Project Sweet Life (13 page)

Do I really need to say that we spent the rest of the weekend trying to figure out where Lei-Lei might have hidden that money?

“Mrs. Yee’s mother told her it was in a very safe place,” Curtis said for the hundredth time. “That means that, wherever Lei-Lei hid it, it’s probably still there.”

“But Mrs. Yee also said that her mother told her it was someplace where no one would ever find it,” Victor reminded him.

It was Sunday afternoon, and the three of us were pacing back and forth inside the bomb shelter. We had
only three weeks left to complete Project Sweet Life—to somehow make the entire seven thousand dollars we needed to prove to our dads that we had spent the summer working. The Lei-Lei Tang fortune—more than twenty thousand dollars in 1885 money—would be more than enough. But if we didn’t find it, Curtis, Victor, and I might never get to see one another again, except in school.

Victor stopped pacing. “It’s pointless!” he said. “We’ll never find it.”

“It’s
not
pointless,” Curtis said, determined to keep pacing. “We
will
!”

“It
is
pointless,” I said, unsure whether to pace or not. “But we still can’t give up. There’s too much at stake.”

We were alternating between hope (Curtis) and despair (Victor) and everything in between (me). It didn’t help that it was the second week in August, and after a cool, comfortable summer, a heat wave had descended on the city like an itchy wool blanket. It should have been cool inside an underground concrete pillbox, but it wasn’t, especially since we’d sold our air-conditioner seven weeks earlier. It felt like we were in one of those metal boxes you see in prison movies, where they put
prisoners out in the yard to bake in the sun.

As he was pacing, Curtis happened to pass
Trains and Totem Poles
, the book on the history of Tacoma.

“Wait,” he said. “Maybe there’s a clue in here.”

I took this to be a very bad sign. If Curtis was resorting to actual research, he was clearly at the end of his rope.

But he opened the book and started reading the section about the city’s expulsion of the Chinese.

“Well,” Curtis said, “everything Mrs. Yee said was true. The city kicked out all the Chinese on November third, 1885—a Tuesday, just like she said.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “But even if the story is true, Lei-Lei could have hidden that money anywhere. We still don’t have any idea where to look.”

“Not anywhere,” Victor said thoughtfully. “It would have to be somewhere
in
the China Tunnels.”

“Which we and lots of others have already explored and didn’t find anything,” I said.

“Or in some area around Chinatown,” Victor said.

“Which doesn’t even exist anymore!” I said. We’d already gone over this again and again.

“No, wait,” Victor said. “Let’s just think about this logically. Years after Chinatown had been destroyed,
Lei-Lei was still telling her daughter that the money was in a very safe place and that no one would ever find it. So what are the possibilities?”

“She could have buried it,” Curtis said.

“I doubt it,” Victor said. “It was supposed to be a temporary hiding place, remember?”

“Then where?” I said. “What’s left?”

Victor pursed his lips. “
Think
. Where could Lei-Lei have hidden the money? Where
would
she have hidden the money?”

“I don’t know!” I said, exasperated.

But suddenly Victor’s eyes grew wide. “I do.”

“You do?” I said. “Tell me more.”

“What do we know?” Victor said, suddenly excited. “The money was stolen from the men and hidden by Lei-Lei late Monday night. The whole Chinese community, including Lei-Lei, was rounded up and kicked out of town early Tuesday morning. And on Wednesday, the whole Chinese settlement was burned down, then pushed into the waters of Commencement Bay. But when Lei-Lei hid the money on Monday night, she didn’t mean for it to be hidden forever. What kind of temporary hiding place is
that
good?”

“I don’t know,” Curtis said. “What kind?”

“Don’t you see?” Victor said. “Something happened after she hid it on Monday night that changed everything.”

“Yeah,” Curtis said. “She got shipped off to Oregon!”

Victor shook his head hard. “No! Don’t you see? The answer is so
obvious.
”

It was late in the summer, and I was now
very
tired of cryptic talk and dramatic pauses. “Victor,” I said, “get to the point. Where do you think the money’s hidden?”

“In the water offshore from where Chinatown used to be!” he said. “Maybe Lei-Lei hid the money underneath a dock, or just under the tide line. It was only supposed to be for a few hours. But then the white men pushed the whole settlement into the bay, right on top of the money.”

Curtis and I thought about this. Was Victor jumping to conclusions now? Maybe so, but it was still a pretty good theory.

“Mrs. Yee did say that in the months after the Chinese got kicked out, Lei-Lei tried to come back to Tacoma to get the money,” Curtis said. “But then she gave up. She must have finally learned that Chinatown
had been burned and pushed into the bay. That’s how she would know that the money was somewhere where no one would ever find it.” Curtis looked at me, blue eyes blazing. “I think Victor is right. Big-time bonus points!”

“But if it really is under all those burned-up shacks and shanties,” I said, “how do
we
get to it?”

“It
was
under them,” Victor said. “That doesn’t mean it’s
still
under them. It’s been over a century since this happened. All the wood from the shanties would have long since rotted away in the water.”

“Well, how do we know that whatever the money was stored in hasn’t rotted away too?” I said. “If it was a metal or wooden box or a leather satchel, that’d be long gone.”

“But Mrs. Yee said the money
is
safely hidden,” Victor pointed out. “If that’s what her great-grandmother told her grandmother, it must have been stored in something waterproof, like porcelain. The Chinese were big on porcelain. There’s a reason why china is called ‘china,’ you know.”

“Sunken treasure?” I said, finally giving in to the wild speculation. “This is the coolest thing we’ve done so far!”

“Well, what are we waiting for?” Curtis said. “Let’s go get ourselves some scuba equipment!”

“Not so fast,” Victor said. “Before we do anything else, I still need to check some things out at the library.”

“The library again?” Curtis said, clearly disappointed. But this made me feel better, because it meant he was back to his usual research-hating self.

Down at the main branch of the Tacoma Public Library, we didn’t even bother asking the research librarian for help.

After a half hour or so, Victor emerged from the online newspaper archives with a satisfied grin on his face.

“It’s all true,” he whispered. “There really was a bank robbery at Tacoma’s biggest bank, the National Bank of Commerce, the night of Monday, November second, 1885. Over twenty thousand dollars was taken. Can you imagine what that would be worth today?”

“No,” Curtis said. “What would it be worth?”

Victor gestured back to the stacks. “I could go look it up.”

“What do you think it is?” I said. “Gold?”

“Well, I don’t think bank notes were in widespread use yet,” Victor said. “So yeah, it’s probably gold or silver. I could go look that up, too.”

Curtis recoiled like a vampire from daylight. “Let’s just get out of this place!”

But as long as we were downtown, we decided to stop in at the Paper Lantern, the Chinese restaurant where we’d learned about the entrance to the China Tunnels.

We took a booth, and the same older woman who had served us before came to give us menus.

“We found what was right in front of the faces,” Curtis told her, referring to the clue she’d given us in the fortune cookie. The woman seemed much more relaxed than she had before. Maybe it was because she was alone this time; I didn’t see her husband back in the kitchen.

“Did you now?” the woman said.

“But it didn’t lead where we thought it would,” Curtis went on. “So now we’re looking for something else. Something that was hidden a long time ago by a woman named Lei-Lei Tang.”

Her face registered absolutely nothing.

“You know who she is!” I said. I was sure I was right. When you mention a name to someone, they usually
react in one of two ways: recognition or confusion. They never look completely blank.

The woman flattened a menu. “I suppose I’ve heard that name before.”

“Is it true?” Curtis asked. “Does the money really exist?”

“Who can say?” she said.

“We think we know where it is,” I said. I think we all knew that if there was anyone we could trust, it was this woman.

“That money has been missing for far too long,” the woman said. I realized we didn’t even know her name.

Victor fiddled with the soy sauce. “If we find it, we won’t keep it,” he said. “Not all of it, anyway. Just seven thousand dollars that we need for…something. The rest…” He looked over at the jar on the counter, the one for donations for the monument to commemorate the expulsion of the Chinese. “The rest we’ll donate to the Reconciliation Project.”

Even as Curtis was saying this, I knew it was exactly the right thing to do.

“In that case,” she said with a smile, “I hope you do find it. Now why don’t I make you some lunch?”

“Um,” Victor said. “We don’t have any money.”

She winked at us. “That’s okay. This one’s on me.”

It may have been the best meal I’ve ever eaten. The vegetables were fresh and crunchy, and the meat was light and juicy. It wasn’t too salty or too sweet. I like my mom’s cooking, but this was better.

After lunch, she gave us each a fortune cookie that we broke open on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. This time she hadn’t made any additions to the fortunes, so we were getting the unfiltered truth.

I read my fortune. “
Mind the smallest detail
,” I said, “
or you may have to begin again
.”

“
A familiar face is proof that you’re not long lost,
” Curtis read.

“
A seat for the weary is always welcome
,” Victor said. He sighed. “Fortune cookies. They’re so vague, they can be applied to any situation.”

“Now what?” I asked.

“What else?” Curtis said. “Now we do some diving!”

The good news is that Curtis, Victor, and I were licensed scuba divers. Better still, in our state fifteen was the age
that we could legally do a dive on our own.

The bad news is that none of us had our own equipment. And renting masks and fins and tanks and regulators and weight-belts is expensive.

Did I mention we had no money?

We looked up the nearest dive shop, then rode our bikes over there. It was part of an old marina in Point Defiance Park, way north of downtown.

The Rocky Bottom was a little shack of a store hidden in a maze of creaky docks and warped wooden boathouses. Curtis stepped up to the man behind the counter. He was brawny and sunwashed, with one green eye and one blue. He looked exactly like a diver should look; there was even a tattoo of Ariel from
The Little Mermaid
on his shoulder.

“We need some diving equipment for a couple of days,” Curtis said bluntly. “But we don’t have any money.”

“Well,” said the man, “that’s definitely a problem.”

“Just hear us out,” Curtis said. “We know for a fact where a huge treasure is located in Puget Sound. It cannot miss. If you let us have the equipment for free, we’ll give you five percent of the total take of anything we find.”

The man thought for a second. “That is an interesting proposal. How about this instead? You three work for me for one full day, and I’ll lend you the equipment you need for up to three days.”

Curtis, Victor, and I eyed one another. It wasn’t the worst bargain in the world.

“Okay,” Curtis said earnestly. “But you’re really going to regret it when we find that treasure.”

“This time next week, I know I’ll be absolutely kicking myself,” the dive-shop guy said. “See you tomorrow morning.”

It’s a long ride from our houses to Point Defiance, so we had to leave early in order to be there by a reasonable hour. It was the earliest I’d gotten up since summer began. In spite of the risk of the total failure of Project Sweet Life, I still considered the fact that I’d been able to sleep in every day since the Saturday of our garage sale to be something of an achievement.

“You boys know how to clean a boat?” said Bill, the dive-shop guy.

“My dad has a boat,” Curtis said. This was true.
We’d been out on it lots of times. But even I knew that cleaning a boat, especially one that’s been in salt water, was a chore and a half. I’d heard Curtis complain about it often enough.

Bill led us down to the docks, then winched a sailboat out of the water and up into one of the barnlike boathouses where vessels were dry-docked. Seagulls rustled up in the rafters. The August heat had caused some sort of algae bloom out in Puget Sound, so the whole area smelled like rotting seaweed.

“The boat’s been moored all summer and most of the spring,” he said.

“In salt water?” Curtis said. “
That
was stupid! Who’s the idiotic owner, anyway?”

“I am,” Bill said.

“Ah!” Curtis said. “And I bet you had an
excellent
reason for keeping it moored, don’t you?”

“It’s a rental,” Bill said. “Which means I want it right back in the water when you’re done. But nice save.” He turned toward the exit. “Between the three of you, you should be able to clean it inside and out before the end of the day.”