PROLOGUE

The Daily Gossip

By a special anonymous columnist for the Blue Lagoon Gazette

By now, you undoubtedly know that Cooper Rock, baseball player with buns of steel, is marrying Waverly Sweet, his pop star girlfriend, in the little mountain town of Shipwreck this weekend.

We’re not here to talk about who’s acting as her maid of honor or what they’re serving for dinner or how the local sheriff’s department will handle shutting the town down with the number of celebrities and athletes destined for the goofball pirate-themed town though.

Oh, no.

We’re talking about what really matters.

The treasure.

You want to know what Waverly’s colors are or how Cooper’s spending his last days of bachelorhood, look somewhere else.

I’m here to give you the real scoop.

To do that, we have to go back in time over two hundred years, to the end of the eighteenth century, when legendary pirate Thorny Rock escaped capture by loading his treasure up in a covered wagon and heading inland from the port of Norfolk.

“Yes, the story I’ve been told since I was little is that Thorny Rock evaded arrest by hustling inland,” Tillie Jean Rock-Cole, Shipwreck’s newly-installed mayor and Cooper’s sister, told me. “My bedtime stories were about his pirate days and how he settled into life here in the Blue Ridge Mountains. My grandpa insisted Thorny buried his treasure somewhere out here, but to the best of my knowledge, if it’s real, it’s never been found.”

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. The biggest part of the story about Waverly Sweet marrying Cooper Rock is that they’re getting hitched in a town where his great-great-something-grandfather, the legendary Thorny Rock himself, buried a pirate treasure.

His family has been hosting Shipwreck’s annual Pirate Festival for longer than this author has been alive, but have they been hiding secrets?

Yes, yes, they donated nearly all of the artifacts now on display at the new Thorny Rock Museum in downtown Shipwreck, but did they donate everything they had?

According to residents of Sarcasm, a town just up the road from Shipwreck, it’s likely the Rock family isn’t fully forthcoming when they talk about their pirate ancestor.

I spoke with one resident who requested anonymity because of the supposed truce between the two rival towns, prompted when Cooper’s brother, Grady, married a Sarcasm native a few years back. My source said tensions between Shipwreck and Sarcasm remain high, and only partially because of the trash talk about who has the better festival.

“They talk about how they’re the best pirate town in the world, but they never mention that Sarcasm was founded by Thorny Rock’s cousin, who did the pirating with him,” my source said. “We’ve always thought they’re hiding more than anyone at their festival suspects. That’s why we started the Unicorn Festival. Because we knew unicorns were the only things that could be more popular than pirates, and we wanted to show them we’re not always last.”

Pirates and unicorns aside, there’s one occasional Shipwreck resident who believes the treasure is still out there.

“Ah, heck, yeah,” Beck Ryder, former member of the boy band Bro Code who has a weekend house just above the town proper, said when I caught up with him at Grady Rock’s bakery. “Of course I believe the treasure’s still out there. How cool would it be to find a treasure? That’s like, next level goals for an amazing life, you know? I want to believe in it. I want to believe my wife and kids and I will find it one day.”

Ryder says he’s been friends with the Rock family for at least a decade, and that Shipwreck is one of his favorite places in the world. His sister is rumored to have fallen in love with her husband while she was in Shipwreck to attend a destination wedding.

That same destination wedding, by the way, is the reason there are wild goats all over town.

Naturally, Shipwreck residents blame Sarcasm residents for nearly ruining their reputation as the place for pirate-themed destination weddings by releasing a herd of goats during the ceremony, and naturally, Sarcasm residents deny it.

One thing that can’t be denied?

Shipwreck is also a town of love.

Beck Ryder added that one of his former bandmates, Cash Rivers, fell in love with his girlfriend, Waverly Sweet’s BFF, the pop star known as Aspen, here in Shipwreck too.

“Oh, yeah, and you know the Wilson brothers are here all the time, between Levi being tight with Waverly and Tripp owning Cooper’s team,” Ryder continued, referencing two more of his four former bandmates. “It’s the best date night when all of us are out here together.”

I asked him if Davis Remington, the last former member of Bro Code, ever visited with a lady love as well, and Beck’s answer convinced me that he was lying about his knowledge of the treasure.

“Davis Remington? Who’s that?”

On point for the men who protect their last band member’s privacy, but suspicious when paired with his claims that he hopes to one day find a treasure.

A treasure that Tillie Jean Rock-Cole continues to play coy about. “Despite all of the pirate tales, no one in my family knows anything about where the treasure might be,” she told me. “Honestly, if it was ever buried here, it was probably found years ago. Before the internet. When someone could anonymously find a treasure and no one would’ve known.”

This author attempted to get a quote from Pop Rock—patriarch of the town and grandfather to Tillie Jean, Cooper, and Grady—but both he and his occasionally-obscene pet parrot, Long Beak Silver, declined to shed any more light on the subject for us.

One thing is certain—if the treasure is still out there, it will be found.

Probably soon.

Because this reporter isn’t the only one covering the history of Shipwreck. And the town has the increased tourism to show for it.

“Oh, yes, we have more and more people stopping in every day to ask if we have any secret intel on where the treasure might be,” Sloane Pearce, a volunteer at the Thorny Rock Museum, told me. “Ever since Cooper and Waverly announced they were getting married here, we’ve been slammed. Tourism is up three or four times what it usually is this time of year. People want to find a treasure.”

When pressed on if she thought it could be found, she simply smiled. “I guess that depends on if it exists.”

Whether it does or not, one thing is certain: this wedding and all of its consequences will be one more story for the Rock family to tell its family for ages to come.