The Gladstone Bag (31 page)

“We came to see what you have in your flour bin,” said Theonia. “No!” Forgetting to shut off the water, Bubbles rushed across the kitchen and spread-eagled himself in front of the bin. “You can’t! It’th mine!”

“What the hell’s eatin’ you?” Quite effortlessly, Vincent took his pudgy friend under the armpits and set him aside. “Get me a long-handled spoon or somethin’.” Meek as a whipped dog, Bubbles slunk over to the pegboard and took down a huge skimming ladle with a handle fully a yard long.

Vincent stuck the ladle down as far as it would go and began to stir.

Half a second later, he was staring down at a length of chain looped around the handle and two ancient coins resting in the scoop. He blew off the flour and they shone bright gold.

“Mighty Jehu, Bubbles! Who have you been robbing?”

“Pocapuk,” moaned the cook. “I found the treasure.”

“I’ll be damned!” Vincent was stirring up a miniature whirlwind by now. “What’s all these pebbles in here for?”

Theonia picked one out of the ladle and rubbed it on her sleeve. “I believe they’re rough-cut emeralds,” she told him mildly. “Vincent, do be careful. You’re getting flour all over the kitchen. Emma, get a dishpan or something to put these in. How much more is there, Bubbles?”

The cook only shrugged his shoulders.

“Why the hell couldn’t you have packed it in plastic bags or somethin’?” Vincent had flour up his nose by now and spoke through a run of sneezes. “Why didn’t you let on you’d found it? Christ, Bubbles, you weren’t plannin’ to steal the stuff? Not you.”

“Yeth, I wath!” Furious, desperate, almost in tears, Bubbles sounded like a defiant six-year-old. “I need it for the hothpithe. Our funding’th run out. We’ll have to clothe the doorth if we don’t get money thomehow. I can’t thand that, Vinthe.”

“Okay, simmer down.” Vincent reached out a huge, floury hand to pat his friend’s heaving shoulder. “I can see how you feel. But damn it, Bubbles, use your head. How did you think you were goin’ to market pirate gold?”

Bubbles sniffed a mighty sniff. “I wath planning to pray for guidanthe.”

“You’d o’ guided yourself straight into jail, that’s what you’d o’ done. Don’t you know there’s rules and regulations about buried treasure? This ain’t your land, it’s Mrs. Sabine’s. If anybody’s got a right to this stuff, she does. Where’d you find it, anyways?”

“Right down in the cove, over by Alding’th cottage. I wath digging for clamth our firtht day out, and there it wath. I jutht thcooped up the treasure with my clamming rake and hid it under the quahogth. I wath planning to go back for more, but the cottagerth came and I haven’t had the chanthe.”

Vincent stood there shaking his head for a long minute, then he heaved a sigh that came all the way from his boots. “Can you beat that? Right in front of our noses all this time. It must o’ got hove up in the winter storms or somethin’. Earthquake, maybe. Bubbles, I’m jiggered if I know what to do.”

“The first thing,” said Theonia practically, “is for us to keep our mouths shut.”

“And the second is to get Parker Pence out here,” Emma added. “He handles all Adelaide’s business; he’ll know what to do. I’ll phone him at his office tomorrow. This may be a break for you, Vincent. Knowing Parker, I can guarantee he won’t let this island go out of the family so long as he thinks there might be one single emerald left under those mudflats. If the Pocapuk legend is true, there ought to be a great deal more treasure where this came from.”

She reached into the dishpan and picked up one of the dull green pebbles. “I must say there’s something awfully convincing about an emerald as big as one’s thumb. You’ll surely get some kind of finder’s fee in any case, Bubbles.”

“But that won’t be enough to keep the hothpithe going!”

“How do you know it won’t? However, I expect there’ll be all sorts of red tape to untangle before anybody gets anything. In the meantime”—Emma tossed back the emerald and turned to the stricken cook, her eyes asparkle and her face aglow—“we’ll run a benefit.”

This was no elderly woman oppressed with the weight of her long-gone youth, her lost beloved, her dying friend, by a decaying house, and an unsolved list of catastrophes. This was Emma, booted and spurred and ready to ride.

“So let’s start getting organized. Theonia, you’re much cleverer with your hands than I; you’d better take the Gladstone bag back with you and get the fairies’ jewelry in order. Then you can begin studying your role.”

“What role? I’m no actress.”

“Of course you are. We need a Fairy Queen for
Iolanthe
and you’re the very one. I think I’ll ask Alexei to be the Lord Chancellor,” Emma added meditatively. “He already knows the songs. And can’t you just see him with dear little gauze wings sprouting out of his shoulder blades? I’ll invite him to stay at my house for the duration.”

Theonia smiled. “That’ll give the ladies in the garden club something to buzz about.”

“Yes, won’t they have fun? The proceeds from the performance can go to the hospice fund, but that won’t be till next April. Right now is when we’ve got to get cracking. A lawn fete here on Pocapuk before Peter starts dredging and word gets out about the treasure, don’t you think? We’ll bring people out in boats and have a gala tea with music and perhaps a make-believe treasure hunt with lots of funny prizes. I’ll alert my orchestra and work out the details. Vincent, you’ll see to the advertising and the boats. Bubbles will manage the food; Neil can help me plan the treasure hunt. Sandy and Bernice must have quaint costumes. With mobcaps, I think, unless we can get hold of that awful hair goo of theirs and bury it somewhere.”

“Don’t rap the goo,” said Vincent. “It saved my kid’s life, don’t forget.”

“True enough. Very well, then, Sandy may have her goo, but she’ll keep it under her cap. Which reminds me, Bubbles and I still have another bit of business to clear up.”

“Thuch ath what?” the cook asked nervously.

“Such as your keeping Alding Fath doped with tranquilizers because she’d come too close to the truth about your secret cache when she was telling fortunes at the dinner table that first night. Naturally when she mentioned black and white and jewels she didn’t mean Shag Rock, as Joris Groot tried to make us believe, she was talking about the emeralds in the flour bin. Furthermore, it was you who hit me on the head when I happened to stumble in the wrong place, wasn’t it? What did you use, a rolling pin?”

“Heaventh no! Jutht a big wooden thpoon. I didn’t want to hurt you, Mithith Kelling, but I wath dethperate about the hothpithe.”

“All right, Bubbles, I understand. Now you leave the hospice to me and concentrate on nursing Alding Fath’s vibrations back into working order. Peter will need her to help find the rest of Pocapuk’s treasure, I daresay, and I shall enjoy having her around.”

There’d be time for quiet cups of tea and pleasant chats now and then. There’d be Black John Sendick dashing about in his absurd sweatshirt and perhaps even writing something scary enough to be salable now that he’d had a taste of real-life horrors. There’d be Alexei Radunov to play courtier when he wasn’t too involved with Rasputin and Queen Victoria. There’d be Sandy, Bernice, and Neil to do her every bidding, there’d be Vincent to make sure they did it right. There’d be Tweeters Arbuthnot dropping by on his way to see the puffins. There’d be no time for hang gliding if she was to rescue Bubbles’s hospice from penury and failure, but not even Emma Kelling could do everything. Granted, they’d got off to a shaky start, but all in all this was shaping up to be quite an agreeable summer.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1989 by Charlotte MacLeod

cover design by Mauricio Diaz

978-1-4532-7861-1

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