I pulled out the architectural book with trembling hands and turned to the Cawley Gardens page. The main photo showed only the house, not the drive, but an inset photo in the bottom right hand corner of the page had been taken from farther back, to convey the scope of the estate at its heyday, and it showed — be still, my hands — the gateway that had once controlled entry, including my column and its disappeared mate.
Two boys on bikes came along, deked around the green-and-white gate, and rode over the grass to the water fountain. They stopped to take a drink and took no notice of me, flushed with excitement, face pressed to a beat-up piece of stone. I stepped back, took out my sketchbook, and began to draw the column, tried to capture on the page its rough, uneven surfaces, its bits of decorative moulding, its ideal suitability to be a hidden but in plain sight feature for Molly’s book. And for ten or fifteen minutes, I forgot to be sad.
When my drawing was done, I packed up, found Tup grazing on a discarded chocolate bar wrapper near the bench, and headed him back across the park to leave, past a flagstone path, partly overgrown with weeds, that led underneath the rampart and into the ravine. Graffiti was spray-painted on the lower part of the rampart wall; the path petered out under the archway. Beyond it, the land dropped down into a dark quiet under the densely leaved tops of the trees that had grown up from the ravine floor.
The footpath was that way, and the site of the old lodge Molly had mentioned, but I didn’t go down. I’d save that outing for another day, a day when unexpected rushes of emotion about sand-coloured columns wouldn’t have rendered me so vulnerable to hearing a remembered echo of Hannah’s voice in my ear, sharp and quick, chiding me to forget the past, to move on.
About a month into our friendship, I’d talked Hannah into helping me search Glenwood, top to bottom. My biggest hope for the treasure location was the lookout tower, a dramatic architectural detail that crowned the house and appeared far more promising from the outside than from within. A reporter from the neighbourhood newspaper had once speculated that Jeremiah Brown sat in the tower for hours at a time, searching for a sign on the road of the return of the two sons killed in World War II, but the first time I stepped inside the tower, I dismissed the reporter’s notion — there was nowhere to sit. Access to the tower was via a wrought-iron-railed circular staircase that led from the master bedroom on the third floor. At the top was a small square room — basically a landing — big enough only for a single person to walk around and look out the four windows set into the plaster walls. There was no hidden vault up there, no secret room, or none that I could detect after I put my ear to the wall, tapped the plaster at six-inch intervals, and listened for a telltale hollow sound. In earnest, Nancy Drew style (Hannah: “She always irritated the shit out of me”), I looked at the stair rail through a magnifying glass to see if a hairline crack in its surface might reveal the presence within of a tightly rolled paper clue covered in spidery black handwriting. Nope. I would have checked the window frames for more potential hiding places, but Hannah pointed out that the windows were new, installed within the last ten years by the house’s previous owners.
When I spotted a small trap door built into the tower’s beamed ceiling, I ran downstairs all aflutter, brought up a step stool from the kitchen three floors below, and spent ten minutes finding a way to wedge it into the narrow space between staircase and window, only to discover that the trap door opened into an empty crawl space. There was no steamer trunk in the corner, filled with old clothing and a bundle of letters, no moth-eaten military uniform set up on a dressmaker’s dummy with a clue-riddled antique postcard hidden in the breast pocket.
I abandoned the tower room at last and dragged Hannah through the rest of the house. We examined the original wood panelling in the dining room to see if a tug on a lamp sconce or the chandelier might swing a portion of the wall open. We poked around in the basement looking for cupboards with false backing, or a discolouration in the floor that might indicate the concrete had been disturbed. We completed every search technique I could think of — and there weren’t many, with so much of the house done over — until I was forced to give up.
“It kills me,” I said to Hannah one day at her kitchen table, the day we’d lifted a loose floor board in a closet, to no avail, “that we’ll never know the real story.”
Mrs. Greer walked in and set her coffee mug in the sink. “The real story about what?”
I turned to her. “Doesn’t it kill you to think that these walls know the truth about the treasure, and though we sit within them, we’ll never learn their secret?”
She said, “You have a unique outlook on life, Blithe. Has anyone ever told you that?”
Hannah said, “I don’t believe for a second that walls can know secrets, but if they could, wouldn’t it be the old walls that knew, the ones that were torn down when the kitchen was renovated?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Maybe you should make it your life’s work to solve the mystery, Blithe,” Mrs. Greer said. “Your quest. Everyone needs a quest.”
I didn’t take this comment too seriously, since Mrs. Greer was at that time writing the sequel to her first big success: a fantasy novel about a time-travelling, quest-pursuing girl who voyages to fairy-tale lands full of knights, dragons, and swirling mists.
Hannah picked up her camera and focussed in on my glass of milk. “Or you could forget the past, forget all this treasure crap, and get on with your own life.”
“Give up on the treasure without knowing what really happened? Is that what you’re suggesting?”
She had held the camera still and snapped her picture. “That’s what I’m suggesting.”
I showed Alexandra how to clip and unclip Tup’s leash to his collar, and how to wrap the end of the leash around her hand. I told her Tup would prefer to walk on the lawn side of the sidewalk because more interesting smells could be found there than on the curb side. And I let her lead the conversation.
She peppered me with questions about Tup. What breed was he and how old and did he sleep in my room, did he sleep on my bed? Had I owned a dog when I was her age? Had my parents made me look after it? We discussed the suitability of eleven-year-old girls as dog caregivers all the way to the park entrance, until she stopped and said, “Hey. Isn’t that the dogwalker over there? That Patrick guy?”
A figure that resembled Patrick Hennessy stood in the middle of the football field and threw a ball to a dog that resembled the dog he’d claimed as his own the day before. “I think it might be.”
Alexandra said,“Does Tup catch balls like Buck does?” She’d remembered the other dog’s name.
“No, Tup likes to wander around and sniff the ground. That’s his specialty.”
“Oh” Disappointment all over her face.
“But Patrick might let you throw the ball to his dog if we asked him.”
“You think so?”
“Why don’t we go see?”
We