Lost Cipher (7 page)

CHAPTER 13

A little after noon, the trail entered what seemed like an endless field of boulders. They had to rely on the counselors' memories and occasional cairns, little stacks of stones left by other hikers, to keep them on course. Aaron explained that these would be the last wide-open views of the trip, so they agreed to take a long break and eat lunch. Just after they dropped their packs, Maggie and the first members of the girls' group crested the same knob heading in the opposite direction. They'd already stopped for lunch, so after a few greetings and a quick meeting between the counselors, the girls moved on across the boulder field.

From their lunch spot on top of a truck-sized boulder, Lucas could see across to another ridge paralleling theirs, perhaps a half mile away. The ridge was topped with the same kind of tilted rocks they'd been through that morning. Some of these had broken off from the top of the ridge and tumbled down the cliff face into the trees. Examining these fallen boulders, Lucas spotted a dark depression in the rock face just above the tops of the trees. From where he sat, it looked like it bored straight into the mountainside. Like the mouth of a cave.

He immediately thought of the treasure and how Beale and his men had buried it in their secret mountain vault. Lucas knew it was a stretch, but for all he knew, maybe the preacher had been searching for a cave just like the one he was looking at now.

He elbowed Alex in the arm and whispered, “Check it out. Down at the bottom of those rocks.” He didn't point, not wanting the others to see what drew his attention. “What's that look like to you?”

At first Alex didn't see it, but he followed Lucas's eyes to the base of the rocks. “You mean that hole? I thought you saw something good, like a bear or something.”

“Shhh. Keep it down.” Lucas pointed with his eyes at Aaron and Rooster sitting just a few boulders away. “I don't want them to hear.”

“Hear what? About some hole in the rocks?” Suddenly, Alex realized what Lucas was thinking. “You've got to be kidding,” he whispered. “There's no treasure in that hole.” He looked down into the steep, thickly wooded ravine that separated them from the other ridge. “Even if you wanted to go see it, how would you get over there?”

George looked up from his lunch. “Go see what?” he asked loudly, spitting out crumbs of trail mix.

Lucas rolled his eyes. “Jeez, George, pipe down. There's a cave over in those rocks. Maybe it's what that preacher was looking for.”

George peered across the ravine. “Sure, I see it. But if I can see it, so can anyone who ever walked on this trail. It's not exactly a secret, Lucas.”

“How do you know?” Lucas asked. “It took us a day and a half to get out this far. And that's only because we came from the camp. Who knows how long it would take from somewhere else. And maybe it's been hidden until one of them fallin' rocks opened it up.”

“It'd take like an hour to cross over there and get back,” Alex warned. “How are you even gonna get away without Aaron and Rooster knowing?”

Lucas was thinking about it when George spoke up. “Oh, that'd be easy,” he whispered. “We could just pretend somebody's gotta go.”

“Go where?” asked Alex.

“Not
where
,” replied George. “
What
. As in dispose of some hazardous waste. You know, drop the Browns off at the pool?”

Lucas and Alex looked at each other and groaned disgustedly, but George went on. “Like, I could say I gotta go, and you guys are staying behind to make sure I don't get lost. We could even tell them the country boy here is gonna find me the right kind of leaf to use for toilet paper.”

“Good one, George,” laughed Lucas.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” whispered Alex. “Who's ‘we'? I'm not leaving the trail. Remember what Aaron said about wandering off?”

“Yeah,” Lucas added. “I don't need no help. Y'all would just slow me down anyways.”

George shook his head. “But Aaron isn't going to let you stay back on your own. There's no way. And it'd be stupid for us to wait right here when the three of us could all go check out the cave.”

“Count me out,” said Alex.

“Really, dude?” said George. “Even after Lucas here stood up to Zack for us?”

“For
us
!”
whispered Alex. “Don't you mean for
you
?”

“So
I'll
stay back with him. You can cover for us.”

“You mean lie.”

“Whatever,” replied George. He turned to Lucas. “Wanna go for it?”

“Oh, I'm goin', and if y'all want to help, just don't mess it up.”

Lucas was feeling the same way he had when he'd decided to get back at Zack—like he didn't care one way or the other if he got in trouble with the counselors. Before his pa died, he'd never been in any real trouble. But now it just didn't seem to matter.

“You know,” said Alex, “chasing after that treasure—which isn't even there—isn't exactly the same as sticking up for George. And we'll probably get tossed out of here if they catch us.”

Lucas wanted his friends along, but he acted like he didn't even hear Alex. Instead he focused on Aaron and Rooster. They were putting away their water bottles and telling the kids around them to pack up. Soon everyone in the group was rising, stuffing away their trash and shouldering their packs again.

“Whatever,” Alex finally said. “What's it matter, anyway?”

Just then Aaron called to them. “Let's go, boys. We've got five more miles ahead of us.” A few other boys moaned loudly.

George didn't hesitate. “You mind if I run off to a tree first. I sorta gotta go.” Aaron looked skeptical, so George grimaced and did a frantic little dance. “Number two,” he added.

Everyone but George, Lucas, and Alex already had their packs on. The other boys groaned at the idea of having to drop theirs again and wait for George.

“Jeez, we've been here like a half hour already,” Zack whined, “and you wait till now?”

Before anyone dropped a pack though, George said, “Just go on. I can catch up. You'll probably want to clear the area first, anyway.”

A few of the boys chuckled. “Nasty,” added one of them.

Lucas piped up. “Alex and I can stick around with him.”

Aaron glanced at Rooster, and Lucas thought for sure he would tell the younger counselor to stay behind with them. But George reached into his pack and pulled out his personal roll of toilet paper. “Boy Scout motto—be prepared,” he chirped, turning and winking at Lucas.

The joke seemed to lighten up Aaron.

“Stick together and hurry up. Look for the cairns up ahead. We're not going to slow down for you.” He turned back to the front of the line and started walking. “And make sure you bury that stuff,” he hollered back over his shoulder.

Alex and Lucas pretended to point out a suitable spot for George to go, but no one was watching. Soon the rest of the boys and Rooster had fallen in line, and the colorful caravan of backpacks began to disappear among the boulders.

Lucas pointed to their own packs lying on the rock next to them. “Leave these right here. That way we'll spot 'em when we come back up and know where to pick up the trail. Y'all ready?”

“I guess we better be, huh?” answered Alex. “Somebody's gotta keep you two from killing yourselves.”

CHAPTER 14

The three friends quickly made it down to the base of the cliffs where they'd seen the cave. They scrambled up some fallen boulders until they came to an overhanging slab of rock about a dozen feet from the forest floor. There were plenty of handholds in the little cliff, so they hauled themselves up and over the lip of the ledge until they were facing back into a deep shadow cast by a rock roof. From across the ravine, with the sun in front of them, the overhang's shadow had looked like an endless tunnel, but from here at the opening they could see it wasn't more than twenty feet deep.

Alex took a few steps inside the little cave. “Looks like we aren't even the first here,” he called out, pointing to the ground.

A crude fire ring sat far enough under the ledge to be sheltered from the weather. The ceiling above the ring of stones was charred black from smoke, and a few rusted cans were scattered among the ashes. The camp looked like it hadn't been used for a hundred years.

“Could still be where the preacher camped when he was looking for the treasure,” offered George.

“I don't know,” replied Lucas. “If he'd a had a little shelter like this up here, why would he have been outside gettin' hit by lightnin'?” He moved deeper beneath the rock, until he had to squat to go farther. Suddenly he called out again.

“Dang!” he cried, backing out of the darkness and into Alex.

“What? What is it?” asked George.

Lucas pointed to the back of the cave. “Take a look.”

At first they'd looked like only a scattering of bright, white sticks glowing in the gloom. But moving closer, Lucas had recognized them. Bones.

“This is somethin's house,” he said. “Whatever it is probably still lives here. Some of these look pretty fresh.”

Most of the bones were tiny, while a few others looked like ribs, almost big enough to be human. Whatever used the cave ate everything from mice to deer. A few still had scraps of fur clinging to them, and the dirt around them was stirred up.

“Do you think it's a bear?” George asked.

Lucas squatted next to a long, knobby bone and examined the ground. He whistled under his breath.

“I can't believe it,” he said. “Look here.”

Alex bent down next to him, but George hung back.

“Four toes and about as big as a baseball,” Lucas said, pointing at an arch of round depressions in the dust. “Know what that is?”

“How would we know?” exclaimed George in a hush, like he was afraid someone—or something—might hear. “All I know is it eats meat. And we're meat.
And
we're sitting in its dining room.”

Lucas was still mesmerized by the print. “It's a painter track,” he said.

“What's a painter?” asked Alex.

“A painter. You know, a big ol' cat 'bout the size of you and me.”

“Oh, you mean a panther?”

Lucas laughed. “Painter. Panther. Yeah, same thing. We call 'em painters around home. They's supposed to be long gone from all these mountains. But a lot of folks around my grandpa's say they's still up here. They say they hear 'em some nights. My grandpa even showed me a print once, but even he wasn't too sure. But this here can't be nothin' else. I seen bobcat prints, but this here's way bigger.”

“Maybe that print's really old,” said George, his voice quaking a little.

“Naw,” said Lucas. “The wind would've blowed it away eventually. It can't be older'n week or two.”

“Great,” said George. “Can we go now? I'd rather not add my bones to the pile if it's okay with you.”

Lucas walked away from the track toward the daylight and began scooting off the ledge to head back. “I don't know, George,” he said. “I bet Aaron and them will probably be pretty interested to know they've got a real painter up here.”

“Sure,” offered Alex, “maybe he'll be so happy he'll go easy with our kitchen duty.”

They dropped down the side of the ravine and back into the thick woods, roughly retracing their steps to the other side. Before they were halfway back, Alex spoke up.

“What would you guys do with a treasure like that anyway?”

“That's easy,” said George. “I'd open up a whole chain of pizza restaurants all over the country. Each one would have a special table just for me and my friends that no one else could ever sit at. Then I'd buy one of those big luxury campers, the ones that are like the size of a bus, and a driver to take me and my friends to any one of my restaurants, any time we wanted.”

“Oh, sure,” said Alex, “I'll bet your dad would just let you travel the country with no grown-ups around.”

George snorted. “Are you kidding? He'd probably be glad to get me out of his hair. More time for him to spend at work or on the road. Like I said, that's all he does anyway.”

“Yeah, but…pizza? That's all you would do with all that money?” asked Lucas.

“Got a better idea?”

Lucas didn't answer at first. He knew exactly what he would do with the treasure, but he wasn't going to let Alex and George in on the sorry state of his life back in Indian Hole.

“I'd think of something,” he finally spit out.

“I know what I'd do,” said Alex. “I'd buy me a plane. That's what I always wanted to do—fly. Not with someone else doing the flying, but with me at the controls.”

“You can't even fly one though,” said George.

“Duh. Dude, I'm thirteen,” replied Alex. “I can't even drive a car. But with all that money, I could take all the flying lessons I wanted. Heck, I could probably open up my own flight school. In a couple years, I'd be awesome at it.”

At the bottom of the ravine, they stepped over a tiny creek not more than two feet wide and climbed up through the trees toward the base of the ledge where they'd started. Alex and George chattered about being rich while Lucas focused on finding the easiest route through the underbrush and back up the rocks to the ledge.

They never saw their three packs—because they were now hidden deep in a dense thicket of laurel on the floor of the forest, far below the rocks.

CHAPTER 15

Half an hour after leaving the panther's cave, the boys pulled themselves up over the last small cliff, expecting at any moment to see the three packs they'd left behind. Instead they saw nothing but rock.

“So where are the packs?” asked Alex.

Lucas looked back at the route they had taken from the cave. He could see the overhang across the ravine. It looked like the same view as when they had first seen it from their lunch spot.

“They's supposed to be right here. I guess we're just off a little.”

“But this is where we ate lunch,” said George. “This rock. I know it. Our footprints ought to be around here somewhere.”

“Ain't no footprints on rocks, George,” replied Lucas.

“Then maybe this isn't even where we were! Maybe we're lost!

“Jeez, George,” said Alex. “Give Lucas a chance to think. I mean, we're not lost. Right, Lucas?”

Lucas wasn't too crazy to hear Alex depending on him already, and he was just about sure they were on the exact same ledge where they'd seen the cave, but he put up a good front.

“Yeah, just take it easy, George,” he said. “We ain't lost. The packs have gotta be close.”

Lucas examined the ground for any sign that they'd been there, but even where the surface wasn't solid rock, it was too gravelly to reveal any prints. In some places, the gravel looked stirred up, but he couldn't be sure. He'd tracked lots of deer back on his mountain, and he knew how to tell plenty of other animals from their prints, but finding a trail across a ridge that was more rock than dirt was a different story.

“Maybe a bear dragged them off,” offered Alex. “I mean with all the snacks George was packing in his.”

“Sure,” said George glumly, “blame the fat kid.”

“Naw,” said Lucas. “A bear wouldn't have hauled off all three of them. Plus he would've torn 'em up right where they was at. There'd be somethin' left to see. It's all right though. We'll just start looking. They're around here somewhere.”

They split up and searched among the boulders for another half hour, always staying within sight, or at least shouting distance, of each other. But there was no sign of the packs. Worse yet, not even Lucas could find anything that looked like a trail across the rocks. Aaron had told them to follow the cairns, but every time Lucas thought he'd found one, it was just a few rocks lumped together, not the neat little stacks they'd seen before.

It was more than an hour since they'd sneaked away, and Lucas couldn't believe that Aaron or Rooster hadn't come back for them. He began to worry that they were so far off the trail they couldn't even hear someone calling. Or maybe one of the counselors had come back when they were still across the ravine and now they were looking somewhere else.

Half an hour later, Lucas gave up looking. He'd even ventured out on his own, far out of earshot, to where the field of rocks ended and the mountaintop turned to forest again. But he returned exhausted and no closer to finding the packs or a trail. It seemed the longer he searched, the more uncertain he was about the way out. If this were his mountain back home, he'd have known exactly where he was and how to get home, but this pile of boulders was nothing like his mountain. He'd relied on someone else to get him out to the middle of nowhere, and now two other kids were relying on him to get them back.

Before long, he saw Alex in the distance, shaking his head and holding up his hands to tell him his luck had been no better. George had stopped looking long before the other two. They found him sitting alone on a rock, wiping tears away with his sleeve. Lucas and Alex sprawled out on the same rock, and for a few minutes, the only sound was George's soft blubbering.

“Sorry, George,” Lucas said finally. “Sorry I got you into this. Both of you.”

George sniffed and shrugged his shoulders. “It's not like you had to twist our arms. I just can't believe we could get lost so quick.”

“What about a person?” asked Alex. “I mean, maybe we're not the only ones up here. Maybe someone's been following us and stole the packs.”

Lucas thought about it, but it just didn't make any sense. “What kind of thief is gonna want to carry our packs all the way out of here? Plus, Aaron said we'd probably have the trail to ourselves, and I believe him.”

“Maybe not,” said George. “Maybe somebody lives close to here. Like that creepy old man Aaron was talking about.”

“Aaron said that old man shoots treasure hunters,” said Lucas. “He didn't say nothin' about him sneakin' around stealin' backpacks full of kids' dirty clothes and candy bars.”

“What about Zack then?” said George. “Maybe he did something with them?”

The thought had already crossed Lucas's mind. “Naw, I definitely saw him up near the front of the line when everyone left. And I watched him the whole way. He never even looked back at us.”

“Me too,” said Alex. “No way he could have sneaked back here without Aaron or Rooster or somebody seeing him.”

“So what are we going to do?” asked George finally. He didn't seem to care that he sounded helpless.

“Anybody got their phone?” asked Alex. “Mine's in my pack.”

“Mine too,” said George. “It was dragging my pants down when we were walking. What about you, Lucas?”

“Ain't got one.” He was looking over Alex's shoulder. “But it looks like the first thing we gotta do is get off these rocks.”

“I thought that's what we've been trying to do for the last three hours,” whined George in a small voice.

“I ain't talkin' about that. I'm talking about
that.
”

Lucas pointed to the west. The sky was a wall of ominous purple, crowned by towering white thunderheads. A breeze that smelled of rain came from the direction of the storm. “That's maybe an hour away,” said Lucas. “If we don't wanna end up like that preacher, we're gonna need to be down in the trees somewhere.”

“Where are we gonna go?” asked Alex.

“Well, if we can find our way back to it in time, I know one good place to take cover.”

“No way, not there,” George protested, shaking his head. “There's got to be a better place.”

Alex's expression told Lucas that he wasn't exactly thrilled with the idea either.

“Look,” said Lucas, trying to calm them down, “that painter's probably miles from here. Even if we don't get hit by lightnin', it's still fixin' to rain buckets. I'd rather be cozy and dry in that hole than mess with a storm up here on top.” He pushed himself off the rock and started back to where they would have a view of the other ridge.

Alex followed reluctantly. “
Cozy?
” he said. “You call that cozy?”

George stayed on his rock at first, sniffling and rubbing the last of the tears out of his eyes. “This can't be happening,” he muttered. But a low growl of thunder shook the ridge, and a few seconds later, he was following Lucas and Alex back to the ravine.