for the great man.

Or so it was handed down as lore, though Harry didn’t think Washington meant it literally, the Walthenson’s, then as now, were not shy of taking advice.

Except, of course, when it came to Harry.

He was, Harry’s father was prone to saying, the exception to every rule. Harry guessed his father was referring to the fact his son wanted to be a Private Detective rather than a dry, dusty lawyer. Just the clothes were enough to turn Harry off the profession.

So, with a little of the money Harry inherited from one of his aunts, he leased an office in Gramercy Park and had it renovated to look like the Sam Spade detective agency, you know the one, Spade and Archer, and The Maltese Falcon.

There’s a movie and a book by Dashiell Hammett if you’re interested.

So, there it was, painted on the opaque glass inset of the front door, ‘Harold Walthenson, Private Detective’.

There was enough money to hire an assistant, and it took a week before the right person came along, or, more to the point, didn’t just see his business plan as something sinister. Ellen, a tall cool woman in a long black dress, or so the words of a song in his head told him, fitted in perfectly.

She’d seen the movie, but she said with a grin, Harry was no Humphrey Bogart.

Of course not, he said, he didn’t smoke.

Three months on the job, and it had been a few calls, no ‘real’ cases, nothing but missing animals, and other miscellaneous items. What he really wanted was a missing person. Or perhaps a beguiling, sophisticated woman who was as deadly as she was charming, looking for an errant husband, perhaps one that she had already ‘dispatched’.

Or for a tall, dark and handsome foreigner who spoke in riddles and in heavily accented English, a spy, or perhaps an assassin, in town to take out the mayor. The man was such an imbecile Harry had considered doing it himself.

Now, in a back room of a disused warehouse, that wishful thinking might be just about to come to a very abrupt end, with none of the romanticized trappings of the business befalling him. No beguiling women, no sinister criminals, no stupid policemen.

Just a nasty little man whose only concern was how quickly or how slowly Harry’s end was going to be.

© Charles Heath 2019

50 photographs, 50 stories, of which there is one of the 50 below.

They all start with –

A picture paints … well, as many words as you like.  For instance:

And the story:

It was once said that a desperate man has everything to lose.

The man I was chasing was desperate, but I, on the other hand, was more desperate to catch him.

He’d left a trail of dead people from one end of the island to the other.

The team had put in a lot of effort to locate him, and now his capture was imminent.  We were following the car he was in, from a discrete distance, and, at the appropriate time, we would catch up, pull him over, and make the arrest.

There was nowhere for him to go.

The road led to a dead-end, and the only way off the mountain was back down the road were now on.  Which was why I was somewhat surprised when we discovered where he was.

Where was he going?

“Damn,” I heard Alan mutter.  He was driving, being careful not to get too close, but not far enough away to lose sight of him.

“What?”

“I think he’s made us.”

“How?”

“Dumb bad luck, I’m guessing.  Or he expected we’d follow him up the mountain.  He’s just sped up.”

“How far away?”

“A half-mile.  We should see him higher up when we turn the next corner.”

It took an eternity to get there, and when we did, Alan was right, only he was further on than we thought.”

“Step on it.  Let’s catch him up before he gets to the top.”

Easy to say, not so easy to do.  The road was treacherous, and in places just gravel, and there were no guard rails to stop a three thousand footfall down the mountainside.

Good thing then I had the foresight to have three agents on the hill for just such a scenario.

Ten minutes later, we were in sight of the car, still moving quickly, but we were going slightly faster.  We’d catch up just short of the summit car park.

Or so we thought.

Coming quickly around another corner we almost slammed into the car we’d been chasing.

“What the hell…” Aland muttered.

I was out of the car, and over to see if he was in it, but I knew that it was only a slender possibility.  The car was empty, and no indication where he went.

Certainly not up the road.  It was relatively straightforward for the next mile, at which we would have reached the summit.  Up the mountainside from here, or down.

I looked up.  Nothing.

Alan yelled out, “He’s not going down, not that I can see, but if he did, there’s hardly a foothold and that’s a long fall.”

Then where did he go?

Then a man looking very much like our quarry came out from behind a rock embedded just a short distance up the hill.

“Sorry,” he said quite calmly.  “Had to go if you know what I mean.”

I’d lost him.

It was as simple as that.

I had been led a merry chase up the hill, and all the time he was getting away in a different direction.

I’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book, letting my desperation blind me to the disguise that anyone else would see through in an instant.

It was a lonely sight, looking down that road, knowing that I had to go all that way down again, only this time, without having to throw caution to the wind.

“Maybe next time,” Alan said.

“We’ll get him.  It’s just a matter of time.”

© Charles Heath 2019-2021

Find this and other stories in “Inspiration, maybe”  available soon.

Here’s the thing…

Every time I close my eyes, I see something different.

I’d like to think the cinema of my dreams is playing a double feature but it’s a bit like a comedy cartoon night on Fox.

But these dreams are nothing to laugh about.

Once again there’s a new installment of an old feature, and we’re back on the treasure hunt.

…

The Ormiston’s from the papers

…

The Ormiston story and that of the thousand or so acres between the sea and the mountains are now known as Patterson’s reach, but once called The Grove, began in 1865 when the original Henrich Ormiston arrived from Germany.

Originally intending to go to Australia to grow grapes in South Australia, instead, his fate turned West to the Americas, and, eventually, this part of Florida.  He started out with the intention of growing grapes, but when that failed to materialize, he moved on to Oranges, hence the name, The Grove.

He had married before leaving Germany and had two children, Marta and Gunter before leaving, and Friedrich after he arrived in 1866.  That Friedrich died, according to the gravestone, in 1924.  Neither Marta nor Gunter stayed, leaving Friedrich to carry on the business, have an only child which he named after his father, Heinrich, born in 1899 and who died in 1976.  He in turn had a single son, which he named Friedrich, the infamous person with who Boggs father had a tempestuous business relationship.

Friedrich was born in 1932, during the depression, and it was about that time that the notion there might be buried treasure, somewhere along that coastal area of Florida, floated by a university professor, Emil Stravinsky, who specialized in old pirates.  He had published a book that basically speculated where treasure might be found, and one of those areas was right smack bang in the middle of The Grove.

This information was plucked from the paper’s births, death, and marriages column around the specified dates, the death notices giving some light on the respective Ormiston’s life and toils on their land.

Heinrich, Friedrich’s father, fell for the story hook line and sinker, and with a promise to share the proceeds of an estimated multimillion-dollar trove, invested a fair chunk of the savings he’d amassed over the years in the first of many treasure hunts.  The name Stravinsky rang a bell in my head.

A quick look forward to the most recent editions showed it was the man who had died on Rico’s boat, who was, in fact, a third-generation relative of the original professor, an archaeologist in his own right, and digging a bit further into the story, the paper had published a dozen or so extracts from the professor’s book, hinting their subject matter had been derived from a particular pirate’s log, and from notes made over the years of research by the professor.  It sounded like there was a diary.

I was going to have to find a copy of the professor’s book, which, if it had been published nearly 90 years ago, would now be out of print.

When the father, Heinrich had failed to locate the treasure, the son Friedrich continued the search, only he put more time and effort into more meticulous research rather than take the professor’s word of its whereabouts.

This was about the time Boggs’s father came into the picture.

He had lived and worked in the Caribbean and discovered quite by chance when a storm had blown his boat way off course on a weekend sailing run, the ruins of an encampment and hidden inlet on an uninhabited island where he believed the pirate had operated from.

While waiting to be rescued, the storm had damaged his boat, he took the time to explore, and although he hadn’t told anyone at the time of his rescue, he had discovered a box buried near where a building had once stood containing a map, several coins, a sextant, and a flag.  The news of those discoveries came some years later when it was revealed he’s struck a deal with Ormiston to renew the search for the treasure.

When the result of that expedition came to nothing, each of the partners blamed the other for the lack of success, with Ormiston all but telling anyone who would listen that Boggs had created the map himself for the purpose of extorting money under false pretenses.

Boggs then had to produce the map, where it was authenticated as a map that had been created at the time of the pirate’s reign, but no one could say whether it was just an invention of someone at the time, or it was real.  The fact nothing was found suggested the latter, and it marked to start of the feud between Boggs and Ormiston.

The question in my mind was whether Boggs had that particular map, and had he shown it briefly to me?  Certainly, one of the maps he had was quite old, but there were so many variations, and they all looked equally as old, it was hard to tell.

One point I was quite certain on, none of the maps I’d seen showed the treasure’s final resting place as being in a cave, and I got the impression just before when I’d run into Boggs, that it was exactly where he was going.

Had that been the clue his father had referred to?  Even with the so-called original map, if it showed the treasure hidden in a cave why did Boggs need Ormiston’s help?

Had Ormiston known that might be the final resting place of the treasure?

I would soon find out.  My next stop was the library.

…

© Charles Heath 2020-2022