Lost Contact (The Bridge Sequence Book One) Nathan Hystad (the reading list book .txt) 📖

him because my father had worked for the man. From what I could gather, most of his expeditions had been funded by Madison.

“You know this guy, right?” Marcus asked.

To say I knew him was a stretch. I knew he’d been at my father’s funeral service, and apparently had a heated conversation with my mother. I heard my uncle had intervened, and Madison had left in a flurry, tearing away in a black Lincoln limousine. “We met when I was a kid. Where’s he living?” I asked.

“Last known address is in New York. Once a New Yorker, always a New Yorker,” Marcus said.

I laughed and went to the fridge, taking out two more beers. “Didn’t you used to live there?”

“I’m the outlier,” he replied.

“Ain’t that the truth. Mark it down. We’re making a road trip,” I told him.

“Now?”

I glanced at the clock. I was beat after the weekend, not to mention, I’d had a drink, and the holiday traffic was going to be insane. “Tomorrow.”

“I think you’re forgetting something.” Marcus started cleaning up the Styrofoam containers, tossing them into the empty garbage can under my sink.

“What’s that?”

“You know, that thing you do during the week. You wear patches on your jacket, probably chew a pipe, try not to gawk at the hot third-year students twirling their hair around their fingers, asking you for some ‘personal attentive at-home studying’.” He said the last making air quotes with his fingers.

My job. He was right. “Damn it. Finals are soon.” I couldn’t wait two weeks. “See if you can reach this Brian Hardy and make the appointment for Friday. I have class in the morning. We’ll go after.”

“What if I have plans?” Marcus asked. He was a freelance research assistant, and from the sounds of things, work was skinny these days.

“Do you?”

He lost his grin. “I’ll set it up. What if he won’t talk to me?”

“Then he’ll have to turn us down in person. Either way, we’re going to New York this Friday.”

“There was something else, right? An important discovery you couldn’t wait to share with me? Now would be a good time.”

“The rubbing,” I said, slapping a palm against the table. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten it.

Marcus turned to face me, raising his hands. “Rubbing? I don’t like the sounds of this…”

“Quit kidding around.” I went to the box, picking out the folded paper cemetery map, and opened it, smoothing it on the table beside Marcus. “I found this on Clayton Belvedere’s gravestone. They’re numbers.”

“I can see that. Why haven’t you ever thought of this before?” he asked, his lips moving as he recited the digits at a whisper.

“I haven’t gone looking. How was I to know there would be some secret message engraved on the tombstone?”

Marcus shook his head and shrugged. “They don’t make sense. There are no degrees or directions listed.”

“Wait, what about decimal degrees?” I asked, and he frowned while sipping his beer.

“The decimal is near the end. I don’t think that’s it.”

Puzzles. Why did everything have to be secretive and hidden from plain sight? Who else would have been desperate for coordinates on some obscure treasure hunter’s gravestone in a nowhere city a couple of hours from Boston, unless it was meant to be a message for someone?

“That’s it!” I stood up, bumping into the table. My bottle fell over, spilling on the map. I picked the paper up by the corner, the liquid running over the rubbing. It was fine.

“Now who’s the messy one?” Marcus asked before grabbing the paper towel. He dabbed it gently. “What has you channeling Archimedes?”

“He must have set this up before he went missing. Clayton knew the message would eventually be put on his grave’s marker. They’re coordinates, Marcus. This is the big break we’ve been waiting for!”

I could hardly contain myself. I’d been chasing ghosts for so long without the hint of a real trail, always coming out with less money and fewer answers. This could be the moment everything changed.

“They’re not. I’m telling you…” Marcus stopped and stared at the sheet. “Unless the numbers are reversed.” He opened the computer again. Clicking on the mapping app, he keyed in the digits as they were. It didn’t work. He started with the first string, adding the last number at the beginning, then a decimal, and the next six numbers from right to left. He repeated it with the second string on the rubbing, and his finger hovered over the search button.

“Would you quit being so dramatic? Hit it,” I told him, and he obeyed.

I slunk to the chair as the map displayed the location. It was the middle of nowhere in Venezuela, four hundred miles south of Caracas. From what little I knew of the region, I wasn’t overly keen on making the trek.

“What the hell are we going to find there?” Marcus asked me, but I really had absolutely no idea.

“I couldn’t begin to guess.”

“I’m sure you have a few theories.”

I considered the statement. “Why was it on Clay’s grave? That implies my father didn’t want anyone revisiting his trail. Maybe Clay did this without my dad’s knowledge. He hoped to leave the breadcrumbs for his daughter or someone willing to follow. It was his out. Or maybe he just wanted someone to eventually learn what happened.”

“You don’t think they died in a collapse on an underground site, do you?” Marcus leaned away in his chair, and we both stared at the satellite image of Venezuela.

I shook my head and tapped my finger on the table. “I know that’s the widely acknowledged hypothesis, but there wasn’t proof to corroborate that. We think they were brought to Portugal by boat, but that’s where the line runs dry.”

Of course, no one had truly put a real investigation into their disappearance, not to the level that would have been necessary to track them. I’d done my best when I’d graduated college, spending a summer backpacking every site possible in Portugal and Spain, attempting to learn any bit of information that might help. I’d returned