“You’re going to be prickly as a cactus and wrinkled as a prune.”
She laughed. “Quite possibly, but it still feels quite lovely so I’m staying put.” Laurel arched her spine, dipped her head, and dove under the water backward. She made a complete circle before her head surfaced again, and then she floated for a while longer.
“Can you see when you’re underwater?” he asked.
“Yes. Can’t you?”
“I didn’t open my eyes.”
The idea of him swimming blindly under the water made her chuckle. She swallowed some water, sputtered, and spit it out.
“Serves you right,” he said.
Laurel stopped floating and went vertical, treading with her legs and one hand while she palmed her face with the other to clear water from her eyes and nose. “It probably does,” she said, unperturbed that he had enjoyed her comeuppance. Dipping her hand under to help her tread, she told him, “The water is remarkably clear for the first few feet, then it gets murky. You can still see, especially on a bright day like this, but everything is distorted.”
“What’s under there?”
“More rock. Grassy things. Sunken treasure.”
He grinned. “Uh-huh. Treasure.”
“No. Really. There are bits of pottery and drawers from what was probably a china cupboard. My brothers and I figured that some early settler unloaded furniture from a wagon upstream and it eventually was carried here. We never found any money except coins our father tossed in and let us search for.”
“Did you always find them?”
“We had to. Coins were too precious to waste. Find them or work to replace their value—that was the deal Pa struck with us.”
Call leaned to one side and stretched an arm toward his trousers. He tugged on a leg and pulled it toward him. When he had the denim trousers in his lap, he searched the pockets. He sifted through the coins he found, eliminating the one- and two-cent copper pieces as too difficult to locate underwater. The five-cent coin was better, but he judged it a little on the smallish size. He finally settled on the silver fifty-cent piece. This was at least a prize worth the trouble of diving for it.
“What about this?” he asked, holding the coin up between his thumb and forefinger. “Shiny enough?”
“It is, but don’t throw your money away. It’s been a very long time since I searched for treasure, and honestly, George or Martin usually found it first.”
“I’ll chance it.” Call flipped the coin into the air and watched its arc until it disappeared under the water beside Laurel’s left shoulder. He thought she might make a grab for it, but she accepted the challenge and let it sink. He didn’t know if the coin would drift sideways on its way down, but he trusted her to figure that out.
Laurel gave the coin a few moments to settle before she disturbed the water. She waved good-bye to Call, took in a lungful of air, and went under in an effortless dive.
She knew she had been treading water in the deepest part of the pool, but she had forgotten how the pressure would build uncomfortably in her ears as she swam toward the bottom. There wasn’t much she could see when her hands touched the rocky basin. If she found the coin, it would be by sheerest luck.
Laurel searched around, patting the smoothly eroded rocks for something that was out of place. If the coin had fallen into a crevice, there was no hope of locating it. She stayed down as long as she dared before she pushed off the bottom and shot to the surface.
Clearing water from her eyes, she saw Call was looking at her expectantly. She shook her head. “It’s deeper here than I remember. There’s not much I can see. I’m afraid you’ve lost fifty cents.”
He shrugged. “You can work it off.”
The way he said it, coupled with a slightly wicked smile, had Laurel sucking in another breath and diving deep. Her ears accepted the pressure better this time around, and she spread her arms to widen her search. She released her air slowly to make herself less buoyant.
When her fingers touched something unfamiliar, she instantly retracted her hand. It wasn’t any grassy thing she had found. Her first thought was that it was a snake—and she had no love for the creatures—but on second consideration, she realized the texture was all wrong. Not only that, but what she’d held hadn’t wriggled under her touch. With some trepidation, Laurel reached out again, and this time when she found it, she held on.
It was a rope. That was hardly interesting by itself, but the fact that it hadn’t floated away meant it was snagged on something. That was a little bit curious, so she tugged. Nothing happened. She tugged harder.
This time the rope gave a little and she had slack to work with. She placed her feet on the rocks and yanked. The rope came free at the same time her lungs were spent. She pushed to the surface and sucked in a great draught of air. When she could breathe properly, she held up the rope. “No coin. But I found this.”
Call was standing now. He nodded, but he wasn’t looking at what was in her hand. He was looking at what had come to the surface behind her. “That’s not all you found.”
20
Laurel followed Call’s line of sight, turned slowly, and confronted a swollen body bobbing facedown in the water. She didn’t scream, but she did swim backward as fast as she could until she was plastered against the pool’s stone wall. She stood on the ledge that Call had occupied and caught her breath. That didn’t seem to matter because she had no words for what she had discovered. Belatedly she realized she was still holding the rope and flung it away. It drifted toward the edge of the pool before it sank.
