Below the Tree Line by Susan Oleksiw

Author:Susan Oleksiw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: CVR01052018;Susan Oleksiw;susan oleksiv;below tree line;pioneer valley;pioneer valley mystery;historical;massachusetts;historical mystery;mystery book;mystery fiction;mysteries
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.
Published: 2018-08-02T17:24:37+00:00

Fourteen

An early morning shower the next day, Thursday, weighed down the stalks of the daffodils outside Felicity’s front door and lining one side of the barn. The raindrops hung like crystals on the yellow-and-white trumpets, and the color alone put a lift in her step. The shower left the air smelling clean but moldy beneath the canopy along Old Town Road.

She moved gingerly among the small puddles dotting the nearly abandoned road, avoiding the obvious mud traps as she made her way past a falling stone wall on one side and a slanting shoulder on the other. She checked the GPS on her cell and concluded that in another hundred feet or so she would reach the corner of Sasha Glover’s property. She didn’t need the GPS coordinates, but she decided to learn to use the app in case some day she did need them. And now it was a game.

The problem with old plot lines on maps was they had no corresponding markers on real land, at least not until developers arrived. She wanted to make sure she found the correct piece of property to explore. Also, she didn’t know how long this would take, but she wanted to give herself all the time she might need. She wore a backpack and carried a picnic lunch.

The official entrance to the lot was a break in the century-old stone wall, its form changing as the ground around it rose or fell, trees dropped limbs, and snow and ice shifted the rocks. But the more obvious sign was a barely discernible row of ATV tracks going in and out on a narrow path. Felicity followed these into the lot, which looked like any other wood lot in the area. Some pine and arborvitae, a few old hardwoods that would be worth something in the future, and a lot of windblown trees rotting in marshy ground. But as she walked deeper in, she noticed something else, something she would never notice while walking or driving past.

It was an old cellar hole, about forty feet from the entrance. She circled it. It wasn’t an unusual sight. And like many of the remnants of abandoned homes from past centuries, the corner of a foundation, set into a once-low hill, still declared itself although the ground had changed, settling and filling in over the decades. But there, in the cellar hole, someone had dug several holes, going deep and piling up the dirt in neat piles. Felicity grabbed a stick, knelt down, and peered into the holes, poking through the loosened soil. She saw nothing that would have told her that the site was valuable.

She was used to seeing men and women, old and young, with metal detectors, searching for anything of interest in old cellar holes or wherever people might have lived and left behind an artifact or two. They might find an old horseshoe, perhaps a scrap of an iron cooking pot, but she’d never heard of anyone finding anything truly valuable.

Ahead of her were several more holes.

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