Magic by the Lake (16 page)

"Sure, don't you see?" said Mark. "This is the one way we could find buried treasure without telling about the magic, and no questions asked! Wasn't that crafty of it?"

"Well? What are we standing here for? Let's be digging," said Katharine.

"Wait," said Mark, and then stopped, thinking hard and fast. "Look. We want Mr. Smith to have the treasure, don't we?"

Three heads nodded.

"Well, then I think
he'd
better be the one that finds it. If
we
dig it up and try to give it to him, he's sure to go all noble and refuse to accept, and want to put it aside in trust funds for our college education! And we don't want
that
kind of thing happening!"

"Ugh!" said Martha.

"It would just utterly and completely ruin everything!" said Jane.

"Exactly!" said Mark. "No. The thing is to leave it, and then lure him here tomorrow, when he's home for the weekend, and let nature take its course!"

"Can't we even peek first?" said Katharine.

"It would be leading us into temptation," said Mark.

"What if somebody finds it and steals it before then?" said Jane.

"I don't think there's much danger," said Mark. "I think it was put there specially for
us.
It's that last wish we made come really true after all. If anybody else happened along, I don't think it'd even exist!"

But he smoothed the attendant weeds back over the stone, just the same.

And regretfully the girls allowed themselves to be led away from the yard and the stone and the haunted house (though
it
had lost all charm by now), and the four children got into the rowboat and headed for home.

No one watched the shore on the journey back, for all hearts burned with impatience to get to the cottage and start working on Mr. Smith. And at last their own beach came in sight, and because it hadn't been a magic adventure (strictly speaking), more time had passed than you would believe, as is usually the case when you've been enjoying yourself thoroughly, and supper was already merrily cooking, but Mr. Smith wasn't there. And their mother told them that a message had been delivered at the farm where the milk came from (for the cottage itself had no telephone). The message was that Mr. Smith had been detained in town on business and wouldn't be home till next day.

And the next day he didn't get there till nearly dark, and it was too late to start luring him anywhere.

"What do you suppose he's been
doing?
" said Martha that night, when four pajamaed forms had assembled upon the sleeping porch. "Do you suppose he's ruined and bankrupt
already?
"

"He can't be," said Katharine. "Not with rescue staring him in the face, if he'd only look."

"I still worry about what's happening to the treasure in the meantime," said Jane. "It might corrode."

"It won't, though," said Mark. "It's all going to work out. It'll have to be tomorrow, though. It's our last day. It's our last chance."

But when they woke up next morning, their mother was already up and heaving bedclothes off beds, and Mr. Smith was in the kitchen packing saucepans into grocery cartons, and all the four children's luring fell upon deaf ears.

"There's just one thing for it," said Jane. "We'll just have to be useful."

And the others privately agreed.

And they worked so hard and fast, and dropped so many hints in between chores, that the unknowing grown-ups finally got the idea, and their mother finally said, "Everybody's being so good, I think we all deserve a last treat," just as they had willed her to.

And though a visit to a haunted house wasn't perhaps the treat the grown-ups would have chosen, still, as Mr. Smith said, this was supposed to be the children's summer, and they ought to have the say.

The car was packed now, and the cottage swept clean of all familiarity, except for the bathing suits still hanging on the line. Mr. Smith had decided they would drive home that night to avoid Labor Day traffic next day.

"We'll have a picnic lunch at your haunted house, come back here for a last swim, and then have dinner at the hotel before we go," their mother decided.

Five minutes later they set out, Jane and Mr. Smith leading the way dashingly in the canoe, and Mark and their mother and Katharine and Martha following in the rowboat.

The haunted house was there waiting. And because the four children didn't want to be too obvious about the treasure, they had to pretend to be scared all over again, though it was an old story. And then they warmed to the spirit of the thing and hid in a closet and pounced out, and their mother obligingly shrieked a couple of times, and then it was time for lunch.

The four children chose the spot for the picnic, though their mother suggested other, less weedy, places. Jane and Katharine spread the picnic tablecloth. Mark maneuvered it so Mr. Smith would sit in just the right place. Martha watched with bated breath.

Mr. Smith sat down. Then he looked surprised. Then he looked beneath him.

"Hmmmm," he said. "This is interesting."

"Yes, isn't it?" said Mark unguardedly. Then he remembered and quickly bent over to look at the stone, just as though he hadn't seen it before.

"C.C.," said Mr. Smith, reading the initials. "That must stand for old Mr. Cattermole. He used to live here. They were telling me about him at the hotel the other day."

"No it doesn't," said Martha. "It stands for..."

"Shush," said Katharine.

"Well?" said Jane impatiently. "Aren't you going to dig? Aren't you going to find out what's under it?"

"I don't suppose there's anything," said Mr. Smith. "He was a peculiar old man. Proud of anything that was his. Used to put his initials all over everything. Some people said he was a miser. They never found any money after he died, though."

"He
was
? They
didn't
?" said all four children. Their fingers were itching. What they were itching to do shone in their eyes.

"You might as well humor them, Hugo," said their mother, with a long-suffering sigh.

And Mr. Smith began to dig.

"Wasn't that
clever
of the turtle?" said Katharine some time later, as they lay on the beach after their last swim. "Changing the pirate's treasure into good old American ten-dollar bills right before our eyes! And so
many
of them!"

"What
I
don't see," said Jane, "is how he arranged it so old Miser Cattermole had lived there in the first place."

"That turtle moves in a mysterious way," agreed Mark admiringly.

Of course, they weren't going to get the money right away. It seemed that there were rules about buried treasures, just as there were about magic.

"And about just about everything, I guess!" sighed Jane resignedly.

First they had to advertise for old Mr. Cattermole's heirs. And if none turned up, and everybody at Cold Springs seemed to think none would, then the government had to get a lot of it.

"Not that I begrudge
that
part," said Jane. "I'm happy to do my bit."

"You mean Mr. Smith's bit," said Mark.

And it was going to be all right about the bookshop, anyway. Because what had kept Mr. Smith in town was that a man had turned up who thought Toledo, Ohio,
needed
a bookshop, and he was willing to invest some money to make Mr. Smith's bookshop a
bigger
bookshop.

"And even that didn't happen till after we found the treasure," said Mark. "I checked on the time. So you see the turtle did it all."

And if any of the miser's money
did
come to Mr. Smith, he was going to buy a summer cottage with it, so they could have a summer by a lake every year. Only not
this
cottage, because it wasn't for sale.

"And I hope not this lake, either," said Jane. "It would only remind us."

"You're thinking what I'm thinking," said Mark.

"Yes," said Jane. "No more magic for us. It stands to reason. Some people never get any at all, and we've had it twice."

"
Three's
the magic number," said Katharine wistfully.

"Even so," said Jane firmly, "and notwithstanding.

And in spite of their greedy youth, Katharine and Martha had to agree.

"The only thing that bothers me," said Katharine, "is I thought we'd get to talk to the turtle one more time. I wanted to thank him."

"And
I
," said Martha, "wanted to ask about those three children we met. I liked them."

There was a pause.

"Children!" called their mother. "Time to go!"

The four children got up. They stood looking at the darkening water.

"I'm going to miss this lake," Mark said.

"Another one just won't be the same," Jane agreed.

"If anybody ever plays 'Back Home in Indiana,' again," said Katharine, "I shall cry."

"It'll be better to start fresh, though," said Jane. "Next year."

And the three of them turned their backs on the lake and started for the car.

Martha lingered. She went close to the rippling edge. "O turtle?" she said softly. She waited, listening.

There was a tiny plashing sound, and a head and two front feet appeared where the water joined the land, with a humped shell behind them.

"Well?" said a cold voice.

"Don't worry," said Martha quickly. "I understand about probably no more magic, and I'm not asking for anything more. I just wondered. About those children we met. That Roger and that Ann. I just wondered, will we ever see them again?"

The turtle blinked once. It put out its tongue after a passing midge. Then it spoke. "Time will tell," it said.

Martha's heart beat faster. "Oh, good," she said. "In books that's always a good sign. At least it's better than no."

"But whether you'll know them or not, if you do," went on the turtle, "is another story." It took a backward step, and the waters closed over its head.

Martha stood on the darkling sand thinking this out.

The horn of the car sounded.

"I'm coming!" she called. She ran up the bank toward it.

The car door slammed. The car lights swung round the driveway. There was a pause, as Mark opened the gate into the field. Then the lights moved on up the hill and out of sight.

The waters of the lake plashed softly against the sand. But nobody was there to hear them now.

Edward Eager
(1911–1964) worked primarily as a playwright and lyricist. It wasn't until 1951, while searching for books to read to his young son, Fritz, that he began writing children's stories. In each of his books he carefully acknowledges his indebtedness to E. Nesbit, whom he considered the best children's writer of all time—"so that any child who likes my books and doesn't know hers may be led back to the master of us all."