by Eve Yohalem
“Uh-huh.” Jules sat up too. “Look at the title.”
Golden Lion.
“WHOA.”
“I know!” Jules said.
“What else?”
“You’ll like this one. It’s really cool. It’s not a painting, though.” Jules took the iPad back and swiped a few times. “These are the exact kind of trunks the VOC used for their payroll. The museum has a bunch in their collection.”
The photograph showed two rows of wooden trunks arranged on a platform. Some a little bigger, some a little smaller. The wood was grainy and medium brown, and the trunks were wrapped in black straps.
Even with a thousand-pound fur rug in thousand-degree heat, I got chills.
“Let me see that.” I snatched the iPad out of Jules’s hands. Enlarged the description. Payroll trunks, VOC, wood and iron.
The straps were made of metal.
Metal straps on wood trunks.
Wood and iron.
Radio static buzzed in my stomach. Otis, sensing my shift from sleepy to hyper, perked up.
“What’s going on?” Jules said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe nothing. But we have to go to the basement to find out.”
We crept downstairs without making a sound. Even Otis managed not to thwack his wagging tail on the banister.
“Oh wow,” Jules said when I pulled the string on the basement light. “You weren’t kidding.”
“This way,” I said. “Be careful of, well, pretty much everything.”
I led Jules to the creepy cobwebby crawl space. When Otis saw where I was heading, he hung back. I kneeled and cupped his cheeks.
“You’re the one who found this place, Otis. You need to be with us now. Don’t worry—I threw away all the mousetraps.”
Otis licked my nose, which was his way of saying he’d try.
I shined my phone flashlight into the crawl space, which was just big enough for two or three people to sit but not stand in. Smooth wood and black metal straps lined the walls, floor, and ceiling.
Jules leaned inside. “What the—?”
“You see it, right?” I peeked over Jules’s head. “I’m not imagining things? This wood and these black metal straps look exactly like the kind of wood and metal the trunks in the Dutch museum were made of.”
“You’re not imagining things,” Jules said. “Come closer. I need more light.”
Kneeling on the floor, Jules and I leaned shoulder to shoulder into the entrance to the crawl space while Otis guarded our rear against flying mousetraps. We looked in every corner. Empty.
“Let’s check the boards one by one,” Jules said.
I set my phone on the floor with the light pointed up. Jules took one wall, I took another, and together we pressed each board, felt every seam, our fingertips turning gray with dust. Our arms made long, wavy shadow puppets on the walls that looked like sails, luffing in a light sea wind. When we finished the walls, we moved to the ceiling.
Nothing.
We left the floor for last. Slowly, silently, we started from opposite sides and moved inward, board by board.
Until I felt something shift under my fingers.
“I think this one’s loose,” I whispered.
I pressed it again. It wiggled. Jules pressed the one next to it.
“This one, too,” she said.
And the one next to that and the one next to that.
Four loose boards in the middle of a seventeenth-century crawl space.
The hairs on the back of my neck tickled.
I tried to pry up one of the boards with my fingers, but even though the boards were wiggly they fit so closely that I couldn’t lift it.
“Hang on.” I shimmied out of the crawl space and ran to the main room, where I remembered seeing a set of kebab skewers, grabbed a few, and ran back.
But before trying again, I hesitated, standing behind Jules and Otis. “We could stop right now and we’d never know for sure.”
Jules yanked her head out of the crawl space and twisted around to look at me. “Are you insane? Why would you want to stop?”
“Because…”
I kneeled and stroked Otis’s long back. Every minute of every hour of every day since Pop Pop died had led me to this moment, here, in the darkest, dampest, seventeenth-century corner of my basement. The space was full of ghosts—I could feel them trailing their feathery fingers up my arms, murmuring their secrets in my ears—and one of those ghosts was Pop Pop. We’d found Petra and Abraham’s ship; now, maybe, we’d found their cargo. What would happen to all the ghosts—to Pop Pop—when there was nothing else left to find?
“I’m just saying that it would keep the mystery alive forever,” I said. “Maybe that’s not a bad thing?”
Jules held back and didn’t say any of the things I know she was dying to say.
Otis nudged my shoulder. He was on Jules’s side on this one. And I knew that Pop Pop would be too. I could hear his voice—his real one, from before he got sick—telling me that no matter what I found underneath these boards, the adventure we had shared would be ours forever.
Finish it for us, BB. And then go find some new mysteries of your own.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
Jules looked up at the ceiling. “Thank you, Lara Croft!”
She put her hand on mine. We wedged a kebab skewer between two of the boards.
“On three,” I said.
We counted together: “One… two… three!”
We pushed.
Nothing happened except the skewer started to bend.
“Use another one,” Jules said.
I grabbed a second skewer and wedged it under the other side of the board.
“One—”
Crack.
The short end of the board popped up. Just a little. Just enough for me to claw my fingernails in and lever it up half an inch. Jules wriggled her hand underneath and together we pried the board out.
There was a long rectangular hole in the floor of the ancient crawl space. A wet black nose leaned in and gave it a sniff.
“Anybody in there?” I asked Otis.
Otis sneezed.
“C’mon, let’s take off the other ones,” Jules said.
The three other loose boards came up easily now that the first one was out. I pointed the flashlight.
We peered into a shallow hidey-hole lined with more VOC wood and metal. Inside was a sack made of raw canvas and, next to the sack, a book made of old, cracked leather. Its twin was upstairs in my living room, filled with the names of every member of my family for the last 350 years.
I reached out, my hand hovering over the sack and then the book, not sure which to take first.
“Go with your gut,” Jules said.
My gut told me I’d find more questions than answers no matter what I chose. I knew what Nora would tell me to do.
I went with my heart.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
True Fact: Even the oldest family secrets have a way of coming out.
I lifted the sack with two hands, careful not to jostle whatever was inside. It was heavy and half-full.
We backed out of the crawl space, and Jules and I sat on the floor knee to knee with our legs crisscrossed and the sack in my lap. Otis sniffed the sack.
I gazed around the room. Centuries of cast-off stuff made mountains around us. My family’s life stories were in those mountains, those old sleds and gardening tools, picnic baskets and baseball bats and quilts and dented mixing bowls and wallpaper leftovers. Every single thing down here was chosen and used by someone related to me. Day after day, year after year, century after century.
Even now.
I took a deep breath and—
“Wait,” Jules said, like I was about to touch a hot stove.
“What?” I pulled back my hand.
“What you said before, about preserving the mystery.”
“Jules—” Now that I’d decided to look inside the sack, it
was calling to me. Waiting felt like lying naked on top of an anthill.
“Just hear me out. Because right now there’s a very real chance that what’s in that bag is part of the Golden Lion payroll, but there’s also a very real chance that what’s in the bag is a bunch of seashells. What if it is seashells? Are you going to be okay?”
I thought about it, worrying the rough cloth between my fingers. How would I feel if I didn’t find the treasure?
Rubbing the cloth made a soft scratching noise that was the only sound in the basement other than Otis’s heavy breathing next to my ear and the low hum of something electric or boiler-ish. Jules was completely still, watching me, giving me time to figure out how I was going to feel if I didn’t find what I was looking for.
My stomach growled, and I did an automatic body scan. No signs of low blood sugar, not from my body or from Otis or the CGM. And that’s when I knew:
I had already found what I was looking for.
I hadn’t thought about diabetes once since I’d woken up to find Jules looking at the museum pictures. It’s not that I was ignoring it; it was that I had so many other things to think about. Interesting, exciting, important things that mattered to me. It’s what—and who—I care about, I realized, that makes me who I am.
Diabetes is something I have to live with, not something I have to be.
I looked at Jules. At her hair, which currently resembled a haystack, or a mouse nest, or maybe a mouse nest on top of a haystack. Then I looked at her pajamas, which were a pair of plaid boxer shorts and a plain stretched-out gray T-shirt, and I decided that maybe she’d found what she was looking for too.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
“Are you absolutely, positively sure?” Jules asked.
“One hundred percent.” Which was 99 percent true.
Jules grinned. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
I untied the drawstring on the sack, carefully, gently, like it was made of cobwebs instead of twisted yarn. I could feel Otis and Jules on either side of me, feel their unblinking eyes and shallow breaths. And then our circle widened, and it was like I could feel Nora and Mom and Dad and Pop Pop and all the Greats with us too.
I reached inside…
…and found a bunch of objects, all different sizes and shapes, each wrapped in soft fabric. My hand closed around one at random, and I pulled out something about the size of a blackboard eraser, covered in black cloth. Set it on the floor between us.
“No licking,” I told Otis.
He gave me his Who, me? look and then hunkered down with his nose as close as it could possibly get to the thing without touching.
“Ready?” I said, locking eyes with Jules.
“Dying,” she said.
The cloth was rolled around whatever was inside it. I unfolded the corners. Unrolled once. Twice. Three times. I could feel the thing itself now through the cloth. It was hard. And rectangular.
I unrolled it again.
And again, one last time.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
True Fact: 350 years ago, my family sailed to Sag Harbor on a ship of gold. (TF supplied by Pop Pop.)
Sleek, solid gold winked at us in the naked-bulb basement light.
VOC
1663
There in front of us was a bar from the Golden Lion payroll.
It had been buried under my very own house all this time.
Which, when you think about it, is hilarious.
Which was why Jules and I laughed. We started out with nervous Really, are you sure? giggles, then morphed into Oh wow, I can’t believe it chuckles, then picked up steam with full-on tears-streaming, Please make it stop, it hurts laughter.
Finally, we pulled ourselves together enough to notice Otis, who was baptizing the gold bar with gentle licks. Jules rescued it and dried it off with her shirt. “It’s warm.” She pressed the bar to her cheek.
“Let me feel.” I took it and pressed it to my face. Jules was right. All those years snuggled up in mounds of fabric—or maybe just Otis’s breath—had kept the bar warm.
“Let’s see what else is in here,” Jules said as she dug around in the sack. She hiccuped, still out of breath from laughing. “Maybe we’ll find Dorothy’s ruby slippers or the Ark of the Covenant or Amelia Earhart’s airplane.” She pulled out more bundles.
“Or socks from the dryer,” I said. And we cracked up again.
All together there were six gold bars, two copper ones, and a small pouch of silver coins. We spread them out on the black cloths.
“Does this make us pirates?” I asked, wiping my eyes.
“It makes you the descendant of pirates,” Jules said with a mock bow.
True Fact: Being the descendant of pirates is the best fun fact ever. Nora was going to love it. What would Dad say when he found out? And Mom?
The silver coins reminded me of another coin. Gold, with the letters V-O-C on it. Hanging from a big ugly chain. “Jules, I think I may be a bad person,” I said.
“Because your ancestors were criminals or because you’re excited about picturing Fitz when he hears you found the treasure?”
I laughed again. “How did you know?”
“Duh,” Jules said.
“His face will turn purple,” I said.
“He’ll vomit,” Jules said.
“His eyes will bulge out of his head the way they did when you told him to use his inside voice,” I said, trying—unsuccessfully—to bulge my own.
“He might cry.” Jules fake-swooned with joy.
“Think about the headlines!” I held up my hands. “‘Fitz Fails!’”
“I can see it now,” Jules said, rising up on her knees. “Fitz picks up his morning newspaper and chokes on his nasty enzyme drink when he reads about how we completely and totally schooled him.”
Jules and I took a moment to revel in our fantasy before I said, “Okay. Time to go back to being good people again.”
We wrapped up all the pieces and put them back in the sack to keep them from getting scratched.
I ran my hand over one of the walls of the crawl space.
“Abraham must have used the wood from the trunks to make the paneling,” Jules said.
“He was a carpenter,” I said. “A good one. See how cleanly each board fits against the next? My dad says you can judge a craftsperson by their attention to details.”
We admired Abraham’s workmanship together. Jules brushed her fingers along the crawl space floor, stopping at the hole where the four loose boards used to be.
“Let’s look in the book,” she said.
I lifted the book out of the secret cubby like it was made of bird bones, which, after 350 years, it may as well have been. The cover crackled when I opened it.
A full telling of how Bram and I came to be in possession of the East India Company Payrolle would fyll this Ledger and more. Know, all who read these Pages, that We dyd not seek these Funds, but We dyd convaye them here to the Village of Sagg Harbor and have tryde to make good vse of them synce. The Crew of our Ship numbered fourteen Souls when We left East India. (The presyse Locacyon of our beloved Island shall remayne a Secret We guard with our very Lyves, lest more Harm come to those few who remayne there.) At the ende of our Journey—plagued as We were by Illness and violent Weather, pursued as We were by Enemees known and vnknown—only five remayned: Happy Jan, Jeronimo Lobo, Louis Cheval, Bram, and myself. Some Days later, Bram, Happy Jan, and Lobo retrieved our moste precious Cargo from the remaynes of our Ship, which was sunk before a houndish Rock near Mister Gardiner’s Island. We called the rock Sorrowwe for the Friends We lost. We shared the Payroll amongst vs fairly and without Rancor. What follows is an Accounting of our Household’s Porcyon.
Petra De Winter Broen,
Sagg Harbor, January 1669
She called him Bram.
I don’t know why that was the first thing that popped into my head after I read my great-times-twelve-grandmother’s story. Maybe because it made them seem like
real people who had adventures and got married and gave each other nicknames, instead of old-timey people in coffee-filter collars.
So many unknowns. Petra’s story was like something only Nora could have imagined. Who were these violent enemies and where was this mysterious island? Who were the friends that Petra and Bram lost? Jeronimo Lobo and Happy Jan were in the Golden Lion ship’s log, but Petra wasn’t, and I didn’t remember seeing Louis Cheval’s name either. I’d thought that if I found the lost payroll of the Golden Lion, then all my questions would be answered. Instead, I found new questions. My family stories didn’t lead me where I thought they would; they led me somewhere surprising, somewhere new.
Suddenly, all the things I didn’t know started to feel like possibilities instead of roadblocks. Pop Pop was right again. What’s important isn’t preserving mysteries; it’s seeking out new ones.
I traced the page with my fingertips. Petra’s writing was even and careful—nothing like mine. Some of the letters were weird shapes—her Ss looked like Fs—and, based on her spelling, I’m pretty sure dictionaries hadn’t been invented back then. A splotch of brown showed where her pen had leaked.
Petra touched this same page I’m touching now.
“Can I see?” Jules asked, reaching out her hands.
I gave her the book, even though a selfish part of me hated letting go of it.
“Oh wow,” Jules whispered as she ran her fingers along the spine. “Do you realize Petra started this book a hundred years before Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence?” Very gently, Jules turned the page. “The Salem witch trials hadn’t even happened yet.”
“What else does it say?” I asked, scooching next to her.
“It’s like she said. It’s a ledger.”
I leaned over Jules’s shoulder. The pages were lined with neat rows and columns with names, dates, amounts, and descriptions. A list of every person who’d used part of the payroll, when they used it, how much they spent, what they spent it on.
Abraham Broen, April 1666, One Gold Barre, Lumber to Bilde a House
At first the names were only Abraham or Petra. Then, as the years went on, Albertina, and then Jan. More years, more names. Never more than one or two entries during the same time period.