The Virginia Mysteries Collection: Books 1-3

by Steven K. Smith

  “Come on!” Derek called to his brother as he scampered down the rocks. Sam just stood there frozen with bulging eyes, thinking that the new boys or a bear were going to emerge from around the rock any second.

  “Sam! Run!” Derek yelled again. He reached up and tugged his brother’s arm, practically pulling him down the rock staircase. They tore around the line of trees and down the slope to the creek as fast as they could without tripping over branches and stones. The shouts of their pursuers echoed in the distance, but they didn’t dare turn around and look. Instead, they splashed right into the creek, not worrying about finding a stone to leap across, and soaking their sneakers and clothes. Sam didn’t have time to think about snakes.

  “Stop!” they heard behind them. But by now the brothers were stomping through the undergrowth and moving back east along the creek towards home. Sharp branches and leaves smacked them in the face and arms as they hurtled through the brush. Derek could feel his elbow burning from where he banged it against the rock, and Sam had a cramp in his side that made him feel like he was going to throw up. But they didn’t stop. They just kept running.

  As they neared the part of the creek that ran behind their house, Derek realized that he couldn’t hear growling or yelling any more. He saw the spot where the trees parted and the green grass of their backyard began. They charged up the slope and around to the cover of their front yard.

  As they jumped up the porch steps, their mom opened the door. The two boys nearly knocked her over as they came spilling through the threshold, dirty and dripping wet. They started babbling about attackers and bears and nearly being killed, but they weren’t making much sense. Mom saw blood on Derek’s elbow, and she ordered them both out onto the deck to take off their wet shoes and clothes while she got some disinfectant and a bandage for his arm.

  Out of breath, the boys didn’t have the strength to argue, so they headed out the back door onto the elevated deck. Neither spoke as they sat and removed the muddy shoes that clung to their wet socks like suction cups. Both just stared off into the distance, replaying in their minds what had just happened. They were too astonished to know what to say, their hearts still beating fast in their chests.

  Sam picked up his shoes and walked over to the railing. He pulled off his wet shirt and hung it over the wood. He felt in his pocket for the coin he had found in the creek and was glad to see that it was still there.

  Derek looked down over the yard to where the trail began in the woods and gasped.

  Sam saw his brother’s pale face. “What’s wrong?”

  Derek didn’t answer, but when Sam followed his brother’s stare to the woods, his heart sank. Under the branches a few feet into the tree line loomed a dark shadow and a pair of eyes peering out from the trees.

  “Okay, come over here, you two. I found the box with the first aid kit!” Mom announced triumphantly.

  Her voice startled them as she opened the back door and walked out on the deck with the antiseptic and bandages in hand. Both boys nearly jumped out of their skin.

  “Mom! Shhh!” they shrieked and ducked down behind the railing.

  “What?” Mom asked, surprised at their panic as she walked over.

  “Look!” whispered Sam as he peered out from behind his wet shirt hanging on the railing.

  “Look at what?” asked Mom.

  “By the woods, over there,” said Sam, pointing towards the trail. But when he peeked up and looked out at the woods to show her, there was nothing there.

  THREE

  The Coin

  After the chase through the woods, Derek and Sam decided to stay indoors for a little while. Not that they were scared, they just wanted to take a break. Okay, admitted Sam, that first night in bed after the lights had gone out, maybe he was a little scared. When he closed his eyes in the dark, he could still feel himself running back home with the leaves and branches all a blur around them. Derek had tried to describe what had happened to Dad earlier that night, but when he talked about it, the words didn’t come out right. It sounded to Dad like they had played a game of tag or something in the woods with some friends.

  “Why don’t you just stay away from that part of the woods for a while,” Dad had counseled. That seemed like a good idea to Sam.

  After breakfast, Sam went up to his room and pulled the coin he’d found in the creek from his desk drawer. It was dark colored but clean from the water. He held the old coin up under the light.

  On the front, it looked like a regular penny. Abraham Lincoln’s picture was in the middle. Honest Abe, he’d heard him called. Along the top edge, he could just barely make out the words In God We Trust. Sam thought he remembered seeing that on a lot of coins, so that part wasn’t different. To the left of Honest Abe was the word Liberty. He’d heard that word in the Pledge of Allegiance in the mornings at school but wasn’t really sure what it meant. He’d ask Derek.

  The last thing he noticed on the front of the coin was a date. 1931. That seemed pretty old. Maybe even older than Dad! Sam would have to ask Dad when he was born, he couldn’t remember.

  He turned the coin over and saw what had gotten his attention in the woods. This part looked different than the pennies he’d seen before. ONE CENT was written across the middle of the coin, and underneath in smaller letters it said, United States of America. Some odd-looking markings were along the sides and at the top were some tiny letters that he couldn’t make any sense of.

  He shook a newer penny out of his piggy bank and inspected it. The back had a picture of a building. He was pretty sure it was the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. They’d visited it on one of their house-hunting trips to Virginia that spring. That made sense, thought Sam, since Abraham Lincoln was on the front.

  Sam went back to those words that he couldn’t understand. He noticed it was on the newer penny as well. He tried to read what they said, but the letters were small and rubbed worn. “E….Pluri…bus….U…num. I wonder what that means?” he said aloud.

  “What what means?” asked Derek as he walked into the bedroom. “What are you looking at?” Sam jumped at Derek’s voice. He was always sneaking up and surprising him.

  “I’m trying to read the words on this old coin. It has strange letters on it that I don’t understand. Look, it’s on this new penny too.”

  “It looks like a different language,” said Derek. “Let’s ask Dad if he knows what it is.”

  Sam picked up both the coins and they headed downstairs. Their dad was working in his office, next to the living room.

  “Dad, we need your help!” called Derek as they reached the bottom of the stairs and bounded into his office. He was filling up an empty shelf with books from a box next to the desk.

  “We have this old coin and can’t read what it says. It looks like Chinese or something!” exclaimed Sam.

  “Chinese? Well that seems unlikely,” smiled Dad, as he set down a book. “Let’s see what you have here.” Sam handed him the old and the new coins.

  “Look, I think these are both pennies, but this one is really old. It says it’s from 1931. Is that when you were born?”

  “1931?” laughed Dad, making a face like he was insulted. “No Sam, I’m not that old, thank you very much. 1931 is ten years before Grandpa was born. You’ll have to ask him if that’s old or not and see what he says! Where are those words you couldn’t read?”

  “Right here,” replied Sam, and he flipped the coin over and showed his dad the small letters. “It says ‘A Power Bus Oven’ or something crazy like that.”

  Dad squinted at the coin. “I may not have been born in 1931, but that is still some very small print. Let me get my magnifying glass.” He walked over to the closet and pulled a box off the shelf.

  “Here we go,” he said and sat down at his desk with the magnifying glass and leaned forward under the light. “E Pluribus Unum. That’s Latin, boys. It means “Out of Many, One.”

  “Out of Many, One,” repeated Sam. “What in the world does that mean? Why
would they put that on a coin?”

  “Maybe it means that many coins should come to one person, like me, so I can be rich!” suggested Derek.

  “I don’t think so, Derek,” laughed Dad. “I think it has something to do with our country being made of different parts but yet still all the same nation. I’m sure you’ll learn about it in history class soon.

  “But look here,” continued Dad, “I see that this is a wheat penny.”

  “A wheat penny? What is a wheat penny?” asked Sam.

  “Is it made of wheat?” asked Derek. “Here, let me eat it, I’m hungry!”

  “No, Derek,” said Dad. “It’s a bit hard to see on this one because it’s so old, but if you look carefully under my magnifying glass, you can see two stalks of wheat along the sides of the coin. That’s why they call it a wheat penny. Here, let me find a picture of one on the Internet so you can better see what it looks like.”

  Dad did a quick Google search for “wheat penny” on his laptop and pulled up a screen full of coins that looked much shinier than the one he held in his hand. He clicked on one of the pictures to make it bigger. Just as he had described, there were two stalks of wheat, one on each side of the coin.

  “So that’s why they call it a wheat penny,” said Sam. “Pretty cool.”

  “How much is it worth?” asked Derek. “Five million dollars?”

  “Probably not,” said Dad, “but let’s see.” He clicked on a link to coin values and scrolled down until he came to the year 1931. “If this was in perfect – or what’s called mint condition, it could be worth up to five dollars. Do you think this is in perfect shape like the ones on the computer?”

  “No, this one is pretty old and worn,” moaned Derek. “How much is that worth?”

  “Well,” said Dad, “it looks like ours is worth about thirty-five cents, which is not so bad when you consider that it used to be worth only one cent. Wow, look here, it says that there were several different kinds of pennies over the years. Wheat pennies were minted, which means made, between 1909 to 1956, when they changed to the Lincoln penny that we have today.”

  “It has the Lincoln Memorial building on the back,” added Sam.

  “That’s right, very good, Sam,” said Dad.

  “What came before the wheat penny, Dad?” asked Derek.

  “Let’s see,” said Dad. “Before the wheat penny was the Indian Head cent from 1859 to 1909.”

  “Does that one have an Indian on the front?” asked Derek.

  “Actually,” said Dad, scrolling through the page on the computer screen, “it says here that the coin doesn’t actually have a picture of an Indian, or what we call a Native American, but a picture of Lady Liberty wearing a feather headdress.”

  “Lady Liberty?” said Sam. “Who in the world is that? Benjamin Franklin’s girlfriend? This is getting confusing.”

  “Are they valuable?” asked Derek.

  “Not all of them,” answered Dad, “it depends on the year and their condition. Some can be worth just a couple of dollars. But here, look at this one – the 1877 Indian Head cent is one of the rarest coins and can be worth up to $5,000.”

  “Wow!” shouted Sam. “That’s a lot of money! Do you have any Indian Head cents?”

  “No,” said Dad, “I don’t think we have any of those. I’d guess only coin collectors and museums would have a coin like that.”

  Just then Dad’s phone rang. “I have to answer this, boys. We can talk more about this later.”

  Sam picked up the coins and the boys walked into the hallway. “Those pennies are cool. I wonder why the wheat penny was out there in the woods. Do you think there’s any more?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Derek, “but I want an Indian Head cent.”

  “I’d go back and look,” said Sam, “but it was over by that boulder and those kids and the bear! I don’t want to run into them again.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” said Derek. “It couldn’t have been a bear. Why would those kids have been playing so close to a bear?”

  “No, they yelled ‘bear!’ I heard them,” declared Sam. “I don’t know why, but I heard them say it. And there was definitely an animal chasing us. I’m not going back.”

  “We’ll see,” said Derek as the doorbell rang.

  The boys walked up to the glass next to the front door and saw Mr. Haskins, their neighbor, standing outside. Derek opened the door.

  “Hello, Mr. Haskins.”

  “Hi, boys,” Mr. Haskins answered in a crusty old voice. “I’ve got some of your mail that the post office put in my box by mistake.”

  He took a couple of envelopes out of his jacket. It was the middle of summer, but for some reason, old people seemed to always dress like it was winter, noticed Sam. He thought Mr. Haskins must be a hundred years old.

  “Were you born in 1931?” Sam blurted out before he could think better of it. Mr. Haskins was old, maybe he knew about the coins.

  “1931!” Mr. Haskins grinned. “No, I was born in 1935. Born right in that house you see there in front of you.” He gestured over his shoulder at his house. It seemed even older than theirs. “We didn’t need fancy hospitals like you kids are born in today. Come to think of it, my older brother, Harold Haskins, was born in 1931, but he died when he was only eight.”

  He leaned in close to the boys and looked them right in the eye. Sam wished he hadn’t talked to the old man. Mr. Haskins was creepy.

  “Died right there in those woods behind your house. Fell in a hole.” Mr. Haskins paused a moment like he was going to say more about the holes but didn’t. He looked at Sam and said in an eerie voice, “How old are you, son?”

  Sam gulped. “Eight,” he whispered, and felt a shiver go down his spine. He was so nervous that he dropped the penny out of his hand and bent down to pick it up.

  “Hey, what ya got there?” asked Mr. Haskins. “Have a coin, do ya? Let me see that.”

  Sam handed him the coin. Derek looked over his shoulder towards Dad’s office for some assistance, but he was still on the phone, gesturing with his hands and looking down at some papers.

  Mr. Haskins held the coin up. “Well I’ll be! I haven’t seen one of these for a while. You’ve got yourself a wheat penny. Where’d you find that, boy?”

  “In the woods,” Sam muttered and looked down at his shoes. He saw his lace was untied. He wondered if Mr. Haskins would notice if he wandered off to tie it and didn’t come back. He was sorry that he’d brought up 1931 in the first place.

  “He found it in the creek yesterday,” said Derek, trying to help his younger brother.

  “Must’a been thirty years since I held one of these,” Mr. Haskins continued, still looking at the old coin. “I wonder if this came from the…nah, couldn’t have been.”

  “Came from what?” asked Sam. He was now suddenly more interested in Mr. Haskins than his shoe.

  “Oh, back when I was a teenager, there was a big excitement around these parts when someone broke into the Virginia Museum and stole a collection of rare coins. It was all over the newspapers. The coppers interviewed a whole bunch of people, including the family that lived in this house of yours – Davis was their name, I think. Seems the man who lived here worked as a security guard at the museum and they suspected that he might be involved. Richard Davis, that was his name. Odd fella. He’d been in prison or something suspicious like that. But they never could prove that he took the coins and eventually the police gave up. Most folks ‘round here forgot about it and got on with their normal business.”

  “What happened to the coins?” asked Derek.

  “Never found ‘em. Oh, every once in a while, some yahoo would claim they found them and haul in a whole bunch of old coins, but they weren’t worth much and weren’t the museum coins.”

  “Hello, Jonas.” The boys jumped and turned around as their dad approached behind them.

  “Hi, Bill. Brought some of your mail that the daggone postman delivered to me by mistake. Lived here ove
r eighty years and they still can’t give me the right mail. I tell you what!” Mr. Haskins complained. “I was just giving your boys some local history lessons.”

  He turned to leave but looked back at Sam. “Good luck with your wheat penny, son. You stay out of trouble now. And watch out for them holes,” he said in that creepy voice again and smiled. Sam gulped and watched him slowly walk away.

  FOUR

  The Storm

  That night, there was a big storm. Derek woke up to a crash so loud that he thought the ground had been hit by a wrecking ball. The whole house shook and rattled. He pulled his covers up over his nose, leaving just enough space so his eyes could peek out.

  Lightning flashed through the bedroom windows like a spotlight. For a moment he could see everything in his room like it was the middle of the day. But then the light vanished and he was surrounded by darkness again. BOOM! Another thunderbolt clapped down as if the huge trees in the woods were tumbling to the ground. It was the angels in heaven at the bowling alley, Mom had told him.

  Derek leaned carefully over the railing of his bunk bed and looked down at the bed below.

  “Sam!”

  No answer.

  A flash of lightning illuminated the room once more and Derek saw his brother’s face peacefully sleeping beneath him. Sam could sleep through anything. He never woke up during thunderstorms. Derek figured they could have an earthquake or even an alien invasion and Sam wouldn’t know the difference. It was crazy. Derek woke up at the slightest noise. It just wasn’t fair.

  He hated thunderstorms. He always had, and even though he was older now and knew that nothing bad was going to happen, he still hated everything about them. The rain, the wind, the lightning, the thunder – all of it. Dad joked that he should be a weatherman. A meteorologist, he had called it – a type of scientist that studies the weather. Definitely not, Derek had responded.