Page 79 of Life, Love and the Pursuit of Happiness

“Hah! We were having dinner at the Cracked Crab at the time.”

“Yeah, but there was the prospect of . . . you know?” He waggled his eyebrows at her.

Laura was not amused.

Merrill assumed he meant the prospect of cookies.

“That is so unprofessional,” Annie said to Laura. “Trading sex for a news story.”

Laura inhaled sharply and reached for a stapler sitting on the desk. “I’ll show you unprofessional, you crazy bitch. How about that time you were caught having sex with a fireman in a boat during Hurricane Florence, and Sam was pretending to drown in two feet of water? You and Sam here are the joke of the Outer Banks.”

“Hey!” Sam protested. “There were snakes in that water. Probably.”

Merrill grabbed the stapler out of Laura’s hand and yelled, “Shut the hell up! All of you!” In the silence, he then said, “Sit down, everyone.”

Gabe brought in some folding chairs to accommodate everyone.

Merrill explained everything to them then, in general, but he said there would be no details until a press conference in two days, on Wednesday at two p.m. And definitely no look-see at any of the gold coins until then. It wasn’t the Three Saints, though, he disclosed that much, but the Falcon, an 1860s era French blockade runner. Merrill had originally planned to hold a press conference on Thursday or Friday, but it was hopeless to think they could hold out that long now.

“Oh, good! That will give us two days to bring out the decorations,” Doreen said.

Merrill groaned.

“Will there be room enough for us to do it here? Maybe we should use your place, Gabe.”

Gabe groaned.

Merrill was further alarmed by Doreen’s use of the word “us” and “we,” especially when she added, “The whole town will want to come.”

“Ooh, ooh, ooh, I have a great idea. If you wait until the weekend for the big reveal, we could have a Dress Like a Pirate Day in Bell Cove. Tourists will love it.”

More we’s! “We’re not pirates. We recovered our treasure by legal means,” Merrill emphasized.

Doreen waved a hand dismissively. “Same thing. Bet we could find some big pirate chests on the Internet. Exactly how much gold are we talking about here, Merrill?”

The sly woman! Thought she could get the deets by the back door.

“That is a wonderful idea, Doreen,” Laura said.

“No, no, no, it is not a wonderful idea,” Merrill protested.

No one paid any attention to him.

“Do you still have any of those wild animals at your place, Gabe?” Doreen wanted to know.

When Gabe, an architect from Durham, inherited Bell Forge and his grandparents’ mansion in Bell Cove, he’d discovered that one of his ancestors had a Big Game stuffed animal collection. The walls and every inch of space in half the mansion was loaded with the things. A taxidermist’s paradise!

“Only a gorilla,” Gabe replied.

“Too bad! Especially all those fish would have made a great backdrop for our event. Imagine a whale lying there with a pile of gold coins coming out of its mouth.”

Merrill’s jaw dropped and, yes, he was noticing the use of “our” event.

“I never had a whale,” Gabe sputtered.

“No problem. Betcha Del Brown over at The Honey Hole could get us a big fish. If nothing else we could borrow that marlin he has up on the wall of his fish shop. By the way, everyone, Del has a sale on halibut this week. Thanks for mentioning that in your paper, Laura.”

Laura nodded and said, “I’m partial to his red fish. Cooked with lemon on the grill . . . yum!”