It was Monday, the same afternoon I’d spent at the library. Dawn was sitting for Charlotte Johanssen, and they had joined Jessi and Becca at the arboretum. After helping Becca and Charlotte start in on the job of clearing leaves out of a flower bed, Jessi had pulled Dawn aside for a serious talk. “Keep your eyes open,” Jessi had said. “We really think someone may be out to ruin Mrs. Goldsmith’s plans for the arboretum. We may not be able to catch the people who are doing it, but at least we can try to fix up whatever they mess up. We can’t let the sabotage work.”
That was when Charlotte and Becca interrupted.
“We weren’t eavesdropping,” Becca explained when Jessi glared at her. “We just came to ask you where the extra wheelbarrow is. And we couldn’t help hearing what you said.”
“If something’s wrong, we want to help,” said Charlotte. “I thought we were helping to save the arboretum. Is it in even more trouble?”
Jessi and Dawn exchanged glances. Then Jessi shrugged. “I guess we might as well tell them,” she said to Dawn. “It can’t hurt.”
Jessi led the others over to a couple of garden benches near the fountain. “It’s like this,” she told Charlotte and Becca when they were all seated. “You know how we’re cleaning up this place so that a rich lady might buy it and keep it running?” The girls nodded. “Well,” Jessi continued, “there are some other people who want to tear down the arboretum and build houses here. They’re called developers.”
“But Mrs. Goldsmith wouldn’t want that to happen!” said Becca.
“Right,” said Jessi. “Neither would we. This is a really special place, and it’s part of Stoneybrook’s history. But if the lady doesn’t want to buy it, the developers probably will.”
“What about that sabo — whatever?” asked Charlotte.
“Sabotage,” said Dawn. “It means when somebody wrecks the work that somebody else is doing, on purpose.”
“And we think that may be what’s happening here,” said Jessi. “We think somebody — maybe a developer — is messing up the arboretum as fast as we’re cleaning it up, so that when the lady comes she won’t be impressed.”
“So she won’t buy the place,” said Becca, nodding.
“And they can buy it, and tear it all down for houses,” added Charlotte. “That’s terrible!”
“We don’t have proof,” Jessi reminded the girls. “So far there are just some clues, but we haven’t been able to put them all together.”
“Clues? Maybe we can help!” said Charlotte. “I’ve helped solve mysteries before, you know.”
Jessi and Dawn looked at each other and grinned. It was true. Charlotte is a good detective, and she’s been helpful in unraveling more than one of the mysteries the BSC has been involved in.
“I think I know a clue,” said Becca.
“You do?” asked Jessi, turning to look at her.
Becca nodded. “One day last week I was working with Mrs. Goldsmith in the greenhouse. I looked out the window and saw these two men in overalls, way over by where the apple trees are.”
“What were they doing?” asked Dawn.
“They were just walking around,” said Becca. “And they had these things they would set up and look through, like they were taking pictures. Only they weren’t.”
“How do you know?” asked Jessi.
“Mrs. Goldsmith said so,” explained Becca. “When I told her about the men, she looked at them and said they were probably — I forget the word. People who measure land. She thought it was strange that they were there, because she hadn’t asked them to come. She seemed a little bit upset.”
“Hmmm, very interesting,” said Jessi. “I’ll bet it was surveyors you saw.” Becca nodded, and Jessi went on. “I wonder if the developers sent them,” she mused.
“Maybe. But we can’t prove it,” Dawn reminded her.
“Still, I’m glad you told us, Becca,” said Jessi. “Anyway, as I was just saying to Dawn, I think the best thing to do is keep our eyes open. It almost doesn’t matter whether or not we prove that the developers are sabotaging our work. The main thing is to make sure the arboretum looks great. So if we find any messes, we have to clean them up right away.”
“We can do that,” said Becca earnestly.
“No problem,” said Charlotte. “But while I’m cleaning up, I’m also going to be watching for clues. If somebody’s doing something wrong, I want to catch them and make sure they stop.”
Charlotte has a very firm sense of right and wrong.
“Okay, then,” said Jessi, standing up and smacking her hands together. “Let’s get back to work. I’ll help you guys find that wheelbarrow.”
“And I’ll start clearing those vines off the house,” said Dawn, looking up at the long brick wall of the main building. It was covered with old, dead vines, and Mrs. Goldsmith had told Jessi that they needed to be pulled down before they ruined the bricks.
“Don’t forget to wear the gloves Mrs. Goldsmith loaned me,” Jessi told her.
Dawn thanked Jessi for the reminder, pulled on the gloves, and started in on the vines as Jessi and the girls headed off to find the wheelbarrow. Those vines were clinging pretty tightly to the wall, Dawn told me later. “I could see what Mrs. Goldsmith meant about their ruining the brick,” she said.
Dawn pulled and tugged at the vines, making big piles of the ones she’d pulled down. The vines were so entwined, and they climbed so far up the building, that Dawn thought they must have been growing there for years and years. Slowly, she worked her way from one end of the building to the other. When Jessi came back from helping the girls, she started pulling vines down, too. She worked on another wall, around the corner from Dawn’s.
“This is hard work!” Jessi called, stopping to wipe her forehead.
“I know!” Dawn called back. “I can’t believe I’m almost finished with this side.”
There was silence for a few minutes. Then Jessi heard a yelp. “Dawn?” she called. “What happened?”
There was no answer, so Jessi headed around the corner to see if Dawn was all right. “Dawn?” she asked again, when she saw a white-faced Dawn staring at part of the wall she’d just cleared.
“Come here,” Dawn said to Jessi in a strange voice.
Jessi stepped closer and looked up. “Wow!” she said. “A brass plaque. Neat! It must tell something about the building.”
“It does,” said Dawn in the same strange voice. “Read it.”
Jessi stepped closer and read the plaque. “Whoa!” she breathed when she saw what it said. Then she and Dawn read it out loud together.
“Do you realize what this means?” Dawn asked, reaching out to run her fingers over the raised letters on the plaque.
“This is awesome!” Jessi said.
“What’s awesome?”
Once again, Jessi and Dawn whirled around. And once again, Charlotte and Becca stood staring at them. “We could hear you all the way over by our flower bed,” Becca explained.
“Is this another mystery?” asked Charlotte.
“It is,” said Dawn, giving in to her excitement. “And it’s a good one, too. Want to hear about it?” There was no way any more work was going to get done that afternoon. Dawn and Jessi took the girls to the garden benches again, sat them down, and filled them in on what they’d found out and what it could mean.
After that, Dawn and Jessi and the girls scoured the arboretum, looking for more clues. They turned over flowerpots, peeked inside birdhouses, and ran their hands over brick walls, searching for secret hiding places. Dawn looked closely at some of the fancy carvings on the wooden porch railings, wondering if one of the beautifully formed flowers or trees might actually be a secret button she could push to open a hidden wall. They poked into the underbrush and examined the pipes going into the fountain. Becca even began to dig in one of the gardens, insisting that a mound near the lily beds looked suspicious, until Dawn put a stop to her excavations.
“We can’t tear the place apart,” Da
wn said, looking around at the mess they’d made. “We’re trying to neaten it up, remember?”
“You’re right,” said Jessi. “We need to make a better plan for searching.” She paused and glanced at her watch. “But we’ll have to clean up tomorrow. Right now, we have a BSC meeting to get to.”
Dawn smiled. “No way do I want to be late to that. I can’t wait to see Kristy’s face when she hears what we found out,” she said. “Will she be shocked, or what?”
Well, as you might have guessed by now, the answer to Dawn’s question was “or what.” I wasn’t shocked — because what the brass plaque said and what I found in the book of old maps made the same thing clear.
The arboretum was Squirelot, and Squirelot was the arboretum.
Not surprisingly, the scene at our BSC meeting that Monday afternoon was total chaos. Picture this: Dawn and Jessi are babbling about a brass plaque, while Mal and Claudia yell questions at them a mile a minute. Stacey is trying to tell everybody she has to collect dues, but nobody can hear her over the racket. The phone is ringing off the hook. Mary Anne has her hands over her ears, and she’s begging everybody to just “Slow down, please! And take turns!”
And me? Madame president? Did I stay out of the mess and maintain some dignity? No way. I was right in there, yelling my head off about maps and landmarks. The rule about BSC business always coming first was out the window. This was no ordinary meeting. Oh, we answered the phone when it rang, and assigned jobs, but that was about it. That day, the mystery came first.
Eventually, we calmed down a bit and started to sort out what we’d learned. I explained about using the maps at the library to figure out where Squirelot had been. “I couldn’t believe my eyes at first,” I said. “But by the time I had double- and triple-checked the old map against the newer one, I knew it had to be true.”
“And now there’s really no question,” Dawn said. “That plaque we found makes it definite.”
“What did it say, exactly?” asked Mal.
Jessi reached into her backpack and pulled out a little notebook. “I wrote it down,” she said. Then she read out loud: “ ‘Squirelot. Donated by Ellen, Scott, and Mary Thomas in memory of their grandparents, Rachel and John Thomas, and of their aunt, Christina Thomas.’ ” She looked up. “If I remember that family tree right, Scott and Mary Thomas were Edward’s children.”
“Wow! So it really is true,” Mary Anne said. “Dawn’s right. The plaque proves it. I can just picture Christina at the arboretum, back when it was a fancy estate. Can’t you see her, wandering through the gardens on a summer evening, dressed in a long white gown?”
“And looking for a spot to hide her fortune,” added Claudia. “While Devon chases after her, trying to force her to marry his awful friend.”
“I wonder if her fortune really is hidden on the grounds,” Stacey said.
“I’ll bet anything it is,” said Dawn. “Where else would it be? In those days, women didn’t go out alone too often. She wouldn’t have had the chance to find a secret place anywhere else.”
“A stash of gold,” mused Mal. “Think of it, all that money just lying buried for all these years.”
“It’s probably worth even more now than when she hid it,” I put in. “What if it’s, like, a million dollars worth of gold?”
“A million dollars,” breathed Claudia. She had this look in her eyes as she started to fantasize. “Think of all the art supplies that would buy. I could even build myself a studio.”
“I’d go on a shopping spree,” said Stacey. “In Paris.” She smiled to herself.
“How much does a private jet cost?” Dawn asked. “If I had my own, I could fly back and forth between here and California as often as I liked.”
“As long as we’re dreaming,” said Mal, “I think I’ll buy a ranch out in Montana, with stables full of gorgeous horses.”
“I’ll come live there with you,” said Jessi. “If you build me a ballet studio in one wing, that is.”
“I’d be happy to,” said Mal, grinning. “We’ll put it right next to my writing studio.”
“Let’s see,” I said. “I’ll start with season tickets to the Mets. Box seats, of course. Then, I’ll buy official uniforms and equipment for the Krushers. After that —” Suddenly, I stopped myself. “What am I saying?” I asked. “The first thing I’ll do is save the arboretum. After all, the money belongs there, right?”
“Definitely,” said Jessi. “I can’t wait to see Mrs. Goldsmith’s face when we tell her that she never has to worry again about the arboretum closing.”
“So it’s settled,” said Stacey, who had a strange look on her face. “The money goes to the arboretum.” Everybody nodded. Stacey looked around at us and shook her head. “Don’t you realize that there’s one tiny thing we’re forgetting?” She paused. “All this fantasizing is fun, but come on, you guys, we haven’t found the money yet!”
“Oh, that,” said Claudia, waving a hand. “That’s only a matter of time.”
“Oh, really?” asked Stacey, arching an eyebrow. “Well, we’d better start, then. What do we do first?”
I could tell Stacey thought she was humoring Claudia. But Claudia was dead serious. “Well,” she said thoughtfully, “I guess the first thing to do would be to look at the clues we have so far. Let’s put everything out on the desk here, where we can look it over.” She rummaged around in a drawer and came up with the family tree we’d made. I added my copy of Christina’s letter (which I’d been carrying around in my backpack), and Jessi tore a page out of her notebook — the one on which she’d written down what the plaque said — and handed it over.
We clustered around Claudia’s desk and stared at the three pieces of paper.
“Not much to go on,” Stacey said, after a few minutes.
“It isn’t, is it?” asked Dawn. “But let’s think. Kristy, Mrs. Abbott said she’d always thought that this letter held some clues, right?”
“Right,” I said. “But if they’re there, I can’t make any sense of them.”
“Well, it seems obvious to me that the letter was supposed to lead Henry to the hidden fortune,” said Mary Anne, after she’d reread the letter carefully. “She must have loved him so much,” she added with a sigh.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s not get all sentimental. What can we figure out from the letter?” I pointed to the date. “February fourteenth. Why that date? Obviously it has some special meaning.”
“It’s Valentine’s Day,” said Mary Anne, sighing again.
“Maybe the fortune’s hidden under that statue of the people kissing,” said Jessi. “Get it? Romance — kissing — Valentine’s Day?”
“I get it,” said Claudia, “but I don’t know. It’s a little far-fetched. Still, I guess we could check there.” She wrote down “check statue” on the list she’d started. (Only she spelled it “statchew.”)
“Or maybe by one of the birdhouses?” asked Mal. “You know, lovebirds?”
Claudia made a note. “It won’t hurt to check every place we can think of,” she said. “A good detective follows up every single lead.”
“I’ve been thinking,” said Stacey, who had been quiet for a few minutes. “What about those roses around the date? Christina obviously put some time into drawing them. They’re beautiful.”
“They are,” said Claudia. “But what are you trying to say?”
“Isn’t there a rose garden at the arboretum?” asked Stacey.
Jessi jumped up. “There is!” she said. “It’s supposed to be gorgeous when it’s in bloom. It’s right in back of the main house.”
“Maybe the rose garden was Christina and Henry’s special place,” said Stacey.
“Whoa!” I said. “I bet you’re right.” I glanced down at the letter again.
“But — I hate to say this — wouldn’t the garden have changed since Christina’s day?” asked Dawn.
“No!” said Jessi. “Mrs. Goldsmith told me that the rose garden has been kept in its orig
inal condition for over a hundred years.”
“That’s it, then,” said Claudia, making one last note and pushing back her chair. “I think we should go to the arboretum right after school tomorrow and check out the roses.”
* * *
The next day, we headed over to the arboretum as soon as school was out. Jessi went inside to check in with Mrs. Goldsmith while the rest of us walked around back.
“Oh, no,” said Dawn, as soon as we turned the corner and saw the gardens. “I forgot about this mess we left yesterday. We’d better clean it up before we leave.”
“We will,” said Claudia impatiently. “But first we have some clues to follow up.”
Jessi came out the back door just then and motioned for us to follow her to the rose garden. “Mrs. Goldsmith was a little upset about the mess back here,” she said, as she led the way. “But I promised her we’d clean it up today. I didn’t tell her anything about what we’re up to.”
“Good,” I said. “That way we can surprise her when we find the fortune.”
We followed Jessi through a trellised arch and into a little garden I’d never seen before. I tried to imagine how it would be when the roses were blooming, but it was hard. All I could see were brownish, dead-looking sticks poking up. Then I peered closer at one of the clusters. “Hey!” I said, bending down to the ground. “Somebody’s been digging here.”
My friends joined me. “Look at that,” Dawn said, checking out the pile of earth that had been shoved aside. “Whoever it was gave up before they dug too deeply. The ground is muddy on top, but it must still be frozen underneath.”
“Check it out!” said Stacey, pointing to a patch of ground a little way off. “Footprints. They’re small ones, though. Like our size.”
My heart was beating fast. I knew — I just knew — that we were onto something. Something important. “We’re not the only ones hunting for that fortune,” I said quietly, as I looked down at the footprints.
“But who else could possibly know about it?” asked Dawn.