A December to Remember (40)
By five o’clock, all they had to show for their search were dirty hands and aching muscles.
“I’d better get Verity in before she turns into an ice pop.”
The garden used to be lit with fairy lights; now the decayed wires hung in sad loops from the skeletons of apple and pear trees that grew along the high stone garden walls. Augustus had made sure that his daughters could play out in the woods till late by hand-carving signs that read This way home! This way to the tree house! This way to the Fairy Glade! and nailing them to rowan tree trunks throughout the area. Winding through the middle of the garden was a stepping-stone path studded along each side with footlights, which Joe had put in during the summer. Maggie followed the path down to the end and stepped through a stone archway into the woods. Here too was Joe’s handiwork. Following the original pattern left by Augustus, he had wired in new lights, which twinkled out from blackberry bushes and rhododendrons like golden fireflies and lent the otherwise dark woods a glowing warmth.
Her footfalls were dull against the soft mossy ground; only the occasional snapping twig gave her away. Above was the canopy of rowan branches with their bunches of red berries hanging down like Chinese lanterns.
“Verity!” she called as she rounded another twist in the path and saw the tree house lit up ahead. The word tree house suggested a kind of makeshift affair, but this more resembled a log cabin built across the boughs of two trees.
Verity came to one of the windows and peered out. “Oh, good, you’re here,” she said, as though she had been telepathically summoning her mother.
“It’s time to go home, sweetheart, come down from there now.”
“I can’t go yet. I’ve lost my holly sticker down the back of the fairies’ treasure chest.”
“It’s only a sticker, darling, I’m sure we’ve got some more at home.”
“No, Mama, this one’s special! Sameera gave it to me in class—it’s the best-friend sticker! I can’t lose it!”
Maggie knew better than to argue: you were never going to dissuade a ten-year-old of the power of best-friend stickers.
“Can you pull the fairy treasure out a bit so you can reach behind it?”
“No, it’s too heavy. I think it’s filled with magical golden goblets.”
She sighed. Her daughter’s imagination was a precious thing, but sometimes it could be a pain in the bum. Just the other day, a group of elves had supposedly moved into the fairy house and she’d had to supply them all with Hobnob biscuits. Now she was going to have to deal with fairy treasure if there was any hope of getting her daughter home this evening.
“Okay, I’m coming up.”
She climbed the ladder set to one end of the tree house and crawled in through the small doorway. The room was just high enough for her to stand up, and she dusted her knees for what felt like the ninetieth time that day as she rose.
“Where’s the fairy treasure?” she asked.
“There, under the reading bench. My sticker fell down the back when I was reading to a pixie.”
“Uh-huh,” said Maggie, crossing to the bench built into one of the walls beneath a round window. She bent down and peered underneath. “Oh!” Whether there was fairy treasure in it or not, there was indeed a chest under the bench. How long had that been there? Then again, how long had it been since she’d been in here? Reaching around it with both hands, she pulled. It was heavy, and for a moment she wasn’t sure it would budge, but with another prolonged heave, the chest began to shift inch by inch until she had pulled it clear. Quick as a flash, Verity ferreted around behind it and emerged triumphant with her sticker, minus all its stick; Maggie would have to tape it to her school jumper tomorrow.
She looked down at the box and shook her head, half smiling, half mildly pissed off at their old man’s wily sense of humor. This had to be it. He’d hidden the strongbox in their most favorite childhood place in the world. Of course he had. “You crafty old bugger!” she said under her breath.
“Uh! You said a swear!”
“Yes, I did. But in this case it’s true, so it doesn’t count. Your granddad was a crafty old bugger, which nobody can deny.”
The box was too heavy for Maggie to manage on her own—quite how Augustus managed to get it up there in the first place was a mystery—but Duncan’s wiry frame belied an easy strength, which meant she was able to lower the box down into his waiting arms. Star, Maggie noticed, couldn’t take her eyes off those arms.
Once back inside the curios shop, she sat down, pulling Verity onto her lap, and Star took the chair opposite, leaning forward eagerly. Duncan stood on the perimeter, and they all watched with bated breath as Simone knelt before the chest and pushed the key into the lock. It fitted. The scrape of metal turning in metal was followed by a clunk, and the lid gave a little jump as the lock snapped open. Simone pushed the lid up and let it fall backward.
“That’s not treasure! It’s just old paper!” Verity was disappointed. Newspapers browned with age shouted Victorian headlines of the day beside old curly-edged notebooks. Maggie stole a glance up at Duncan, who was almost salivating at the contents; like her, he probably wanted to dive in and have a good rummage, but he kept a polite distance. When they unearthed the shop’s ledger, a weighty tome with a cracked spine—as promised in Augustus’s letter—Simone handed it up to Duncan, who took it as though she’d just passed him the Holy Grail. He retired immediately to his desk to look through it.