Green by Laura Peyton Roberts Page B

carved into the wall, right at eye level, was a perfect keyhole.
    And there I stood, holding a magical key.
    Not stopping to think, I slipped Gigi's key into the rock. It slid in as if greased, disappearing up to its hilt.
    The stone wall shimmered, then vanished in a puff of dust. I gasped as a much larger cave was revealed behind it, one loaded to its stalactites with glowing leprechaun gold.
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    Chapter 6
    All the blood in my body rushed straight to my head...Gold sparkled and glittered and gleamed until my brain nearly shorted out. For a moment, I just stood there, staring. Then I found my legs again and ran in among the treasure.
    There were piles and piles of coins mounded higher than my head--disks like dimes with holes drilled through them, solid rounds the size of coasters, and quarter-sized coins stamped with clovers and crowns. Gold bars the size of erasers, of sticks of butter, of bricks, were stacked in pyramids ten feet high, right up to the ceiling. There were other
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    golden objects too: plump gold eggs, heavy-linked chains, goblets, plates, a human baby shoe. And filling every space between were truckloads of gold nuggets, from lumps smaller than raisins to hunks the size of my fist.
    The gold sucked me into its center as if it had its own gravity. Its strange flickering glow filled the cave with light. I waded ankle-deep through nuggets, my hands reaching out first to stroke, then to grab. Snatching handfuls of coins, I tossed them up into the air and watched them rain back down.
    "Whoo-hoo!" I shouted, skipping from pile to pile, kicking nuggets about. My shout echoed off the spiky roof and bounced back into untold tons of hoarded leprechaun gold. I finally understood what I was supposed to be keeping.
    I was in charge of all this gold!
    Darting from side to side, I touched everything within reach and tried to guess what it was all worth. Millions, for sure , I thought. Probably billions!
    I had never much cared about money before, but I suddenly understood why people spent their whole lives chipping through solid rock or standing in freezing streams swirling gravel around a pan. I knew in the deepest part of myself why people fought and died for gold, and even why they killed.
    I had gold lust, and I had it bad.
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    I ran deeper and deeper into the cave. The gold stretched on like a sweet dream. At last the cave's real back wall came into view, and in a cozy open pocket between its smooth stone and the last mounds of gold were a cot, a chair, a stack of empty burlap sacks with green lashing cords, and an antique desk. A lamp burned on the desk beside an open leather-bound book. I moved closer, intrigued.
    Cramped rows of green handwriting formed columns stretching halfway down the book's open page. The enormous ledger was jam-packed with strange names, numbers, and dates. With a start, I recognized the tiny writing: Gigi's. Her final three lines read:
    Feegan Green +500 dymers 6 August 48
    Evan Green +4 gold eggs 13 August 48
    Nonny Green-9 deloreans 24 August 48
    I flipped backward through the pages. The book's paper was thin as a Bible's, but somehow the writing inked on both sides didn't bleed through. The last number in Gigi's entries ticked gradually backward from forty-eight to one. Instinctively, I understood that the center column kept track of the gold entering and leaving the cave, but I just didn't get those dates. They obviously couldn't stand for 2001 to 2048, and 1901 to 1948 didn't make sense either.
    Finally, on a page by itself, I found this:
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    Here begins the Accounting of Maureen Green
    in the first year of her service as
    Keeper of the Clan of Green.
    The first line of the next page read:
    Balthazar Green-500 deloreans 4 April 1
    The dates came clear all at once. My grandmother's birthday was March 31. She must have become keeper four days later. That last number didn't stand for a calendar year at all; it marked her years of service.
    Flipping back past Gigi's first page, I