The Treasure of Hollin Beck

Hollin Beck was a small village in the hills, the kind of place where most people knew each other's grandparents' names, and where every kid grew up hearing the same handful of stories.

The biggest story was Old Tarvik's treasure.

The version Lina knew went like this. Tarvik had lived in Hollin Beck about eighty years ago. He had been a farmer with a small holding up the slope above the village. He had lived alone. He had been thought of, at the time, as eccentric. He had buried something — gold, jewellery, important papers, depending on who told the story — somewhere on his land. He had died without telling anyone. The land had been sold and resold. The treasure had never been found.

Most kids treated it like a joke.

"Oh sure," they would say, rolling their eyes. "Tarvik's treasure. The pot at the end of the rainbow."

Lina was eleven. Her cousin Bo was nine. They were spending the summer at her grandmother's house at the bottom of the village. They had nothing else to do.

On the first morning, Lina sat on her grandmother's bench in the back garden and said, "Bo. We are going to find Tarvik's treasure."

Bo nodded with great seriousness. "Yes," he said. "How?"

"By doing what the others didn't."

"What didn't they do?"

"Listen properly."

Lina explained. Most kids who had hunted Tarvik's treasure had gone straight to the slope and dug. They had dug for an afternoon,found nothing, gone home. They had not asked the people who actually remembered Tarvik. They had not read about him. They had not done — Lina's word — research.

Lina and Bo started by interviewing everyone in the village over seventy. There were eleven of them. They went door-to-door with biscuits as bribes. Lina's grandmother had warned the neighbours, so nobody was surprised.

What they learned, after a week:

Tarvik had not been a farmer. Tarvik had been a clockmaker, which was unusual in a farming village. He had inherited the smallholding but had not really worked it.

Tarvik had not been eccentric. He had been quiet. The "eccentric" thing had come from one neighbour who had not liked him and had gossiped after his death.

The treasure was not gold. Or — none of the eleven old people thought it was gold. Several of them thought it was a clock. A particular clock, which Tarvik had been working on his whole life, that he had said was the best clock he had ever made.

"A clock isn't really treasure," said Bo, on day eight, eating a digestive biscuit on the bench.

"It is to a clockmaker," said Lina. "And it might be to other people too. Some clocks are very valuable."

"Where would he have hidden it?"

"Somewhere dry. Somewhere he could find it again. Somewhere he trusted."

They started looking properly the next day.