Finders Keepers

Bullshit you are, only girls do that.

Maybe, but he felt decidedly woozy, and realized part of the problem was that since opening the trunk he had forgotten to breathe. He inhaled deeply, whooshed it out, and inhaled again. All the way down to his toes, it felt like. His head cleared, but his heart was whamming harder than ever and his hands were shaking.

Those bank envelopes will be empty. You know that, don’t you? People find buried money in books and movies, but not in real life.

Only they didn’t look empty. They looked stuffed.

Pete started to reach for one, then gasped when he heard rustling on the other side of the stream. He whirled around and saw two squirrels there, probably thinking the weeklong thaw meant spring had arrived, making merry in the dead leaves. They raced up a tree, tails twitching.

Pete turned back to the trunk and grabbed one of the bank envelopes. The flap wasn’t sealed. He flipped it up with a finger that felt numb, even though the temperature now had to be riding right around forty. He squeezed the envelope open and looked inside.

Money.

Twenties and fifties.

‘Holy Jesus God Christ in heaven,’ Pete Saubers whispered.

He pulled out the sheaf of bills and tried to count, but at first his hands were shaking too badly and he dropped some. They fluttered in the grass, and before he scrambled them up, his overheated brain assured him that Ulysses Grant had actually winked at him from one of the bills.

He counted. Four hundred dollars. Four hundred in this one envelope, and there were dozens of them.

He stuffed the bills back into the envelope – not an easy job, because now his hands were shaking worse than Grampa Fred’s in the last year or two of his life. He flipped the envelope into the trunk and looked around, eyes wide and bulging. Traffic sounds that had always seemed faint and far and unimportant in this overgrown stretch of ground now sounded close and threatening. This was not Treasure Island; this was a city of over a million people, many now out of work, and they would love to have what was in this trunk.

Think, Pete Saubers told himself. Think, for God’s sake. This is the most important thing that’s ever happened to you, maybe the most important thing that ever will happen to you, so think hard and think right.

What came to mind first was Tina, snuggled up next to the wall in his bed. What would you do if you found a treasure? he had asked.

Give it to Daddy and Mommy, she had replied.

But suppose Mom wanted to give it back?

It was an important question. Dad never would – Pete knew that – but Mom was different. She had strong ideas about what was right and what wasn’t. If he showed them this trunk and what was inside it, it might lead to the worst arkie-barkie about money ever.

‘Besides, give it back to who?’ Pete whispered. ‘The bank?’

That was ridiculous.

Or was it? Suppose the money really was pirate treasure, only from bank robbers instead of buccaneers? But then why was it in envelopes, like for withdrawals? And what about all those black notebooks?

He could consider such things later, but not now; what he had to do now was act. He looked at his watch and saw it was already quarter to eleven. He still had time, but he had to use it.

‘Use it or lose it,’ he whispered, and began tossing the Granite State Bank cash envelopes into the cloth grocery bag that held the hammer and chisel. He placed the bag on top of the embankment and covered it with his jacket. He crammed the plastic wrap back into the trunk, closed the lid, and muscled the trunk back into the hole. He paused to wipe his forehead, which was greasy with dirt and sweat, then seized the spade and began to shovel like a maniac. He got the trunk covered – mostly – then seized the bag and his jacket and ran back along the path toward home. He would hide the bag in the back of his closet, that would do to start with, and see if there was a message from his mother on the answering machine. If everything was okay on the Mom front (and if Dad hadn’t come home early from therapy – that would be horrible), he could whip back to the stream and do a better job of concealing the trunk. Later he might check out the notebooks, but as he made his way home on that su

He thought, I’ll have to take a shower. And clean the dirt out of the bathtub after, so she doesn’t ask what I was doing outside when I was supposed to be sick. I have to be really careful, and I can’t tell anyone. No one at all.

In the shower, he had an idea.

1978

Home is the place that when you go there, they have to take you in, but when Morris arrived at the house on Sycamore Street, there were no lights to brighten the evening gloom and no one to welcome him at the door. Why would there be? His mother was in New Jersey, lecturing about how a bunch of nineteenth century businessmen had tried to steal America. Lecturing to grad students who would probably go on to steal everything they could lay their hands on as they chased the Golden Buck. Some people would undoubtedly say that Morris had chased a few Golden Bucks of his own in New Hampshire, but that wasn’t so. He hadn’t gone there for money.

He wanted the Biscayne in the garage and out of sight. Hell, he wanted the Biscayne gone, but that would have to wait. His first priority was Pauline Muller. Most of the people on Sycamore Street were so wedded to their televisions once prime time started that they wouldn’t have noticed a UFO if one landed on their lawn, but that wasn’t true of Mrs Muller; the Bellamys’ next-door neighbor had raised snooping to a fine art. So he went there first.

‘Why, look who it is!’ she cried when she opened the door … just as if she hadn’t been peering out her kitchen window when Morris pulled into the driveway. ‘Morrie Bellamy! Big as life and twice as handsome!’

Morris produced his best aw-shucks smile. ‘How you doin, Mrs Muller?’

She gave him a hug which Morris could have done without but dutifully returned. Then she turned her head, setting her wattles in motion, and yelled, ‘Bert! Bertie! It’s Morrie Bellamy!’

From the living room came a triple grunt that might have been how ya doin.

‘Come in, Morrie! Come in! I’ll put on coffee! And guess what?’ She gave her u

‘Sounds delicious, but I just got back from Boston. Drove straight through. I’m pretty beat. Just didn’t want you to see lights next door and call the police.’

She gave a monkey-shriek of laughter. ‘You’re so thoughtful! But you always were. How’s your mom, Morrie?’

‘Fine.’

He had no idea. Since his stint in reform school at seventeen and his failure to make a go of City College at twenty-one, relations between Morris and Anita Bellamy amounted to the occasional telephone call. These were frosty but civil. After one final argument the night of his arrest for breaking and entering and assorted other goodies, they had basically given up on each other.

‘You’ve really put on some muscle,’ Mrs Muller said. ‘The girls must love that. You used to be such a scrawny thing.’

‘Been building houses—’

‘Building houses! You! Holy gosh! Bertie! Morris has been building houses!’

This produced a few more grunts from the living room.

‘But then the work dried up, so I came back here. Mom said I was welcome to use the place unless she managed to rent it, but I probably won’t stay long.’

How right that turned out to be.

‘Come in the living room, Morrie, and say hello to Bert.’