Treasured Dreams by Kendall Talbot Read Free Book Online Page B

at the nunnery, Helen had gradually been gaining weight.
    â€˜Alex, can you please slice up the sourdough?’ Ginger asked.
    â€˜Sure, il mio dolce .’
    Alessandro reached for the bread and removed it from the tea towel.
    Rosalina admired her own baking. The five decorative slices she’d made in the dough before she’d put it in the oven looked perfectly measured in the golden crust. Sourdough had a lovely depth of flavour, which was why she believed it went so well with risotto, especially with a slathering of butter. Real butter, not that ghastly margarine spread.
    Alessandro cut the loaf into thick slices and juggled a steaming piece onto her bread plate. Rosalina quickly buttered it while it was still warm, and licked her lips as the butter melted.
    She decided to open the conversation as Ginger spooned the risotto into their bowls. ‘Okay, fellas. How about you tell me what’s going on?’
    Both Jimmy and Alessandro looked in Archer’s direction, and he in turn bit into the sourdough poised at his lips and hastily swallowed the mouthful. ‘Okay. We’ve been going through my dad’s scrapbooks, trying to decipher his scrambled notes.’
    Rosalina nodded. Before Archer’s father, Wade, was killed by a shark, he’d discovered several significant treasures and ever since they’d found thirty-four notebooks filled with Wade’s musings, they’d been trying to work them out. They were detailed with drawings, notes, paper clippings, words circled, words underlined, and words crossed out. There were names, places, dates … it was all random and mostly indecipherable. And yet, every one of these notes had meant something to Wade, which potentially meant they were important clues to finding a treasure.
    The notes covered many treasures that Wade had been in the process of tracking down. All they had to do was work them out.
    â€˜Do you remember how each notebook had four countries listed inside the front cover?’ Archer said.
    Rosalina placed a spoonful of risotto in her mouth, nodding as she enjoyed the delicious roasted duck meat mixed with creamy rice.
    â€˜Okay. So we started by looking for any references to Singapore in the books. We only did this because we know for a fact that the Awa Maru was docked there. Alessandro, how about you carry on?’
    Archer practically tossed the conversation to Alessandro, and by the look on his face, the Italian wasn’t expecting it.
    Alessandro swallowed a lump of food and cleared his throat. He was in professor-mode now. Rosalina had come to recognise it. He had learnt to relax a lot since he’d joined them in their treasure hunting, but give Alessandro the opportunity to detail anything and he was guaranteed to deliver it as if it were a university lecture.
    â€˜While we couldn’t work out much from his notes,’ he said, ‘we did notice there were nearly as many references to Singapore as there were to Saigon.’
    Alessandro would’ve been in his element if he’d had a whiteboard to scribble on as he spoke. ‘I obtained the Awa Maru ’s tabular record of movement since the day she was built. During the course of her four short years, she only visited Saigon once.’ He held up his forefinger. ‘On 24 th February, 1945.’ He paused to drink his wine.
    â€˜How’d ya get your hands on that?’ Jimmy huffed.
    Alessandro shrugged his shoulders. ‘During the Second World War, the Japanese Imperial Navy were arguably the most powerful navy in the world. Once they were crushed under the US navy, who at the time were considered underdogs, their impeccable tabular records became the subject of comprehensive scrutiny. Everyone wanted to establish what the Japanese did wrong. Fortunately for us, the records are readily available.’
    â€˜So what’s the significance of the Saigon visit?’ Rosalina asked.
    Alessandro picked up his fork and used it