Three Bird Summer (14 page)

“You’ve got to have one of these cinnamon rolls,” she said, pointing at the tray of pastries on the table. “Mom has a rare talent.”

Mrs. Jensen had already put a roll on a plate for me, and I took the empty seat across from Alice.

“I hear you and Alice had a wildlife experience yesterday!” Mr. Jensen said. “Mink, huh? You sure about that? There are a lot of raccoons around here. They get into our garbage more often than I care to admit.”

“They weren’t raccoons,” I said confidently.

“What about a couple of stray cats?” he continued.

“They weren’t cats, Dad!” Alice exclaimed.

Her father seemed to consider this. “You sure they weren’t skunks?”

“Dad!” Alice said.

Now he was just teasing, and I didn’t mind so much. My dad sometimes teased me in the same way.

The cinnamon roll was delicious, but I couldn’t wait to get Alice alone so I could tell her what I’d found. Unfortunately, Mrs. Jensen sat down with a cup of tea and seemed to be settling in for a good long conversation.

“So, Adam, how much longer will you all be staying up here?” she asked.

“Um, I think we’re supposed to go home the week before Labor Day. But my grandma wants to stay longer. She says the fall is even better than the summer.”

“I’d love to come up in the fall sometime,” Alice said. “No bugs. Glowy leaves. Can we come up some weekend, Mom?”

“I don’t see why not,” Mrs. Jensen said.

“We’ll just need to make sure to fire up that furnace!” Mr. Jensen said gustily, rubbing his hands together. “It’ll be cold here on the water!”

Before Mrs. Jensen had a chance to ask another question, I stood up awkwardly. “Thanks for the cinnamon roll, Mrs. Jensen. But I need to go, um, do something.”

Alice looked at me quizzically. I’d hoped she’d pick up on my secret signals the way I’d picked up on hers, but she just seemed confused.

“Going mink hunting, maybe?” Mr. Jensen asked.

“Maybe,” I said distractedly. I looked at Alice and gave a slight nod toward the door. She glanced at the door, looking more confused than ever. Telepathic communication was never going to be my thing.

“Or maybe treasure hunting,” I said in a moment of inspiration.

Alice’s eyes widened. “Hey, hold on — I’ll come with you.” She stood up and brushed cinnamon roll crumbs off her hands.

“Call if you’re not going to be back by lunch!” Mrs. Jensen said as we hurried to the front door.

“What is it?” Alice asked the moment we were out of earshot. “Did you find another note?”

“Even better,” I said, drawing out the mystery.

When we reached the end of the driveway, I pulled the folded paper from my pocket. “Would you have any interest in looking at a . . . treasure map?” I asked.

“No way,” Alice whispered. “For your grandmother’s treasure? Is it from G?”

I nodded and held it out for her to see.

“Where did this come from?” Alice asked.

“My grandma had it in a file drawer,” I explained. “She asked me to put away some papers, and that’s when I saw it.”

“So you stole it?” Alice sounded more pleased than disapproving.

“Well, I’d prefer to call it borrowing,” I said, happy that I’d managed to impress her.

We sat on the grass and studied the map. Alice marveled over every detail — from the ink (she informed me it was from a fountain pen) to the penmanship (she told me no one writes like that anymore) to the dotted lines with their animal street names. She even admired the carefully drawn target symbol — three concentric rings — with the “Secret Treasure!” label.

“This is so awesome, I think I’m going to scream,” Alice said at last.

“Please don’t,” I said. “Your father will come out with a shotgun.”

Alice bit her lips as if to contain her voice. Then she looked at me with shining eyes. “What are we waiting for?” she asked. “We have treasure to find!”

“But we don’t know where to start,” I pointed out.

“Sure we do,” she told me. “At the rectangle!”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “But what’s the rectangle?”

Alice laughed. A lifetime of analytic genius and Camp Watson summers had come to her aid. “It’s your cabin, dummy!” she said. “Didn’t you notice the waves on the porch railing?”

The zigzag line. The waves. Of course!

I sighed in reluctant admiration. “OK, Duck,” I said. “Lead the way.”

WE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN
it wouldn’t be that easy. Surely Grandma would have recognized that the rectangle was the cabin. And like any good outdoorswoman, she was handy with a compass. I don’t know why we thought we’d be able to solve in an afternoon a mystery she’d been working on for decades. But we did.

We started at the corner of the cabin indicated on the map — the northeast corner, facing the lake. I hoped Grandma wouldn’t get a sudden urge to step out on the deck; we’d have a hard time explaining what we were doing skulking around under the cabin on such a nice day.

Alice held up the map. “First up: fifty steps on Mouse Main Street!” We stood shoulder to shoulder and walked fifty paces straight away from the corner of the cabin, parallel to the lake. I ended up a step ahead of Alice, which we decided was probably OK, since my paces were closer to what an adult’s would be.

Next we took twenty paces down Chipmunk Chute, heading straight to the lakeshore. After a ninety-degree shift, we were ready for thirty steps on Beaver Boulevard.

“Maybe we should mark our path with bread crumbs or raisins or something,” Alice suggested, “so we can look back and make any adjustments if we think we were off.”

I liked the idea of trail markers but wasn’t interested in going back into our cabin. So instead I proposed we use sticks to mark our intersections. Alice agreed and began gathering medium-size sticks to poke into the ground every time we turned onto a new trail.

“Next is Mink Meander,” I said. “It looks like a forty-five-degree angle, doesn’t it?” I wondered why G bothered to draw a compass when he didn’t even refer to it in the directions.

We started counting off forty paces but found ourselves at the water’s edge by the time we’d counted to thirty-two.

“Do you think we go in?” Alice asked.

“I guess,” I said. “Maybe the water level has changed after all these years.”

I pushed my sneakers off and waded eight steps into the water. “What’s next?” I asked Alice, who was on shore, holding the map.

“Head straight back to land,” she said. “Two hundred steps on Deer Drive!”

I started counting, and when I reached shore, Alice handed me my sneakers and joined in. Two hundred paces was a lot, and we ended up walking straight past the cabin and entering the woods.

“Using steps as your unit isn’t exactly scientific,” Alice commented.

“His mistake, not ours,” I said.

We continued with the rest of the map trails. We ended up angling back through the high meadow where Grandma had had her wedding reception, then far back into the forest where Grandma, Mom, and I had walked a few weeks before. When we counted our last step, we looked down at our feet and saw, well, nothing. Just more trees and bare ground and a fallen log.

“Do you think we’re in the right place?” Alice asked.

I shrugged. “Let’s look around.”

At first, we searched along the ground for anything that looked like it might be important. Scattered among the leaves were sticks, acorns, mushrooms, rocks, and a fresh pile of deer droppings. But we didn’t see anything that looked like a special treasure from decades ago.

Alice was, not surprisingly, a tenacious searcher. When we’d covered all the open ground, she began turning over rocks. Then she squatted down on one side of a fallen log and peered inside. “Hand me a stick,” she said. When I did, she began jabbing it in as far as she could reach.

“I really hope you’re not blinding some poor baby chipmunk,” I said.

She frowned. “It feels more like rotten wood.” She went over to the other side and tried again. “This would be better with a flashlight.”

I looked at the map again and at the concentric rings marking the treasure’s spot. “Do you think maybe he drew a target on the ground where he buried the treasure?”

Alice wrinkled her forehead. “If he did, I doubt it would still be here.” She stood up. “Maybe we’re not in the right place,” she said. “What if we tried the whole thing again, but this time with my paces instead of yours?”

“Why?” I asked.

“Maybe my paces are closer to your grandmother’s.”

“If anything, I think we should try longer paces. I’m sure he was taller than me or Grandma.”

“OK,” Alice agreed. “We’ll do it again and take extra-long steps. But if we end up in the center of town, don’t blame me!”

We made our way back to the corner of the cabin where we’d started. We could see where we’d left the sticks at our intersections before, and it’s true that we ended up following a different path when we used longer paces. But with all the zigzagging, we ended up closer to our first ending point than I would have predicted.

“Interesting,” Alice said. “Maybe we should just cover a big circle that includes this spot and our last spot. And we’ll go over it with a fine-tooth comb.”

“That’s still a lot of ground to cover.”

“We have a lot of time left at the lake,” she said. “If there’s treasure here, we’ll find it.”

I didn’t want to talk about how much time we had left at the lake. It happened like this every year — just as you rounded the bend into August, and the deerflies died off, and the water temperature was at its most perfect, and the crickets began their nighttime percussion, you had to start thinking about heading home. And this year, maybe even more than any of the others, I wanted summer to last forever.

“What if he just made her a batch of cookies or something?” I said. “A treasure like that would be long gone by now.”

Alice shrugged. “Maybe. But let’s look some more anyway.”

We searched the ground for a couple of hours, with a quick break for lunch. After a while, I found I wasn’t looking for anything anymore, just poking idly at the forest floor, swatting at bugs, thinking about the lake.

“Are you still looking?” Alice asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“Liar.”

I stood up and wiped my brow. “Fine. You got me,” I said. “How about a swim?”

Alice shook her head. “Are you even thinking about your grandmother?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, startled by the question. In truth, the treasure hunt felt like a game for me and Alice, not my grandmother’s concern. Not anymore, at least.

“Wouldn’t she be touched if we found her secret treasure?” Alice asked.

I made a face. “I don’t know what she would think, actually.” It occurred to me then that I really had no idea who my grandmother was at this point: a judgmental lady who made me feel bad about my paddling skills, a lovesick teenager who wrote poetic notes to her boyfriend, a confused old woman who struggled to remember what year it was. More and more she seemed almost like a puppet whose voice changed depending on who was holding the strings.

“Let’s just take a little break,” I told Alice. She was kneeling in the dirt, her hands raking through the grassy undergrowth.

“OK,” she said, squinting up at me. “But only if you promise me one more search day. At least.”

“Deal,” I said.

An hour later, we were swimming in the lake in the late-afternoon sun. I saw a canoe working its way across the water in our direction, with two people inside. It was Alice who recognized them first as my mom and grandmother.

“Hello, there,” Mom said as they approached. “We wondered where you two had gone off to.”

Grandma smiled smugly at me from beneath her bucket cap. As they drew up to the dock, she shipped her paddle and grabbed hold of the dock with a gnarled hand. But Alice was already there to help them come to a stop, standing waist-deep in the water and holding the canoe steady while they climbed out.

“Thank you, dear,” Grandma said.

“Yes, Alice,” Mom said. “Very thoughtful.”

I dropped under the water before Mom could give me a pointed look.

When I popped up, Alice was helping Mom carry the canoe onto the shore. They were chatting as they turned the canoe over, and still talking as they made their way back to take the paddles from Grandma. Then the three of them walked the paddles and life jackets up to the storage area under the cabin and disappeared from sight.

I turned and swam freestyle down the length of Grandma’s property, pulling hard against the water with my arms and kicking steadily. When I neared the boundary to the church camp, I didn’t even feel tired. I turned around and swam back at full speed. Alice was waiting for me on the dock.

“I should probably be heading home,” she said.

“OK,” I said. And then I couldn’t help myself. “Did you have a nice chat with the ladies?” I asked.

“Adam,” she said, as if it were a complete sentence.

“What?” I asked.

She cocked her head to the side and looked at me just the way Grandma did sometimes — knowing and amused.

“Am I not supposed to talk to them?” she asked.

“Of course you can talk to them,” I said. “I’m sure it thrills them. For a lot of reasons.” I pulled myself out of the water and padded over to my towel.