“Maybe you could grab a shovel and help, Madam Deputy Mayor,” Silas suggested, climbing out of the ninth hole he’d dug. He leaned down and dragged Maggie out of hers. “Drink break,” he insisted.
“Why am I the only one digging?” Cody complained.
“Because your back is twenty years younger than mine,” Silas called from the striped lawn chair he’d collapsed into.
The August sun cast a special kind of swelter over the land as mirages blurred the landscape of dust and scrub brush.
“This was a stupid idea,” Maggie said. The cold water in her canteen chased the grit from her throat.
“Not stupid,” Silas insisted, dragging his sweaty, dirty T-shirt over his head and dumping water over his chest.
“Definitely not stupid,” she murmured, admiring the show.
“Are we on a break, people?” Wallace demanded from under his Panama Jack hat. He gave his face and mustache a sassy spritz with a spray bottle.
“Are you on some kind of deadline?” Silas asked, refilling his tumbler with water from the cooler.
“As a matter of fact, I invited Florence to dinner tonight.”
“We’re in the middle of a treasure hunt,” Maggie complained. “How the hell are we supposed to find the treasure and get you back to Kinship for dinner in time?”
“Don’t forget you also have to cook dinner,” Wallace insisted.
“What?” Silas asked. “Where is this dinner you’re hosting?”
“The Old Campbell Place, of course. Where else?”
“I’m gonna bury him in one of these holes,” Maggie whispered.
“I’ll help,” Silas said, throwing his shirt in the back of his pickup.
“Yoo-hoo!” Kressley called, waving with an iPad. “I’m working on the press release. Who wants to hear it so far?”
“Press release for what?” Cody asked.
“For finding the gold, of course. Here’s what I have so far,” she said, clearing her throat. “Kinship Idaho native Deputy Mayor Kressley Cho solved the century-and-a-half-old mystery of the Dead Man’s Canyon stage robbery after discovering a historic trove of gold.”
“New plan,” Maggie said. “I’ll hit her with a shovel, and you take Wallace.”
“Deal,” Silas said.
While Wallace and Kressley bickered over the wording and Silas forced Cody into a hydration break, Maggie picked up the photocopy of the topographical map for the hundredth time.
She scanned the area, noting the outcroppings above them. The map had led them to an offshoot of Dead Man’s Canyon, barely a mile from where the bandits had taken the stage. It was a centuries-old streambed that had run dry ages ago, now scattered with scrubby trees and huge, dusty boulders. It was just inside the boundary of the sixty-acre plot the Campbells had purchased in 1910.
“What am I missing?” she muttered to herself.
She took her shovel and climbed the short incline behind their dig site, thinking to get a better look at the lay of the land. She’d reread the scenes in Canyon Secrets half a dozen times that morning. But Ava hadn’t left any additional clues in her words.
The air buzzed with the sound of insects, the slow, steady beat of shovels attacking the ground beneath her.
“Okay. I’m a bandit. I’ve got four strongboxes of gold. Where am I going to put them? Mrs. Campbell? Mom? A little help?”
When no signs from the universe arrived with fanfare, Maggie took another drink from her canteen. The water dribbled down her chin and splashed onto the boulder beneath her.
She wouldn’t have seen it with the dust covering it. That’s how she’d tell the story for years to come. That accidental splash of water landing at just the right spot in that entire canyon? Well, it had to be fate.
“Silas? Can you come up here a second?” she called.
“Be right there.”
“This is no time for you two to take selfies,” Kressley reminded them. “We have holes to dig.”
Sy’s long shadow came into view as Maggie crouched down and dumped more water onto the surface of the boulder.
“Is this a make-out break?” he asked. “Because I might need some deodorant first.”
“Oh, we’ll be making out,” she assured him. “But first, I think I found a sign.”
He joined her in front of the broad, flat slab of rock, and she pointed to the wet spot.
“Well, I’ll be damned. That looks just like Ava’s pretty little octagonal window,” he mused.