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

by P. D. Workman

  Erin looked at Cam for a minute, then nodded slowly. “Okay… but trusted to do what? What are you guys up to?”

  Beaver looked at Erin for a minute. She shook her head and looked back at Cam. “There’s been… an accident. A cave-in.” She gestured at the mine.

  Cam’s face showed surprise. He looked around, as if expecting to see someone sneaking around, eavesdropping on their conversation. “That’s not good. Do you think…?”

  Beaver shrugged. “I don’t know anything yet. But if this was intentional…”

  Erin looked at the two of them, frowning so heavily that her head hurt. “What? What are you talking about? If this was intentional? It was a cave-in.”

  “We’ll have to wait for the results of the investigation before we know that,” Beaver said, shrugging.

  “The results of what investigation?”

  “Into the cave-in,” Beaver said evenly.

  Erin stared at her, shaking her head. “You think that somebody did this to them? Somebody caused this cave-in on purpose?”

  “We don’t know anything about it at this point,” Beaver said. “All we know is what you have told us. That Vic and Willie and Jeremy went into the mine and then the cave-in happened. We don’t know any more than that, and we only know that because you told us.”

  “Then what are you doing here?” Erin asked. “I thought you were here because you had heard over the police radio, so you came to help.”

  Beaver shook her head. “We’ve been… investigating other things.”

  “And that investigation led you here. To Orson Cadaver’s farm.”

  “It’s an interesting coincidence that this is where your mystery led you,” Beaver contributed. There was a twinkle in her eye despite her worry for Jeremy.

  Erin tried to understand what the connection between Beaver’s investigation and her treasure-hunting could be, and couldn’t come up with anything. Obviously, it had been a surprise to Beaver as well. She hadn’t expected to find Erin and her friends there.

  “What are we going to do?” Cam asked Beaver, looking toward the mine. “Can we call someone to help? And what about the town?” He gestured to the radio and addressed Erin. “Did you call the police? There’s a volunteer fire department, they could help.”

  “Everyone is on their way,” Erin told him. “Terry is already scouting around to see if there is an alternate way to get in.”

  Cam nodded. “Do you want me to take a look around?” he asked Beaver. “Make sure there isn’t anyone else around?”

  Beaver shook her head. “No. You’d better stay here with Erin. Make sure she’s safe until Officer Piper gets back. I’ll look around.”

  Erin expected him to argue. What young man wouldn’t argue with a woman who told him that he needed to stay and take the safer course while she walked into danger? Every boy she had grown up with would have been offended by such a suggestion and would not have agreed without significant coercion. But Cam surprised her by not objecting. He just sat down beside Erin while Beaver got to her feet.

  “Who are you looking for?” Erin asked. “I haven’t seen anyone else around here.”

  Beaver chewed her gum and gave a loose shrug. “Just anyone who shouldn’t be here.”

  “But everyone has been called to help, so pretty soon, everyone is going to be here, and you won’t be able to tell…”

  Beaver nodded with grudging respect. “You’re right,” she agreed. “So, I need to look around before everyone shows up. If there’s anyone else hanging around this farm, I need to find them.”

  “I didn’t see any other cars on the road on the way out here, and we parked by ourselves.”

  “They would at least think to hide their vehicle, I would think. That was one reason I was so surprised to see Willie’s truck there, right out in the open.”

  Erin couldn’t help the smile that started to creep across her face. “Did you think that Willie was involved? Everybody is always thinking that he’s involved in criminal operations, but he’s not. He got out of that, and he doesn’t help the Dysons out any longer.”

  “Never trust appearances,” Beaver said. “I have to assume that people are lying. I have to assume that when they say they’re not involved, they really are, and I have to act as if it were true. As that old TV series used to say: ‘trust no one.’”

  “Willie isn’t involved in anything. He’s in the mine. He’s one of the victims here. He’s not involved in anything shady.”

  “Willie went in there with your friends,” Beaver said slowly. “But that doesn’t mean he was innocent. He may have been stabbed in the back by one of his cohorts. He might be working both sides. He might have taken Vic and Jeremy in there, fully intending to get them out of the picture.”

  Erin was shocked at the suggestions. It wasn’t like she hadn’t suspected Willie of shady dealings in the past. She had suspected him more than once, but he always came out innocent, and she didn’t think he would ever get caught, even if he were involved in something. But to suggest that he had gone into the mine to rid himself of his girlfriend and her brother… there was no way. Erin knew that he loved Vic and there was no way he would ever betray her.

  Beaver was studying Erin’s reaction carefully. She nodded slowly to herself as she prepared to look for whatever conspirator she thought might be lurking nearby. “I hope not too,” she said. “But I can’t afford to trust anyone.”

  “Doesn’t that include me, then?” Erin asked. Beaver had confided in her. She was leaving Erin there where she could cause more mischief. If anyone was to be suspected of causing the cave-in, Erin had to be the chief suspect. She had brought them there. She had allowed them to go into the mines while claiming that she herself was too scared to go inside. She was the one who could most easily have arranged for an accident to occur, all while she sat coolly outside and waited for help that she knew would arrive too late.

  Beaver looked at Erin, then looked at Cam. “Keep an eye on her.”

  Cam nodded, understanding. Beaver walked away, and Erin turned her attention to the young man.

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “I don’t think you did,” Cam agreed. “But we have to be careful. Beaver is really good at what she does. She wouldn’t still be alive if she wasn’t.”

  “What do you know about her? And what exactly are you doing with her? I don’t understand how you’re involved in any of this. You’re an informant? Is that it? But why would she bring you here? I don’t understand what someone as young as you could be doing that the federal agencies would be involved. I don’t understand what you could do to help them.”

  Any answer that Cam might have had for Erin was swallowed up when the rescue teams from Bald Eagle Falls began to arrive. They came in groups that Erin assumed must have carpooled together, half a dozen helpers to a vehicle. Some carried rescue or aid supplies with them, food, or equipment Erin was unsure of. They were a strange combination of laughter and grim determination. Excitement to be part of a big disaster and rescue operation, and anxiety about how it was all going to turn out and if they were going to be able to save their friends from injury or death.

  They greeted Erin and coordinated with each other, setting up equipment in the glade, going into the mine to have a look at the problem, and discussing the situation vigorously with each other. Erin wasn’t sure who was in charge, but someone needed to coordinate everybody before they all started approaching the problem separately and ended up tripping over one another.

  Terry returned from his scouting mission and tried to make himself heard above the babble of all of the volunteers.

  “Can I get your attention, please? I need everybody to listen so that we can approach this in a coordinated effort and do everything we can to help Vic, Willie, and Jeremy.”

  The scattered volunteers quieted, listening to Terry’s instructions.

  “I want you to get together with your teams. Firefighters in a group, Scouts in another. People in charge of foo
d. Communications. Get together with your group and make sure that you have a spokesperson appointed. We are going to manage all communication through that spokesperson so that I don’t have to yell over all of this chaos.”

  People nodded and smiled their agreement.

  “If you don’t have a group, stand over here,” Terry pointed. “We’ll put you where you can be best used. Okay? It’s going to be a while before any of the responders can make it from the city out here. I could use a few flagmen for traffic control, to help direct the city folk to the right route and make sure we’re sticking to the established roads rather than just driving across private land.”

  A few hands went up. Terry looked around at them, nodding. “Don, maybe you could take charge of the flagmen and coordinate them.”

  The man he spoke to nodded agreement, and Erin watched them gravitate toward each other and start to make arrangements for who would stand where and what jobs they would have.

  “I want to break this rescue into two approaches,” Terry advised. “Until we have experts in here who can tell us otherwise, I want to go in two ways. First, clearing the rocks and rubble out of this entrance,” he pointed to the mine entrance that Erin was already intimately familiar with. “There isn’t a lot of room to work, but if we could run a line of people outside, passing rock from one person to the next like a bucket brigade, I think that’s the quickest way to get rock out of the tunnel rather than just shifting it from one place to another inside. I don’t know how much rock is in there… It’s a lot. It might be a hopeless venture. But I need a team to get started.”

  There were nods of agreement.

  “Secondly, I want to go in through another tunnel. K9 and I have been exploring some of the other mines and entrances, and I think we have one that has the potential of getting close to this tunnel here, after the cave-in. Assuming that the whole tunnel has not collapsed and that we still have a chance of getting to any survivors… I want to get together a team that can come up with a plan to dig or drill from one tunnel to the other.”

  He looked around at the grim faces. Everyone was now listening to him, no one was joking around.

  “Get your groups together and appoint a spokesperson. I want to talk to the spokesmen in ten minutes.” Terry looked at his watch and nodded, marking the time.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  E

  rin watched the townspeople organizing themselves and thought that she should attach herself to one of the teams, but she didn’t have the energy to do anything but sit beside the radio listening for the updates on when the actual Search and Rescue team would be arriving from the city.

  Erin saw a group of the church ladies setting up a folding table. There would be drinks and sandwiches for the volunteers. Erin would normally be there, coordinating the sandwich-making, setup, and distribution with Vic at her side. She looked at the radio, waiting for confirmation that trained rescuers were on their way.

  Erin saw Mary Lou coming toward her, a confused expression on her face. Campbell scrambled to his feet.

  “Mom!”

  “Campbell. What are you doing here?”

  “I… er… I was helping out Beaver.”

  “Beaver? Helping her with what?”

  Campbell gave her a hug. “How are you, Mom? And Josh?”

  “Fine. We’re good. You don’t answer my calls. I never know what you’re up to.”

  “Sorry. Just getting myself settled. I get wrapped up and forget to call back until it’s late, and then I don’t want to call and wake you up.”

  Mary Lou brushed Campbell’s cheek with a kiss, then held him at arm’s length to look at him. Erin evaluated him silently as Mary Lou did. He appeared to be healthy. His color and weight were good. He didn’t look like someone who was using drugs or partying every night. Erin would have guessed that he had a good job and a safe place to live. Mary Lou dropped her hands, nodding.

  “You call me back anyway,” she told him. “Even if it’s late at night. I want to hear from you. Go ahead and wake me up.”

  He shrugged.

  “I need to help out here… why don’t you come tell me what you’ve been up to.” Mary Lou gestured back toward the table where the ladies were setting up the refreshments.

  Campbell’s eyes flitted to Erin.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she told him. “I want to be close to the radio.”

  He nodded and walked with his mother over to the table.

  Beaver sat down close to Erin. She looked around, watching all of the volunteers hard at work. Her eyes lingered on Cam, talking to Mary Lou and helping her out at the refreshment table.

  “So… what can you tell me about this Orson Cadaver? He was a distant relative of yours?”

  Erin nodded. “Lots of years back. I don’t know what I can tell you that you don’t already know. He came into a lot of money, but nobody knew where it came from. Or no one told, anyway. It seemed like it could match up with the poem, but I don’t know. It was only a guess.” She stared at the mine entrance. “A guess I wish I hadn’t made.”

  “It’s not your fault. You couldn’t have predicted that something was going to happen to Vic and the others. You wouldn’t have let them go in if you’d thought that they were going to get hurt.”

  “I was worried… I did tell them not to go at the last minute… but by that time they were already all excited about going. I couldn’t stop them.”

  “Did you have a premonition something was wrong?” Beaver asked. “Why did you tell them not to?”

  “I was just… worried about them being underground, I guess. I’m… claustrophobic after what happened to me in the caves… I couldn’t go down there if someone held a gun to my head.” She considered for a moment. “Well, maybe if someone put a gun to my head. I did go in there to see what had happened. But I couldn’t ever have gone down there to explore with them.”

  “So, there wasn’t something specific that you thought was going to happen? Or anything that triggered the thought?”

  Erin thought about it and shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

  “I just wonder whether your unconscious mind had processed something that you weren’t aware of consciously. There might have been something that tipped you off to someone else’s presence here. Or that made you feel like they were in danger from someone specific.”

  “Whoever stole the first copies of those maps hit me over the head. They could have killed me. It obviously wasn’t someone who had any qualms about using violence. If they’re racing us to find the treasure… then that puts all of us in danger.”

  “Maybe,” Beaver agreed. “So what about the cabin? You and Vic explored it?”

  “Yes, but there really wasn’t anything there. It’s been over a hundred years since he hid the treasure… I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that we didn’t find anything else. What kind of clue would have survived that long?”

  “You never know. Sometimes the darnedest things survive… things you never would have expected to.”

  Erin sighed. “Well, not in this case. It seems like all that survived was the poem. And if it hadn’t talked about moles, we never would have considered looking in the mines. Or maybe we would have, I don’t know. But I wish we hadn’t. I wish I’d never found that poem.”

  “But you did.” Beaver’s burning eyes betrayed her interest in hearing more about the treasure, maybe in finding it herself. “I know you don’t have the poem anymore, but could you tell me again what it said? Do you have it written down anywhere?”

  “Beaver…” Erin’s voice broke and she cleared her throat to try to speak clearly. “They’re trying to figure out how to get our friends out of a collapsed mine. If they’re still alive. And you’re looking for the treasure?”

  “I’ve done everything I could to help. I’m standing by if there’s anything else I can do. But in the meantime… why not look into the treasure? If the treasure is what is motivating someone to commit violence, even ris
king killing three innocent people in one blow, then we need to catch him. Don’t you think?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, the only way we’re going to catch him is if we know as much as or more than he does about the treasure. We need to get out ahead of him. We need to try to find the treasure before he does, if it still exists.”

  “You and Cam… is this about the treasure hunt, or about illegal drugs? I don’t understand what it is you have to do with him?”

  “Cam’s a good boy. He’s got a good heart. But he’s going to end up in trouble if someone doesn’t get him back on track. I hate to see anyone throwing their life away. I really do.”

  Erin nodded. “I know… I saw it in foster care… it only takes a few steps to go from being an honest, hardworking citizen to someone operating on the wrong side of the law, as if you had no conscience in the first place. I’d hate to see that happen to Mary Lou’s son. I wouldn’t want to see her hurt.” Erin’s eyes were attracted back to the entrance of the mine by a group of people who suddenly started talking louder, but then they quieted again and whispered among themselves, giving nothing away. “But I don’t want my friends to get hurt either. He came here with you, right?”

  Beaver took her time answering, chewing slowly on her gum while she watched Campbell with his mother.

  “We came separately,” she said finally. “We didn’t want to attract attention by being seen together. We expected it to be deserted, no witnesses. When we saw the vehicles, I had to investigate further.”

  “So if you came separately, you don’t know what he might have done before you got here.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “And he doesn’t know what you did before he got here.”

  “No.”

  “And you both hid your cars, so no one knows how long you were here ahead of time and whether you were here before me and the others. Or whether you had time to rig up some kind of booby trap.”

  Beaver gazed steadily at Erin. “That’s right,” she agreed. “You know I’m a federal agent. What are the chances that I would give up my whole career to pursue some treasure that probably doesn’t even exist?”