Chapter 7: The Beginning of August

Before the End of August

When the police asked us later what happened in August, it was hard to remember exactly. No one left out any information intentionally, but it was difficult to parse out the information the police would be interested in from the most important things that were happening during those weeks, because so much happened to us outside of the tragedy we saw the start of, or perhaps the conclusion of, that night. 

The day after Cocoa’s pool party, Lydia and I met up for pastries mid-morning, a sometimes Sunday tradition of skipping lunch in the summer and meeting at the bakery instead. The bakery was a brown-sloped building on the far side of the golf course, the opposite direction from where we had been riding that summer. Back then, I thought of the bakery as historical, though I doubt the building was older than the 60s, because the building looked dark and ornate to me, and most of the clientele out-aged us by at least five decades. Lydia and I, plus Jenna when she wasn’t working, would meet just before lunch on our bikes, parking them on the bike rack outside while we swung through the doors to the bakery to make our picks. 

Lydia was quiet today as we searched the glass cases, passing up cookies and cakes, settling on the breakfast pastries of chocolate croissants and jam-filled tarts. Lydia picked out her normal frosted slice of lemon bread to go, and I chose the croissant of the week, an experimental flavor filled with banana and cream. 

We took our pastries in their white paper bags out to the porch and sat in the sun as the tables around us filled with gray-haired women “doing lunch.” Across the road from the bakery, golfers passed by in groups, too far away for us to hear anything but the occasional splink of a golf ball shooting into the distance.  

“Where did you and Jenna go last night?” I asked Lydia.

“To her house. I just needed to get out of there.” Lydia picked at her lemon cake, pushing the frosting off to one side. 

“Yeah, I get that.” I did get it, even though I didn’t understand it fully yet. I got the need to leave, the feeling of too many things closing in, of you being closed out of a relationship you might have wanted. Another foursome pulled into our view on the golf course, and I watched them selecting clubs, clustered together as the sun glared down at their visors.

“Did Ralphie drive you home?” Lydia asked. I nodded, no need to tell her about the ice cream, to have when she had not. “Did he drive Devi and Box too?”

“Yep,” I said. “Apparently that’s a thing now. Or at least, they made it seem like it was last night.” 

The corner of Lydia’s mouth twisted as if she was debating asking more. I spared her from having to ask. 

“They didn’t say anything specific. We just dropped them off, and they were giggling like crazy. It was kind of annoying, to be honest.” 

Devi hadn’t done anything wrong, and neither had Box, but Lydia’s lemon cake was now in pieces on her paper bag, barely eaten. The foursome got back in their golf carts and continued on, rounding the trees out of my view.

“Lydia, did you really want to date him? Did you want something to happen?”

Lydia shook her head and started to smile. “That is the same thing that Jenna asked last night. And the answer is no, I knew I didn’t want to start anything with him. But I’m still sad.” 

“What do you think is making you sad?” 

“I’m sad I don’t have the option anymore. Is that bad? I liked knowing that someone might be looking at me when I’m not paying attention. I liked knowing that if I wanted to start something I could. Box and I never happened in school, and after last night, I know we never will, and that’s okay, but it feels more definite than I was expecting. It is definitely done, just like so much else is. Box and I are definitely not going to date, just like we are definitely never going to be back in high school, just like you and me and Jenna are all definitely moving to different states in a few weeks.” 

Lydia looked forlornly at her lemon cake, and I knew exactly what she meant. Even though my night had ended on potential—maybe something would happen between me and Ralphie, maybe we would find each other in the next year of school, maybe we would stay friends past high school—all of that potential also meant that other doors were closing. What would my life look like if I picked something new right now? What doors would have to stay closed for another door to open? Why would I choose something so dramatic when everything else was already changing? 

I rotated my croissant in a circle with my fork, starting to pick off flakes from the other side. 

“Wow, we’re fun today,” Lydia remarked. I looked at her and grinned. 

“There are some definite things that are good, you know?” I said. “You and me and Jenna, we’re definitely staying friends, even through college. Even you and Box, you might not date, but you can definitely stay friends if you want to be. And as far as someone looking at you when you aren’t paying attention, I can definitely tell you there will be more of that in your future.” I leaned over and shook her blonde braid hanging over her shoulder. “Miss Blondie-Blonde.” 

Lydia wrinkled her nose and started eating her lemon cake, and I reached the center of my croissant, where the banana and cream were smushed in between halves. Above us, the trees on the patio reached overhead, their branches touching and weaving together, a stray leaf falling here and there across the tables, onto the red umbrellas near the bakery or across the lawn near our bikes. 

✷

Time after the pool party sped up, and all of Lydia’s definites came closer, more in focus each day as our departure for college inched nearer on the calendar. Lydia’s job at the pool ended mid-August, and she had the days marked in sticky notes on her desk inside the pool office. My job at the library didn’t end for a few more weeks, and Jenna’s job at the store was just as indefinite as always, but we all felt the turning of the world each day, time slowly running out. 

I had reached a rhythm at the library, and I had learned to enjoy my time there each day. I knew to be prepared with a sweater on days that I sat in the back office, checking books back in. I had mastered the favorite children’s books to pull out during story hour, and I had even substituted for the children’s librarian once at story time, managing to keep eight six-year-olds alive and entertained for nearly twenty minutes. I didn’t have the magic spell of the librarian yet, but I had watched her reading, her voice just soft enough to make the kids lean in, her gestures jumping at the right moment to make them laugh, and I wondered if I could have the magic too someday. 

I had even learned to get along with Mr. Fleet, who had so disliked me at the beginning of the summer. I suspected that, in addition to his copious notes on his clipboard, he also kept a running list in his head of the younger workers who were more annoying and another of workers who were less so. I had a feeling I had made it onto the “less so” list, and I was glad to be there, the scrutiny never quite resting on me the way that it had at the beginning of my time at the library. 

On the Tuesday after Cocoa’s party, as I was sitting behind the reception desk, checking books back in and placing them on carts, a book I had never seen caught my eye. 

I had gotten used to the waves of books by now—children’s books coming in twenty at a time, dropped off by a tired parent who was grateful to be picking up another giant stack; the flimsy brown pages of the romance and horror novels, cartoonish covers with swirling letters of love or dripping blood; the books that took themselves seriously, the business and true crime and novels and cookbooks, hard covers coming into the return chute with a thunk, pages often so crisp still that I wondered if they had even been opened. Then there were the high school required reads, checked out with a frenzy now that school was within sight again; and non-fiction books big enough to have lost their self-importance, now circulating with vigor in accessible paperback forms, sometimes laminated by our head librarian to give a worn copy a few extra lives. 

But this book did not fit into any of the usual categories. On the front of an oversized hardcover book, a man and woman stood in a black-and-white world next to a church I recognized, one that sat on the main road in town. Our Town: A History of Trust and Turmoil on America’s Great Frontier. I opened the book and saw more pictures strung alongside dense text jammed with dates. At the back of the book, a map spread across several pages, and I traced my finger along the lines to find the church from the front cover, the creek by the bakery, and the open field where my neighborhood and the library I sat in now presided.

I began flipping back through when the pages fell open to a picture of a woman standing on a tennis court, holding a racket with both hands as though she wasn’t sure where to put them for the photograph. Behind her, I saw the edge of a tall building in the background, a long line that looked like our silo, complete with its other half. The caption read: The rich and famous find their respite on the sunny acres of the Linden Lodge.

Was this our silo, our tennis court? Was it ever an insane asylum, or just a place for rich people to retreat? Where was the lodge itself, and what was the silo for? I looked at the picture again, turning it around and flipping to nearby pages, until I realized that Mr. Fleet was watching me from the other side of the desk, clipboard in hand. I pictured his threat of moving me from the “less annoying” list back to the “unacceptable” column, just as the summer was ending. I dropped the book down beside my chair and resumed my job scanning books back in, a huge stack of paperback romance novels waiting their turn.

That night, I turned on the lamp by my bed and pulled the heavy book out of my bag. Now, without Mr. Fleet watching me, I began at the beginning, absorbing each page. Most of it was a history of the town, provincial and largely inconsequential. Would they grow wheat or soybeans? When could they change the fields to subdivisions? Did they need to build a second elementary school? 

But after all that, despite the greatest efforts of the book’s author to present a sanitized version of what our town had been, a bit of more interesting history slipped through, a brief era when our town sat on the fringe of civilized society, a last stop of the train between farming country and the city sprawl. Our town was a haven by the lakes where the city was close enough to run to or far enough to run away from. In a section that was just a few pages, I learned what I could about the woman on our tennis court, in front of our silo, when the town was just an intersection old.

Linden Lodge was owned by a cattle baron whose wife disliked the city. She invited her city friends to come to the lodge when they needed a break. When her husband James Linden was mysteriously killed in a train accident, her city friends—some of whom were gangsters and gun-runners—took advantage of the lodge, using it as a hideout from the law. Three years after her husband’s death, the lodge had burned down, suspected arson. She was never heard from again, and sadly, most citizens of the town at the time were more interested in looting the Lodge of its remaining riches, unharmed by the fire, than they were in finding out what happened to Lacey Linden, the Lady of Linden Lodge.

I flipped the page, ready for the next wave of the saga but the commentary had moved back to soybeans, the most pressing issue of the following decade. I dropped the book back down into my lap, looking out across my darkened bedroom at my closet doors, half open with clothes spilling out, waiting to be packed for college. 

Apparently our town had only had one interesting year in its history, and the silo where we had watched the summer go by was a part of it. I pulled out my laptop and opened it up, now with something new to search: the Linden Lodge.

The first result popped up: an image, the same one from the book, with Lacey Linden’s face looking at me again, now from my computer screen, tennis racquet in hand. A click took me to a page with five more images, all from the same photo session, Lacey standing with both hands on a tennis racket, looking out front, one with her head turned, another looking to the side. In the last one, where she almost seemed about ready to walk away, I could see in the background our silo, complete, without the top cut off, and a tennis net, spread across the very place that Jenna had suspected.

The next result in the search took me to a forum page that started with the question, “What happened to the Linden Lodge loot?” The poster, obviously proud of their alliteration, said that at the time of the fire the lodge was suspected to be holding a trove of riches for the most famous gangster of the era, jewelry and cash that would have made a getaway possible to any country in the world. Lacey’s husband may have been the only one who had known where it was hidden. The stash was never recovered after the fire. Some say Lacey Linden took it with her. Some say she never knew it was there at all. One person claimed that she had lit the fire herself, to sneak away with the mysterious loot, but she had died in the fire accidentally, her body and the treasure both gone forever.

Below the post, the comments rolled in, some commenters drawing on ghost stories, others referencing sightings of Lacey Linden in South America. One even speculated that she and a famous gangster had faked their deaths to go south together. The last comment read, “I’ve been out that way, and I doubt anything is even there anymore. If it was, it would have been in the silo, but that was demolished back in the 80s.” 

I scanned through the comments again, and I zoomed in on the final picture of Lacey, her tennis racket askew. I could see the silo in the background, the slight lift in the ground, the door half-way around. I could picture us dropping our bikes and going inside. I could feel the spot where she was standing, where Jenna had stood measuring out where the tennis court would have been. 

I looked at the last comment again. Was it possible that these commenters didn’t know that the silo still existed? That the construction crews around the silo didn’t know what it had been? Was it possible that Jenna, Lydia, and I had seen the silo for more than it was, not just because it had been a refuge for us this summer, a place for us to hide as the world changed around us, but because it held history and we somehow felt that? 

My searches earlier in the summer when I had discovered the silo had led me to legend hunters and ghost tours, to the supernatural and suspicious, always waiting to hear from another world. Yet now that I had a name for the place, I was shoved into a world of history, of exact dates and town charters and soybean calendars. Somewhere between the two, our silo sat unnoticed by anyone but us, and I wasn’t going to let any threats in the development stop me from getting back there again. 

✷

The next day, Lydia, Jenna, and I made a plan. We would return to the silo that afternoon, another fortunate coincidence that we all had off. I told them what I had learned, and Lydia, eyes wide, had shouted, “I knew it! I told you there was treasure somewhere out there.”

Jenna had been most concerned about the construction site, how we would get past the houses without being noticed, what we would do if someone was there who didn’t want us around. 

“Here’s what I’m thinking. If I had been more careful on my way in, I would have seen the car behind the house. I think that we could probably cut through by the golf course, but check behind the houses as we go.” 

We were at Jenna’s house, lounging on the couches in her living room since both of her parents were at work. Jenna still looked concerned. 

“Okay,” she said, “but let me check on something before we go.” She left the room. When she came back a few minutes later, Lydia and I were still leaning over the library book, trying to find any additional clues in the pictures of Linden Lodge. 

“I think we’re good,” Jenna announced. “Jay said he hasn’t heard anything in a few weeks.” 

Lydia raised her eyebrows. “We’re trusting Jay now?” 

Jenna groaned. “Yes, we are. He might be a jerk, but he’s not an idiot. He wouldn’t lie to me if he thought there were people out there still.” 

“Does he know what we’re doing?” I asked, dropping the library book down onto my folded legs. 

“No, I just found a way to ask about it without telling him much else. Honestly, at this point, he probably thinks I’m a narc or something, just interested in busting some kids up for selling drugs.” 

“You’d make a bad narc,” I observed. 

“Yeah, and if you were a narc, would you really still need to work at the store? It seems like a narc shouldn’t have to work shifts in the produce section,” Lydia remarked. 

“I don’t think narcs get paid, do they?” The three of us debated this as we packed up our bags for the bike ride to the silo. We decided to leave the library book at Jenna’s; it was just big enough and heavy enough to be hard to carry on a bike. But Jenna printed off one of the pictures from the internet before we left, her mom’s printer squeaking as the bar of ink bounced back and forth across the page. 

The photo of Lacey Linden, ink lines across her tennis skirt and racket by her legs, was folded in quarters and shoved in Lydia’s back pocket, ready for the ride ahead. 

✷

The afternoon was still, not a whiff of wind to make the evening come in faster. Instead, the thick heat of August sponged around us as we rode our bikes out of the neighborhood. The air cooled in the underpass, and the trees on the side of the golf course path gave us a little respite in their shade. We reached the entrance to the construction site, the green foliage covering our tracks behind us as we pushed through. We reached the site, and the first of the houses was in view. 

“It looks the same,” Jenna said, peering past the leaves to the house where I had heard the couple fighting.

“That’s the house,” I said, pointing at it. “The car was around back, and I didn’t see it, but I’m pretty sure we could see it if it was parked there now.” We pushed our bikes into the cul-de-sac. 

“What about that house over there?” Lydia motioned to the house on the other side. The sun cast shadows behind it, but the inside was flooded with the afternoon light, each support beam stretching far past its actual height. “Is it more built up than last time?”

“It looks the same to me. Let’s keep moving.” We were still pushing our bikes over the gravel, just as we usually did to get to the silo, but Lydia hopped up onto her seat. 

“I’d rather get through here quickly.”

Jenna and I mounted our bikes as well, pedaling across the gravel road, rocks spraying out behind us, definitely not quiet, but a lot faster than normal. 

When we pulled our bikes through the trees at the last house of the neighborhood, we were relieved. Somehow, the construction site felt like the uncertain place where bad people might hang out, but here, by the silo, where we knew bad people had once hung out, it didn’t feel dangerous. It felt safe, a world that was just ours. 

We dropped our bikes on the ground by the silo, and Lydia pulled the picture out of her pocket, running down to the field. 

“She would have been right…” Lydia walked a few steps over and glanced behind her, “here.” 

Jenna took the picture from Lydia’s hands and moved back. “That means the photographer was right about here.” She framed Lydia with her hands. 

“I guess it could be a different silo, but it’s hard for me to imagine that there was another one around here near a tennis court like this.” 

While Jenna and Lydia studied the picture, I had been searching the grass for the metal post I tripped over on our first day. “Here it is,” I called out when I nearly stubbed my toe on it again. “Jenna, do you remember where the other one was?” 

Jenna found it in the grass on her side of the field. Lydia looked between us. “Yeah,” she said, “if this is where the net was, this has got to be the place.”

Together, we turned to face the silo. “What are we looking for again?” Jenna asked. 

“I don’t know exactly,” I answered. “What would a fleeing widow leave behind after burning her house down to save it from being overrun by gangsters?” 

“They should consider putting that on the town welcome sign,” Lydia remarked. 

We went into the silo. A soft yellow light illuminated the top half, casting shadows down where we stood. The ground was soft and moist, and Jenna crouched on her hands and knees, examining the bottom of the silo wall.

“If I was going to hide something,” she said, “it would be down here. Somewhere it couldn’t get lost easily but isn’t at a height to be found.” 

Lydia started examining the doorway, looking at the edges of the door. “If I was going to hide something, it would be near the door so I didn’t have to come in and get too close to spiders.” 

I looked up at the open sky above us, tracing the maps of the silo’s cracks along the walls until they reached the sky. “If I was going to hide something, it would be by the baseboard or maybe in the roof.”

“If you think it was in the roof, then it’s long gone by now.”

“Maybe not in the roof, but near it. Somewhere it would be hard for gangsters to get.” 

Jenna, who was still making her way around the baseboards, began knocking at the bricks as she went, each peck echoing shrilly through the silo walls. 

“I wonder,” she click-click-clicked to the next brick, “if the wall would be hollow where they hid stuff. Maybe if we tap it, it will be obvious?” 

Jenna clicked on each tile below. I clicked on the tiles above. Lydia clicked around the doorway and the door. Nothing. We reached each other back at the door. 

Lydia looked above the door, to the stretch of bricks beyond her reach. “What about up there? Somewhere you’d need a ladder?” 

It took a few tries, but Jenna and I successfully hoisted Lydia onto our shoulders, her middle school cheerleading experience coming in handy. As Jenna and I tried to remain steady, Lydia resumed tapping. 

“This is the best way I’ve ever found hidden treasure,” Jenna quipped. 

“Oh same,” I responded. “I usually prefer finding it while diving from my yacht, but this is definitely preferable.” Lydia shifted and my hair got caught under her leg. “Ouch!” I pulled it free.

“Guys, be quiet. Listen to this one.” Lydia tapped again, and it did sound different. 

“Is there a way to get it open or pull it out?” I asked up to her.

“I’m looking,” she said. Jenna and I felt her wobbling around trying to find her grip around the brick. 

“It’s loose!” she shouted, her voice echoing in the silo. “I’ve got my fingers around it.” With a heavy tug, the brick came out, and Lydia fell backwards off our shoulders as we stumbled to catch her. We all landed safely, if gracelessly, on the grass at the center of the silo, looking up at the gap in the wall where the brick had been. 

“What was in there?” Jenna asked.

“I couldn’t really see anything. I think I need to go up again.” Jenna and I hoisted Lydia again, this time with Lydia holding the flashlight that Jenna had been smart enough to bring. 

“It looks like it’s mostly just dust. I’m nervous to reach in because something could be living in there!” Lydia squirmed on our shoulders. “I’m just going to use the flashlight to poke around.” 

We heard the flashlight scraping on the brick as Lydia tugged at something. “Oh my gosh there is something in here!” Lydia shouted. Suddenly, scraps of paper started floating down around us, and a small box landed on the ground with a thunk. 

“I think that’s it.” She hopped off our shoulders, and we crouched down to look at what had fallen. We pulled apart clumps of paper to discover photographs, the same woman in the photo standing near the silo before the tennis court had been put in. In the rest of the photos, an even younger Lacey Linden was unleashed from her tennis court: standing at the railing of a boat in a dock, locking arms with another woman as they walked down a city street, looking out a window, a gauzy curtain grazing her face. 

“Do you think these are valuable?” Lydia asked.

“Historical more than valuable, I would think.” I picked up the box that had fallen. “Now this, on the other hand, might be valuable.” I opened the lid carefully. 

It was a jewelry box, with spots in a fabric cushion for earrings and a necklace. On the lid of the box was a note: Darling, your insurance for when I’m gone. Love, Jim. The box was empty except for the note and the silk cushion.

“Does that mean she took them as insurance to get away or that someone else stole them?” Jenna asked. 

“I don’t know,” I answered. 

“Are we the first ones to find this?”

“I don’t know.”

“What should we do with it?”

“I really don’t know.”

By now, the inside of the silo was getting dark. We took the box and photos outside the silo into the waning sun. We sat on the grass together, looking over the tennis courts where Lacey Linden had played, all of us knowing together that we didn’t know what to do. 

“If they’re just going to tear down the silo anyway, we should keep it,” Lydia argued. “It’s only a matter of time before the construction crew gets back here or whoever moves into one of those houses finds it.” 

“We could turn it in,” Jenna suggested. “I don’t know, to a historical society or something.” No one wanted to say it but none of us liked that plan. This place had been a secret, something that none of us had mentioned to anyone else. Other people could know about the secret golf course entrance, about the construction and the houses, but not about this. 

“It doesn’t feel right to keep the box,” I said, thinking of Lacey, leaning on her tennis racket in the picture. “It’s not like anyone is coming back for it. It feels like a violation of what Lacey would have wanted. If she took the jewelry when the fire started, that means that she left the box behind on purpose. It should stay where it was.”

“What about the pictures?” 

“Maybe we put those back too? Or we could turn them in somewhere anonymously. It might be valuable to have, historically, but then why wouldn’t we turn the box in too?”

We were all unsure. There we were, three girls hoping to find treasure in a place that had already given us so much—a mystery, a respite, a place to lay and to dream, to watch the sky change and imagine the maps of our futures. And now we had been given treasure as well, without a clue what to do with it. 

“Let’s put it back,” Jenna decided. “At least the box.” She looked wistful. “If it was from her husband and she chose to leave it here, it feels disrespectful to take it out now. Maybe someone else will find it some day and they can decide what to do with it. We can always come back if we change our minds.”

“And the pictures?” 

“Let’s bring those with us for now. It can’t hurt. Maybe she left them behind for a reason too, or maybe she forgot they were in there.”

Suddenly the three of us, barely eighteen, not living a mile beyond where we grew up, were speculating on the desires of a woman long gone, likely long dead. I imagined leaving behind that box, that note, maybe the only remaining clue to whether or not Lacey Linden had escaped with her fortune or perished in flames. Suddenly, I pictured myself grabbing the jewelry, on the run, the last jolt of hope getting me out before everything around me burned down. I had felt so much with Ralphie just a few days before, but suddenly that seemed small, trivial compared to this love wrapped in death and fire. 

We sat for a few more minutes, watching the last of the sun disappear behind the trees. The plan seemed good, and we all agreed: we could always change our minds later. We slipped the box back behind the brick. We tucked the photos in with our printed photo from the internet, an odd reuniting of Lacey Linden’s likeness—the digital photo on printer paper and the originals finally found after decades of hiding—and we began our ride back through the sunset.

✷