Treasure Watching

“Ara, this is ridiculous!” Cassidy whispered to her friend as they stood on the bluff overlooking the bay. “You know the whole thing is just a stupid ghost story!” Cassidy shoved her mittened hands deeper into the pockets of her thick wool coat.

            “Says who?” Arabella responded, tugging her knit hat tighter over her ears and leaning slightly forward to see the island better.

            “Says everyone!” Cassidy squeaked, following Arabella to the very edge of the bluff. “Everyone! Everyone admits it’s just a story! Even the information center admits it’s just to get the tourists to the bay!” Cassidy said.

            “Noooo. Annamae says its true! And I bet Anne Barry says it’s true too!” Arabella protested, and pulled the binoculars from her pocket. It was freezing in Chester that night- every night so late in October. The cold ocean breeze blowing onto the grassy overlook didn’t help, but Arabella and Cassidy had come prepared.

            “Annamae is eighty! And Anne Barry’s family has lived here since the sixteen hundreds! Of course she would believe the stories!” Cassidy protested. “But no normal person in the entire town will admit to you that there’s actually treasure on Oak Island!” Arabella shook her head and focused her binoculars on the island out in the distance. Everything was pitch-black dark in Chester Basin that night. The only illumination came from the ghostly full moon looming above the ocean, mirrored in the waves.

            “No. All the facts point to it. And if anything’s going to happen, it’ll happen tonight. It’s a fact that in October 1795, Daniel McGinnis found the money pit on Oak Island. They went back the next day to dig, and ran into a series of MANMADE barriers. Try telling me that logs just happened to roll into the sinkhole in perfect formation, stacked neatly.” Arabella gave Cassidy a pointed look.

            “Ara, that was two hundred years ago!” Cassidy cried. “There is NO proof at all!”

            “Shhh! It’s the middle of the night! Don’t wake up the whole town!” Arabella shushed her friend.

            “There’s no one within half a mile from here! Do you forget that we’re in Chester in October? All the summers are gone!” Cassidy pointed out. She was the logical one, having come to Chester ten years earlier from New Brunswick. Arabella, on the other hand, had been raised by one of Chester’s oldest families, and had grown up listening to the legends of the Money Pit on Oak Island.

            “Anyways,” Arabella said, glaring at Cassidy, “When they went back on Monday, the pit was flooded with salt water. But nine years later, they found the rock that-” Cassidy cut her off.

            “I know, I know. The code.” Cassidy rolled her eyes. “Forty feet below two million pounds are buried.” She said. “But at that point, they’d talked to all the locals. The locals they were paying o search for the treasure. Any one of them in Chester could’ve made up a code and carved the stone, then put it in the Money Pit. As long as they thought there was treasure, the locals had a job hunting for it.”

            “Okay, okay. But the stone wasn’t native to Nova Scotia. And no one in the town had the money to import a rock from who knows where just for that.” Arabella said, keeping the binoculars pressed to her eyes. “And ever since then, there have been sightings of the orbs. And there tend to be even more on nights of significance to the island. Like when there’s a full moon in mid-October. Like tonight.”

            “This is ridiculous, Ara. Do you realize how many people make up those stories to sell to the press for money? Tons!”

            “What about the photographs?” Arabella countered, sitting down on a rock and letting the binoculars dangle from her neck.