The Case of the Piggy Bank Thief (3 page)

A skinny man with a brown beard came out to meet us. Mr. Bryant had already met him, and introduced us. His name was Mike, and he was one of the college students working on the dig.

“Welcome to the offices of Dig, Inc., White House branch,” he said, grinning. “We're glad to see you. We can always use new shovelbums.”

“Shovelbums?” I repeated.

“You know, dig? Shovel?” Mike said. “A shovelbum is anyone who helps us out.”

Besides Mike, there were five people under the canopy in the dig's “office.” Seated at a desk was a big man with bushy gray eyebrows and the kind of helmet people wear in TV shows about safaris. Standing behind him were two women and two men. All of them were studying a computer screen and talking, and you could see they were excited.

The man with the eyebrows shook his head. “You kids realize I don't trust this new technology any farther than I can throw it. I bet there's a bug in the detector, or maybe the software.”

“I don't think so, Professor. I checked it out myself,” said one of the women. “All indications are that we've found gold.”

Gold?

No wonder they were excited!

And now so were we. “Mike, can we go look at the screen, too?” Nate asked.

“Sure, why not?” Mike said. “Come on over, and I'll introduce you.”

The man in the helmet turned out to be Professor Mudd, and the others were students like Mike—Wen Fei, Stephanie, Roy and Daryl.

The computer display they were looking at had multicolored specks and blobs on a background marked off in squares. One of the blobs stood out brighter than the rest, a sunlike yellow dot near the top right corner.

“Just what is it we're looking at here, if you don't mind my asking?” said Mr. Bryant.

Professor Mudd snorted. “Prior to the California Gold Rush in 1849, there was very little gold in the United States. The archeological remains we're looking for date from long before that, 1814 through 1817. It's Wen Fei here who insisted on trying out a new gadget. If you ask me, the gadget's gone haywire.”

“What kind of new gadget?” Nate asked.

“Fancy metal detector,” Mike explained. “Excavating a site—digging, in other words—is expensive and takes a lot of time. So before we start, we do a survey to decide where we should focus. Yesterday Wen Fei did part of the survey using a new neutron-scatter device that gives a readout on the properties of the metal it finds.” He pointed at the computer screen. “The different colored markings are different types of metal, see? And Wen Fei and Stephanie are convinced that yellow one shows gold below the surface at the northeast corner of the dig site—about halfway between here and the Rose Garden.”

“How much gold?” Zach asked. “Like a treasure chest?”

Stephanie laughed. “Not hardly. The technology's very sensitive. What we found looked more like about an ounce. Could be a coin, maybe.”

All during the last few minutes, Tessa had been shifting her weight from foot to foot, and now she tugged my sleeve. “Cammie? I don't feel so good.”

“What is it?” I asked.

She put her hand on her tummy and made a face.

“I can walk back with you, young lady,” Mr. Bryant said. “Are the rest of you children all right?”

“We're going to put them right to work, sir,” Mike said. “In fact, Daryl's got a spot for them all picked out.”

AFTER Tessa and Mr. Bryant left, Daryl took me, Nate, Dalton and Zach over to a big metal cupboard with tools inside. Each of us got a trowel, a mesh strainer and a pair of gloves. Then we followed Daryl to a shallow trench on the side of the canopy closest to the swimming pool, and he showed us what to do: cut into the dirt with the trowel, break up any clumps, then shake the dirt through the strainer like flour through a sifter.

“What are we looking for, exactly?” I asked.

Daryl answered my question with a question. “You guys know British soldiers burned down the White House in August of 1814, right?”

“That was during the administration of James Madison,” Nate said. “The fire destroyed everything but the outer walls, and rebuilding took three years.”

Zach looked worried. “Is there going to be a quiz?”

Daryl laughed. “No quiz. I'm just giving you some background so you know what you're looking for. See, a fire makes a heck of a mess, and in those days there
weren't any dump trucks for hauling trash away to the landfill. Now you mention it, there weren't any landfills. So what they did was dump the trash right out here—burnt timber and bricks, doors, broken windows, china, pretty much whatever you can think of that was destroyed in the fire.”

“Yuck—you mean we're digging for burned-up trash?” Dalton said.

Daryl grinned. “Now that it's been underground so long, you can't call it trash, exactly. Come right down to it, you're looking for anything that isn't dirt. Could be a nail, a piece of glass, maybe even a piece of teacup.”

After that, Daryl asked if we had questions, and none of us did, so he left us to dig on our own. It was fun, like being a little kid in a sandbox. About an hour went by and nobody found anything. I was starting to get bored when, finally, something showed up in my strainer. It was hard, lighter than a rock and sort of leaf-shaped, but so covered with dirt and grime I couldn't tell if it was important.

I showed Nate, who wasn't impressed, but Zach said, “Maybe it's a relic, Cammie. You'd better mark where you found it and show it to Professor Mudd.”

Daryl and Mike were just on the other side of the canopy, and I held out my find for them to see.

“Do you think it's important?” I asked.

“Sure. Could be,” Mike said. “Stephanie will clean it up and analyze it.”

“How long will that take?” I asked.

“Tomorrow sometime,” Daryl said. “Just right now,
I'm not sure where either she or Wen Fei has got to. I think they're pretty annoyed that Professor Mudd doesn't believe their new metal detector's working right.”

Mike came back to the trench with me and noted the exact depth and location where I had found whatever-it-was. Then he asked, “How are the rest of you getting along?”

“I'm bored,” Dalton said.

Mike laughed. “Yeah, I hear you. But hey, unlike us, you guys are volunteers. Feel free to take a break.”

“We had an idea . . . if it's okay.” Nate set down his trowel and pointed. “Northeast is over there, right? Could we go have a look?”

Mike understood right away. “For the gold, you mean? Sure, but you realize whatever's over there's underground, right? And since it's part of the dig site, you can't disturb the surface without permission from Professor Mudd.”

“We just want to see the spot,” Nate said. “Then maybe later, if it's okay, we can dig for buried treasure!”

Mike gave his okay, and we took off.

If you have a bad sense of direction, the White House is a good place to live. All you have to do is remember the north and south porticoes and the east and west wings, and you can't really get confused. Since the dig site was marked out on the lawn with tape and stakes, I expected we'd find the northeast corner without that much trouble.

The way it turned out, though, it was totally no trouble.

That's because someone had been there before us. And pretty much right where the computer screen said the gold was supposed to be, there was only a hole in the ground!

THE hole, about a foot wide and six inches deep, made a brown blotch in the green grass. Nate said, “We'd better tell Professor Mudd right away,” and we were going to do just that when we heard a horrible
screech-yeowwwww
that could only mean one thing: cat in crisis!

I looked toward the sound, and there it was—a black-and-white furball streaking across the grass.

Maybe “streak” is the wrong word.

For sure, the cat was moving as fast as it possibly could, but it was so fat that its motion was more like waddling in a hurry.

A few seconds behind it, singing
“Arrh-arrh-arrh”
in a squeaky soprano and moving a whole lot faster, came a beagle I recognized right away.

“Pickles—
no!
” I shouted, and took off sprinting to intercept him. “You leave that poor kitty alone!”

Pickles belongs to Ms. Ann Major, who is a deputy assistant associate in my mom's press office. He and
Hooligan went to obedience school together, and now they have playdates sometimes.

I was out of breath when I caught up to Pickles by a hedge halfway to the Rose Garden. The hedge must be where the cat had its hideout.

“Pickles,
come
,” I said, which caused him to look up and wag his tail before he went back to sniffing under the hedge. So much for obedience school.

Meanwhile, I heard running footsteps behind me and turned around. There was Ms. Major, also out of breath. And right behind her were Nate, Zach and Dalton.

“Oh, that darned cat!” Ms. Major said, which didn't seem exactly fair. I mean, the cat was just trying to survive. It was Pickles who was acting all bloodthirsty.

But I like Ms. Major, and she helped Nate, Tessa and me solve a mystery once, so what I said was “I never saw that cat before.”

“It's a stray, and it's been hanging around for a few weeks,” Ms. Major said. “I think somebody's feeding it, because it used to be pathetic and scrawny, but now it's got a belly like a bowling ball.”

“Tessa's been bugging Granny for a cat,” I said. “If she finds out about this one, she'll never shut up.”

“Oh, I think she knows already,” Ms. Major said. “I saw her and Hooligan both out here yesterday afternoon.”

By then, I guess, the cat had gotten away, because Pickles trotted over to us and sat down like an obedience school star student. Ms. Major sighed, then scratched him behind the ears. “You don't fool me for one minute, you know.”

“How come you have to work on a Saturday, Ms. Major?” Nate asked.

“I work most Saturdays, it seems like,” she said. “Today I have to do some prep for that ceremony coming up tomorrow. It'll amount to ten seconds on TV if we're lucky, but it still takes some work. I don't generally bring the pooch in, but he's got a therapy appointment across town.”

“Dog therapy?” I said.

Ms. Major nodded and tapped her head. “The mental kind. He's terrified of thunder, poor thing—goes absolutely crazy in a storm. The therapist is supposed to help him take control of his fear.”

Nate said, “Really? Is it working?”

Ms. Major shrugged. “Who knows? There hasn't been a storm since he started.”

Since Dalton and Zach hadn't met Ms. Major, I introduced them. Then Ms. Major said, “It's your dad giving the medal at the ceremony tomorrow, isn't it? I hope I get to meet him afterward. I have questions about some old coins of mine . . . if he doesn't mind, that is.”

“He won't mind,” Zach said. “He'd talk about coins all day if he could.”

I wanted to tell Ms. Major about the dig and the gold and the mysterious hole in the ground, but she had already scooped up Pickles. “I'd better get back to work,” she said. “We don't want anything to go wrong tomorrow.”

When Ms. Major was gone, we four kids headed back to the dig office. We wanted to tell Professor Mudd about the hole we'd found.

The way it turned out, though, we weren't the ones to break the news. As we approached, we saw Mike talking to him. “Hold on to your helmet, sir,” Mike said. “I've just had a look around the site, and it's like Swiss cheese out there—seven unauthorized holes at least! What do you think? Could Wen Fei and Stephanie be right about the gold? Could someone be digging for buried treasure?”