by Elise Broach
“This is a good place for ghosts,” Jack whispered, glancing around.
Henry kept his eyes on the path. He couldn’t bear to look at the faces of the tombstones, as he marched silently alongside them. He was afraid he might see other names he recognized.
Then they had reached the fence. Beyond its spiked railing, Henry could barely discern the blackness of Superstition Mountain, a blurred mystery. They would be back there soon enough. He sensed that it was waiting for them.
* * *
After a rushed good-bye to Delilah at the end of her street, the boys pedaled furiously back home, swinging their bikes into the driveway just as their father was carrying the recycling bin out to the street.
“There you are!” he exclaimed. “Your mother just called Delilah’s house looking for you.”
“We rode out by the cemetery,” Simon told him promptly.
“At night?” Mr. Barker raised his eyebrows. “That sounds spooky.”
“It was!” Jack declared. “But we didn’t see any ghosts,” he added, disappointed.
“Oh well,” Mr. Barker said. “Maybe next time.”
Mrs. Barker was less understanding. “It’s almost nine thirty!” she scolded. “If you can’t make it home by nine o’clock, we’ll have to make your curfew earlier.”
As with many parental edicts, this made little sense to Henry. If they couldn’t make it home by nine, it seemed obvious that their curfew should be LATER, not earlier. But the parental mind was a contrary thing and did not often work logically.
“Okay, okay,” Simon said. “Sorry! We were riding around and lost track of time.”
“I don’t like you riding your bikes so late at night, either,” Mrs. Barker said, piling on admonishments. “You could get hit by a car.”
“We were out by the cemetery,” Simon assured her. “There weren’t any cars.”
“That’s even worse. What if something had happened to one of you? How would you have gotten help?”
There was no winning, Henry decided as his mother herded them down the hallway to their bedrooms.
Minutes later, they crowded around the bathroom sink, finally alone.
“So when are we going back to the cemetery to dig up the grave?” Simon asked. “Tomorrow?”
“No!” Jack protested. “We have to take the gold back first! Before I die,” he added glumly.
Simon rolled his eyes. “Jack, listen. It’s been weeks since you took the gold, and you’ve been fine. I’m pretty sure a couple more days won’t matter.”
“You’re not the one with the curse on you,” Jack grumbled.
“Neither are you!” Simon exploded. “Come on. Don’t you want to find out what’s buried in ol’ Uncle Hank’s grave? What if it’s money? Or jewels? Or gold we can actually keep?” Simon’s eyes lit up and he rubbed his hands together. “We could be RICH. Legit rich! And it’ll be so easy, ’cuz we won’t have to worry about how to get the gold off the mountain.”
“Well…” Henry hesitated. “Delilah’s right. The last time we thought that, it was a coffin with a dead cat in it.”
“Which just means that Jacob Waltz’s gold is somewhere else!” Simon said. “And we could be the ones to find it.”
“You don’t care if I DIE,” Jack protested, enraged. “All you care about is getting rich.” He balled up his fist and slugged Simon in the arm.
“Owww!” Simon yelped. He whipped around and grabbed Jack’s shoulders, thumping him against the closed bathroom door.
“Hey, stop!” Henry whispered urgently, wedging himself between them. “Or Mom will come back here and wonder what’s going on.”
As Jack continued to swing his fists in Simon’s direction, Henry tried to reason with Simon. “Come on, Simon. We both promised him we’d take the gold back to the mine on Sunday. Remember? When Mom and Dad go to the art museum with Aunt Kathy and Emmett.”
“But that’s two whole days away!” Simon protested. “I don’t want to wait that long to go back to see what’s in Uncle Hank’s grave.”
“I know,” Henry said. “But it’d be hard to go to the cemetery before then. We can’t go during the day or someone might see us digging up the grave. And Mom and Dad won’t let us stay out so late at night again. Plus, when Mr. Delgado sees that Julia Thomas’s grave is all filled in, he’s going to be suspicious … so we should stay away for a while.”
Aggravated, Simon clawed his hand through his hair. “I told you we shouldn’t have put the box back!”
Henry shrugged. “Well, it’s too late to change that. So we might as well go up the mountain and return the gold. Right?”
Simon sighed. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Yeah,” Jack added, kicking Simon in the shin for good measure. Simon glared at him, but their mother knocked on the door before he could retaliate.
“Boys, hurry up! It’s time for bed.”
Docilely, they filed out of the bathroom and headed toward their separate bedrooms. As Henry crawled inside the cool sheets, his mind was racing. He opened the drawer of his nightstand and felt around for Uncle Hank’s note. In the dim glow of the nightlight he read again the words that his great-uncle had written to him before he died:
Dear Henry,
Your name is my name. It will outlast death—the way a place can be about death but outlast death. If you believe that, you’ll know where to find something I left for you and your brothers. Live well, Henry.
Love, Uncle Hank
Carefully, he folded the note and returned it to the drawer. Live well, Henry. Was it a wish? Or an order?
CHAPTER 21
RETURN TO SUPERSTITION MOUNTAIN
IT TOOK NO SMALL AMOUNT of persuasion on the boys’ part to get their parents to let them stay home while Mr. and Mrs. Barker, Aunt Kathy, and Emmett drove into Phoenix to spend the day at the art museum. Mrs. Barker had been looking forward to a family outing all week; Mr. Barker wanted the boys along so that he would have an audience for his funny comments about modern art. But when Simon promised that they would clean up the garage, Henry could tell they were both wavering. Since their move to Uncle Hank’s house at the beginning of the summer, the garage had remained the last frontier of disorder. Moving boxes were piled high against the rear wall, some of them partially and messily unpacked, some of them still taped shut. The garage was Mr. Barker’s domain, so Mrs. Barker left it alone. Since Mr. Barker had no interest or investment in any particular system of organization, it was the one area of the house where the boys were given free rein.
“Like goes with like,” Mr. Barker advised. “That’s all I ask.”
“What does that mean?” Jack asked. “We put the things that we like together?”
Henry had a brief vision of the jai alai set being grouped with the hammer, because Jack was fond of both of those. “No, Jack,” Henry said. “It means we put things that are”—he struggled for the right word—“homogeneous together.”
Mr. Barker laughed, ruffling Henry’s curls. “Exactly! Homogeneous, not hodgepodgeneous. Think you can handle that?”
“Sure,” Simon said expansively. “Leave it to us! It’s going to look great.”
“Well”—Mrs. Barker sighed—“I would be thrilled to have the garage in order. But I do wish we could all go to the museum together! I feel like we’ve spent the whole summer moving into this house. I wanted us to have some fun.”
Henry marveled that his mother’s perception of the summer could be so different from his own. All they’d done was move in? Moving in had been the least of the summer’s preoccupations! They’d climbed Superstition Mountain three times already. They’d discovered a long-lost gold mine. They’d uncovered a curse and a conspiracy and Uncle Hank’s true love. It suddenly occurred to Henry that he and his parents lived parallel lives, running similar courses but never quite intersecting … in the same place, with the same props, but filled with vastly different experiences.
“We should be back by five o’clock,” Mrs. Barker said. “Ple
ase be careful unpacking the boxes! Some of them are heavy.”
“We will,” the boys chorused, trying not to appear too eager for their parents to leave.
* * *
Delilah showed up right on schedule, and for the next two hours they all worked feverishly to put the garage in order. Jack was in charge of opening and emptying boxes, a job he performed noisily and with gusto, ripping the packing tape, emptying the contents onto the garage floor, and then crushing the cardboard cartons and stacking them. Henry sorted the garden spades, tennis rackets, rakes, and hoses into their correct groups, and Delilah arranged them on the garage shelves and against the walls. Simon’s sole responsibility was their father’s tool bench, where he planted himself to create some kind of order out of the stupefying array of wrenches, bolts, and drill bits.
“Keep up the pace!” he commanded periodically. “We need to start up the mountain by eleven. It’s going to be really hot.”
“I got extra water,” Delilah said.
“Yeah, so did I.”
Henry could see Simon’s black backpack and Delilah’s pink one leaning against the side of the house, filled with the necessary provisions for their climb, along with a garden spade, rope, and flashlight. He was thirsty already, soaked in sweat, and covered in a light film of grime from the unpacking. But they were almost finished. Out on the driveway, Jack was crushing the last moving box, jumping vigorously on the cardboard.
“I’ll sweep,” Henry offered. “Then we can go.” He took the large janitor’s broom and pushed it back and forth across the concrete floor, clearing the dust and debris.
“Hey, this looks really good!” Jack declared in surprise. “We did a GREAT job!”
Henry had to admit the garage was transformed. The moving boxes were gone. The walls and shelves were as orderly as a hardware store’s. Mr. Barker’s bench full of tools in their cubbies and cases gleamed with possibility, and the floor was swept clean.
“Mom will be happy,” he said. “And it didn’t even take us that long.”
“That’s because I helped,” Delilah said nonchalantly.
Normally, Henry might have minded her smugness. But he was beginning to realize that when Delilah bragged about one of her skills or personality traits, she tended to be right … and that made it seem less like bragging and more like an observation of fact.
In a matter of minutes, they washed off their faces and hands, used the bathroom, took big swigs of water at the kitchen sink, and slathered themselves with sun lotion, filling the house with a pungent odor of mango and coconut. Jack had put his collection of gold flakes in a clear plastic sandwich bag, which he now held up to the sunlight pouring through the sliding glass doors. The gold flashed and sparkled.
He sighed. “I wish we didn’t have to take them back,” he said morosely.
“Oh, SHEESH, Jack,” Simon snapped. “All you’ve been saying for days is that we had to take them back to the gold mine as soon as possible! Make up your mind.”
Jack’s face clouded. “I said that ’cuz I don’t want to be DEAD,” he groused. “But I still wish I could keep my gold.”
Henry put his arm around Jack’s shoulders. “The important thing is that you found the gold mine,” he said. “That’s what really matters. Even without the gold, you’ll always know you did that.”
“I guess,” Jack mumbled. “But I want to keep my gold.”
He was still complaining about it as they grabbed the backpacks and began their journey through the foothills toward the craggy wilderness of Superstition Mountain.
* * *
The first part of the climb was so familiar to Henry that it passed quickly—a blur of shrubbery and spiked grasses, the occasional stately cactus, the vivid pockets of purple and yellow wildflowers. As the ground became rockier and steeper, he noticed the remnants of their past exploration: a few of the sticks Simon had propped in the sand to mark the path the very first time they’d ascended the mountain, back in June. After a while, he turned around and saw the roofs of the houses in their neighborhood dwindling to insignificance, like the tiny green roofs of the houses in the board game Monopoly, which he and his brothers sometimes played. The mountain began to assert itself, stern in its silence.
“It almost looks like it might rain,” Delilah said once, stopping to rest for a minute against a boulder. The sun was a blazing sphere high above them, but the sky had a strange layering of clouds that periodically muted the light.
“Yeah,” Simon agreed. “I don’t think it’s rained since we got here. Has it?”
Henry couldn’t remember it raining over the summer. He thought of the heavy summer rains in Chicago and the lush greenery of their old backyard. It was so dry here, a place constitutionally opposed to water.
They kept climbing. Occasionally a small brown lizard flitted out from under a bush and studied them with its bright eyes. The only sounds were the chattering of birds, the crunch of their feet on the rocks, and their noisy breathing as the slope became steeper. Even Jack was quiet from the exertion.
Henry walked behind Delilah, thinking about their last trip up the mountain, when she’d struggled to keep up with all of them, her leg in a cast.
“Does your leg hurt at all?” he asked her.
“Nope!” she said, smiling back at him. “It’ll be much easier and faster for me to climb down into the canyon. Maybe I can even look for my dad’s compass.”
Henry remembered so vividly the moment when the compass had slipped from her grasp and she had lunged after it, tumbling down the canyon wall and breaking her leg.
“I really hope we find it,” he said.
“Yeah, me too. But I kind of doubt we will. An animal could have taken it by now, or it could be buried under something.”
Henry was surprised at how cheerful she sounded. “You don’t seem so … worried about it anymore,” he said, watching her.
Delilah sighed. “Well, I would still really like to find it, ’cuz it was my dad’s. All the things that were his, when I touch them, I think of his hands touching them … you know?”
Henry nodded. It was how he felt when he held the letter that Uncle Hank had written to him, the sense of his great-uncle’s spirit flowing through the paper and into his hands.
“But then,” Delilah continued, “I thought that my dad wouldn’t want me to be upset about losing the compass. He would say, ‘It’s just a thing, it doesn’t matter.’ Things don’t matter as much as people do.”
“No,” Henry agreed. “But they’re a way of remembering people.”
Delilah nodded. “That’s why it would be great to find it. But I don’t need to find it anymore, the way I did at the beginning of the summer.”
Henry smiled at her. “That’s good.”
“Hey,” Delilah said suddenly, stopping.
“What?” Henry almost bumped into her.
“Did you see that?”
“What?”
Delilah frowned, squinting into the patchwork of bushes and boulders. “I thought I saw something.”
Henry followed her gaze into the thickets of gray-green vegetation along the path. “Maybe it was a bird?”
Delilah shook her head. “Something bigger than that.”
A little ahead of them, Simon stopped too, unzipping his backpack. “Let’s take a water break,” he suggested.
“Yeah, I’m thirsty!” Jack snatched a bottle of water from Simon’s pack.
They gathered around a large reddish rock, unscrewing the caps of their water bottles and dousing their parched mouths. The water was still cool from the kitchen tap, and as it poured over Henry’s lips and into the collar of his shirt, he marveled that something so ordinary could taste so good.
Delilah continued to scrutinize the bushes uneasily.
“What’s the matter?” Simon asked her.
She twisted her braid in one hand. “I think someone’s following us.”
Henry turned to her in surprise. “You mean Officer Myers and the other
s?”
Simon came to stand beside her, scanning the dense shrubbery on the side of the trail. “Did you see someone?”
“I saw something,” Delilah said. “In the bushes. And…” She hesitated. “I can feel it.”
Henry looked around, at the prickly cactuses and red-brown boulders and stunted trees. The mountain’s heavy stillness, its tense waiting quality, was utterly recognizable to him now.
Jack shrugged. “It always feels creepy up here.”
“It’s more than that,” Delilah said, her eyes darting over the landscape.
“I checked to make sure nobody was following us when we left home,” Simon said. “But they’ve done that before and we didn’t see them. So, okay, we’ll keep an eye out. We’re almost to the canyon anyway.”
Delilah held on to her water bottle, but they put the others away. Henry and Simon took the backpacks, hoisting them on their shoulders as they resumed climbing.
They had gone only a short distance when Delilah grabbed Henry’s arm.
“Look!” she whispered, clutching her water bottle against her chest. “Over there.”
CHAPTER 22
“SOMEONE IS WATCHING US…”
DELILAH POINTED into the brambly undergrowth. This time, Henry did see something—a shadow of movement, dappled by sunlight. And he felt it now too: the mysterious weight of someone’s gaze on him. Despite the heat, he shivered.
“Simon,” he said softly. “We’re being followed.”
Simon dropped his backpack in the dirt and walked over to the edge of the trail. “Who’s there?” he shouted.
This was a bold move, Henry thought. What were they going to do if somebody answered? Especially if it was Officer Myers, with his gun?
But the woods were silent. “I can feel it. Someone is watching us,” Delilah said, turning to Henry.
“I know,” Henry said. A thin electric tension pulsed through the air. It was more than the strange atmosphere of the mountain; it felt closer and more personal.
