AND THE RIVERS RAN DOWN TO THE SEA

JOHNNY CARL SAT totally immersed in the book while reading and didn’t see Jolyn come in.

For a moment, the sixteen-year-old sat watching her big brother. What was he reading? The little black notebook looked odd—no, not odd in the way it was strange, just odd in that its cover had no markings and seemed more of a dairy than something printed. The girl’s curiosity got the best of her.

“Where’d you get the book?”

“Uhn?”

“The one you’re reading, numbnuts?”

The boy chuckled, and for a moment, moved the book slightly out of reach of his sister. At seventeen, Johnny Carl was a big kid who’d preferred doing outside sports over being glued to a chair, with his face buried in some book—which made things strange to his sister, to discover him all of a sudden doing this. “I found it,” he said. “Now go away, I’m busy.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“What?”

“You didn’t find that book.”

“Girl, you don’t know what you’re talkin’ about?”

“Uhn, uhnnnnn—you stole it!”

“Puuuuhhh!” Johnny Carl made a puff of air sound at his sister to ward her off and he turned his back to her, continuing to read.

Just then the girl reached over his back and snatched the book from his hands. She ran out of the kitchen into the living room and directly into Johnny Carl’s path. He had run through an adjoining room that had a door that opened into the living room.

But Jolyn had already flopped herself down on a sofa and was beginning to read a passage out loud from the book. The passage was written in a very well-formed handwriting. “It was not until I found the diamonds that I began to fear for my safety--”

“GIVE ME BACK MY BOOK!” Johnny Carl yelled at Jolyn, trying to take it from her.

But she was on her back, twisting and turning and giggling hard as she held the book out of her brother’s reach. Aloud, she continued to read:

“—That was when . . .” she dodged his hands, but Johnny Carl kept reaching— “. . .that was when I came up with the idea to sell them to Julie’s old man—” The girl fell back, laughing out loud. “What a bunch of junk! Who wrote this crap, and where did you get the book from?”

“Givvveee—mmmeee—thhe—boooook!”

“Where did you get it?”

“I told you.”

“You found it?”

“Yeah-ya!, dummy!”

“Where?”

“At the store, it was on the floor, beneath a shelf.”

“You mean you found it while you was working?”

He nodded. The big moose of a boy had a part time job as a cleaner at the local grocery store. Its owner, Pete Duberry was a pleasant fella who took piety on the kid when he came asking for work and offered him the position more out of charity than need, because the old grocery had lasted these many year—fifty-two to be in fact--never having had a janitor before him. But Pete Duberry cared about his reputation in the community and felt it would show him to be generous and considerate to people needing a hand up or a handout. People noticed and it was a bragging point for the store owner, of whom was well-known for his public display of generosity. He was also known for one other thing: Pete Duberry was a big gossiper. If there was ever any juicy news to tell, he knew it and took great delight in spreading it. He knew all the latest: who was sleeping with whom; what families were having financial problems, all sorts of things. A few years back, folks around town say Pete was responsible for a boy going to jail. They say Boffy Frank was "makin' moonshine down at his still" and the law didn't know it until Pete got to "talkin' about it", and they went down to the creek behind his farm, and woww--weeee! They say you could get "lightheaded just by sippin' the creek water near the still."

“--And it was just there on the floor?” Jolyn was asking about the book.

“No, not exactly. I was mopping and my mop got stuck on something under a shelf, so I tugged at it and gave it a yank and this book come slidin’ out.” He had a backpack on, and he reached inside and brought out three large vanilla envelopes, that looked weathered and worn, and folded many times over, with deep hard creases. They were stuffed with something and looked heavy. “And I found it with these—” He opened an envelope and held up hundred, literally hundreds of one-hundred-dollar bills. “The book was held by rubber bands to these . . . packages.”

“GGGREAT GOD!” stammered the girl, leaning forward. “How much is it?”

“Not quite sure, but I think abouts $20,000—all one-hundred-dollar bills.”

“You’re not sure?”

“You know I’m not that good with countin’.”

“No matter,” she said. “What else did the book say?”

“Well, it’s kinda strange . . . “

“Yeah-ya—you think?”

“It’s got a date at the beginning. June 2, 1983.”

“Mm-hum.”

“The guy who wrote it says he’s keeping a record of his activities so that if he turns up missin’ or dead, people will know who to blame.”

“Really?”

They were both quiet for a moment.

“What do you think we ought to do about it?” asked Jolyn.

“We?” said the brother, a sarcastic expression on his face, suddenly. “Since when did we ever become a ‘we’?”

“When I caught you in the kitchen reading the book, and when you showed me the money.”

Johnny Carl thought for a second. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.

“Of course, I am,” and she usually was about most things. One thing was certain, and Johnny Carl didn’t question it, his kid sister was smart. Straight A’s in all her subjects, including math, she loved figuring out puzzles and working through complicated problems. The girl could be an investigator or a lawyer or a police officer or—in this case—his partner in solving this mystery.

“Sooner or later, Johnny Carl, you’ve got to grow up in your thinking and stop letting yourself be bullied by false thinking. Know for sure about things and not allow yourself to be fooled.” Then she looked him right straight in the eyes and said: “Practice some grown-up thinking for a while. You can do it! Mama said you’ve got some smarts about you.”

He shook his head yes.

“Okay, then,” said Jolyn, “now tell me as much about all of this as you know.”

They began putting together as much of the details and the information recorded in the book to decide what should be done about the money. The book’s writer was someone named Danny Cannon, who called himself a junk dealer. He said he found the stolen diamonds in an old crate he located in a load of discarded furniture he’d purchased from a U-Haul self-storage facility. From what Johnny Carl and Jolyn could see, the black book and the money had been there quite some time. The last entry in the book (neither of the kids thought to call it a journal because it only recorded three individual days, and no more) said Danny Cannon had sold the diamonds to Julie Marshall’s father—a man identified only as Big Easy Sanders.

“Why they call him that?”

“Dunno!”

“He must be a gangster or somethin'?”

“Yup.”

Two minds thinking.

“Say, Jo, where you think the diamonds was stolen from?”

“Dunno.”

“Could it’ll been exchanged for spy money, you think?”

“Dunno.”

“I wonder if they killed Danny Cannon?”

“Dunno.”

The brother and sister looked at each other, wondering, and determined that the book and money might have been left there as a drop-off from Danny to whomever—but maybe the person never got it, or was killed before he got to it—

“Or maybe Danny stashed it there himself while fleeing his murders or maybe—"

“We can come up with a lot of maybes,” Jolyn said finally.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Johnny Carl agreed. As a person, he wasn’t too bright; kind of slow, but he was honest and always wanted to do the right thing. Once, he found a small bird, fell out of a tree. He nursed it for a month until it was able to fly. At another time, when he was a kid, his bike fell by accident against Jed Thompson’s truck and put a big dent in it. Johnny Carl went and got some scotch tape and bandaged it up. Looked good as new. “Maybe we should post an ad in the paper or tell it on Facebook and try to find whose money it is?”

“Why you wanna do that, dumb butt?”

“To see if . . . well—”

“Every nut and his nannie will come out of the woodworks to claim it.”

Johnny Carl cocked his head sideways.

“How long you think the money’s been under there at the store?” she asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said, “maybe since he lost it.”

“And what’s the last date in the book?”

She handed the book to Johnny Carl so he could look inside.

“June 5th, 1983.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Uhhh—” he was scratching his head.

“Thirty-eight years.”

“Really?”

“That’s right! Thirty-eight years—thirty-eight years collecting dust, being hidden, being forgotten--unnoticed. “

“Yeah—which gives us every reason to report we found it.”

Jolyn laughed aloud.

“Are you deaf or what? You think after thirty-eight years somebody’s still looking for this money?” Her hands where on her hips, and the money was spread out on the sofa between them. “Of course not. If after thirty-eight years they haven’t found it, then its lost.”

Yeah, nodded Johnny Carl and he had a bright light in his eyes.

“The best thing for us to do is keep it to ourselves and never tell a soul we found it.” She gathered up the money and the book and got up to leave the room, taking the money and the book with her. “The first thing I’m gonna do is go burn this book and get rid of the evidence. Then we can discuss how to hide the money, OK?”

Jolyn left the room.

“OK,” said Johnny Carl, sitting there thinking. He felt he’d do as his sister advised him to do. Maybe he should practice some grown-up thinking for a change? Then he thought: “Oh, crap! I left so fast a while ago, after finding the book and money, plumb near forgot to put away my mop and bucket.” He was talking to himself. He was nervous about what he should do. Pete, his boss, might get mad. Pete’s been good to Johnny Carl. Johnny Carl always said Pete’s his best friend. And he couldn’t disappoint Pete. Besides, somebody might get hurt if they trip over the bucket and mop at the store. Johnny Carl decided he’d better go back and put things away. Getting up, he headed out the front door. “I’ll just tell Pete what had happen’ –what I’ve found. I can trust him. He likes me. I’ll ask him not to tell anybody.”