Seven Red Knots: A St. Augustine Time Travel Mystery

Joel blames himself for the horrific experience his sister Carol endured as a child.Prof. Benjamin Schwartz, the estranged father of Joel and Carol, gave Joel the gift of an eight-inch, 5,000-year-old solid gold statue of the Egyptian goddess Isis, for achieving his doctorate at Princeton.Their father was a retired professor of Hebraic studies and a world-renowned antiquities dealer who would mysteriously obtain artifacts from different centuries. He’d take his children around the house and point out his latest acquisitions, teasing them that no one could find the things he did and that someday they would discover the answers in the Kabbalah.When their father dies under suspicious circumstances, Professor Arenofsky, their father’s best friend and business partner, gives Joel and Carol an envelope their father had entrusted to him. It contains God’s name and two red strings with seven knots (also known as Rachel’s string) to protect them from evil. The professor warns Joel and Carol that the knowledge of God’s name is dangerous because of various financial and commercial organizations that will stop at nothing to possess it.After the funeral, in their father’s attic the siblings find a cryptic message and a map of historic St. Augustine that should lead them to the lost Spanish treasure.Learning the secret of time travel through the Kabbalah, they travel in St. Augustine between the seventeenth, eighteenth, and twenty-first centuries—during which they change their identities and have near-death experiences.Joel and Carol are shocked to find their father is stuck in 1680; he died in 2012 and can no longer transmute. He tells them that Juan Caruso, a Jewish converso, will help them locate the treasure; however, they must go to the year 1702.While searching for Juan Caruso, a wild boar charges at Carol and at the last moment Juan Caruso saves her life. Joel, Carol, and Juan must reach the Government House during the attack by the British on Spanish St. Augustine, in order to secure the treasure. They find the three chests, haul them back to Anastasia Island, and bury them for safety. Because Joel can transmute to modern days for medications, Carol, a pharmacist, prevents Juan from dying of a rattlesnake bite. She falls in love with Juan and refuses to return with Joel to 2012. Carol and Juan marry, only later to die at sea.Back in 2012, Joel has a religious revelation in the Chapel of Our Lady of La Leche, on the grounds of the Mission of Nombre de Dios.Professor Arenofsky turns out to be a traitor who captures and threatens Joel with torture because he wants Joel’s valuable statue of Isis to use as a bribe to restart a war between Egypt and Israel.A mysterious redheaded woman who appears throughout the story is with Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency, and as the torture is about to begin, she frees Joel.With his sister living in a previous century, Joel is heartbroken and lonely. He transmutes back to when they were children, to change Carol’s destiny.