Bonnie of Evidence - By Maddy Hunter Page 0,1

could knock himself out.

I’m Emily—Emily Andrew Miceli—glorified chaperone for a core group of a dozen Iowa seniors who regularly sign up for international tours. On this trip, twenty-nine guests from across the Corn and Rust Belts had booked the Scottish tour offered by Destination Travel—the travel agency my husband opened after moving across the Atlantic to settle in my hometown of Windsor City. The prize Osmond alluded to is a promotional offer I thought up to attract more business in a bad economy—a drawing at the end of the tour to award a free trip to the lucky winner. And the only thing a guest would have to do to qualify for the drawing would be to locate a series of objects stashed in obscure places throughout Scotland by avid geocachers.

Decades ago, when children ran all over their neighborhoods armed with lists of nonsensical items to find, they called it scavenger hunting. Today, adults still look for the same nonsensical items, but they’ve expanded the playing field to the entire world, and they’re using Internet websites and sophisticated GPS units to assist their search. Today, the pursuit is called geocaching, and it’s become the favorite pastime of every member of the Windsor City Senior Center, next to texting and synchronized back floating in the new warm-water wading pool.

“Don’t get too cocky,” I advised the group. “This is only the first site, so I wouldn’t count Team Five out just yet.”

“Did you miss the discussion?” asked Dick Stolee. “They can’t win. Bernice is on their team.”

I’d divided the group into five teams of five guests apiece and stipulated that each team would have a limited amount of time to find the cache. After all, we were on a tour and had a schedule to maintain. Whichever team registered the most number of finds at the end of the trip would be eligible to enter the lottery for the grand prize, with yours truly drawing the name of the winning team member out of a hat. On paper, it looked like a pretty good system, but as the saying goes, the devil is in the details.

“You wanna see what we found in the first cache?” Nana asked me as she fiddled with her phone. She held up the picture of a narrow alleyway that dipped below street level as it snaked between two buildings. “This here’s the alley where it was hidin’, but the locals don’t call ’em alleys. They call ’em ‘closes,’ and they’re so historic, each one’s got its own name on a fancy sign on the entrance. I can’t remember what this one’s called on account of I forgot to take a picture of the sign.”

New York City had alleys, too, but when I’d lived there, the only signs I’d ever seen had read KEEP OUT.

She showed me the next photo—swirls of green and yellow set against a rough gray background. “This is the graffiti what someone spray-painted all over the wall. It musta been the real expensive brand ’cuz I didn’t see no signs of chippin’.”

George Farkas thumped toward me on his wooden leg. “This one’s my favorite.” He angled his phone so I could see the image on the screen. I tilted my head left and right.

“What is it? A sewer grate?”

“Steel bars. They’re on all the windows in the alley. I thought they added a nice touch to the general ambiance.”

Right. Kind of like razor wire added a nice touch to state prisons.

This opened the floodgates for Osmond, Tilly, and the two Dicks to crowd around me, offering up their own photographic masterpieces.

“This is the doorstoop where the container was stashed,” enthused Tilly.

“Here’s the container,” said Osmond, displaying a photo of a plastic box the size of a brick.

“This is the little notebook what was inside,” said Nana. “We signed and dated it to prove we was actually here and found it.”

“And then we put it back under the stoop for the next team to find,” Dick Stolee chimed in. “And we did it way under the fifteen-minute time limit.”

“That’s all that was inside?” I asked. “A notebook?”

“And a pen,” said Tilly. “A very thoughtful gesture on the part of the person who hid the cache. Without a writing implement, you can’t sign the register.”

“And if you don’t sign the register, you don’t got no right to score it as a find,” added Nana. “The rules say you gotta have proof.”

“Does anyone ever leave anything inside for you?” I asked. “A little reward for your efforts?”

“We