AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I feel a kick of excitement. “It sounds like a goodbye note! The kind you’d leave before embarking on a doomed bank heist.”
Ivy nods, looking just as excited. “It’s Earl’s handwriting, but I’ve been wracking my brains all morning, and I still have no idea what it means. Is it a location? A secret code for something else?”
“Curtain … curtain … is there a theater in town? Her old bedroom? A local haberdasher?” I spitball ideas, my mind racing. Because if Earl sent this right before he set off on that robbery …
It could lead us straight to the gold.
“Ivy?” Ivy’s coworker, Dot, interrupts us, sticking her head around the door. “The next school group is just arriving. Unless you’re—” She looks back and forth between us, her expression delighted. “Otherwise engaged?”
“I’ll be right there!” Ivy blurts. She closes the binder, and hands it to me. “I have another session now, but I could meet after work? At the diner?”
“Sounds good. But wait, are you sure you trust me with this?” I ask, half-teasing.
Ivy gives me a wry grin. “I’ve already sealed it in protective wrap, so as long as you hold off hurling it into traffic…”
“That, I can just about manage,” I agree. “I’ll brainstorm some more, see what else I can find about this curtain. Maybe there’s a reference to somewhere local.”
She nods, breaking into a smile. “I can’t believe we found another clue. This one is it, I can feel it!”
But six hours,three cups of coffee, and two slices of diner pie later, I’m still no closer to cracking the clue.
“I searched the entire archive at the museum,” Ivy reports, flopping into a booth with me after she gets off work. “But … nothing is jumping out at me.”
“I’m coming up blank, too,” I confess, beckoning the waitress over. “And I’ve been Googling all day. There must be something we’re just not seeing.”
We order a feast of burgers and fries, and settle in with Ivy’s documents spread out across the table. “I’ll show you my list, if you show me yours?” Ivy quips, so we slide our notebooks across the table to each other.
I scan her neat handwriting. Fabric shops, theaters, seamstresses … we’ve pretty much had the same ideas for everything this “curtain” reference could be.
“I don’t think it’s curtains in a house,” Ivy muses, nibbling on a French fry. “If this is the treasure Earl’s talking about in the note—”
“It is.”
“—then we’re talking a heavy stash. It would take up space, you couldn’t just drop it in the corner and drape some fabric over it.”
“And if he did, somebody would have found it a long time ago,” I agree.
“Ivy, what are you working on there?”
A bearded guy in matching sweats strolls over. “Clayton!” Ivy exclaims, quickly slamming our binder shut. “Have you guys met? Reeve, this is Clayton. Jake’s producer,” she adds.
I follow her lead, and shove our notes under a menu, too. “Hey man,” I greet him. “How’s your dig going?”
Clayton’s shoulders fall. “Nothing yet,” he admits. “I haven’t said it out loud to Jake yet, but we’re all pretty sure it’s a bust.”
“That’s too bad,” Ivy says, and to her credit, I can’t even hear a note of triumph in her voice.
“We all knew it was long shot,” Clayton says with a sigh. “And now we have to break for the weekend, because Jake has some college reunion thing.”
Ivy freezes, with a diet coke halfway to her lips. “He’s coming to that?”
Clayton pauses. “Oh, yeah, I forgot, you two went to school together, didn’t you?”
“Yup.” Ivy clenches her jaw. “We sure did.”
“Well, I’m sure you won’t even see him,” Clayton says brightly. “Big campus, you know how it is. See you Monday!”
He makes a quick escape, leaving Ivy to slump back in the booth with a sigh. “That man is a terrible liar,” she says. “The reunion is going to be one big episode of the Jake show now.”
