The Fossil Hunter of Sydney Mines

by Jo Ann Yhard

  The

  Fossil

  Hunter of

  Sydney

  Mines

  Jo Ann Yhard

  Copyright © Jo Ann Yhard 2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission from the publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, permission from Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5.

  Nimbus Publishing Limited

  PO Box 9166

  Halifax, NS B3K 5M8

  (902) 455-4286 www.nimbus.ca

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Design: Jennifer Embree

  Front cover illustration: Gerry Cleary

  Author photo: Rhonda Basden

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Yhard, Jo Ann

  The fossil hunter of Sydney Mines / Jo Ann Yhard.

  ISBN 978-1-55109-760-2

  EPUB ISBN 978-1-55109-851-7

  I. Title. PS8647.H37F67 2010 jC813’.6 C2009-907321-8

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the Canada Council, and of the Province of Nova Scotia through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage for our publishing activities.

  For James, my best friend and sounding board. For Mom, who gave me the nudge and helped me find my path. And for Mary, my buddy and fellow explorer.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter

  1

  GRACE DOUBLE-CHECKED HER GEAR: FLASHLIGHT, MATCHES, pocket knife, caving rope, rock hammer, and gloves—all there. She grabbed her trusty Dalhousie University baseball cap. Her thoughts flipped back to the day her dad had given it to her. She squeezed her eyes tight and tried to stop the memory from coming. The strategy usually worked, but not this time. It had been three months ago, on her birthday—the worst day of her life.

  That morning he’d made her favourite breakfast, blueberry pancakes.

  “Here’s part one of your present,” he’d said after she’d blown out the candles on her pancakes and they’d eaten so much they could hardly move. He’d pulled out a baseball cap that was embroidered with the letters DAL, short for Dalhousie. It was identical to the one he’d worn every day. He had earned his doctorate in geology at Dalhousie and she was going to do the same.

  “I love it,” she’d said.

  Then he’d left for work with his trusty fossil bag over his shoulder, just like every other day. It had seemed so normal, but it was the last time she’d ever seen him.

  She had anxiously waited for him to come home that night. There had been a knock on the door and she’d run to open it. Her smile had quickly faded as she stared in shock at two police officers.

  Her mother had sent her upstairs.

  Shore Road. Car crash. Ocean. No body. The words had drifted up to her as she huddled in her room.

  Now, as she packed her fossil-hunting gear in her bag, she felt the sting of tears, just as she had that fateful evening. Shaking her head, Grace tried again to rattle the memory to the back of her brain—into that dark corner where she locked away all those memories. This time it obediently returned to its hiding place and she sighed with relief.

  KCHHHHH!

  Grace’s walkie-talkie squawked loudly. It must be Fred, finally. She’d told him to radio her as soon as he got home.

  “Fred, come in,” Grace said into the walkie-talkie. Within seconds, there was an answering crackle.

  “Roger, Grace. Fred here.”

  “Radio Jeeter and Mai. Tell them to meet us at Black Hole in thirty minutes.” Grace paused, trying to calm her stuttering heartbeat. “It’s an emergency!”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’ll fill you in later. Get moving, okay?”

  “Sure thing, Grace. Over.”

  Grace flung her battered backpack over her shoulder, grabbed her hat, and raced out the door. “Darn,” she muttered, making a U-turn back into the house. She ran to the kitchen counter and scribbled a note for her mother:

  Gone to Jessica’s to study. Math test. Back by nine. Yes, I ate already. Love, G.

  This should cover my tracks for a few hours, Grace thought. A shiver of guilt rippled through her as she re-read the note. Well, it wasn’t a total lie. She had eaten already. She slapped the note on the fridge and headed out the side door. Of course Mr. Stuckless was watching from his window.

  “Hi, Mr. Stuckless!” Grace waved and gritted a smile at their next-door neighbour as she passed by his window. Nosy old goat, she thought, backing her bike out of the garage. He must be stuck to that window. He probably has a portable toilet under him so he never has to move! She hopped on her bike and coasted slowly down her driveway.

  She picked up speed and was soon flying down Queen Street. Without a thought, she took her hands off the handlebars to put on her hat and reached up to tug her long blonde ponytail through the back of it. Hands dangling at her sides, she thought about what had happened that day. Her head was spinning. Who could have done it?

  Playing the day back in her mind, she tried to remember the last time she’d been at her locker. Had there been anyone hanging around? She couldn’t say for sure, but she didn’t think so.

  Grace was so lost in thought as she zipped down Pitt Street that she nearly missed the turnoff. Checking behind her to make sure no one was watching, she veered past a pair of rusted gates with a faded danger sign and onto a forgotten path that ran through an overgrown field called the heaps. Gangly alders and tall elephant ear plants immediately hid the streets from view.

  She cycled slowly and scanned the ground with her eyes, always on the lookout for sinkholes. They could appear anywhere, even here in the fields where the old coal wash plant used to be.

  Perched above a spiderweb of coal seams at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in Cape Breton, the town of Sydney Mines had a labyrinth of coal mining tunnels—both commercial and illegal bootleg tunnels—running beneath its surface. The commercial mines were hundreds of metres deep and stretched for kilometres out under the ocean, but they had been shut down for many years. They had been flooded with sea water long ago. The bootleg tunnels were usually shallower, and often ran directly from miners’ backyards into the coal seams. As the years went by, the miners had kept digging under their homes, making longer and wider tunnels to extract more coal. For many of the poverty-stricken residents of Sydney Mines, illegal mining had been the only way they could heat their homes and survive. The tunnels were long since abandoned, their coal extracted. Some of them had collapsed.

  Coal also meant fossils and there were plenty of those in Sydney Mines too, if you knew where to look. Grace had been a fossil hunter practically since sh
e could walk. Back then her dad used to call it hunting for dinosaur bones. He would take her to Lachman’s Beach, where it was flat and sandy. She’d found her first fern fossil there. Her dad had chipped it out of a large piece of broken slate with his rock hammer. Grace had proudly donated it to the fossil museum when it first opened.

  Several years ago, Grace had taken Mai and Fred to the museum to show them all the fossils she’d donated. As soon as Fred had seen her name on the “Donated by” plaque, he’d decided he wanted to have his name on a plaque too. They’d been fossil-hunting together ever since.

  Grace, Mai, and Fred had found this perfect clubhouse last year. They’d been cutting across the heaps one day, when Fred had almost fallen in a sinkhole. The hole had been created by the earth collapsing over an abandoned bootleg mine. When they’d climbed down to investigate, they’d been amazed to discover tunnels at the bottom they could walk through.

  Before they found Black Hole, Grace and her friends’ fossil hunts had been above ground at places like Lachman’s Beach, Florence Beach, Sutherland’s Corner, and the old strip mine at Halfway Road. Exploring the bootleg mining tunnels that were connected to Black Hole was way more exciting than hunting for fossils along the beaches. Many of the bootleg mines stretched all the way under the town. But rooting around in illegal caves was much more dangerous than fossil-hunting on the beaches. Grace knew it; they all did.

  Ducking behind a huge oak tree, Grace hid her bike behind some foliage and skidded down a nearby bank. At the bottom of the slope was a pile of old lumber. Grace carefully moved the pieces of wood aside, revealing the hidden entrance to Black Hole.

  Grace turned on the electric lantern she and her friends kept at the entrance and soon the inky walls of the mine were bathed in a soft glow. Deeper in the cave she could see the outline of the logs they had set up as benches and the rough wooden table they’d made. Fossils and other treasures they’d found on past expeditions were tucked in scattered hollows of the cavern walls.

  As Grace waited for her friends, the sounds of water gurgling in the brook that ran through the hideaway and the slow drip of water trickling down from the ceiling were the only noises interrupting the silence until—

  “Ouch!”

  “Good grief, Fred. Do you have to hit your head on that log every time?”

  “Come off it, Mai. It’s not every time.”

  Grace sighed in exasperation. “Will you guys keep it down?” she frowned at her bickering best friends as they entered the cave. “It’s supposed to be our secret headquarters!”

  “Well, blame Fred—he makes such a racket,” Mai said, brushing dirt from one of the logs before perching daintily on its edge. Her smooth caramel skin glowed in the shadowy light.

  “Where’s Jeeter?” asked Grace.

  “He said he’d be here later,” Fred replied, tossing his pack on the wooden table with one hand and hauling up his baggy jeans with the other. “I told him to come right away, but he didn’t seem too worried about it.”

  “What’s the big rush?” Mai asked. “Fred said it was an emergency, but I figured he must have been exaggerating, as usual.” She tucked her shiny black locks behind her ear and threw Fred a playfully mocking look.

  Grace grinned at Mai. It was so easy to get Fred going—it had been ever since they’d all become best friends a hundred years ago, way back in grade three.

  Fred muttered something about not being appreciated and began digging around in his backpack. His chunky build and round cheeks were telltale signs of his favourite hobby: munching on chocolate. He pulled out three bars and tossed one to Grace.

  She tossed it back. “Allergic to peanuts, remember? One bite and I’d be barfing my guts up.”

  “Oops, sorry,” he said, grabbing another. “So what’s going on, Grace?”

  Grace’s face turned serious as she ripped open her chocolate bar wrapper. Tension bubbled back to the surface as she answered. “You’re not going to believe this!”

  Mai leaned forward. “What?”

  Grace tossed a piece of paper onto the table. “I found this in my locker today.”

  Mai gasped and Fred’s mouth stopped mid-chew as they read the note:

  Chapter

  2

  “IT WASN’T AN ACCIDENT? DO YOU THINK THAT HAS SOMETHING to do with your dad?” Mai’s brown eyes blinked in surprise.

  Fred squirmed, looking troubled. “But Grace, it’s been almost three months since the car crash. Who would leave a note after all this time?”

  “What else could it mean?” Grace jumped up from her seat. “It never made sense—that he didn’t come right home that night, and that they never found…him.” She paced back and forth, chewing her thumbnail. “I mean, whoever left the note must know what happened. Maybe they’re too scared to show their face. We have to find out who left it!”

  “Piece of cake!” came a voice from the shadows.

  The distorted voice bounced eerily off the mine walls, startling Grace. She whirled around to see who had spoken.

  Fred stepped in front of her, his hands balled tightly into fists, ready to deal with the intruder.

  “We’ll hack into the school security cameras,” continued the mystery guest, stepping from the shadows into the lantern’s circle of light.

  “Oh, it’s you!” Grace relaxed and dropped back to her seat. “I thought you couldn’t come ’til later?”

  “Jeeter, we’re going to have to put a bell on you or something,” Mai giggled, smiling up at him.

  Fred stared at Mai’s upturned face. His hands were still clenched into fists. “You know how to get into the school security cameras?” he asked.

  “Geez, Fred,” Grace said. “Chill! I told you before—Jeeter’s a genius with computers.”

  Fred shot her a skeptical look as he turned around and stomped over to the brook, his curly black hair bouncing with every step. He reached down into the icy water and pulled out two dripping pop cans.

  “Genius, yeah right,” he mumbled, banging the cans down on the table. He yanked the tab off the first can and it emitted a loud warning hiss. As if in slow motion, a purple geyser exploded from the can and shot up into the air. It seemed to hover for a second before crashing down, covering Fred from head to toe in soda. Purple rivers ran down his face. Wordlessly, he handed the dripping can to Mai.

  “Uh…thanks, Freddo,” she said, taking a sip. “Mmm, grape. My favourite.” She wrinkled her nose as sticky pop trickled from the side of the can onto her hand.

  Fred’s scowl deepened.

  “Jeeter, what was that you said about the cameras?” Grace asked.

  “It’s no problem. I should be able to hack in on my dad’s computer at home.”

  “Hack in?” Fred said. “Maybe I’m not a genius, but I know computers, too. It’s not easy to hack into stuff.”

  “It might work,” Grace said.

  Mai slipped Fred a wet wipe from her backpack. “Thanks,” he said, finally showing a hint of a smile as he mopped his face.

  “I’ll get right on it,” Jeeter said. “Give me an hour, and then come over to my place, okay?”

  “We’ll come with you,” Grace said. But she was talking to air. Jeeter was already gone.

  “What’s his hurry?” Fred asked. “You know, Grace, I don’t think it was a good idea, letting him into our group.” Soda-soaked curls hung in his blue eyes and he brushed them away. “I mean, we don’t even really know the guy.”

  “Don’t be paranoid,” Grace replied. “He just moved here and he doesn’t really know anyone. I told you. His mom died last year. Give him a chance.”

  “Fine,” Fred mumbled. “I feel bad for him about his mom and all, but there’s just something weird about that guy…”

  Jeeter was standing on his front step when they arrived. “It worked!” he exclaimed as Grace, Fred, and Mai walked up the drive. “I told you it’d be a piece of cake!”

  As she followed Jeeter inside, Grace noticed how tall he was. With his
muscles and brush cut, he looked more like an action figure than a teenager only one year older than she was.

  There were boxes stacked in Jeeter’s living room, covering the couch and coffee table as if it was still moving day. But the basement was a different story. It was lit up with blinking lights and glowing screens from several computers. One of them caught her eye—it showed a map of mine sites around Cape Breton. She’d seen paper ones just like it in her dad’s office.

  “Where does your dad work, anyway?” Fred asked, echoing Grace’s thoughts. “He lets you use all this?”

  “Roger’s never around. I do what I want.”

  “You call your dad by his first name?” Fred said. “That’s weird.”

  “You want weird, look in the mirror.”

  “Knock it off, you guys,” Grace said. “Hey, there’s my locker!” She pointed to an image on one of the screens.

  “How did you hack into the cameras?” Mai asked.

  “It wasn’t hard. Here, I’ll start the feed over at the beginning.” Jeeter sat at the terminal and pounded on the keys.

  The picture was dark and grainy. First there was nothing but an empty hallway. The hall was usually filled with students laughing and banging locker doors. Grace never knew there was a camera watching everything they did. It was kind of creepy.

  She gasped as a person suddenly appeared on the screen, walking toward the lockers. He was dressed in jeans and a hoodie, with the hood pulled up over his head. He took something out of his pocket and slid it into Grace’s locker. Then he backed up and the screen went blank.

  “That’s no good,” Grace sighed in frustration. “You can’t even see his face.”

  “Let’s watch it again,” Jeeter said. “Maybe we missed something.”

  Jeeter started the video from the beginning. Grace, Mai, and Fred leaned in close to get a better look.

  “Hey, I think something fell out of his pocket!” Fred leaned forward and touched the computer screen. “Right there!”

  “Fred!” Grace yelped. “Hands off! I can’t see.”

  “Oops, sorry,” he said, hastily removing his hand. A purple fingerprint was smeared across the monitor.