Henry was thinking that he himself could wait, especially after Simon’s encounter with that thing in the cellar.
CHAPTER 3
PLOTS AND PLOTTING
THEY SAID GOOD-BYE to Delilah at the corner of her block, then pedaled hard toward home. Their house—Uncle Hank’s house—waited at the end of the street, the porch light casting a pale, reassuring circle of light across the scrubby yard. The dry landscape still took Henry by surprise at times—the hardness of it, the tall fingers of saguaro cactuses, the bright bursts of desert flowers in a place that seemed so bare and harsh. Sometimes, the boys played moon landing in their backyard, behind the thin border of trees that separated their house from the rolling foothills of Superstition Mountain. They would disembark from their wagon spacecraft to the rocky lunar surface with a bunch of old jars, to explore and collect samples (which usually involved Jack trapping lizards and pretending they were aliens bent on destruction). Henry had to admit, unlike when they had played the game in the verdant lawns of their Chicago neighborhood, here in Arizona it really did feel like they had landed on the moon. But as strange a place as Superstition was, during the hot stretch of summer, it had started to feel more and more familiar. Henry thought about Illinois only rarely now, and when he did, it was almost never with a sense of wistfulness or longing. He realized to his surprise that Uncle Hank’s house had become home.
As they rode up to the open garage, Josie darted past them into the dark backyard, amber eyes glowing.
“There’s Josie,” Jack yelled.
“She looks back to normal,” Simon observed.
“Josie,” Henry called to her, stopping his bike. He reached out his hand, snapping his fingers. Josie hesitated on the lip of the yard. But she only studied him impassively for a moment before slipping into the night.
Mr. Barker was in the kitchen, finishing the dishes, when they bounded through the door from the garage.
“Hey, guys,” he said cheerily. “How’s the night air?”
The boys looked at each other. Mr. Barker often asked goofy questions like this, for which there was no real answer. Simon shrugged. “It’s nice out.”
“Not nearly as hot as it is during the day, right?” Mr. Barker said. “It’s a better time for you to be outside.”
That was certainly true, Henry thought. The baking heat of summer in Arizona meant you couldn’t ever go barefoot outside; the pavement fried your feet. During the day, the boys were thirsty all the time, and because Mrs. Barker was annoyingly insistent about sun lotion, their skin smelled constantly of tropical fruits. Riding their bikes or playing in the yard at night was pure relief by comparison. The temperature dropped twenty degrees or more. When the cool night air beckoned, anything seemed possible.
Henry heard voices on the deck, and Aunt Kathy’s telltale rolling laugh. “Aunt Kathy’s here?”
“Yes, she came to see Emmett for the weekend, and they stopped by on their way back from the airport.” Mr. Barker finished rinsing a saucepan and balanced it in the dish rack, then wiped his hands on his shorts. “It’s almost time for bed, but you guys can go out and say a quick hello.”
“She’s ALWAYS here now,” Jack declared, already thundering to the sliding door and yanking it open.
Aunt Kathy had been visiting Arizona almost weekly since she met Emmett Trask. He was her new boyfriend, she proudly told the boys, and such a sweetie. Very responsible and thoughtful, but interestingly independent, which she liked … and her worries that his work as a geologist had turned him into a nerdy loner had happily proven to be unfounded. Her frequent visits were a nice bonus for the Barker boys, because (1) Aunt Kathy was a lot of fun, (2) Emmett knew a lot about Superstition Mountain, and since he was often at their house now, that made him conveniently available to answer their questions, and (3) their parents were distracted by adult conversations and the tasks of entertaining, which meant the boys had more freedom than usual, especially in the evenings.
Henry and Simon followed Jack onto the deck, where their mother was sitting at the patio table with Emmett and Aunt Kathy.
“Boys!” Aunt Kathy cried. “I was hoping you’d come home before we had to leave.” She hugged Jack against her side, ruffled Henry’s curls, and then reached over to squeeze Simon’s arm.
Emmett stood up and grinned at them. “I was hoping I’d see you too. I had a meeting in Phoenix last week, and I had a chance to go to that cemetery where Jacob Waltz’s neighbor, Julia Thomas, is buried.”
“You DID?” Jack yelled.
“Jack, shhhh,” Mrs. Barker hushed. “The whole neighborhood will hear you.”
“Is she really buried there?” Henry asked, while Simon blurted, “Did you find her grave?”
“Yes, yes, and yes,” Emmett answered, holding up his hands against their barrage of questions. “I talked to the groundskeeper, and he showed me the map of grave plots. Then I walked out to the actual grave. It’s there, with a marker. The dates are correct … and as I told you, Phoenix was where she lived until the end of her life, and where she died. Do you remember me telling you about the weird cult she was involved in? Burning fire pits in the yard, and other strange rituals?”
Henry did vaguely remember this. It had seemed spooky when Emmett described it before, almost like witchcraft, and it made the original Julia Thomas seem even more unknowable.
“Well, her house is no longer standing,” Emmett continued, “but I drove through that part of town on my way back to the freeway. It’s not far from where she’s buried.”
“What did it say on her tombstone?” Henry asked. In his mind’s eye, he could see the tilted stone markers in the neglected, older section of the Superstition cemetery, and the one with Julia Elena Thomas’s name carved in faded letters across the rough face. With a shudder, he recalled the tombstone that bore their own last name: BARKER. He knew that Delilah must have seen her own name on a tombstone too, when her father was buried, and the thought made him feel hollow inside. Seeing BARKER on a tombstone had been awful because there was no explanation for it; but for Delilah, seeing DUNWORTHY on a tombstone must have been awful because there was an explanation.
“Just her name, Julia Thomas Schaffer,” Emmett answered, and at Henry’s puzzled expression, he added, “Remember how she married Albert Schaffer later on? After she divorced her first husband, Emil Thomas. And the tombstone also had the dates of her birth and death. She died in 1917, on her birthday, actually.”
Henry flinched. It seemed terrible to die on your own birthday. But then he wondered if maybe it felt like an accomplishment, because you’d made it to a whole year older.
“So, I don’t know what you guys saw at the cemetery,” Emmett was saying, “but it couldn’t have been her grave.”
“The cemetery?” Mrs. Barker looked at Henry sharply. “Were you boys at the cemetery?”
Henry bit his lip and turned to Simon. It was sometimes hard to keep track of what their parents did and didn’t know about their adventures over the summer. It was exhausting to keep secrets from them, and it plagued him with guilt. But the events of the summer were like a row of dominoes; the boys couldn’t reveal one without a chain reaction of other revelations, and there was still so much about the mountain and Uncle Hank’s search for the gold that they didn’t understand.
Simon answered her smoothly. “Yeah, sometimes we ride our bikes over there ’cuz it’s away from the busy roads. It has this really cool historic part, with graves from the 1800s.”
“Isn’t that interesting!” Aunt Kathy exclaimed. “So you can find out who lived around here all those years ago … the pioneers and settlers. Is your Uncle Hank buried there?”
“Nope,” Mr. Barker said. “He was cremated. We have his ashes—”
“Jim,” Mrs. Barker cautioned. Henry thought, not for the first time, that his parents were an odd combination. As a medical illustrator, Mrs. Barker spent her days studying and then rendering in pencil sketch or watercolor the most visceral images of human
body parts, often riddled with disease or maimed by injury. The boys could ask her about anything, the more graphic and disgusting the better. But she had a clear sense of what was appropriate, by age, by timing, and for certain company. Their father, on the other hand, was squeamish to the point of nausea about even mundane things like splinters, yet he was outrageously blunt about what their mother called inappropriate personal details that she herself would never share in polite company. Henry supposed that they balanced each other out, and that maybe this was what you did when you chose somebody to marry—tried to find someone who could fill in your gaps.
Mrs. Barker regarded them skeptically. “Is it okay for you boys to wander around a place like that? It’s not private property?”
Simon shrugged. “We didn’t stay there for long. And nobody said anything to us.”
“We talked to the daughter of the guy who’s in charge of the cemetery,” Henry added. “And she didn’t tell us to leave or anything.” Of course, Sara Delgado wasn’t actually in a state to communicate any coherent messages, Henry thought.
“I think it’s fine as long as they don’t disturb the graves,” Emmett said. “But at any rate, whatever marker you saw in the cemetery, it couldn’t have been for this Julia Thomas. She’s buried in Phoenix.”
“Thanks for checking on that for us,” Henry said.
“Yeah,” Simon added, his brow furrowing. “That saves us some time.”
“What do you mean?” Mrs. Barker looked from Simon to Henry and back again. “Time for what?”
But Aunt Kathy was finished with the cemetery discussion. “You boys are very polite, do you know that?” She turned to Emmett. “Did you hear how they said thank you? Without even being prompted! My sister has done such a good job of raising them.”
Emmett’s cheeks reddened, though Henry couldn’t tell whether he was embarrassed for the boys or for himself. “Yes, she has.”
Mrs. Barker smiled, while Mr. Barker did a mock double take. “Hey! What am I? Chopped liver?”
Aunt Kathy laughed. “Of course not! I mean BOTH of you. You’re both such good parents. I want to be just like you when I grow up.” She winked at Henry.
Mrs. Barker stood up and slipped an arm around Jack’s shoulders. “All right, boys,” she said. “Time for bed. Go brush your teeth and I’ll come tuck you in.”
The boys fled the deck in relief.
* * *
In the bathroom, crowded around the sink, they discussed the trip to the ghost town.
“But what are we looking for?” Henry asked. “The stairs in the hotel were all rotted out. We can’t get to the second floor where Julia Thomas stayed. And even if we could, you saw what those other buildings were like in the ghost town—hardly anything was left behind.”
Simon looked exasperated. “Okay, number one, we don’t have to know what we’re looking for to find something interesting. Think about the saddlebag and the Spanish coins and the directions to the gold mine! Number two, we didn’t really have a chance to poke around the hotel, ’cuz I fell through the floor right after we got there. Number three, you heard what Emmett told us about those people in the historical society: they’re TREASURE hunters. They’re looking for the gold. So if they think the ghost town is a good place to find it, that’s where we need to go.” He paused. “Before they do.”
“Yeah!” Jack echoed, spitting a mouthful of toothpaste into the sink.
Henry sighed. Simon was so annoyingly logical. He had an answer for everything.
“Besides, Delilah is dying to go, and it wouldn’t be fair to her not to,” Simon added. “She missed it last time.”
Missed what? Henry grumbled to himself. The terror of not knowing what was down in the dark cellar with Simon? The ordeal of trying to haul him up before it got him?
“When do you want to go?” Henry asked resignedly.
“Tomorrow!” Simon said. “The sooner the better.” And then, seeing Henry’s face, he added, “Don’t worry, Hen. We’ll be careful. This time we’ll bring a rope and a flashlight.”
And hope we don’t need them, Henry thought grimly.
CHAPTER 4
RETURN TO GOLD CREEK
THE NEXT MORNING, the boys met Delilah at the corner of Waltz Street to ride out to the ghost town. It had been Delilah’s job to check on the room numbers for Julia Thomas and the Petrasch brothers in the old hotel ledger that they had brought back from their first trip to the ghost town, so that they would know where to begin their search. As promised, Simon had gathered a rope, a flashlight, some granola bars, and several water bottles and stuffed them into his school backpack. He rode ahead with the straps looped over both shoulders, the pack bulging.
Henry realized that in a few weeks, with school starting, that same backpack would be filled with textbooks and papers. And they would all be at a new school, with an unfamiliar lunchroom and playground and hallways crowded with strangers. He decided he liked the backpack better the way it was now, fat and heavy with supplies for exploring.
Soon they had passed the streets of low bungalows and stucco ranch houses and were riding through the outskirts of town.
“Are you worried?” Delilah asked Henry, slowing down to pedal beside him. “Because of that thing in the cellar?”
Henry squinted over at her, hoping his brothers were out of earshot. “A little, I guess.”
“Maybe it was nothing. Maybe something just fell over in the dark down there, and Simon couldn’t see.”
Henry shook his head. “No, it was moving. We heard it. It kept rustling.”
“Do you think it was a snake?”
“I don’t know. Whatever it was, if it lives down there, it must be getting food somehow.”
“Well, we’ll just have to be extra careful in that old hotel,” Delilah said.
“Yeah,” Henry said doubtfully. He felt glum. All this time, he had thought he was getting braver, more like Uncle Hank—on the mountain, in the gold mine—and now he felt just like his old anxious, fearful self. Maybe change was like that—not steady and reliable, but gradual, unpredictable, and full of setbacks … one step forward, two steps backward. Or maybe he hadn’t really changed at all. Maybe you could never change your essential nature.
“Look! There’s the cemetery!” Jack yelled, barreling past Simon into the lead.
Henry glanced through the wrought-iron gates at the rows of tombstones gleaming in the sun. It was strange to think of so many dead people gathered in one place, a crowd of skeletons in boxes underground. He thought of all these people as they must have been when they were alive, with their separate, busy lives; their families and jobs and houses; the books they must have read. It was impossible to imagine that the endpoint of all that life was this quiet, orderly place full of tombstones. From the road, he couldn’t see the far corner where the older graves were, the markers that read JULIA ELENA THOMAS and BARKER. But even in the bright, ordinary sunshine, just knowing they were out there sent a chill through him.
They rode past Black Top Mesa, where Emmett lived, and along Peralta Way into the desert, with the shadowy cliffs of Superstition Mountain rising in the distance. There were no houses on the sides of the road now, only the endless stretches of dry, pebbly ground, speckled with low shrubs and cactuses—the paddle-shaped arms of prickly pear and the tall, straight fingers of the saguaro. Jack raced ahead, calling, “I see it! I see the ghost town!”
There, far across the rough fields, rose the dark huddle of buildings, like an animal crouched in the brush, waiting for them. Henry could see their sagging roofs, and the stark shape of the old wooden water tower rising above them.
“Wow,” Delilah exclaimed. “How do we get to it?”
“There’s a path on the side of the road,” Simon told her.
“Is there anything left in the buildings?” Delilah asked Henry. “Furniture and stuff?”
Henry tried to remember what they’d seen in the dark, dilapidated wooden buildings. “Not much. There was some junk out
side, and the hotel had that ledger and the room keys, so maybe it wasn’t cleaned out like some of the other places.”
“I hope not,” Delilah said. “It would be cool to find something.”
“Here’s the path!” Jack bellowed, turning off the road and onto the rutted wagon trail that led to Gold Creek.
“Wait for us, Jack,” Simon ordered. “Don’t go into the hotel till we get there.”
They rode toward the cluster of buildings, bumping over the uneven path, as dust clouded the air.
When he reached the side of the hotel, Jack skidded to a halt and leapt off his bike, dropping it against the splintered porch. Henry pedaled through the dry clumps of grass to join him, looking with trepidation at the faded sign hanging above the doorway, with its faint image of a cat.
“Is this it?” Delilah asked excitedly, leaning her bike next to Jack’s and Simon’s. “The Black Cat Hotel and Saloon?”
Henry nodded. Together, they followed Simon and Jack across the porch of the hotel. At the doorway, Simon grabbed Jack’s shoulder. “Let me go first. And walk exactly where I do, okay?’
“Okay, okay,” Jack said impatiently. “But you’re the one who fell through the floor, not me.”
Simon glowered at him and led the way into the hotel, stepping carefully along the wall, where the floor was solid.
Henry could see the rough edges of the hole in the floor where Simon had fallen. Below the broken wood was pure darkness.
“Let’s have a look,” Simon said. He slid his arms out of the backpack and set it gently against the wall, digging around for the flashlight.
CHAPTER 5
“WHAT KIND OF PLACE IS THIS?”
HENRY COULD FEEL HIS HEART quicken. “Simon…,” he began, but Simon was already crawling carefully across the wooden planks to the edge of the hole, shining his flashlight into the cellar.
Henry and Delilah stepped gingerly on the solid boards a few feet from the gash in the floor, and Jack scrambled next to Simon. “What do you see? Is there a SNAKE down there?”