The 312 Word Big Birthday Bash!!!

Title:  Deer Creek

Genre: Mystery/Romance--Women's Fiction

Status: Work in Progress (first 100 pages)

Author:  Valerie J. Steimle

           Wyatt Litchfield, Mason Dutton, Jake Asher, Landon Spacks, and Blake Cassin stayed together through thick and think. These five boys were always best buddies from elementary school through high school and now college.

They rode horses together, skied together and dated girls together.  One day, much to the surprise of their parents’, Mason Dutton announced to the group that it was important for them to learn how to scuba dive.  It was a skill not easily mastered in their area of Southern Utah.  There were no great bodies of water nearby unless you count Lake Powell which was over a hundred miles away.  But Mason got the scuba diving bug and the others followed suit.  All five boys found themselves swimming in a pool with diving masks and breathing apparatus.

For a year, the fearless five devoted themselves to learning how to dive so it wasn’t much of a surprise when Wyatt’s father asked the boys a favor.

Jerry Litchfield and Edgar Kauffman were real estate buddies.  They shared an office and did very well in the Deer Creek area of the Southern Utah Mountains.  There were lots of vacation areas which became popular during the 90’s when many area residents had more money to spend and bought vacation homes to alleviate the hot, dry summers of the valley.  Jerry and Edgar also treasure hunted on the side as a hobby. They heard the stories of the Montezuma treasure buried somewhere around the area but no one could find it.  They studied the markers left on rock walls and traveled all over the area to find any clue they could. They became well versed with the treasure hunting lingo and kept notes so they could study what they found.

One hunting adventure took the pair to a place through a cave.  Not unusual as most of the places they searched were caves,