Apple-achian Treasure (Auntie Clem's Bakery Book 8) Read online

  They were, of course, long past the point that Charley could have helped with anything, unless she wanted to take over the register during the rush or help with the cleanup after closing. Erin just looked at her.

  “I was working,” Charley insisted. “I was just doing it from home instead of here. It’s so hot in the kitchen and that little office…”

  The office was bigger than the one Erin had used in the original Auntie Clem’s Bakery, which had been hardly more than a closet. With a desk fan on the heat was nearly tolerable.

  “I didn’t say anything,” she asserted. “Things went pretty well. We had a good amount of business.”

  “Good. I was a little worried after we decided not to do a big grand reopening. I mean, I didn’t want to do a big reopening, I just had some… last minute qualms. What if nobody came? What if not enough people knew that we were open for business again today…?”

  “There’s nothing that says you have to make all of your money the first day,” Erin reassured her. “Even if opening day didn’t go well, there’s lots of time for word to get around that we’re open and to get people in. But, nothing to worry about, it went just fine.”

  “Good.” Charley put a stuffed shoulder bag that doubled as her briefcase down on one of the little wrought iron tables at the front of the bakery. “I’m new to this whole ‘business owner’ thing. I don’t want to screw it up.”

  “That’s why you’ve got us,” Vic offered, putting her arm around Erin’s shoulder to remind Charley that she was there too, part of a package deal. “We know how to run a bakery.”

  Charley didn’t quite make a face, but her look at Vic didn’t convey that she was thankful to have Vic there helping to look after things. She and Vic had never quite clicked. Erin wasn’t sure whether it was a personality thing, or whether there was a certain amount of jealousy between her sister and her best friend, each of them wary of the other intruding on their relationship with Erin.

  “I’m glad I’ve got you,” Charley agreed, but her words were aimed at Erin rather than at Vic. “Whenever I start to panic about not knowing everything there is to know about the business, I just remind myself that you’ve done all of this before. I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been for you to start up Auntie Clem’s Bakery with no one to tell you how to do everything. How did you manage?”

  Erin motioned Charley to move to the side so that she wasn’t blocking paying customers.

  “I read lots. Talked to my lawyer and accountant. Wrote out my business plan and goals and milestones…”

  “You’re so organized. You always know exactly what’s coming next, don’t you?”

  Erin only wished that were true.

  Chapter Two

  W

  hen they arrived home after closing the bakery, Erin saw that Rohilda Beaven’s big white truck was parked in front of the house.

  “Looks like Jeremy has company,” she observed, and pulled around to the back to park in the garage.

  “It’s amazing how well they get on together,” Vic said, shaking her head. “You’d think that with Beaver being older than him and a federal agent, they wouldn’t have anything in common. But they get along like a house on fire!”

  Erin winced at the expression. They had almost lost the house to fire once, and the original Auntie Clem’s Bakery burning down was still too recent and a sore spot.

  “Or like something on fire,” Vic amended quickly, then tried again. “Or… like a pig and mud. They belong together!”

  “They really have seemed to hit it off,” Erin agreed. She unlocked the back door, pausing and calling out to warn Jeremy and Beaver that they were no longer alone. “We’re home, Jeremy!”

  They could hear the murmur of voices for a moment, then Jeremy’s door opened, and he entered the kitchen.

  “Hey Erin, hey Vic. How was the first day back?”

  “It was good,” Vic offered, giving him a quick hug. “Beaver’s here?”

  “She’ll be out in a minute. We’re just getting things packed up and ready to go.”

  Erin felt a little pang at the thought of Jeremy moving out. It had sometimes been awkward with him there, especially when he had been trying to hide out from the clans and the police. She had told him that he needed to find his own place, but she still felt responsible for him and like she might be turning him out of the nest too quickly.

  “Everything is arranged at the new place?” she asked.

  “Deposit and first month have been paid,” Jeremy agreed. “So, it looks like I’m all grown up after all. My first place all my own.”

  Erin suspected that most of the money for the basement suite had been put up by Beaver, since Jeremy had just recently landed a job and hadn’t likely received an advance on his paycheck. But he hadn’t told her what arrangements were being made and it wasn’t any of her business how he had managed to rent a place so quickly.

  “It will be nice for you,” Erin said. “You won’t have me and all of the critters underfoot.”

  Orange Blossom, Erin’s cat, was rubbing up against her legs meowing noisily over their conversation. Marshmallow was closer to Jeremy, and he bent down and picked up the brown and white rabbit. Marshmallow kicked his back legs, not liking to be lifted into the air, but Jeremy held the rabbit snug against his body and settled him down.

  “Actually, I’m going to miss these guys. The house never seemed lonely with them around. My apartment is going to seem awfully quiet after being used to them running around here.”

  Erin wasn’t about to offer that he could take one of them with him. She wouldn’t be able to bear to part with either of them and would never separate the two. The cat and rabbit had grown remarkably close to each other.

  Jeremy’s bedroom door opened again, and Rohilda joined them in the kitchen. Her tall, lanky body, which always gave the impression of being slow and lazy, was anything but. She was strong quick, and graceful. She just conserved her energy until she had a need for it. She gave them a smile, chewing on a wad of gum. Her nose and lips were too big for her face and her blond hair was more like Jeremy’s unruly mane than Vic’s sleek, smooth hair. All together, she was not unattractive, but didn’t have the type of beauty that society typically worshiped.

  Erin had learned to appreciate her open, honest manner. Unlike the women of Bald Eagle Falls, whom Erin found difficult to read, with Beaver what you saw was what you got. She never put on a false front.

  “Good evening,” she greeted Erin and Vic. “Uneventful day at the bakery?”

  Erin nodded vigorously. “Luckily, yes! I don’t know what I would have done if… something… had happened. I might have a breakdown and never recover.”

  “Good thing we didn’t have to find out.”

  “So…” Vic looked at Jeremy and back at Beaver. “I guess you’re leaving tonight…?”

  “Everything is packed up and ready to go,” Beaver agreed. “Jer can sleep in his own bed tonight. I need to go back to the city for a few days, so he’ll have some time to settle into his new digs. I’ll be back for a day or two on the weekend.” She looked at Jeremy with affection.

  He grinned back at her. “I told her she could stay, but she doesn’t want the commute. So, I guess I just get a few days here and there whenever she can fit me in. I feel used.”

  “You’d better not complain,” Vic warned. “The lady is good with a gun.”

  Beaver grinned and nodded, chewing on her gum.

  “I’m not complaining,” Jeremy assured her, and put his arm around Beaver to pull her close for a moment. “I’m perfectly happy with being used.”

  Beaver laughed and gave him an embarrassingly passionate kiss. Erin looked at Vic and rolled her eyes.

  “Did you work today?” Vic asked without waiting for Jeremy and Beaver to finish.

  Jeremy pulled back from Beaver. “Yep. I don’t work the long hours you two do, but I put in my time.”

  “What exactly is it that you’re doing?” Erin asked.
While he’d told her before, she never felt like she’d gotten a full explanation.

  “Just keeping an eye on things,” Jeremy said. “Making sure that no one bothers the crops.”

  Erin studied him, trying to make sense of the explanation. She knew that he was working on Crosswood Farm, but he had refused to tell what kind of crop he was guarding. It didn’t seem likely that it was any of the crops that were widely farmed in the area. After all, why would fields need to be guarded against intruders? There was no reason for people to come in and steal corn or apples. What was the benefit, unless they were starving? It was harvest time, so the plants would be mature, but she couldn’t see why anyone would be interested. Was there a black market for cider?

  She was afraid that what he was doing wasn’t quite as innocent as he made it sound.

  Terry had said that they had eradicated the drug trade in Bald Eagle Falls, so Erin told herself it couldn’t be anything to do with the clans. Jeremy had done his best to get away from the Jackson clan that he’d been born into. She couldn’t see him giving in and just going right back to a life of crime. And she couldn’t see Beaver letting him. Beaver didn’t contradict anything Jeremy had said about his job, so either she knew the details, or she was satisfied that as much as he had said was the truth.

  It just didn’t make any sense to Erin.

  “You’ve got to be on the lookout for poachers,” Jeremy told Erin, watching her face carefully. “You’d be surprised at how much illegal trade there is around here.”

  “Poachers… so does that mean you are guarding animals? Not plants?”

  He kept his face carefully blank. “I’m not allowed to talk about it.”

  “Not allowed to?”

  “It’s in my employment contract.”

  “So, your job is watching to make sure nobody steals a bunch of plants?”

  He shrugged.

  Erin looked at Beaver again, trying to read her expression, but she was even more closeted than Jeremy, giving Erin a cheeky smile that betrayed nothing of what she knew or didn’t know about Jeremy’s new job.

  Chapter Three

  I

  n the aftermath of the fire at old Auntie Clem’s and the opening of the new bakery, Erin hadn’t had time for much other than business arrangements. Even when she took some downtime to relax, it was usually to bake and experiment with new recipe possibilities.

  Now that the bakery was open once more, she couldn’t bring her brain to focus on anything else business-related, so Erin instead pulled out one of Clementine’s fat genealogy files and started to leaf through it for old stories about Bald Eagle Falls and its residents. She’d never been much of a fiction reader, but she found history fascinating, and the stories of the old Bald Eagles Falls residents, progenitors of Erin and her friends, were particularly enthralling. They were people who had lived right there, had established the traditions that became ingrained in Bald Eagle Falls life, and had passed on names and physical and personality traits to the people Erin knew.

  She carefully unfolded yellowing old newspaper articles, the dust tickling her nose, and dug up the past lives of Bald Eagle Falls. It was almost voyeuristic. She read in fascination about the ways they had lived and died. Where there were pictures, she studied them closely, sometimes with a magnifying glass, searching for familiar features and taking in the old-fashioned clothing and equipment. It must have been an interesting—and difficult—time to live.

  She opened up a letter written on thick paper that had been folded twice, the paper almost brown with age. The old-fashioned cursive writing was difficult to read, but she was getting better at it after puzzling through dozens of letters. This one appeared not to be a letter, but a poem.

  The treasure it enfolds

  Where lies there forest gold

  A king’s ransom hid amidst

  The warrens of the moles

  The gift of life to those who toil

  Each day to reap the sterile soil

  Be wise if thou would life preserve

  And no lord be forced to serve

  Erin read over it a few times. She felt a thrill of excitement.

  She tapped out a quick text to Vic.

  Do you want to find a treasure?

  It was a few minutes before Vic messaged her back a questioning smiley face. Erin grinned.

  Come and see!

  She looked out the attic window toward the apartment loft over the garage, where Vic’s light was still turned on. In a few moments, she saw Vic’s door open and saw the girl silhouetted against the light from inside for a moment before she hurried down the stairs and headed toward the house. Erin picked up the poem and went down the attic stairs to meet Vic in the kitchen. Vic stopped for a moment to make sure the burglar alarm hadn’t been armed yet, then turned to look at Erin.

  “A treasure? What’s all this?”

  Erin held the paper out to her, and Vic took it carefully by the edges. She didn’t have as much practice as Erin did in reading the old-style script, so it took her a few minutes to puzzle through the short poem, then she looked at Erin, eyes sparkling.

  “Gold? Where did you find this? And how do you know it wasn’t already found a hundred years ago?”

  “We’d have to do some more research before we’d know one way or the other. Go through the rest of the file, the newspaper archives, see if there’s anyone around who can remember what it’s all about. I just thought…” Erin shrugged. “It sounded like fun. I’ve never had a real-life treasure to find before.”

  “And we needed another mystery to solve since no one was killed at the opening,” Vic teased. “You might get bored without something to challenge that noggin of yours.”

  Erin rolled her eyes. “Honestly, what I need is something to take my mind off of Charley and whatever her next idea is going to be. This looked… promising.”

  “Forest gold,” Vic said slowly, meditating on it. “A king’s ransom. That’s got to be pretty big. I mean, we’re not just talking a few coins, here.”

  “Yeah. It has to be something good. Everyone says there is treasure hidden around here, right? Well… maybe there is. What if we could find it?”

  “That would solve a lot of problems. Nothing like a little gold to smooth your way.”

  “So, you want to find out more?”

  “Why don’t we look through the file? We can do that tonight without having to go to anyone else or go to the library.”

  “It’s upstairs. I’ll go get it.”

  Vic was waiting on the couch when Erin brought the bulging file down the stairs. She laid it on the coffee table, being careful to keep everything in order and not let the papers spill out in an avalanche.

  “It’s like an archeological dig,” she said. “Everything related to the poem should be in the layers around it, so we don’t want to get them out of order.”

  “Right here in the middle?” Vic indicated the two stacks of paper. “I guess I’ll take the top, and you can go through the bottom. You’ve already looked through the top anyway, haven’t you?”

  “Yes. You’re sure you don’t want to go through the bottom together? I don’t think there was anything about treasure in that half.”

  “No, you go ahead and take the bottom. If there’s anything about a hidden fortune or a treasure map in the top, I’ll find it.”

  Erin shrugged. “Okay.”

  She took her half, and they started to go through the piles a page at a time. Orange Blossom had been sleeping on the arm of the easy chair but, hearing the rustling of paper, he woke up, stretched his body out slowly, and wandered over to see what they were looking at, making inquiring noises.

  “Nothing interesting to kitties,” Erin said, pushing him away with her toe. “Just boring old papers.”

  He went around her foot and approached Vic’s pile. Vic pulled them away. “Nope. Not today, Mr. Blossom. I need to look at these.”

  Orange Blossom jumped up on the coffee table, sniffing all around the empty
file folder. He sneezed three times, shaking his head briskly between each sneeze.

  “Oh, gross!” Vic protested. “He sprayed cat snot on my papers!”

  “Oops,” Erin laughed. “I don’t imagine that’s good for them.”

  “If the oils from our skin and the acid in the paper can make it degrade, I hate to think of what cat snot could do.”

  Vic did the best to dab at the wet spots with a tissue and waved the papers in the air to dry them out.

  “Have you found anything about the treasure?” Erin asked.

  “No, not yet. Just lots of marriage and death records and what dresses everyone is wearing to what parties.” She sighed. “Were people really so shallow? That’s all they had to put in the newspaper?”

  “Well, it isn’t like today when we can gather news from all over the world. They probably didn’t even hear much from outside the county. It was all local news. So, the social stuff became really important.”

  Vic shook her head. “I love a nice party dress as much as the next girl, but this is going a bit too far, if you ask me.”

  Erin looked at the additional articles she had read through. “There’s a bunch of war stuff too. You don’t really think about how it affected people out here in the hills. You think they were far away from the fighting, and their lives would just go on as normal. But people from all over sent their sons to fight, and the war disrupted all kinds of infrastructure and people’s ability to earn money. It’s no wonder someone would write about finding treasure to save your life and not have to serve anyone else. It sounds like things were pretty grim.”

  “I guess it must have been important to keep up appearances,” Vic said, fingering through her social notices, “even if they were dirt-poor and having trouble making ends meet.”

  “I guess.”

  “Did you find anything else about the treasure?”

  “I don’t know.” Erin had her fingers marking a couple of places in the file. “This one talks about people trying to solve a riddle. And this one talks about them waiting for gold to come in to pay for shipments of corn that had been sent to the front.”