“No, it’s okay,” Emmett said quickly. “I’m glad you came.” He smiled at Kathy. “It was nice to meet you.”
Uh oh, Henry thought, don’t encourage her. But it was too late. Aunt Kathy’s whole face lit up, glowing warmly at him as she herded the boys and Delilah toward the door. “And I am just so happy I got to meet you,” she gushed, touching Emmett’s arm. “I’ve never been to this part of the country before, so this is all new to me. It’s fascinating to hear an … expert … talk about the environment and history of this place. I wish I could have you as a tour guide while I’m here!” She laughed, hiking her purse strap over her shoulder and stepping onto the porch.
Delilah looked at Henry and raised her eyebrows slightly. All Henry could do was shrug.
Emmett held the door wide for them. “Oh…,” he said slowly, and Henry saw that he was blushing again. He looked down, as if embarrassed. It reminded Henry of what he himself did when he was daydreaming in class and the teacher called on him and he had no idea what to say. But how could a grown-up be like that? Surely after you’d lived all those years, you would have things figured out. He glanced at Aunt Kathy, who was watching Emmett with a shy, twinkly look. Henry decided they were as silly and awkward as any kids he’d ever met.
“Well, I’d be happy to show you around, if you like,” Emmett said. “How long are you here?”
Aunt Kathy hesitated on the porch, shielding her eyes from the bright sun as she smiled up at him. “Just until Tuesday, when the boys’ parents get back from Santa Fe. Would you have time this weekend maybe? I’d love that.”
Emmett paused. “Sure. Sunday? I can give you a sense of the desert, and there are some Indian petroglyphs about an hour’s drive from here.” Warming up, he added, “I’ll show you the most interesting rock formations in the area.” With a twinge of resentment, Henry noticed that this offer sounded much more specific—on the verge of becoming an actual plan—than Emmett’s earlier comment about visiting the cemetery.
“Oh, that would be wonderful!” Aunt Kathy fumbled briefly in her purse and scribbled something on a torn piece of paper. “Here’s my cell,” she said. “Call me, and we’ll figure out a time. I just have to check with my sister to make sure the boys can be on their own for a bit.”
“Oh.” Emmett paused. “Well, I could take all of you. I’d be happy to.”
Before the boys could even muster a reply, Aunt Kathy jumped in. “That’s very sweet of you, but the boys don’t like long car rides, do you?” She shot Henry a pointed glance.
“And we’ll have chores to do on Sunday,” he chimed in helpfully.
“What chor—” Jack began to protest, but Simon subtly punched him in the back before he could finish.
“So let me make sure it’s okay with their parents, and we’ll set up a time, okay?” Aunt Kathy continued. “Thank you so much, Emmett! This will be the highlight of my trip.” She tousled Henry’s hair and remembered to add, “Next to seeing my nephews, of course.”
After they all got into the car and Aunt Kathy was backing it out of the driveway, she told them cheerily, “Now, see? I have a date! That, my friends, is how it’s done.”
“Oh, brother,” Simon muttered, shaking his head.
But Henry could tell from his expression that he was thinking the same thing Henry was: Aunt Kathy was going to be busy all day on Sunday, which meant they were going to be left on their own.
* * *
When they reached Delilah’s house, Aunt Kathy pulled the car up to the curb to let her out.
“I’m so glad I got a chance to meet you,” she told Delilah. “I hope your leg will be better soon.”
“You don’t have to say good-bye,” Simon said. “You’ll see her again. We hang out with her all the time.”
Delilah smiled at him, and Henry felt a small pang. Simon always seemed to know the perfect thing to say. While Henry agonized over seeming too pushy or too eager or just plain rude, Simon said what he was thinking, and it always seemed to come out exactly right.
Delilah started to get out of the car, then stopped. “Hey, what’s my bike doing there?”
Henry saw that her bike was in the driveway, leaning against the garage door.
“You must have left it there,” he said.
She shook her head. “No, I didn’t. I haven’t ridden my bike since I broke my leg. It’s been in the garage the whole time.”
“Did you leave your garage open?” Aunt Kathy asked.
Delilah frowned. “Sometimes the side door is unlocked.”
“Is your mother home?”
“No, she’s at work.”
Aunt Kathy shifted the car into park. “Boys, help her put the bike back. I’ll have a look around and make sure it’s safe for her to go in the house.”
The boys climbed out and dutifully followed Delilah up the driveway. Simon walked to the side of the garage and turned the handle on the door, which opened easily. “It’s unlocked,” he said, and then, “Wow! Look at all the cool camping stuff. I’m surprised somebody didn’t take that.”
“That’s my dad’s,” Delilah said, and Henry remembered the silver compass, Delilah’s prized possession that she’d said was from camping trips with her dad … now lost somewhere on the mountain.
“Hey,” Jack interrupted, “there’s Josie.”
And there, indeed, was Josie, crouched in one of the landscaped beds near the front porch. She gazed at them calmly, one ear twitching.
“I wonder if she saw who was fooling around with my bike,” Delilah said.
Henry felt suddenly sure that Josie had seen it. But Josie was so implacable, she would look exactly the same whether she’d seen something suspicious or not.
“Well, is your bike okay?” Simon asked her. “They didn’t do anything to it, did they?”
Delilah hobbled over to the bike and leaned down, scrutinizing the tires. “It looks fine—” She stopped. “There’s something in the basket.”
Henry peered over her shoulder into the bike’s white wicker basket. There was a folded slip of paper at the bottom. Delilah pinched it between her fingers and took it out, opening it carefully.
Jack pushed next to her, leaning close to the note. “Who’s it from? What does it say?”
Delilah’s brow furrowed. She held the note out to Henry. Neat capital letters in black felt tip crossed the white paper. Henry stared at Delilah. Quietly, he read aloud: “What was in the saddlebag doesn’t belong to you.”
CHAPTER 18
SECRET LETTERS
SIMON SNATCHED THE PAPER and read it for himself. “I thought you said nobody knew about the saddlebag,” he said to Henry. “You said you hid it.”
“I did,” Henry protested. “I did hide it! When Delilah and I were alone in the canyon.” He turned to her for support, and she nodded at Simon.
“We didn’t tell anybody about it, not even the police,” Delilah said. “That’s why we hid it! So we wouldn’t have to carry it all the way down the mountain, and so nobody would know about it.”
“Jack!” Simon whirled around. “Did you say something—”
“NO!” Jack shouted. “You are always blaming me! That was a SECRET, and I didn’t—”
“What’s going on?” Aunt Kathy called, walking toward them from the house. “What are you arguing about?”
“Nothing,” Simon said quickly, jamming the paper into his pocket.
“Is everything okay?” She looked from one of them to the other. “Delilah, is anything wrong with your bike?”
Delilah shook her head. Henry thought she looked pale, and her freckles stood out even more than usual.
Aunt Kathy glanced back at the house. “Well, honey, the doors are locked, and it doesn’t look like anyone’s been inside. Give me the key, and I’ll go in with you. Henry, put her bike back in the garage.”
Delilah roused herself from her daze and took out her house key. “Hang on,” she said to Henry. “I’ll put up the garage door.”
She and Aunt Kathy dis
appeared into the house, and a minute later, the garage door lifted, clattering on its metal tracks. Henry rolled the bike into the garage, past a folded tent, tarps, and several complicated-looking backpacks with straps and clips dangling from them. He thought about the note. What did it mean? Who could have been watching them in the canyon? The only possibility, he realized with a shudder, was whoever had been shooting at them.
“The house is fine,” Aunt Kathy called.
Jack ran to the front steps and scooped up Josie, whose ears flattened in protest. Delilah stood in the doorway uncertainly.
“Alrighty, boys, back in the car,” Aunt Kathy said. She rested one hand on the driver’s-side door, studying Delilah. “Will you be okay here, hon? When does your mother get home?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. She’ll be home by five or so.”
Aunt Kathy seemed unconvinced. “Would you rather come back with us until then?”
“That’s okay,” Delilah said.
Henry turned to her. “You might as well,” he urged. “We’ll probably want you to come over later anyway.” He knew Simon was going to want to look at the old map again, after the conversation with Emmett. Besides, even if the note wasn’t exactly a threat, somebody had been at Delilah’s house, messing with her things. It was unsettling.
She hesitated for only a second. “Okay,” she said, and Henry could hear the relief in her voice. She pulled the door shut behind her and carefully locked it.
* * *
On the way back to their house, they had to listen to Aunt Kathy chatter excitedly about Emmett. Wasn’t he the nicest man? So smart and interesting. Maybe not traditionally handsome, but he had the cutest smile. She could never resist a cute smile. Now, you did have to wonder about somebody living all by himself like that, out in the middle of nowhere. That wasn’t a good sign—“a red flag,” Aunt Kathy called it.
“He doesn’t have any flags,” Jack corrected her. “Just rocks.”
Aunt Kathy laughed her rolling laugh. “No, sweetie, it’s an expression. A red flag is a warning sign … but, I don’t know, he is a scientist. They’re different. Maybe in his case, living alone in the boonies isn’t a red flag.” This prompted a discourse about scientists and their quirks. In Aunt Kathy’s experience, they could be nerdy loners. But they were usually honest and straightforward, and they weren’t afraid of commitment. Better that than a player, in Aunt Kathy’s opinion.
Henry was only half listening to her, but he perked up when he heard the word “player.” It was the term their mother often used disapprovingly to describe Uncle Hank in his relationships with women.
“That’s what Mom says Uncle Hank was,” he told Aunt Kathy. “What does it mean exactly?”
Aunt Kathy thought for a minute. “Well, a player is a lady’s man … somebody with a lot of different girlfriends and nobody special.”
“Is it a bad thing?” Henry asked.
“It doesn’t sound bad for the guy,” Simon observed.
Aunt Kathy considered. “I think it depends on what you’re looking for. It’s all about expectations, you know? If a woman wants a casual, easy relationship with a guy and isn’t expecting anything more, then a player might be just fine.”
This made absolutely no sense to Henry. Who wouldn’t want that kind of relationship? “Doesn’t everyone want an easy relationship?” he asked.
Aunt Kathy smiled at him. “Yes, of course. But some people think being with one person isn’t as fun as dating a lot of people. Let’s hope Emmett Trask isn’t like that.” She pulled the car into the garage and turned off the engine, grabbing her bag and leading the way into the kitchen. “Now, let’s check in with your parents.”
Their mother and father were having a wonderful time in Santa Fe without the rest of the family, which Henry found slightly galling. In fact, they were sitting in the sunny courtyard of a noisy restaurant and couldn’t hear too well, but they promised to call back later that night.
“More fun than if we were there?” Henry asked his mother, when it was his turn to talk.
“Of course not, sweetheart,” she said diplomatically, “just a different kind of fun. I can’t wait to tell you all about it. Everything’s going okay with Aunt Kathy? I can’t believe she’s been there only a day and already has a date! Who is he, anyway? Emmett somebody? She says you boys know him?”
Henry gulped, realizing that they’d never told their mother about their first trip to Emmett’s house. “Um, yeah. Emmett Trask. We met him at the library. He’s a geologist.” All of that was true, at least.
Fortunately, Mrs. Barker was clearly distracted by the bustle at the restaurant and not inclined to ask any more questions. “You make sure you have her cell phone number if she goes out, okay, Hen?”
“We will,” Henry promised. Their parents seemed surprisingly amenable to the idea of the boys being left on their own on Sunday afternoon—so amenable that Henry thought they must have misunderstood. But according to Aunt Kathy, it was fine as long as (1) they could reach Aunt Kathy on her cell phone, (2) it was only for a few hours, and (3) she was home before dark.
Henry, Simon, Jack, and Delilah left Aunt Kathy giddy with excitement about her date. Delilah scooped up Josie, who was circling her legs obligingly, and they all retreated to Henry’s bedroom, closing the door behind them. Simon took the note out of his pocket and flattened it on the carpet where they could look at it.
“What was in the saddlebag doesn’t belong to you,” he read. Josie immediately pounced on it, batting it with one paw. “She loves paper,” Henry explained to Delilah, snatching it away from her.
“Well, what was in the saddlebag doesn’t belong to them either,” Jack said staunchly. “Everybody it belonged to is dead.”
“But who wrote that?” Delilah demanded, scratching Josie’s ears. “And then put it in the basket of my bike? Nobody knew about the map or the coins but us. It’s freaky. Not to mention annoying. I don’t like people touching my things.”
“Well,” Simon reasoned, “it doesn’t say they know what was in the saddlebag.”
“No,” Henry allowed. “But it sounds like they’ve figured out that it was something important.”
“We don’t even know whether it’s something important,” Simon contradicted. “I mean, sure, it’s a map. But it’s not like we can find the gold mine marked on it. And the coins are not that valuable. They’re like the ones in Uncle Hank’s coin box in the basement, just old Spanish silver pieces. Remember when we looked them up on the computer? They weren’t worth that much.”
“Somebody saw us take something out of the saddlebag,” Delilah said to Henry. “The only person that could have been is…”
Henry nodded grimly. “I know. The person who was shooting at us.”
“Maybe they were shooting at us because we found something valuable,” Delilah said, running her hand thoughtfully over Josie’s sleek back. “Or because we were close to finding something valuable. Not just because we were in the canyon. But still—who could it be?”
Just then, Josie launched herself from Delilah’s lap onto Henry’s nightstand, knocking over the stack of books there. As the books cascaded to the carpet, Missing on Superstition Mountain, the historical society’s booklet of strange events and disappearances that Henry had kept carefully tucked under his pile of books, fluttered loose. It landed on Henry’s lap.
“Josie!” Henry protested. He picked up the booklet, which he hadn’t really looked at since their trip up the mountain to retrieve the three skulls. He absently flipped through to the end, and then gasped.
“What’s the matter?” Delilah asked.
Henry folded open the last page and held it for the others to see. A list of historical society members filled the page in a neatly centered column. Under Emmett Trask, President, was a list of three officers:
Julia Thomas, Vice President
David Myers, Treasurer
Richard Delgado, Secretary
“Look!” Henry whispered urgen
tly. “Emmett told us that Julia Thomas was the new president of the historical society, but do you see who else is in it? Not just in it, but in charge of it!”
“Myers,” Simon said slowly. “The policeman. So that is how Mrs. Thomas knew what happened to us on the mountain. And Delgado…”
“Sara Delgado,” Delilah interjected. “From the cemetery.”
Emmett had told them the story of how Sara had been lost on the mountain for days and had returned in a fugue state, crazed with fear, unable to say what had happened to her. On their first trip to the cemetery, they had had an unsettling conversation with her that didn’t make any sense.
“That weird girl!” Jack exclaimed.
“This must be her father,” Henry said. “It’s like a secret club.” He glanced over at Josie, who was watching them impassively from the bed, the scattered pile of books on the carpet below her. Sometimes it almost seemed as if she meant to show them things. He thought of her lying on top of the tombstone that said BARKER at the cemetery or waiting in Delilah’s yard by the displaced bike.
Simon sat back, running his hand through his hair till it stood in a spiky halo. “So these are the treasure hunters,” he said.
“And maybe they’re the ones who have been following us and shooting at us and leaving strange notes, trying to stop us from finding the gold,” Henry finished for him.
“Well, this only proves that they’re in the historical society together,” Simon amended. “And they know each other. But if they are the ones following us, they must really believe there is gold.” He paused, mulling this over. “Let’s look at the map again. See if you notice anything new, after what Emmett talked about.”
Henry dug through the clutter of shoes and board games on the floor of his closet and pulled out Delilah’s pink backpack. He unzipped the side pocket and carefully removed the thick square of brown paper, unfolding it in front of them.
They all leaned over the map, peering at its dark markings: the upside down V’s of the mountains, the squiggly line of the creek, the narrow, jagged channels that appeared to indicate canyons.