The bell rang, and the teacher caught her at the door. “Chris, is everything okay?”
“Great! I just got a cool compass that I’ve been thinking about!” She ran off down the hall.
Weird little kid, the teacher thought. But in a good way.
Chris burst through the door of her grandmother’s upstairs apartment, rolling in her bike. She ran right for her room. She rifled through papers and magazines and library books on her little desk. It became frantic. She ran out into the living room.
“Grandma, have you seen my green notebook? . . . Grandma?”
“In here.”
Chris ran to the kitchen. “Grandma, what are you doing reading my notebook?”
“I wouldn’t read it if it was your diary because that would be private.” The old woman turned the page with sausage fingers. “But you left it open on your desk. All these numbers and complex diagrams, for a child your age no less. So this is how you always get straight A’s?” She handed the book back. “I’m very proud of you. Just remember not to care what anyone thinks; you’re going to do great things someday.”
“Thanks, Grandma.” A kiss on the cheek, and then she was off again with her bike.
Today would be a watershed, but it didn’t look that way at first, taking two hours to find the next coin. But shortly after, her hands hit something else in the soil. She pulled out a piece of wood. A short thin plank with rusty rails on each end like it had been part of a packing crate. She tossed it aside and began excavating with vigor. The hole was wider than her others, exposing the surface of two more broken planks. She lifted them up and froze. Six more coins in a cluster. There was now no doubt that this wasn’t just stray dropped money. The folklore was true. Chris wanted to tell the world, but “I can’t tell anybody.”
She made all the required documentation in her notebook, then taped everything to her stomach again, and pedaled her bike home like a maniac.
Now she had a problem. An embarrassment of riches, so to speak. If her hunch was correct, she would quickly run out of room under her dresser drawers. And the bag she taped beneath her shirt wasn’t going to cut it much longer. She started taping coins inside her shoes, but that just made pedaling too hard. She had a stroke of brilliance.
The next day she raced home from the fields again. Boys stopped her bike at the corner of the apartments. There was a basket on her handlebars with daisies.
“Hey, Milk Crate! What have you got there?”
“None of your business.”
The tallest boy looked in the basket. “Textbooks? Ewww!” A punch on the shoulder and they let her go.
Chris ran up to her room and removed the rubber strap holding the books together. She opened an old algebra text that she had found discarded behind the school. In the middle of the carved-out pages were her coins for the day.
Next order of business: Improve storage. This would be more difficult. She stared out the window. Then she got down on the floor and began removing tape from under dresser drawers . . .
And so it went. Days, weeks, then months, slowly building her haul. She had depleted all that apparently could be found from that first crate, and there had been a dispiriting lull. But it was followed by the wooden remnants of a second box. Then a hundred yards south, the discovery of the next planks.
A year passed. Then two years. At first it had been pure excitement. Nothing goes together better than kids and buried treasure. But now that she was getting older: “Am I doing something wrong?”
Chris sat at her usual computer in the library the next afternoon. She looked up site after site on salvage laws. She read about how if something sinks in a body of water, under certain circumstances, it’s up for grabs. Then she went back to meteorology pages showing detailed computer models and maps of the tidal surge from the 1928 storm. The highest water levels rose twenty feet over the field she’d been working. She sat back and bit her lower lip in thought. “Technically, the treasure did sink. And I’m the finder.”
Back to work.
More time passed, more trips to the cane fields. But all good things must come to an end. Chris’s efforts dwindled in results as she depleted her find, until there was nothing. And she was sure about it, too, because she had dug her scientific sampling holes far and wide in the logical drift directions.
She was happy and sad at the same time. What an adventure it had been. On the other hand, Chris always felt unanchored when she didn’t have an obsessive goal to focus her mental energy. She would just have to come up with something else.
It only took a few days. She rode her bike as fast as she could, hyper as hell, down to the high school. She knocked on a door . . .
Chapter 5
South Florida
The Plymouth Satellite wound its way east on U.S. Highway 1 and crested the bridge out of Key Largo at mile 107. Then it entered what locals call “the Eighteen-Mile Stretch,” a no-man’s-land of mangroves and wild scrub from the bottom tip of the mainland to the first dribbles of civilization at Florida City. Do not break down, do not run out of gas.
Coleman sucked on his gator bottle and blew smoke out the window. “I never heard about trying to explode birds.”
“A sad state of affairs,” said Serge. “And not just Alka-Seltzer. Do any kind of Internet search on animal abuse, and it brings up a trail of tears. Pelicans get it especially bad for some reason, and now these ass-heads are filming the brutality and proudly posting it on the web. Rice is another one.”
“Rice, like the San Francisco treat?”
Serge nodded. “People feed uncooked rice to birds, waiting for them to burst. It’s another myth, and luckily, in that case, the birds aren’t poisoned and can fly away. But the intent is still there. I can’t get my head around that brand of cowardice.”
“But, Serge, there must be another way.”
“There is.” Serge checked the clip in his pistol and stowed it under the seat. “That’s one reason why a lot of people have stopped throwing rice at weddings. Instead they hand out bags of birdseed. Of course they don’t realize that the rice is safe, but I’m heartened to see they care enough to err on the side of caution.”
“You said it was one reason they stopped throwing rice?”
“The other reason is all the documented slips and falls on the tiny kernels,” said Serge. “It dampens the mood when the lovebirds are driving away with tin cans bouncing behind the car and then Grandma Petunia takes a spectacular header in the driveway.”
“You know, I admire the way you respect animals,” said Coleman.
“Really?”
“Yeah, I like my little nature friends,” said Coleman. “Squirrels dig my potato chips.”
“You are noble in that way,” said Serge. “Although the salt contributes to hypertension. Those tiny fellows are wound way too tight as it is. Especially the flying ones. What is their fucking hurry? I mean, damn, just slow your roll, man.”
“What about jelly beans?”
“Diabetes,” said Serge.
The Plymouth entered southern Miami on the Dixie Highway. Soon, they passed a church, and Serge craned his neck around as people entered. “Well, I’ll be.”