“Kassy!” he hollered, calling to one of the Handy Gals. She’d been working on repairing a broken handrail that was dangerously close to falling off the wall and clattering down the stairs to the next landing down.

  “Yo!” Kassy replied.

  “Come here, please,” Freddy shouted.

  A few long minutes later, a very filthy and exhausted-looking Handy Gal came strolling up the central staircase to Freddy’s guest room. “What’s up?”

  “Listen,” Freddy said, pointing at the exterior wall.

  He and Kassy both stood there, totally silent, listening to the high-pitched buzz coming from inside the wall. “What the heck is that?” Kassy asked.

  “I was hoping you would know,” Freddy admitted.

  “That’s not right,” Kassy blurted out.

  Freddy cringed. “And that’s not reassuring.”

  “I think we need to break in and see what’s up.” Kassy texted Lila, who’d been working downstairs but appeared not long after with a sledgehammer and a flashlight. Herb, Lucy, and Dad were close on her heels. “Just a little hole, to scope things out,” Kassy promised.

  And then she started whacking away at yet another wall in the Peach Pit. This time, it was different from the day they’d discovered the doll’s head deep within the walls. Because of the funny noise coming from within, and to minimize the damage, Kassy wanted to be pretty specific with their wall-busting. So all the Peaches stepped back, stood by the door to Freddy’s suite, and let the Handy Gals do their thing.

  It only took a few well-aimed swings of her hammer before a chunk of plaster crumbled inward, leaving a hole in the wall the size of a bagel. Lila moved her flashlight toward the wall…and that’s when a slow, drowsy bee came spiraling out. That first bee was quickly followed by a second, a third, and within just a few seconds, a whole river of bees was lazily pouring out of the wall. “I think we found the source of the noise,” Freddy blurted out.

  The Peaches and the Handy Gals raced to get out the door of Freddy’s guest room. Lila was pulling up the rear of the group, and she yelped when one of the bees stung her. “Move it!” she shouted. “They’re confused, but they won’t be for long!”

  Within fifteen seconds, they’d all cleared out of the room. Lucy quickly grabbed a towel from the neighboring suite’s bathroom to plug up the space under the bee-room door. “That should keep them inside,” she said, using her knees to push the fabric tight against the base of the door.

  “Huh,” Freddy said. “I’m kinda thinking that’s not going to be a very comfortable room for our guests.”

  Everyone cracked up.

  “What are we supposed to do now?” Dad asked, looking absolutely bewildered.

  “There are people who handle this sort of thing,” Freddy said.

  “Like…people who kill the bees?” Herb asked, his lip quivering. “We can’t hurt them. It’s not their fault we stole their house. They were here first.”

  Freddy shook his head. “No, bees are good for the planet, so we definitely don’t want to kill them.” Herb nodded his agreement as Freddy went on. “I read a story about this lady—a special bee lady—who got called into this house whose walls had been totally overtaken by bees. Like, the insides of her walls were one hundred percent hive. She put on this special suit, and somehow she took apart the hive and moved it in pieces to outside somewhere. She somehow found the queen bee—which, did you know, is usually the mom of almost all the other bees inside the hive?!—and moved her, and all her little bee minions followed. I can’t remember the specifics of how it all went down, but we could call that lady.”

  “Where was she located?” Lila asked.

  “New Hampshire, maybe?” Freddy guessed. “Or it could have been Maine?”

  “Okay,” Dad said with a huge sigh. “That’s not realistic. But maybe we can find our own bee lady here in Minnesota.”

  “It’s not gonna be cheap,” Freddy said softly. “This is, like, high-tech specialty work. And dangerous, probably, too.” He grinned. “If you buy me a bee suit, maybe I could do it.”

  “No!” Dad, Lucy, and Herb all shouted at the same time.

  Freddy shrugged. “Okay, let me do some digging and see what we can find out.”

  “I’ll help,” Kassy offered. “I’m the one who decided to crack into the bees’ house—I sort of feel like it’s the least I can do to make up for disturbing their peaceful home.”

  Freddy high-fived her. “Operation: B and B Bee is underway.”

  * * *

  A few hours later, Freddy decided it was time to call a family meeting. Over the past few weeks, the Peach Pit “family” had officially grown to include Theo and the two Handy Gals. Freddy convinced Dad to order a couple giant pizzas from everyone’s favorite—Sammy’s Pizza—to feed the whole crew while he broke the bad news he’d learned about bee removal service. He also thought they ought to talk through where all their other B&B projects stood.

  “First of all, bee relocation is definitely not cheap,” Freddy said through a mouthful of gooey Sammy’s Special. It was his favorite kind of pizza—green pepper and onion, topped off with one perfect, round ball of sausage on every piece. Perfection! “Frankly, moving one wall of bees costs more than it would cost to hire movers to move us out. Let’s just say, we might want to consider an alternative.”

  “What sort of alternative?” Theo asked. Then he said, “Here’s an idea: What if we replaced the plaster wall with clear plexiglass and left the hive inside the wall? Then guests could watch the bees at work. It would actually be really fascinating, and I bet we could get some pretty good publicity with a guest room that has an actual working hive visible through the wall.”

  Freddy’s mouth dropped open and half a sausage ball rolled out. “You are a genius,” he said. Freddy had liked Theo from the very first time he’d come by for an interview. Freddy knew he had to be cool since he was a Cardboard Camp instructor. But then he’d learned Theo knew how to shoot an actual longbow (the kind they use in the Lord of the Rings movies!), and he earned extra money on weekends by drawing those crazy caricature portraits at random art and music festivals in his spare time.

  “Right?” Theo agreed, taking a swig of his milk. “There’s the theme of your room, Fred. Solved. Bees and Breakfast.”

  Freddy inhaled sharply, then blurted out a laugh. He leaned over to high-five their B&B host, but Lucy reached out and blocked it. “No,” she said. “We cannot build a plexiglass wall to show the bees at work. We’re under a tight deadline here, and that’s a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have.”

  Freddy glared back at her.

  “Lucy’s right,” Dad agreed.

  Lila shrugged. “To be honest, the cost of removing that whole wall and replacing it with plexiglass—not to mention the job of keeping the bees safe and not attacking while we did that kind of work—would cost a whole lot more than just moving them. Sorry, Freddy.”

  With Theo’s suggestion officially vetoed, they all returned their attention to the matter of bee removal. Freddy and Kassy explained the process to everyone, and then dropped the price. “It’s gonna be a few thousand bucks,” Freddy said, watching Dad’s face as he said it.

  “I’m done,” Dad said, closing his eyes and slumping back in his chair. “That just stings.”

  Freddy and Theo both laughed but quieted quickly when they realized Dad’s pun—stings…bees—hadn’t been intentional.

  “I’d be willing to give up the rest of my share of the winnings from the Ohio Food Truck Festival to help pay for it,” Lucy said quickly.

  “Same,” Herb offered.

  Freddy paused. They had split the Food Truck Festival winnings in equal fourths, which left each of the Peaches with $2,500. They’d each already chipped in $1,000 of their winnings to furnish the B&B guest rooms. Freddy had been excited to spend the rest of his share on something like real metal armor for next year’s Cardboard Camp, or maybe a 3D printer. “I’m in, too,” Freddy said. If it came down to him buying some unnecessary new stuff, or helping fix his family and their home, the choice was simple. “Between the three of us, we can cover the cost, Dad.”

  Dad opened his eyes just a sliver. “Okay.”

  “Okay?” Freddy confirmed.

  Dad nodded. Before he could say anything more, Lila cut in. “Kassy and I can call the bee people tomorrow and figure out how soon they can get here to sort stuff out. And we’ll patch up whatever mess they make of the wall afterward. No charge. We helped cause the problem.”

  “Thank you,” Dad said softly. After a long pause, Dad admitted, “My cousin David keeps calling, nudging me to get on board with the idea of selling this place. Well, it’s actually more of a push than a nudge—and I know he’s working the same angle with Great Aunt Lucinda. Every time another problem comes up, it’s really tempting to listen to him.”

  “I don’t want to just let this house go,” Lucy moaned. “We need to fight back.” Freddy knew that his sister, possibly more than any of them, loved the rickety old mansion. But Lucy also hated failure more than any of them, so he had a feeling that she also really didn’t want to flop in their quest to convert the Peach Pit into a perfect B&B.

  “None of us want to let it go,” Herb agreed. Freddy noticed that the dogs were all sitting in a perfect line beside Herb’s chair, waiting patiently for the balls of sausage Herb was slipping them quietly under the table.

  “I finished designing a guest book this week,” Lucy said quickly. “And we have Theo on the team now to help with a lot of the little stuff we need to figure out before David and Great Aunt Lucinda check in for opening weekend. We have a ton of breakfast recipes ready to go.”

  Dad grabbed a slice of pizza, but his hand stilled halfway to his mouth. “We have a little of Mom’s fun money left over, but not much. We’ll just have to make do with that, and if we run out before everything’s ready, well…” Dad stopped. The thing was, Freddy knew there wasn’t anywhere they could turn for help. They couldn’t ask Great Aunt Lucinda for money, since she had already given them a whole house. She was giving up a lot of her own personal money by offering to hand them a house, no charge, when she needed the money for her own retirement. And Dad’s cousin David wasn’t about to offer them cash to help with something he thought was a “crazy plan.” So they were going to have to make this work—to finish—with what remaining money and energy they had. If they couldn’t do it, they’d need to move on and let someone else grow the Peach Pit into something wonderful.

  “You think I want to sell this house to the highest bidder?” Dad blurted out suddenly, his cheeks growing pink. “No. I want to keep it in the family just as much as any of you. This house is stuffed with history. And inside that history is our story—mine, and yours, and ours—and it’s exactly where I want to build some of our family’s future memories.”

  Freddy blinked. He wasn’t used to his dad being so expressive. Clearly, the Peach Pit had grown on all of them. But that was because they’d been the ones nurturing it, in order to help it grow.

  Dad set his mouth in a firm line. He glanced at each of his kids. “We deserve good things after the past couple years. So I’m going to fight as hard as I can to keep us here. Just like all of you are doing.”

  As they cleaned up after dinner, Freddy considered what Dad had said: That the Peach Pit was stuffed with history, and inside that history was a story. Their story.

  There was a ton of history crammed into the old house, and bits and pieces of their family’s story were hidden inside each wall and broken doorknob and old toilet they’d pulled out of the house over these past weeks. Suddenly, Freddy realized exactly what he needed to do to build his art project with the personal touch he’d been searching for all this time. He could use cast-off pieces of the Peach Pit to build his treehouse art installation! By doing this, he would create his own style of art and preserve important pieces of their family history in one gorgeous sculpture.

  A family tree of sorts. “The Peach Family Treehouse!” he blurted out just as Dad pulled the full garbage bag out of the can under the sink. “I’ll take out the trash,” Freddy offered. He tossed on a pair of shoes and ran outside. He threw the garbage bag in the plastic bin at the end of the driveway, then raced over to the dumpster that was stuffed full of old construction debris and pipes and plaster and wood chunks that had been dragged out of the house. Now that he knew what he wanted to do, Freddy was eager to begin his hunt for the perfect building materials. He finally had the right plan, and he couldn’t wait to start.

  It was freezing cold outside, but Freddy had a thick sweatshirt on, so even the soft dusting of snow that covered the edges of the dumpster (and everything inside it) was hardly noticeable.

  Freddy hopped up onto the edge of the dumpster and lowered himself down into a century’s worth of Peach family history. Almost as soon as he was inside the pile of rubble, he saw it. A perfect base from which to grow his sculpture: the old toilet they’d pulled out of Freddy’s very own guest suite! “A latrine is the heart of a house and the one thing that all members of a family have in common,” Freddy said aloud in a royal accent, beating his chest with one fist as he chuckled to himself. “Just think of all the family history this throne has witnessed.”

  19

  A BOX OF CLUES

  As soon as she realized the paper labeled The Hunt for Hidden Riches was a map of the Peach Pit, Lucy was determined to figure out what the mysterious piece of paper meant. Could it possibly be a treasure map? What if there actually was some old, forgotten treasure hidden inside Great Aunt Lucinda’s mansion? After all the strange and surprising and bizarre things that had happened to the Peaches over the past six months, it wouldn’t be that weird. And how cool would it be to find a big pot of money that they could use to make the mansion truly shine in the way it deserved? This could be exactly what the Peaches needed to turn things around.

  But what if someone else already found the treasure?

  What if no one had?

  The map was labeled with a bunch of numbers and lines that didn’t seem to make any sense. The number one was drawn in her bedroom on the map; was she just supposed to start digging around for random stuff or clues that might be hidden? With twelve numbers in total, this hunt could take her a lifetime.

  After poring over the map with Maren—who had offered to scan the map using her mom’s fancy scanner and then upload it to a computer to adjust the resolution so the lines were darker and clearer—Lucy began to wonder if she was missing some key piece. Had she overlooked something? Another clue of some kind that she needed to help her solve the hunt?

  She’d already scoured the entire attic and hadn’t found anything else that looked useful. But she figured two sets of eyes were better than one, so she invited her best friend over that weekend to help her expand the search. They decided to start in the spot where Lucy had first found the map.

  “Do not tell my brothers this trapdoor exists,” Lucy told Maren as she led her to the secret door in the ceiling of her closet. “So far, neither of them has noticed me sneaking up here, and I want to keep it that way.”

  “Understood,” Maren said, easily hoisting herself up into the attic space. “Whoa…this is amazing, Luce.”

  Lucy grinned. “Isn’t it?”

  Over the past couple months, Lucy had been spending whatever free time she could spare digging through and tidying up the attic mess. She’d organized the boxes, stacked crates and bins, and washed the windows. She’d swept the floor and pulled a couple of old pieces of lawn furniture into a back corner near one of the windows to create a sort of reading nook. She’d covered the grimy wicker furniture with spare blankets that had been tucked away in closets in some of the guest rooms, and found a cute woven rug that she laid down on the floor to make it feel even more homey.

  “You should move up here,” Maren said, peeking into some of the boxes before flopping down on one of the chairs.

  “It’s not insulated,” Lucy pointed out. This was one of the things she’d learned a lot about over the past few months, by shadowing—and listening to—the Handy Gals. Insulation was super important in an old house like this, to help keep heating costs down in the winter, and to help keep the house cool in the summer. Dad had explained that it would cost a fortune to heat a house this size through a Duluth winter, but luckily Great Aunt Lucinda had updated and improved the wall insulation in much of the house over the years. This—and semi-regularly getting the outside of the house painted—was one of the few things she had done to help keep the house from crumbling into a total money pit. There were a lot of problems Aunt Lucinda had ignored, but she hadn’t ignored everything. “I’d freeze to death in the winter, and I bet it gets to be at least a hundred degrees up here when it’s super hot in the summer.”

  “Oh,” Maren said, shrugging. “Okay, so maybe don’t move up here permanently, but we should totally have a sleepover up here sometime.”

  “That would be super fun,” Lucy agreed. Then she remembered the idea she’d been considering that would be even more fun. “Hey, do you maybe want to spend the night this weekend and be a practice guest at the B and B? You can stay in my room—The Winter Suite—and let me know if it’s comfortable, or if you notice anything missing for you to have a good night’s sleep and a comfortable stay?”

  Maren laughed. “You sound like the front desk lady at the hotel my swim team stays at for our state swim meet.”

  “That’s good!” Lucy said, laughing along with her. “Because sometimes I will be the front desk lady at a hotel, starting in just a couple weeks.”

 

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