Back at Kate’s cabin, Eli stood at the old wooden table, the torn photocopy in one hand and the original ledger in the other. A soft rain tapped against the windows, and the late evening light gave everything a golden-brown hue.
Kate brought over two mugs of tea and set them down beside a spread of documents—photographs of the stone marker, handwritten notes, and a digital scan of the ledger pages. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, pulling up a chair. “What if the treasure isn’t the point?”
Eli raised an eyebrow. “You’re starting to sound like me.”
She smiled faintly. “Hear me out. The map, the chest, the stone—all of it feels like breadcrumbs, but maybe Elias was trying to protect something bigger than gold.”
Eli opened the ledger to a page they had skipped before, one filled not with neat journal entries, but messy scribbles and marginal notes. “He knew someone would come looking,” Eli murmured, running his fingers along the faded ink. “This writing—these aren’t just ramblings. This looks encoded.”
Kate leaned in. “What if it’s a cipher? Maybe a substitution or symbol-based code.”
They studied the page together, tracing patterns. Certain symbols repeated every few lines—small hand-drawn marks that resembled the shape of a key, a leaf, and something that looked like a flame. And beneath one of them, barely visible in pencil, was a faint signature: E. Arvin.
“I think this is the key,” Eli said. “Literally.”
They turned back to the original stone rubbing they had made at the cave—the one bearing the carved 'E. Arvin' mark. There had been faint symbols etched around the base that they had initially dismissed as weathering. Now, they realized, those marks matched the ones in the ledger.
Kate grabbed her tablet and began aligning the images. “If we overlay the two—ledger and rubbing—then rotate the ledger entry…”
Eli watched as the shapes aligned perfectly.
“It’s a map,” he said. “A second one.”
But instead of leading to a single point, this one seemed to mark a boundary, an area outlined by old property lines… and at the center, a name: Joseph Bennett.
“Does that name mean anything to you?” Kate asked.
Eli looked out the window toward the darkening forest. “It does now.”
Flashback: 1820 – The Last Visit
Rain fell steadily as Elias Arvin rode alone through the thick forest, his cloak heavy and soaked through. He reached the small farmhouse nestled in the hills—his friend Joseph Bennett’s land. The two men had served together during the war. Loyal, honorable, and bound by more than just survival.
Inside the farmhouse, Elias handed Joseph a small wrapped bundle.
“If anything happens to me,” Elias said, “this is to be buried beneath your stone wall. Not for you, not for me—but for the one who comes after.”
Joseph nodded solemnly. “You think they’ll come?”
“Not now. Not soon. But eventually.”
Elias pulled a scrap of paper from his coat and scrawled something hastily.
“The fifth mark,” he whispered, sliding it into the bundle.
Back in the present, Kate looked up. “So this Joseph Bennett—his land is part of what’s now the wildlife management area?”
Eli nodded. “And it’s public land. That means whatever Elias left… it might still be there.”
Kate reached for her coat. “Then what are we waiting for?”
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