Only they didn’t look empty. They looked stuffed.
Pete started to reach for one, then gasped when he heard rustling on the other side of the stream. He whirled around and saw two squirrels there, probably thinking the weeklong thaw meant spring had arrived, making merry in the dead leaves. They raced up a tree, tails twitching.
Pete turned back to the trunk and grabbed one of the bank envelopes. The flap wasn’t sealed. He flipped it up with a finger that felt numb, even though the temperature now had to be riding right around forty. He squeezed the envelope open and looked inside.
Money.
Twenties and fifties.
‘Holy Jesus God Christ in heaven,’ Pete Saubers whispered.
He pulled out the sheaf of bills and tried to count, but at first his hands were shaking too badly and he dropped some. They fluttered in the grass, and before he scrambled them up, his overheated brain assured him that Ulysses Grant had actually winked at him from one of the bills.
He counted. Four hundred dollars. Four hundred in this one envelope, and there were dozens of them.
He stuffed the bills back into the envelope – not an easy job, because now his hands were shaking worse than Grampa Fred’s in the last year or two of his life. He flipped the envelope into the trunk and looked around, eyes wide and bulging. Traffic sounds that had always seemed faint and far and unimportant in this overgrown stretch of ground now sounded close and threatening. This was not Treasure Island; this was a city of over a million people, many now out of work, and they would love to have what was in this trunk.
Think, Pete Saubers told himself. Think, for God’s sake. This is the most important thing that’s ever happened to you, maybe the most important thing that ever will happen to you, so think hard and think right.
What came to mind first was Tina, snuggled up next to the wall in his bed. What would you do if you found a treasure? he had asked.
Give it to Daddy and Mommy, she had replied.
But suppose Mom wanted to give it back?
It was an important question. Dad never would – Pete knew that – but Mom was different. She had strong ideas about what was right and what wasn’t. If he showed them this trunk and what was inside it, it might lead to the worst arkie-barkie about money ever.
‘Besides, give it back to who?’ Pete whispered. ‘The bank?’
That was ridiculous.
Or was it? Suppose the money really was pirate treasure, only from bank robbers instead of buccaneers? But then why was it in envelopes, like for withdrawals? And what about all those black notebooks?
He could consider such things later, but not now; what he had to do now was act. He looked at his watch and saw it was already quarter to eleven. He still had time, but he had to use it.
‘Use it or lose it,’ he whispered, and began tossing the Granite State Bank cash envelopes into the cloth grocery bag that held the hammer and chisel. He placed the bag on top of the embankment and covered it with his jacket. He crammed the plastic wrap back into the trunk, closed the lid, and muscled the trunk back into the hole. He paused to wipe his forehead, which was greasy with dirt and sweat, then seized the spade and began to shovel like a maniac. He got the trunk covered – mostly – then seized the bag and his jacket and ran back along the path toward home. He would hide the bag in the back of his closet, that would do to start with, and see if there was a message from his mother on the answering machine. If everything was okay on the Mom front (and if Dad hadn’t come home early from therapy – that would be horrible), he could whip back to the stream and do a better job of concealing the trunk. Later he might check out the notebooks, but as he made his way home on that sunny February morning, his only thought about them was that there might be more money envelopes mixed in with them. Or lying beneath them.
He thought, I’ll have to take a shower. And clean the dirt out of the bathtub after, so she doesn’t ask what I was doing outside when I was supposed to be sick. I have to be really careful, and I can’t tell anyone. No one at all.
In the shower, he had an idea.
1978