where did you find the box?" I tossed out.
"We was readin' the squiggles on the map wrong from the beginnin'," Nana explained, as she and everyone else whipped out their own personal copy. "This squiggle here is the fork in the river, not an imitation wave. And all these other little squiggles are a little waterfall, not the big one at the Secret Falls. And the X shows where you gotta stop, not where the treasure is buried. You can't go no farther there 'cause the river narrows down too much and gets too shallow."
"After we reached the impasse and went onshore to eat our box lunches, we found the little waterfall in a lovely glade," Tilly continued. "But we have one of the Dicks to thank for finding the treasure."
Dick Teig shrugged. "It was nothin'."
"Go ahead," Helen urged proudly. "Tell Emily what you did."
He lifted his shoulders again. "I sat down."
Applause. High fives. Laughter.
"On what?" I asked, noting that the teak box wasn't splintered into a bazillion pieces.
"A heap of rocks by the waterfall. It looked pretty stable until I sat myself down, then the whole pile dislodged beneath me."
Hunh. I guess even rock piles had a maximum weight limit. "Is that where you found the box?" I asked. "Under the rocks?"
"Show her, Dick," Grace Stolee instructed her husband.
Dick unwedged himself from his seat on the sofa and handed me his camcorder. "Just press the button there, and it'll play back."
I set the box back down on the vanity, punched the button on the camcorder, and watched the action unfold on the display screen.
Dick Teig, flat on his butt near a little waterfall, a surprised look his face. Laughter in the background.
Dick shaking his fist at the displaced rocks behind him. Growly noises from his throat.
Dick tilting his head as if he's just noticed something of interest in the cavity where the rocks collapsed.
Dick rolling over onto his hands and knees for a better look. More hoots and hollers, with people talking over each other.
The back of Dick's head.
A blank screen.
I waited for the picture to return. And waited. And waited. "There's nothing on the screen," I fussed. "It's gone blank."
"I know what you're looking at," Dick Stolee spoke up. "It's not blank. That's just a close-up of Dick's head."
I squinted at the image. Oh! I should have been able to figure that out. Duh.
The picture wobbled, followed by a more steady shot. Okay. Here we go. Hands grappling at the rock. Yanking. Wrenching. Grunting. Muted gasps of surprise.
A close-up of the top of an old chest that looked to be the size of a shoe box. "Oh, my. That thing looks like a real antique. What's it made of? Looks like some kind of metal."
"Lead," said Tilly. "The perfect vault for a wooden box. It won't rust. It won't weather. And the lid was sealed so tightly, it didn't allow any moisture into the chamber that might have caused the teak to decay."
I scanned the floor of the cabin. "Did you bring the chest back with you, too?"
"It was much too heavy to transport in our kayaks," said Tilly. "And we weren't at all sure about handling the lead, so we left it there."
I returned my attention to the display screen to view fists beating on the lid. Dueling voices. An angry Uff da as someone broke a nail. A Swiss army knife angling into the picture. The lid of the chest being slowly levered off. Oohs. Aahs. An initial shot of the teak box lying within the lead chest. A slow three-sixty of the stunned reactions on everyone's face.
"Balls!" yelled Dick Teig. "Check out the time!"
Gasps. Shouts. Wails.
The floor seemed to tilt as the group struggled to their collective feet. Bumping. Shoving. Hysterically out of control. "How did that happen?" cried Helen. "It's a quarter past six! We'll never make dinner on time!"
Not only had my group lost all sense of direction, they seemed to have lost all sense of time. Wow. Folks back home were never going to believe this.
They rushed toward the door, jamming up in the tiny entryway like jellybeans escaping a narrow-necked bottle. "My camcorder!" Dick Stolee called back to me, extending his arm through the crowd.
As I attempted to depress the button to stop the replay, I stood motionless for a heartbeat, my eyes glued to the display screen as Bailey Howard's image stared back at me in the final frame. Oh, geesch! How could I have forgotten about Bailey? I was