Apple-achian Treasure (Auntie Clem's Bakery Book 8)

by P. D. Workman

  “Right. If it’s still standing, we’ll find the cabin.”

  Erin studied the survey map closely. It wasn’t easy to compare the roads and trees they were passing with the flat survey map and to match everything up properly. “I think there should be another road to the right, about three hundred yards ahead.”

  “Okay…” Vic was already going pretty slowly, but she hit the brake and they both watched for a break in the trees where there might be an access road. Some of the roads they had taken to get there had been pretty questionable. They might have been roads at one time, but Erin wasn’t sure that they could be called roads anymore.

  “There.”

  Vic turned the car slowly in. “Maybe we should have waited and gotten one of the boys to come with their trucks. I’m a little worried about your car’s suspension handling this off-roading.”

  “We’re not off-roading,” Erin corrected. “These are roads. They’re just very… not very well-maintained anymore. They’ve been replaced by paved highways, so people don’t really use them anymore.”

  “Not very well-maintained.” Vic snorted. “You have a talent for understatement.”

  Erin grinned. She looked back down at the map, trying to pick out landmarks, topography, and distances. “We’ll go in a curve around a hill, and when we get to the opposite side, there should be a fork in the road, and we’re to take the left one.”

  “Left fork,” Vic confirmed. They again watched intently out the windshield as the barely-visible track wound around the hill. “Here? Is that a fork?”

  “I don’t know. It could be.” Erin tried to compare it with the map. “Let’s give it a try.”

  “Are you going to get me lost?”

  “We can’t get lost; we have a map.”

  “That doesn’t mean we know where we are.”

  “We know where we are. We’re… somewhere on this map. Somewhere on one of these maps.” Erin shuffled through them. “We’re not going to get lost.”

  “Don’t lose track of which one we’re supposed to be on,” Vic said nervously.

  “I’m not going to mix them up. We’re on this top one. Or was it this one?” Erin looked slyly sideways at Vic, who shook her head at Erin baiting her.

  “Okay, where after this?”

  “Looks like about two miles. We just keep following this road. And then eventually, we’ll be up to Orson’s house.”

  “I sure hope it’s still there,” Vic said. “I don’t see much other development out here. Doesn’t look like anybody is even farming this land anymore. So hopefully…”

  Erin looked at the land with new eyes. There were areas that were clear of trees and the land was fairly flat. But she wasn’t sure she would have tried to farm it. It would have taken a lot of work to plow the land, breaking the soil and moving the rocks out of the fields, trying to keep the trees from creeping back in on them.

  “This really is wild,” she said.

  “Yeah, it is,” Vic said. “A lot more remote than my farm.”

  Erin remembered Vic’s family farm. It had been more like the farms she was accustomed to; much flatter, with a country farmhouse and a big red barn.

  They were both watching the odometer to see how far they had gone. Erin looked out the window and started scanning for any buildings or fences or signs of the old farm. The country looked untouched other than the faint track through the trees that Vic was trying to follow without jostling their brains out. Erin was starting to regret having tried to find the house so soon. She was still having headaches following her mugging and the bumps and ruts in the so-called road were not helping.

  “What’s that?” Vic pointed.

  Erin could barely see the outline through the trees. “Is it a house? I think it’s a house! I think that’s it!”

  Vic got as close as she could. The trees were doing their best to take back the clearing that had once been made, and they couldn’t drive right up to the house. It was very small, and Erin was worried it was just an outhouse or shed until they got closer. It was larger than it looked from the road, but still very small when compared to Clementine’s house or most of the homes that Erin had grown up in.

  “It guess this is it,” she said, looking around for any other buildings. If there had been barns and other outbuildings, they had been reclaimed by nature; Erin couldn’t see any sign of them. The house must have been sturdily built to have resisted the advances of time.

  Vic parked the car. They both got out, looking around. There was no sign of other human life around them. The birds were singing and the sun was shining. The leaves were rustling in a slight wind. But it seemed like it had been a hundred years since another human being had set foot on the property.

  “Just look at it,” Vic breathed.

  They walked toward the house. Old and gray from the weather, but the corners still mostly square. The windows were broken and a couple had tattered curtains behind them. As they got closer, Vic called out.

  “Hallo the house! Anyone home?”

  Erin looked at her.

  “There’s no one here. That’s obvious.”

  “Well… it’s still rude to just walk in.”

  “Even if there’s nobody there?”

  Vic shrugged. “What can I tell you? Even if you don’t think there’s anyone home, you should always call just to be sure. I was always taught that.”

  “Okay!” Erin laughed and continued to walk toward the house.

  There was still no answer, but neither expected there to be. Erin expected Vic to knock on the door when they got to it, further demonstrating her training in southern manners, but Vic did not. She put her hand on the doorknob and waited for a moment.

  “Do you want to open it?” she asked. “He’s your uncle.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “On the count of three?”

  Erin again laughed and waited for Vic to count it off and open the door. It wasn’t locked and swung open under her hand. They walked in and looked around the interior of the house.

  It was empty. Any furniture that had once been in the house was long gone, other than a kitchen table made of a slab of wood, and a broken-down rocking chair across the room by the fireplace. It was mostly a one-room home, with partial partitions built up between the kitchen and the seating area, and a little niche Erin thought must have been for a bed. Very small and cozy. Even smaller than the summerhouse on Erin’s property that Adele lived in.

  “See any clues?” Vic asked.

  Erin searched the room. There was no desk with hidden compartments. There were no cryptic notes scribbled on the walls. Anything that had been left in the house was long gone.

  She walked around the little room, looking at the plank wall, where there could obviously be no hidden rooms. In places there were wide cracks between the planks where the sun came in from the outside.

  “There’s something there,” Erin pointed to the floor at a cut-out square.

  “A trapdoor,” Vic observed. “There must be a root cellar.”

  They went over to it together. Vic put her finger into a little notch cut-out and gave a tug. The trapdoor no longer fit well in the space. It took a bit of pulling and tugging before Vic was able to lever it up. Erin looked at the narrow stairs that led down into the darkness. It was more like a ladder than a staircase. Erin wasn’t sure how anyone would walk down it.

  “You want to go down?” Vic asked.

  “It’s worse than the basement at Bella’s house.”

  “Definitely.”

  Neither one of them made any move to go down the steps to see what was down there.

  “If there are any clues, they’re going to be down there,” Vic said. “You can see there isn’t anything left up here.”

  Erin looked around. She looked up at the roof of the house. No attic, just the inside of the roof that kept out the rain. Or mostly, anyway. They could go outside and look for a barn and other outbuildings. There might be more clues as to what Orson Cadaver had be
en doing in the outbuildings. Erin hadn’t been able to see any from the car, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist. One just had to look harder.

  “You want me to go first?” Vic asked.

  “Yes.”

  “If I go down there, you have to too.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Come on, Erin. You can do that. It’s not a cave, it’s just a basement. And there won’t be any hidden corners. You’ll be able to see everything when you get down the stairs.”

  Erin crouched down at the edge of the hole. “Maybe I could just poke my head down and not go down at all.”

  “I’ll go first, but only if you promise you’ll come too.”

  Erin let out a puff of breath. “Fine. I’ll go down. Unless you fall and break your leg. Then I’m going back to the car to get help.”

  “I’m not going to break my leg.”

  “You might. Those stairs don’t look very safe.”

  Vic stopped arguing and walked around the trapdoor, trying to figure out the best way to get down the dangerous-looking stairs. She finally decided to approach it like a ladder. She went down it backward, feet first, holding on to the sides of the stairway to stabilize herself.

  When she got to the bottom, she put her foot out to feel for another step, then looked down and saw that she had made it. She pushed away from the stairs and looked around.

  “Come on down.”

  “Is there anything to see?”

  “Erin you promised you’d come. So, come.”

  Erin hesitated. But she had promised, so she slowly climbed down the stairs the same way as Vic had. They held their phones up with flashlight apps on to explore the tiny cellar.

  “Not much here,” Erin muttered.

  “Nope.”

  It was a dirt floor. There were a couple of shelves that might have once held preserves. There was a wooden plank box with a lid torn off. Erin bent over it, shining her light into the box.

  There were a few twisted shapes. Old parsnips and potatoes or other roots that Erin wasn’t sure about that had dried out and petrified long ago. She poked around at them with one finger, worried about stirring up spiders or something worse. Nothing jumped out at her. There was no journal or note or other clue hidden under the old vegetables.

  Erin stood back up. “Well… let’s explore a little more upstairs and outside. Maybe there are some other buildings that might give us a clue.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  T

  he upstairs was no more enlightening than it had been the first time they looked at it. Erin looked again for any hidden panels, notes folded up and stuffed into the cracks of boards, or anything else that might give them a clue as to the hiding place of old Orson’s fabled gold. There was nothing in the house.

  Outside, Erin looked out at the forest. If Orson had indeed cleared a field, it was barely detectable a hundred and fifty years later. The trees had reclaimed the area.

  There was a scattering of low plants with bright yellow leaves dappling the shadows under the trees. Tennessee autumn came much later than Erin was used to in Maine, but she had noticed some changes and variations in the foliage.

  “I’m going to get the map.” Erin returned to the car to get the map to see if there were any other buildings or landmarks marked on it that they should look at.

  Erin returned to where Vic was standing.

  “Do you see anything?” she asked.

  Vic motioned to the trees to their right. “I think there’s a building over there. Maybe some pieces of an old barn.”

  Erin squinted, but couldn’t see anything through the trees that looked like a building. She looked at the map in her hand, then she and Vic walked over to have a look. Erin had been looking for a building that was still standing, like the house, so she hadn’t seen the timbers that were on the ground. They walked around the perimeter of the pile of wood pieces, looking down at the ground and the area around for anything that they might have missed.

  “You want to look through this?” Vic asked, motioning to the boards. “It could take a while.”

  “Let’s just have a quick look,” Erin said. “We can look more later. If it looks promising or if we can’t find anything else.”

  They moved in. Erin thought belatedly that they should have brought work gloves and shovels and rakes. Any other implements that would let them handle the old boards and detritus without getting dirty or putting nail holes in their hands. As it was, they handled the boards delicately, trying to avoid slivers or dirt. Or spiders or other crawly creatures that might like hiding in the pile.

  “Looks like there was a fire,” Vic pointed out, as they got down a layer and encountered boards that had been blackened to charcoal.

  Erin agreed. “I guess that’s why it’s not standing anymore. If he did leave any clues here, they would have been destroyed.”

  “Depending on what kind of clues they were. If he left another note with a poem…” Vic wiped her forehead with the back of her arm.

  “There could still be a strong box or coins. They would have survived. But chances are, whoever burned it down would already have looked through the debris for anything like that.”

  “It might not have been burned down deliberately. Could have been a lantern or a lightning strike. And who knows how long ago. It might have just happened last year.” Vic studied the wood, looking for clues. “Longer ago than that, though, I’d say. There’s a lot of overgrowth. If it was just last year, there wouldn’t be so much growth over top of the site. This looks like it’s been here for a long time.”

  “Yeah.” Erin looked at the pile. It had been there before she was born. Before her parents or grandparents were born. A long time. It gave her a strange feeling of being small and insignificant. All of that history, all of that time marching by, and nothing had changed. She hadn’t changed anything. She and her ancestors were barely a blip in the long history of the place. Nature was wiping out every trace.

  She abandoned her search of the wood. If there was anything hidden in the ashes and fallen timbers of the barn, it was going to take a much more involved excavation to get at them. More people, and proper equipment rather than bare hands. She took the map back out of her pocket.

  “What do you think? It looks like there were a few roads through here back in the day. But everything is so overgrown, that even the main road is almost undetectable. There’s no way we’re going to find any of these other roads.”

  Vic looked at the map, studying the lines and the contours of the topography. “Actually, I don’t think those are roads.”

  “What are they, then? Rivers?”

  Vic shook her head and looked at the title and legend on the map. “This was a mining survey. I think those are mines that were dug and then abandoned.”

  “I’m not going down any old mines,” Erin said immediately.

  “No, not today,” Vic agreed. “We’ll need Willie to look to see what kind of condition they are in. They might need to be shored up. Or they might be completely caved in. But we’re not going to go anywhere without him having a look first to make sure it’s safe.”

  “I’m not going into any abandoned mines period. I don’t care how much money might be down there. I’m just not doing it.”

  “Okay. That’s fine. Leave it to me and Willie.”

  Erin shook her head. She didn’t even want any of them going into an old mine. Just the thought of it made her stomach clench. She and Jeremy had already been in the hospital; she didn’t want anyone else put in danger. And she knew how dangerous it could be underground. It wasn’t safe for any of them.

  “Let’s just see if we can find any entrances,” Vic suggested. “We’re definitely not going in anywhere. But if we can find the entrances and maybe take some pictures for Willie, it will save time. He’ll have a better idea of what kind of shape they’re in and what kind of equipment we’ll need, and we won’t have to waste time looking later. And if I’m wrong, and they are someth
ing other than mines, then we won’t be wasting time coming back for something that isn’t there.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  T

  ired and grubby after their afternoon at Orson’s old farm, Erin and Vic decided to go back to the hospital before heading home to Bald Eagle Falls. It wasn’t long before Jeremy would be released. Erin was looking forward to knowing that he was close to home and they could go see him just a few minutes away instead of having to take a couple of extra hours to go to the city and back. It made it quite an ordeal.

  “We should stop for something to eat while we’re here too,” Vic suggested. “Otherwise, we’re going to be too tired when we get home to do anything other than put something in the microwave.” Which was their usual practice when getting home from the bakery after a long day of work. Either that or having leftover bread or buns and jam. Either way, they rarely actually cooked a full meal for anything other than holidays.

  “That sounds good. I wouldn’t mind something other than frozen pasta or casserole,” Erin admitted. She didn’t normally go out for burgers, but they sounded awfully good after a steady diet of muffins, sandwiches, and frozen dinners.

  “We’re doing it then. We can either get something at the hospital cafeteria or hit a fast food restaurant on the way home.”

  “The hospital cafeteria isn’t actually too bad. And that will keep the car from smelling like french fries for a week.”

  Vic grinned. They reached the door to Jeremy’s room and Vic looked in to see whether he was alone. Sometimes when they arrived, the doctor or a nurse was there tending to his bandages or checking out his healing bullet holes. Vic stopped in the doorway, frozen. Erin couldn’t see past her to see what was going on inside. Her heart started thumping hard in her chest.

  “Vic?” she murmured. “What’s up?”

  Vic still didn’t move or say anything. Then there was another voice that Erin didn’t recognize.

  “Well, look who’s here!”

  She could have mistaken it for Jeremy’s voice, except that it was a bit huskier, and he didn’t quite have the same cheeriness that Jeremy usually exuded.