Chapter Text
Golden Pogues
Prologue
What did a cursed compass, wheat, a lynching and mosquitos have in common?
Quite a bit, actually.
Not that they knew it, in the beginning.
Compass. Wheat. A lynching. Mosquitos. Absurd breadcrumbs leading to a lost hoard of $400 million in British gold.
Nearly two hundred years, the wreckage of The Royal Merchant ship and its lost treasure had driven men mad, trying to uncover her watery grave in the Atlantic seabed, and cash in on the fabled gold. It took a dropout orphan with slight ADD from the Cut to link the breadcrumbs all together, with a tenacity that outweighed good sense.
She’d lost her dad to the Merchant first, after a lifetime’s obsession. Ahab and the white whale. And within the same year, John B had followed his fate. Single-minded to the point of recklessness, the both of them, driven to self-destruction in their pursuit of buried treasure. Big John, because it would change their lives in untold ways to find it: John B…because he was haunted by the ghost of their dad, Hamlet-style…and he thought he had nothing to lose.
Nothing but his life. Dead. Both of them. All because of one man’s insatiable greed.
They were dead. Big John and John B. But she had survived - to set things straight, clean up the mess, and watch Ward Cameron be buried alive as the rotten foundations he had built his life on came crumbling down upon him.
It was the one silver lining in all this mess. The glitter of gold in the marsh, as it were.
For once, the kook wouldn’t get away with it.
Not this time. Not with this much blood on his hands.
Not when the story was too ridiculous not to be believed.
Not when they had evidence. A drug-dealer getting shotgun pellets removed from his ass in the E.R. A murder in cold-blood caught on camera. And gold bars embossed with wheat.
The discovery of The Royal Merchant’s gold was nothing if not a victory for the Cut.
Finally, finally - the kooks of Figure Eight got what was due to them.
Epic karmic payback.
Outer Banks was shaken to its core.
Paradise on Earth would never be the same.
All because of a cursed compass, wheat, a lynching and some mosquitoes.
All because of five kids with nothing to do all summer, and nothing to lose by picking up that first breadcrumb and following the trail, wherever it led.
It was bittersweet. They’d found the gold. Some of it. And the rest had been stolen.
Still, what did it matter, losing something they had never had?
But losing John B…
Liv had lost her twin-brother.
What did the gold matter?