Lost and Found

Our annual beach vacations had always been enjoyably the same: the scent of salt and seaweed in the air, the steady sound of waves rolling onto the shore, the unchanging faded gray of the shutters on our family’s cottage. Year after year, I recognized certain seagulls by the splotches on their beaks and the patterns of their feathers—and I knew which “regulars” would steal my peanut-butter crackers off the beach blanket.

But this year, everything was different.

Nobody was on the beach but Trevor and me, probably because thick clouds, the color of milky tea, covered the sky. Our parents were still inside the rental house on the other side of the dunes, trying to figure out where to put the dishes in the unfamiliar kitchen cupboards. I used to always drink my orange juice out of the same chipped sailboat mug—one my grandma had bought the first summer she and my grandpa came to Hatteras. This morning, I’d gulped my juice out of a plain, clear glass.

It hadn’t tasted as good.

The water was rough, and I didn’t know this new stretch of beach, which was right on the edge of the National Seashore. The hurricane last fall had changed the shoreline. So instead of swimming, I squatted by a tide pool, watching a crab hobble across the sand.

“Laurel! Laurel! Come over here!”

I pushed myself up and raced toward the sound of my big brother’s voice. He was standing in the middle of some debris near the water’s edge.

“What is it?” I stopped, panting, next to a big chunk of wood. It was about the size of a boogie board.

“A piece of wood from a shipwreck,” Trevor said with complete confidence.

I bent over for a closer look. Yesterday’s waves must have left it on the beach for us to find.

“I think you’re right, Trevor,” I whispered excitedly. In all the years of beachcombing at the old cottage, we’d never found anything like this.

Trevor tiptoed carefully around the debris. He gasped.

“What?” I pushed salty strands of hair off my face and moved closer.

Trevor rubbed something on his T-shirt. He held out his cupped palm, trembling a little. In it was a thin metal circle, greenish with a hint of gold. “Laurel . . . I think it’s treasure.”

I plucked it out of his hand. The worn and scuzzy coin felt heavy in my palm. Something was stamped on it, a shape like an X or a cross. I ran my fingertip over the surface, feeling the shape of rough letters or maybe numbers. On the opposite side was a picture of something like a coat of arms.

“It looks really old,” Trevor said, taking the coin back. “Maybe a piece of eight . . . No, I think it’s gold, which means it could be a Spanish escudo.” My brother had spent many summers reading Grandpa’s books about pirate ships and the kinds of treasure they carried.

“We have to get Mom to drive us to the museum,” I said. “They’ll be able to identify it!”

The museum has a lot of artifacts from shipwrecks discovered on North Carolina beaches. This area is called the Graveyard of the Atlantic because so many boats have wrecked here over the years. It was always a big event at the museum when something new was discovered; Trevor and I loved listening to the stories the museum guide would tell about each object.

“Wait.” Trevor looked at me. “Let’s not tell anyone. Not yet. If we found one coin—we might find more.”

I frowned. “We can’t keep this a secret. Plus, we’re probably on the National Seashore part of the beach right now, which means the coin isn’t ours.” A large sign at the entrance near the dunes had made it very clear: Any objects—including historical artifacts—found along the National Seashore are protected and are not to be removed.

“But,” Trevor paused, “nobody knows where we found it. Think about it, Laurel. If this coin really is an escudo, something old and rare, it would be worth money. Like, thousands. Maybe—maybe even enough to fix the cottage.”

Yesterday, we had stopped by the cottage on our drive to the rental home. It had looked so sad and broken. The hurricane winds had ripped off chunks of the roof, so a blue tarp covered most of it. Shingles were missing all over, creating bald patches. The deck looked rotten. But even if the cottage were repaired, it would never be the same. The floodwaters had ruined things that we couldn’t replace: albums full of vacation photos going back to when my dad was a kid, the shell art that my grandma had glued together on cloudy days, a picture of the sunrise that Trevor had painted. The beach cottage hadn’t been just a house; it was a home for my family’s memories. After my grandparents passed away, we needed all that stuff even more—curling up at night with my grandma’s handmade quilt in my grandpa’s favorite chair felt like they were giving me a goodnight hug.

Part of why we’d come back to the beach this summer was so Mom and Dad could talk to people about repairs. If fixing the cottage was going to cost too much, though, they were going to sell the whole lot—just like that.

I watched Trevor dig madly through the sand. “Whoever lost these coins did so long, long ago,” he declared. “Didn’t Grandpa keep the stuff he found?”

Trevor stopped searching for a moment and looked at me. “Maybe he’d want us to do this—use treasure from the beach to save his cottage.”

When we were little, our grandpa would sometimes get the metal detector out after storms and look for loot on the beach. He never found anything valuable or historical, and he hunted for treasure only where it was allowed.

Trevor went back to raking his hands through the sand. Only moments later, he let out a whoop. “I found another!”

I didn’t know why, but my heart sank a little.

I left Trevor and wandered over the dunes, trying to figure out if we really were on protected land. Then I saw the sign. Trevor’s treasure was well within the boundaries of the National Seashore.

I decided to go back to the rental house and pretend I had never seen that sign. But just then, the wind kicked up, pushing against me. I turned back to the water. The clouds were moving fast now, and the waters beyond the beach looked like an upset stew, waves crashing against each other wildly, as if they couldn’t find the shore.

I saw the shape of my big brother, hunched over and small in the distance. When I reached him, I noticed that he was cradling a small bounty of greenish coins in his shirt.

“Trevor,” I said, squatting down next to him. “We’re definitely on the protected beach.”

Trevor stared at me for a moment, chewing on his lip.

“I want to fix the cottage just as bad as you do, but . . . ” I said.

Trevor gave me a sad smile. “It’s just too bad, you know? How some stuff gets lost.”

I held out my hand and helped my brother stand up. Coins fell around his feet. We stood there for a moment, looking at the pile of treasure on the sand. I pictured my mom back at the rental house, lining up the bottles of sunscreen in the bathroom, and my dad marinating the fish we’d be eating for dinner. I thought of my grandma and grandpa, and the way they loved to hike the island, hand in hand.

Suddenly, the shoreline didn’t seem so unfamiliar.

“I know,” I told my brother. “But you never know where you might find it again.”