by Elise Broach
“Well, that would have been a big help,” Jack said in exasperation. “Look, it shows the rock horse and everything. It would have been easy-peasy to find the mine if we’d had that.”
“That handwriting,” Delilah said, her brows furrowing. “It looks kind of familiar. Is it the same as the writing that’s on the other note?”
“I don’t think so,” Henry said. He thought back to the day in the canyon, when they’d been searching for the mine; how many times he’d read and reread the directions on the little scrap of paper they’d found in the secret compartment of Uncle Hank’s coin box. The handwriting on this paper looked different, but—Delilah was right—also vaguely familiar.
“Somebody probably copied it,” Simon said. “But let’s compare them to make sure. You put that other note back in the coin box, didn’t you, Hen?”
Henry nodded. Though it had only been a few weeks, it seemed so long ago that they had discovered the gold mine, returning home with the note of directions and Jack’s fistful of tiny gold flakes. “But why would the directions to the gold mine be here, behind the picture of Julia Thomas?”
“I don’t know,” Simon said. “And look—there’s nothing on the back of the drawing itself. Nobody signed it or wrote on it.”
“I wonder who made this picture,” Delilah said softly. “And who hid the directions there.”
“Yeah,” Simon said. “It’s kind of hard to tell if they did or didn’t want them to be found. I mean, this is a picture of Julia Thomas, and she was the one Jacob Waltz told about the gold mine before he died.”
Simon handed the note to Delilah, then quickly reassembled the picture and tucked it into his backpack, stashing it under the bed.
“Let’s go downstairs to Uncle Hank’s desk and look at the handwriting on that other piece of paper,” he said.
CHAPTER 9
KEY TO THE PAST
MRS. BARKER EMERGED from her study just as they started down the hallway. “Delilah,” she said, smiling. “I thought I heard your voice.”
“Hi, Mrs. Barker,” Delilah said. “Is it okay that I came over this early?”
“Of course,” Mrs. Barker said. “You’re always welcome here. In fact, I’ve been meaning to ask you and your mother to come over for a cookout one night. Maybe this evening? With Emmett and Kathy, while she’s visiting. Do you know if you have plans?”
“No, I don’t think so—that would be great!”
“Well, we should call your mother to make sure. What are you four up to so early this morning?”
They looked at each other uncertainly. “We were just going to have another look at Uncle Hank’s coin collection,” Simon said. “Downstairs in the desk. Is that okay?”
“Sure. I need to clean that out at some point.” Mrs. Barker continued into the kitchen with her coffee mug, and Simon, Henry, Jack, and Delilah headed straight for the basement door.
Uncle Hank’s old rolltop desk stood in a corner of the basement, its various contents consolidated by Mrs. Barker’s post-move cleaning and organizing spree into just two of the large drawers. The coin box with the secret compartment that housed the directions to the gold mine was in the second drawer. Delilah gently unfolded the note that had been tucked inside the picture frame and set it on the desk. Simon pulled out the rusty-orange oblong box and slid open its concealed lower drawer, taking out the piece of torn, yellowed paper with the directions written on it. He flattened it next to the note from the picture and switched on the desk lamp. In the round glow of light, Henry could see that the handwriting was nothing alike.
Delilah sighed in disappointment. “It’s not the same,” she said.
“No,” Simon agreed. “It’s not even close. This handwriting from the picture is so neat and small. And it’s in real ink, not ballpoint pen.”
“Why does it look familiar?” Delilah puzzled. “I could swear I’ve seen it before.” She picked up the ivory note and squinted at it.
“Wait,” Henry said, staring at the slanting black lines of script. “It’s … it’s the same as the handwriting in the hotel ledger!” He turned excitedly to Delilah. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she cried. “That’s it! It’s Julia Thomas’s handwriting. That’s why I recognized it. But what does that mean?”
“It means that Julia Thomas herself wrote the directions and drew the map!” Simon said jubilantly. “And that makes sense. Remember? Emmett said that when she couldn’t find the gold mine herself on that trip up the mountain with the German brothers, she drew maps showing where it might be, based on Jacob Waltz’s instructions, and started selling them to people. So maybe this is just one of the maps, with directions. And someone stuck it behind her picture in the hotel.”
Jack picked up the torn scrap of paper from the coin box. “But what about these directions? Who wrote these?”
They all considered the note silently. “Someone must have copied the original directions and given them to Uncle Hank,” Henry said. “But who?”
“Not Julia Thomas the librarian,” Delilah said thoughtfully. “’Cuz we know her handwriting looks exactly like the handwriting of the first Julia Thomas. I almost wish I was still wearing my cast so we could compare them, side by side.”
“Right,” Simon said. “It was somebody else. Not Uncle Hank, not either of the Julia Thomases. Somebody who was helping Uncle Hank look for the gold mine?”
Henry pulled the drawer all the way open, propping it with his knee so it wouldn’t tumble onto the floor. “What about all these letters and cards?” he said. “We haven’t looked through any of these yet.” He lifted the stack of postcards and letters tied together with string that they had found at the beginning of the summer, when they first explored Uncle Hank’s desk. Henry had noticed them before but hadn’t thought there was anything special about them. Now it seemed like they could be the key to figuring out who was the author of the note in the coin box.
“That’s a great idea, Hen,” Simon said enthusiastically, and as always when Simon praised him, Henry felt his heart swell with pride. It almost meant more to him than having his parents compliment him, because Simon’s praise was so rare, and much harder to earn. Also, he knew that Simon never said nice things to encourage him or because his spirits needed boosting.
Henry couldn’t get the string unknotted with his stubby nails, so Delilah took over. After a minute or two, she untied it, and was starting to fan out the letters and cards so they could look at them when something fell heavily out of the packet and thumped onto the carpet.
“What’s that?” Jack asked, reaching for it.
But Simon grabbed it first. “Hey…,” he said. He held it aloft.
It was a rusty metal key. Simon fished in his pocket and held up the key to room five that he had brought back from the ghost town.
Henry saw that the two keys looked identical. He gasped.
“It must be the key to room six! The key to the room Julia Thomas stayed in!”
CHAPTER 10
A PERFECT MATCH
“DO YOU KNOW what this means?” Simon asked, his voice breathless.
Delilah leaned forward on her knees and scattered the postcards and letters in a wave of enthusiastic confetti over the carpet. “It means your Uncle Hank went to the Black Cat Hotel and Saloon! And he took the key to Julia Thomas’s room.”
“Or somebody gave it to him,” Henry said. “Why was the key in that batch of letters? Maybe it fell out of one of them.”
Simon ran his hand over his spiky hair, making it stand on end. “Either way, he had the key,” he said. “So it’s safe to assume he was in her hotel room.”
“Do you think he found anything there?” Jack asked eagerly. “Maybe he found the GOLD!”
“Maybe.” Simon continued to rub his hair, frowning slightly. “But those rooms were pretty cleaned out.”
“Let’s look through these cards and letters,” Delilah suggested. “We can see if there’s handwriting that matches the note from the coin bo
x, and maybe we’ll be able to tell if the key came from a letter that’s here.”
“Okay,” Simon directed. “Look for handwriting that matches this.” He waved the scrap of paper from the coin box under their noses.
“You are always making us READ things,” Jack complained. “And I can’t read. It’s no fair.”
“You’ll learn to read this year, in first grade,” Henry told him. “And you know all the letters. You don’t have to be able to read to match the handwriting—just compare the letters, like the capital C and the V’s, or how the A’s look.”
“Yeah,” Delilah added. “Pretend you’re a detective. It’s like trying to figure out if two drawings are by the same artist.”
“Pretend you’re Encyclopedia Brown,” Henry encouraged him. “Remember how I read those books to you, and we were always trying to figure out the clues? This is something Encyclopedia Brown would do.”
Jack’s grumpy expression softened. “Okay,” he conceded. “I’m a good detective.”
Simon put the two keys on top of the desk. Crouched in a ring on the carpet, they began sifting through the pile of correspondence. There were postcards from various friends of Uncle Hank’s, with colorful pictures of white beaches and old churches and nighttime cityscapes. When Henry turned them over, he saw cheery scribbled messages from these far-flung locales. He found a postcard all the way from Australia—Australia!—and one from Las Vegas, with a neon-lit casino on it. There were even a few postcards from the Barker family on their various vacations. It was funny to read affectionate messages from Mr. Barker to Uncle Hank that had been written years ago, some of them before Jack was even born. It seemed strange to Henry that the letters still existed, when Uncle Hank no longer did. He saw his father’s jagged scrawl and tried to picture him in that moment, a young dad with babies, writing to his beloved uncle.
“Listen to this,” Henry said, lifting a postcard that Mr. Barker had sent to Uncle Hank from their family camping trip to Yellowstone National Park. “Yellowstone is spectacular—saw the hot springs yesterday. Also, lots of buffalo. We’ll have to come back when the kids are older. Camping with diapers is not as fun! Love, Jim and the gang.”
“I remember that trip!” Simon grinned. “We saw bears.”
“BEARS!” Jack protested. “Was I there too? I never saw a bear.”
“Well, you were a baby,” Henry told him. “Look at the date—you were two. I can barely remember it.” He had only the vaguest recollection of a green tent in a forested campsite, and his father lifting him high above a wooden railing to see the steaming turquoise waters of the hot springs. But now he wondered if he really remembered it, or if he’d just seen pictures of the trip and was remembering those. It was so long ago.
“It’s not fair,” Jack grumbled. “You got to see BEARS.”
“You saw them too,” Simon told him. “It’s not our fault you don’t remember.”
Jack’s face clouded, and Henry could see him balling up a fist, ready to slug Simon.
He tried to intercede. “Hey—”
But Delilah came to the rescue. “You guys,” she said. “Look.” She was holding a folded blue note card in one hand and the torn scrap of the gold-mine directions in the other. “I found it!”
Henry felt his heart quicken. He could see that the generous, rounded letters on the blue card matched the ones on the paper. “It’s the same handwriting! Who’s it from?”
“There are initials on the front,” Delilah said, showing them the letters PAC engraved in navy. The A was larger than the other two letters, a formidable triangle centered between them.
“It’s a monogram,” Henry corrected her.
Simon added, “The A is the biggest, so it’s from somebody with a first name that starts with P and a last name that starts with A.”
But Delilah had opened the card and was lost in its message. “Wow,” she said slowly.
“What is it?” Simon demanded. “What does it say?”
“It’s…” Her eyes were riveted on the blue paper.
“Come on,” Jack demanded. “Read it!”
Delilah looked at Henry, her brows drawn together. “I don’t know. It seems … private.”
Simon shook his head impatiently. “Nothing is private after you’re dead.”
He reached out to take the blue note card from Delilah, but she held on to it. Henry wondered if that was true. Did you lose your privacy when you died? Did that mean it was okay for other people to find out all your secrets? It didn’t seem quite right to him, but Simon said it with such certainty.
“No. I’ll read it,” Delilah said, tightening her grasp. She tossed her long braid over her shoulder and bowed her head, reading slowly: “My love, I am sorry about today. I want you to find what you’re looking for. Here’s the key. You already have a more important one … the key to the chambers of my heart. I am yours always. Prita.”
CHAPTER 11
THE ONE
“YUCK,” SAID JACK, wrinkling his nose. “That’s too lovey-dovey.”
“No it’s not,” Delilah answered staunchly. “I think it’s beautiful.”
“The key!” Henry said. “Not only is that the person who copied the directions to the gold mine … she gave Uncle Hank the key to room six!”
“Who is it again?” Simon took the note from Delilah. “P-R-I-T-A … Prita? Like Rita. Never heard of her. But I guess ol’ Uncle Hank had a girlfriend.”
“More than a girlfriend,” Delilah contradicted. “A true love.”
“You can’t tell that from one letter,” Simon told her.
“There’s not just one,” Delilah said. “Look.” From the scattered pile of postcards, she lifted a thick packet of identical blue cards, tied with a ribbon. Not a string, like the stack of correspondence; a pale sliver of white ribbon.
“Love letters?” Henry asked in amazement. “But Uncle Hank was supposed to be a player.” It was the word his mother had used to describe Uncle Hank once, a word that—confusingly—meant something bad: a man who had a lot of girlfriends at the same time, or one girlfriend after another, with no long relationships. Henry had to agree with Delilah; the words on the blue note card did not sound like something a woman would write to a man who had other girlfriends.
“Let’s read them,” Simon said, stretching out his hand. But Delilah eluded him, snatching the stack of cards behind her back.
“No,” she said firmly. “We shouldn’t have read this one. They weren’t meant for anyone but your uncle Hank.”
“What are you talking about?” Simon glared at her. “You don’t get to decide that.”
Henry almost laughed, because it sounded so much like something Jack would say to Simon. And indeed, Jack immediately chimed in.
“Yeah! You are not the boss of us!”
Delilah was unfazed. “We should return them to this woman, Prita. That’s the right thing to do.”
“But they’re Uncle Hank’s letters!” Simon protested. “They belong to us now.”
Henry considered this. Did letters get inherited like all the other stuff in their uncle’s house? Or now that he was gone, did they belong to the person who wrote them?
“Okay,” Delilah said coolly, springing to her feet. “Let’s ask your mom what she thinks.”
Simon groaned. “You’re such a tattletale.”
“Yeah!” Jack yelled. “TATTLETALE!”
“You said there was nothing wrong with reading the letters,” Delilah retorted. “If that’s true, why do you care if we ask your mom?”
“Well, geez, Delilah, you know our mom will see something wrong with it,” Simon protested. “Moms are just like that.”
As if on cue, Mrs. Barker’s voice drifted down the basement stairs. “What’s all the yelling about?”
Delilah stood poised, the packet of blue note cards clutched behind her back. She shot Simon a challenging glance.
He rolled his eyes in frustration. “Nothing, Mom,” he called. “Jack and Delilah are
just arguing about something.”
Outraged, Jack gaped, but they could all hear that their mother was still hesitating at the top of the stairs.
“Jack,” she called, “do you need to come up here for a little break?”
“No!” Jack cried. “I wasn’t doing anything!”
“It’s okay, Mom,” Henry interjected. “We can work it out.”
Their mother was a big fan of working it out. She much preferred for the boys to solve their own disagreements, even if they did so unfairly, than to be called upon to referee. Simon, Henry, and Jack had learned this the hard way; whenever they got into an argument over something, even when one of them was clearly and gallingly right, Mrs. Barker would send all parties to their rooms to cool off. Her familiar warning was, “Don’t make me sort this out, or none of you will end up happy.”
Mr. Barker, meanwhile, loved to referee … and the more trivial the disagreement, the better. He would decide, unilaterally, who should get the last cookie, who won the argument about best superhero, and who did the most impressive job on his weekend chores. If one of their games got out of hand, he would jump in with suggestions, rather than trying to break things up, the way their mother did. The last time they played shark attack, he even supported Jack’s attempt to drag Simon across the carpet by his feet, since for the purposes of the game, Jack was the great white shark.
Unlike their mother, their father liked to listen to all sides first—the pettier the complaints and accusations, the more interested he became—and then render a final verdict, like a judge in a courtroom. The good thing about Mr. Barker was that he had grown up with brothers of his own, so he knew all about fighting and the importance of winning. The bad thing was that he was shockingly unpredictable, so you never knew in advance what he would decide. But at least he didn’t play favorites.
