MARGIE'S SECRET TREASURE

This task I so confidently  accepted three weeks ago has challenged and humbled me.  It is not easy to come up with a fewer than 1000 word mystery every week.  But I will keep trying. Thus my new effort—

MARGIE’S  SECRET TREASURE.

The clutter in Harry’s barn challenged description.  Piles of magazines, stacks of books, shelves of bottles and endless rows and columns of boxed whose contents,  if truth be known, even Harry had long forgotten. What better place to hide treasures, treasures of mice, litters of stray cats, hibernating snakes and shelter seeking  wasps.

So thought Margie who for years had nagged Harry to get rid of ‘some of that junk’.  To no avail.  Harry’s stock response was ‘you never know when you might need it’.

It was the bane of Margie’s life for years.  Until Harry died.  He had been central to her life for fifty years.  Fifty years of adventure, ups and downs, tears and laughter, and most of all consuming love.

Harry’s enthusiasm for life knew no end, no end until he met his end, the victim of a drunken driver, leaving behind his wife, his barn, the storehouse of his  life.

Margie met  her loss, alternating between despondent inertia and frenetic activity.

Sort, donate, trash.   Organize, give, toss.  Day after day, month  after month.

At the back of a three tiered stack of boxes she found the wooden trunk, stored unexamined, in the barn after Harry’s mother died. The trunk cleared of dust, mouse drippings, dead lady bugs and abandoned snake skins spoke of another time.  With apprehension, hope and wonder Margie opened the trunk. Fragile crumpled newspaper cradled  hidden items  which Margie eyed with wonder and handled with care. She picked up the first item, carefully removed it the newspaper—The Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan 1925.

Margie rowed up twelve unwrapped  coffee/tea cups and eleven matching  saucers deep enough to be considered bowls. A jingling Clabber Girl Baking Powder resisted her attempts to open it. Margie shook it gently, then vigorously producing the sound of cheap castanets . Tapped gently with the wooden end of a screwdriver,  squirted  liberally with WD-40 the lid yielded.  Inside the can were marbles – aggies and cats eyes. When Margie dumped the marbles into her hand small pieces of marbles slipped through her fingers onto the barn floor. Margie picked up one of the pieces – no color, no evenness. These were not marble shards.  They were – she dared not think that.

‘Oh my God,’ she whispered to the barn walls. ‘I am rich.’  She returned the Clabber Girl can contents, refitted the lid and replaced it in the trunk. One by one she rewrapped and carefully positioned  the cups and saucers atop her treasure. She  re-stacked the boxes above the trunk.  No one need know she was rich.