Front Yard (27 page)

“Likewise, I'm sure,” Nan said, raising her own glass. “Way to go, guys. Can you drag it over here?”

“I can't say for sure,” said Jim, who had run over to the site to help George and Dr. Lick extract the chest. “But that looks to me to be rather old.”

“If Miss Price is right, then it is
very
old,” Dr. Lick said. “Many hundreds of years old.”

“A treasure?” wondered Jim.

“Of sorts,” said Dr. Lick, smiling through a mask of perspiration. “We'll soon see.”

There were no handles on the ends of the chest, so George and Jim picked it up from the bottom and lugged it over toward the table, over which Nan had now spread two layers of drop cloths.

“Maybe it's too heavy for the table,” she said. “How about setting it right on the cement?”

“No problem for the table,” George said. “It's not nearly as heavy as I thought it'd be. In fact, it seems kind of light to be holding such a heavy load.”

Miss Price stared at the chest for a moment, then ran her trembling hand over it.

“This is very nice work. It was made in Wales, of course. There is no lock on the clasp, as you see. It's very rusted, though. Perhaps a screwdriver and hammer and some oil could loosen it.”

Once the rust was flaked off with the screwdriver and a few taps of the hammer, and some oil was sprayed on it, the clasp proved easy to pry open.

“Now, to open this chest,” said Miss Price. “And, goodness me, I find that, after all these years, I lack the nerve.”

“You should be the one who opens it,” George said.

“Yes,” said Nan. “You must do the honor. It wouldn't be right for any of the rest of us to do it.”

“Then get me another good, stiff drink to steady my hands.” Miss Price knocked down most of her gin and tonic in one minute as George and Nan watched her in admiration, and Jim, the euphoria of the find proving only fleeting, wondered whether Alicia had already sold his baseball card collection.

“Okay,” Miss Price said. “Here goes.”

“Stop!” said Nan, raising her hand suddenly, palm outward. “Just a moment. Listen.”

“Stop?” said Miss Price. “Listen to what? I just hear birds.”

“Precisely,” said George. “Listen to the birds.” Ten seconds later, an urgent, shrill trilling shattered the stillness, modulating higher, then lower, in a crazy series of pitches and dynamics. It stopped, then started all over again.

“There it is.” George pointed to one of the fence posts, on which perched a squat, fidgety, long-beaked brown bird. It warbled again, then lifted off and disappeared into the small hole in the birdhouse under the eaves.

“Everything's all right now, no matter what happens,” said Nan, beaming. “Our house wrens are back.”

After a short pause during which everyone listened, or pretended to listen, to the song of the house wren, Miss Price raised her glass.

“Back to the business at hand,” she said in a hoarse, croaking whisper. “This is what those whose only concerns are of a pecuniary nature would call the lost treasure of Livia.” As they all sat or stood there gathered around the object, visions of debts paid, glory gained, an expensive college education, a startup landscaping business, and lots of new pairs of shoes danced in their heads. Yet Miss Price seemed strangely reluctant.

“Before I open this,” she finally said, after having drained her gin and tonic with one last, noisy glug, “I must tell Dr. Lick I'm sorry. As the Lord God Almighty and my dear ancestors are my witnesses, I am truly sorry.” Dr. Lick almost choked on the merlot sloshing around in his mouth.

“Sorry for what?” he gurgled.

“I'm going to tell you I have deceived you, just as I have deceived everyone here today. But please look and listen before you vent your ire on an obsessed woman who's been on the quest of a lifetime for so many long years.”

“Open it!” cried Nan and George.

“Open it!” cried the others.

The hinges creaked and squealed as Miss Price with some effort pushed open the top of the chest. Inside and taking up most of the space was what looked like a large and deep covered stoneware baking dish. The top was held on tight by tied and knotted leather straps, which George cut through with the loppers from the toolshed. Miss Price bent over, raised the baking dish out of the chest with more effort than appeared to be necessary, and placed it on the table. Standing up straight, she sucked in a deep breath, then noisily exhaled. She then removed the top, peered inside, and began rummaging among the contents. Everyone crowded around her.

“Please,” she said, stretching her arms out. “Give me some space.” After doing some more poking around she stopped and smiled a beatific smile the likes of which no one there had ever seen light up her face.

“It's all here!” she cried. “It's all here! Now I have proof!” She collapsed back into her chair, suddenly exhausted and fragile. “I must tell you the
real
truth of what is gathered here in this chest. This will be the complete, unvarnished truth, with no equivocation, no embellishment, and no little half-lies. So help me, God!”

George, Nan, and Dr. Lick bent over to see what was inside the dish and frowned. There was an ancient photograph—an old, sepia-toned, and cracked daguerreotype, tintype, or ambrotype; they didn't know which—several cracked and discolored leather-bound journals, a few crinkled documents, a crucifix and a chalice, a small, ring-shaped metallic object bisected by a pin, and what looked like a hunk of scrawled-on undistinguished-looking rock. Nothing more.

“Sit down,” said Miss Price, chuckling softly. “There's another story coming, and you must hear it. It is of immense importance to me, but perhaps little to you. I have lied to you, Dr. Lick, and I even lied to the dolts I hired to help me find this chest. As for Mr. and Mrs. Fremont, I've done you an even greater disservice from the very beginning by hiding the truth from you and resorting to subterfuge and quasi-criminal acts to make sure it remained hidden. You purchased the property legally, and by all rights everything should have been yours, though we now have our agreement and you might not be so enthusiastic about it once you see what we've
really
unearthed. All this is an injustice and I shall take it to the grave with me. But I had no choice. How else could I have gotten anyone else interested but me? Now, just listen . . .”

31

The Story of Livia

M
iss Price, deliberately and with an apparent reverence that calmed and quieted her perplexed listeners, now began the tale of two Welsh brothers, Caradoc and Llywelyn Morgan.

The Morgan brothers, she said, sailed to the New World during the mid-1800s. Not content to stay in the thriving metropolises of the East, they pushed westward, following the frontier to the grassland where Livia now stands.

At first, they lived together, trading with the Indians for furs, hunting, and doing a little scratch farming and fishing. At some point, there was an argument, and the two brothers broke up, Caradoc building his sod cabin on the bare rise overlooking Bluegill Pond, and which had been used by the Indians for their camp sometime before that, and Llywelyn moving a few miles southeast, still within the confines of present-day Livia, but in an area next to the Big Turkey River that was more mixed prairie and woods. The two brothers eventually reconciled and, though they continued to live apart, together built a store stocking the most basic of goods.

“That store was on this very rise, maybe thirty yards from Caradoc's cabin.”

Miss Price stopped and gulped. Tears glistened in her eyes. She smiled apologetically and continued.

Both brothers became well versed in Indian languages and customs, though Caradoc, much more than Llywelyn, took to a primitive lifestyle. Within a couple of years, he fell in love with the daughter of an important Indian, either a warrior, a medicine man, or a chief, and married her, both in the Indian way and the Christian way, as he had not neglected his Methodist upbringing whatever the changes the wilderness had wrought upon him. At that point, settlers were filtering into the area and the Indians began to recede farther to the west and north. What had seemed perfectly natural to Caradoc, now the father of a son and a daughter, did not seem so to his neighbors, who became hostile to a family whose mixed blood marked them as outcasts. Caradoc and his wife were shunned. Even Llywelyn turned his back on them. He sold his half interest in the store to Caradoc, who eventually shut it down when business dried up. Still, he stayed on. He replaced the crude cabin with a house of hauled-in timber, turned more land, and made a poor living as a farmer.

Miss Price stopped again, and trembled.

“This part is very moving to me,” she said. “Another gin and tonic would be most helpful.”

“We're cutting you off, Miss Price,” Nan said. “You have taken advantage of our hospitality by deceiving us and playing us for fools for your own devious and selfish purposes. We offer you no more now than just to hear your story out and decide for ourselves whether to believe it or not. Now, keep going.”

“Well, I'll try.” Miss Price stifled a sob, then delivered a sudden, stinging slap to her right cheek. “There,” she said. “That helps.”

One night, someone set fire to Caradoc's home and the store, which Caradoc had just closed for business and was still half-stocked with goods. Caradoc and his wife died in the fire. Who did it? Settlers? Indians? Renegades white or red? Who knows? No one ever found out, and, even if so, no one told. Their two mixed-blood children, aged fourteen and twelve, escaped, shivering and scared, into the night. Llywelyn, who had seen the flames far off in the distance and ridden over, found them. At heart he was a good man, and was able to lay aside his prejudices and take pity on them. He buried Caradoc and his Indian wife, and raised their children as his own.

“Llywelyn wrote these things down in his own diary, as well as a number of other things.” Miss Price said. “That went missing for decades. I was finally able to find it some thirty years ago in the attic of a distant relative, who was loath to give it up. I persuaded her with a check for $1,000. That diary is where most of my clues came from. Of course, you know about the remains of two skeletons all tangled up in the roots of the white oak we cut down.”

Nan gasped.

“Caradoc and his wife!” she cried.

“Yes. Though I wasn't quite sure that's what we would find when we cut down the tree. I was actually thinking the chest would be under there. But I should have known, especially the way the tree was acting. They wanted to be found and their story to be told. Isn't it obvious?”

“Hmmm,” said George.

“No!” barked Nan. “It's not obvious at all. That tree didn't die because a couple of dead people willed it to. I'm sorry, Miss Price, but that's a little too weird for me.”

“Well,” said Miss Price. “Think about all the strange things, both bad and good, that have happened on your property, Mrs. Fremont. And I am quite familiar from the press account with what happened to you last year. These things don't happen by mere chance. And you're hearing that from a trained historian. Anyway, as you know, I had forgotten about the other tree. And thank you, Mr. Fremont, for remembering my clothesline reminiscence.”

George nodded.

“That's all well and good,” he said. “Now, please continue with your story, Miss Price.”

The Morgan brothers shared a big secret, Miss Price said. They were both direct descendants of Welsh nobility of the highest order. Indeed, they claimed to trace their ancestry all the way back to Hywel Dda, the first great king of the Welsh. But the ensuing centuries of hardship and misfortune and the changing tenor of the times had leveled the family and made them common. By the time Caradoc and Llywelyn were born, the Morgans were farmers of only modest means.

So, the brothers, being ambitious sorts, were ready for a new beginning. But they did not neglect to bring certain things with them. Each brother was given a chest of belongings by their aging parents as a legacy to take with them to America. Onto the top of each chest was carved a red-painted dragon—
Y Ddraig Goch
. That is, “the Red Dragon,” or the Welsh, who (or so the prophecy went) would drive “the White Dragon”—that being the invading Saxons—back into the sea.

“You can see the outlines of the dragon here,” said Miss Price, closing the chest. “The paint has all chipped off and faded away, but this is it, the Red Dragon.”

In each chest, Miss Price continued, were a few small, run-of-the-mill belongings. But there were other things as well. In Llywelyn's chest was the silver of kings, passed down through the generations and stamped especially to mark it as the coin of the realm, legal tender for the rich and the nobility. In Caradoc's chest were a chalice, a brooch, a large, flat piece of rock into which an inscription was etched, and a cross. They had belonged originally to Hywel Dda, who used the brooch to fasten his cloak. The inscribed rock was Welsh bluestone, now often used as paving stones for pathways and patios. So great was the pride of lineage that no one over the many years had ever attempted to use even the silver to restore some measure of prosperity to the family.

They traveled armed and guarded the chests closely on their passage to America. Once here, they kept their chests in broad view in their cabins, adding little valuables and mementoes as acquired; and, in the case of Caradoc, the photograph—it was actually a daguerreotype—and important documents as well as his own logs and journals. With the passage of time, both brothers grew fearful of the pilfering of Indians and the wild, lawless white men who roamed the land. They buried their chests. And there they remained.

“Llywelyn was driven off his land suddenly, and we don't know exactly why,” Miss Price said. “But he had to leave with the two children very quickly. What happened next is lost in the mists of time. The two children—Rhys and Gwyneth—grew up and married, and found their way back to Livia, which was no longer frontier. It might have been the lure of their birthplace that drew them back, or maybe they had somehow heard about the two chests. Could Llywelyn have told them? Whatever the reason, they came back. After a few years, the acreage on the rise overlooking Bluegill Pond, where we are sitting right now, became available, and Rhys and his wife bought it. Gwyneth and her husband were able to find Llywelyn's old plot, which was not very good farmland, and which they acquired for a good price. Rhys, of course, was my great-grandfather. Anyway, they must have looked and looked and looked for the chests. Or maybe they didn't. Maybe they didn't even care. Both chests remained hidden underground, at least until today. The other one, the one with the silver coins, remains buried elsewhere. I think I know where it is, but I'm not telling. It is southeast of here. Let's leave it at that.”

“So there
is
a lost treasure of Livia!” George said.

“Yes, I suppose there is. But it is not a matter of concern to me. This is the one that matters most to me.”

“Why?” said Nan.

“Why?” said Miss Price, patting the chest tenderly. “Isn't that obvious? What I've believed with all my heart for so many years has only been surmise, based on flimsy evidence gathered over many decades. Now I have the proof!”

“Proof?” wondered George coldly. “Proof of what?”

“Proof of who my great-great-grandparents are. The daguerreotype is of Caradoc and his wife. There is a document from the circuit preacher who married them. There are also journals and logbooks that should establish that Caradoc and Llywelyn were the first European inhabitants of Livia. That means I beat out Marvelle Olson. Marvelle Olson is, according to the current accepted history, descended from the Norwegian Olsons, Livia's original inhabitants. And, oh, how she flaunts it! Now, Livian history will have to be rewritten, and my family will get the credit! Mine! And I am descended from the great Hywel Dda! This chalice touched his lips. This crucifix graced Hywel Dda's altar. The inscribed bluestone bears words in Latin scrawled into the rock by hardworking monk-artisans. It either broke off by itself or was broken off a flagstone that was either inside or outside of the chapel and should hold the proof that all this is true. I believe it can be dated by the proper authorities. The penannular brooch fastened Hywel's tunic. And it's not just Hywel Dda I am descended from, but also from a line of great Indians, or, I suppose we should say Native Americans! Chiefs. Medicine men who had magnificent dreams and visions. Brave and accomplished warriors honored with many ceremonial feathers. That would make me nobility from both sides of the ocean! Isn't that great? Isn't that wonderful? Thank you, God! Thank you!”

“What a waste of time,” huffed Dr. Lick. “All this for a little family history one hundred and seventy-five years old at best. You could certainly make up for leading me on a wild goose chase, Miss Price, by pointing the way to the other chest. At least the Fremonts here and I could get something out of
that
.”

“I told you, Dr. Lick, I don't really know where it is. I have an inkling, but I intend to take that inkling to the grave with me. I'll have no big dustup over my inheritance.”

“I believe there's some legal action I can take here,” Dr. Lick said. “Defrauding an academic institution in the furtherance of research and education. I fully intend to explore every avenue.” “Uh, don't forget, Dr. Lick,” said Nan. “You and the university owe us $30,000 for ripping up our arbor over there.”

“We'll just see about that,” he said. “I consider this contract null and void since I'm the victim of a fraud.” With that, he stormed off down the steps, kicking Nan's precious pea gravel all over the surrounding gardens and lawn.

Nan and George stared at Miss Price, trying to sort out whether to honor her for her quest or shun her for her duplicity.

“One thing?” Nan said.

“Yes?”

“You never told us the name of your great-great-grandmother.”

“Well, her Indian name has been lost. After years and years of looking, I haven't been able to find it. Her white name, the one she took upon marrying my great-great-grandfather, why, isn't that obvious? It's Livia!”

Grudgingly, but without complaint, the Fremonts carried the chest down to Miss Price's car, and fit it snugly in the trunk.

“Don't forget that you owe us one-half of the value of what you have,” said George as he slammed the lid of the trunk.

“Yes, that's right,” said Nan. “It's in the contract.”

Miss Price smiled.

“Don't you worry about that, Mr. and Mrs. Fremont. I intend to fulfill my obligation. Just remember, you've already been rewarded for your stewardship of the land. Whatever good fortune you've gained from this property is due to them. Call it spirituality. Call it whatever you like. I really do believe that.”

“Well, there has been a fair amount of bad fortune, too,” George said. “Are they responsible for
that?
”

Miss Price shrugged.

“You may come out ahead yet, Mr. Fremont,” she said. “Never underestimate the power of beneficent spirits to make things right, especially for good people.”

“Ba-loney,” Nan said. “What about the other chest?”

“Not covered in the contract. And as I said, I'm not even sure where it is.”

“A little bit of uncertainty didn't stop you from digging here, did it?” said Nan.

“This is true,” said Miss Price. “And you've both been very indulgent with me, I must say. And what a nuisance we've been to you! But there are secrets one must keep to one's self.”

George and Nan watched silently as Miss Price drove off.

“Jerk!” said Nan as she polished off the last of her Sagelands. “Why is the world so full of lying, malicious jerks?”

“I'm sure you can sue her,” said Mary, who, with Shirelle, had been silent bystanders to the climax and denouement of the treasure hunt.

“We're already suing her,” said George. “And her henchmen. Those Scroggit brothers.”