The Treasure Hunt Nobody Finished Part 1

The Treasure Hunt Nobody Finished Part 1

The Treasure Hunt Nobody Finished Part 1

The Treasure Hunt that Nobody Finished, The Treasure Hunt Nobody Finished Part 1, Full Body Massage Service
The Treasure Hunt that Nobody Finished, The Treasure Hunt Nobody Finished Part 1, Full Body Massage Service
AFTER DARK DIARIES | ROMANCE  TWO- PART  STORY

PART ONE

The Treasure Hunt Nobody Finished

Reader Intro…

Some love stories end. Others simply stop, leaving behind questions nobody thought to ask.

When Alice inherits her Aunt Marcy’s house, she expects memories, clutter and the difficult task of deciding what to keep. Instead, she discovers a letter addressed to a man she has never heard of and the first clue in a treasure hunt that has been waiting more than fifty years to be finished.

What begins as a glimpse into her aunt’s secret past soon reveals a love story nobody in the family knew existed.

And one question Alice cannot ignore.

Whatever happened to Albert?

The Letter That Was Never Read

Alice had been given the house, but for the first three weeks it felt as though the house had been given someone else.

Aunt Marcy was everywhere.

She was in the faint lavender scent that lingered inside the wardrobe, in the collection of chipped mugs nobody else would have kept and in the row of gardening shoes beside the back door, each pair progressively muddier than the last. Her handwriting covered labels on jars in the pantry. A cardigan still hung over the kitchen chair as though she might return at any moment and complain that Alice had moved it.

At thirty-six, Alice understood perfectly well that death left things behind. She simply hadn’t expected those things to feel so alive.

Marcy had died six weeks earlier, aged seventy-four. The solicitor’s letter had brought the first surprise.

The house was Alice’s.

There were other beneficiaries, modest gifts to friends and charities, but Marcy had left the red-brick house, its large garden and almost everything inside it to her niece.

No explanation.

Just one line in the will.

To Alice, who will know what deserves to be kept.

Alice wasn’t at all sure that she did.

For now, she had reduced the problem to three piles: keep, charity and God knows.

The third was winning.

That Saturday morning she tackled Marcy’s bedroom.

By lunchtime she’d discovered forty-three scarves, a biscuit tin containing buttons, several birthday cards Marcy had apparently considered too attractive to throw away and enough hotel toiletries to suggest her aunt had spent decades preparing for a national shampoo shortage.

Alice smiled despite herself.

“You were a menace.”

The empty room offered no defence.

Then she found the box.

The Name Alice Had Never Heard

It was tucked behind two blankets on the highest shelf of Marcy’s wardrobe.

The box itself wasn’t remarkable. Dark wood, perhaps mahogany, with a small brass clasp and scratches around the edges. Alice nearly put it aside unopened.

Something stopped her.

There was no lock.

Inside lay a single cream envelope, yellowed slightly with age.

One word had been written across the front.

Albert.

Alice sat on the edge of the bed.

She couldn’t think of an Albert.

Not a family friend. Not a neighbour. Certainly not anyone Aunt Marcy had ever mentioned.

For most of Alice’s life, Marcy had simply been Marcy. Unmarried. No children. Fiercely independent and perfectly capable of making anyone regret asking why she’d never found herself a husband.

Once, at a family lunch, an elderly relative had made precisely that mistake.

“Perhaps I didn’t want one, Dorothy.”

That had ended the conversation.

Alice turned the envelope over.

It wasn’t sealed.

She hesitated.

Reading a dead woman’s private letter still felt like reading a private letter.

Curiosity won.

The paper inside had been folded twice. Marcy’s handwriting was immediately recognisable, although younger somehow. Larger. More extravagant. The letters leaned forward impatiently.

Alice began to read.

My darling Albert,

If you’re holding this, then I managed to put it into your hands without Father seeing me, which may be my greatest achievement yet.

Alice stopped.

Father?

She continued.

I’ve thought about what you said beneath the oak. I’ve thought about it in the morning, in bed at night and during three unbearable dinners while Father talked about people neither of us likes.

A smile tugged at Alice’s mouth.

That was Marcy.

You asked me to choose.

I have.

Alice’s smile disappeared.

But you’ve spent two years telling me that I make everything too easy for you, so I’m afraid I’m not giving you my answer yet.

If you want it, you’ll have to find it.

Start where you first kissed me. Reach inside the hollow on the side nobody can see from the house.

And Albert…

Don’t keep me waiting.

All my love,

Marcy

For several seconds, Alice simply stared at the page.

Then she read it again.

Two years.

My darling Albert.

A first kiss.

A choice.

None of this fitted the woman Alice thought she’d known.

Her gaze drifted towards the bedroom window.

Beyond the glass, stripped almost bare by early autumn, stood the enormous oak at the bottom of the garden.

“No.”

She looked back at the letter.

Then at the tree.

“You cannot be serious.”

Twenty minutes later, Alice was standing beneath it.

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The Hollow in the Oak

The old tree had dominated the garden for as long as Alice could remember.

As a child she’d been convinced it was the largest tree in England. Marcy had refused every suggestion that its branches should be cut back.

Alice remembered asking why once.

“Because some things have earned the right to stay.”

At eight years old, she’d assumed her aunt was being peculiar.

Now she wondered.

The side facing the house revealed nothing.

Alice walked around the trunk.

There it was.

A narrow hollow, almost completely concealed beneath a fold in the bark.

Her pulse quickened.

“This is ridiculous.”

She reached inside.

Her fingertips touched metal.

Alice froze.

Whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t actually to find something.

She stretched farther and pulled out a small tobacco tin, rusted around the edges and wrapped in the remains of what might once have been blue ribbon.

Inside was another folded piece of paper.

Alice laughed aloud.

“Oh, Marcy.”

The second piece began halfway through a sentence.

…because you were shaking even though you still insist you weren’t.

Alice sat beneath the oak to read.

You kissed me here and then looked absolutely terrified by what you’d done. You may continue claiming it was the cold if you like. We both know better.

I remember the rain beginning. I remember you asking whether I wanted to go inside.

I didn’t.

I remember kissing you again so you would stop talking.

Alice grinned.

The woman writing this wasn’t the aunt she remembered lecturing her about taking an umbrella.

I sat opposite Father at dinner that night and answered questions about university while I could still feel your mouth on mine.

It was terribly improper.

We should do it again.

Alice laughed aloud.

The final lines contained another clue.

You told me once that you could always tell when I’d been thinking about you because I wore the blue one.

Go to where I kept it hidden from Mother.

Alice frowned.

“The blue what?”

No answer came from the tree.

For the first time since inheriting the house, she couldn’t wait to get back inside.

A Woman Alice Had Never Known

It took nearly two hours.

Alice searched Marcy’s bedroom first, then the spare room and finally the landing cupboard.

Blue dress?

Blue shoes?

A photograph?

Nothing.

Eventually she returned to the bedroom and stood with her hands on her hips.

“What did you hide from your mother?”

Her eyes settled on the old walnut chest of drawers.

It had been Marcy’s since childhood. Alice knew because she’d complained about the thing countless times. The bottom drawer stuck whenever the weather was damp.

Alice pulled it open.

Nothing blue.

She was about to shove it closed when she remembered Marcy’s wording.

Where I kept it hidden.

Not inside.

Alice removed the drawer completely.

A faded square of blue silk had been taped underneath.

Her breath caught.

Wrapped inside it was another piece of paper.

This one made her blush.

You once told me blue was your favourite colour. I’m beginning to suspect you meant this particular piece of it.

Alice looked at the silk in her lap.

A slip.

Her Aunt Marcy had hidden a blue silk slip from her mother.

I wore it beneath that dreadful respectable dress Mother bought me because knowing what was underneath made dinner almost bearable.

Then you saw it.

You didn’t say anything for such a long time that I thought I’d killed you.

Alice pressed her lips together.

I liked the way you looked at me.

The next sentence was quieter.

I liked even more the way you touched me afterwards, as though wanting me and caring for me were somehow the same thing.

Alice stopped reading.

That line changed something.

Until then, the treasure hunt had been amusing, almost mischievous. A glimpse of a younger Marcy who’d once broken rules and kissed a man beneath an oak tree.

This was different.

This was love.

The final clue referred to flowers that never needed watering and something Marcy’s mother thought hideous.

Alice didn’t even need to think.

“The ginger jar.”

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Flowers That Never Needed Watering

The large porcelain ginger jar had lived on a table in Marcy’s sitting room for decades.

Cream, covered in sprawling pink and green flowers, it was exactly the sort of object Alice would normally have put directly into the charity pile.

Now she lifted it as though it were priceless.

A folded note had been secured beneath the base with ancient tape.

This part of the letter was longer.

Marcy wrote about Albert making her laugh when she was supposed to behave properly. She described sitting beside him in his battered car eating chips from newspaper and getting vinegar on her skirt.

There was an afternoon at the coast.

Brighton.

They’d told everyone they were elsewhere and taken the train.

Marcy described walking along the seafront with Albert’s hand inside hers, exhilarated by something as ordinary as being able to touch him in public where nobody knew who she was.

They ate chips on the beach.

Albert lost money in an amusement arcade.

Rain arrived sideways.

Instead of going home, they found a tiny guesthouse with peeling wallpaper and a landlady who barely looked at them.

Alice slowed as she read.

We lay on that ridiculous narrow bed listening to rain against the window.

You asked where I’d live if I could choose anywhere.

I said somewhere with a kitchen big enough for a table and a garden where nobody cared what Father thought.

You said you’d need a shed.

I told you absolutely not.

Alice smiled.

Then you kissed my shoulder and said you’d negotiate.

There was nothing graphic in what followed. There didn’t need to be.

Marcy wrote about warmth beneath the blankets, Albert’s skin against hers and waking later with one leg tangled through his. Mostly, though, she remembered talking.

Children, perhaps.

A dog, definitely.

A house that belonged to neither of their families.

A life where nobody had to lie.

Alice looked around Marcy’s sitting room.

For the first time she understood that the house she’d inherited might have contained echoes of another one.

A house Marcy had once imagined sharing with Albert.

The letter continued.

Father still believes he can decide whom I see.

He says you’re not suitable.

I told him I’m not a vacancy he’s trying to fill.

“Good for you,” Alice murmured.

He thinks because he’s an MP and people listen when he talks, I should do the same.

He doesn’t understand that I don’t care who your father was, what school you went to or whether you know which fork to pick up first.

I know who you are when nobody important is watching.

Alice read that sentence twice.

Then she reached the clue.

Go where we hid the evidence of Brighton. You said nobody would ever think to look behind something so respectable.

Alice frowned.

Brighton had apparently produced several forms of evidence.

She had absolutely no idea which one Marcy meant.

For the first time, the trail went cold.

Drinks, Friends and an Impossible Clue

Five days later, Alice was still thinking about Brighton.

On Thursday evening she met friends for drinks at a pub near the centre of town. She nearly cancelled. Marcy’s house had consumed every spare hour that week, and Alice had spent far too much time searching cupboards for something connected to a seaside town.

In the end, a glass of wine and conversation with living people seemed sensible.

There were six of them around the table.

Daniel arrived last.

Alice knew him through her friend Sophie. They’d met four or five times over the previous year, usually at birthdays or drinks like these.

He was easy company. Mid-to-late thirties, dark-haired, quietly funny and attractive in a way Alice had registered without doing anything about it.

Sophie asked the inevitable question.

“How’s Marcy’s house?”

Alice took a sip of wine.

“I’ve accidentally started a fifty-year-old treasure hunt.”

Everyone looked at her.

Daniel put down his pint.

“You can’t say that and then ask what everyone else has been doing.”

So Alice told them.

Not everything.

She certainly didn’t share the blue slip.

But she told them about Albert, the first love letter, the oak tree and the hidden pieces of a relationship nobody in the family knew existed.

By the time she reached Brighton, the table had gone unusually quiet.

“What exactly does the clue say?” Daniel asked.

Alice pulled out her phone. She’d photographed it.

He read the screen.

“Go where we hid the evidence of Brighton. You said nobody would ever think to look behind something so respectable.”

“Did your aunt go to Brighton often?” Sophie asked.

“No idea.”

“Photographs?” someone suggested.

“I’ve checked.”

Daniel was still considering the clue.

“What would two people having a secret relationship bring back from Brighton that needed hiding?”

“A postcard?”

“Why hide a postcard?”

Alice conceded the point.

“Something that proved they were together, then.”

“Exactly.”

He took another drink.

“And what’s more respectable than your grandfather?”

Alice stared at him.

Daniel raised an eyebrow.

“The MP.”

Her thoughts jumped immediately to Marcy’s study.

The shelves.

The leather-bound volumes she’d intended to donate.

“Oh, bloody hell.”

He smiled.

“You’ve thought of something.”

“My grandfather’s parliamentary books.”

Behind Something Respectable

The following afternoon, Alice stood in Marcy’s study facing a shelf of political volumes.

She pulled out the first.

Nothing.

The second.

Dust.

Behind the third was a photograph.

Brighton Pier.

A young woman stood laughing into the wind, hair whipping across her face.

Alice recognised Marcy immediately.

She was beautiful.

Beside her stood a young man Alice had never seen before.

Tall, dark-haired, one arm around Marcy’s waist.

Albert.

On the back, Marcy had written a date and two initials.

M + A

A ticket stub and another folded section of the letter had been tucked behind the photograph.

Alice immediately took a picture and sent it to Daniel.

You were right.

His response arrived less than a minute later.

Obviously.

Then:

Is that Albert?

Must be.

Three dots appeared.

What does the next one say?

Alice smiled.

I’m not sure you’re entitled to know.

I solved Brighton. I believe that makes me a consultant.

Unpaid consultant.

We’ll discuss my fee.

Alice found herself looking at the phone for longer than necessary.

Over the next few days, messages passed between them that had very little to do with anything else.

Daniel wanted updates.

Alice pretended this was annoying.

It wasn’t.

One clue led to Marcy’s old sewing box, where a wooden cotton reel had been hollowed out. Inside was a tightly rolled strip of paper.

Alice sent Daniel a photograph without being asked.

She’s getting ridiculous now.

Your aunt was magnificent.

Alice stared at that response.

Then smiled.

You never met her.

Starting to feel like I did.

That stayed with her.

The Clue Daniel Refused to Miss

The next clue defeated Alice completely.

It referred to the argument with the apricots.

She searched the kitchen.

Nothing.

On Saturday morning Daniel texted.

Any progress?

No.

Excellent.

How is that excellent?

Because I’m not solving another one and letting you have all the fun.

Two hours later he was standing in Marcy’s kitchen holding two takeaway coffees.

They searched for nearly an hour.

Alice told him everything she knew about Marcy’s fondness for preserves. Daniel inspected cupboards with unnecessary seriousness.

Eventually he opened an old recipe book.

A dried apricot fell onto the floor.

Both stared at it.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Alice said.

A folded note had been pushed into the spine.

Daniel picked up the apricot.

“Evidence.”

“Don’t eat that.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You considered it.”

“For science.”

Alice laughed.

The note explained the argument. Albert had attempted to make apricot jam for Marcy after she’d mentioned liking it.

It had been terrible.

Marcy told him so.

Albert sulked.

She kissed him.

Apparently this solved the disagreement.

Alice read the last lines aloud.

“You said if I kissed you like that every time you were wrong, you intended to be wrong considerably more often.”

She stopped.

Daniel was smiling.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re laughing at my aunt.”

“I’m admiring Albert’s strategy.”

Alice folded the note.

“Perhaps we should keep looking.”

“Absolutely.”

Neither moved.

They were standing close enough that Alice could smell coffee on his breath.

His gaze dropped briefly to her mouth.

There it was.

Not a thunderbolt.

Not some ridiculous moment in which Alice suddenly discovered Daniel was attractive.

She’d known that already.

This was simply an unexpected little oh.

Then Daniel stepped back.

“What’s the next clue?”

Alice looked down at the paper.

For some reason, she needed to read it twice.

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The Journal That Wasn’t Part of the Hunt

The clue eventually led them to the old cabinet in Marcy’s study.

They found the next fragment behind it.

Alice should have been satisfied.

Instead, while replacing one of the drawers they’d removed, she noticed something dark wedged deep inside the wooden frame.

“There’s something else.”

Daniel helped pull the cabinet forward.

Alice reached behind it and retrieved a small leather-bound book.

No ribbon.

No clue.

No folded piece of Marcy’s love letter.

On the first page was written:

Marcy Eleanor Whitmore. Private.

Alice’s excitement faded.

“This isn’t part of it.”

Daniel glanced at the cover.

“No.”

She sat on the floor.

The journal was dated 1973.

Daniel seemed to understand before she said anything.

“I’ll make tea.”

He left her alone.

Alice opened the journal.

The earliest entries were ordinary. Friends. Family arguments. Her father’s political dinners. Complaints about her mother.

Then Albert appeared.

At first occasionally.

Then everywhere.

Marcy had met him through friends. Her father disliked him almost immediately. Albert came from the wrong family, had the wrong prospects and possessed what Marcy described as a spectacular inability to be impressed by important men.

Their relationship developed secretly.

Marcy lied to her parents.

Albert waited at the ends of roads.

Friends covered for them.

They stole afternoons wherever they could.

The treasure hunt pieces Alice had been finding suddenly had dates and circumstances around them.

The oak.

Brighton.

The blue slip.

The ridiculous apricot jam.

Then Alice reached an entry several months later.

The handwriting changed.

Albert didn’t come tonight.

She turned the page.

Still nothing.

Another.

I went to his rooms. Mrs Talbot says he hasn’t been back.

Alice’s stomach tightened.

The next entries became frantic.

Marcy telephoned his workplace.

He hadn’t been there.

She contacted friends.

Nobody had heard from him.

Then somebody told her a man matching Albert’s description had been taken to hospital after an accident.

Marcy travelled there alone.

The entry afterwards was only four lines.

It wasn’t him.

I didn’t know whether to feel relieved.

There was another woman waiting outside the ward. She was crying.

I hated myself for being happy.

Alice closed her eyes.

A week later, Marcy went to the police.

One officer suggested that young men sometimes disappeared when relationships became complicated.

Marcy’s fury covered two pages.

He would not do this.

That certainty weakened only when weeks became months.

A friend of Albert’s heard he might have gone north.

Marcy followed the rumour to an address outside York.

Alice read the entry slowly.

An old woman answered the door.

There was no Albert.

On the train home I kept thinking perhaps I’d written the number down incorrectly. I knew I hadn’t. Hope makes you stupid.

Alice lowered the journal.

Daniel had returned without her noticing.

Two mugs sat on the desk.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded, although she wasn’t sure why.

“He disappeared.”

Daniel sat beside her.

“Just disappeared?”

“Nobody knew where he’d gone.”

She looked at the pages.

“Marcy spent months trying to find him.”

The Woman Who Kept Living

Alice read more after Daniel left.

Months became years.

The journal changed with them.

Albert appeared less frequently, but he never disappeared entirely.

Three years today.

Later:

I thought I saw him at King’s Cross. I followed a stranger halfway along the platform like a fool.

Then:

Ten years. I hate myself for still counting.

Yet Marcy lived.

That mattered to Alice.

Her aunt hadn’t spent fifty years sitting beside a window mourning a man.

She worked.

She travelled.

She had friends and holidays and dreadful Christmas jumpers. She became an aunt and then the particular sort of aunt who slipped children extra money and taught them card games their parents didn’t approve of.

Alice found herself in those later pages.

Alice lost her first tooth today and informed everybody at lunch as though she’d personally invented the process.

Alice laughed through tears.

Marcy had possessed a full life.

A happy one, in many ways.

But every few years Albert returned.

Sometimes I wonder whether hope is simply grief refusing to learn its manners.

Alice cried at that one.

The next morning she stood beneath the oak again.

Now she understood why Marcy had never removed the pieces of the treasure hunt.

She knew exactly where they were.

She had left them waiting.

Because if Albert ever came back, the first kiss would still lead to the blue silk.

The silk would still lead to the ginger jar.

Brighton would still be hidden behind something respectable.

And whatever answer Marcy had prepared for him would still be there.

Just in case.

The Last Piece of Marcy’s Love Letter

Two weeks later, Alice and Daniel found the final hiding place.

By then, he was no longer merely helping.

The treasure hunt had somehow become theirs.

They’d driven down an old country lane searching for a place Marcy remembered from 1974, argued over directions and laughed until Alice’s stomach hurt when Daniel confidently led them to entirely the wrong church.

They ate chips in his car one evening because everywhere else had closed.

Alice realised halfway through that she was thinking about Brighton.

Perhaps Daniel was too.

He didn’t say.

Somewhere during those weeks, Alice stopped thinking of him as Sophie’s friend.

She wasn’t yet sure what he had become.

One evening, after they’d spent almost three hours together, she stood at Marcy’s front door as he prepared to leave.

“You know you don’t have to keep doing this with me.”

Daniel looked at her.

“I know.”

That was all.

He came back the following evening.

The final clue brought them to Marcy’s bedroom.

Inside the lining of an old suitcase, Alice felt paper beneath her fingers.

She carefully loosened the stitching.

A folded sheet slipped into her hand.

Daniel remained beside the window while she opened it.

The handwriting was unmistakably Marcy’s.

My darling Albert,

If you’ve found this, then you know my answer.

Alice swallowed.

Yes.

Yes to you. Yes to us. Yes to a life that belongs to us rather than everybody who thinks they know what is best for me.

Meet me at the station on Friday at six.

I’ll have my case.

You bring yours.

We’re going to Gretna Green.

Alice stopped reading.

For a moment, the room seemed impossibly still.

All those years.

All those hidden pieces.

Marcy hadn’t been waiting to decide whether she wanted Albert.

She’d already chosen him.

She was going to marry him.

“He never knew,” Alice whispered.

Daniel moved closer.

“No.”

“He didn’t even get the first letter.”

Alice looked down at the suitcase.

Perhaps Marcy had intended to carry this very case to the station.

She imagined her at twenty-two, terrified and exhilarated, waiting for the chance to put the first letter into Albert’s hands.

Instead, he’d disappeared.

Daniel’s fingers touched hers.

This time neither pretended it was accidental.

Alice looked at him.

He was close.

Close enough that she could have moved forward and discovered whether the thought that had been following her for days felt as good as she imagined.

Daniel didn’t move either.

Then Alice looked down at Marcy’s letter between their hands.

Not here.

Not now.

Somehow, kissing beside the words Marcy had waited fifty-two years for Albert to read felt like trespassing.

Daniel seemed to understand.

His fingers squeezed hers once before letting go.

One Question Left Unanswered

After Daniel had gone, Alice returned to the journal.

She knew how the treasure hunt ended now.

What she didn’t know was why it had never begun.

This time she returned to the entries immediately before Albert disappeared.

She read them slowly.

Three days before the night he failed to meet Marcy, she’d written:

Albert was strange tonight. Distracted.

A few lines later:

He kept asking about Father’s dinner last Thursday and whether I knew a man called Richard Vale.

Alice frowned.

She’d read the name before without noticing it.

Earlier in the journal, Marcy had complained about one of her father’s interminable dinners.

Richard Vale had been there.

A businessman.

Someone her father knew socially.

Alice continued.

I asked why he cared.

Albert said he’d seen something.

A later entry contained another name.

He spoke to Tommy again tonight. I don’t know what about. Albert wouldn’t tell me.

Tommy meant nothing to Alice either.

For now, Richard Vale seemed the more important name.

Nothing else.

No explanation.

The following entry was about an argument with her mother.

Then Albert disappeared.

Alice reached for her laptop.

Searching the name produced nothing useful at first. She added the year.

Eventually an archived newspaper result appeared.

LOCAL BUSINESSMAN FOUND DEAD

Richard Vale, thirty-nine, had been discovered dead at his home in 1974.

The article was short.

Police had attended.

An inquest had followed.

No suspicious circumstances had been identified.

The death had been reported as suicide.

Alice looked at the date.

Four days later, Albert disappeared.

That was all.

No conspiracy.

No explanation.

Just two events separated by four days and one sentence in Marcy’s journal.

Albert said he’d seen something.

Alice picked up her phone.

Daniel answered on the third ring.

“Please tell me you haven’t found another ginger jar.”

“Daniel.”

His voice changed immediately.

“What’s happened?”

“I found the name Albert asked Marcy about.”

Alice told him about Richard Vale.

The dinner.

The newspaper article.

The date.

For several seconds, Daniel said nothing.

“Could be a coincidence.”

“I know.”

“Do you think it is?”

Alice looked at the journal beside her.

“No.”

Another pause.

“What do you want to do?”

That should have been easy to answer.

The treasure hunt was finished.

Marcy was gone.

Albert, if he had survived whatever happened in 1974, would now be close to eighty.

Alice could put the letters back into the wooden box. She could keep the photograph. She could finish clearing the house and eventually decide whether to sell it.

None of those thoughts felt possible anymore.

“I want to know what happened to him.”

Daniel didn’t hesitate.

“Then we’ll find out.”

After the call ended, Alice remained at the kitchen table.

Beyond the dark window, the old oak moved gently in the wind.

For fifty-two years, everyone who knew anything at all had assumed Albert had walked away from Marcy.

Sitting alone in the house he’d once planned to take her away from, Alice began to wonder whether Albert had ever been given a choice.

Lookout for Part 2

The Treasure Hunt Nobody Finished Part 2 will be available this week

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❤️ Ready to indulge? Call Sue on 07504 937253 or email [email protected] to book your private sensual massage today.

📧 Drop Me a Line, You Naughty Wanderers…

Hey, my deliciously daring darlings… I can practically feel the secrets tingling between your toes. That midnight tiptoe across a hotel carpet, the sly brush of an ankle under the dinner table, the time your feet led you straight into trouble, and you loved every scandalous second.

Why hoard those toe-curling tales? Kick off your heels, wiggle free, and spill the juiciest, most wicked foot-fetish confessions you’ve got. I want the stories that make my pulse race, my cheeks flush, and my soles itch to join the fun.

Think you’ve got what it takes to make me squirm? Slide your steamiest secret into my inbox at [email protected] . Fair warning: I’m hard to shock… but a bold, barefooted confession? That just might do it.

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