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

by P. D. Workman

  “That’s… it’s missing. He didn’t just take the money.”

  “What else is missing?”

  “The poem.”

  Erin was waiting for word from the doctor that she could be discharged when Vic walked in, pushing Jeremy in a wheelchair. He was dressed in a hospital johnny, but looked remarkably well, as if it were just a Halloween costume.

  “Vic! Jeremy! How are you?”

  “I am just as good as you, if not better,” Jeremy said with a grin.

  “I just got bumped on the head. You got two bullets in you.”

  “Yeah, but the doctor fixed me all up. You didn’t get any work done. I’m good as new.”

  “Are you going home?”

  He hesitated. “Well, not quite yet.”

  “Then I’m in better shape than you are. I’m just waiting to be released.”

  “That’s because you’ve got someone to take care of you when you get home. You’ve got Vic and Terry around, so you’re not on your own.”

  “What about Beaver? Can’t she look after you?”

  “No, she’s got to get back to work. She won’t be able to stay close by like Terry and Vic.”

  “They’ve got to work too,” Erin said. “Though if I called them, they could come. But I’m not going to need to do that, because I’ll be back at work, not at home.”

  “You’re not ready to go back to work,” Vic said sternly.

  “I have to! We have to keep the bakery running.”

  “We’ll keep the bakery running. You need to stay home until you’re healed. You’re not allowed to come back in while you’re still concussed.”

  “Why not? It’s not affecting me. Other people would be around.”

  “For the same reason you’re not allowed to drive,” Vic said. “You need to do what the doctors say.”

  “They didn’t say I couldn’t drive or work.”

  “Well, I’m saying it.”

  Erin rolled her eyes. “How are you feeling?” she asked Jeremy, cocking her head to look at him. “You sure are looking a lot better than I would have expected.”

  “I’m sore all over,” Jeremy admitted. “Apparently, getting shot is sort of the equivalent of being trampled by a horse. I’m not just sore where the bullets went in, it’s like I have the flu or got beaten up.”

  “Me too. I only got hit once, on the head, but I feel like he must have punched and kicked me once I went down, because everything is tender. Every time I move, I find a new bruise or sore muscle.”

  Jeremy nodded. “We make a good pair. Maybe we should both just go back to your place and we can take care of each other and commiserate over our injuries.”

  Erin looked over at Vic, who shook her head.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Jeremy’s not ready to go home yet, even if he thinks he is. If one of you fell down and needed help getting up, you’d both just end up on the floor. Neither of you is supposed to be doing any heavy lifting.”

  “I’m not going to fall down,” Erin said.

  “Neither am I,” Jeremy agreed.

  “You guys are incorrigible. Quit it. Besides,” Vic raised an eyebrow at Erin, “I don’t think your man would be too happy about Jeremy staying at your house again.”

  Erin shrugged stiffly. “He might not be, but I don’t make all of my decisions based on what he does or doesn’t want, either. I’ll do what I think is best.”

  Vic raised her eyebrows. “Well, I don’t think I’ve heard you talk that way about Terry before. Are you sure it’s not the concussion talking?”

  “No… it’s me. I know he doesn’t like everything I do. But I’m my own person. I’ll do what I need to do.”

  Vic nodded. “I’ve always said so. Good for you. If he’s expecting you to be some shrinking violet who does everything she is told and just stays in the kitchen all day, he should think again. You might act like a pushover sometimes, but underneath, you’re pretty tough.”

  Jeremy looked at Vic, frowning. He looked back at Erin.

  “I don’t know if women like being classified as tough any more than as a shrinking violet, do they?”

  Vic shrugged. “It depends on the woman. I’d rather be tough than a cupcake. I think Beaver would say the same thing. Erin might like cupcakes, but I don’t think she wants to be one.”

  Erin laughed at that. “No, I don’t,” she agreed. “I am my own person. I don’t know why Terry is acting like he owns me or can control what I do. I’m not a child.”

  “He just wants to protect you,” Jeremy said. “He’s a cop. It’s in his DNA. He wants to protect people, and especially the ones closest to him. He’s not telling you that you can’t be the person you want to be, he just wants to keep you from getting hurt and is trying to encourage you down the pathway he thinks is safest.”

  “He can’t keep bad things from happening,” Erin pointed out. “No matter what he does, he can’t predict the future and he can’t keep things from happening to me, or Vic, or even himself. You can go down all the safe garden paths you like, but that doesn’t keep you from being run over by a bus.”

  “Or hit by a mugger,” Jeremy agreed.

  “Or shot by a poacher,” Vic added.

  “It’s just not feasible to avoid every danger.”

  “Of course not,” Jeremy agreed. “But that doesn’t mean Terry won’t try. And as far as me staying at the house with you… well, it’s perfectly understandable that he doesn’t want another guy horning in on his territory. Even if you’re not his territory. I know he doesn’t own you. But he doesn’t want another guy looking at you. Trying to have a relationship with you.”

  “Well, I told him that wasn’t the case. You were just a friend staying over for a few days. I told him there wasn’t anything between us, but he still gets all… manly about it.”

  Vic laughed. “Well, you wouldn’t want him to stop being manly, would you? I don’t think you would have picked a cop in uniform if you didn’t like that about him.”

  Erin’s face warmed. She rolled her eyes and looked around the room, looking for some way to change the subject.

  “Personal preferences aside… I do want to talk about the schedule at Auntie Clem’s. We can’t let it just stay closed until I’m feeling better. I don’t know how many days it will be before I can put in a full day. I might only be able to come in for a few hours at a time at first, until I’m sure that I’ve got my mojo back.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Vic said. “We’ll take care of everything. Bella was in early this morning and Charley is taking over at noon. Then I’ll do late shift and make sure everything is prepped again for the morning. It’s not as easy to run the shop with just one person on shift at a time, but it’s possible, especially if we’re not putting in full-length shifts. You can put up with it being harder if you know you don’t have to be there as long. We might work it so that we overlap by an hour over the usual rushes; we’ll put our heads together and see what we can come up with. In the meantime, you’re not allowed to worry about anything. You just rest and be reassured that we’re holding things together until you’re healthy again. Really healthy, not forcing yourself to come back because you’re afraid everything is going to fall apart.”

  “Are you sure?” Erin was already worrying about how hard it would be for each of them to run the bakery by themselves. She had done everything by herself for the first little while, before taking Vic on as an employee, and it had been exhausting. There had to be a way to set up the shifts so that two people could cover each shift…

  “Leave it to me,” Vic insisted, staring at Erin as if she could see right into her mind to what she was thinking. “You don’t need to think about it at all. Bella is happy to take the early shift. She doesn’t have any classes that interfere and she’s a farm girl, so she’s used to being up early. Obviously, Charley can’t take the early shift, but she’s fine once she’s out of bed. She doesn’t even have to make anything for the middle shift, she can just man the
counter. But she likes to cook, so I think she’ll still put in a tray of cookies when she has a lull. Then I’m there at the end of the day to make sure that everything is cleaned up to your usual exacting standards and that all of the batters are ready for when Bella gets there in the morning. We all get our preferred time of day, I still have time to check in on Jeremy or you, and nobody is trying to shoulder the full burden.”

  “I suppose.” Erin had to admit, it sounded like they had everything worked out. She wanted to fix it, but if there was nothing to fix, she should just let them do it their way and not try to come up with a better idea.

  “Why don’t you work on the mystery while you’re recovering?” Jeremy suggested. “You can look at the poem and see where the clues lead you. Maybe you’ll be able to find something out that you weren’t able to see before, when you were so busy and distracted by other things.”

  Vic bit her lip and gave Jeremy a warning look.

  “What?” Jeremy shook his head, eyebrows down. “What did I say?”

  “Terry told me. When Erin got mugged, they stole the poem and Willie’s maps.”

  Jeremy looked surprised. He opened his mouth to speak, then did a sort of double-take and looked at Vic again, opening and closing his mouth like a fish on the other side of the aquarium glass.

  “Yeah,” Vic confirmed. “Someone else is trying to find the treasure. Someone who is willing to hurt people to find it.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  A

  s far as Terry was concerned, and probably the rest of the men who were her friends too, Erin should just drop the treasure hunt nonsense and do something that was safer. But as Erin had said, she wasn’t about to live her life the way that Terry or anyone else said that she should. She had always found her own path in the world and was her own person, and that wasn’t going to stop. She wasn’t going to be cowed just because someone had hit her over the head and taken the poem and the maps.

  Willie said that he hadn’t given her the original maps, just good quality copies, which he could run off again and, while Erin hadn’t made any copies of the poem, she had read it enough times that she had it memorized. As soon as she got home and was alone, she wrote it out again, just the same as it had been on the original. Maybe not exactly the same, because she couldn’t replicate exactly the swoops and curls of the old-fashioned script that it had been written in, but she did the best she could to keep the spacing the same and to exactly replicate each word and mark that had been on the original paper in case there was any significance in the way they lined up.

  She wasn’t going to give up on finding the treasure. Maybe someone else was looking for it, but that didn’t mean she was just going to go away. She had a head start on whoever was just picking up the hunt. Maybe it was only a few days of research, but she knew more than they did, and that meant she could get to the treasure faster.

  She studied the words of the poem. She couldn’t do much about the maps until Willie got her new copies. She had looked at them only briefly, and she had only a rough idea of the topography and roads from what Betty and Edna had drawn for her, but it was enough for a start.

  She went back to Clementine’s files and thumbed through the labels on the folders. Nothing on lost treasure. Nothing on old legends or untold riches. But she might have something in one of her files that would point Erin in the right direction.

  She started at the front of the drawer and looked carefully at each folder, rating them as to which was most likely to hold clues to the treasure hunt poem, and then she went through each of the likely folders from front to back, examining every single page and clipping carefully. She had all the time she needed.

  She had all day for as many days as she decided to tell her employees that she needed to be home, and they would keep the bakery running in her absence. She wouldn’t draw it out any longer than she needed to, of course, but she could take all the time she needed, and why not do something productive with it?

  “Here, look at this.” Erin knew that Vic was tired and probably just wanted to get into a hot shower and some comfy clothes for the evening. She’d be up at the hospital again in the morning to check on Jeremy and see if he needed anything. Even if she wasn’t working her usual long hours, she was still keeping herself busy for most of the day. “It will only take a minute.”

  Vic sat down to look at the file Erin had pulled out.

  “This is a file on Orson Cadaver.”

  Vic’s eyes widened and she opened her mouth to make a crack about the name.

  “I know,” Erin said, “spooky name, right? Anyway, this is a great, great-something uncle of mine. He was raised dirt poor, never had a single possession, and then suddenly he starts spending a fortune in gold coins.”

  Vic took the folder from her and read through the first paper or two. “It was modern currency, not like he dug up a pirate treasure.”

  “I know. It was modern, and he said he earned it legitimately. But get this—he would never say how he earned it. Just that it had been honest work. But with the amounts of money that he had suddenly come into, everybody thought he’d robbed a wagon train or hit it big in the mines. Or that he found a pirate treasure and cashed it in for modern gold. He would have had to pass it through someone else to get it laundered. No one knew for sure how he had gotten the money in the first place.”

  “That is kind of suspicious,” Vic admitted. “Where did he live? Right here in Bald Eagle Falls?”

  “No, down in the valley. He’d been trying to farm, but there wasn’t enough flatland. The soil was the wrong pH or something and wouldn’t grow corn or the other crops he tried. He did something else every year, and just got further and further behind. Then suddenly, he is successful, but he won’t tell anyone what it was he planted, and no one knew what it was he took to market. He drove wagonloads of product into the market for sale, but it was covered up and nobody knew who he sold to or what commodity it was he was selling.”

  “Maybe he was a witch,” Vic suggested. “It all sounds pretty dark and mysterious.”

  “A witch?” Erin repeated.

  “You know, selling potions or elixirs or turning coal into gold. Something sinister and unexplainable.”

  Erin gave Vic a look. They both knew that Adele, an actual witch, didn’t do anything of the sort. “I think he might actually have found the gold for the corn crops. Or the soldiers’ payroll that disappeared. The timing is right. Of course, he never says so, because neither one was intended for him. But if he had been lying in wait along one of those routes that Edna pointed out…”

  “It would take more than one man to take down all of the guards transporting a big payment like that. They wouldn’t have sent it on its way without lots of protection.”

  “Maybe he had help. Maybe he hired someone else to help him. If he did, we don’t know what happened to them. Either he paid them off well so that they wouldn’t talk about it, or he got rid of them some other way.”

  Vic gave a shudder. “You really think this is the guy? He’s the one who hid the treasure?”

  “It makes sense. I haven’t come across anyone else in the family who suddenly had more money than they should have. This guy was as poor as dirt before this, then suddenly starts paying for everything with gold coins. They had to come from somewhere, but he would never say where. And he didn’t have any heirs. After he died, people went looking for his money. They found a few gold coins, but no fortune. Like they just found his spending money, but the real money was somewhere else.”

  “Like the bank, maybe? Why didn’t these guys ever use banks?”

  “Maybe they weren’t secure then like they are now. Or they weren’t being run by someone trustworthy. Weren’t insured. Things weren’t regulated like they are now, were they?”

  “No, you’re right there,” Vic admitted. “But if they all looked for it at the time, then what makes you think that we’re going to find anything now? They would have looked pretty carefully.”

&nbs
p; “But they didn’t have the poem.”

  “If the poem is related to Orson, then why wasn’t it in that file instead of the one you found it in?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Clementine didn’t know they were related. Or maybe she didn’t want someone else to know.”

  “Or maybe they’re not related.”

  Erin shrugged. “Maybe not, but looking is fun, isn’t it?”

  Vic laughed. “It is, kind of. So, what’s your next step?”

  “As soon as I get the maps from Willie, we go down to see if we can find Orson’s old house. I think there’s enough detail in this file to identify where it is once we have the map. And then… maybe we find more clues.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  I

  t was a few days before Erin was able to get away with Vic to try to find Orson’s old homestead. She had to first convince everybody that she was well enough to be working again, and then, once she was well enough to work, she had to be at Auntie Clem’s doing her job until she could arrange for a day off for both her and Vic. Since everybody had been putting in extra hours, it didn’t seem right for Erin to take the first opportunity to get a shift off again. But when Saturday afternoon rolled around, Bella was happy to take a quiet shift and let Erin and Vic go off treasure hunting. Though they didn’t tell her that was what they were going to do. They might have led her to believe they wore going into the city to visit Jeremy or to take him out on a day trip. Jeremy was getting pretty eager to get out of the hospital, feeling like he could be back to his normal activities again in spite of the gunshot wounds.

  “Do you think we’ll be able to find it?” Erin asked, as Vic followed her instructions through the overgrown backroads to try to find the old homestead.

  “If it’s there, we’ll find it,” Vic said. “The cabin, that is. I’m not guaranteeing anything else.”

  “We don’t even know if there is anything else,” Erin said agreeably. “Who knows?”