Amelia let out a shrill, hysterical shriek as she fell backward into an open crate. Her arms and legs flailed about, though whether to fend off the ghost dog or push herself farther down into the safety of the crate, it was hard to say. More graceful than her friend, Sloane was able to quickly get up out of the crate she’d fallen into. Her heart hammered and her skin crawled with cold terror—but she was determined to give the demon dog a good fight.
That fight turned out to involve a very wet slurp from an enormous tongue.
“Ewwwww!” Sloane threw her hands up to protect her face.
An excited bloodhound turned its attention to the trapped Amelia, slobbering all over her face as it licked her eyes, nose, and mouth enthusiastically. It seemed that this dog was no ghost. This dog was very much alive. Enthusiastically, wetly alive.
“Hey! Stop!” Amelia gurgled, turning her face from side to side in a vain effort to avoid both the tongue and the drool. “Patooey! Blech! Sloane!”
“I’m trying to help!” Sloane grabbed at the dog, but the bloodhound was so pleased to see them that it couldn’t stay still. Paws scrabbled at the wooden crate, long ears flopped everywhere, and each time Sloane tried to catch the dog by the shoulders and pull it away from Amelia, she got beaten up by a fiercely wagging tale.
“Chiave! Down, girl!” a voice commanded from the tunnel.
Amelia froze and made a sound like “EEP!” clearly convinced the voice belonged to some dead bootlegger. Even Sloane went rigid with fear and then spun around, half expecting to see something ghastly float out of the darkness.
Instead, it was a thick-set, oldish man who wheezed his way out of the tunnel, which was not nearly as dark as Sloane and Amelia had thought, thanks to the ancient electric lights that swung from cords overhead. He wore a floppy hat, a well-worn shirt, and baggy shorts. The man also leaned on a gnarled walking stick. With his gray hair and broad face, he looked ridiculously like a troll—but at least a nice troll. As if Sloane and Amelia had discovered a hidden doorway to a magical land of rainbows and candy-haired people.
Chiave listened to her person and thwapped her butt down onto the stone floor. She panted happily, tail still whacking the nearby crates excitedly.
“Now, who might you be?” the troll asked them in surprise.
“Who might you be?” Amelia demanded in response as Sloane tugged her free from the crate. With the back of her arm, Amelia wiped at her sodden curls and face with as much dignity as she could.
“I’m Sherwood Lindsay,” the man said, patting Chiave’s head with a hand as gnarled as his walking stick. “And I own Tangle Glen.”
“You own this place and you live in the basement?” Sloane asked incredulously. “You know there are much nicer rooms upstairs, right?”
Mr. Lindsay chuckled. “I don’t live down there! Chiave and I were just taking a walk along the river. The smugglers’ tunnel is the fastest, easiest way back up to the house. I pulled some muscles in my back last week, and now walking is pretty painful.”
With a grimace, Mr. Lindsay used his walking stick to tug himself the rest of the way into the basement. Unlike his dog, he moved slowly and carefully, lumbering like a troll. Or maybe a mushroom that had learned to walk. Chiave didn’t seem to mind, though. She smiled up at her person, tongue lolling out of her mouth.
“Sorry if Chiave and I frightened you.” Mr. Lindsay reached down to scratch his dog’s head. “She’s not even a year old, for all that she’s grown into her full-size. She gets away from me pretty easily, but I wasn’t expecting any of the guests to be down here!”
Pushing Chiave’s nose and tongue away with as much dignity as she could, Amelia introduced herself and Sloane. “I’m Amelia Miller-Poe and this is Sloane Osburn. We’re from Osburn and Miller-Poe Detective Agency, and we’re here to find Bootleggin’ Ma Yaklin’s missing money. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel, where you can watch the videos we’ll be uploading each night to show what we’ve discovered during the day. If you’d like, you can google our names, and you’ll see that we recently solved the case of the long-lost Cursed Hoäl Treasure.”
Mr. Lindsay blinked in surprise at all of this, so Sloane added, “And Amelia’s dad is one of the judges at the peony competition this weekend.”
“Ah.” Mr. Lindsay nodded in understanding. Then a twinkle sparked in his eye. “I should never have had Shakespeare add that to our website, that bit about Ma and her missing money. You wouldn’t believe how many of our guests go poking and prodding about the house, looking for that missing two million. Hate to tell you this, but my granddaddy already turned this place upside down a long time ago, trying to figure out what she did with it. No luck, though! Whatever Ma did with the money, she was too smart for him. Too smart for herself, even! She hid it in such a clever spot, she couldn’t find it again, heh-heh-heh. Here, if one of you would be so kind as to help me take Chiave upstairs and outside so she can run around, I’d be happy to tell you what I know.”
Sloane thought this was a fair enough trade, and besides, she liked dogs. So, she happily took the leash from Mr. Lindsay and clipped it to the back of Chiave’s harness. Less of a fan of animals in general, Amelia pushed away Chiave’s quivering, sniffing nose from her girl-detective costume with a grimace. Hoping to make the best of things, she switched her camera back on to record Mr. Lindsay.
“My grandparents bought Tangle Glen for a song and a dance after Ma Yaklin got arrested back in 1932,” Sherwood Lindsay explained, pulling himself through the cluttered basement and up the stairs to the main floor by leaning heaving on his walking stick. “That means they got it for practically nothing. You see, 1932 was the worst year of the Great Depression, but Granddaddy Lindsay had a bit of money saved up because he’d done some bootlegging himself! Rumor had it that Ma Yaklin had hidden money all over the mansion in case she ever had to go on the run from either the feds or Two Thumbs and the Digits Gang. ’Course, when she did, she couldn’t find it. Instead of grabbing it and taking off in her roadster, she ended up trying to run from the feds on foot. They caught her in the woods around Tangle Glen. Granddaddy figured it had to still be here somewhere in the house. His thoughts were that Ma wasn’t thinking straight the night the feds came for her, and that’s why she couldn’t remember how to get back to the hiding spot. See, her dog, Eli, had run off, so maybe she was trying to find him in the woods. There’s a bunch of pictures of Eli up in the portrait gallery over there, if you girls want to take a look. That dog was like a son to her.”
They’d reached the entry hall by now. As Mr. Lindsay waved his hand toward the portrait gallery, Sloane had to brace her legs and hold on to Chiave’s leash with all her strength. The bloodhound had either spotted or smelled the giant vase filled with hundreds of peonies in the middle of the room. A man in a tuxedo stood on a stepladder to add more flowers to it. Spotting Chiave, he clutched the peonies to his chest and trembled.
“We’ve already seen it,” Amelia replied, collapsing her selfie stick and tucking it into a pocket of her checked cape coat so she could help Sloane tug on the dog’s leash. Together, they managed to yank Chiave out onto the front porch. Behind them, the man in the tuxedo sagged in relief.
Mr. Lindsay joined them to collapse on a bench beneath Tangle Glen’s high, columned porch. With his floppy hat and brown clothing, he looked like a mushroom growing up out of the wood. “After Ma was arrested, the feds searched Tangle Glen for the money. Granddaddy said they thought there must be a secret compartment behind one of those paintings of Eli. Never found a blessed thing. Anyhow, Granddaddy bought the place, thinking he’d find what neither Ma nor the feds had been able to find. He never found a blessed thing, either. You want my opinion? The money is sunk on one of them islands out in the river.”
He used his cane to poke in the general direction of the back of the mansion. Where the cliff swept quickly downward to the Maumee River.
Sloane and Amelia exchanged an unhappy look.
Dredging a wet, weedy, tick-infested island for buried treasure was well beyond what they could do. At least, not without a map.
“Did anyone ever find Eli?” Sloane asked, grappling with her own bloodhound as Chiave ran over to one of the peony bushes planted all along the front of Tangle Glen and promptly peed on it. Mr. Boening-Bradley had just hopped outside in his dark green suit to greet another car pulling up the gravel driveway. His mustache twitched with excitement at the sight of more peonies. Exactly like a grasshopper’s antennae would.
“What are you doing?” He gasped in horror at Sloane, going as rigid as if someone had just tried to electrocute him. “You can’t do that here!”
“It’s not like I’m the one peeing!” Sloane protested.
“Please don’t use that word.” Mr. Boening-Bradley made a face.
Amelia tried to help. “Don’t think of it as a word. Think of it as a letter!”
It didn’t help. Looking very much like he wished he could drop Chiave, Sloane, and Amelia into the river, he hurried forward to this newest rich person stepping out of a fancy car. Where he sneered at Sloane and Amelia, he practically bowed and drooled all over this person.
“Odd bunch, these peony enthusiasts.” Mr. Lindsay shook his head, then returned to Sloane’s question. “No, Eli never showed up, and I think Ma cared more about that than being sent to prison. Right before she died of pneumonia, the only thing Ma would say about her lost millions was, ‘When I lost Eli, I lost everything.’ You see, without your loved ones, what does money matter?”
“Not a whole lot,” Sloane admitted, throat clenching up tight. She’d give any amount of money to have her mom back.
And to make sure that her family and life at home were exactly as she left them when she got back.
That Cynthia Seife and her two kids hadn’t moved in while Sloane was away.
Which, obviously, wouldn’t happen.
Probably.
Amelia had a slightly different reaction to Mr. Lindsay’s words. Passionately, she said, “Even if you have your loved ones, what does money matter if they still think you’re some giant weirdo? I mean, yeah, love is great and all, but you can love someone without liking them or—or respecting them, you know? Sure, you can be grateful that you have your loved ones around, but maybe it would be nice if they’d stop looking at you in a way that lets you hear all of the negative things they’re thinking even if they don’t say them out loud!”
Stopping to catch her breath, Amelia realized that both Sloane and Mr. Lindsay were gaping at her, open-mouthed.
So were Mr. Boening-Bradley and a man clutching a vase filled with orange peonies, who he’d been leading into the mansion.
Her skin going hot and prickly, Amelia stuck her nose in the air and tried to look dignified. “I’m just saying, that’s all.”
“Uh, those are good points too.” Sherwood Lindsay blinked and squashed his hat back on his head, becoming a mushroom once more. Then he hefted himself slowly, painfully to his feet. Without enthusiasm, he said, “Suppose I’d better take Chiave for her walk.”
Sloane and Amelia exchanged a look as Chiave hopped up and began to frisk about once more.
The trouble with looks, though, is they can sometimes be misunderstood. Amelia’s look said, Thank goodness! while Sloane’s look said, We should help him out, with the result that Amelia went stiff with horror as Sloane said, “Hey, we could take her for a walk for you!”
“Uh, could we, though, Sloane?” Amelia hissed.
Mr. Lindsay didn’t hear her as he scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Are you sure? My back is hurtin’ something terrible, but I know my Chiave can be a handful.”
More like tongue-ful, Amelia thought as Chiave spat out a mouthful of bright pink peony blossoms and turned to give Amelia’s girl-detective outfit one more wet sniff.
“We don’t mind,” Sloane reassured him.
Sherwood Lindsay’s face brightened. (As much as a mushroom could brighten.) He leaned both hands on his walking stick as a muddy-faced Chiave smiled up at Amelia. “That’ll be a big help. I could sit down in the sunroom for a while and rest my knee for a bit. I’ve been saying that I could really use a vacation. Maybe a nice weekend at a spa…”
Trailing off with a wistful sigh, Mr. Lindsay gave Chiave a fond pat on the head and lumbered back into the house.
As Sloane and Amelia dragged Chiave away from the peonies and toward a garden off to the side of the house, Amelia said grumpily, “We really need to come up with some sort of code. A way of saying ‘Don’t offer to walk the dog.’ ”
“Sorry.” Sloane grinned sheepishly. “Don’t you like dogs?”
“I like dogs. I don’t like getting sniffed or licked by dogs! Or-or-or snorfed by a dog.”
“What’s snorfing?”
“When a dog sniffs something so enthusiastically that they actually pull whatever their sniffing into their nostrils.” Amelia explained her definition of the word she’d made up, then shuddered with revulsion.
No one wants any part of themselves to end up inside something else’s nostril.
As Sloane and Amelia each strained to keep their animal under control, they pushed open a white gate and walked through a brick archway into a garden. Sloane had hoped it would lead toward somewhere they could take Chiave off the leash and play fetch with her. Instead, they found themselves in a very formal garden with geometric paths leading the way sharply through perfectly trimmed trees and orderly rows of rose bushes.
Hand on hip, Amelia took it all in and said, “It looks like the Red Queen’s garden. You know, the angry, uptight one from Alice in Wonderland?”
Before Sloane could respond, Chiave broke away from her and ran over to a girl who looked like she could be a long-lost member of the Miller-Poe family. She had the same well-muscled, outdoorsy look to her that Amelia’s parents and siblings had. Though her messy ponytail, freckled face, and wide grin also made her seem like she’d be more relaxing to hang out with than the Miller-Poe family.
“Hey there, girl! Settle down!” she laughed, setting down the clippers she’d been using to trim a rose from one of the bushes. Her face crinkling, she knelt to embrace Chiave. “What are you doing out here? Did you get away from your person again, you bad dog?”
“Sorry, that’s our fault,” Sloane explained, hurrying over to catch Chiave’s leash again. “I’m Sloane Osburn and this is Amelia Miller-Poe. We’re staying at Tangle Glen this weekend, and we offered to help Mr. Lindsay by playing with Chiave for a while.”
“We’re also girl detectives,” Amelia added importantly. “Here on a very important case.”
The girl looked suitably impressed, pleasing Amelia. “Wow! I didn’t know there would be any kids staying here this weekend. I thought it was going to be all uptight peony competitors. Do not get in their way. They’re intense. Oh, and I’m Sergeant Pepper Arroyo.”
“You’re in the military?” Amelia asked as Chiave continued to beg the sergeant for pets.
“No, my parents were huge fans of the Beatles,” Sergeant Pepper explained. Trimming the thorns from the rose she’d cut, she tucked it into Chiave’s collar, giving the bloodhound a stylish look.
When Amelia tried to look knowledgable while really being confused, Sloane caught on and explained, “The Beatles were a band in the 1960s. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the name of one of their albums. My grannies are fans too.”
Sergeant Pepper nodded. Still grinning, she stood up and tucked another rose into her own ponytail. “I’m just glad they didn’t name me after the whole thing! Anyhow, I’m the gardener at Tangle Glen. My family has been hanging out around here for ages. Grandma used to visit the mansion when she was a little girl, and she told my dad a lot about it. There’s so much history along this stretch of the Maumee River, you know. Tangle Glen was built by a notorious bootlegger named—”
“Bootleggin’ Ma Yaklin,” Sloane and Amelia finished in unison.
“Oh.” Sergeant Pepper blinked in surprise. “Well, did you know that she misplaced two—”
“—million dollars somewhere in Tangle Glen,” they finished once again. To this, Amelia bragged, “That’s why we’re here, you know. To find that missing money.”
Once again, Sergeant Pepper looked suitably impressed. “Well, good luck with that! Lots of people have tried to figure out where it went, including my grandma when she grew up! I think Mr. Lindsay’s grandfather once chased her out of the peony bushes when she was a teenager, convinced the money must have been buried under one of them.”
With a laugh, Sergeant Pepper returned to spreading mulch around the rosebushes. As she did so, Chiave lunged forward and swiped her wallet out of her back pocket. Before anyone could stop her, the dog took off with it, romping back to the front of Tangle Glen.
Fortunately, neither grasshopper-like Mr. Boening-Bradley nor any of the super-fancy peony enthusiasts were outside right then, because Chiave spat the wallet out into a pool of drool on the grassy front lawn. Then the bloodhound wagged her tail and grinned at Sloane, Amelia, and Sergeant Pepper as they finally caught up with her.
“Ugh! This dog!” Sergeant Pepper laughed again, not really seeming to be bothered by the fact that her wallet was now very slimy. “I was cutting back the peonies earlier, and I must have touched my wallet afterward. Chiave is peony-obsessed. Mr. Lindsay said all the dogs in her line have been that way, all the way back to when he was a little boy.”
“His family breeds dogs?” Sloane asked curiously, picking up a stick and throwing it for Chiave so the dog could romp after it.
“Not really. Just one litter from each dog before they get them fixed. See, they’ve had a bloodhound named ‘Chiave’ ever since Mr. Lindsay’s grandfather, Anderson Lindsay, was a bootlegger. He made a lot of money working for Jacqueline Yaklin, and he never got caught and sent to prison the way she did. So, I guess they figured always having a bloodhound named Chiave around was lucky for the family.”
As she returned to the side garden and Sloane continued to throw sticks for Chiave, Amelia considered what the gardener had just told them. “Hm. It’s interesting that Mr. Lindsay didn’t mention that his grandfather worked for Ma Yaklin.”
“Maybe he was embarrassed by it,” Sloane suggested.
“He told us his grandfather was a bootlegger.” Amelia scootched behind Sloane when Chiave returned, tail-wagging, to barf a peony stem at her feet.
“Blech.” Sloane picked up a new stick and threw it, sending the bloodhound bounding happily after it. “Yeah, but he might have been ashamed that Ma Yaklin went to prison and he didn’t. I mean, if he worked for Ma, then Mr. Lindsay’s grandfather must have been guilty too.”
“If he worked for her, you’d think he’d have a pretty good idea of where she’d hidden her money,” Amelia said thoughtfully, tapping her chin with her finger as she looked up at the columned brick mansion looming over them. “I mean, if Anderson Lindsay worked for Ma Yaklin, then wouldn’t he have known some of her hiding spots?”
“Sure, some. But I bet not all. It’s not like she was going to tell everyone working for her, ‘Hey, here’s my money. Come and get it!’ ” Chiave returned with another wilted, dripping peony stem. Sloane found a new stick.
“Let’s think this through. Ma Yaklin’s beloved dog, Eli, disappears from Tangle Glen.” With her finger, Amelia drew a line from the mansion to the trees surrounding. “So she goes looking for him in the woods. Only… doesn’t she already know the feds were after her? Why wouldn’t she take off in her roadster to escape them and then come back to look for Eli later? After all, she can’t find him if she’s in prison.”
Sloane shrugged as an exhausted Chiave flopped down at her feet, panting and clearly worn out. At least for the moment. “Mr. Lindsay said that everyone said she was so upset that she wasn’t thinking straight.”
Amelia snorted. “Please. That’s the sort of thing people used to say all the time about women. ‘Oh, they’re all emotional. They can’t think straight.’ Believe me, I see it all the time when I watch movies from back in the 1920s and 1930s. Jacqueline Yaklin was a successful businesswoman and the owner of prize-winning peonies and the owner of a prize-winning bloodhound. You don’t get that way without being super smart and super competitive. Believe me, I know. I live with a whole pack of super-smart, super-competitive people. They’re annoying and treat everyone else like weirdos, even when they’re not exactly ‘normal’ themselves. Whatever ‘normal’ is supposed to be! Why aren’t I every bit as ‘normal’ as them? Who decided what ‘normal’ even is, anyhow? I don’t think it’s actually a thing! I think it’s all made up. I—” Amelia caught her breath, realizing that she was ranting. Both Sloane and Chiave made sympathetic faces at her. Quickly, Amelia finished up before either one of them could say or do anything nice, because it might very well make her cry. “Anyhow, the point is: Super-competitive people aren’t going to stop thinking logically just because their dog disappeared. If she knew the feds were coming, Ma Yaklin would have gotten into that roadster, driven off, and then planned a way to find Eli.”
Sloane didn’t answer right away. She could tell that Amelia didn’t want to talk about what she’d just said about the Miller-Poe family. Her friend was sniffling and rubbing at her nose with the back of her hand like it was her allergies causing her eyes to water.
Sloane might be afraid that things would be different when she got home.
But Amelia was afraid they’d be exactly the same.
Oh, her family was trying. Clamping their mouths shut instead of bossing Amelia around.
But you could still hear all of their criticisms pounding at their clenched teeth, trying to escape out into the air.
It was like being haunted by ghosts.
Just because you couldn’t see them didn’t mean you couldn’t feel them.
Speaking of ghosts…
Sloane went rigid.
“Amelia,” she squeaked, her gaze fixed on one of the round windows poking out of Tangle Glen’s attic.
“What?” Amelia snuffled wetly.
“Gst” was all Sloane could force out.
“What?” Confused, Amelia swung around to look upward too.
She squeaked just like Sloane had.
Movement flickered in one of the attic windows.
It was a face.
No more than a smudge of darkness where the eyes and mouth would be. A hint of a line to suggest a nose.
Then it vanished.
That face just dissolved. Both Sloane and Amelia could have sworn it.
“It—it was a trick of the light.” Sloane gulped. “Right, Amelia? Right?”
Amelia couldn’t answer.
She didn’t know.
She just hoped that they were the only ones looking for the missing two million dollars.
Because what if Ma’s ghost was looking for them, too?