Barefoot in the Dark

by Suzanne Enoch

  And she’d been dead on target, too. If she’d factored in that they’d moved the treasure because of Rick stumbling across it as a kid, she would have started this morning’s search at the church, but this was where it had been for the previous two hundred plus years. Right here.

  Stoney emerged from the manhole-sized opening in the side of the ravine. “It’s small and rough, but we’d need way more time to open it up more. We also found a nice boulder to roll over the opening here.”

  “Excellent. I’ll go in and place everything if you guys will hand it in to me.”

  Putting her flashlight between her teeth, she dove in headfirst. The ground was cold and damp, but it hadn’t frozen yet, thankfully. In another couple of weeks this would have been a very different operation. She picked up a fist-sized rock and scraped and punched it into the wall a couple of times where the shovel marks were too obvious, going in about a dozen feet before a higher, wider chamber opened up. At the back, crumbling dirt revealed part of a brick wall – The Bonny Lass’s cellar.

  Settling the flashlight into the dirt wall, she heaped up some loose soil. When the box arrived, she flipped it on its side and half buried it. The saddle went into the opposite wall as if over time the sides had caved in over it a little, while she squished the sheets of silk into the edge of the box and the dirt around it. When she got hold of the satchel she took out one of the necklaces and dropped it behind the saddle, clumping more dirt over most of it.

  Digging a little wedge into the bottom of the wall, she spread the dirt around to soften the floor. The saddlebag had to appear overlooked, but not so well-hidden Reg and Norway wouldn’t find it.

  “They’re getting in the jeep now,” Rick’s voice came from her pocket, making her jump. “Where do you want me?”

  If they were driving down, her team had like ten minutes left. She pulled out the radio. “In the house, where we all are,” she returned, digging out a little more dirt with her free hand. “Yule knows what’s up. We’re all there, and we’re having dinner as usual. Got it?” Reaching over, she shoved the saddlebag into the space she’d made, reaching into it for a coin she could put just at its mouth so light would reflect against it. Hopefully.

  “Yes, dear,” Rick said, English affront nearly dripping from the speaker.

  She started out again on her hands and knees; using one elbow to brace herself, she lifted the walkie-talkie again. “Sorry. In a hurry. You’ll have to stall your aunt and uncle now, so they don’t start wondering where we are. Love you.” Once her head poked out of the hole Stoney grabbed her arm and pulled her to her feet. “We have ten minutes, max. Let’s get some dirt shoved in right at the end and put the stone in front of that. We,” and she gestured at herself, Stoney, and Donner, “need to get out of sight. I’m thinking The Bonny Lass cellar, so we can listen in and make sure this is working.”

  “Aye,” Jamie said, handing a shovel to the large man Father Michael had called Clive. “Get to it, lads. Come in for a beer on the house when ye’ve finished, but clean yerselves up first. I have standards to maintain. This way, Miss Sam.”

  “Is this how you become a crime boss?” Donner whispered, leaning closer to her as they moved past where amateurs would look for footprints and climbed the steep hill.

  “You’d better hope not, Guido,” she returned, reaching back a hand to haul the rounder Stoney up behind her.

  21

  Monday, 4:58 p.m.

  The walk to The Bonny Lass was much quicker, Samantha noted, when she didn’t have to detour into the wilderness to avoid being seen. It would have been much easier just to have Rick just threaten Reggie and Norway into going away and keeping their yaps shut. But Rick and Reggie were family, when he didn’t have much in the way of kin, and she had even less than that. She was willing to bank on a little bit of crazy as a plan, and he was willing to trust her on it. That was both gratifying and terrifying.

  The Bonny Lass had already begun filling up, which didn’t surprise her. For her this was a Hail Mary to save a treasure and Rick’s relationship with his cousin. For the villagers of Orrisey, this was their future – and they were trusting her, too. Cripes.

  Jamie pulled open the trap door behind the bar and led the way downstairs. In the chilly air the damp and mud on her jeans and coat and gloves started to feel even ickier, but for now she ignored it. When the pub owner hit the light switch she crossed the room to the far wall beside the row of beer kegs and tubes leading to the taps above.

  The wall was old quarry stone and mortar, but because she was looking for it, the rough circle of newer cement and newer stones was fairly easy to make out. “Is the wall just these stones?” she asked running her gloved palm over them. “No insulation?”

  “Nae. We like the cold, for the beer. The cave’s just on the other side.”

  “Do you have a nail or a spike and a hammer?”

  “I have a spike for tapping the kegs.” He picked up the old, sharp metal spike and a hammer and brought them over. “If ye break down the wall I reckon that ruins yer plan, though.”

  She took the tools. “I’m not breaking down the wall. I just want to listen.” Picking a spot at the bottom right corner of the newer section, she set the spike between two stones and struck it, hard. It barely made a dent. “Huh.”

  “Let me,” Donner said, taking the hammer and giving the spike a wack.

  “The hole has to be small, Thor,” Samantha admonished. “Maybe not even all the way through.”

  “I got it.”

  “Here’s a nail,” Stoney said, straightening from the pile of junk in the corner. “Smaller hole.”

  At least her team was trying to be helpful. Donner hadn’t mentioned calling the cops or getting arrested even once. That didn’t mean she liked him now, but the next time they clashed she would cut him a little slack. Maybe.

  “Okay, that’s good,” she said, when the spike was about six inches in. “We’re out of time, anyway. Jamie, head upstairs and remind everybody this is just an ordinary evening.”

  “And if this doesnae work?” he asked.

  “We go to plan B.”

  “Is that the plan where we give them a lesson or two so they understand we protect what’s ours? Laird Rawley may not like that.” The barkeep tilted his head. “Ye ken ye’re only here because the laird kept his word to us all those years ago.”

  Great. “Beating them up is plan C. Plan B is where Lord Rawley kicks their asses and tells them to get the hell off his land.”

  He sniffed, nodding. “I hope yer plan A works. I’m glad to know ye’ve a B and a C ready to hand, though.” He climbed the steep ladder. “Lights on or off?”

  “Off, just in case. But normal noise upstairs.”

  “Aye. We’ve played this game before. Well, not us, but our greats and great-greats.”

  In a second, they were surrounded by blackness. She turned on the flashlight she still had, and used it to find a seat against the wall right beside the hole.

  Stoney plunked down beside her, then patted the floor on his other side. “Come on, lawyer. Don’t be shy.”

  Grumbling, Donner sat as well. “This is not going in my memoirs,” he grunted, as Samantha flicked off the flashlight again.

  After a minute of rustling they settled, and she put her head back to listen. Through the closed trap door above the pub was still a little too quiet, but the sound mostly wouldn’t carry through the stone wall anyway. Beyond the wall, silence. It would stay that way until Reg and his greedy girlfriend shoved that stone out of the way. If they realized the stone marked the entrance to the old treasure vault.

  With a few days she could have turned that cave into a ruin that would have fooled an archaeologist. Even with just fifteen minutes, it wasn’t too shabby. Thanks to the slush slowly freezing all along the floor of the ravine, the entrance looked pretty well, but not too well, concealed. She hoped. It was, after all, the first time she’d laid out treasure for somebody else – somebody way less skilled th
an she was – to find.

  “So, you do a lot of this sitting in the dark shit?” Donner whispered.

  “No, she waits in the dark for saps like you to fall asleep and then she takes your best stuff,” Stoney hissed back.

  “That’s enough, boys,” she snapped, as loudly as she dared. Her father had always called the subject of a theft either saps or marks, and she’d never liked it. Cat burglary had been a challenge for her – her skill versus someone else’s paranoia – and her win didn’t mean she thought the other guy was stupid. Just less lucky. “I’m retired. This is a favor. Shut up.”

  They sat there in annoyed silence for what felt like an hour, until she risked checking her phone for the time. Forty-seven minutes they’d been waiting there. Oh, for crying out loud. For the first time it dawned on her that Reggie and Eerika might be too crap at treasure hunting to find the cave. Or what if they were less crap than she’d realized, and they’d figured, like she had, that the loot was in the church? Even she would have had to do some searching to find that hidden door, though.

  “Is it here?” she heard faintly, in Norway’s voice. She twisted to put her ear closer to the hole. Stoney tapped his finger against her hand, so she knew he’d heard it, too.

  “There’s a cave opening up,” Reggie’s voice returned. “Don’t shove me.”

  “Well, hurry! We don’t have much time. You don’t want your cousin to come looking for us. He can still cancel a stupid check.”

  “If you don’t want to risk it, Ree, we don’t have to be here. I could be happy with the million and the job offer.”

  “As long as no one misses us, we’re not risking anything. If we find what we expect, you can tear up that check and throw it back in his face,” the Viking hissed back. “Do you see anything?”

  “I dropped the torch.” A pause. “I see a box!”

  “Move! I want to see!”

  The hushed, excited tones almost – almost – made Samantha feel guilty. She lived for that feeling of anticipation, of reward at the end of a complicated hunt. But there was a reason she’d never hit a museum and she’d only taken from those for whom treasures were about dollar value. The village of Orrisey needed that stash far more than Reggie or Eerika ever would. It had been left for them, for exactly the purpose they’d been putting it to.

  “It looks like really old satin,” Reggie said, to the accompanying sound of the box being dragged across the dirt floor.

  “Silks,” Norway corrected a couple of seconds later. “They’re…ew, moldy. Completely rubbish. Oh, what’s that? Pearls?”

  So far, so good. Now Booty Queen just had to recognize why the pearls had been left behind.

  “What… Give me the torch, Reginald. Oh, fuck. They’re paste! Everything here is worthless!”

  “It looks like the valuable things were taken or sold off a long time ago, darling. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? You’re sorry? This would have made us famous. Now it’s just…nothing. We have nothing!” Eerika’s voice rose higher and higher in pitch. Great. Hysteria. They hadn’t planned for that. If she started flinging the box and rocks around, the cave could collapse on them. That would mean having to dig them out, which would take more fancy footwork to avoid giving away that the treasure crap had been planted.

  “Here’s a saddle, Ree. And…look, a satchel. Perhaps—”

  “Give me that. A coin! And a…necklace.” Silence. “The stone’s gone. Two – no, three coins, an old silver chain, and mold and paste.” More silence. “If your cousin found this, why didn’t he just tell us?”

  “Maybe there was more here eighteen years ago. Or maybe he never got this far, and just assumed?”

  Yes, go with that, Samantha urged silently. Don’t ask the sticky questions they hadn’t had time to plan for.

  “I can’t bel…” Norway trailed off.

  “What, love? We still have the check. That’s more than enough compensation for this mess.”

  “Yes. Come on. We have to get out of here before somebody notices that hole is open. I’m definitely not risking that check now.”

  “We said we were supping at The Bonny Lass.”

  “I am not going in there looking like this, Reginald.”

  “We can’t go back to Canniebrae looking like this, either. What if… We’ll go into the pub and say you took a tumble in the mud, and I rescued you. We’ll clean up there, and then head back.”

  “Yes, yes. For once you’ve thought of something clever. Let’s go.”

  Crap. Samantha put the flashlight beneath her shirt and turned it on, giving them a dim glow to see by. “Let’s go,” she breathed, standing and hauling Stoney up beside her. “They have the jeep. If they keep us pinned down here, we’ll never get back to the house before they do.”

  She got them to the ladder and led the way up. As she shouldered the trap door open it yanked up over her head, nearly sending her down backward off the ladder again.

  “Well?” Jamie MacCafferty demanded, the pub around them immediately going silent again.

  “Be loud,” she ordered, hopping up to the bar’s wooden floor. “They’re on their way here. We need to go.”

  “Did it work, lass?”

  “Yes, it did. So keep in mind that you don’t know why the silly English are down here in the village.” She jabbed a finger into his wide chest. “You didn’t know what they were up to, and you have nothing to hide. Got it?” Samantha enunciated.

  The big man tilted his head a little. “Aye. So don’t take it wrong when I tell ye to get the devil out of here. And keep what ye saw and heard to yerselves. All of ye.”

  “Yeah. We were never here.” She backhanded Donner in the chest and headed for the door. After she stuck her head out to make sure it was still clear, she sent her team out ahead of her. “We take the road, hurry, clean up, and sit down to dinner.”

  “You’re bossy,” Donner noted.

  “Go.”

  As she started out after them, Jamie caught her arm. “We want ye to know, if this doesn’t work, we’ll be blaming ye for stepping in where ye’re nae wanted.”

  “Okay. If this does work, your council can vote on giving me a fucking parade for me sticking my neck out this far.”

  He grinned, releasing her. “Ye’re a bit mad, aren’t ye? I like it. Ye’ve a deal, lass.”

  As she sprinted into the cold twilight, a bouncing flashlight and a pair of bodies appeared around the corner. Reversing course with a silent curse, Samantha dove back inside the pub. “They’re right behind me,” she muttered, as she dodged Jamie, jumped the bar, and half slid down the ladder, pulling the trap door down over her as the front door jingled and opened.

  “Well, shit,” she breathed, freeing her flashlight and turning it on again as she stepped onto the cellar floor. If she didn’t get back to Canniebrae and take a seat at the dinner table before the treasure hunters returned, this whole gig would be blown.

  She looked at the repaired wall. If the treasure hunters stuck to the tumble-and-rescue story they’d concocted in the cave, at best she probably had twenty minutes before they left to get the jeep and drove back up the hill. While she could get the wall down in that time, doing it quietly was something else altogether.

  “Okay, Sam. Think.” Flashing the light toward the junky corner, she dug past a bucket, an empty, broken keg, some cleaning supplies, bits of brick and stone, some rope, and three beer mugs. Even MacGyver would have had trouble with this one.

  She picked up the rope, then squatted by the small hole Donner had made. With the spike and quiet taps on the hammer she chipped bits of it away, making the hole big enough to fit the spike all the way through.

  The radio in her pocket clicked three times. Cursing, she pulled it free. “I’m here,” she whispered.

  “What happened?” Stoney whispered back.

  “Too much gabbing. Keep heading to the house. I’ll meet you there.”

  Pocketing the radio again, she knotted the rope around the middl
e of the spike and pushed it through the hole in the wall. She had to use the nail to poke it all the way into the cave, then fed through a little more rope to give the spike room to settle on the ground. Then, wrapping both hands around the rope, she pulled. Hard.

  The spike stopped crosswise against the hole, which she’d wanted. The wall around it, though, didn’t budge. “Dammit.”

  She fed rope through again, then stood, bracing one foot on the floor and the other against the bottom of the wall, and hauled backward with all her strength and weight. One golf-ball sized stone popped out of the wall and clacked to the floor in front of her.

  Well, that was a start, anyway. Shifting the spike with her hand, she did it again. Five minutes later three stones sat at her feet, and she had a hole too large for the spike to work efficiently, but too small for more than one leg to fit through.

  “Come on, stupid wall,” she grunted, shoving her arm in and going after the next stone.

  “Samantha, what’s going on?”

  Rick’s voice on the radio was quiet, so at least he was trying to be cautious. It would take Stoney and Tom another ten minutes at least to get back up the winding hill to the house, so he was probably totally in the dark. “You’ve been more patient than I expected,” she returned quietly.

  “I just hit my limit on patience. Words, please.”

  “I can’t right now. Reggie and Norway bought the story, Donner and Stoney are on the way back to the house, and once your cousin cleans up at The Bonny Lass so he doesn’t look like he rolled in the mud, they’ll be back up, too. Talk soon.”

  “And where are you?” he insisted, keeping his voice down. “You left that part out.”

  “I’m in The Bonny Lass’s cellar,” she finally whispered. “They haven’t seen me, and I want to keep it that way.”

  She could almost hear him come to attention. “You need to be back here before the jeep is.”

  “I know. I’m working on it. Hence the wanting to stop talking.”

  “You opened the cave, yes?”