Page 23 of The Treasure House

“This thing is huge!”

Too excited to sit still, she soon hopped back out again and tore off toward the bedroom, leaving me alone with Jake. He was very still and watchful. “You seriously want this place? Even after seeing it?” he asked.

“Thanks to you showing me its potential.” I gave him a fake smile.

“Right. Fine. Well, so long as you know what you’re in for.” He seemed to mentally shake himself. “Who am I to tell you how to live your life? Especially if the family have decided you can take a look at the place.”

“Indeed,” I said dryly.

“You’ll want to see the furnace and the utilities, then.”

When we walked back into the main bedroom, Flo was in one of the squashy armchairs by the window, flipping through a book. “Look, Mom. It’s the same copy you have.” She held up, of all things, Anne of Green Gables. It was a green cloth hardback with faded gold lettering and a little silhouette of a house under the title. I got that twisty feeling again. I’d gotten my copy at a library sale when I was a kid. This copy had probably been in this house since the year it was printed.

I’d been thinking about Green Gables in the kitchen earlier, and how much this house reminded me of Anne and Marilla, and now here was the book. In my new bedroom.

A glorious sign!

Tina had always believed in signs. She used to say if we saw a yellow car it was going to be a good day (it usually wasn’t). If the radio played “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” by Whitney Houston, her favorite song, it meant that she was about to meet the man of her dreams (she never did). If a cat looked you in the eye, someone unexpected would drop into your life (that happened all the time, but more because of Tina’s nature than because of any cat).

I took the book gently from Flo. It was familiar in my hands as I opened it. The same marbled flyleaf, the same yellowed pages. The same smell of aging paper.

“She loves that book,” Flo told Jake. “I don’t really get it. I tried to read it a couple of times, but nothing really happens. It’s just a bunch of people going to school and walking about and talking and doing chores.”

“A lot happens,” I corrected her, appalled by her indifference to the folk of Avonlea. I put the book down gently on the little wooden table. There was a neat pile of hardbacks there, including one that looked like a bodice ripper, judging by the image on the dust jacket.

“Anne of Green Gables has no magic schools or Hunger Games or anything,” Flo told Jake as she followed him down the stairs. “It’s boring.”

I paused at the threshold of the bedroom before I closed the door. The sun was a sharp sparkle on the ocean and the room shivered with light, even though it faced east and the day was leaning to a close.

This could be mine.

I imagined watching daybreak over the ocean from the brass bed; curling up on the loveseat on lazy weekends, listening to the call of the gulls and the restless whisper of the waves. The house was a promise of a life I’d never thought I could have. It gave me a buoyant, giddy, gusting feeling, like I was one of those gulls lifted on currents of marine air.

I knew I was buying this place.

I was a little unsteady as I followed Jake and Flo downstairs. I’d never been in debt before—the thought of taking a loan from Suni and Wayne was intimidating. I didn’t want to let them down. I remembered the Tiffany lamp and the paintings stacked in the dining room. Maybe I’d find a treasure or two that could help me fund the renovations… and pay them back.

“There is a secret tunnel!” Flo all but squealed when Jake swung open the narrow wooden door under the stairs. “I knew Narnia would be here somewhere!”

“It’s just the door to the basement,” Jake told her calmly.

“But it’s a secret door. How cool is that?”

Behind the secret door in question was a steep flight of stairs leading down into the dark.

Jake yanked on a tattered cord that hung down the wall to turn on the basement light.

“That’s really weird.” Flo couldn’t resist trying it herself, pulling on the cord a few times to turn the light off, on, off, and on again.

“Not weird, just old-fashioned,” Jake said. The two of them had fallen into a pattern of amiably disagreeing with each other.

They creaked carefully down the stairs into a dank-smelling basement, and I followed. The musty space was full of old furniture and garden tools. There also seemed to be enough empty pickle jars to start a small pickling business.

I jumped as the shadows moved. “Oh God!” There was a low, frightened yowl as something bolted over the tumble of junk.

“It’s a cat!” Flo was delighted.

Jake hurried to close the basement window behind the departing animal.