Topher handed the shovel to the kid. It was almost as big as he was, so he wasn’t all that effective even in the sandy soil. After a few minutes Jackie handed the spade back.
“I’m the cap’n. You’re the crew,” he said. “You dig.” He folded his arms across his narrow chest. His school shirt was already dirty, and it occurred to Topher that explaining the dirt might prove difficult. Ashley was going to have Topher’s ass in a sling before this escapade was over.
But he was surprised to discover that he didn’t care. If Ashley was so sunk in her black-and-white view of the world that she couldn’t, for one minute, admit to miracles or pirates or buried treasure, then he felt sorry for her.
He stared down at the boy and decided maybe believing was better than the alternative.
He got to work, digging a three-foot hole but predictably finding nothing. It was a testament to Jackie’s wide-eyed innocence that Topher didn’t feel immediately discouraged.
“You think someone else found it?” the boy asked, his faith in the treasure palpably real.
“Maybe. Or maybe we didn’t go due west. What if we made a trench north and south along this line?” He indicated the direction.
The kid nodded eagerly, and Topher went back to work. He dug for a good twenty minutes—long enough to wonder what failure might do to Jackie’s simple faith. Had he made a mistake in following the child’s lead?
And then his spade hit something.
“What was that?” The kid’s voice almost leaped from his throat.
“Probably a rock,” Topher said as he stepped on the spade again. But if it was a rock, it was a big one and made a funny sound against the shovel.
Jackie got down on his knees and started pushing the sand out of the hole with his hands, uncovering a piece of wood that might have been a box once.
The excitement and surprise that washed through Topher almost cauterized his cynicism. Holy crap. They had found something!
Topher got down and helped the boy, his heart pounding in his chest as he dug the cool, sandy soil away from the object, which was a small box about eighteen inches wide and about four inches high.
It wasn’t anything like the proverbial treasure chest in pirate movies. The box was flatter and much smaller. And the wood was heavily damaged, falling away in splinters as they tried to excavate it from the soil, leaving only the black corroded hinges and edge details.
“It’s falling apart,” the boy said in an urgent tone as Topher removed the top portion of the box in several long pieces, revealing several additional objects below.
“What’s that?” Jackie asked, pointing to a shiny object that caught the sunlight filtering through the pines.
“It’s an inkwell, I think,” Topher said, pulling a small cut-glass vial from the hole.
“What’s an inkwell?” the kid asked.
He stared up at the child, born in the twenty-first century, and explained about ink and quills. “I think this might have been a writing box.”
“What’s that?”
“It was a place to keep paper and stuff for writing, and it looks like it had a hinge on the top to provide a slightly angled surface to write on.”
“You think this is the box Rose Howland wrote her letters on?”
Damn. The question set Topher back on his heels. What had he just done?
If this was truly an artifact from the eighteenth century, or something that had once been owned and used by Rose Howland, then it deserved to be treated as an archaeological artifact. They should stop digging and start thinking about preserving.
He put the inkwell aside, pulled out his cell phone, and started taking pictures. “I think maybe we should leave this where it is and call someone who knows something about history,” he said.
“But…Mom’s going to be really unhappy about this.”
Topher studied the hole he’d made. He didn’t think there was any pirate treasure here. But there was a mystery that needed solving. The only question was whether Ashley wanted to solve it.
“I’m not sure about that. But you can keep it a secret until I talk to her about it.”
“Okay. But she can get real mad sometimes.”
Topher almost smiled. “I can take it. Don’t worry. I’m going to go get a tarp and cover up what we’ve found for now, and tomorrow I’m going to find someone who knows something about history and archaeology.”
“Okay.”
“But in the meantime, you should start working on your report. Because I think finding Rose Howland’s letter