Project Sweet Life (14 page)

The day had started out hot and grew hotter with each passing hour. And that stuffy, stinky boathouse wasn’t air-conditioned.

We started with the hull. It was covered with scum and something rough and bumpy.

“
Barnacles?
” I said. “There are actual
barnacles
growing on this thing.”

“That’s one of the problems with salt water,” Curtis said.

We got to scraping.

“Wait,” I said as we worked. “If Lei-Lei’s money is hidden in a porcelain pot, how are we ever going to find it? Won’t it be completely buried under barnacles and mussels by now? It’s been over a hundred years.”

“Not if it really is stored in porcelain,” Victor explained. “Barnacles don’t grow on glass or porcelain. The glaze is too smooth. There’s nothing for sea life to cling to. Fiberglass is completely different. It’s basically the perfect surface for barnacles. But it’s light and it’s cheap, which is why they make boats out of it.”

In terms of scum, the only thing worse than the fiberglass hull was the name of the boat,
The Ruby
Slipper
, spelled out in pewter.

“Oh, pewter’s the
worst
,” Curtis said. “But at least it doesn’t rust.”

It was well into the afternoon before we were finally done with the hull. Then we flushed and cleaned the engine and turned to the boat’s interior. Right away, we discovered water sloshing around in the bilge, which is the space between the floor and the bottom of the boat.

“It’s no big deal,” Curtis said. “We just have to open the drain plug down in the bilge. Someone get me a wrench.”

So we got a wrench and opened up the drain plug, a small hole in the lowest part of the boat. Foul water spilled onto the wooden slats of the boathouse floor. Then we hosed the whole thing down.

Next we cleaned the seats and dashboard and paneling where salt water had splashed and evaporated. For the record, salt water had splashed
everywhere
, along with something dried and sticky.

I wrinkled my nose. “Dried beer,” I said.

“It’s a rental,” Curtis said.

Finally, we finished. We pushed the boat toward the docks, then winched it back down into the water.

We went inside to get Bill. He was, I swear, actually
sharpening a fishing spear. How fitting was that?

“We’re done,” Curtis said. “Is it okay if we get fitted for our equipment now? That way we can get an early start tomorrow morning.”

“Sure thing,” Bill said. “But let’s go take a look at your work first, okay?”

We followed Bill outside. He strolled calmly toward the docks. But then he slammed to a stop, his whole body snapping to attention.

“What is it?” I said, but even as I said it, I saw:
The Ruby Slipper
was sinking.

“How—?” Victor started.

“Please tell me you replaced the drain plug!” Bill said.

Curtis immediately reddened. “Uh oh.”

Bill suddenly broke into laughter. Relief swept through me: We’d screwed up, but not so badly that he couldn’t laugh about it.

Bill kept laughing, and it was pretty clear he was laughing at us.

“Uh,” I said, “don’t we have to get the boat out before it sinks?”

Bill wiped tears from his eyes. “Hey, it’s a small hole. We’ve got a few minutes before it sinks completely.”

Sure enough, a few minutes later, we had the boat winched up onto the dock again. But a lot of water had gotten inside the body—salt water choked with algae and little pieces of loose seaweed that were already drying in the intense heat.

Bill faced us. “So,” he said, “I’ll see you guys again same time tomorrow morning, right?”

Curtis sighed. “Yeah. You will.”

As we were walking back to our bikes, I dug my hands in my pockets. I felt something in there and pulled out a little strip of paper—my fortune from our lunch at the Paper Lantern.

I read it to myself. Then I started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Victor said.

I read out loud, “
Mind the smallest detail, or you may have to begin again
.”

The next day, we rode our bikes back to the dive shop. It was blistering outside, even hotter than the day before. The inside of that boathouse felt like a crematorium left on all night.

Cleaning that crusty seaweed was a challenge, but at least we didn’t have to scrub the hull again. When we
were done, we made absolutely sure that the drain plug was tightly sealed.

We went back inside the dive shop to get Bill.

“Okay,” Curtis said. “This time, we’re really, really done.”

Bill checked to make sure that the boat hadn’t sunk again and was satisfied at last.

“Okay, let’s get you three fitted,” he said. “With weather like this, I’ll bet you can’t wait to get into that water. I’ll just need a major credit card for the deposit.”

Neither Curtis, Victor, nor I spoke. What could we say? None of us had credit cards. We were fifteen years old!

“Excuse me?” Curtis said at last.

“The deposit?” Bill said. “I won’t actually charge anything, not if you bring the equipment back. It’s just in case you run off with our stuff.”

Bill stared at us.

We stared at him.

Finally, a smile cracked his face.
“Kidding!”
he said. “Leave your student I.D. cards, and we’ll call it a deal.”

It was already too late in the day to try to get in a dive, so the next day, Thursday, we rode our bikes back to the
dive shop to pick up the equipment, then rode all the way downtown. How did we manage to carry our tanks and the rest of the gear on our bikes?

Don’t ask. I don’t want to relive it.

But eventually we made it.

Back in the nineteenth century, Tacoma’s Chinatown had been located on the stretch of coastline just north of the city center, a narrow strip of land at the base of the greenbelt where the exit to the China Tunnels had emerged from the ivy. Now the greenbelt was cut off from the beach by a busy concrete parkway and a set of train tracks. Thea Foss Park, a forgotten little stretch of grass, juts up from tideflats to the south, so that’s where we went to lock our bikes and sort out our equipment.

Looking north from that park, there’s no sign of Chinatown now, not even a monument. In fact, the only signs of life are the rotting pilings of some abandoned piers and a concrete granary farther down the beach. Because it’s industrial, the whole area was deserted, despite being just a few hundred yards from the city center.

“So this is it,” I said. The water itself was dark, almost crude-oil black.

“This is the least appealing dive site I’ve ever seen,” Victor said.

“All the more reason why we should get it over with,” Curtis said, slipping into the water.

On the plus side, it felt good. The water of Puget Sound never gets much above fifty degrees, so it was the perfect antidote to the blistering heat.

On the negative side, there was a steep drop-off only a few yards from the beach. And the water was murky.

Really murky.

Puget Sound is always murky, but the weird August algae bloom had made it worse. And it wasn’t just algae: the Puyallup River, which emptied into Commencement Bay right behind us, muddied the water with silt from the mountain glaciers. Visibility was a few feet at best. It was like you could feel the sediment clinging to you, coating you with slime, weighing you down.

Since there were three of us, we couldn’t split up into dive buddies, so we stayed with one another at all times. This was especially important given the low visibility.

Under the water, we stopped at the edge of the sharp drop-off—a steep slope just off from the beach
that quickly disappeared into the gloom. The whole area above and below the drop-off was covered with trash, mostly bottles and scraps of white plastic. I’d never understood why people needed to use the ocean as their personal garbage dump.

Curtis reached out, picked up one of the discarded bottles, and showed it to Victor and me.

It looked odd somehow. Not like a pop bottle, that’s for sure. I tried to make out the words written on the side, but they looked odd too—not like English.

I squinted through the fog of my mask and through the murk of that water. They weren’t words at all but little squiggles, almost like Chinese writing.

It took me a second to realize what this meant.

This glass bottle was something from the Chinese settlement!

I looked more closely at the garbage strewn around us.

It wasn’t discarded plastic I was seeing, but porcelain: plates and saucers, their blue or rose-latticed borders still visible. Little teacups. Pots and tureens and long-necked vases.

Victor had been right when he’d said that barnacles
didn’t grow on porcelain or glass. He’d also been right about the fact that all the wood from the settlement itself had long since rotted away.

Most of the porcelain was in pieces. This made sense. Since the whole settlement had been burned and pushed into the water, it stood to reason that a lot of it would have cracked and shattered. But did that mean that whatever the money was in had been broken too?

We rooted through the pieces of porcelain and glass—all that remained of what had once been a whole community. We groped our way back and forth along the upper shelf, before the bottom dropped off into darkness. To the south and north of the dive site, parallel to the beach, the glass and porcelain remnants eventually petered out. We had isolated exactly where the settlement must have been.

We brought the intact pots to the surface to open them up, but we didn’t find anything with twenty thousand dollars in gold or silver inside.

We had no choice but to go deeper, down the steep drop-off. So down we went, crawling along the muddy bottom.

We found more glass and porcelain, but had no better
luck than we’d had at the shallower level. And the deeper you dive, the higher the pressure is, and the more quickly you use up your oxygen. So by the time we reached sixty feet, we were burning through our air pretty fast. Eventually we had no choice but to surface.

“Nothing,” Victor said. “Not a thing.” Truthfully, without his glasses, Victor was kind of worthless for searching underwater. But he was right that none of us had found anything.

The water sloshed around us, smelling of brine and seaweed. There was a rainbow sheen of spilled gasoline roiling on the surface—runoff from the industrial tideflats.

“We need to go deeper,” Curtis said. “We have to come back tomorrow.”

The tide was out, and I’d found a flat rock to sit on. “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “If Lei-Lei only hid the money for a day, she wouldn’t have hid it that deep. She
couldn’t
have.”

“Maybe it slid,” Curtis said. “But it’s gotta be here somewhere.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Victor said. “Maybe someone else found it. We can’t be the first people ever to have dived
here.” He had a point. Lots of people had probably dived here, looking for salvage. Why hadn’t this occurred to us before?

“Or maybe it broke open and the gold sank into the mud,” Victor went on. “Or maybe it was never here to begin with. All I know is I can’t bear the thought of bringing this equipment all the way back to the dive shop to get more air, then carrying it all the way back here tomorrow.”

“We
have
to,” Curtis said. “There’s only two weeks of summer left. If we don’t get that seven thousand dollars soon, we’re sunk!”

Barnacles poked me in the rear, making me squirm. I didn’t say anything. Victor didn’t either. What could we say? Curtis had made a good point, too.

Victor sighed, slumping in the mud. But then he jerked upright again. Like me, he’d sat on something sharp.

“What is it?” I said.

He reached down into the water and pulled out an oddly familiar object.

It was a ceramic statue of Mr. Moneybags, his arms outstretched. He had the cane in one hand, but
it was partly broken off.

“Where’d
that
come from?” I said.

It wasn’t our statue, of course. That was safely back at the bomb shelter. For one thing, this one was covered with mud, like it had been underwater for a while. But—what a coincidence!—it looked exactly like ours.

“It’s a sign,” Curtis said suddenly. “Don’t you see? A familiar face!”

“What?” Victor said.

“Remember my fortune cookie?
A familiar face is proof that you’re not long lost.
Well, this is the familiar face!”

Victor and I looked at each other. He had been right when he’d said those fortune cookies had been pretty vague. But twice now, they had applied directly to the situation at hand. It was incredible.

“Look,” Curtis said. “I know it’s just a fortune cookie. But the fact that this was right here all afternoon and we never spotted it because of the murk or whatever, well, that means there might be something
else
that’s right here and we didn’t spot it, either.”

I had to admit this made sense, enough to make me feel at least a little optimistic again.

The next day, Friday, we rode back to the dive shop one more time to pick up our refilled air tanks.

“Buck up,” Bill said. “You think Pizarro found the golden city of El Dorado in a day? Or Ponce de León and the Fountain of Youth?”

“Pizarro
never
found the golden city of El Dorado,” Victor said. “And Ponce de León didn’t find the Fountain of Youth either.”

Bill grinned. “Oops. My bad.”

I could tell the mood was grim when Curtis didn’t say anything back.

By the time we’d ridden the scuba equipment back to the dive site, I was already exhausted. My skin itched; even though I’d been wearing sunblock the day before, I finally had the sunburn my parents had been warning me about all summer—not to mention some weird rash breaking out on my legs, either from the algae bloom or some toxic chemical wafting over from the tideflats. This was turning out to be the most difficult Project Sweet Life scheme by far. I could only hope it would be worth it.