She scanned the area, noting the outcroppings above them. The map had led them to an offshoot of Dead Man’s Canyon, barely a mile from where the bandits had taken the stage. It was a centuries-old streambed that had run dry ages ago, now scattered with scrubby trees and huge, dusty boulders. It was just inside the boundary of the sixty-acre plot the Campbells had purchased in 1910.

“What am I missing?” she muttered to herself.

She took her shovel and climbed the short incline behind their dig site, thinking to get a better look at the lay of the land. She’d reread the scenes in Canyon Secrets half a dozen times that morning. But Ava hadn’t left any additional clues in her words.

The air buzzed with the sound of insects, the slow, steady beat of shovels attacking the ground beneath her.

“Okay. I’m a bandit. I’ve got four strongboxes of gold. Where am I going to put them? Mrs. Campbell? Mom? A little help?”

When no signs from the universe arrived with fanfare, Maggie took another drink from her canteen. The water dribbled down her chin and splashed onto the boulder beneath her.

She wouldn’t have seen it with the dust covering it. That’s how she’d tell the story for years to come. That accidental splash of water landing at just the right spot in that entire canyon? Well, it had to be fate.

“Silas? Can you come up here a second?” she called.

“Be right there.”

“This is no time for you two to take selfies,” Kressley reminded them. “We have holes to dig.”

Sy’s long shadow came into view as Maggie crouched down and dumped more water onto the surface of the boulder.

“Is this a make-out break?” he asked. “Because I might need some deodorant first.”

“Oh, we’ll be making out,” she assured him. “But first, I think I found a sign.”

He joined her in front of the broad, flat slab of rock, and she pointed to the wet spot.

“Well, I’ll be damned. That looks just like Ava’s pretty little octagonal window,” he mused.

“Which looks just like the one in the picture of her as a lady’s maid. I think it’s a sign,” she told him.

“’Course it is,” Silas said with confidence. “Let’s dig.”

It took them ten minutes of focused digging, their shovels and backs working in tandem. And then Sy’s blade hit something.

“That didn’t sound like rock to me,” he said.

Maggie grinned. “That sounded like metal. Should we get the others?”

“Let’s make sure it’s something and not nothing before we haul Wallace up here,” he suggested.

They dug more frantically until the first box came into view.

“Well, it’s heavy as fuck. Either there’s gold in there or someone melted down a buncha antique bowling balls,” he predicted.