Finding Fortune (13 page)

The whole time I'd been talking, Hildy kept flipping through the pictures in her lap. She lingered over one—a black-and-white photo of a young boy and a man, standing on the deck of a boat heaped with shells—then finally lifted her tired gaze. Without her eyebrows and lipstick painted on, her face looked pale and stripped, like a tree branch without its bark. “Oh, honey,” she said. “I appreciate the apology and the fact that you wanted to come back and help. But to be honest, I don't know if this foolishness of mine is really worth your time.”

“What do you mean? Your museum isn't foolish.”

Hildy shook her head. “I'm starting to think maybe Jack's right. Maybe I'm just wallowing in the past, and nobody will care one bit about what life on the river was like in the old days or a piddly little thing like how buttons used to be made.”

Hildy had a denim apron tied over her outfit, and she reached down into its wide front pocket. “And look at this,” she said, pulling out a stack of envelopes. “This is what I find waiting for me when I go to the mailbox every morning.” She dropped the envelopes on top of the photos in her lap. “Bills, bills, and more bills.” Shifting in her chair, she winced as if she could feel her bones grinding in their sockets. “The truth is I don't think my bank account's big enough to see this thing through. Real museums—they've got display cases and proper restrooms … those ramps for handicapped people. All that equipment costs a lot of money. Money I don't have at the moment.”

A whisper had started in my head like the steady tick-tick of a time bomb ready to explode—
the treasure, the treasure, what about the missing treasure?
But of course I couldn't tell Hildy that I had discovered her secret, not when I had barely finished apologizing for all the other stuff I had done. “What about your son?” I asked instead. “Can't you talk him into lending you some money?”

“Puh.” Hildy blew out a disgusted puff of air. “Like I said, Jack thinks I've gone senile. He'd like nothing better than for me to give up and move out of this place, spend the rest of my days in an old folks' home.”

Poor Hildy. Not only was she low on money, but her son didn't trust her to run the museum, much less a rooming house. I was sure the awful scene Mom and I had made in the cafetorium had made it even more difficult for her to prove her case.

I had to make it up to her. “Hildy,” I burst out. “I've got to tell you something. You're probably going to be really mad.”

“Oh, mercy,” she breathed, straightening her glasses on her nose. “What is it?”

“Remember that day I spent here? Before my mom came to get me?”

She nodded warily.

“Well—” I gulped. “When I was exploring with Hugh, I kept seeing those chalkboards with the word
no
written on them. I started asking questions and Hugh told me that
you
were the one who writes on the boards, not Garrett, and Hugh says you've been looking for something.”

Hildy's jaw—every part of her—stiffened. I blinked my eyes shut, and when I opened them again, I opened my mouth too and didn't stop talking until the whole story was out. “I'm really sorry, Hildy,” I said, when I had finished telling the worst parts. “I know it sounds sneaky and awful, breaking into your safe like that, but I swear we were never going to take anything. Hugh just wanted to look inside to see if we could figure out what you'd been searching for, and then when we found that letter from your brother, it was so … I don't know,
mysterious
 … that … well, I guess we couldn't stop ourselves from reading it.” I clamped my teeth down on my bottom lip and braced for what was coming next.

But nothing that I had been expecting to happen happened. Hildy didn't yell or tell me to get out or give me a long lecture. Instead she started to chuckle. It started deep in her throat, and soon her skinny shoulders were shaking. I stared at her in bewilderment, my mouth hovering on the edge of a smile.

Hildy took off her glasses and wiped her eyes with the bottom corner of her apron. “Doesn't that beat all?” she said. “That little stinker. How'd he find the combination? I'd have never known it was in that drawer if the last principal hadn't come by for a visit and pointed it out to me.”

“So you're not mad?” I asked in disbelief.

Hildy pulled herself up disapprovingly. “Oh, don't get me wrong,” she said. “I think you kids were way out of line to open that safe without permission and then read a letter that wasn't addressed to you. But”—she lifted her shoulders in a resigned shrug—“I suppose what's done is done, and at least you had the courage to own up to what you did.”

“And, Hildy, now that you know the truth, we can help you,” I told her. “Hugh and I. We can help you find your missing treasure, and then maybe you could sell it and use the money to finish the museum.” I leaned forward, my voice rising with excitement. “It's pearls, isn't it?”

“Shhhhh.” Hildy held her finger against her lips, cocking her head to listen. “Tucker might be down there,” she rasped, “and I don't want him to hear any of this.”

“How come?”

Hildy listened a few seconds longer, and then murmured, “Because he might tell his father. And Jack already thinks I'm senile enough as it is. He's heard me talk about the missing pearls for years, but he doesn't want to hear about it anymore. He hates to think I might have bought this place just because I think they're still hidden here.”

I glanced uneasily over my shoulder. “Where
is
Tucker, by the way?”

“He's sorting through my shell collection today and taking the ones we don't want out to Garrett. So he's probably out back at the labyrinth.”

“So what does your son think happened to the pearls?”

“Oh, he has all sorts of theories. He thinks maybe one of the students stumbled across them, or maybe my father found Tom's hiding place after all. But his favorite theory is that Mr. Bonnycastle took them.”

“What? Wasn't Mr. Bonnycastle your brother's good friend?”

“Sure was. But Jack likes to remind me that greed does funny things to people. Tom's letter didn't show up at school until a few months after he'd been killed. I'm not sure why it took so long to arrive. But by the time it did, Bonny had moved on, supposedly to a teaching job out east somewhere. Jack's convinced that Tom must have accidentally let something slip before he left for basic training and that Bonny had figured out where the pearls were hidden, then skipped town as soon as he found them.”

“How'd you get the letter then? If Bonny was already gone?”

“The school secretary delivered it to me. After graduation I worked in a little secondhand shop in town. Thank heavens she brought it there instead of dropping it off at the house with Pop. He would have opened it for sure.”

“So you never got to talk to Mr. Bonnycastle and ask him what he was doing that day when Tom came to the school to say goodbye?”

Hildy shook her head sadly. “I tried for years to track him down. There were no computers or Internet back then, remember, so I put advertisements in the big city newspapers. Talked to everyone who had known him.” She scratched at her forehead in concentration, tugged her wig back into place, and then went on. “But Bonny had always been a bit of a mystery.”

“What do
you
think? Do you think Mr. Bonnycastle took the pearls?”

“No, I don't,” she replied firmly. “All the kids here used to adore Bonny. He was such a sweet young man … not much older than Tom, but he had a heart condition so they wouldn't let him join the service. He'd stride up and down the aisles, reading out loud and using different voices for the characters in his favorite books. He did a wonderful Sir Lancelot … and King Lear.” Hildy smiled to herself, remembering. “And you should have seen us shiver when he read Edgar Allan Poe stories on Halloween. That old skull you discovered would always make an appearance. And at Christmas he played carols for the pageant. He was quite a piano player, that Bonny, in addition to being a good artist. He used to spend hours in the music room tinkling away.” Hildy had crossed her arms stubbornly. “No sir,” she declared. “I don't think there was a shifty bone in that man's body. And my brother, he was a good judge of character. He'd never have chosen a friend who would turn on him like that.”

“So that means we should keep looking,” I insisted, thumping my fist on my knee. I knew I was supposed to be there to help in the museum, but weren't the pearls more important right now? Especially with Hildy on the verge of giving up? “We should start over again and make sure you didn't miss anything. What did the box look like?”

“It was plain. Made out of old pine wood. About this big.” Hildy held her hands half a foot apart. “If you saw it, you'd never guess there was a fortune inside. But heavens, Ren,” she said, sighing. “I already searched this whole place from top to bottom. And I must have read my brother's letter more than a hundred times looking for clues. Who knows what Bonny was doing that day my brother came to say goodbye. He could've been anywhere. Bonny was like Garrett—good at fixing things—so Mr. Harper had him traipsing all over the school with his tool kit. He was the only one who could keep the old boiler in the basement going—”

Down below there was a faint clank of metal. Hildy sat up straight as another clang, much louder, echoed through the gym. “Tucker's back,” she said, gathering up the bills in her lap and pushing them back in her apron pocket. “Let's go on down and see what he's up to.”

Before I helped Hildy to her feet, she asked me to set her stack of photographs back in the shoe box on the trunk—but not before she picked off the top one, of the man and the boy on the boat. “Tom and my father,” she told me, giving the picture one last look before she tucked it into her apron pocket along with the bills. “During happier times.”

I had at least a dozen more questions to ask. What had caused all the bitterness with her dad? And would she let Hugh and me hunt for the pearls too?
And what about the museum?
I wondered as I shuffled along the railing behind Hildy, looking down on all those memories heaped across the gym. Was she really ready to let go of all that?

Hildy cut my wondering short as we reached the top of the stairs. “Remember now,” she said, turning and putting her finger to her lips again. “Mum's the word.”

Mum's the word
. Her warning rang a bell. Then it hit me. Those were the same instructions Tom had written in his last letter to Hildy.

 

SIXTEEN

TUCKER TRIED TO ACT
like he wasn't the least bit interested to see me. “Oh, hey,” was all he said when Hildy reintroduced us. But then I noticed his ears had turned red, and when Hildy started quizzing him about his progress that morning, he had a little trouble keeping up his cool-guy routine.

With her hands on her hips, Hildy stood looking over the buckets filled with shells that were lined up outside the storage room. The shells were all shapes and sizes and they didn't have any holes cut through. “So are you getting the hang of telling them apart?” Hildy asked Tucker. “Are you being sure to check that shell guide I gave you?”

Tucker shrugged. “I don't really need to use the book anymore.”

Hildy bent down with a grunt and plucked a long black shell from the top of the nearest bucket. “What's this one?” she asked, holding it out to Tucker.

He gnawed the corner of his bottom lip as he came over to take it. “That's a … wait, let me think.” He turned the shell over and over in his hands. After what I had heard about Tucker making fun of Hugh's slippers, I enjoyed seeing him squirm.

“Is it a spectacle-case?” he finally guessed.

“Nope.” Hildy smiled. “Black sandshell. But that's an honest mistake. Those two look a lot alike. What about this one?” She held up a thick brown shell with knobs running down the center.

“A sheepnose!” Tucker blurted out.

Hildy punched the air with delight. “Bingo!” she cried.

But Tucker, obviously embarrassed by his little flash of excitement, had already returned his face to its usual blank expression. “Here, I'll take it,” he said, as he reached for Hildy's shell. He stepped over to a worktable against the wall. There were a dozen or so labeled shoe boxes lined up on top and he dropped the black shell into one of the boxes and then walked farther down the row and dropped the sheepnose into another.

I followed Hildy over to take a closer look and read the names on the labels. They were a funny assortment—fat mucket … fawnsfoot … monkeyface … pigtoe … pistolgrip … purple wartyback. I peered into the box labeled “Butterfly” and picked up the single shell that sat inside. It was delicate and yellow with a pattern of darker markings fanning out from the narrow end, just like a butterfly's wing.

After she had finished inspecting the shoe boxes, Hildy turned to Tucker appreciatively. “You'll be an expert by the time this is done, honey, and we'll have one of the best shell collections in the whole state.”

“Where'd you get all these?” I asked Hildy.

“Oh, here and there. My dad collected them back in his clamming days and different folks have brought me theirs over the years. A lot of these species weren't any good for button-making of course, but the old-timers knew they were disappearing fast from the Mississippi. They liked keeping a few so they wouldn't forget what they looked like.” Hildy let out a dry laugh. “Whenever old geezers from Fortune would kick the bucket, I'd get their bucket of shells.” I glanced over to see if Tucker had cracked a smile yet, but he wasn't even listening.

“So, Ren,” she said, “if you're ready to get started on that service project of yours, you can give Tucker a hand going through the rest of these shells. It'll go a lot faster with the two of you working together. Whenever you're not sure of something, just ask Tucker. He can show you the ropes.”