Page 78 of Life, Love and the Pursuit of Happiness

“Are you saying you don’t need thirteen bathrooms?”

“When I go to the head, one toilet, one sink, and one shower are all I need.”

“Yeah, but if you and Delilah get married and have a dozen kids, you might need a McAnnie-sion, Daddy Warbucks. Might even turn it into an orphanage.”

“Harry talks too much,” Merrill said. “Listen, speaking of bathrooms, I’ve gotta go take a shower and shave.” He rubbed a hand over his bristly chin. “I’m starting to itch.” Plus, he had enough salt encrusted on his skin and hair from diving to fill a salt shaker.

“You can go to my place if you want.”

“Nah! I’ll use the shower in my motel unit. I have clean clothes there. If Harry gets here while I’m gone, tell him to hold down the fort. I know he has a lot of business to go over with me. And tell him to stop gossiping about me.”

“I think it’s the grandmother who’s been filling Harry’s ear with ideas.”

He rolled his eyes. “As long as that’s the only cavity being filled.”

“You’ve been too long at sea, my friend,” Gabe observed with a chuckle.

When he got to the motel, he saw that his pickup truck was missing, as he’d predicted. Delilah’s grandmother, who was the only one there, affirmed his suspicion.

“Lilah and Maggie went to the Laundromat and the grocery store.” She narrowed her heavily mascaraed eyes at him. “Lilah seemed awful happy. Did something happen?”

Well, that answered that question. Delilah hadn’t mentioned the treasure or their relationship.

“No idea,” he said. “She’s probably just glad to be with her daughter again.”

“Uh-huh,” the grandmother said, skeptically. She was looking him over like he was a prime steak, meanwhile puffing on one of those ridiculous flavor vapor cigarettes. Apple this time, he would guess.

“I’ve gotta go shower and get back to the office,” he said then. Really, his eyes were starting to burn with his effort not to go googly-eyed at the sight that Salome Jones presented.

The sixty-something person had her forty-something body squeezed into a pair of figure-hugging short shorts and a stretch T-shirt that showed off her cleavage almost to her waist. Long, shapely legs led to a pair of high-wedge-heeled sandals, exposing neon pink toenails. Bottom line, a woman her age had no business having a butt like that. And her boobs!

I. Am. Not. Looking.

Harry was at the office when he got there about noon. Right off the bat, Merrill noticed that Harry had a new hairstyle, parted on the side. And his eyebrows looked different. Didn’t he have a unibrow before?

Not my business!

Harry had ordered pizzas and cold sodas for lunch. Glancing at the huge pile of papers on the desk waiting for his action, Merrill almost turned around and left. With a sigh, he dug in, to both the food and the work.

An hour later and only halfway through the pile of paperwork, all hell broke loose. News had broken about the treasure.

It started with the mayor, Doreen Ferguson, rushing into the office, without knocking. “I just heard. I just heard. Oh, my God! You found the treasure!”

“What? Who told you that?”

“I was having my roots done at Styles & Smiles. That’s my daughter’s hair salon,” she said, pausing to catch her breath. Just then, he noticed that half her hair was wet and had some reddish-brown substance plastered on it. The other half was brown and dry with a one-inch line of gray at the roots. This was not good. Even he knew that. “And Maisie Dolan . . . she gets a shampoo and blow-dry every Monday, when Francine runs a half-price sale . . . Maisie said she heard from her cousin Bruce who works at Bell Forge that you guys have been hauling gold in here by the wheelbarrow loads.”

“Do we own a wheelbarrow?” he asked Harry. Before he had a chance to respond to Doreen’s statement, the sound of screeching wheels could be heard in the parking lot. Looking out the window, he saw that two news vehicles had arrived, a van with a satellite dish on its roof and the logo, NBX-TV, and a black sedan with the logo, “The Bell, Where Local News Is Celebrated.” Annie Fox and Sam Castile from The Morning Show were fighting to get past Laura Atler at the entrance.

“Where’s the gold?” all three of them yelled once they got inside and noticed Merrill and Harry through the doorway that Doreen had left open.

Laura gave Doreen’s half-dyed head a double take, then turned to Gabe, who’d joined the fray by now, having heard the commotion from the other side of the building. “You promised me, Gabe. You said I would get a scoop when they found the sunken ships.”

Merrill and Harry glared at Gabe, who was looking like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

“Um, I was in an, um, vulnerable position at the time.”

Merrill assumed he meant in the sack with his cookies exposed.