Something Buried, Something Blue by Lorena McCourtney

Author:Lorena McCourtney [McCourtney, Lorena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rogue Ridge Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

IVY

Thursday night was fun. We found popcorn in the pantry, popped a big bowl and smothered it with butter, and played a card game Elle called Concentration. Yes, she’d even come prepared with a deck of cards. Surprisingly, Natasha really got into the game and collected those pairs of cards with a vengeance.

After the cards, victorious Natasha went to bed. Mac and I included Elle in our scripture reading and prayer time before bed. Koop settled down with Elle on the sofa for the night, and BoBandy climbed the stairs with Mac.

The last thing Elle said before I headed for my cot was, “I do get to help you look tomorrow, don’t I?”

“Look for what?” I asked warily.

She smiled guiltily, as if she’d been hoping to fake me into revealing what we were looking for before I thought better of it. “Whatever you’re looking for.”

“Well, we’ll see.”

Elle wrinkled her freckled nose. “That’s what Mom says when she’s thinking about how to say ‘no’ about something.”

“We’ll talk to your Grandpa and see what he thinks.”

“Okay. But if he does say I can help, what do I look for?”

A sly and persistent budding sleuth!

“Papers,” I improvised. “Maybe a will. Everybody has important papers, but we can’t find Dawson’s.” I figured that would keep her busy without revealing the real goal of our search here. And papers might indeed be helpful, though I didn’t think she’d have any better luck finding them than we’d had.

***

Next morning after breakfast, we checked with Mac, and then Elle started looking for papers in all the places we’d already looked: the bookshelves, kitchen drawers, and various cabinets. She even found a drawer built into the dining room table that we’d missed. You’d think a secret drawer would hold exciting secrets, but all this one held was a jumble of rubber bands and old coupons for everything from toilet tissue to organic Dijon mustard. I wasn’t surprised by Dawson’s interest in Dijon mustard, given what we already knew of his unexpected tastes, but I wouldn’t have pegged him as a coupon user. But there it was.

Natasha sat up on the sofa and watched Elle make her search. Finally she whispered to me, “You didn’t tell her about the D.B. Cooper money, did you?”

“No, of course not. I just told her Dawson must have important papers somewhere, and we needed to find them.”

And that’s exactly what Elle did!

I couldn’t believe it when she came out of the pantry carrying that cardboard carton of canned tuna, the top open. Because the box didn’t hold cans of tuna. It was full of papers.

With what sometimes seemed like extra-sensory perception, Natasha yelled from her sofa, “What did you find?”

I took a quick peek before taking the box in to her. Property tax bills and receipts. House insurance. Title on the pickup. Various newspaper clippings. A deed to something, probably the ranch. Other miscellaneous receipts. Dawson had an odd system for establishing what qualified as important. One neatly handwritten page was a recipe for oysters Rockefeller; another printed page appeared to be a genealogy for Clint Eastwood.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.