Page 151 of Trouble Comes in Threes

“No!” Neely Kate and I said simultaneously.

Aunt Bessie, who was standing on the front porch, started to laugh.

“You’re still leaving,” Neely Kate said, “but I forgot something. Hold on.” She ran up the steps and into the house. About half a minute later, she ran out holding the wooden box.

“How on earth did you get that?” I asked. “It was on Joe’s desk.”

“I grabbed it,” she said. “In case those guys were actually after it. I want to give it to the person who buried it.” Her face fell. “Which, I guess, is impossible now, but there’s still Jason.”

“Yeah.” I walked around the back and opened the hatch. “I’ll bring it to the office. Maybe in the next day or two, we can go to the library and look up those yearbooks.”

She set the box in the back, and I closed the hatch.

“I’ll see you after your appointment,” I said, then gave her a hug. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

“I hope so,” she said as she glanced at the back of my packed-to-the-gills SUV. “Good luck with the circus bus.”

Laughing, I gave her another hug, then got into the car and headed back to Henryetta.

Chapter Thirty-Two

The kids were chatty on the way back, talking about their fun day at the farm and asking when we could go back to see my aunt and uncle. I told them I didn’t know, but we’d talk to Daddy and figure out a weekend to make it happen.

I dropped Ashley and Mikey off at school first, but as we pulled up to the carpool drop-off lane, I realized we’d put their backpacks in the back. When it came time for them to get out, I ran around to the back and opened the hatch, while Mikey and Ashley climbed onto the sidewalk.

The woman in the car behind me leaned out her window and shouted. “Oh, come on!”

Ashley rounded the back of the car, her face red with embarrassment.

“Where did you get that cool box, Aunt Rose?” Mikey asked as he ran his hand over the carving.

“It’s the box she and Neely Kate dug up,” Ashley said, rolling her eyes.

I hadn’t told her so, but she must have inferred it.

Mikey’s face radiated with excitement. “Maybe it has a secret compartment like in the treasure book my teacher is reading. Maybe there’s buried treasure inside!”

“Secret compartments and buried treasures aren’t real,” Ashley said with an exaggerated sigh as she grabbed her backpack. In her haste to make her escape, the wooden box fell out, landed on its side on the pavement, and shattered into multiple pieces.

She looked up at me in horror. “I’m sorry, Aunt Rose! I’m sorry!”

“It’s okay,” I assured her and bent down to pick up the pieces. Thankfully, the engagement ring was buried under several pieces of wood and hadn’t rolled away. The necklace was there too. I picked up the envelopes and jewelry and tucked them into my oversized cardigan pocket.

The car behind me lay on the horn. “Ignore them,” I said as Ashley and Mikey helped pick up the pieces. I grabbed a loose plastic Walmart bag that I kept in the back in case of accidents and held it out. “Let’s put all the pieces in the bag, and I’ll sort through it all later.”

“What’s this?” Mikey asked, holding up a very yellowed Ziploc bag that contained two yellow plastic squares.

It took me a second to realize what they were. “I think those are floppy disks.”

Mikey scrunched his nose. “Floppy what?”

“Floppy disks. They used to go into computers.” I wanted to ask where they had come from, but the obvious answer was staring me in the face.

He shook them. “They don’t seem very floppy. How do you fit them in a computer?”

“Computers used to be a lot different,” I said, taking the bag from him and setting it in the back of the trunk. “Those weren’t in the box before.” Had Neely Kate put them in there? But that seemed unlikely.

“I told you!” Mikey shouted excitedly. “It had a secret compartment!”

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