The Winner's Game(37)

With the flip of the switch I power up and begin tracking back and forth across the lawn, swinging the device in low, smooth motions. In the first thirty minutes I get six blips on the scanner, and each time I dig in that spot I end up finding something: a dime, two pennies, and three bottle caps.

A little while later, once the rain has slowed to a mist, I spot Bree sitting on the back porch under the cover of the roof, sipping a cola. “Any luck?” she asks.

“Twelve cents.”

She returns my smirk from earlier. “See. I told you there’s no treasure.”

“Don’t be so sure. I’m just getting started.”

“Search all you want. You’re still going to owe me fifty bucks.” She smirks again, then stands up to leave.

Right then my buzzer starts going off like never before. I’m standing in the bark dust, just off the edge of the lawn, near the fence that divides our house from the next. “I found something else!”

Curious, Bree wanders down from the deck to check it out. “What is it?”

“I have to dig first. You want to help?”

I give her the hand trowel and I use my hands, and together we brush aside the mulch and begin digging through the dirt. Within a minute we’ve got a hole a foot wide by a foot deep, but we haven’t found anything. I sift through our dirt pile to see if we’ve missed something, but still nothing. Just to be sure, I scan the pile with the metal detector, but no alarms go off.

“Scan the hole,” suggests Bree. “Maybe it’s still down deeper.”

Sure enough, when I scan the bottom of the hole…BZZZZZ!

When we start digging again, we take great care to make sure we aren’t missing anything. Carefully, we take a scoop of dirt, sift it in our hands, then sift it once more as we deposit it on our growing pile beside the hole. At about sixteen inches deep we finally strike gold. Well…probably not gold. But something.

“What is it?” asks Bree again.

“I don’t know. Dig a little more.”

Bree jabs the point of the trowel under something hard and pries it loose. When she gives it another firm pop, a white-flecked object, smeared with dirt, comes flying out of the hole at Bree’s face, hitting her right on the mouth. “Oooh!” she screams, spitting like mad. “What is it?”

I pick it up to give it a closer look. “I think it’s a skull.”

She spits at least five more times and then wipes at her lips like crazy. “That is so gross!”

It’s impossible not to laugh. “Yeah, you just kissed a dead cat!”

She wipes once more, going all the way up her sleeve. “I thought your thingamajig is only supposed to find metal.”

“It is.” I take the tiny shovel and begin poking around in the hole again, in the area where the skull was. It doesn’t take long before I uncover a leather collar with a stamped metal tag attached. “Mr. Skittles,” I say aloud, reading the name on the inscription. “That should make you feel better.”

“Why?”

“At least your first kiss was a boy.”

She punches me as hard as she can in the arm, but I don’t care. From now on, no matter how she teases me, I will be able to tell people that a dead cat named Mr. Skittles kissed Bree on the lips, and that’s easily worth a bruised arm.

“This is so stupid,” she hisses. “I’m going inside.”

“Great,” I reply with another laugh. “I’ll be in as soon as I find a treasure.”

For the next hour, I venture farther out on the beach, again swinging the metal detector low across the sand. After a while my arms feel like they’re going to fall off, but I continue on, because I can’t let Bree win.

Because I don’t have fifty dollars to pay her!

As it starts getting dark, I begin slowly back toward the house. I don’t want to give up just yet, but I know finding treasure in the dark would be hard, even with a metal detector. As I approach the property line, the sun is so low that my shadow in front of me is twice my size.

That’s when it happens.

Maybe ten feet from where the edge of the beach meets our lawn, the device starts buzzing again. This is the loudest buzz yet!

Worried that I might uncover another dead something-or-other, I dig carefully, lifting out each handful of sand with care, then letting the grains strain through my fingers until there is nothing left. After twenty scoopfuls, my fingernails scrape along a flat metal surface of something nearly as big as my hand. It isn’t big enough to be a treasure chest, but this is definitely the biggest thing I’ve found so far. At least it’s not some stupid bottle cap!

Eagerly, I trace around the edges of the whatever-it-is, like an archaeologist uncovering bones. At last, the object takes shape. I dust away the thin layer of sand covering the inscription, salivating over what it might be, and then, just like that…the thrill is gone. “Altoids,” I mumble, reading the top of a rusty tin box. “Curiously strong mints. Gosh dang it! Bree was right. There’s no treasure out here.”