by Iacopo Bruno
But the blood drained from his face until he looked like a freckled ghost. Then Tom turned and ran off, just like I knew he would.
Slapping my legs for courage, I faced the rear of the cave and approached the two tunnels. The left tunnel was a dead end ten feet in. Backtracking, I took the right fork, feeling along the jagged walls to keep steady. Charlie walked a few paces ahead after a little prompting. There was a drip-drip-drip coming from somewhere deeper in the darkness. I filled the oil lamp from the bottle in my sack and lit its wick.
“Let’s make this quick, Charlie.”
But after a time, the walls got closer together and the ceiling started to slope downward. The cave smelled sickly sweet and mildewy, almost like body odor mixed with . . . I wasn’t sure what. Charlie slowed down, finally stopping at another intersection.
“Come on, boy,” I said, but Charlie wouldn’t follow me any farther. He just growled and whined, gripping the back of my overalls with his teeth. He pulled at me, but I yanked free and gave him a little scolding.
“Now, stop that! You don’t have to go down there, but I’m going.”
The dog whimpered and went for my pant leg again.
“Go on,” I said, shoving him. I pointed firmly back the way we came. “It’s okay, boy. You just go wait by the entrance.” I grabbed the wilted daisies from his collar and stuck them under Jon’s shirt, right next to my pounding heart. Keep me safe, brother. “I’ll be just fine.”
Charlie let out a mournful howl.
“Shh! Now go! I said I’ll be fine. I promise.”
But I shouldn’t have promised. As I watched the tail end of my guard dog wiggle away, my mind connected the dots and realized what the sickly sweet smell was.
It was the same odor that had risen from Joe Harper’s cigarette—the cigarette made from expensive tobacco that he found behind the school. Reed’s brand tobacco. The same brand of tobacco that was stolen from the dry-goods store by thieves who were also fond of sweets.
I listened for noises and crept quietly ahead, certain of nothing except the fact that each step put me closer to the Pritchards’ hideout.
Chapter Fifteen
Pritchards, a dead cat, and a dead Pritchard
After just a few turns, a side tunnel led to a cavern the size of a rich man’s parlor. The Pritchards must have been smoking cigarettes like crazy, because rolling papers and tobacco were all over the place. I picked up a tin and saw the Reed’s label.
In the center of the cave was an ashy fire pit. A sofa-wide stack of boxes about four feet high was covered with a canvas tarp along the far wall, opposite the entrance. The stash. I hopped over the pit, set down my lantern, and commenced to checking out the loot.
Hooey! There were stacks of dollars, bags of coins, jewelry, cases of beer and whiskey, a bunch of men’s belts with shiny silver buckles, and a whole box of Brinker’s sour balls and taffy. No wonder they’ve only got a few teeth left. There was nothing that looked like it came from a dead man’s grave. I’d have to settle for evidence of their general thieving, which I’d leave at the sheriff’s office along with a note indicating that the Law could find more spoils at the cave.
I put a bound stack of dollars and a bag of coins into my sack. Those coins were packed so tight they didn’t even jingle. I hefted my load and swayed it side to side, surprised to hear a muffled laugh. But the chuckle wasn’t coming from the bag in my hands.
For a long second, my body turned into a hunk of rock and my head wouldn’t even move to look in the direction of the noise. When it did, I nearly fainted because, Lordy be, if there wasn’t a glow coming down the tunnel!
The voices heading toward me didn’t sound like Charlemagne or Tom Sawyer, and the language was too coarse for any adult from St. Petersburg. My hands went numb, then prickly. Shaking, I set Miss Ada’s cookies on a flat rock near the fire pit. I’d brought them just in case the Pritchards made an appearance and I needed to appeal to their rumored fondness for sweets. A pile of cookies was a weak trade for my life, but maybe eating would distract them long enough for me to slip past.
But maybe it wouldn’t. I heard myself let out a strange, high-pitched chirp of fear. Swallowing hard, I tried to get the knot of dread down past my throat. With a desperate glance around the cave for a hiding spot, I sprang behind the booty and blew my lamp out.
All I could see was a thin circle of moonlight, shining in from a hole in the cave’s ceiling. And all I could hear were the steps of the Pritchard brothers (who may have killed a man or five, depending on who you asked) coming my way.
They entered the hideout without noticing me, grumbling and passing gas and setting things down. I heard one of them digging around the fire pit. A low glow filled the cave with the soft bouncing light particular to wood flames. When I was certain they weren’t going to add any freshly stolen goods to the pile I was hiding behind, I risked a peek. There was a nice little watching space between the cave wall and one side of the stack.
The taller one, Billy, was taking a long gulp from a bottle. His back was to me.
Forney had already discovered my stack of cookies and was pawing through them. “Lookee here, brother!” he crowed. “I got me some sweets.” He ripped into one and his mouth turned upward in a bliss I knew well. “Good ones too.”
“Will you shut up,” Billy said. “You’re too dang loud! And where’d you swipe them cookies from, anyway? I told you not to rob another store in this town. Leastaways not for candy and such.”
“I didn’t swipe nothing from this town but what we swiped together. These cookies were sitting right—”
Billy snatched the cookie from Forney’s hand and threw it into the fire. “And you know that man told us not to eat so much sugar, ’specially not until these nuggets settle in. Don’t you want more than one solid tooth?”
What man?
Forney’s lips trembled. “Sure, Billy. But he had to rip the rotten ones out first, and that last one hurt awful bad.”
Billy snorted. “If you think it was bad on your end, you should’ve seen him trying to pull the goods off that dead man. The girl I caught spying on us was shaking less than him.” He pressed one nostril and blew the contents of the other across the cave. “Gotta give him credit for finding us and coming up with the idea, but trusting a couple of outlaws? What an idiot. Any blame comes to us for digging up that body, he’ll take it.”
Hmm. So they had an accomplice in the cemetery. I’d seen Billy close up, but he must’ve brought someone other than Forney to do the dirty work. And I still didn’t know what it was they stole from Amos Mutton.
Smoke started burning the bottom of Forney’s shoes where his feet were too close to the fire. He winced at the smell a good minute before pulling his boots back. “You said yourself that man’s an idiot, so I don’t see why we should even listen to him, especially when he’s saying I can’t have a cookie.”
Billy sat on the cave floor and tossed Forney the liquor bottle. “What kind of outlaw are you, whining about cookies? Jesus and Judas, grow up!”
I felt a little bad for Forney in that instance. People were always telling me the same thing. The feeling didn’t last long, though, because when Billy turned toward the pile, he yawned. With his mouth open wide, I saw something glint in the firelight.
Whoever said those Pritchards didn’t have any solid teeth was wrong. Billy Pritchard had two or three of his bottom teeth and two or three of his top, by the look of it. Gold teeth.
Gold teeth like Mr. Mutton who got dug up.
Gold teeth that looked just like shiny corn kernels.
Shiny corn kernels like the ones in Mr. Dobbins’s locked drawer.
It clicked into place, piece by piece. Mr. Dobbins used to be a dentist. . . . He was about the same height as Forney and had the same longish hair. . . .
That was Billy and Mr. Dobbins in the graveyard—Dob-head was helping the Pritchards!
And his ankle. I bet Charlemagne had gotten Dobbins right on the leg before
ripping a piece from Billy’s shirt. Old Dob-head dug up that body and did his dentist work on the Pritchard brothers, putting in those gold teeth. That was the terrible moaning in the school that night. It was the sound of rotten teeth being torn out and Mr. Mutton’s gold teeth being jammed into the Pritchards’ mouths.
All the evidence needed to save the Widow Douglas was right behind the Pritchards’ crooked lips.
A blast of hot breath hit me square in the neck. In my shock over the teeth, I didn’t notice Forney moving around the back of the loot pile. Before I could scramble away, he’d yanked me by the back of Jon’s overalls. I held on to my cornmeal sack as he pushed me into the light of the fire.
“Well, well, big brother, lookee what I found when I was going to take a pee.”
Billy was bent over the fire. “How many times do I have to tell you, don’t pee in here! Stinks up the whole—” He looked up and stopped talking, cocking his head to the side.
Forney shoved me forward. I stumbled to my knees and crouched there, fear making every inch of my body feel hot and icy at the same time.
Billy Pritchard reached for the long knife strapped to his hip. Seeing that my eyes were glued to the blade, he pulled it out real slow, letting it catch the firelight. He stared at me and smiled, licking his lips. “Well, little brother. That is a fine treasure indeed. Do you want me to kill her, or should I let you have a murder to your name too?”
Thoughts whipped around my mind real fast, like a load of fireflies in a jar. The one I managed to grab onto was Miss Ada’s voice from one of the many times she chided me for warming up to Jon’s advice: Your brother heard that nonsense from a fool, Becky. Superstitious folk go around believing anything, if you say it in the right voice. Billy had been paranoid about getting his gold teeth put in under a full moon, so most likely he had other beliefs too. But how could I use that to my advantage?
“You’d better let me go!” I backed away from the fire, plastering myself against the stash and praying for an idea.
Forney laughed and reached over to me, his fingers closing again over my overall straps. “What for? So you can run out and tell on us?” Lifting me with a grunt, he jerked his arms over the fire and let me dangle there. “Not likely, Missy. You’re headed for a bad place.”
“I’m already in a bad place,” I pointed out.
He looked at Billy. “She’s right.”
“Hell!” yelled Billy. “We’re gonna send you to fire and brimstone!”
I managed to twist and kick Forney in the stomach. When he dropped me, I barely missed the flames. Before I could dash to the tunnel, the two brothers retreated to block the exit, Forney on the right and Billy on the left. Both had knives out, the tips pointing right at my guts.
“Actually, sirs, you don’t want to be hurting me,” I said quickly. “You got gold teeth, don’t you?”
Billy sneered, revealing a glint in the lamplight. “That’s right.”
“And I’m getting ’em next,” said Forney. “Only got one in me before it hurt too bad. He had to pull out all our bad ones first and Billy took all the whiskey to suffer through his treatment. There warn’t none left for me and—”
“Hush up!” I yelled. “Any fool knows gold teeth don’t mix with cursed dead cats in the moonlight.” I pointed to the stream of light coming through the ceiling.
“What dead cat?” Billy asked. “I don’t see no dead cat.”
I dug into my cornmeal sack. The kitten had decayed quite a bit in the last week and was a fearsome thing to behold. Stinky, too. I held up the carcass with my right hand, keeping the sack in my left. “This dead cat. Cursed it myself, the same night Mr. Dobbins dug up that body for its gold teeth! All I got to do is rub it on you and you’re doomed.”
I thrust it toward Forney and he staggered back.
“When this cat touches a man with stolen teeth,” I hollered, “that man will drop dead! And if the stolen teeth are made of gold, that’ll make your deaths all the more painful. Any fool knows that.”
Billy eyeballed his brother. “Forney, grab her.”
Forney, I was happy to see, was trembling so hard his knife shook. “I don’t reckon I will, brother. You do it.”
“Little brother,” Billy growled. “Get over there and tie her up, or I’ll stab you in your sleep tonight.”
Lips twitching like he was trying not to cry, Forney started my way.
I nodded at him. “Come on then, though it’s a shame your brother’s using you to test the curse. All the same, I can’t say I’ll miss you much.”
He gave Billy a wary look.
The older Pritchard’s eyes went from me to the cat to his brother.
“Here,” I told Forney. “I’ll bring it to you.” In a fit of nerve, I shot forward.
Forney’s high-pitched squeal turned into an all-out scream when I reached up and rubbed the dead kitten in his face, pressing it into his neck and ears and mouth and dropping it down to his heart for a good rub there as well.
Before they could figure out my bluff, something curious happened. Forney’s eyes nearly popped out of his head before they rolled back, leaving just the whites flickering in the firelight. He stumbled to the right side of the tunnel exit, reaching toward the cave wall for support.
And then Forney Pritchard dropped dead.
Billy stared at me, his mouth hanging open. His chest was going in and out real fast and his dirty fingers went in his mouth to touch his gold teeth. “He’s . . . dead! You killed him! You and that dead cat killed my brother!”
I wasn’t certain how to proceed. After all, I didn’t know it was going to work. I hadn’t even cursed the cat. Had Amy cursed it? No, that didn’t seem likely. Anyway, I could tell Billy was half-terrified and half-rageful that I’d killed his brother. I needed him to stay on the side of terrified.
“There now, you see,” I said, trying to control the wiggles in my voice. “I just wanted to be on my way, without any trouble. Now I guess I’ll have to kill you, too.”
Billy backed away from me, his body pressing against the cave wall.
I edged forward, dangling the kitten as a warning. “Now you and your gold teeth stay there.” When I was two feet from the tunnel entrance, an awful thing happened.
Forney woke from the dead, moaning and rubbing his head.
Billy’s face shot back and forth between the two of us, and I saw his rabbit-poop-size brain working. He sneered and raised his knife, jumping back in front of the exit.
“Why, you ain’t killed Forney! He up and passed out or something!” Billy smiled at me, flashing yellow metal mixed with tobacco chew. “I think I’ll kill you now.”
Fear and regret froze me in place. Billy Pritchard’s ugly face was the last thing I’d look upon, and all I could think about is how much I wanted to be safe at home with Daddy yelling at me for not acting more like a grown-up. Instead, I watched as Billy took his time stepping toward me, grinning his evil grin.
The truth will set you free, the Bible’s John had said. I had the distinct feeling that I wouldn’t be in such a mess if, up front, I had just told the truth about seeing the Pritchards in the cemetery. But I’d learned the lesson too late. The Pritchards would go free, the Widow would go to jail, and as for me, I was fairly certain that I was about to die.
No, a voice whispered. I couldn’t tell if it was Jon or my conscience. Becky Thatcher, you’re going to fight for what you’ve got left, the voice said.
In slow motion, my eye caught the edge of something white by my foot. One of the limp daisies had worked its way down my shirt and pant leg.
You still got living to do.
And that, right there in a cave with two murderous outlaws, was the moment I decided that maybe growing up wasn’t such a bad thing. In fact, under the circumstances, I was desperate to give it a try.
I swung my evidence-holding sack in a circle, wondering how much damage a sack of coins could do against a knife. Trying to scramble away from Billy, I felt a hand grasp m
y ankle. Forney had recovered enough to yank me down to the cave floor where my forehead skin split open so I could hardly see from the dizzy pain and mess of blood.
Still holding the kitten by the tail, I whapped at the younger Pritchard a few times before he took sight of the whiskers and fainted again.
By then Billy was nearly upon me and I was out of curses. My heart hurt something awful. Knowing you’re gonna die is one thing, but knowing that your death is going to be particularly painful is another.
My eyes burned, half from frightened tears and half from the fire’s smoke.
Fire.
Throwing the kitten at Billy to buy time, I backed up to the fire pit and grasped the end of a glowing stick. With a deep and hopefully-not-final breath, I charged forward, prepared to plunge the fiery embers into Billy Pritchard’s face, taking a slice from the knife if necessary to reach the tunnel.
“Stop!” came a shout from way down the tunnel.
Me and Billy both obeyed.
“Jon?” I called, convinced his spirit had been following me around the whole night.
“Who’s Jon?” Billy turned to face the entrance to the tunnel, and that was enough for me. I dropped my sack, jumped over an unconscious Forney, and scooted past the distracted Pritchard brother. I ran straight down the tunnel, Billy swearing terrible things as he followed.
A rock tripped me and I flew forward with the fiery stick, feeling my knee scab break open in an explosion of pain. It made me light-headed, but the grip of a sweaty hand on my ankle brought me back. I kicked hard and felt his fingers slip off.
Scrambling up, I turned and flailed with the stick until I made contact with Billy. He yanked the ember side of the wood from me, screamed from the pain in his burning hand, and let it go. Hot blood trickled down my split forehead and leg scab, sticking to my hair and the inside of Jon’s pants, but I kept moving forward.
