In three days we planned to return home to Philadelphia after we’d spent two weeks vacationing in England. This Saturday was to be an outing in the park, but my husband was nowhere in sight. I watched large white clouds move across a bright blue sky and paused to listen to a band playing marches.

Then I rushed to catch up with my eight- and ten-year-old boys. “Where’s Dad?”

“Somewhere.” Tommy laughed.

Tomorrow Tom and I would have our twentieth wedding anniversary here in his homeland. But today I wasn’t in the mood for celebrating. I felt neglected. During the period we’d been here visiting his family and friends, there were times when I felt excluded. And other days he’d be out on business, leaving me with our boys in unfamiliar surroundings. Wasn’t this to be our family’s annual vacation?

My sons and I stopped by a stream and watched the ducks glide by.

My oldest held up a camera. “Mom, take my picture.”

“All right,” I groaned.

Above the water was a bridge and multicolored flowers hung along the side of a bandstand next to it. “Stand over there.”

I took off my glasses, dropping them into my bag. “Josh, please hold this.”

From the corner of my eye I watched him. “Stop swinging that around, Josh!” Had I closed the handbag?

The three of us started back to the parking lot, where Tom was standing beside the open door of our rental car. “Ready to go, then?”

PART II...go here to catch PART I 

In the years before they left home, Danny and Caroline Dixon continued their search for Blackbeard’s treasure, digging randomly in the area of the clues they found. But they always came up empty-handed.

After college, they both married and raised their children, but they kept the memory of the treasure hunt alive, discussing it whenever they talked with each other.

Danny chanced upon the secret of the location more than forty years after their first quest. One Friday evening, he and his wife watched a television program in which an old woman buried her deceased husband close to their cabin. Another character asked her, “Why didn’t you bury him under that tree on the hill, where he asked to be buried?”

“I’m a tired, old woman,” she replied, “and I didn’t have anybody to help me. But even if I’d had help, I’d still have buried him in the same spot.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s so much easier on me when I want to visit his grave.”

Danny made no immediate connection between the movie and the treasure, but his mind connected all the dots as he slept. Around 3:00 a.m., he sat up in bed. “That’s it!”

“That’s what?” his startled wife asked.

“Remember when I told you about my family’s treasure hunt when I was a kid?”

“Yes. You’ve told me many times.”

“Well, that movie we watched last night made me realize where the treasure’s buried.”

“Where?”