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I take my beer and head for the balcony stairs. “You just keep telling yourself that.”
3
It’s morning,and Casey and I are out walking Storm before we settle in for a day of poring over maps. There’s a chill in the air that reminds us we need to get a move on this. Pick three potential locations from those we’ve scouted so we can head back up there in winter and see how the weather affects our choices.
As we walk, I tell her about the bakery issue, just to hear her sputter.
“Bakery’s safe,” I say. “Will and I set him straight.”
“Can we just make sure no one declares this another sign of Eric spoiling Casey?”
“I try to make sure you get what you want when possible. That’s not spoiling, Casey. It’s showing I give a shit, just like you do for me.”
“I know.”
“If I really thought no one else cared about the bakery, I’d have let it go and filled our ice box with cookies.”
She smiles over at me. “Thanks.”
“A bakery is a little luxury that goes a long way with residents, and it’ll be cheaper without a separate building and better with indoor and patio seating. We just need—”
I turn, as I realize Storm hasn’t caught up. She stopped to snuffle a log about ten feet back. I’ve seen people in the city who need to drag their dog away from every scent. That wouldn’t work for us. Storm is walked off leash, and we let her sniff, knowing she’ll catch up. When she doesn’t, it means more than a casual scent.
We head back to see Storm has shoved her massive head into a log.
“Are you stuck, baby?” Casey says with a laugh.
Storm backpedals frantically and pops out, landing on her ass. When we both laugh, she glares at us and shakes herself. Then she sniffs the log again.
“Squirrel?” Casey says. “Fox? Moose?”
She runs through the list of critters in Storm’s vocabulary. Each earns an ear perk and a glance around, as if to say, “Where’s the moose?” Not one has her whining and returning to the log, which means whatever she smelled, it’s none of the above.
“Let’s see what we’ve got,” Casey says as she bends before the hollow log. She shines her cell phone light inside. “Ooh, some very big bugs and some droppings. Must be the droppings. There’s also a bottle.”
I grumble at that. I don’t understand people who can’t shove their damn garbage into their backpacks. Stuffing it into a log is worse. At least if they left it beside the path, someone might pick it up. We’ve been bringing a plastic bag with us on every walk to gather the random shit that blows in from hikers and last summer’s lodge guests.
Casey pulls on a latex glove and reaches in to retrieve the trash.
“Coke bottle,” she says, “and it looks even older than me. There’s something inside, too. Please tell me it’s a message in a bottle.”
She tips the bottle upside down and pulls out a folded piece of paper. “Yes!” She waves it at me. “A bona fide message in a bottle.”
I lean against a tree as I smile. When we first met, Casey hated to be seen getting excited over something she considered “silly.” It took a long time for her to be comfortable goofing around.
She holds the still-folded letter to her forehead. “I do believe it’s a treasure map.”
“Pirates?” I say.
“But of course. Who else leaves treasure?”
“Bank robbers?”
She makes a face. “As a detective, I’d need to turn that over to the police. But I’m not the coast guard. Pirate treasure is free and clear. I’m hoping for a million dollars.”
“Which you’ll use to buy something you really want.”
“Of course. A town in the Yukon wilderness. With a hot tub.”
