The Treasure

by E. A. House

  They stood there in the slowly gathering dusk, mourning the loss of a friend for the second time, until the groundskeeper had to chase them out.

  The girl at the flower shop didn’t even blink when Chris asked for asters, she just asked him how many flowers he wanted and if he would like to choose from one of their popular aster arrangements.

  “One of their popular aster arrangements?” Carrie repeated incredulously when Chris climbed into the car with his bouquet. “When Detective Hermann said there was a sudden fad for asters he wasn’t kidding, was he?”

  “They’re using them in all the displays now,” Chris added, and removed the sparkly plastic wrapper so he could get at the stems. Chris had made flower chains out of clovers and dandelions since he was a kid, and he could even manage a pretty decent braided flower crown if he had a lot of free time to braid stems together, but the crowns Dr. McRae had been leaving on Aunt Elsie’s grave were even more complex. Chris had spent two hours with Dr. McRae the day before practicing the technique Dr. McRae had learned from Aunt Elsie, who in turn had originally learned it from Ryan Moore’s sister the summer Elsie spent in Georgia. To make this kind of flower crown you had to be able to braid with four strands and weave three different braids together, and even though Chris had practiced on a dozen crowns the day before, the one he made out of asters was still a little lopsided. Putting it on Maddison’s head only made the lopsidedness more obvious, and was that a stem sticking out?

  “Chris, it’s fine,” Maddison said. “It looks wonderful.” She’d been witness to his many failed attempts the day before.

  “It looks wonderful in the car mirror,” Carrie pointed out to be contrary. Maddison took the crown off her own head and placed it delicately on Carrie’s. “Now my ears tickle,” Carrie commented.

  “Guys,” Chris protested. This had seemed like a good idea last week when he proposed it but now he was getting irrationally nervous. It was just a cemetery. Nothing to be afraid of. Except the cemetery wasn’t what was making Chris nervous.

  Aunt Elsie’s grave was less of a fresh wound now. The grass was strong and sturdy over it, the headstone had been rained on until it lost that new-stone look, and there was an opportunistic weed growing close up against the headstone where the lawnmower couldn’t reach. Time had softened the scene, and yet it was hard to tell if seeing the hand of time was comforting or painful. All Chris knew when they reached it was that it made something ache in his heart.

  “Hi,” Chris said to his aunt, every single word deserting him. “Um. I brought you something different,” he said, and held up the flower crown like an idiot before setting it down in front of his aunt’s headstone and settling cross-legged in front of the headstone himself. After a beat, Carrie and Maddison sat down on either side of him. “Dr. McRae taught me how to make these,” Chris went on. “He says you were the one who taught him. I’m not very good at it yet but I wanted to—” The tears welled up. Chris took a shuddering breath and was distantly aware of an arm around his shoulder and a Kleenex being pressed into his hand. “I figured I should let you know I met him,” he managed. “And his daughter—you never met Maddison, but I think you would have liked her. She’s really good at codes.”

  “Hi, Miss Kingsolver,” Maddison said politely, producing another Kleenex for Chris. “We wanted to thank you for leaving Chris that letter.”

  Carrie, who had been sitting in silence—and in fact had been very quiet most of the day—finally cleared her throat. “Also,” she said, “Chris needs to tell you about how we found the San Telmo.”

  “I do? But she already knows!”

  Carrie handed him another tissue. “Aunt Elsie already knew about half the stuff we got up to, but we still told her.”

  Chris looked at the headstone, and thought about his aunt, and sighed. “Okay, well you already know how this whole thing started,” he began.

  THEY SAW THE FBI AGENTS OFF AT THE AIRPORT with homemade cookies. It was the least Chris and Carrie could do, and Maddison agreed that if nothing else, the intention would be kindly received, so they spent a day in Chris’s kitchen making chocolate-chip cookies, oatmeal-raisin cookies, and chocolate-chip-oatmeal-raisin cookies—which happened when Maddison got distracted halfway through and added oatmeal to the wrong batter. They should not really have tried watching a documentary on Russian Bigfoot sightings while baking cookies, but you could almost see the television in the living room from the kitchen and they had wanted to check out Robin Redd’s latest gig. Apparently, Harry Bradlaw had volunteered Redd for a low-budget documentary on Bigfoot sightings in Russia. The previously arranged star had broken a leg and so couldn’t handle the terrain and the entire crew was in a panic of preparation. Redd was deeply disappointed that he might not get to help out with the San Telmo excavation and Bethy thought they were all going to die from exposure or Bigfoot or frosty relations between the US and Russia, and was more than half convinced her brother had arranged the ever-so-convenient broken leg.

  Agent Grey was touched by the cookies, although she didn’t show it much. Her partner, on the other hand, ate three of the chocolate-chip-oatmeal-raisin ones just during the five minutes they took to say goodbye. But then, Agent Holland seemed sad to be leaving, and Agent Grey wanted out of Archer’s Grove as soon as possible. “This has not been fun,” she said, shaking Detective Hermann’s hand with the hand not holding the cookies. Agent Holland stepped lightly on her foot and she relented. “But that wasn’t your fault, so I do thank you for being professional and effective. If you ever have need of us don’t hesitate to call, but please never have need of us ever again.”

  “She means that this is a lovely community and she hopes your crime rate stays extremely low and you never have a tragedy like this ever again,” Agent Holland translated as he was dragged through the entry doors of the airport.

  “That’s what I said, Forrest,” Agent Grey said. “Oh—and this is for you three,” she added, turning around just before entering the line for security. She pulled a sheet of paper from her pocket and handed it to Chris, who unfolded it to discover a printed registration document that read, “Thank you for registering for this seminar,” and had login information.

  “It’s an online seminar,” Agent Grey explained, “which isn’t ideal, I know. But I know the instructor and she’s very good. You three are registered; the details are on there.”

  It was an online seminar on how to deal with armed gunmen and hostage situations.

  “How did she know?” Chris asked Carrie and Maddison later.

  “And more importantly, why does she think we need to know this now?” Maddison wondered.

  The San Telmo took three months to excavate, although Dr. McRae liked to say that was only because everyone they brought in to help had to stop and sob for joy first.

  “And that takes up valuable time that could be spent retrieving and cataloging the treasures,” he told Chris on the occasion of the third crying graduate student, and Abigail had punched him gently on the shoulder and threatened to withhold Moby. She knew what she was doing—withholding Moby was an effective threat. They needed that submersible to scour the sections of the cave that were too deep or too tight for Maria’s team of four divers. Also, although nobody ever came out and admitted it, they needed Moby involved in the San Telmo excavation because they needed Abigail involved in the San Telmo excavation. Chris and Carrie still felt horrible about how Professor Griffin had wrecked the college’s boat and nearly wrecked Moby, and everyone felt guilty because Abigail’s thesis advisor and mentor had gone nuts over the San Telmo and left her without an advisor in her last semester. She hadn’t even been able to do her last bit of field work with Moby when she was supposed to because the college had panicked and locked the submersible away for protection.

  Dr. McRae felt horrible for Abigail because he personally knew what it was like to have your academic reputation destroyed as a byproduct of one of Professor Griffin’s plans, and he’d been instrumental in getting
her the position, although ultimately Abigail had been put in charge of the excavation because she was good at organizing and had a knack for finding volunteers to do the tedious sifting the excavation required. And it meant that there would be no confusing transfer of leadership if Redd or Dr. McRae had to, say, go to Russia for several months.

  Redd was still supposed to be filming the second half of a season of Treasure Hunter prior to spending August through October in Russia hunting Bigfoot, but he dropped by whenever he could and poked things, occasionally providing unexpectedly useful random trivia. Chris, Carrie, and Maddison spent most of their time at the site of the sunken ship cleaning and cataloging the vast treasure of the San Telmo, which was basically an unpaid archeology internship and had the entirely unexpected benefit of finally getting Chris’s mom to stop nagging him about a job. Chris thought this was a terrible moral, since he had slacked off on finding a summer job and been rewarded for it, but he’d bypassed his best chance at an actual job by skipping the interview for the bakery so he couldn’t exactly complain. Carrie and Maddison had been forced to quit their job with Mrs. Hadler—the scariest school secretary imaginable—a few weeks early in order to help with the San Telmo, and Chris was still a little shocked they had survived that conversation. Mrs. Hadler had actually said, “Well, I think that’s an excellent opportunity,” and even dropped by the site one day to say hello, incidentally scaring Chris half to death.

  Chris also spent a lot of time arguing with Carrie and Maddison about where they were going to donate the San Telmo and asking the grad students Abigail had recruited about their majors and getting nervous at their answers. Well, Carrie was making herself nervous about the upcoming school year by asking the grad students questions. Chris just asked every new volunteer if they were studying coastal erosion or had ever known anyone who actually studied coastal erosion. “Because I don’t think anyone actually studies coastal erosion,” he told Carrie when she demanded to know what he was asking everyone. “I think it’s a topic Professor Griffin made up.”

  He almost had a heart attack when one of the infrequent volunteers looked up from the repair work she was doing to Moby’s camera and wanted to know what he thought was funny about coastal erosion. She then sat down and gave him a three-hour-long lecture about how interesting and important and ultimately revolutionary the study of coastal erosion was going to be. Carrie just laughed at him.

  “I looked up the last time the Richard E. Emanate Collection was pulled before Bethy found the page from the manuscript,” Dr. McRae said later that summer. He was leaning against the doorframe of the kitchen while Chris surreptitiously hid the maraschino cherries behind the carrots. Carrie and Maddison were busy in Maddison’s bedroom looking for a missing sweater.

  Chris moved the broccoli into a better position in the vegetable drawer and didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to know or not.

  “I know it doesn’t really matter one way or another, not now, but I thought you’d like to know,” Dr. McRae said. “Your aunt had that collection out to answer a research question for a college in New York. It was returned the day before she died.”

  So, the Emanate collection had probably been sitting on Aunt Elsie’s desk while she’d been researching the San Telmo. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to remove a page from one collection and slip it into another, and in so doing hide every possible clue to the San Telmo from Professor Griffin. Maybe she’d even done it in a hurry, just as he was walking into the room . . . Chris wondered if that had been the one frantic moment that had warned the professor, that had doomed his aunt and started the whole thing. There was no way to tell now, and so many things he could say, and all of them stuck in his throat, so what he said was, “If I get out the chocolate-chip ice cream and offer you some are you going to be one of those horrible people who want to put maraschino cherries on it?”

  It didn’t surprise him at all that Dr. McRae was.

  “Don’t know what to do with it?” Harry Bradlaw sat up impatiently. “My dear, sweet, beautiful sister, don’t be a lunatic! This is filmmaking gold right here!”

  “Well, I know it’s solid camera work,” Bethy Bradlaw said dubiously. “With Griffin dead and Brad pleading guilty, there isn’t a police injunction on any of the film, but Harry, this isn’t the right tone for an episode of Treasure Hunter, not even a special episode.”

  Her brother gazed wide-eyed at her and shook his head. “And people go on and on about me losing touch with reality and having a nervous breakdown.”

  “Harry, you tried to shoot someone.”

  “Piffle,” Harry said, waving his sister’s objection away impatiently and masterfully ignoring the fact that he was still in a hospital being treated for a nervous breakdown. “That’s beside the real point,” he said as his sister scowled at him. “Which is that this, my dear sis, is an opportunity. The kind that wins best documentary at Sundance.” Bethy opened her mouth to protest. “—Ah! No,” Harry said, stopping her. “Don’t tell me how it can’t be done, just go do it. Interview Redd, and that McRae person, and get them to find some photographs of the bunch from college, and shoot some street views of the Edgewater Archive in black-and-white, and make sure you get a couple atmospheric clips of that priest fellow. And see if Flo’s cousin’s brother’s ex-wife’s niece is still doing freelance composing, this sort of thing needs a moody sort of score.”

  Bethy sighed and rolled her eyes and made a couple of pointed comments about how someone was feeling better, but she took notes too, and then went and set up interviews. The shooting schedule for Treasure Hunter was trashed beyond recognition anyway while they prepared to go to Russia to freeze to death and get eaten by Bigfoot.

  The documentary did not win any awards at Sundance—although, much to Bethy’s shock, it actually got considered—but it did turn into something of a cult classic, and was generally expected to stream online until the end of time. Flo’s cousin’s brother’s ex-wife’s niece (who was, in fact, still doing freelance composing, and created the entire soundtrack for the documentary that would come to be called Curse of the San Telmo) insisted it was because of the touching traditional song about ships lost at sea that Bethy convinced Detective Hermann to record; Detective Hermann insisted it was because of the saxophone solo they included in honor of Ryan.

  They gave most of the treasure to the local museum. Or at least Chris and Carrie and Maddison tried to, after Redd refused point blank to take any shares and Dr. McRae smiled mysteriously when they offered, but the museum director stared at them in shock for ten minutes before weakly asking if they had any idea how much the treasure of the San Telmo would fetch on the open market.

  “It’s never been about the money!” Chris explained, and the museum director had sighed and insisted on negotiating a purchase agreement. “So this transaction doesn’t bite us all in the butt later.” She had a point, especially since Chris wanted to give the Edgewater Archive rights to the exhibit and that required a lot of paperwork and three joint board meetings. It wound up being a tidy sum in the low thousands, which was still rather less than the treasure was worth but something the museum had little difficulty paying.

  “Normally we’d get a lot more resistance over the cost,” the curator said, staring wide-eyed at the flower crown, “but the opportunity to have the San Telmo in our museum actually made two of our board members light-headed. We’ve gotten twice our normal number of monetary contributions for the year and it’s only August, and museum attendance is through the roof. In other words,” she explained, “this is the best investment we’ve made in years, you could have asked for hundreds of thousands and we still would have been interested in the collection.”

  The joint exhibition opened on a Saturday in early September. They held it at the museum, the better to show off the new permanent San Telmo exhibit; the Edgewater Archives’ related document collections were to be returned after the month-long exhibit. To his relief, the museum and the archive had agreed no
t to make Chris, Carrie, or Maddison say anything, even though they were the most accessible guests of honor—Redd and his entire film crew were in Russia looking for Bigfoot and completely snowed in, just as Bethy had feared would happen. So Chris lurked, watching people ooh and ahh over the salvaged hull of the San Telmo, the mast re-​created to scale, the actual octopus figurehead, and the case after case of treasure from the ship. He was hanging out by the snack table wondering if the bacon-and-peach bites were the universe’s way of laughing at them all when Maddison found him.

  “I know,” she said when Chris showed her the bacon-and-peach bites. “I was with Dad when he noticed them, I was afraid he was going to combust from horror. Then he took a picture to text to Redd.”

  “Of course he did,” Chris said, and gave in to curiosity long enough to try one. The bacon-and-peach bites were actually pretty good, with some kind of honey glaze over the top. Dr. McRae must be thoroughly offended. Chris didn’t think he was ever going to get to the bottom of how Robin Redd and Dr. McRae felt about each other—there was no one left to ask if this was normal behavior for them—and he suspected they didn’t know what they were doing half the time, either.

  “Anyway,” Maddison said, putting strawberries on her own plate, “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  “I was behind that plastic replica of the ship for a while,” Chris admitted. It was intended as a play structure for kids, but it was also a great place to people-watch, and none of the kids who’d stumbled across him had been rude enough to blow his hiding place. Chris was beyond happy right now but also beyond overwhelmed.

  “Well, did you make it to the end of the exhibit yet?” Maddison asked, hauling him along in that direction as she did. “Because there’s something at the end I think you need to see.”