Revenge of Superstition Mountain

by Elise Broach

  It was exactly what Uncle Hank had said in his letter, which made it the second time Henry had been told that in one day, and he wasn’t even sure what it meant.

  “We’ll come visit you again,” Delilah promised, as they left Prita’s front stoop and started to head down the driveway.

  “And you’ll have to come to our house,” Henry said. “Uncle Hank’s house.” He added, “When it doesn’t make you sad anymore.”

  “I would like that,” Prita said. She lifted her hand to wave as they hopped onto their bikes and rode away, down Ken-tee Court.

  * * *

  That afternoon, they gathered in the kitchen to discuss their return to the cemetery. Conveniently, their mother had gone to the grocery store; they had the house to themselves and could talk freely. Henry had tucked Uncle Hank’s note safely in the drawer of his nightstand and was now pouring frosty glasses of lemonade for everyone, while Simon slapped together ham and cheese sandwiches. Delilah held Josie on her lap, stroking her flat, triangular head. Josie purred contentedly.

  “I wonder where we can find information about who owns the grave plots,” Simon said, spreading mustard on four slices of bread. “It would be better not to have to ask that caretaker Mr. Delgado. You know he’ll report back to the librarian and Officer Myers about what we’re doing.”

  “Do you think there are records anywhere else, besides at the cemetery?” Delilah asked.

  “I don’t know. I doubt it.” Simon assembled the sandwiches and sliced them diagonally, piling them on a plate in the middle of the table. Henry carried the glasses over from the counter, and they all clustered around to eat.

  After a bit, Henry said, “It seems like there might be a record for the historic graves.”

  “That’s true,” Simon allowed, “but how does that help us? We’re interested in a grave plot that Uncle Hank would have purchased in the last ten years or so. Right?”

  “Yeah,” Henry said, wiping the crumbs from his mouth. “But maybe we should ask Emmett. He had to find the location of Julia Thomas’s grave in Phoenix, remember? I bet he’ll know what to do.”

  “Good idea. Let’s call him,” Simon said. He wiped his hands on his shorts and grabbed the phone book from the cupboard, sliding it across the table to Henry.

  Jack thumped his hand on top of it, holding it firm. “No, wait,” he protested. “When are we going back up the mountain? To return the gold. We have to do that first! Before I DIE.”

  “You know we can’t do that while Mom and Dad are around,” Simon said.

  “When, then?” Jack demanded, holding tight to the phone book. “That’s more important than going back to that old graveyard.”

  Simon turned to Henry. “Didn’t they say they’re doing something with Emmett and Aunt Kathy on Sunday?”

  Henry did vaguely remember that. “Yeah, I think so. They’re going into Phoenix to the art museum, right? But I thought they wanted us to go with them.”

  “We can probably get out of it,” Simon said. “We’ll stay and clean out the garage. Mom’s been wanting us to do that.”

  The garage! Henry shuddered. It was full of moving boxes that were packed with their outdoor toys and games from Illinois—volleyball, croquet, sidewalk chalk—not to mention the various tools and yard implements that Mr. Barker hadn’t needed yet … saws, wrenches, hedge trimmers. “That’ll take a really long time,” Henry said dubiously.

  “I’ll help you,” Delilah offered. “I’m good at organizing stuff.”

  “Then we can clean the garage in the morning, and go up the mountain in the afternoon,” Simon announced.

  Jack shook his head vigorously. “That’s two whole days away!”

  “Jack, listen,” Simon said firmly. “The curse probably isn’t even real. You’ve had that gold for weeks now, and you’ve been fine.”

  Jack’s face began to crumple. “You don’t care whether or not I DIE!” he wailed.

  “Of course I do,” Simon said calmly. “And we’ll take the gold back, I promise. But we’re going to the cemetery first.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” Jack grumbled. “You’re not the one who’s cursed.”

  Henry tried to calm him down. “It’s okay, Jack. We can’t go until Sunday anyway. And don’t you want to try to find whatever it is Uncle Hank left for us?”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “Before I DIE.”

  “You’re not going to die,” Henry said. “We won’t let you.”

  As soon as he said it, Delilah glanced at him strangely. He thought of her father, killed in a car accident. Instantly, he regretted what he’d said, which sounded like you could protect someone from dying through sheer effort or will.

  He looked at her apologetically and pried the phone book loose from Jack’s fingers. “Let me call Emmett and see what he says.”

  Henry dialed the number, and the phone rang and rang. He was almost ready to hang up when a breathless Aunt Kathy answered.

  “Oh, hi, hon,” she said. “We’re just walking in the door from the library. What’s going on?”

  “Can I talk to Emmett for a minute? We need to ask him something.”

  “Sure. Something about rocks? My smart boyfriend! He is a veritable encyclopedia.”

  “No, not rocks,” Henry said. “Something about graves.”

  “Graves? You know, I am beginning to think you boys are a little obsessed with death.” She laughed her ringing laugh. “Your interests are so macabre.… That’s a good word for you, Henry. It means gruesome. Here’s Emmett.”

  Macabre, Henry repeated to himself. It was a good word for their entire summer, he decided—the steady parade of skulls and bones and curses and graves. When Emmett answered, Henry said without preamble, “Hey, Emmett, we think Uncle Hank might own a plot in the cemetery and we wondered how we could find out. Can you tell us how you found Julia Thomas’s grave in Phoenix?”

  “Sure, but I thought you said your uncle was cremated,” Emmett said.

  “He was. We think he might have gotten a cemetery plot for a different reason.”

  “Really?” Emmett sounded perplexed, and Henry was grateful he didn’t ask more questions. “Well, you’ll have to go down to the cemetery and look at the records. They’re in the office at the caretaker’s cottage. Richard Delgado can help you.”

  Henry hesitated. “We were sort of hoping to avoid him … because of the historical society and the treasure hunting and all.”

  “Does he even know who you are?”

  Henry squirmed, gripping the phone. “Yeah. He knows.”

  “Oh,” Emmett said. “Well, he’s not there right now anyway. Kathy and I just saw him over at the library, talking to Julia Thomas. Who knows what they’re up to. But his daughter, Sara, should be there, and she can show you where to look.”

  “Sara?” Henry asked doubtfully. “She always seems so out of it.” He remembered Sara babbling nonsensically to them that day at the cemetery, and Emmett saying that although she’d always been a strange girl, shy and difficult to talk to, after she was lost for days on Superstition Mountain she had seemed even stranger, as if the mountain had confused the wiring in her brain. She’d come back from the mountain in a fugue state, with no memory of what had happened to her there.

  “I don’t think she’s out of it, exactly,” Emmett said. “She can be very observant. She just doesn’t communicate the way the rest of us do.”

  “But you think she could show us how to figure out if Uncle Hank owned a cemetery plot?”

  “Sure. The records are in a vertical file cabinet in the front of the office. The list is indexed two ways, by plot location and by last name, so it shouldn’t be hard.”

  “Thanks, Emmett,” Henry said with relief.

  He hung up the phone and relayed the information quickly to the others. “And if we go now, Mr. Delgado won’t be there. Emmett and Aunt Kathy just saw him at the library. So Sara can help us instead.”

  “That crazy girl?” Jack asked. “We couldn�
��t even talk to her last time.”

  “Maybe we won’t have to,” Delilah said, “if the office is open and she’ll let us look at the files.”

  Henry agreed that it might be difficult to communicate with Sara. But it was still far better than having to deal with her suspicious father.

  “Good, let’s go before Mr. Delgado gets back,” Simon said.

  They quickly gulped down the rest of their lemonade and raced out the door.

  CHAPTER 16

  UNDERSTANDING SARA

  THEY RODE PAST THE MAIN ENTRANCE to the cemetery and steered into the small paved parking lot by the caretaker’s cottage. There were no cars outside, and the house looked quiet and empty.

  “What if Sara’s not here either?” Delilah asked.

  But before Henry could answer her, the front door swung open and Sara appeared, her long brown hair hanging on either side of her pale face, nearly hiding it. Her eyes darted over them furtively, then looked away.

  “You’ve been here before,” she said.

  “Hi, Sara,” Simon said, and Henry could tell he was trying to sound normal. “Yeah, we met you a few weeks ago. We wondered if you could help us look something up. We think our uncle may have purchased a grave plot here.”

  “He is in a better place,” Sara murmured.

  “Oh, brother,” Jack whispered to Henry. “Here we go again.”

  “Do you have somewhere you keep the records of who owns which plot?” Henry asked her.

  Sara looked at him and nodded, motioning them inside.

  “Everything is as it should be,” she said, as she led them into a small office area.

  “Here? In the file cabinet?” Simon asked, tapping on the front of a metal drawer.

  Sara nodded, taking a piece of paper from a stack on the desk and handing it to Henry. “It is not for us to know. We are not given answers, only questions.”

  Henry saw that the paper was a photocopied map of the cemetery, with each plot clearly delineated and numbered.

  “Well, we were kind of hoping for answers,” Simon told her, but Henry noticed that his voice was gentle. He seemed to be trying not to scare her. “Can we look through the files?”

  Sara opened the drawer to the file cabinet and turned to him expectantly.

  “Alphabetical!” Simon exclaimed. “Great. This shouldn’t be too hard.”

  “Great!” Sara echoed, clapping her hands.

  Delilah was watching Sara, her expression thoughtful. “Is your father coming home soon?” she asked.

  “Yes, yes,” Sara murmured, distractedly tugging at strands of her long hair. “He will come with the others.”

  Simon looked at her sharply. “The others? Who’s with him?”

  “The policeman and the librarian,” Sara said. “No one is ever really gone.”

  Yikes! Henry thought. They didn’t have much time.

  He studied the cemetery map. By orienting it correctly, he could see where the old section of graves was, where they had found the tombstone of Julia Elena Thomas. “We can also look things up by plot,” he told Simon, holding the map aloft. “We should see who purchased that Julia Thomas grave, and when.”

  “Good idea.” Simon was thumbing quickly through the manila folders that bulged from the file drawer. “Here are the C’s. Hang on.…”

  Henry felt a tingling beneath his skin, a combination of excitement and foreboding. What if it was there? What if Uncle Hank had purchased a cemetery plot even though he planned to be cremated? Did it mean he had left something for the boys here in the cemetery?

  On the other hand, what if it wasn’t there? Henry considered Uncle Hank’s message. He could think of nowhere else that so clearly constituted a place that was about death but would outlast death.

  “Here it is! Cormody!” Simon cried, and Henry felt a shiver flow through him.

  Simon pulled one folder from the tightly packed row and flipped it open, eagerly scanning the contents. “You were right, Hen. Uncle Hank did buy a plot.… Look—Henry Cormody.” Simon tapped his finger on a densely typed form, with Uncle Hank’s bold signature coursing across the bottom.

  “When did he buy it?” Delilah asked.

  Simon’s eyes raced over the page. “The purchase date is two years ago.”

  “Let’s go find it!” Jack shouted.

  “Do you have the number of the plot?” Henry asked. “I’ll look it up on the map.”

  “It’s thirty-one.”

  Henry flattened the map on the desk, and they all hunched over it, squinting at the tiny rectangles that covered the paper.

  “Here it is,” Henry said, pointing. The 31 marked a rectangle in a tight grid of plots in the far corner of the cemetery.

  “Things are never what they seem,” Sara Delgado murmured, still twisting her hair.

  Simon glanced at her. “It’s okay, Sara,” he said. “You helped us.”

  “There’s nothing anyone can do,” Sara whispered, sounding sad.

  Henry felt it too, suddenly; the accretion of losses. What had happened to all of these people whose names stuffed the file cabinet? They all had graves here. They all had ended up in this place. Well, all except Uncle Hank.

  Simon was frowning at the map. “Huh. That corner is where the old graves are, isn’t it?”

  “Where the Julia Thomas tombstone was?” Delilah studied the grid. “Can you look that one up?”

  “I’ll only be able to find it if she purchased it under her own name,” Simon said. “If she didn’t, we’d have to know the plot number for the tombstone and look it up in reverse.”

  “Try,” Henry urged.

  Simon returned to the file cabinet, thumbing through the manila folders. “There are a couple Thomases, but no Julia,” he said after a minute. “Wait … what was her husband’s name again?”

  Henry tried to remember. Was she still married when she was taking care of the ailing Jacob Waltz? Henry couldn’t recall what Emmett had said.

  “Emil,” Delilah said. Henry looked at her in astonishment, but she only shrugged. “I remember stuff like that.”

  “Emil Thomas!” Simon echoed, waving another folder aloft. “Let’s see which plot this is.” He opened the folder on the desk and smoothed the thin yellow paper, stained and marbled with age, splotched with fountain-pen ink. “Plot twenty-seven,” he said. “And it was purchased in 1889, so that would make sense. It’s right near Uncle Hank’s. Henry, mark them on the map.”

  Henry took a ballpoint pen from a canister on the desk and carefully drew circles around the two grave plots.

  “But why would she have TWO graves?” Jack demanded.

  Sara gathered the folders and started to replace them in the file drawer. “Everyone wants to know that.”

  The boys and Delilah looked at each other in surprise.

  “What do you mean?” Delilah asked her.

  Sara slammed the top drawer shut with a bang, holding Emil Thomas’s folder under one arm. “Two graves, two graves,” she murmured, almost as if she were reciting a rhyme. “Why did she have two graves?”

  Delilah tried again. “Who wants to know about Julia Thomas’s grave?”

  Sara laughed a strange, high laugh. “The one who’s buried there! She wants to know herself.”

  “Do you mean Julia Thomas, the librarian?” Henry asked carefully.

  Sara smiled at him. “Two graves, two graves. What’s in the second grave?”

  Delilah took her arm gently. “Sara.”

  But Sara pulled open the third drawer of the metal file cabinet and bent over it with the folder, wedging it back into the section of T’s.

  “They’ll find out tonight,” she said, straightening. She looked directly at Delilah. “The dead will be raised.”

  Henry felt a chill beneath his skin.

  “Look,” Sara said, swinging her hair back from her face, her eyes darting to the window. “Here they come now.”

  CHAPTER 17

  TOMBSTONES BY MOONLIGHT

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nbsp; THEY RUSHED OVER TO THE WINDOW, following Sara’s gaze through the dusty panes. Henry almost expected to see the long-dead occupants of the cemetery stirring up from their graves. But instead, he noticed in the distance a brown sedan trundling down the road toward the cemetery.

  “Who is that?” Simon turned to Sara. “Is it your father coming back?”

  “No one is ever really gone,” Sara said. She continued to tidy the office, moving absently around the desk.

  “Sara,” Delilah said, and again, Sara looked directly at her. “Are they coming here tonight? To dig up the grave of Julia Thomas? Is that what you meant?”

  “The dead will be raised,” Sara repeated.

  “We have to get out of here,” Henry said. “Before they see us.” He stared into Sara’s wild, dark eyes. “Please don’t tell anyone we were here. They…” He hesitated, not knowing how to explain why. It was her father, after all. Would she keep their visit a secret from him? He took a deep breath. “They wouldn’t understand.”

  “Nobody understands,” Sara said. “Nobody ever understands.”

  “Come on, let’s go,” Simon urged. “Thanks, Sara. Thanks for helping us find the graves.”

  Her brown eyes flickered toward him and she nodded.

  The boys and Delilah nearly trampled each other in their effort to get out of the office. Henry had the cemetery map in his hand, with faint blue circles around plot numbers thirty-one and twenty-seven. They ran to the parking area, where they’d dumped their bikes, and quickly threw their legs over the seats.

  “They’ll see us if we ride out the way we came,” Delilah said. “And what if Mr. Delgado has Julia Thomas and Officer Myers in the car with him?”

  “Go behind the house,” Simon said. “Quickly! We’ll ride through the field behind the cemetery.”

  “Not on the pavement?” Jack moaned. “That’s how I cut my knee!”

  “I know, Jack,” Simon answered impatiently. “But we don’t have any choice. Would you rather bump into the librarian?”

  “No,” Jack grumbled, following Simon over the rough terrain.

  Henry steered around a cactus and pedaled harder to keep his balance over the uneven desert. They rode along the wrought-iron fence that enclosed the cemetery, with the bright rows of tombstones marching past them. Henry could see the brown car continuing down the road to the house, almost to the driveway now. It was not until they turned behind the cemetery that he breathed a sigh of relief. Here was a border of high flowering bushes that fully concealed them.