23
Jacky couldn’t sleep, and spent the next hour staring at a rough-edged, old piece of paper by the moonlight coming in the window above the head of his bed.
The piece of paper was part of the package given him by Marcellus, supposedly a page torn from Lawrence Marcellus’ diary. Crisp and grimy, it showed an illustration in pencil, faded, almost invisible. Two straight lines running parallel with horizontal lines connecting them, rather like a sketch of a ladder. There was a number “18” inside the “ladder”. The bottom of the drawing ended where the paper was torn. But could this really be a quick illustration of the Money Pit, drawn by the man who supposedly designed it? The jotting down of a mental image not yet formed fully, the horizontal lines depicting the platforms that would later intrigue diggers so?
The only other mark on the paper was a small L, for “Lawrence” no doubt, above and to the left of the Pit sketch.
He thought of the guy called Patrick, the fellow that Marcellus had mentioned. The guy who fashioned the bone necklace. In Patrick’s diary, which Jacky had skimmed through, there was nothing of note to this quest, nothing at all about the Money Pit. Mostly it contained his thoughts and actions. He read how Patrick travelled all over Nova Scotia during the first two weeks after they’d arrived (“they” were never described, but Jacky assumed it meant Lawrence Marcellus and the rest of the group), and how he had gone digging at a place called Joggins. Jacky knew that Joggins, near the Bay of Fundy, was the site where the world’s highest tides constantly eroded the cliffs and frequently revealed new fossils from the Carboniferous Period. There was no mention of his finding a fossil that he scraped away at to reveal bones he would use for a necklace, but then why should there be? Patrick wasn’t to know that his jewellery would later become so famous.
No mention of Oak Island, though. And only scant reference in the diary of Lawrence Marcellus. Obviously Lawrence Marcellus had feared his diary would be read by others and hadn’t wanted to risk their discovering the truth, so he had kept all knowledge of the Money Pit in a mental journal. Wise.
Reaching over his head, Jacky stuck the piece of paper to the wet glass. That would probably ruin a major clue, an important piece of antique paper, and annoy Theodore Marcellus, but he was too tired to care.
Five minutes later his eyes snapped open. He just couldn’t sleep. And now he knew why. For an adventurer like him, research was not done naked in a bed. He could feel his mind clogging up, rusting.
He got up and got dressed.