...The four of them made their way inside again. They found Tiger, Lauren and Ray in the main room, with the big round coffee table cleared off and Lori’s map in the center. Between laboriously translating the diaries, a few pages at a time, and creating a map of the house and grounds, their little party was kept busy. Lori and Vince worked on the diaries in the tower room. The other five examined one room at a time, jury-rigging the amazing warehouse of equipment in Uncle Zeppo’s workshop to look for hidden doors, secret passages, booby traps, false floors, and drawers or compartments hidden in the walls and floors and ceilings. In the three days since Deborah, Michael and Vince had joined them, they had explored and cleared four rooms on the fourth floor. Much of that time had been spent in moving decades’ worth of furniture, clothes, books, dishes, and miscellaneous possessions stored there, and cataloging the items, then putting them back in some semblance of order. Along the way, they had found a dozen clues for the other treasure hunts Uncle Zeppo had left behind for their amusement and challenge.

Ray had a talent for scale maps, and had taken on the job of filling in the details they had discovered during the day in terms of room dimensions, walls, and hidden surprises. That necessitated drawing a blowup scale map of each room, to have enough space for all the notations.

Lauren kept an inventory, and was just finishing transposing all her handwritten notes into the computer, while Tiger worked on putting the photos taken during the day, from four different cameras, into some kind of usable order, and labeling each one in his computer files, as well as printouts kept in a growing set of photo albums.

If she couldn’t see how much the others enjoyed their tasks, Lori would have felt guilty for starting them on the monumental effort. After all, they hadn’t come here to tend to her interests and act as her hands and feet while she was recovering.

“All done with the evening patrol?” Tiger asked, glancing up from his notebook computer. He winked at Lori and immediately closed the lid and bent to tuck it under the old couch. “That old coot hasn’t been running you ragged, has he?”

“I’m trying to convince her to run off to Vegas and marry me,” Vince said with a cackle. He patted Lori’s shoulder and gave her a little shove in Tiger’s direction. Not that she needed it. She had already zeroed in on the seat next to him, that he was even now clearing of papers.

“Bad idea,” Ray said without looking up from his task. He knelt on the floor in front of the coffee table, drafting pencils tucked behind each ear, with a third pencil in his hand as he used a template to draw something on the single room floor plan in front of him. “Everybody I know who’s gotten married in Vegas, it hasn’t lasted more than a year.”

“Yeah, well, that’s not so bad. I might not last a year, either.” He grinned at the assembled company and dropped into the creaky old chair that had fake tusks for the armrests and legs, with elephants carved into the seat and as the feet.

“You promised me you’d live to be a hundred and fifty, Grandpop,” Deborah said, settling down in the only other two-seater remaining.

Lori was pleased to note that even though there were plenty of easy chairs remaining gathered around the enormous coffee table, Michael sat next to Deborah. He also waited just a few seconds until she was seated, and she pinked just a little, as if she didn’t expect him to want to sit next to her.

She devoutly hoped Michael and Deborah were working on something close and romantic. Vince certainly approved of their pairing, and not just because Michael was a “‘good, old-fashioned Italian boy,’” in his words.

“So, Blondie, what’s the verdict?” Tiger asked, when she had settled next to him and he had neatly filed away all his papers. “What do you feel like doing tonight?”