Part 9

Ben, Abigail, Emily, and Ben's father, Patrick, are all hovering around a desk in Patrick's house. They have Riley's map and notes spread everywhere, along with a few history books lying open around the room. Sunlight pours through a window and although Ben and Abigail have changed clothes from the previous night, the bags under their eyes reveal that neither have slept.

"Ugh, this is gibberish," Emily complains, rubbing her eyes.

"No, not entirely," Patrick says, "Read the notes on the marked sheets. Some of the words on them coincide with real places that are marked on this map. See, this one here with the asterisk on it mentions endless bridges of stone. The asterisk on the map is placed right about where Arches National Park is."

"You're right, dad," Ben says, picking up another of Riley's marked sheets. "But some of these are pretty vague. We're probably going to have to work backwards – look for places we think Riley may have been targeting, then look for anything written on the sheets that confirms we have the right place."

"And there's still the matter of the story," Abigail chimes in.

"Story?" Emily asks.

"Well, Riley keeps mentioning a warrior on several of these pages, and this page here mentions a talking salamander, and there's this page over here mentioning a trapped bear. There's a story hidden in this mess somewhere, and I'm guessing that's the part that Riley has in his head – it's the key to putting this whole thing together."

Ben looks through all the marked sheets, again, then picks up the other pages of notes that aren't marked with a symbol. He finds the one that he had done the graphite copy of the night before, and looks again at the words, "warrior's eye" encircled on it. Looking at the map, he suddenly picks up a pencil and traces through each symbol, connecting the dots. When he's finished, he leans back so everyone can see. With the symbols all connected, there is now what looks like a giant eye drawn across the country with one corner of the eye at Roanoke Island in North Carolina and the other corner at Arches National Park in Utah.

"The warrior's eye," Ben states.

"And somewhere in it lies the secret to the Cittie of Raleigh," Patrick quietly remarks.

"Cittie of Raleigh?" Sadusky's voice is heard entering the room, "Sorry, the door was open." Patrick shakes his head in a not-a-problem fashion. "That was the name of that colony of settlers that disappeared from Roanoke Island, right?"

"Yeah, they disappeared sometime between 1587 and 1590. One hundred and seventeen men, women, and children disappeared from the Roanoke Island colony in the three years between the birth of the governor's – "

"John White" Abigail interjects, remembering that Riley had made a point to jot the name down in his notes.

" – Right, John White was the appointed governor of the Cittie of Raleigh. Anyway, his daughter, Eleanor Dare, gave birth to his granddaughter on August 18, 1587. They named her Virginia after the queen, and she was the first English child ever born on American soil. Ten days later, White returned to England to get supplies for the colony, but ended up having to stay in England longer than he anticipated due to the invasion of the Spanish Armada. Exactly three years after Virginia's birth, White stepped foot on Roanoke Island, once again, only to discover that the Cittie of Raleigh was no more. Every one of those one hundred-seventeen colonists had disappeared and the only clues left behind were the carvings of the word 'Croatoan' on a fence post, and simply 'Cro' on a nearby tree. White was never able to find what happened to his daughter and granddaughter, or any of the other settlers. It's remained a mystery to this day."

"Until Riley Poole, or I should say Riley Brenner, got his hands on it."

"Brenner?" Ben asks, "I thought you said it'd take a while to track down who Riley's real parents were."

"I pulled an all-nighter - and from the looks of it, so did you - and that's what I was able to come up with. I actually don't have any hard evidence yet to back up my theory, but I'm certain I'll be proven correct once all the paperwork on Riley's history in foster care comes back to me. On a hunch, I ran Riley's photo through the facial recognition software comparing it to anyone murdered around the time Riley first appeared in the foster system. I didn't come up with anything convincing, so I broadened the search to scan for couples that may have come up missing or suffered accidental deaths. There were hundreds, of course, that could have been potential candidates, so I narrowed the search down to just those couples who were known to have had a child around Riley's age at the time. There were only a few possibilities that the scanner could match Riley's photo to after that. One, in particular, caught my eye."

Sadusky drops the file folder he's been holding in his hands onto the desk. Ben opens it and pulls out a picture of the deceased couple in question, noting that Riley does, in fact, look very much like the man except for in the eyes. This man's eyes are dark brown, but Riley's are an inquisitive blue, a blue that matches those that the woman in the photographs is sporting. He hands the pictures to Abigail and picks up Sadusky's report. Looking down, Abigail sees that the rest of the folder is full of copies of old newspaper articles. She picks them up and begins scanning over them.

"Lily and Mark Brenner…" Ben reads out loud, "Died, along with their five-year-old son, in a cave-in while they were working at a dig site near Zacatecas, Mexico."

"A dig near Zacatecas? I don't remember that," Emily says.

"It seems the site wasn't up for very long before it was abandoned due to the cave-in," Abigail summarizes from the articles, "The dig was granted funding when a few Aztec artifacts were discovered, which was enough evidence to investigate whether the Aztec empire actually extended further north than what was originally assumed." She starts to read one of the articles aloud, "'Researchers unearthed a small room that contained some Aztec artifacts and a secret door that led further underground. In haste to study what lie beyond the door, Mark and Lily Brenner ignored orders to wait until the tunnel within was secure, and when the walls collapsed, they met their fate inside. Unfortunately, so did their five-year-old son, who was known to play hide-and-seek around the dig site.' This next article goes on to say that the bodies were never found, and the dig site was abandoned a short time later when it was concluded that the room just served as a hide-out and storage facility for thieves who had merely stolen the artifacts from an Aztec city."

"A thieves' quarters turned tomb," Patrick mumbles, "The nightmare of every archeologist and treasure hunter – to become the past while trying to uncover it."

"Well, if these people are, in fact, Riley's parents, it really does seem that treasure hunting is a genealogical trait," Emily quips.

"And that's not all that got passed to Riley," Ben states, stopping on the third page of Sadusky's report, "Check this out – Lily Brenner's maiden name was Lily Harvie, and get this, she was Lumbee."

Emily, Abigail, and Patrick all look at Ben in disbelief.

"Did I miss something there?" Sadusky asks.

"The Lumbee are a Native American tribe of mixed ancestry - see how her features are very European? It was speculated that the ancestors of the Lumbee were a mix between European colonists and possibly the Croatan, or Croatoan, Indians. One of the theories is that the colonists from Roanoke were never actually lost, but that they simply merged with the Croatan Indians."

"Which would explain the carvings White found when he returned to the Cittie of Raleigh," Sadusky concludes.

"My God," Emily says quietly, "If all this is true, do you realize what this means?"

The others look at her in silent anticipation.

"Riley could very well be a direct descendant of one of the Lost Colonists of Roanoke Island."