Troubled Treats (18 page)

“Is Descent still trying to buy the wagon factory from you, even after everything that’s happened lately?”

“He is, but it’s all in vain.  I’m determined to see this rehab through to the end, no matter what.  The factory is going to be a showplace for April Springs, and I’m going to be the one behind it.  Now, to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?”

“Do you have a second?”

“For you?  Always,” she answered.  “Phillip is in the den poring over more papers from the wagon factory.  He’s convinced that there’s gold hidden on the premises, no matter how much I try to dissuade him of the notion.”

“How can you be so sure?” I asked.

“Oh, no, not you, too.  Don’t tell me you’ve caught the gold fever yourself.”

I shrugged.  “The stories are all clear enough.  Martin Polly didn’t trust banks, or even paper money all that much.  He must have done something with all of that gold.”

“I’m sure that he spent it,” Momma said, “Or at least his family did.  I can’t imagine that there’d be any place left in that old building that we haven’t looked.”

“Have you been actively trying to find it, yourself?” I asked her.  My mother was a great many things, but trying to get rich quick didn’t fit her profile at all.

“Of course not, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t kept my eyes open during the renovation.  We were able to recover a great deal of the cash Jim stole, and I consider that the only bonus we’ll ever get from the project, not that it was an inconsiderable sum.”

“How much cash did he find?” I asked.

“Jim confessed to finding thirty thousand dollars, and he admitted to spending a little under two of that, so all in all, it’s not bad, though it’s not exactly what I’d call a fortune.”

“How was he planning to retire on twenty-eight thousand bucks?” I asked.  “He’d be lucky if that lasted him a year, the way that he was spending it.”

“I honestly don’t believe that he was thinking that far ahead,” Momma allowed.

“You missed
that
stash of cash,” I pointed out.  “How can you be so sure that there’s not another hiding place somewhere else within the building?”

“You and Jake searched the second floor, and we’ve ripped up nearly every floorboard on the first floor.  If it’s there, where could it be?”

“I don’t know, could it be squirreled away somewhere inside a wall?” I asked.

“Sorry, but we stripped the walls down to the studs so we could rewire and insulate the first and second floors.”

“How about the attic?”

“We’ve been over every square inch of it.  There was nothing there,” she said confidently.

“The basement?” I asked, desperate to find an answer.

“There isn’t one.  Not even a crawl space,” Momma answered.  “I’m sorry, but there is no more treasure left in that building.”

“Actually, it might be too soon to say that,” Phillip said as he came into the room holding a faded letter in his hands.  “I might have found something.”

“What is it?” Momma asked.

“Listen to this.  I found a copy of another letter from Martin Polly
.  ‘The emblem of my company holds the only real value to my life.  Beneath it is everything that matters to me, and I’ll go to my grave knowing that keeping it safe is the noblest thing that I can do.’ 
What do you think of that?  I’m not exactly sure what it means, but it’s an odd way to phrase his beliefs, isn’t it?”

“The man was proud of the company he built almost single-handedly,” Momma said.  “What’s all that surprising about that?”

That’s when I got it.  “That’s not it.  What if the meaning of that passage is literal?”

“What, that the stones and timber used to create the seal in the floor are made of gold?”

“Hear me out,” I said, suddenly getting excited by my new theory.  “Who did he write that letter to, Phillip?”

“His wife, Enid,” my stepfather supplied.

“When did he write it?”

“It was dated a month after the factory opened,” he supplied.  “She was visiting with her family in Los Angeles during her father’s long illness.  She wasn’t on the scene the entire time that the factory was being built, and he kept a copy of every letter he wrote to her while she was away.”

“What’s your point, Suzanne?” my mother asked.

“Momma, you said yourself that you’ve explored just about every nook and cranny of the entire building.  Let me ask you something.  Did you ever disturb the wagon factory emblem in the course of everything that you’ve done so far?”

Momma frowned.  “No, we wanted to leave it intact for history’s sake.  Phillip, it was your idea. Suzanne, surely you don’t think it’s valuable.”

“Other than as a window to the past?  No, I don’t think so.  I’ve studied the stone and wood carefully.  They’re real enough.”

“Then what do you mean?” Phillip asked, getting caught up in my enthusiasm.

“I’m not talking about the materials we can see,” I said.  “I’m referring to the space beneath them.  We’ve already seen that Martin Polly liked secret hiding places.  The cache of money proves that.  What I’m wondering is if there’s one more niche that we haven’t uncovered yet.”

“I don’t know,” Momma said.  “It all seems rather farfetched to me.”

“But it’s possible, isn’t it?” I asked.

“In order to find out,” Phillip said, “we’re going to have to tear up the last piece of floor that we’ve been trying to preserve.”

“Not if we do it right.  There must be some sort of catch or release hidden somewhere if there’s a cache there.  All we have to do is find it.  Who wants to go with me?”

“I’ll go,” Phillip said eagerly.

I turned to my mother.  “Momma?  How about you?”

“I’m sorry, but I just put a cake in the oven, so I have to be here for at least another half an hour.  Can it wait?”

“Tell you what,” Phillip said.  “Why don’t Suzanne and I go check it out?  If we find anything, we’ll head straight back here and tell you all about it.”

“Is that okay with you, Suzanne?” Momma asked.  She’d been wanting me to spend more time with her husband, and I had to wonder if she wasn’t using this as an excuse to make it happen.

“That’s fine, if I can drive us in my Jeep,” I said.

“It’s a deal,” Phillip said, and then he kissed his wife before he turned to me.  “Let’s go, Suzanne.  This is exciting.”

“It’s probably going to turn out to be nothing,” I said, trying to keep his enthusiasm at a healthy level.

“Maybe, but what if it’s not?” he asked as we walked to my Jeep together and got in.

The drive to the factory was a short one, and no one was working, so we had the place to ourselves.  I got down on my hands and knees and began to study the emblem buried within the pattern of the floor.  Though the blood had dried thoroughly and had been washed away with repeated cleanings, I was still careful where I put my hand. 

I didn’t want to touch the spot where Sully Jackson had breathed his last breath.

“I don’t see anything,” I said as I started studying the inlaid wood and stone.  “Do you?”

“There’s got to be something here,” Phillip said as he joined me.  In random patterns, we both began pushing and probing the stone and timber at various spots, hoping to find some kind of trigger mechanism that opened it.

If there was anything there, we couldn’t find it.

“Should we just tear up the floor?” Phillip asked me.  “It’s the only way we’ll ever know if we were right or not.”

“Hang on a second,” I said as I spotted a small hole in the center of one of the timbers.  “What’s that?”

“It looks like a wormhole to me,” he said.

“Do you have a pen on you?” I asked him.

Phillip retrieved one from his notebook and handed it to me.  “It’s too big.  It’s never going to fit.”

“Not like this, but I have an idea,” I said as I unscrewed it.  While it was true that the pen itself wouldn’t fit into the opening, the plastic cylinder that held the ink might.  I pulled the pen apart and then pushed the plastic tube downward into the hole.  It started to bend under the pressure, and I was about to pull it out, when I heard a distinct click.

Something had happened to the emblem as I’d done it.

As one piece, the entire thing shifted in the floor, raising itself up enough to reveal edges where I could pull it open.

As I gently eased the secret lid in the floor open, I held my breath, wondering what we were about to see.

And then I heard a voice behind us ordering me to stop what I was doing and step away.

As I pivoted around, I saw a familiar face holding a gun on us, and I knew that they’d been waiting all along for us to uncover the hidden treasure to claim it for themselves.

Chapter 21

“Very good,” Carl Descent said as he looked greedily at the hidden cache we’d just uncovered.  “What’s inside the hole?”

“Sorry.  It’s empty,” I said as I looked down, though what I’d told him was far from the truth.  There were at least fifteen small velvet bags in the bottom of the opening, and each one looked as though it contained at least a dozen coins each.  I had to stall Descent to give us time to come up with some way to counter his attack, and lying to him seemed to be the best option that we had at the moment.  “How did you even know that anything was here?”

“I didn’t, at least not with any degree of certainty,” he said.  “When your mother turned my final offer down today, I decided that I had to move quickly or risk losing the gold forever.  My grandfather used to talk about it all of the time while he was still alive.  It had been an obsession with him, and I caught the fever myself.  I was about to break in when I saw you two coming, and from your expressions, I knew that you were on to something, so all that I had to do was to sit back and wait.”

“Is that why you killed Sully?” I asked.  “For the gold?”  It didn’t seem like any motive worth murdering someone over, at least not as far as I was concerned.

“He caught me snooping around, and he threatened to have me arrested for trespassing.  I couldn’t have that; someone might figure out what I was really doing here.  When I tried to offer him a bribe to keep his mouth shut about finding me there, he got so angry that he grabbed me.  The man was full of some brand of righteous indignation that I’d never seen before.  What choice did I have?  I had a right to defend myself, so that’s what I did.”

He’d found a way to justify the murder in his own mind, and I had to wonder if he actually believed what he was saying now.  “And then you ran away.”

“I did what I had to do,” he repeated, almost like a mantra.

“It’s still murder,” I said.

Descent shrugged his shoulders.  “Are you sure that it’s in your best interest to convince me of that?  If it’s true, then what will a few more bodies matter in the end?”  He gestured with his gun before he added, “Stop lying to me, Suzanne.  I saw your eyes light up when you looked down.  That cache isn’t empty, is it?”

“Sorry.  You’re out of luck.  I guess you killed Sully for nothing,” Phillip said beside me.  Good.  I was thrilled that he was playing along.  Maybe we’d make it out of this alive after all.

“I don’t believe either one of you,” he said as he gestured with his gun.  “I’m not sure why I bothered asking; it will be easier for me to check after you’re both dead.  Now, I’m going to ask you one last time.  What did you find?”

“There are bags of something down there, but I can’t swear what they are.  You should check it out for yourself,” I said.  If I could get him close enough, we might just have a chance to overpower him.

“You don’t need that gun,” Phillip said beside me.  “We aren’t going to resist.  If it’s indeed gold, take it.  We won’t try to stop you.”

Descent seemed to be thinking about his options, and then finally he nodded in my direction, gesturing with his eyes that I was to follow his lead.  I didn’t know what he had in mind, but I suddenly had a plan of my own.  However, much of it depended on what Descent did next.

“Why don’t I believe either one of you?  Go on.  Reach in slowly and retrieve one of the bags.”  As Phillip started to comply with the order, Descent barked out, “Not you!  Suzanne, you do it.”

“I’m doing it,” I said, making my voice quiver a little with fear.  I didn’t even have to fake it; I truly was frightened that we weren’t going to get out of this alive.  It was time to act, and fast. 

We might not get a second chance.

I reached down and grabbed two bags, not one, as I’d been instructed.  It felt as though there were plenty of coins inside when I lifted them; the bags were heavy, weighing more than they should have if they’d held anything but the precious metal Carl Descent had been dreaming about since he’d been a boy.  It appeared that the small bags really did contain gold coins.  I did my best to disguise the fact that I now held two bags, not one.

“Very good.  You’re doing fine.  Now don’t try anything tricky and toss it to me,” Descent ordered, the avarice clear in his voice and his gaze.

This was going to be tricky.  I had to toss one bag while still holding onto the other, all without the killer noticing.  There was only one way I could do that.  I had to spill one of the bags.  Fortunately, the material had rotted sitting in that enclosure for all of those years, so one of the bags tore easily as I tugged on it.

“I’m waiting!” Descent said impatiently.

I didn’t have any way of warning Phillip of what I was about to do, but that couldn’t be helped.  I just hoped that he didn’t get shot in the process.  Not only did I want him to stay safe, but I had no idea how I’d tell Momma if I somehow managed to get her husband shot.

As I tossed one of the bags to him, I made sure to spin it in the air in a high arc, and sure enough, gold coins tumbled out of the bag on the way down and scattered across the floor.

Descent was suddenly mad with lust for the gold now.  He seemed to forget all about us for a moment as he dove for one of the rolling pieces, still shiny and bright after all those years.

It was the only chance we had.  Taking the other bag in my hand, I swung it at his hand when he got close enough, doing my best to knock the gun out of his grasp.