Very eighteenth- or nineteenth-century.
Also very rusty.
“Stay here,” Davis says on a sigh.
We’re out of sight of the camper—it’s on the other side of the cabin. I can see the falling-down porch of the cabin better from this side.
“Have you looked under the porch for the treasure?” I ask Davis when he joins me again.
He shakes his head. “It’s not supposed to be on this property at all.”
“Unless someone moved it.”
“Or lied about where it was located.”
“Or both. You know what I would’ve done if I were a pirate? I would’ve hidden it and not told my family where so that they could all fight over it because that’s a dick thing to do, and pirates are dicks. And then if my family were dicks too, if one of them found it, they’d hide it somewhere new so that the rest of the family would never know, and they’d use it the same way dear ol’ Thorny or Walter or whoever used it. Huh. I wonder if I’m descended from pirates too because my family is also made of dicks.”
His lips twitch again before he drops into a squat and uses bolt cutters to break the lock. When he lifts the wooden cover, there’s a creak so loud, they can probably hear it all the way down the mountain.
“What was that?” Giselle calls.
“A hundred years of rust rubbing against itself,” Davis calls back.
“Not raccoons?”
“Too bright.”
“Not for those fuckers.”
“She has a point,” I murmur.
Davis grunts and shoves the lid the rest of the way open, then shines a flashlight below.
And we both sigh.
“Root cellar,” he says.
Definitely a root cellar. It’s a square room lined with wood shelves and dust-covered jars, some still on the shelves, some on the ground.
“It’s small enough to have been an outhouse,” I muse.
He smiles at me, then puts a hand on either side of the opening and swings down into it.
I squat wrong and get a stick almost up my ass—freaking bushes—but readjust until I’m able to peer down too.
“Pass me down the metal detector and a shovel, then sit on the edge,” Davis tells me. “I’ll help you down from there.”
It’s not deep—he can barely stand straight—so I do as I’m told, and soon, we’re standing in the root cellar with a shovel and the metal detector leaning against one of the shelves. It’s so tiny in here that we barely both fit, and I wonder if whoever used this last had to bring a ladder over every time, or if it got so old that it just disintegrated.
Roots poke through the dirt walls behind the uneven, free-standing shelves. There’s maybe a foot of dirt overhead, reinforced with a couple beams that look like they’re about to give their last hurrah.
We should definitely not stay down here long.
“Why was it locked?” I ask.
For one brief moment, I see the pirate in Davis as he grins at me. Then he shines a light at the shelf that’s hardest to see from overhead, and when I’m expecting him to say something likebecause people are weird, he says something else entirely.
Something that makes my heart pound and my muscles tense in excitement.
