CHAPTER 4

I pulled out the money and removed the elastic band. The money fanned out and extended over the sides of my palm. The outer bill was a hundred dollars with the bespectacled and bemused face of Benjamin Franklin. Ben looked happy to see us. I was sure happy to see him. The fact that it was American money wasn’t surprising; St. Stephen was separated from Calais, Maine, by a narrow river, and lots of people shopped over there. Most St. Stephen wallets contained at least a few American bills.

“Wow! A stack of Benjamins,” Ralph said.

“Benjamins?”

Ralph pointed at Franklin. “Benjamins is slang for hundred-dollar bills. All the rappers use it. If you weren’t so busy listening to that old music you’d know this stuff.”

I rolled my eyes.

I grabbed the now empty bag and examined it inside and out for a name or other distinguishing marks that could tell us who the money belonged to. There weren’t any.

“This is a lot of money,” I said. “Who leaves a paper bag filled with cash in a baseball dugout? Let’s look through the bills, check if there’s a note inside.”

Ralph nudged me and nodded toward Joe, who was still running the track. “It’s too public here. We should look at the money somewhere private. What if someone comes along and mugs us?”

“I doubt Joe’s going to mug us. I thought you said he was a good guy?” Ralph and Joe had played on the same hockey team a couple of years ago, before Ralph realized that he hated hockey and couldn’t skate worth spit.

Ralph continued to scan the horizon for potential muggers. “He is a good guy. Still …” I stood up to go, but Ralph clutched my arm. “Wait—are we thieves if we take it with us?”

I thought of all the mystery books I’d read and shook my head. “I don’t think so, unless we keep the money, which we won’t do, right?”

Ralph looked horrified. “Of course we won’t!”

“Let’s take the money and find a way to return it to its rightful owner. If we leave it here someone else will find it and they might keep it. We owe it to the owner to take care of it.”

I imagined myself handing the money to some faceless person, them clasping me in their arms and crying tears of joy for returning the family fortune. I heard the newspaper reporter saying, “How were you so smart to figure out who’d lost the money?” I’d reply, “It was easy.” We’d be heroes. Just thinking about all of the attention we’d get had me completely pumped, like there was extra energy running through my body. It was all I could do not to go run a lap with Joe.

Instead, I took a deep breath, put the money back into the bag, and handed it to Ralph to tuck into one of his pockets. “Let’s go count the money in Mrs. Attwood’s barn. No one will see us there.”

“Who knows,” Ralph said as we stepped out of the dugout. “Maybe there’ll be a reward for returning the money. We could go to Hollywood. You could hang with movie stars and I could become a famous chef.”

I hadn’t even thought about the possibility of a reward. “Hollywood, here we come!” I whooped. After a couple of energetic high fives, Ralph and I raced off to Mrs. Attwood’s barn to count the money we were both certain would lead to our fame and fortune.

Mrs. Attwood, or Mrs. A. as I like to call her, lived across the street from me. The gray-shingled barn behind her house stored a prized Model T Ford, the perfect place to sit and count the money in private. The barn door was locked when we got there, but it was no problem to jimmy one of the windows open and crawl through. We’d done it lots of times before when we were playing hide-and-seek. We climbed into the car like we were going for a Sunday drive, with me behind the wheel because Ralph said he was too nervous to drive. As soon as we were settled, he took the bag out of his pocket and pulled out the money.

“How much do you guess is in here?” he asked.

“I bet it’s at least a thousand dollars.”

“I say a million dollars!” He fanned his face with the money and cackled like a madman.

“Calm down, Rockefeller,” I said. “I can tell it’s not a million. It’s mostly small bills, fives and tens.”

I grabbed the money and began to count out loud, laying bill after bill on the car seat between us. It took a while. “One thousand four hundred and ninety, one thousand four hundred and ninety-five, one thousand five hundred, one thousand five hundred and five …” I paused and took a deep breath before I laid down the final bill. “One thousand five hundred and ten dollars. Holy. Cow.” We sat staring at the money, stunned.

One thousand five hundred and ten dollars. Not a million, but more money than we’d ever seen before, and I began to say as much to Ralph when I was interrupted by a loud crash from behind the car. We both jumped and the money scattered.

Then the barn went quiet.

I crouched down in the seat. Muggers! I could picture tomorrow’s headline: BELOVED KIDS FOUND MURDERED IN LOCAL BARN. I was happy to wait for my untimely death to find me, but Ralph signaled for us to check out the source of the crash. I shook my head. His eyed bulged and he mouthed “Come on!” Then he made a series of hand gestures, motioning for me to climb out my side before pointing to the back of the car. Since it was his idea, I let him go first.

I clambered out from my side of the car, my heart slamming in my chest, and began to creep toward the rear fender. At the moment I passed the trunk, I jumped and yelled “Gotcha!” as loud as I could, hoping to scare whoever or whatever it was away. The whoever or whatever it was screamed.

Pig Face. I should have known.

Lester was flat against the back of the car, clutching his heart, looking both embarrassed and terrified.

“What are you doing here?” Ralph and I said at the same time.

Lester being Lester, it didn’t take him long to get over being petrified and return to being his normal, annoying Pig Face self. “Isn’t it obvious? I followed you here.”

“Why?” I snapped. I don’t know why I asked the question. I already knew the answer.

“I dunno. I wanted to see what you were up to.”

“How long have you been following us?” Ralph demanded.

“Since you left Charlie at the house” was my rat brother’s sullen reply. Lester’s head hung low, showing off the massive cowlick that made his hair go crazily in three directions.

Since we’d left Charlie at the house? That meant he’d been following us for almost the entire afternoon! The only thing he’d missed was our run-in with Hazel and Zach.

“You’re such a little sneak!” I leaned forward to give him a good shake but Ralph stopped me, holding up a hand and looking remarkably like a traffic cop.

“I’m sorry,” Lester said, finally peering up at me. “I was just bored and you guys did blow me off. Oh, and you dropped some money,” he added as an afterthought, pointing to the hundred-dollar bill on the floor beside me.

Ralph and I whipped around and began to frantically scoop up bills. Lester, no doubt thinking that helping us would put him back in our good graces, crawled under the car to grab one that had fallen beneath the engine.

He held it out to me. “Fifteen hundred and ten dollars is a lot of money.”

I took the bill and sighed. “You heard everything.”

He shook his head. “Not everything.”

“What did you miss?” Ralph said, looking skeptical.

“What you said after holy cow,” Lester replied.

I exploded. “We didn’t say anything after that!” I went to grab for him again, forcing Ralph to stand between us once more.

“Let me at him!” I said, trying to reach around Ralph, which wasn’t easy, given his size.

“Tracy, there’s nothing we can do about it now,” Ralph said. “It makes me wanna kill him, too, but what’s done is done. It’s not like he can un-know stuff.”

I resented how reasonable Ralph was being. He should be riled up, too. Lester had no business snooping on us! Who knew what he would do with his newfound knowledge?

Meanwhile, Pig Face had turned full-on detective. “Who do you think the money belongs to? I saw Joe Tunney on the track—do you think it’s his? Maybe it belongs to one of the baseball teams. It’s too bad we were out of town. I have no idea who played last night.”

I shook my head, looked up at the barn ceiling, and counted to ten. “I’m not going to dignify your questions with a response. Go home and stop spying on us, or else I’ll tell Mom!”

Lester smirked. I knew that smirk well. It was the one he used when he had something he could use against me.

“You can’t make me go home. If you tell on me, I’ll tell on you.”

My excitement fizzled, leaving a sour taste in my mouth. He had me. If Pig Face told Mom that would be the end of my dream of fame and rewards. My only chance was to bargain with him, and from experience, I knew that was almost always impossible.

I held up my hands. “What do you want?”

Lester knew he had me over a barrel. He thrust out his chest and crossed his arms. “I want to help you guys find out whose money it is.”

“No way—” Ralph began, but I held my hand up and shushed him.

“You’ll have to listen to us,” I said, looking into those Pig Face eyes. “And you can’t say anything to Mom or Dad about this unless we say you can.”

“Fine. And you can’t say anything to them about me following you,” he countered. “And you have to listen to my ideas.”

The thought of listening to Pig Face made my toes curl. On the other hand, the idea of stuffing him into the trunk of the car was very appealing. Still, what choice did I have? Pig Face had won. Now my only hope was to somehow keep him under control.

I nodded. “Fine.”

We gave each other a solemn nod and then spat in our hands and shook on it.

Ralph shook his head. “You two are gross. Okay—so we’re stuck with Lester. Now we have to figure out what’s next.” He began to count the money to make sure we’d picked it all up.

“I think we should hide the money and check around. See if we can figure out who lost it,” I said.

Ralph nodded, but Pig Face began to hop up and down like a windup rabbit. “What do you mean we’ll hide the money? Shouldn’t we call the police or put the money back or put an ad in the paper?”

I bit my lip. I wasn’t going to tell Pig Face that if we did any of the things he’d suggested we wouldn’t be heroes. We had to find the money’s owner ourselves and return it with all the pomp and ceremony such an act required. Suddenly an image of Zach reading the St. Croix Courier, admiring my picture on the front page as he marveled at how exciting St. Stephen was, popped into my head. No, I was definitely solving this myself.

I looked at Lester scornfully. “It’s a mystery, Pig Face!”

“We—meaning, Ralph and me, and now, unfortunately, you—are going to figure this out on our own. We don’t need grown-ups. We can solve this ourselves. It’ll be exciting!”

“Plus, if we turn the money in, maybe the police will charge us with stealing,” Ralph added. I could tell from the look on Ralph’s face that he was worried this might be true but was trying hard not to show it.

Lester looked nervous. I waited for the hives. Maybe he’d decide it was too much for him and he’d abandon the idea of working with us. “I’m not sure …”

I gave him my hardest stare and said the one thing that I knew would get him on board: “Don’t you want to help Ralph and me? Be part of the team?”

Lester’s eyes were as big and round as the old headlights on the Model T. This was an offer he couldn’t refuse. “I’m in,” he said, reaching into his pocket for a tissue and blowing his nose. Dust, he mouthed to me. Then he added, “But no more calling me Pig Face, okay?”

I nodded. I’d started calling Lester Pig Face when he was four and used to chase me around the house, snorting like a little pig. The name had stuck, although I usually reserved it for when he was really annoying or when I wanted to make him mad. It wasn’t going to be easy to stop calling him names, but if it meant he wouldn’t tell Mom, it would probably be worth it.

“I’ll try,” I said. “But you have to try not to be a Pig Face.”

Lester nodded begrudgingly.

I smiled at Ralph. “Hey, we have our summer project!”

“Woohoo!” Ralph stretched his arm out in front of him and gestured for Lester and me to do the same. We locked hands and then Ralph said, “One, two, three—Team Huffman-Munroe!”

Lester’s eyes shined. “This is just like being on a hockey team,” said the most un-athletic boy in St. Stephen.

Ralph laughed. “Only it’s better, because you don’t have to keep falling on your butt on the ice or worry that someone’s going to bump into you,” said the second most un-athletic boy in St. Stephen.

I nodded, but more out of sympathy than agreement. And I definitely didn’t like that there were now two Munroes on Team Huffman-Munroe.

“The first thing we need to do is figure out where to hide the money,” I said.

“We could hide it here, in the barn,” Ralph suggested.

I looked around. The Attwoods had stuff everywhere. Tools hung from hooks in the wall; the lawn mower was parked beside the Weedwacker near a pile of old tires. “Too risky. Mr. and Mrs. A. are in here all the time. It should be somewhere no one will stumble upon it, and that only we know about.”

“Like where?” Lester asked.

Ralph and I seemed to have the exact same thought at the exact same time. “The Big Rock!”

“What’s the Big Rock?” Lester asked.

I smiled. “You’re about to find out, Pig Face. I mean, um, Lester. We’re about to show you our secret lair.”