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

  “Maybe related and maybe not,” Vic agreed.

  She pushed Orange Blossom off the coffee table in order to put her pile of papers back into the file folder. He landed awkwardly on his back, flipped over, and jumped to his feet. He licked down the fur on his back and glared at Vic.

  Erin laughed. “Stay out of the way and you won’t get pushed off.”

  Vic looked toward the back of the house and Erin heard the growl of a truck engine a moment later.

  “That will be Willie,” Vic said. “We’d better head to bed if we’re going to be up in time in the morning.”

  “Okay. Say ‘hi’ to Willie for me.”

  “He says ‘hi’ back,” Vic said. She gave Erin a quick hug around the shoulders and headed out. “I’ll arm the alarm,” she called back to Erin.

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  Erin put her papers back into the folder. “And off to bed for us too,” she told Orange Blossom. He immediately took a few steps toward the kitchen doorway and looked back at her expectantly. Erin followed him and, as soon as she was in the kitchen, she heard the patter of Marshmallow’s paws behind her. She gave them each their treats and shut off the lights.

  “We should ask Beaver for her thoughts on the hidden treasure,” Vic suggested to Erin while they prepared the baking the next morning. “She’s the one experienced at this kind of thing.”

  Erin thought about it. “I guess that would be okay,” she agreed. “I don’t think she’s the kind of person who would take off on her own to claim it for herself, do you?”

  “No.” Vic considered the matter herself. “I know treasure hunters are known for having no honor… but I think Beaver does. It isn’t like she took all the credit for the drug bust, did she? She could have. She could have said it was all her doing.”

  Erin had been thinking the same thing. “We could ask Terry what he thinks.”

  “You’re going to tell Terry?”

  “Of course!” Erin was surprised Vic would even ask. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I just wondered… he might not like you… you know… detecting.”

  “It’s not detecting. Not like asking about a murder. I’m just… looking into something from the past. Genealogy. He won’t care. There’s nothing dangerous about it.”

  Terry didn’t welcome the idea quite as much as Erin had hoped he would. His mouth formed a straight line and his forehead creased as he thought about it.

  “It’s just an old poem,” Erin said. “I’m sure it probably won’t even lead to anything; it’s just something sort of fun to look into. It’s not like it’s a crime. It’s not something dangerous.”

  “I’d agree, except that I know the way you seem to stir things up… just because you don’t think there’s anything to it or anything to worry about, that doesn’t mean it’s true. You seem to have a knack for finding dangerous things, even if it doesn’t seem like there would be anything to it. Treasure maps and hidden tunnels… they shouldn’t be real… but they are.”

  Erin tried to shrug it off.

  “I really don’t think this is anything that’s going to attract any attention. We’ll keep it quiet. Just me and Vic.”

  “And Jeremy and Beaver. And whoever else you happen to ask for background information from. Maybe the librarian.”

  “And you, but you’re not going to suddenly turn into a homicidal maniac, are you?”

  He didn’t crack a smile at her teasing, which told Erin that he really was worried.

  “Really, it’s just a poem,” she said. “It will probably turn out to be something some high school student wrote for an English assignment. You really think there is a chest of gold buried out there in the forest somewhere?”

  “No… but people can act strangely when they think there is. You don’t know how people might react to the suggestion that there’s a treasure to be found. What happened when you told people that there was a locked cabinet in your basement that might hold some kind of key to finding an ancient pirate treasure?”

  “Well… someone broke in.” Erin hadn’t even thought about that. They would have to be careful of security and make sure they didn’t tell the wrong person what they were looking for. “I’ll be careful, Terry, but I really don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

  Terry sighed and shook his head. “Famous last words.”

  Chapter Four

  I

  n spite of Terry’s concerns, Erin forged on ahead. She agreed that they would need to make sure that the wrong people didn’t find out about the poem and what they were looking for, but she still wanted to find out more about the poem, who wrote it, and what the treasure was that was possibly hidden somewhere in the forest. What were the chances that it was still there after so many years? If it had even existed, the chances that it would still be there were, Erin thought, pretty slim. But it would be fun to try to find out anyway. Like geocaching, it would be fun just to see where the clues led them, even if they didn’t find anything that had intrinsic value.

  They decided to have supper with Beaver and Jeremy at the Chinese restaurant and, after eating, Erin pulled out the poem, which she had carefully protected in a plastic sleeve and transported in a clipboard to make sure it didn’t get folded, crushed, or torn. Erin gave a little preamble about looking through Clementine’s genealogy, then handed the poem across the table to Beaver and Jeremy to have a look at.

  Beaver’s eyes gleamed as she read through the poem. Her smile was wider than ever. She passed it over to Jeremy for him to read. “Got the treasure-hunting bug?” she asked Erin. “This looks like a lot of fun.”

  “Do you think it’s real?”

  “If you didn’t make it up, it’s real. But a real what, we don’t know. Is it actually a clue to a treasure? A real treasure? Something that is still valuable today? And if it is, has that treasure been found, or is it still out there? How many people know about it? How many people have looked for it? What are the chances it has been found?”

  “Well, I guess the chances are pretty good that it might have been,” Erin said, shifting uncomfortably. “I mean, it’s been a long time, so someone might have found it just by accident, not even looking for it. And if a lot of people know that it exists or have looked for it…”

  “Right,” Beaver nodded. “Don’t get your hopes up too much. There is no guarantee that this treasure is even around anymore. If there is a treasure. It could just be a poem.”

  Erin nodded.

  “Was there anything else with it? Something that might indicate that it is legitimate?”

  “It was in a folder with a lot of other stuff, but none of the other papers I went through mention it at all. So, I don’t know… I found some other newspaper clippings that might be related.”

  Erin withdrew the other clippings from her clipboard, likewise preserved in plastic sleeves to keep them from tearing or being damaged.

  Beaver took the other two articles and read them through slowly. She pursed her generous lips, thinking it through.

  “You’re right,” she agreed. “They could be related or could be nothing to do with the poem. You could just be making connections between things that are completely unrelated to each other. It’s pretty tenuous.” She looked at them again. “Solving a riddle… it could just be some kind of crossword or brain teaser that the paper had published the previous week. There might have been a prize for being able to crack the code. If it was related to your poem, then they might have figured out what it meant a hundred and fifty years ago. Do your newspaper archives go back that far?”

  Erin shook her head. “I haven’t looked yet, but I doubt it. Though Aunt Clementine got this from somewhere. Someone still had old newspapers around twenty years ago when she was on a genealogy kick.”

  “This wasn’t clipped from any official archives. It’s original. If it was in archives, she would have done a microfiche print or photocopy. No archivist is going to let you clip out of the original paper.”

  “No,”
Erin agreed. “But Clementine had a lot of stuff that was original papers.”

  “She must have known someone who hoarded them. Or she had them herself from an ancestor’s collection. Sometimes old papers were used as insulation in walls or attics. She might have come across it during some renovations.”

  “I don’t know when it was she built the reading room in the attic. She could have found it then.”

  Beaver nodded. “You never know what you’re going to find in old attics and crawlspaces.”

  “What’s the other one?” Jeremy asked.

  Beaver slid them over to him so that he could read them as well. Jeremy read over the description of the payment the town was awaiting for the crops that had been shipped out.

  “How much would they have been expecting to get for one shipment of crops? It wouldn’t have been a king’s ransom. Just part of one year’s earnings.”

  Fresh off the farm himself, Jeremy would have a pretty good idea of how that worked. “One portion of one year’s crops wouldn’t even be enough for the farmers to get through one year. It certainly wouldn’t set anyone up for life.”

  “No, I guess not,” Erin admitted, with a twinge of disappointment.

  “A king’s ransom might well be an exaggeration,” Beaver said. “If it was the payment for the crops that was lost or hidden, it might still be worth quite a lot… just not as much as you would hope.”

  “Or it might be practically worthless,” Vic put in. “We don’t know how big this crop was that they sent to the troops, how many farms it was from. If it was just one or two farms, then we could be talking about ten bucks each for the laborers.”

  “Gold is still worth something, though,” Erin argued. “Ten dollars of gold a hundred and fifty years ago would be what now?”

  Beaver gave a grin. “It would still have some value. Especially since we don’t have to pay anybody’s wages with it this many years later.” She took a sip of her green tea. “I just don’t want you getting your hopes up. You might think that because you found a tunnel full of illegal drugs on your first try that treasure hunting is easy, and it’s not. I’ve looked for a lot of treasures over the years, and I’ve only been successful in a handful of cases. Enough to keep me looking for more, but the actual value of what I have found so far doesn’t amount to even a fraction of a king’s ransom. If you’re looking for this, it should be because of the challenge, not because you think you’re actually going to make a fortune.”

  Erin nodded. “To be honest, I just want something to do that isn’t related to the bakery and Charley. I want a diversion. Reading through genealogy stories is fun, but this is even better… I kind of like solving puzzles.”

  “Kind of,” Vic agreed with a wry grin. “What did Officer Piper have to say about it, by the way?”

  “It’s just a poem,” Erin said, not answering the question. “There’s no harm in seeing if we can figure it out.”

  “Well,” Beaver positioned the poem in front of herself again, reading it through. “With the mention of moles, I’d say our first clue leads to an underground tunnel. Now you wouldn’t know anything about underground tunnels in these parts, would you?”

  Erin laughed. “Well, it’s not in the tunnel under the bakery, I can tell you that. I think the DEA would have mentioned if they’d found a stash of gold down there with the drugs.”

  “Or else the Jackson clan made off with it when they first discovered the tunnel,” Beaver agreed, “and if they did, they’re not very likely to share that news with us.”

  “But what are the chances that it would have been hidden in that tunnel? Or in any of the old tunnels that were right in town? If it was you, wouldn’t you hide it somewhere more remote? I wouldn’t want people stumbling over it here in town. If those tunnels were used regularly during the war, then they would have been too well-known to hide anything really valuable. You wouldn’t want some other person in town just stumbling across the treasure.”

  Beaver nodded. “You’re probably right. Though we don’t know how many people knew about the tunnels, or if they knew about all of them, or if each family only knew about the ones that were connected to their homes or businesses. There were probably some tunnels that were only known to the owner.”

  “So, you think we should try to find as many of the old tunnels in town as we can?”

  “No.”

  Everybody just looked at Beaver. She took a long sip of her tea and grinned at Jeremy.

  “I think that after the big drug bust, everybody is looking for signs of tunnels under their houses and workplaces. It isn’t exactly a secret anymore. One thing you need to know about treasure hunting is that if you look in the same places everybody else is looking, you’re not going to find anything. It would be a waste of time for us to go around town trying to find all of the old tunnels. Everybody else is already doing that, and they’ve either found a tunnel and aren’t going to tell you about it, or they don’t want anyone looking for tunnels on their property. They’re not just going to invite you in to look at their basements while you try to catalog all of the old tunnels in Bald Eagle Falls.”

  “We could make it into a contest,” Vic suggested. “We could have everybody who has found a tunnel make a submission to a contest, and then the person we draw or the person who knows the most about the old tunnel system wins a prize…”

  “Of what? A gluten-free muffin? Nobody is going to tell you about their secret tunnels for even a full box of muffins.”

  “The town could enact some kind of law that all of the tunnels have to be registered,” Jeremy suggested. “For safety reasons. An inspector has to go check out each one to make sure that it is safe and isn’t going to collapse. Then there would be a record of where they all were, and we’d probably be able to find a few new ones that hadn’t been discovered yet between dead-end tunnels…”

  Beaver was shaking her head. “None of that would be of any help to us. Like I said, you’re just looking where other people have already been. There’s no point. And even if you did get the town to enact a law like that, most people would decide that their secret tunnels were their own business and they’d refuse to register them. You wouldn’t even get enough votes on the town council to pass a law like that.”

  “Let’s assume it’s not in the townsite,” Vic said. “Like Beaver says, everybody is already looking for those tunnels. There are plenty of places outside the townsite a treasure could have been hidden. It’s not necessarily a man-made tunnel. It could be a natural cave or a mine.”

  Erin gave a shudder.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know anyone who is an expert on caves around here, would you?” Beaver asked with a grin.

  Willie had been invited to dinner, but he’d had other things to do and hadn’t been able to join them. Erin hadn’t thought about him being a resource in their search for the treasure, or she would have tried to schedule a better time for their dinner so he would be able to join them. It made sense, when she thought about the “warrens of moles” in the poem that they should be looking for tunnels, caves, or mines. And that was Willie’s purview.

  “Do you think Willie would be able to help us?” Erin asked Vic.

  “Sure. But you know… he’s not the treasure hunting kind.”

  It seemed like a strange thing to say. Willie spent much of his time mining or exploring caves or old mine shafts, which sounded exactly like treasure hunting to Erin. Erin frowned at Vic.

  “But… that’s what he does.”

  “Mining isn’t the same as treasure hunting,” Vic disagreed. “It’s science based. He knows which mines are more likely to produce because of the surrounding geology and what he’s taken out of there before. Treasure hunting is… pretty much chance. If he agrees to help out, it will probably be for a fee. And not a portion of whatever you find, an up-front fee.”

  “Oh.” Erin hadn’t thought about that. Of course, she knew that Willie was involved in a wide variety of money-making ventures. He wasn’t t
he kind of guy who was satisfied working one job and making a regular salary. He followed his interests and did a lot of smaller jobs on a short-term basis. If he were going to waste time looking for treasures in caves, then of course it would be for a fee. He wasn’t going to take time out of paying jobs for something that was just for a favor. “Yeah, that makes sense. We’ll have to talk to him about what his fee would be.”

  “If you’re just doing it for fun, you don’t want to be pouring money into the venture,” Beaver warned. “If Willie doesn’t want to help just for the challenge, you might not want to run up your costs. There are bound to be other people who have some knowledge of caves in the area, old survey maps, things like that.”

  “Yeah.” The wind had been taken out of Erin’s sails a little. She had hoped that she would be able to figure out the clues to where the treasure might be with a little ingenuity and the help of her friends. She hadn’t considered having to pay for professional advice. She looked down at the poem in front of Beaver. “So, what else? Do you think there are any other clues as to where it is in the poem? If it’s supposed to direct us to the treasure, it doesn’t seem like there are many things to point to a particular location.”

  “No, you’re right. Talking about those who toil… that lends some credence to it being the lost payment for the corn crop… sterile soil, though… that could be something else. Some of the other words in the poem might be locator clues, too. King and lord are both named, so you might be looking for a location that is named after someone with high-ranking authority. Or for a castle-shaped landmark. Life preserve… I don’t suppose they had any animal preserves back then… but I might look into whether there were any endangered species they were trying to protect.”

  Erin jotted words down on her napkin, listing the clues and then places or ideas that came to her mind. Her excitement started to rise again. “I’m going to need some maps. And to do some more research on the area around here. And there might be something in the clippings Clementine kept about royalty; I wasn’t looking for that…”