Caching In by Tracy Krimmer Page B

“Fishing.”
    “Fishing.”
    “Yes, fishing. Is that weird?”
    “Not at all. I just never figured you for the fishing type.”
    “Surprise. I’ll meet you at the B&B Sunday morning at six.” I could go visit my dad after our fishing expedition.
    His eyes widened. “Six in the morning?”
    “Yeah. Problem with that?”
    “No. It’s just a little early.”
    “Well, I’ll be there at six to get you. If you’re not there, then I guess I’m on my own.” I peeked behind him at the next customer. “Excuse me, but if I don’t help the next in line, I’ll never hear the end of it from my boss.”
    He tapped his knuckles on the counter. “Understood. See you Sunday.”

 
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER TEN
     
     
    The rest of the workday I spent daydreaming about my date with Seth. Another date with Seth! Sure, he came to me, but I basically asked him out. I came up with fishing, therefore, my idea. Awesome. Still, his conversation with Mike confused me. Why did he act so secretive about his cache? What did it mean? I didn’t get the impression the cache replicated the ones I found so far, small containers with a simple log sheet. This held more meaning than the ones I found. My mind worked overtime trying to figure out the mystery. A completed Rubix cube? (Perhaps he belonged to Mensa.) A Chicago Bears jersey and he didn’t want me to have him arrested for being a Bears fan instead of Packers? Oh! I bet he loved One Direction as much as me and he stashed an iPod Nano (did people still have those?) with all their songs loaded in some place meant only for a super stealth spy. Doubtful, but how cool would that be? Possibly a thumb drive with a sex video? No, caches needed to be kid-friendly. My imagination went wild, until my idea well ran dry. I wanted to find out, but my resources were limited. No mutual friends connected us, and I didn’t exactly fit the profile of Nancy Drew. I didn’t know how to be discreet in my questioning. On our second date, I couldn’t come out and ask if he had a super-secret cache he hid from me. I already labeled him a cheater with no evidence to support my hypothesis, and accusing him of anything else risked damaging any potential relationship between us.
    I logged on to the geocaching site and poked around for a while in the message boards, thinking a post or a user name would catch my eye. I hoped to find a user with a name that played on the term bed and breakfast or rock climbing, but nothing grabbed my attention. The only option I thought may work meant finding all the geocaches hidden in town. While doable, such a thing would take too much time, and even so, the cache may not even be in town. There were too many places to search. Of course, more of the possibility existed that I obsessed over this for nothing.
    I decided to give it some time and naturally work my interrogation into a conversation. I still wanted to peek around online in case I came up anything. When I searched in my area, a lot of cemetery caches came up, among four cemeteries scattered throughout town. For such a small community, we sure buried a lot of people. What would someone hide in a cemetery? If not a simple container with a log sheet inside, what else could it be? People left things sometimes when they found a cache, but I couldn’t think of one thing I would want to leave in a cemetery. What if Seth were some sort of weird freak and hid something in a grave? No. That couldn’t be. I shivered the thought out of my mind.
    The site showed a lot of caches around City Hall as well, with titles welcoming people to the community, or about discovering the town’s history. I knew Seth ran the bed and breakfast; however, what if he aspired to be a politician, and buried a deep, dark past in the cache? Probably not. Oh! Perhaps he moonlighted as a newspaper writer and he cleverly created a newspaper log. That would be pretty cool. Hm. Nothing to keep a secret, though. I just about drove myself insane