HIDDEN GOLD
Lost Treasure in the Flint Hills
Beth Pierce, a beautiful young graduate student at Emporia (Kansas) State University, discovers a past-life dimension while training for an upcoming marathon. She tells what she sees and hears in her mind’s eyes and ears from ghostly people during pre-Civil War years in Kansas Territory—especially Jacob and Elvira Phenis, who lived in the Flint Hills southwest of Emporia. But Beth can’t talk to friends about her visions and conversations with these pioneers because her professors and classmates might think she was crazy. Only when two department heads, Ron Cannon and Dwight Watt, stumble upon an old-fashioned, iron coffin in a nearby creek, do their university administrators allow them to create a new, experimental graduate-school course to solve the mystery of its origin. Beth quickly enrolls, because she knows about the coffin and has “talked” with the deceased before they died. She also knows what happened to the Phenis couple who stored their accumulated wealth in a very strange place.
This rapidly-unfolding novel, partly based on historical facts, becomes an exciting adventure between the activities of early settlers in and around early Emporia—and twenty-eight graduate students who combine their intellectual talents to solve the many riddles about the Phenis couple through scientific, technological and sociological investigations. What happens when the class finally discovers and unearths the long-lost treasure on Phenis Mound will quickly change the minds of those who steadfastly believe that dead men tell no tales.