Hired by heirs to find two million in treasure hidden in a completely empty house, Pilgrim Hugh finds himself stuck.

The house sparkles and no stick of furniture remains.

Original house plans show clearly that no room hid behind any walls. And millions of dollars in cash takes up a bunch of room. But where?

A puzzle mystery that stumps for a short time even the great Pilgrim Hugh.

 

 

 

THE CASE OF THE LOST TREASURE

A Pilgrim Hugh Incident

 

 

ONE

 

 

Pilgrim Hugh tried to gather his thoughts as he stared out the front window of the four-bedroom home in the northwest section of Portland. The early fall day outside was warm and the lush green of the oak trees that lined the quiet street had not even hinted at turning to fall colors.

The home still had its air-conditioning set at a comfortable seventy degrees, even though no one lived in the home. Every stick of furniture had been removed from the house two months before when Mary Ellen Ryan died at eighty-six.

The air smelled of a lemon-scented cleaner and the old hardwood floors shone under a fresh polish. The walls had been freshly painted a soft, eggshell and the walnut baseboards and door trims had also been polished.

The place sparkled, ready to be shown to a new buyer as soon as he solved this case.

And Pilgrim had no doubt the house would sell quickly. It was in a wonderful neighborhood on a large lot with flowers and large trees. The house had been built in the early 1920s and clearly maintained along the way, sporting a newly remodeled kitchen and bathroom.

Pilgrim wore jeans, tennis shoes, and a light blue dress shirt with his sleeves rolled up. Over the last hour and ten minutes he had become very, very familiar with the home as he looked at every wall and every board in the floors.

Somewhere in this home was a treasure trove of over a million dollars in cash, maybe more. He had been hired to find it by the two sons of the woman who had lived here.

A challenging case to say the least. And he loved challenging cases. It was what he lived for, actually.

He had ended up a private detective through a series of strange events. First, three years of law school and a failed first marriage while working for a corporate law firm had convinced him he wasn’t a normal lawyer.

Or a decent standard husband either.

In fact, he sucked at both.

Then his grandmother had died and left him more money than he could imagine, which sent him on a year of traveling and drinking, which eventually got very, very boring.

On a lark, a few weeks after he stopped drinking to excess, he went back to school to become a private detective. After he hung out his shingle, he learned that being a private eye wasn’t what the detective novels described. It was all computer work and long boring hours of nothingness trying to watch someone.

At that point, he had finally caught a simple clue that his problem was he bored easily. He needed some excitement and challenges in his life.

So with some of his grandmother’s money, he set up Hugh and Associates, a combination law firm and private investigative firm. Then he had hired a couple great associates who took all the boring cases and made the firm lots of money and they hired even more associates that he had no desire to meet who also made him lots and lots of money.

And he also discovered he was pretty good at real estate investment, so his money made even more money and an entire floor in his office building handled his investments in commercial and apartment complex real estate.

He had then offered for free his investigative state-of-the-art services to surrounding police forces. As it turned out, they liked free and he had helped solved some really interesting cases.

Seldom boring.

And find this money was far from boring as well, although not brought to him by a police force.

Benson and Brad Ryan had hired him to find their mother’s treasure trove, as they called it. They were twin sons of Mary Ellen Ryan who had lived in this house for forty years before dying from a stroke. She had told them about the money, that it was hidden here in the house, and that when she was gone they needed to find it.

So the two twins were stuck. They couldn’t even begin to probate their mother’s estate until they knew about all the assets. And a million or more in cash were a lot of assets.

When Pilgrim had talked to them about the case, sitting in his office in his building, he had asked a very simple question. “How did your mother manage to get that much cash?”

They had both laughed.

“She was the child of Depression parents,” Brad had explained. “She had been left wealthy by her father, their grandfather, when he died when they were in college thirty years earlier.”

Benson nodded. “Mom and dad bought the house she was in after we were out of college. She would take five thousand dollars out of her bank account in cash every week, for miscellaneous expenses, as she called them.”

“She would maybe spend a few hundred of the money,” Brad said, “and the rest would vanish into what she called her fund that she had set aside in case the banks closed. She did that for years and years.”

“She made sure to tell us that there was at least a million dollars or more hidden in her house,” Benson said.

“But she never once told us where it was,” Brad said.

Pilgrim stared at the beautiful lawn and the street shaded by tall trees. This really was a very private neighborhood and a very nice home.

Pilgrim turned around and put his back to the big window to once again stare into the empty house.

It was here. He knew that. And in a place that an elderly Mary Ellen Ryan could access easily every week, since her husband had been dead for the last thirty years.

The puzzle was where.

Why was it taking him so long to figure it out?