“I don’t have time for this.” I started down the hallway. It was morning, therefore Bern would be in the kitchen, eating his second or third breakfast.
“Nevada, do something!” Arabella snarled behind me.
“No time.”
“I hate this family!”
“We hate you too.”
“Hehe!” The silver bells rang.
Bern sat at the kitchen table, putting away a bowl of cereal.
“Will you please come with me to Rynda’s house? I want to look through it one more time in case I missed something. I don’t want to go by myself, and I don’t want to ask Cornelius because he’ll bring Zeus and I have trouble concentrating when he’s around. I don’t want to take Leon either, because I don’t want to be responsible for him shooting anyone. I just want to think quietly.”
Bern got up and took his bowl of cereal to the sink. “Let’s go.”
Rynda’s house stood quiet. Bern and I walked through the front entrance into the living room, our steps loud on the tiled floor. Houston decided that we really needed some rain, and the light filtering through the dense blanket of clouds was watery and dim. The air felt oppressive.
“Gloomy,” Bern observed.
“Yes.” The house felt like a crypt. “I wonder if Rynda will sell it.”
“I would,” Bern said. “Where do you want to look?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Divide and conquer?”
We split up. I headed for the kitchen. Rogan’s people had already swept through the place. I’d reviewed the search report. They were thorough and efficient. But they might have missed something.
I started with the pantry. An hour later I was done with the kitchen. Coffee proved to be coffee, rice turned out to be rice, and a container of sugar contained only sugar. No hidden Ziploc bags containing mysterious evidence. I shook the cans one by one. None showed any signs of tampering. No hidden spots in the dishes. Nothing taped to the inside of the cabinets. We were wasting time we didn’t have, but every instinct I had told me that whatever we were looking for was here somewhere.
“Nevada?” Bern called.
I walked into the living room. He stood over Kyle’s paintings. I came over to stand next to him.
“What are these?” he asked.
“Kyle’s paintings. Olivia Charles had them framed. I’ve gone through them. No hidden ink. Nothing in the frames. I was so sure that there was something hidden here.”
Bern crouched and picked up the top painting. A curving road flanked by trees.
“There is something about them,” I said. “It makes you want to keep looking at them.”
Bern wandered to the center of the room where the light from the back window shone on the carpet, and put the painting down.
“Give me the rest?” he asked.
I picked up a stack of paintings and handed him the next one, a tiny sea with a too-big pirate ship on it. He took a few steps backwards and placed the painting to the left and below the first one. “Next.”
A playground with a cute monster holding a red balloon and peering out of the bushes followed, then the curve of a road with a bright yellow sports car, then the clouds with a white, almost transparent flying ship. Another road with a knight in armor riding on his horse. Bern put it between the first painting and the yellow car. The road connected.
The tiny hairs on the back of my neck rose.
We went through the stack, Bern placing the pictures one by one into a six-by-four grid, like pieces of a puzzle clicking together. We finished and stood back. A road wound in a wide arc around a house that was part suburban home, part castle, and part magic tower. A playground lay to the right, a pond just below, mountains to the left, and in the bottom left corner, four paintings came together to form an X near a gnarled tree.
“A map,” I whispered.
“He isn’t a dud,” Bern said. “He’s Magister Examplaria. A pattern mage, like me.”
Grandma gave Kyle a treasure. He hid it and then he drew a map to it, because he couldn’t help himself. And Olivia must’ve known. I’d helped to take away the only person in Kyle’s life who understood him.
“I’m an idiot,” I said.
Bern glanced at me.
“I should’ve questioned the children. Instead I let Rynda do it, because they were traumatized by Vincent. I let it get personal, and it blinded me.” This is why Dad always cautioned about getting too involved.
“We have it now,” Bern said. “You can beat yourself up later. The sea is the pool. We’ll need a shovel. He must’ve buried it. Pirate treasure is always buried.”
I snapped a picture of the map with my phone. We found a pair of shovels in the garden shed and tracked our way through the lot down to the back of the property, where the woods stood dense. We pushed through the brush into a small clearing.
The sky broke open, sifting cold rain on us. I surveyed the clearing. On the right a big oak spread its branches, on the left two stumps and more brush. No signs of digging marked the forest floor.
If I were a little boy, where would I bury my treasure?
He’d made sure to point out the tree on the map. The tree was important.
I circled the big oak. Little round marks punctured the bark on the north side, two in a row, at about even intervals.
“What is it?” Bern asked.
“This was a climbing tree. These are nail holes. They must’ve nailed planks to it and then someone pulled them off.”
Bern took a running start and jumped. His hands caught the thick lower branch and he pulled himself up.
“Anything?”
“A hollow. Hold on.”
He jumped back down, a canvas bag in his hands. He set it on the ground, and I gently pulled the strings open. A plastic pirate chest, the kind you could get in a craft store or online, the plastic made to look like dark aged wood. A skull sat where the lid met the box, with two plastic swords thrust through the skull’s eyes. Smaller skulls decorated the surface.
Bern carefully pulled the swords free and opened the chest. I took the objects out one by one, carefully placing them on the canvas. A Swiss Army knife. A little velvet sack containing ten golden dollar coins, each with a different president. Three bullets. A yellow sports car. A flashlight. And a small cardboard jewelry box, the kind you would use to store a necklace.
Gently I opened it. A single USB stick lay on the velvet cushion. Inside the lid in a confident feminine cursive, someone had written, “Grandma’s Secret.”
I hugged the box. I felt like crying.
I drove through Houston’s traffic.
“It’s encrypted,” Bern said, his fingers flying over the keyboard of his laptop.
“Can you break it?”
“I’ll need time. It’s not one of the commercially available cyphers. This is a custom job and it’s very good.”
“Call Rogan.”
The car obediently dialed the number.
“Yes?” he answered.
“We have Olivia Charles’ USB. We can meet their demands.”
“What’s on it?”
“It’s encrypted. We’re bringing it home, but Bern’s uploading it to our home server as we speak.”
“Good. Great.”
“Okay, bye.” I hesitated for a moment. Why not? “Love you.”
There was a slight pause. “I love you too.”
I hung up and grinned. The Scourge of Mexico just told me he loved me. I never got tired of hearing it.
“What’s going to happen when this is over?” Bern asked.
“What do you mean?”
“What will happen with you and Rogan once this emergency is over?”
“Then we’ll have to do the trials.”
“You’re avoiding the question.”
“What exactly is the question, Bern?”
“Once all of these crises are over, what will happen with you and Rogan? Will you move with him into his house? Will you commute to work? Are you planning to marry him? Do you want to marry him?”
Well, that was unexpected. “You’ve been hanging out with Grandma Frida for too long. Are you worried I might take advantage of Rogan’s virtue and shack up with him?”