Page 16 of Finders Keepers

Quentin and I both pause on the top step. He looks at me and raises one eyebrow. “What do you think, Hunnicutt? Should we go at the same time and call it a draw?”

It’s kind of him to offer. A very “clean slate” sort of thing to do, I guess. Then again, not having these stupid competitions in the first place is an even cleaner slate. I ignore him and take the final step, onto the grounds of Sprangbur.

We’ve arrived at what is technically the rear of the property, near the small eighteenth-century graveyard that Quentin labeled “the Bone Zone” on our map.

Fountain left it mostly as it was when he purchased the land.

Whether that was out of respect or some superstition, I don’t know.

I used to find it spooky, but the historian in me lingers for a moment outside the little iron-fenced corner, attempting to read names on the eroded tombstones.

I make a mental note to look up two of the ones I can glean to see if there’s any interesting research to be done there, then head for the gardens.

It’s an interesting contrast. Now, in the early summer, everything on this part of the property is so vibrant and alive.

The extensive formal plantings are like a great undulating ocean of green, Sprangbur Castle rising up behind it like a curious sea monster made of stone and wooden shingles with mismatched turrets for arms. I turn to Quentin but find him yards behind me, his attention focused on the small, boxy stone structure off to the right.

Julius Fountain considered architectural design one of his hobbies.

Unlike most amateurs, though, he actually had the resources to build the bizarre things he dreamed up.

I do have to hand it to him—most of his creations are still standing, as far as I’m aware, so at least they’re structurally sound if not always aesthetically pleasing.

There’s the mushroom folly in the gardens that lost the red and white paint on its cap long ago, so it’s now more like a phallic gazebo, and a gigantic brick arch flanked by bronze statues of haunted-looking soldiers he constructed in honor of the (relatively few, as far as I’m aware) Luxembourgian Americans who fought for the Union in the Civil War.

Three freestanding Greek Doric columns, identical in height and spaced five feet apart.

A tiny stucco pagoda. And the thing that’s captured Quentin’s attention: the tomb Fountain designed to be his final resting place.

It’s where I was supposed to meet Quentin that final night but didn’t.

I slowly make my way to where he stands lost in thought. “Quentin…”

“Did you ever come back here?” he asks, his voice distant. “After everything?”

It’s tempting to lie and say that I did.

That I used to come here to fool around with my crushes, like the goth kids were rumored to do.

But the truth is that the wound of Quentin’s abandonment was easily reopened if I wasn’t careful; I spent most of the two years before college staying away from anything that might be even a little sharp.

Instead I organized my life in such a way that I was always too busy with SAT prep and debate team practices and extra credit essays to even tempt myself. “No,” I say. “Never.”

He nods once, twice. It’s almost like he appreciates that I never reclaimed this place as my own, as somewhere that meant anything to me beyond what it meant to both of us.

I consider saying something that might hurt him, something about how I was too busy living my life and didn’t have time for childish games after he stopped goading me into them.

That isn’t very clean slate of me, though.

Nor do I think it would fool him. So I resecure the hurt that’s threatening to come loose from its chains and instead go with “Why do you ask?”

He seems to come to, refocused on me now. “I figured we shouldn’t waste time rechecking the places we already checked. I wanted to see if there was anywhere else you’d already covered.”

“No,” I say. “I only checked…”

“Where you went instead,” he finishes for me. But there’s no heat in his words, not even the subtle, repressed kind, so I order the defensiveness rising up in me to take a hike.

“And I assume you checked the cenotaph that night?” I ask.

“The what?”

I gesture in the direction of the little cave-like building.

He squints at it. “You mean the mausoleum?”

“A mausoleum that doesn’t actually hold any remains is called a cenotaph,” I say, enjoying the way Quentin’s eyebrows still get that deep dividing line between them when I’ve said something that annoys him.

“And Fountain wound up being buried in Baltimore, in the same plot as his brother and parents, remember? So technically…”

“Then yes, I checked the cenotaph ,” he says, and pauses before continuing, “inside and out.”

The only clue Fountain left was that the treasure was hidden somewhere at Sprangbur, and the riddle: “Stiff of spine, body pale, you shall find what you seek beneath the whale.” Much of our time on the estate that summer was spent looking for carvings or markings that even remotely resembled a whale.

The problem wasn’t that we couldn’t find one so much as we found about two hundred.

Whales were second only to stars as Fountain’s favored decorative motif.

But in early July, we found a newspaper article talking about Fountain’s burial in Baltimore and learned that what we assumed was just another weird stone outbuilding was actually what Fountain had once intended as his final resting place.

“Stiff of spine, body pale” certainly seemed to apply to a dead person.

So we started focusing on the cenotaph, which, frustratingly, was the one place on the property we couldn’t seem to find anything whale-related.

We figured we were on the wrong track and went back to researching and wandering aimlessly around Sprangbur together in hopes of having an epiphany.

Then, on Quentin’s penultimate night in Catoctin, as we were talking through our windows, he switched over to his normal voice and asked me to meet him out back.

I snuck out of the house and went around to the gate at the end of his yard, where he directed me to a fleece blanket flung over the grass near the garage, where it was darkest. We lay there, arms pressed together, the air still warm and humid despite it being near eleven.

The memory of how my heart kicked up when he asked if I’d stargaze with him, beating so hard it felt like it was trying to knock its way out of my chest, is still surprisingly fresh in my mind.

I tried to bury every other memory of that summer after it became clear Quentin wasn’t going to be in my life anymore.

But that one I’ve kept a bit closer than the rest.

Quentin reached over and handed me something. It was a planisphere—one of those star charts where you adjust it to the right month and time and you can see what constellations are in the sky above you. He said, “I found this while packing up my bedroom.”

I spun the planisphere to August, eleven p.m., and adjusted it so the cardinal directions around the outside lined up with our position.

“I bet,” Quentin started, “that I can accurately identify more constellations than you can.”

It turned out he could, and I didn’t really mind, because it meant I got to lie there beside him while he pointed up at the sky and taught me about the stars.

When he finished with what we could see, I thought he would stop. Instead, he continued, taking the planisphere and rotating it to different dates, telling me stories about the constellations currently in hiding.

“That one, there, is Cetus,” he said quietly. “The sea monster, or whale.”

“The whale, huh,” I said. “Wait. Quentin. The whale !” I sprang up then and grabbed the planisphere. “What if this is what Fountain meant?”

Which is how we realized there may be a whale on the cenotaph after all.

I feel the sudden and urgent need to explain myself.

To confess what I discovered on my own and why I never made it to the cenotaph that night as we’d agreed.

But before I can decide how to start, how to phrase it, Quentin walks to the outer edge of the gardens, where his fingers graze against the top of a well-manicured hedge.

It sends a shiver through me, as if my skin can’t help but imagine being one of those waxy leaves.

“I thought about this place a lot when I was overseas,” he says matter-of-factly.

“I visited a bunch of the grand European estates while I lived over there. Versailles. Boboli. Schonbrunn. Keukenhof. And even after seeing all of those much bigger, much older mansions and gardens, I couldn’t help but compare them to Sprangbur and find them… well, lacking.”

I let out a surprised laugh. The gardens here are beautiful, and the county and volunteers have always done a great job with their upkeep, even when the Castle itself was a condemned eyesore.

But the property is also much less ornate and, like, one-twentieth the size of the famous ones Quentin mentioned.

“I didn’t say I thought Sprangbur was nicer ,” he clarifies. “There’s just…something really special about it.” He smiles fondly as his gaze sweeps over the large house and the land surrounding it.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been missing about that summer whenever the memories of it have managed to slip through my defenses.

In my head, it was the time Quentin and I were closest, inching toward some precipice that was terrifying and exciting all at once.

I thought that maybe I was developing romantic feelings for him, that we might have been developing those sorts of feelings for each other, and that’s one of the reasons it hurt him so much that I went behind his back.

But now I’m wondering if it wasn’t that Quentin and I were falling in love, but simply that we were overcome by the surprising magic of this otherworldly domain that Fountain built.