Casey Daniels - Dead Man Talking

Automatically, I looked around for Lamar, too, but he was MIA, and didn’t it figure. That’s the thing with ghosts, see. When I want them to leave me alone, they’re all about help me, help me . And when I need some ectoplasmic assistance? Well, that’s when they tend to go wherever it is they go when they’re not bugging me.

With no help coming from the disembodied, I concentrated on the living.

“How’d you find the box?” I asked Delmar.

“He didn’t find it.” Reggie marched over. I swear, there was steam coming out of his ears. “I found it.”

“I saw it first.” Delmar plunked down on a handy headstone. “We was digging around a little bit. And I saw the corner of that box there.”

“I saw it,” Reggie insisted. “I saw it first.”

“Whatever!” I gave his comment all the attention it deserved before I turned back to Delmar.

“I saw it first, and I got it out of that hole,” the kid told me. “What’s that saying about possession being nine-tenths of the law?”

Reggie had no response. Then again, I don’t think Reggie understood the law. Or fractions for that matter. He grunted. “If there’s something valuable in that box-”

“If there is, it’s mine,” Delmar said. His jaw was rigid.

“Not a chance!” Reggie closed in on him. “If you think you can-”

“Hold on!” I stepped between them. “The box doesn’t belong to either one of you. It doesn’t belong to me, either. If it was buried at this grave, then it belongs to this man.” I looked down, as if I had to check the headstone to know who was buried there. “Jefferson Lamar. It belongs to Jefferson Lamar. Or to his family.”

Delmar wasn’t convinced. “Ain’t no dead man needs anything valuable.”

“Maybe there’s nothing valuable in it,” I told them. “Maybe it’s just a nasty old box. Did you ever think of that?”

Delmar hadn’t. Neither had Reggie. I could tell because, suddenly, they were all about keeping their mouths shut.

I saw my opportunity and took it. I hadn’t thought to bring gloves. Too bad. The wooden box was mushy. One corner of it was splintered, too, probably less from time and weather than from where Delmar and Reggie had knocked into it with their shovels. It had a small metal lock on the front of it, but since one side of the box was completely rotted away, opening it wouldn’t be a problem-if I had the nerve to pick away the moldering wood and stick my hand into a box that had been buried underground.

I held my breath, gritted my teeth, and got to work.

Delmar and Reggie stepped closer. So did Absalom and Sammi. Crazy Jake took pictures.

I hoped when he developed them, I wouldn’t look as disgusted as I felt sticking my fingers inside that box.

I picked a piece of fabric out. It was torn and faded, but it looked like it had once been orange. It unrolled, and a fat brown spider dropped to the ground, and it’s not like I’m a chicken or anything, but I was so startled, I jumped back. I was so busy watching that spider scuttle under a nearby rock, I wasn’t paying attention. It wasn’t until I saw something silvery and shiny on the ground that I realized that along with the spider, a coin had fallen out of the box. By that time, it was too late.

Absalom bent to retrieve it. “Look at that!”

“What is it?” Delmar asked. “You think it’s real?”

“Heck with real. You think it’s worth something? If it is,” Reggie reminded us, “I found it.”

Crazy Jake took a picture.

Surprise, surprise… Absalom handed me the coin. I held on tight and, fortunately, it wasn’t nearly as dirty as the box it came out of. I buffed it against my jeans and took a good look. “I think it’s silver,” I said. “There’s an eagle on one side of it, and it says here that the coin is worth one dollar.” I flipped it over. “There’s a head of a lady on the other side. It’s dated 1902.”

“That’s old,” Crazy Jake informed us.

“That means it’s worth something. I’m thinkin’ it just might make me rich.” Reggie made a move to snatch the coin out of my hand, but I turned so he couldn’t reach it.

“I don’t know what it might be worth,” I said, “but I think it’s plenty interesting.” They didn’t know that I’d been chatting it up with Jefferson Lamar, of course, so they couldn’t know I was wondering what significance the coin had to him, and why it was buried at his grave. Since I wasn’t about to get into all that, I stuck with what I didn’t have to explain. “We’ve got something unusual here. I think this is going to make us look pretty good in the competition.”

“Who cares about the friggin’ competition,” Sammi bellyached.

“We should care.” OK, I sounded a little too much like a cheerleader, but let’s face it, if any team needed encouragement, it was mine. “Like Delmar said earlier, the producer, Greer, is probably going to suck up to Team One. I’m sure that’s why she decided to start with them today. So we’ve got to make it so she can’t ignore us. This is going to help.”

“If that coin is worth something,” Sammi grumbled, “we should all get a cut.”

“You ain’t listening.” Absalom took a step toward her. Sammi wasn’t about to back down, and either Absalom didn’t notice the fire in her eyes, or he didn’t care. “This is going to make us look good,” he added. “We got ourselves a genuine mystery here, and that TV chick is gonna love that. Bet those rich ladies, they don’t got a treasure like this in their section.”

As if his words were the magic abracadabra that made them appear, we heard rustling through the weeds and the sound of Greer’s squawking as she instructed her cameraman to start filming.

“Let’s not tell them. Not yet, anyway.” Making sure that fat spider was long gone, I retrieved the faded orange fabric, wrapped the coin in it, and tucked it all back in the box. I dropped the whole thing in an especially dense patch of spiny weeds behind Absalom’s voodoo altar headstone, and fluffed the taller weeds so that they wouldn’t look as if they’d been disturbed.

“I’d rather do a little research before we let anybody know what we’ve found,” I said, when what I meant was that I wanted to talk to Jefferson Lamar before I showed the coin to anyone else. “That way when we reveal we have the coin, we can show how good we are at research, too.”

I don’t think any of them agreed with me, but I never had a chance to find out because just then Greer and her cameraman showed up.

“Keep doing what you were doing.” She gestured in a way that told us to get busy and act natural all at the same time. “We just came to see what Team Two is up to.”

She wasn’t kidding when she said we . Team One trailed behind Greer and the cameraman, and even before they stepped into the little clearing near Lamar’s grave, they were mumbling to each other.

“Not nearly as aesthetically pleasing as the section we’re working on,” Lucinda Wright commented as she adjusted her picnic basket over one arm. She shook her head sadly.

“Not nearly as promising,” Katherine Lamb said to Gretchen Hamlin.

Bianca didn’t speak a word. She just gave me a look, head to toe, that said she was assessing my fashion sense.

It was the first I realized there were bits of rotted wood and a streak of dirt across the front of my emerald green scoop-necked tee.

“Well…?” Her top lip curled, Greer gave my team a collective look that clearly said we were a disappointment. “You’re supposed to be doing something. Anything. Anything?” This time, her gaze fell on me.

“We were just-”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter.” She waved away whatever explanation I was about to give as inconsequential. “We need a scene where we introduce both teams. I thought we could do that now. You know, like you’re working in this section over here…” She waved my team to one side. “And Team Number One…” When she turned to the other team, she smiled in a way she didn’t when she looked at the rest of us. “You’ll come through over there, between that mausoleum and that headstone there with the angel on top and-”