Seb pointed at me. I raced around the cottage and retrieved both a shovel and an old crowbar from the garage, and when I raced back to the hole, Seb and Jazmine took turns trying to crack open the crate. It didn’t seem to want to budge... and then wood splintered.
“There!” Jazmine said, lifting the shovel out of the hole. “Put the crowbar right there!”
Seb stuck the crowbar inside, and with the edge of the hole as a fulcrum, used all his weight to pry the top off the crate. Rusted nails lined the inner lid, but we avoided them and got the rest of the lid off, and Benny shined his phone’s flashlight inside.
Packed tight as sardines in neat rows, gold bars glittered in the old wooden crate. Dozens of them. I reached inside and picked one up, only to be shocked by the weight of it.
“Jesus! This is...” Seb couldn’t even finish. One by one, everyone picked up a gold bar, murmuring in amazement. “Holy shit, guys. Are you seeing this?”
I was seeing it. I just wasn’t believing it. Not until Seb desperately pulled out more bars, trying to see how far down they wentand quickly counting. “There must be... fifty gold bars, easy. Maybe more.”
“The gold bar that was found downtown!” Jazmine said.
“Shit!” Benny said, his face lit up like Christmas with the biggest smile I’d ever seen on him. “The news said that bar was worth thirty thousand. Fifty times thirty thousand...”
“Wags,” Seb said, looking around at all our faces. “There’s more than a million inside here. We’re fucking millionaires!”
Nervous laughter erupted, as well as dismissals of Seb’s claim.It can’t be. This isn’t happening. It must be fake, another one of Mabel’s tricks.
But as we all worked together to pull out all the gold bars, loading them into a wheelbarrow and hauling them toward the back deck, where we stacked them into some plastic totes that were left over from when I packed up Nana’s stuff. All in all, there were forty gold bars, potentially worth more than a million.
Even splitting it four ways, it was more money than I could fathom.
When we’d removed all the gold, Seb and Benny pulled out the wooden crate that had held the bars. It was so old and damaged from being inside the hole that the sides were rotted and crumbled in their hands. But once they’d retrieved the bottom of the crate, we peered down in the hole to see another crate below it.
“What the hell... ?” Jazmine said, joy dancing in her eyes.
Like the sides of the gold-bar crate, this wood was rotten, so we made quick work of its nailed-on lid. Once it was torn off, we peered at something wrapped in burlap. Something that was about the size of a lamp, maybe a couple feet high. And as Seb lifted it out with a strained grunt, Benny helping him get it overthe edge of the hole, it was clear that we’d reached the bottom of the smuggler’s hole.
Seb dropped the heavy burlap sack on the nearby sand. And as my heart thudded wildly I my chest, I tore at the rotting fabric to reveal what lay inside.
The glittering figure of a nude woman stared back at me, carved marble covered in flaking gold. Unlike the larger, armless Venus de Milo sculpture, this little lady had all her appendages, and stood on a small hill made of seashells.
The Golden Venus.
Mabel was right. Once you’d seen it, you understood why it was so precious. All of us were lost for words. We just sat around the gilded statue, amazed and dumbfounded.
After all these years. And everything we’d been through this summer. It felt like a dream.
I couldn’t breathe.
The statue literally stole my breath away.
“She’s beautiful,” Jaz whispered.
“Unbelievable,” Benny said.
“Is it real?” I whispered, clutching my chest. “We really found her? This isn’t a dream... ?”
“It’s real,” Benny said reverently. “It’s very, very real.”
“Nana Malone wanted us to find it when she gave us those Blackbeard rings,” Seb said, looking at me with happy tears shining in his eyes.
The realization was a potent one. Nana had trusted us, even as kids, not to lose the vintage Blackbeard rings, just like she trusted the Neelys to look after her painting of Mr. Legs. Maybe she’d inherited Mabel’s spirit-medium talents.
Or maybe she was just a sucker for a good treasure hunt like the rest of us.
“We didn’t let her down,” I said as Seb wrapped me up in his arms and tears of joy streamed down my cheeks. “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it...”
