Mara Louis; Girl of Mystery

by Timothy Paterson

and after the war, he continued taking photos until his death in 1949, at the age of 102. When I was a boy of thirteen, I also became interested in photography and my great grandfather Danny Boy taught me everything he knew. For the two of us, photography was more than a hobby. It was a way of preserving moments of history. Neither of us took posed photographs. We took action photos, candid photos, without the aid of props. We took photos of people, places, and nature.”

  Do you still have any of those photos?” asked Mara. Samuel’s eyes lit up when Mara showed an interest in the photos. “I have thousands of photos,” said Samuel. Danny Boy taught me to always keep a copy of every photo I ever took. My collection goes back to 1926, and I have Danny Boy’s collection of photos dating from 1864 to 1949, as well. Would you like to see them?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Mara. “I’d love to see them.” Since the photos were stored in the house from when Samuel had lived there, a few years back, he took Mara to a room, where there were several boxes filled with photos. Mara got Scott, Brenda, Jordan and Kenny to help her carry all of the boxes down into the living room. Then, the five of them and Samuel started looking through the photos.

  Mara fell in love with the photos immediately. They captured the character of the subjects in the photos. Mara was surprised to see a photo of Teddy Roosevelt, and there on the back, was written: ‘T. Roosevelt, 1898- Sp. Am. War’. “Wow”, she said, this was taken of him before he became president. As she continued looking at the photos, she saw many such photos, of famous people, before they became famous. She even saw some photos of President Morgan as a child.

  In Samuel’s collection, there were photos of almost every president since 1900, and almost all of them taken before they became president, either when they were lawyers, in the military or just entering politics.

  Mara and Scott were looking at some of Daniel’s photos, when they got very excited. They found hundreds of photos that were taken during the Civil War including photos of Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, taken at Lee’s surrender. Not only were there several photos of the top generals of the Civil war, but ones of several Army officers who would one day become a U.S. President. They even found several photos of President Lincoln, including some that were taken just days before was assassinated.

  The last boxes of photos that they looked in were marked ‘family photos’. There were several photos of the Jackson family, including one taken in 1949, that showed six generations of the Jackson family, from Danny Boy aged 102, down to Brenda and Kenny’s grandfather Howard Jackson when he was just a baby. Samuel remarked that it was taken a couple months before Danny Boy died.

  “Do you have any photos taken before 1864?” asked Mara. “No” replied Samuel. “I wondered that myself, but I searched and searched this house and never found any photos before Danny Boy went to fight in the war.”

  When they finished looking at the photos, it was after eleven o’clock p.m.

  As Mara lay in her bed, she began thinking about Danny Boy and his treasure, and after a while, she finally fell into a peaceful slumber.

  When Mara woke up early the next morning, she began carefully going through Daniel’s letter looking for clues. She was concentrating on it so intensely, that she did not hear Scott and the others enter her room. When Scott spoke to Mara, she jumped up and dropped the letter. “You startled me, Scott,” she told him.

  “Did you figure out where the treasure is yet?” asked Kenny.

  “Not yet” said Mara. “There are some things that I understand, but there are things that are puzzling me. For example, there are three feet in a yard, but how does that help? Does it mean we should go three feet in a certain direction? If so, which direction? Then the clue, ‘read between the lines and dig real deep’, does that mean that we should look for a clue in a book? What book? Maybe it refers to a hidden meaning in the poem?”

  At breakfast, Mara mentioned her frustrations to the adults at the table as well. “Just relax. I’m sure that it’ll come to you,” said Samuel. Maybe, if you walk around the yard after breakfast, something will pop into your head.”

  Suddenly, Mara picked up the letter and read it once again. She had a big grin on her face. “I know that look,” said Scott. “You’ve figured it out, haven’t you?”

  “Yes” said Mara, “or part of it, anyway. I was reading the letter wrong. Samuel gave me the correct meaning of a clue. The puzzle doesn’t refer to a measurement of feet in a yard, but rather people’s feet in a yard, such as a front or back yard.”

  The room became very quiet as Mara concentrated on the rest of the puzzle. The adults were just as excited as the children were. “Where is the box of family photographs that we were looking at last night?” asked Mara. “I need to see them right away.” Kenny ran to the living room and brought the box of photos to Mara. Mara began carefully looking through the photos. She stopped when she found the photo she was looking for. It was taken a few years after the Civil War. Mara’s eyes got very big and she started screaming, “I know where the treasure is buried”.

  “Where is it?” asked Scott and Kenny at the same time.

  Mara had to take a moment to calm down, and then she began explaining. “I thought that the clue in the puzzle; ‘look between the li’ns’ meant read between the lines. But it actually meant ‘look’ between the ‘lions’ In this picture taken after the Civil War, it shows that there used to be two lion statues in front of the house, one on each side of the front porch. The treasure is buried in the front yard, directly in front of the porch, between the places where the statues used to sit.”

  “What are we waiting for?” asked Kenny. He and his father went to get some shovels out of the tool shed, as Mara and the others went out into the front yard. The recent rains had softened the ground, making it easy to dig. Mara carefully studied the photo, and then after estimating where the lion statues had been, she pointed to the spot where Scott and Kenny should start digging.

  Scott and Kenny began digging, while everyone else anxiously watched. When they had dug down two and a half feet, they found something. After digging around the object, they lifted it out of the hole and onto the ground. The object was wrapped in some kind of protective fibers, and under that layer, it was wrapped in several layers of cloth. When Mara and Kenny had unwrapped all of the layers, they found a rectangular box two feet by three feet, and one foot high.

  Everybody held their breath, as Brenda lifted the lid of the iron chest. Inside the chest, they found three old fruit jars filled with coins, a very old pocket watch, a pocketknife, a boy’s cap, carefully wrapped in layers of cloth, and a few journals that belonged to Danny Boy when he was a teenager.

  Kenny, who was a coin collector, was very excited to find the coins, because all of them were more than one hundred fifty years old.

  Kenny’s dad started to fill the hole back in, when Mara yelled; “Stop, Mr. Jackson. Do not fill in the hole yet. This chest is not the main treasure. It’s only part of it.”

  “Why do you say that, Mara?” asked Samuel.

  “The puzzle said to dig real deep. Two to three feet is not very deep. Also, the puzzle said not to squirrel away, or keep the treasure to yourself, but to share it with the world. Nothing in this chest is all that exciting, that it would be worth sharing it with the world.”

  Samuel and the other adults agreed with Mara and Scott, Kenny and Brenda begin digging the hole deeper and wider. When they had reached almost five feet, Kenny suggested that they stop. “I’m sorry Mara, but there is no more treasure. This time, your psychic instinct was wrong.” At that very moment, Scott thrust his shovel into the bottom of the hole and everybody heard a dull metallic sound.

  Kenny looked at Mara and said “I’m sorry that I ever doubted you, oh great and powerful one” and then he bowed to her. Everybody laughed, including Mara and the digging continued. They widened the
hole to find the edges of the box. Scott could feel handles on the box, which was much larger than the first chest. It was also much heavier.

  Scott and Kenny attached ropes to both handles and with the adults pulling on the ropes, and Scott and Kenny, guiding the chest up; they lifted the chest out of the hole. The chest was much bigger than the first one. It was three feet by four feet and two feet high. It was wrapped the same way as the first chest. After it was unwrapped, everyone just stared at the enormous chest, imaging what treasures it contained.

  Samuel said that since Mara was the one convinced them to keep digging, that she should be the one to open it.

  Before Mara opened the chest, she said “I believe I know what is in this box, and if I am right, it is more valuable than gold.” Mara then opened the chest and saw hundreds of large envelopes. She opened one envelope, and pulled out several old photographs, all with the dates and names on the back. Mara replaced the photos in the envelope. She noticed a smaller envelope in lying on top of the others, in one corner. She opened the envelope, pulled out a letter, and read it out to the others gathered around her.

  “These photographs represent the life work of my father; Richard Jackson and my grandfather; George