Nancy Clancy Seeks a Fortune
DEDICATION
For Robin Preiss Glasser—
how fortunate that we became a pair!
—J.O’C.
For Beth and Georgie,
with all my love forever
—R.P.G.
CONTENTS
DEDICATION
CHAPTER 1: WEALTHY OR NOT?
CHAPTER 2: TREASURE HUNTING
CHAPTER 3: SUNDAY NIGHT TV
CHAPTER 4: GOLD FEVER DAY
CHAPTER 5: GETTING RICH QUICK
CHAPTER 6: THE ROAD TO RICHES
CHAPTER 7: THE BUN CROWN
CHAPTER 8: THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE ARE FREE?
CHAPTER 9: BUSINESS TROUBLES
CHAPTER 10: ANTIQUES IN YOUR ATTIC
CHAPTER 11: NO ANTIQUES AND NO ATTIC
CHAPTER 12: SHOWTIME!
CHAPTER 13: PRICELESS
CHAPTER 14: STARRY NIGHT
BACK AD
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
“Are we wealthy?” Nancy asked her parents. Being wealthy sounded—well, it sounded wealthier than just being rich.
It was Sunday afternoon. Her father was checking the kitchen cabinets and making out a grocery list. Her mother sat at the breakfast table, paying bills. JoJo was feeding Frenchy part of a sugar cookie.
Her mom looked up from her laptop. “What makes you ask that?”
“Mom!” Nancy cried. “You always do that!”
“Do what?” her mom asked.
“Instead of answering a question, you ask another one.” Nancy sighed. “I’m not being nosy. I am being inquisitive. So . . . are we?”
“Nope,” her mother said. “We’re definitely not wealthy.”
“But,” her dad added, “we have a roof over our heads that only leaks a little, clothes on our backs, and—once I get back from the supermarket—I can promise none of us will go hungry.”
“Exactly. We aren’t rich and we aren’t poor.” Nancy’s mother handed her father a bunch of coupons for stuff on sale. “We are lucky to be somewhere in the middle,” she told Nancy. “We have everything we need but maybe not everything we wish we had.”
Nancy had expected that answer. The Clancys were average. That was fine. She understood that her family was lucky not to be poor. Still, average sounded boring.
“Grace’s family is wealthy.”
Nancy’s mom didn’t answer. She was focused on her laptop.
“Her grandpa is a millionaire,” Nancy went on. “Someday Grace will be an heiress. That means she’ll get tons of money after he’s dead.”
Getting a fortune sounded great to Nancy. Finding a fortune sounded even better. At school, room 3D was learning about the Gold Rush of 1849.
“Did you know that as soon as gold was found in California, thousands and thousands of people raced out there? They all wanted to find gold and get rich quick, and some did!” Nancy paused, then went on, “If that happened to me, we could fly to Paris and stay at a fancy hotel. I’d buy a whole new wardrobe. Not just for me but for all of you.”
“Merci beaucoup,” her mom said. “That’s very sweet.” Then she put down a stack of bills. “Sure, being rich would be fun. Still, it isn’t what’s most important to Dad or me.”
Her dad stuffed the shopping list and coupons in his back pocket. Then he jangled his car keys. “Come on, girls. After the Stop and Shop we can hit a tag sale. Who knows what treasures we’ll find.”
Nancy knew that by “treasures” her dad meant old superhero comic books. He had boxes and boxes of them from when he was a kid. And he was always adding to his collection.
JoJo leaped up on their dad for a piggyback ride out the door.
“Alas, I cannot come,” Nancy told her father. She had to put the finishing touches on her project for Gold Fever Day. It was tomorrow. And Nancy’s project was superb, if she did say so herself.
It was late afternoon. Nancy finished gluing gold glitter and pebbles to the bottom of an old pie pan. The pebbles were painted gold. Then she started writing her paragraph. She stuck in as many vivid—that meant interesting—words as she could think of.
“Long ago in days of yore, one way prospectors discovered gold was by—”
Suddenly a bell rang outside her window. It meant Bree had sent a message in their Top-Secret Special Delivery mailbox. The mailbox was actually a basket. It was strung on a rope between Nancy’s bedroom window and Bree’s.
Nancy reeled in the basket and looked at the message. It was written in secret code. The trouble was, she and Bree kept switching codes to make sure their messages stayed super-secret. Which code were they using now? It took a minute before it came to her. She had to look at each letter and then jump back to the one before it in the alphabet. B became A, C became B, and so on.
The message was brief. It said: Meet me in the clubhouse. Now!
Ooh la la! This sounded important, maybe even urgent. Finishing her homework would just have to wait!
Nancy dashed downstairs and out the side door into the Clancys’ backyard. She had just plopped down on one of the beanbag chairs in the clubhouse when Bree came bursting in.
“Ta-da!” she cried, and thrust an arm out toward Nancy. Bree was holding a long black rod with a big double ring on one end.
“What on earth is that contraption?” Nancy asked.
“A metal detector.”
A metal detector? Nancy sprang from the beanbag chair to take a closer look.
“My dad needed to rent one for a commercial he’s shooting. For Solid Gold chocolate bars.” Bree’s father worked at an advertising agency. He did way more fun stuff than Nancy’s father, who helped people with their taxes. “We can try it out if we’re careful.”
“For real?” Nancy clutched Bree’s hand. “Who knows? We might find long-lost treasure!”
“Fingers crossed!” Bree wanted to get rich quick just as much as Nancy did. But she was more realistic. So she said, “Look, it’ll be exciting if we just find some coins. Watch this.” Bree pushed a button at the top of the rod. Then she pointed the double-ring thingie at the buckles on her shoes.
Bleep! Bleep! Bleep! went the metal detector.
Double ooh la la! “Do it on me now!” Nancy bent down so Bree could point the double rings at the silver barrettes in Nancy’s hair.
The metal detector bleeped wildly again!
They didn’t bother shooting to see who got to look for treasure first. Since the metal detector belonged to Bree, sort of, it seemed only fair to start in her yard. And it went without saying that any treasure they found they’d split even Stephen.
They began at the far end of the yard by the fence. Slowly they worked their way toward the deck. The metal detector was much heavier than it looked. So they took turns, walking in straight lines back and forth, back and forth, across the grass.
The metal detector didn’t bleep a lot. But every time it did, the girls searched carefully to see what had set it off. After an hour, they had found:
•a key
•a bent spoon
•the top of a tuna-fish can
•a penny
“Maybe the key opens a treasure chest that’s buried somewhere,” Nancy said, but she didn’t sound very convincing, not even to herself.
“Nancy, face it. It’s a house key. That’s all.” Bree handed over the metal detector. “Maybe we’ll have better luck in your yard.”
In Nancy’s yard pretty much the same kind of stuff turned up. Only a fork instead of a spoon and not even a single penny.
By now the sun was low in the sky. It was almost dinnertime. Nancy walked Bree back home
. They took the shortcut, squeezing through the tall bushes separating their yards.
Suddenly the metal detector bleeped once more. Not very loudly.
“It won’t turn out to be anything good,” Bree said.
Still, they both knelt in the dirt and felt around with their hands.
Nancy touched something first. Her fingers wrapped around a very thin chain. Nancy gave a gentle tug and—triple ooh la la!—suddenly a very grubby necklace was in the palm of her hand.
Bree and Nancy both let out a scream.
“It’s the one Mrs. DeVine gave you!” Bree exclaimed. “The one you lost.”
Indeed it was. For once Nancy was speechless. She had never expected to lay eyes on the necklace again.
Nancy had often admired the necklace, which Mrs. DeVine kept in a jewelry box, and then—surprise, surprise—Mrs. DeVine presented it to Nancy on her last birthday. The necklace was more than fifty years old. Mrs. DeVine said it was a piece of costume jewelry. That meant the sparkly teardrops were rhinestones, not real diamonds. Nancy didn’t care. It was like wearing a tiny chandelier around her neck. Then a month ago the necklace had gone missing.
After rubbing off more dirt, Nancy could see that the clasp on the chain didn’t close all the way. That explained how it had gotten lost.
“I never even told Mrs. DeVine. I felt so bad. I thought it was my fault—that I’d been careless. But I wasn’t!”
“Wear it tonight when we go over to her house.”
Nancy smacked her forehead. “Sacre bleu!” That was French for yikes. “I totally forgot.”
On Sunday night Antiques in Your Attic was on TV. Bree and Nancy always went to Mrs. DeVine’s to watch it. Every week people brought in stuff from home and had it appraised. That meant they found out what it was worth. Most of the time stuff that looked like junk was just junk. But once in a while a super-ugly vase or a painting of crazy blobs turned out to be really valuable. That was always so thrilling to see. One woman fainted right on TV after hearing the good news.
Sunday night counted as a school night, of course. However, Bree and Nancy were allowed to watch the show since it was on public TV and counted as educational . . . but only if all their homework was done.
“I haven’t finished the writing part of my Gold Fever project.” Actually Nancy had hardly begun it. “I may have to miss the show.”
“Nan-cy!” Bree sounded irritated. She never left homework for the last minute. Never, ever.
At that very moment the girls heard Nancy’s mother calling her home for dinner. Antiques in Your Attic would be coming on right after that.
“Maybe I can finish in time to see the end of the show,” Nancy said.
As she walked back to her house, Nancy told herself that even if she got stuck doing homework, finding the necklace was worth missing TV. Although she hadn’t found any long-lost treasure today, she had found recently lost treasure.
That was just as superb.
“Nancy! You won’t believe this!” Bree exclaimed. “You just missed a lady with an old doll. It was naked and missing an arm. But it was worth two thousand dollars!”
“Sacre bleu!” Nancy said as she entered the living room and took a seat on the divan. That’s what Mrs. DeVine called the couch.
“Have a cookie.” Mrs. DeVine passed a tray of fancy cookies to Nancy. “Oh! I see you’re wearing your necklace.”
Nancy touched her throat. Her mom had fixed the clasp. Even so, Nancy had put tape around it. She wasn’t taking any chances.
“The lady got the doll at a tag sale,” Bree went on. “She only paid fifty cents. Nancy, it was so creepy-looking, I had to shut my eyes.” Bree paused and gave a little shudder. “When the lady heard what it was worth, her eyes bugged way out and she said . . .”
“Wait! Let me guess,” Nancy shouted. “I bet she said, ‘Wow! Are you kidding? I had no idea!’”
It was what everybody said. Every single time.
The TV program was almost over.
A kid brought in a wind-up toy bank. It had once belonged to his great-grandfather. After he put a penny on the seal’s nose and turned a key in its back, the penny flipped way up and then dropped down into the slot in the bank.
“That’s pretty awesome,” Nancy said. Then she corrected herself. “I mean to say, ‘That’s startling and unusual!’” Her teacher, Mr. Dudeny, thought that “awesome” was a boring word because kids used it way too much.
“Ooh, guess what.” Bree brushed a cookie crumb off her upper lip. “The penny I found was old. From 1956. It looks different from pennies now. There’s a picture of wheat on the back side. So I called Grace.”
“Grace is a girl in our class,” Nancy explained to Mrs. DeVine. “She says she’s a coin expert.”
“Well, Grace called me back. Her coin book said that the penny might be worth as much as a nickel.”
“Girls. Girls. Pay attention. This looks interesting.” Mrs. DeVine was pointing at her TV.
A young couple had brought a statue of an angel. They had bought it on their honeymoon in Europe. “I collect angels,” the wife said. “And I had to have this one. It cost a lot and my husband thought I was crazy to pay so much. But the owner of the shop promised it was from the Middle Ages. It’s wood and some of the paint is still on it. See?” She pointed to the angel’s wooden curls.
“Do you mind my asking how much you paid?” the TV show woman asked.
“Six . . . hundred . . . dollars.” The husband spoke each word separately and slowly. Nancy almost expected him to start twirling a finger around his ear. She could tell that he thought spending six hundred dollars was cuckoo-cuckoo.
“Uh-oh. This isn’t looking good,” Mrs. DeVine said. “Look at the appraiser’s face. I think the wife got swindled.” Mrs. DeVine explained that meant the lady had been lied to and paid way too much.
Mrs. DeVine was 100 percent correct.
The appraiser looked sad and said, “I am afraid this object was made to appear old, but it’s not. The wood is new wood. And the paint on the angel is modern-day paint. Not the kind that artists in the Middle Ages used.” The appraiser said that the angel was still very pretty—“decorative” was the word she used. Then she delivered the bad news. “I’m so sorry to tell you that this statue is worth less than a hundred dollars.”
“I—I don’t care. I still—s-still love it,” the wife stammered. But you could tell her husband did care.
“I think that couple with the angel is having a big fight right about now.” Mrs. DeVine stretched out the word “big.”
Nancy and Bree both agreed.
“Maybe they’ll show up on Divorce Court,” Nancy said, and giggled. That was another of Mrs. DeVine’s favorite shows but not one that the girls were allowed to watch.
A minute later the program ended with the host asking home viewers to “check the show’s website to see if Antiques in Your Attic is coming to your town.”
Nancy and Bree stood and thanked Mrs. DeVine. They kissed Jewel on the top of her head. Tonight she had on a tiny gold tiara. . . . Très fancy!
On Monday morning, a surprise was waiting for everyone in 3D. Mr. Dudeny was growing a beard.
“What made you do it?” Nancy asked.
“To tell the truth, I got tired of shaving every morning.”
“Same here, dude,” Lionel said. He had a beard too. Of course, his was a fake one. Along with the beard, he was wearing a pair of old overalls and a bandanna around his neck. Lionel explained that he was supposed to look like an old-time miner from the days of the Gold Rush. So when classed started, Mr. D called on Lionel first to tell everyone about his project.
“This here rock is called pyrite,” Lionel began, and held up a big chunk of something gold-colored and sparkling. He passed it around the class.
“Pyrite looks like real gold, don’t it? Sure had me fooled. That’s why they call it fool’s gold. Miners like me would find a big piece and start shouting that we had struck it rich. But pyr
ite ain’t worth nothin’.” Then Lionel whipped off his bandanna and began sobbing into it.
Grace went next. She showed the class a tiny coin inside a little plastic envelope. Her millionaire grandpa had given it to her.
“That’s the smallest coin I’ve ever seen,” Robert said, squinting at it. “It makes a dime look big.”
Grace looked not mad, exactly, but annoyed. “For your information, this happens to be real gold,” she said. “Not fake like pyrite.” Then Grace told the class about her coin collection. “This one is nearly a hundred years old and it’s worth tons of money. Tons.”
Maybe so. But Nancy didn’t see how the coin had much to do with the Gold Rush except that it was gold. She turned to Bree and they exchanged looks. Show-off! they were both thinking. Being best friends meant that they could often read each other’s minds.
After Grace, it was Robert’s turn. He had drawn a big map of the US. It showed how wagon trains made their way across the country to California.
Bree went next. “I made an ad like the ones that used to run in newspapers.” In very big, very neat letters, Bree had written, Get rich quick! Come to California. There’s gold in those hills. And it can be yours!
“People would read ads like this and rush out West. But not many found gold. So it’s really false advertising,” Bree explained before sitting down.
As Mr. Dudeny looked around the room to choose who would go next, Nancy figured he might call on her since she sat next to Bree. But instead he said, “Clara, I’m really anxious to know what’s under the napkin in your basket. Something sure smells good.”
It turned out to be biscuits.
“I took out a book from the library . . . ,” Clara began in a soft voice. Almost a whisper.
Mr. Dudeny asked her to start over. “Remember. Loud and proud, Clara!”