“What?” My father stared at me, puzzled.
“The finders keepers law,” said Aunt True, throwing a towel around me. “It’s a treasure hunter thing.”
As if on cue, Amanda Appleton came crashing through the undergrowth just then, emerging breathless but triumphant. Cupping her hands around her mouth, she shouted, “I claim this island and any treasure it may contain under the finders keepers law!”
“Too late,” Aunt True called back. “May the best man—or in this case, woman”—she pointed to me—“win, remember? She already claimed it! In front of”—she did a quick head count—“ten witnesses!”
We left Dr. Appleton standing there, open-mouthed, and headed back to shore.
“Hey, what’s that?” asked Cha Cha. She pointed to my white-knuckled fist, pressed tight against my clamshell bra.
I was still clutching the rock I’d found at the bottom of the lake. “Just a rock,” I told her, unclenching my fingers to reveal—something that wasn’t a rock at all!
Everyone on the boat turned and looked at my outstretched palm. On it, a big, heavy coin caught the last rays of the setting sun, glinting a warm gold.
Later, while my parents took me to get my scalp stitched up, Aunt True and Professor Rusty and Bud Jefferson took the coin back to Bud’s shop, where Bud did a little research. It turned out I’d found not just any gold coin, but the unicorn of gold coins: an incredibly rare 1703 Queen Anne “Vigo” five guinea piece. Only twenty of them had been minted from gold the British seized in 1702 from treasure ships in Vigo Bay off northern Spain, and of those twenty, only fifteen had been known to survive—sixteen now—and only six had come up for sale in the last half a century.
“I don’t want to get your hopes up,” Bud told my parents. “But the last one that was auctioned sold for—well, a lot.”
Our ancestor’s shady past quickly became big news in Pumpkin Falls—and far beyond. DANDY DAN, THE PIRATE MAN! blared the Pumpkin Falls Patriot-Bugle’s lame front-page headline. Janet’s article accompanying it was good, though, and so were her photos of the coin and of Nathaniel Daniel’s portrait. The Pumpkin Falls Private Eyes got star treatment too, with a whole sidebar of our own. We were rapidly becoming hometown celebrities.
The Lovejoy College history department mounted an official exploration of the cave, hiring professional divers and an underwater camera crew. It turned out the coin I’d found was the last of the treasure. There was little else left, just a coil of rope and a few pieces of wood that proved something had been there. Still, it was enough to create plenty of excitement for historians, including Professor Rusty, who had plans to write a book about Nathaniel Daniel. He already had the title for it—Dandy Dan: The Pirate of Pumpkin Falls.
After the exploration crew finished, a metal gate was placed across both the underwater entrance to the cave and the one by the boulder, and there were NO TRESPASSING signs on Cherry Island now. The sheriff didn’t want anyone else getting hurt.
It was Professor Rusty who solved the mystery of the vanished treasure. The clue was in Prudence Lovejoy’s last will and testament, which none of us had thought to look at. She’d left her husband’s gold eagle ring to their son, Obadiah, but there was nothing about “the sunrise of our youth” or “where the eagle flies, there lies the prize.” It was just a bequest, plain and simple.
A little more digging revealed that Prudence had been just as civic-minded as her buccaneer husband. With the money that he’d left her, she’d helped found the town’s hospital, the library, the first school, and even the Grange. She did it quietly, though, and didn’t paste her name all over everything.
“It was like she wanted to give it all away,” Rusty told us all at dinner one night.
“She probably did,” said Aunt True. “They were ill-gotten gains, after all, and she must have known it. And I hope whatever was left when she was done funded a comfortable retirement.”
“Except she missed one coin,” I added.
Marketing genius that she was, my aunt made hay with that single gold coin, putting it on display at the bookshop “FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY!” She hired Officer Tanglewood to work security for us after his daytime shift, and she rented a pirate costume for my father to wear. He was used to her schemes by now, and gamely put on an eye patch and a bandana and his Captain Hook prosthetic arm and stood around saying “aaargh!” a lot and scowling at anyone who got too close to the glass case with my five guinea piece in it.
The customers loved it. They couldn’t get enough of the fake gold coins that Aunt True had specially made for the event, and they scooped up the Terminator hot sauce with its skull and crossbones label, and all the pirate and mermaid books we put out on display.
Miss Marple got to wear a bandana and an eye patch too, and Aunt True had her “conduct” an interview with me for our online newsletter, which proved hugely popular and got picked up by news media around the world. So did Carson Dawson’s segment with me on Hello, Boston!
Yes, I was on TV again, only this time not in my shimmertail. Bud and Elmer had managed to repair most of the tears in it, but I politely declined Mr. Dawson’s request that I show it off. I did, however, recount my adventure as vividly as I could, and I squeezed in mentions of both our bookshop and The Pirates of Penzance. Aunt True—and Augustus Wilde—had taught me well.
All the publicity helped sell out our performances at the Grange and brought a flood of tourists to Pumpkin Falls, which made Ella Bellow and all the other businesses in town happy. Aunt True brainstormed with Bud Jefferson and helped him set up a display of “pirate
