Chapter 15
The letter arrives by certified mail two days before Christmas. When the mail carrier knocks on the door, Punkin flies to answer it, thinking it’s Ben bringing Chief for a walk. I follow her, wiping the flour from my hands with a dishcloth. We’ve been baking cookies.
Punkin turns to me with her disappointed face. “It’s for you,” she says.
The mail carrier avoids my gaze. Certified mail always means trouble, doesn’t it?
Especially when the return address is a law firm.
I sign the form and take the rest of the day’s mail—a credit card offer for Dad, a marketing mailer proclaiming that now is the perfect time to have all my windows replaced for a low introductory price.
Punkin is already back in the kitchen, earnestly cutting more Christmas shapes from the dough I’ve rolled out.
Snowmen and trees. She likes to alternate, for some reason.
She sticks the cookie cutter in the flour and then on the dough; wriggles the shape free and places it on the parchment paper that lines the cookie sheet, while I open the envelope and read the letter.
The law firm is employed by Topher Dumont.
They are authorized to inform me that, following my application for administration of the estate of Boswell Bankes Cooper in the county of Sussex, New York, they have lodged a claim against said estate in respect of a loan made between the claimant and Boswell Cooper on various dates in the years 2020 to 2023, the balance of which now totals two million three hundred and twelve thousand eight hundred and six dollars and ninety-one cents.
The lawyers respectfully remind me that, by the terms of the loan, if the account is determined to be in default, the claimant will be forced to begin repossession proceedings on the property against which the loan was secured.
Punkin looks up from the kitchen table. “Do we have any more green sprinkles?” she asks.
—
We tramp across the meadow toward Summerly.
The grass is low and brown, hunkered down for winter.
Not a breath of snow yet. For some reason I imagined all New England should be covered by snow by now, but Leah Cowles just laughed when I brought it up.
Coastal weather, she said. The last few years, they haven’t had much snow at all.
“Did you know this used to be a pond?” says Punkin.
“A pond? When?”
“In the olden days,” she tells me knowledgably.
“I guess that makes sense. It’s always muddy down there. Did you learn that at school?”
“No,” she says. “It was on one of Grandad’s old maps.”
I step over an old anthill. I’m carrying a bottle of my great-grandparents’ contraband hooch and I don’t want to drop it. “What else did you find out?”
“There used to be a springhouse next to the pond.”
“I’m not surprised. They had a lot of those in the olden days, before they invented refrigerators.”
“So a springhouse is a house that keeps things cool?”
“Yes. You dig it into the ground near some water. The water keeps the ground cool and that keeps the springhouse cool. Neat, huh?”
She looks across the muddy hollow. “I’ll bet it’s still there, under the ground. I’ll bet that’s where the treasure is and that’s why he put it on the map.”
I stop and turn to her.
“Elise Frossard,” I say, “you are not allowed to go digging around for that springhouse, do you hear me?”
“Why not?”
I narrow my eyes at her. “You haven’t already gone looking, have you?”
“Not with a shovel,” she says cagily.
“With what, then?”
“Chief’s nose. I didn’t know it was bad!” Her eyes fill with tears.
“Oh, honey. Come here.” I open my arms and she steps between them, holding the plate of cookies to her chest. “It wasn’t bad.
I’m glad you’re curious. I’m glad you’re so smart with maps.
It’s just that Grandad spent so much time looking for that treasure.
His whole life. He never got to do anything else, because all he could think about was finding that treasure.
And I don’t want that to happen to you, okay?
I want you to have a big life with lots of adventures.
And you can’t do that digging around this island all your life.
Chasing something that might not even exist.”
“Okay.” She chokes back a little sob, sniffs, and pulls back to look in my eyes. “But the treasure does exist, Mama. Just so you know. I can feel it in my toes.”
“Weird,” I say. “That’s exactly what your grandfather used to say.”
—
Chief spies us first. He races from between the trees and throws himself either at Punkin or the cookie plate, it’s hard to tell. I swipe the plate from her hand just before it drops. One cookie falls free, to be swept up by Chief’s tongue in an act of practiced thievery that leaves no trace.
From the Summerly driveway comes a whistle. Chief’s ears jerk to attention and he races back the way he came. An instant later, Ben appears.
“Wow. Are those for me?” he asks.
Punkin scrambles from the grass and takes the plate back from my hands. “I baked them myself.”
“You’re kidding me.” He pulls one from beneath the green tissue tent, nibbles off a snowman hat, and closes his eyes in rapture. “Stop. These have to be from the bakery, right? Nobody makes cookies this good in their own oven at home.”
“We do,” says Punkin. “We’re from France.”
“Fair point.” Ben steps forward, still holding the plate in one hand and the cookie in the other, and kisses my cheek. “Hey, you. Merry almost Christmas.”
“To you too. How was basketball practice?”
—
Punkin’s the one who convinced Ben to coach the girls’ basketball team at the Winthrop Island School. Who else?
Her train of logic was unanswerable. “You do know how to play basketball, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he admitted.
“I’ll bet you played in high school, right?”
“Maybe a little. But I’m busy in the afternoons, Elise. I have work to do.”
We were standing in the driveway at Summerly the day after Thanksgiving, having just returned Lola’s blanket and come outside again to find Ben mulching the last of the dead leaves into the compost pile.
“Ben,” she said, “I might be a little kid, but I happen to know that nobody does their gardening in the winter.”
Ben turned to me. “You put her up to this.”
I shrugged and said, “It’s up to you, Ben. The pay sucks and the hours are long.”
He set down the pitchfork and looked at Chief, who sat on his haunches with his tongue lolling out of his mouth, offering no moral support whatsoever. “What if I want to take it easy this winter, Elise? What then?”
Punkin looked up at him with her wide, wet eyes and said, “But there’s literally nobody else. You can’t let down a bunch of girls who only want to play basketball. They need you.”
What else could Ben do but shove his hands into the pockets of his thick plaid shacket, examine the windswept sky of cold blue, and say, “When does practice start?”
Practice started the Monday after Thanksgiving.
They’ve already played two games, one an away game at a parochial school in Providence, leaving on the noon ferry and returning on the last boat back.
They won both. Nobody recognized Ben—why would they?
He wore a Winthrop Basketball cap over his trademark hair and a Winthrop Basketball quarter-zip, and his new beard covers half his face.
People see what they expect to see. Nobody expects Coach Ressler from Winthrop Island School to be Ben Ressler, disgraced former NFL star.
Still, it’s only a matter of time before someone connects the dots.
And even under his Winthrop Island gear, you can’t mistake Ben for anything other than a guy who does sports for a living.
—
So my question is what you might call loaded, and Ben answers it intentionally.
“Practice was good,” he says. “We pick up again a couple days after Christmas.”
I hand him the bottle. “An early present. I kept one back from the buyer.”
“Are you serious? For me?”
“You strike me as a man who appreciates a vintage Scotch. Also, I didn’t have time to go out and buy anything.”
“We’ll open it up together, okay? Soon as I’m back from Boston.”
“Boston?”
“Sedge and Audrey invited me to spend Christmas with the Peabodys.”
“Oh,” I say.
But the word is smothered by Punkin’s outraged “What? You’re leaving? But you’re supposed to come to our house!”
“Honey, it’s okay.” I offer Ben an apologetic look. “We came over to invite you to Christmas Eve.”
“Mama’s roasting a whole entire duck,” says Punkin. “The French way. You have to come.”
Ben looks stricken. “But I thought you were flying home for Christmas. I mean, I just assumed—your family—”
“Totally okay. I should have spoken up earlier. I didn’t think.”
Chief settles on the ground and lays his muzzle on his paws.
The tears are welling in Punkin’s eyes. “Can’t you tell the Peabodys to buzz off?”
“Aw, sweetheart. I promised.” Ben crouches down to meet her eye to eye. “You know how it is when you make a promise.”
“You have to keep it.”
“That’s right.” He pats her head. “When you promise to be somewhere, and people make arrangements, you have to go.”
“Unless you’re sick.”
He takes her hand and lays it against his forehead. “What do you think? You feel any fever there?”
“Cool as a cucumber,” she says sadly.
“Darn it. Believe me, honey, I’d rather spend Christmas with you and your mom.” He straightens. “Do you mind taking Chief for a little walk so I can have a word with her?”
When Punkin and Chief wander to the edge of the driveway, Ben turns to me.
“Well, this sucks,” he says.
“I should’ve said something earlier.”
He reaches for his phone. “Let me call Sedge. See if they can fit—”
“No! God, no. Hard, hard no.”
“They’d love you to come. I know that.”
“Ben.”
“You’ll be all by yourself. This is so dumb. I could have sworn I heard you say something about flying home.”
“Nope,” I say.
He fiddles with his phone and puts it back in his pocket. “You can always change your mind. God knows there will be plenty of food to go around.”
He wants to go, I think. He wants to spend a big family Christmas with the Peabodys. Of course he does. Who wouldn’t? All the trimmings. A big house in the Boston suburbs; a gigantic noble fir cut down from the New Hampshire forest, hauled in just for them.
And Laura. Laura would be there, tanned fresh from her adventures in South America.
“You know what I want? I want you to go have a merry Christmas,” I tell him. “We’ll be just fine.”
Punkin gallops up. “Sorry to interrupt, but we need to scoop some poop around here?”
—
Punkin and I spend the rest of the afternoon hunting for the old springhouse.
Don’t judge me, okay? We needed something to occupy our minds, and you can only bake so many cookies. When we got home, I asked her to show me the map with the old pond, and the next thing you know, we’re tramping back across the meadow.
It’ll be good exercise, I tell myself. It’ll be fun.
According to Dad’s map, which he copied from some older map he found in the Winthrop Island library, the springhouse was built into the southwestern slope of the meadow at the edge of the pond that no longer exists.
Which makes sense. You don’t want your natural refrigeration unit getting any afternoon sun.
What you can’t really tell is how big the pond was. The original map was not to scale, apparently, and Dad could only make an educated guess.
Punkin and I start right next to the edge of the mud, wearing the old wellies from the closet in the mudroom.
The puddle is bigger than usual, after a rainy spell last week, but I figure there must be a spring feeding up from below to add to the general wetness.
We trace long furrows along the side of the hill, working our way up the slope.
Punkin holds the map; I hold the compass.
Every time we encounter some kind of irregularity in the ground—humps, lumps, dips—she takes her pencil, examines the compass, and makes a note on the map.
“How about we take a cookie break?” I say, when we’re about two-thirds of the way up the hill.
She brightens. “Okay.”
I pull a paper bakery bag out of my coat pocket. “Snowman or tree?”
“Tree,” she says.
The grass is too damp to sit. We stand there nibbling our cookies while the cold, steady breeze numbs our cheeks.
From here, you have a clear view straight to the sea.
Block Island is a smudge on the horizon to the left.
How strange to stand here in the cold, brown winter, surrounded by empty houses.
No white sails skimming the water. No shouts from the beaches nearby.
No warm sun to bathe you. No clink of cocktail glasses, no smoke of grilling meat.
Nobody in the world but you and your daughter.
For some reason I’ve tucked the cookie bag between my elbow and side, and as my brain wanders the bag flies from my hand.
I dart after it.
When I finally trap the paper against the grass, I notice a piece of curved metal sticking up from beneath a small rock. I pull it free and realize it belongs to a shovel.
“Punkin!” I call. “Come here and look at this!”
She doesn’t answer. The wind must have snatched my voice.
I turn back in her direction. But there is no girl standing there.
Instead, at the rim of the hill, I see a man’s figure. Next to a tree, watching me.