The snowfall had confined its coverage to the mountains, but the cold sweep of the northwest wind had definitely paid a visit. Billy listened to it blow newly fallen leaves and watched the little dry imps dance across the lawn and then squat like defiant settlers, never to budge until the next rake came to persuade their exit.
Billy was ready to go back inside, but a rustling sound in front of the porch made him stiffen his body. He took a deep breath and tiptoed slowly toward the stairs, whispering, “Who’s there?”
He climbed down the steps and started poking through the hedge that bordered the house. Could it be? Dare he hope? He whispered into the thin branches. “Dad?”
Suddenly a human form burst out from the bushes and ran across the lawn. Billy knew immediately that the runner wasn’t his father; he was too short.
He didn’t have time to think. Though he was barefoot and wearing only pajamas, he dashed after the intruder. Adrenaline pumping, he ran faster than he ever had in his life. He had to solve the mystery and find his father. He did have one other thought—Old Hambone. Just like the dog, he wanted to get the chase over with, and fast. It was way too cold!
The runner, bundled up in a heavy coat, couldn’t stay ahead of Billy for very long. A hundred feet down the sidewalk, the intruder tried to cross the street, but Billy reached out for his shoulders and pulled him to the asphalt. They fell hard, tumbling on the rough pavement like two grunting football players.
The intruder tried to roll away, but Billy kept him pinned, strength flowing through him like shots of liquid muscle. He pulled down the runner’s hood and snatched his ski cap off.
“Adam!”
Adam struggled underneath Billy’s weight. Billy jammed the bully’s wrists against the pavement, and he noticed a book in Adam’s right hand. Billy moved up to sit on Adam’s chest and grabbed the book with one hand while trying to keep Adam in check with the other. “It’s a Bible!”
“So what!” Adam growled.
Billy looked at it more carefully. “I know this Bible; it’s the one I had back on the mountain.” Adam struggled again, wrapping his free arm around Billy’s waist and trying to wrestle him to the side. This time Billy pressed his knees on Adam’s upper arms and pinned his head to the road with one hand. “Talk fast, Adam. Were you delivering it or stealing it?”
Adam smirked. “Wouldn’t you like to know, Dragon Breath?”
Billy pulled on Adam’s hair and then jerked it back toward the road, slamming Adam’s head on the pavement and shouting. “Yes, I would like to know!”
Adam angrily kicked and pushed, forcing Billy to fall back. Both boys scrambled to their feet, and Adam pushed Billy backward as hard as he could, sending him flying toward the curb. He landed heavily, tearing his pajama sleeves and scraping his elbows on the pavement, and the Bible flipped out of his hand and slid across the sidewalk. Adam took off in the opposite direction, his footfalls clopping loudly on the pavement in the silence of the early morning. Billy scrambled to his feet, but Adam was already well down the road. There was no catching him now.
Billy retrieved the Bible and brushed it off. He jogged back to Walter’s house, staring at the newfound treasure all the way. He knew he ought to be cold all over, but only his bare feet complained. He burst back into the house yelling. “Mom! Come here, quick!” He ran toward the guest room, and his bleary-eyed mother met him in the hallway.
“Billy! What do you mean shouting through the house this early in the morning?”
Placing one hand on his knee and trying to breathe without coughing, he showed her the Bible. “Look!” He took two gasping breaths before continuing. “The Bible I was carrying up on the mountain!”
She took it and turned on the hall light. “You were carrying this up there? I didn’t notice.” She flipped through the pages. “So, why is it here? Did you bring it back to Castlewood with you?”
“No! Don’t you get it? I left it up on the mountain!”
Billy’s mother rubbed her eyes and finally seemed to wake up. “You mean it was out on the front porch this morning?”
“Not exactly. Adam had it. He was hiding in the bushes, but when he ran away I tackled him and took it.”
She stared at him with her head cocked to one side. “You mean he’s the one delivering things to us?”
“He wouldn’t say, but I don’t think so. I think the Bible was already there, and he was stealing it.”
The kitchen light flashed on, and Mr. and Mrs. Foley came in from the other side of the house, both in long pajamas and bedroom slippers. “Is there a problem?” Mr. Foley asked.
Billy took the Bible back from his mother and handed it to Mr. Foley. “Adam Lark was hiding in the bushes out front, and he had this. I tackled him in the street and took it from him.”
Mr. Foley looked at the Bible and then back at Billy. “Adam was carrying a Bible and you mugged him for it? Doesn’t seem like the Christian thing to do.”
Billy grabbed the Bible back and sputtered. “No, that’s not it at all, I—” He then noticed Mr. Foley’s big smirk and stopped.
“I heard what you told your mother, Billy,” Mr. Foley said. “The whole neighborhood did. Don’t have a heart attack.”
Billy felt his face turn red, but the embarrassment died quickly. He just stared at the Bible and rubbed its imitation leather cover. “What’s Dad trying to tell us now?”
“But could it be Devin this time?” his mother asked. “Adam had it. Could he be doing something for Devin, trying to confuse us maybe?”
“No! He was stealing it. He had to be!”
“Let me see it again.” She took it and opened it to the blank pages in the front and then to the rear. Her frown gave away her disappointment. “No message. Just this brownish stain on the cover.”
“Oh, yeah. I guess that’s where I threw up on it.” Billy took it again and started flipping through the pages rapidly. “But I don’t see any other marks. Whoever owned this Bible never wrote in it, so if Dad left a message in here somewhere, I should be able to find it.”
Mr. Foley pointed at the clean pages. “Don’t you think your dad would have made his message easy to find?”
“I guess so, but Devin would have, too, if he were trying to fool us.”
“Good point!” Mr. Foley conceded.
Walter finally joined the gathering. He staggered with stiff legs, hands in his bathrobe and eyes barely open, mumbling something about all the noise. When he got to the hall, he raised his head and opened and closed his eyes several times while everyone watched, snorts and chuckles filling the room. He finally kept his eyes open and focused on the Bible. After a few seconds of staring he said, “Revival meeting?” He then turned around and headed back to his room, loud laughter following him down the hall.
Expecting Professor Hamilton to arrive at any minute for class, Billy and Walter sat at the table, each one staring at the pages of the Bible. Every few seconds or so, they nodded to each other and turned the page.
Billy raised his head and rubbed his eyes. “Okay, Exodus is done,” he said, closing the Bible. “No clues yet.”
Walter looked at his watch. “The professor’s late. That’s not like him.”
“He’s picking up Bonnie this morning,” Billy explained. “She’s probably still moving kind of slow.”
Billy rolled his eyes around a couple of times to rev them up for the work ahead and then looked at Walter. “You ready?”
“I guess so.”
Billy opened the Bible again and sighed. “Leviticus chapter one.”
After a few minutes Professor Hamilton strode in, followed by Bonnie, still on crutches and wearing her usual jeans and sweatshirt. The professor sported a new look, a full-fledged safari outfit, complete with khaki shorts and an elephant gun.
Both boys stared at him until Billy finally said, “Africa again, professor?”
“Yes, of course. It’s a very large continent, you know. Much ground to cover.”
Walter laughed.
“You never dressed like that at Castlewood.”
The professor stared at Walter, his gray eyebrows twitching. “Of course not. Do you think they would let me carry a gun into school? And shorts, especially on a frigid day such as this? That would be a professional embarrassment of the highest order!”
“And how are you feeling today?” Billy asked Bonnie.
“About the same. The knee feels a little better, but it’s still real sore. I don’t think I’ll have to get an MRI, though.” She glanced over at the open Bible on the table. “Homework? I thought we were studying the New Testament first.”
Professor Hamilton looked over Billy’s shoulder. “Good idea. You cannot understand the new without the old, right William?”
“No, we weren’t studying for the class, we were just—” Billy stopped and stared at the teacher. “What did you just say, Professor?”
“Oh, nothing, just that you cannot understand the New Testament properly without a solid understanding of the Old Testament. We were going to discuss that today, actually. That’s why I brought it up.”
“Can’t understand the new without the old,” Billy repeated softly, his voice trailing away at the end.
Walter picked up the Bible and showed it to the professor and Bonnie. “Adam Lark had this in front of the house early this morning. It’s the same Bible Billy was carrying around up at the crash site, and he’s sure he left it there.”
Bonnie took the Bible and looked it over, flipping through the pages. “Adam had it? Why would he have it?”
“Billy thinks it was already on the porch, and Adam was stealing it.”
Bonnie put the Bible back on the table. “Do you think your dad left it there, Billy? What’s he trying to tell us this time?”
Walter waited for a second for Billy to answer and then shrugged his shoulders. “We don’t know. We were going over every page looking for clues, a mark, a symbol, anything.” He waved his hand in front of Billy’s eyes. “Earth to Billy. Come in, Billy.”
Billy blinked his eyes and smiled. “Sorry, I was just thinking.”
Bonnie’s face lit up, and she held out her hand. “May I see it again? There’s something I want to look for.” She reached for the Bible and opened it to the book of Job, then slowly turned the pages to chapter forty-one. “I’m looking for my mother’s favorite passage. It might be one of his, too. . . . Here it is.”
Billy stood up, and he and Walter looked over Bonnie’s shoulder. “What did you find?”
“No writing; no symbols; only this tiny black smudge in the margin next to verse twenty-one. ‘His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth.’”
“What?” Billy said, nearly shouting. “Let me see that.”
Bonnie handed the Bible to him, and Billy pulled it close to his face. “It is a smudge, just a dirty black smudge.”
Bonnie put her hand on Billy’s shoulder. “But the verse, Billy. It has to mean something.”
Billy didn’t answer. He just handed the Bible to the professor. “What do you make of it?”
Professor Hamilton eyed the page closely and then pushed the book out to arm’s length. After another second or two, he brought it back up to his face and sniffed it. “It’s coal,” he finally said. “Yes, it is definitely a coal smudge.”
“Coal?” Billy repeated, sitting down. He looked at Walter and Bonnie. They just raised their hands, perplexed. Professor Hamilton kept staring at the page.
All four sat silently for nearly a minute until Billy started mumbling. “New without the old. . . . A coal smudge. . . . His breath kindleth coals.” He was quiet for another minute with his eyes squeezed shut. Finally he opened them wide and said, “A dragon shorn.”
“What?” Bonnie asked.
“A dragon shorn,” he repeated, louder this time. “The prophecy, remember? ‘A dragon shorn will live again, rejecting Eden’s pride.’”
Walter looked at his friend like his head had sprouted horns. “What are you talking about?”
Billy closed his fist and banged the table. “I’ve got it! I know what’s happening!”
“What is it?” Bonnie asked, her voice rising to match Billy’s. “What’s happening?”
Billy gestured for Bonnie to follow. “Come on.” He hurried out of the schoolroom and shouted down the hall as he ran. “Mom!”
“Yes, Billy?” she answered from somewhere in the house. “I’m in the living room.”
Billy jogged to the living room and Bonnie tagged along, her crutches clopping on the floor in time with her squeaking tennis shoe. He found his mother sitting on a sofa, a tablet on her lap and a pen in hand. She was talking on the phone, taking notes as she spoke. She held up one finger of her pen hand to signal for Billy to wait a minute.
“What do you mean ‘criminal arson’? All arson is criminal. . . . But Jared didn’t start it; someone else did. . . . Who? I told you who. . . . Didn’t the police report mention the ripped open door jamb? . . . No, of course he didn’t fake it!”
Billy paced frantically while Bonnie watched, and in a few seconds Walter and Professor Hamilton walked in.
“Oh!” the professor started when he saw Billy’s mother on the phone. “Pardon the intrusion, madam.”
She hung up the phone with more than a delicate landing. “The insurance company won’t listen! It’s as if someone is pulling their puppet strings.”
“Mom! I figured it all out. At least I think I did.”
She sat up straight in her chair. “You mean the ring and the Bible?”
“Yes.”
A new fire kindled in her eyes. “Tell me!”
He looked around the room at the others. “I—I can’t. At least not right now. It’s too weird to talk about. Can you just get me back to the mountain, to where they found that cave, the place where Hambone went crazy?”
“I don’t know where it is,” she said, tapping her pen on her knee.
“How about Officer Caruthers? Can you contact him?”
She placed her hands on her knees and let out a slow sigh. “Billy, nobody’s going to help you if you keep this hunch of yours a secret. Please, just tell us!”
“I have an idea. Can you ask him to tell us where Old Hambone lives? Tell him we want to thank him and his master and give them something?”
Her face began turning red, but her voice stayed calm, yet stern. “Billy, I’m not going to lie for you.”
“Well, I really do want to thank him. I like Old Hambone, and I really will bring him something. Then maybe he can lead us back to the cave.”
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Billy, if you have a serious idea, you need to tell me right this minute, and then we have to tell the police.”
He gestured with his head toward the professor and Walter. “Mom, I can’t!”
Walter grabbed Professor Hamilton’s sleeve. “Professor, come and show me that gun.” He led the teacher out of the room.
“The gun? Why do you want to see . . .” The professor’s voice trailed off down the hall.
Billy waited a few more seconds and walked closer to his mother, signaling for Bonnie to follow. “Mom, if I’m right,” he said softly, “we don’t want the police to know. We can get what we need today for hiking and leave for the mountain first thing in the morning, that is, if your ankle’s okay.”
“My ankle’s doing fine.” She sighed and sat back in her chair. “Okay, let’s hear your idea.”
Mr. Hatfield! Are you there?”
A chorus of barks and howls greeted Billy’s call. He stopped, petrified at the thought of a hundred hound dogs crashing through the trees and jumping all over him.
“Let’s keep going, Billy.” His mother continued down the trail with just a hint of a limp. “The dogs are probably penned up. It doesn’t sound like they’re getting any closer.”
They kept walking the beaten-down path in the woods and finally saw an old shack in the distance. Snow still speckled the flattened leaves, and Billy and his mot
her hiked through the dappled landscape, bundled in heavy coats, gloves, and ski caps to battle the piercing wind. After the snowstorm, the sun melted whatever layers it could reach through the thinned, autumn canopy, and the cold front brought a bitter sting, battling the sunshine to keep the mountain in its winter grip.
When they arrived at the shack, Billy gave a small box to his mother and knocked on the door. The howling songs rose to a crescendo.
A voice bellowed from inside. “Whoose thar?”
“It’s Billy Bannister and my mother, Marilyn Bannister.”
“The kid what lost his pa?”
Billy couldn’t help smiling. “Yes. My fath—uh, my pa was in the airplane that crashed in the Otter Creek Wilderness.”
There was silence from inside the house for a moment, and Billy and his mother waited, trying to listen through the terrible dirges being sung by the various beagles, blueticks, and mongrels they had seen fenced in at the side of the shack. The dogs had a large, covered kennel area that looked as cozy as the man’s house, but they roamed out in their yard, jumping with their forepaws on the fence, their noses upturned and sniffing the air and their tongues dangling like pink welcome mats.
Then, from within the house, the sound of clumping shoes came closer and closer. The door opened, and Mr. Hatfield appeared, pulling up a strap on his overalls while leaning against a crutch on his left side. “What choo want?”
Billy felt his jaw tremble. “A couple of things.” He took the box from his mother again. “I have a gift for you and Hambone to thank you for helping us look for my pa.”
Mr. Hatfield reached out and took the box, opened it greedily, and looked inside, sticking his nose through the top. His eyes brightened, and he took out a foil bag.
“Chawin’ toback-ee!” he chortled. “And it’s my favorite kind!” He reached in the box and took out another foil bag and inspected it with his eyes half-closed, first sniffing it and then trying to decipher the label, his lips moving as he read.