The Diamond War Read online

  The Diamond War

  A Castle Court Kids Book

  Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  For kids and dogs everywhere

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Preview: The Box and the Bone

  A Biography of Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  Chapter 1

  IT WAS EARLY ON a Saturday morning and light was just beginning to slant across the cul-de-sac known as Castle Court. Long shadows reached out from each of the seven houses, and a damp fog still drifted under the tall trees that grew on the mysterious vacant lot. In the misty morning light the great jagged crag on the hill above the cul-de-sac looked, more than ever, like an old ruined castle.

  The sun was just clearing the hilltops when a back door slammed open at number three Castle Court. Number three was a big new Spanish-style house with a tile roof and an enormous swimming pool, and the person who came out the door was Carlos Garcia.

  Carlos was wearing swimming trunks and carrying a Dove bar. He stopped for a moment on the big back deck to look around. Next door, at the Brockhursts’, there was no sign of life. The Brockhursts slept late on Saturdays. But on the other side of the Garcias’ lot something was moving. Just barely. It was the Andersons’ old Shetland pony trudging slowly across his pasture.

  Carlos watched the pony absentmindedly as he unwrapped the Dove bar, dropped the wrapper on a bench near the back door, and ran down the steps. But his mind wasn’t really on the pony, or on the Dove bar either. And it certainly wasn’t on the loud sniffing, slobbering noise that came out from under the deck and then followed him as he crossed the lawn. He knew it was only Lump.

  Lump, the Garcias’ enormous Saint Bernard, could smell ice cream half a block away. He sniffed and slobbered and whined hopefully as he lurched out from under the deck and followed Carlos and the Dove bar. Carlos was usually a soft touch.

  But today Carlos had other things on his mind. He jogged around the swimming pool and out onto the diving board. At the end of the board he lay down on his stomach and went on eating—and thinking.

  Lump stood at the other end of the diving board for a minute or two, licking his slobbery lips. Then he sighed loudly, climbed up the stairs, and ate the ice cream wrapper. Carlos didn’t notice that either. He was much too busy thinking about his wonderful idea.

  Carlos, who was ten years old and in the fifth grade at Beaumont School, was a good athlete, and he was also good at solving problems. Particularly sports problems—like where to put first base. By the time he’d finished the Dove bar he was pretty sure he’d come up with something that just might work.

  As soon as the ice cream was all gone he flipped the stick into the water and dove in after it. It was a professional dive, straight and clean. A minute later he climbed out of the pool with the stick in his mouth. He had grabbed the stick in the water like a shark catching a fish. Carlos liked to do tricks like that, even when there was no one around to watch.

  On the back porch he stopped long enough to blot himself a few times with a towel before he hurried to the kitchen telephone. He had to call Eddy immediately to tell him about his great idea. Eddy would be really excited.

  Eddy Wong, who lived right across the cul-de-sac at number six Castle Court, was Carlos’s best friend. Except, of course, for Bucky Brockhurst, who was another kind of best friend. But it was Eddy who was going to be really crazy about Carlos’s idea.

  The phone rang three times before Eddy’s mom answered. She sounded rushed and a little breathless as she said, “Oh, hello, Carlos. I’m fine, thanks. Yes, I’ll call Eddy but he can’t talk very long. We’re just going out the door. So just a short conversation. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Carlos said, but what he was thinking was, Rats. Eddy had told him they were going to visit relatives today, but he’d forgotten. The Wongs were always visiting relatives in the city.

  “Rats,” he said out loud. The trouble was, his great idea wasn’t going to be easy to explain in a hurry. He’d just have to get to the important point right away. He was reminding himself to get to the point in a hurry, when Eddy picked up the phone.

  “Hi, Eddy,” he said excitedly. “You know what? There’ll be plenty of room if we put it right in the middle of that little forest. I mean, after we chop it all down.”

  “Yeah?” Eddy said in a questioning tone of voice. Then for a few seconds he didn’t say anything. “I don’t get it,” he said finally. “What are you talking about, Garcia?”

  Carlos sighed impatiently. He should have known that jumping to the main point wouldn’t work with Eddy. Eddy liked things to be in order. He started over. “It’s about having a baseball diamond,” he said. “Right here at Castle Court.” That would get Eddy’s attention.

  Eddy was the one who had been wanting a baseball diamond more than anything—and Carlos knew why. Here at home there had never been enough room for a diamond, so Eddy and Bucky and Carlos had played other games. Or game, really. Like, nothing but basketball for years and years and years. And Eddy, who was a great batter and pitcher and all-around good athlete, just happened to be a little bit short.

  Short doesn’t matter in baseball, but it certainly does in basketball, particularly when you’re playing with Bucky Brockhurst. Carlos didn’t blame Eddy for being tired of basketball. He himself got a little tired of losing every tip-off and rebound to Bucky—and he was two inches taller than Eddy.

  “What baseball diamond?” Eddy said. “Where?”

  Carlos knew that would get him. “The Weed-patch,” Carlos said. “At Dragoland.”

  “But there’s no room,” Eddy said. “Remember? We measured it. If you put home plate near the basement, the creek is in the outfield. And if you go the other way, there’s no place for first base.”

  “I know,” Carlos said triumphantly. “That’s just it. There will be lots of room for first base if we just chop down—”

  “Eddy! Come on. Right now!” It was Mr. Wong’s voice and he sounded like he meant it. Eddy yelled good-bye and hung up the phone.

  “Rats,” Carlos said again. With Eddy gone he had only one other PRO to talk to—and that was Bucky Brockhurst.

  Chapter 2

  THE PROS WERE LIKE a special club. A club just for guys who played sports a lot and who were all planning to be “PRO-fessional” athletes when they grew up. Actually there were only three full-time PROs, plus a bunch of part-timers. The part-timers were mostly guys from other neighborhoods, plus a couple of Anderson grandkids. But Anderson grandkids were around only on weekends and holidays. So the only real, original, full-time Castle Court PROs were Carlos Garcia, Eddy Wong, and Bucky Brockhurst.

  Carlos sighed. The thing was that even though Bucky was just about the greatest athlete at Beaumont School, and you couldn’t help being a little bit proud to be his best friend, he wasn’t always all that great in some other ways.

  Like, for instance, you never knew what Bucky was going to do. He might be all for Carlos’s plan or he might not. It all depended on the mood he was in. He might get all excited and want to start chopping down everything in sight. Or, on the other hand, he might decide he wasn’t interested at all. He could even go back to saying what he’d said when Carlos and Eddy first started talking about hav
ing a baseball diamond at Castle Court.

  “It’ll never work,” Bucky had said. “The Weed-patch isn’t wide enough. And no other place around here is deep enough for a diamond. Not if you have any real sluggers anyway. Like me, for instance. You remember what happened that time we tried to play out in the street, don’t you?”

  Carlos remembered, all right. He’d pitched the ball and Bucky had batted it right through the Nicely’s picture window. “Yeah,” Carlos said. “How could I forget? I got my allowance taken away for a month. Playing baseball was Eddy’s idea, and you hit the ball, but I was the one who lost my allowance.”

  “Well, poor old you,” Bucky said. “I lost my allowance too.”

  “No, you didn’t. You had lots of money the very next day. Remember all that stuff you bought at my dad’s restaurant?”

  “Oh, that,” Bucky said. “That wasn’t my allowance. That was just blackmail money. I was blackmailing Muffy.”

  “Oh yeah?” Carlos said. He should have guessed. Muffy was Bucky’s sister, and the “pay up or I’ll tell” routine was something they used on each other a lot.

  “Yeah,” Bucky said. “But Muffy’s getting real sneaky lately. I haven’t gotten anything good on her for a long time. So I sure can’t afford to lose my allowance. So you better just forget about playing baseball around here. There’s just no place big enough for—”

  Carlos sighed. “Yeah, I know. There’s no place big enough for a slugger like you.” He might have gone on to say that Bucky just wanted to keep playing a game where he had a natural-born edge on everybody else. Like, being a lot taller than most people in the fifth grade.

  That had been the end of that conversation. So there probably wasn’t much use calling Bucky. But with Eddy gone, Bucky was the only real PRO left to talk to. Carlos pretty much had to tell Bucky about his great idea, or nobody. He picked up the phone again and dialed the Brockhursts’ number.

  Bucky answered the phone on the second ring, and he seemed to be in one of his better moods. He actually seemed to be listening while Carlos explained his idea about how to solve the first-base problem.

  “Sounds okay to me,” Bucky said. “A lot of work though. Hey! Unless we had a chain saw. That’s what we need. A big old chain saw.”

  “Yeah,” Carlos agreed. “A chain saw would be great. But I guess axes and lots of muscle power would do the job.”

  “Well, maybe,” Bucky said. “Your dad got any axes?”

  “I don’t think so,” Carlos said. “You don’t need axes very often in a restaurant. How about your dad?”

  “Naw. No axes. But he does have a killer hatchet I could use.”

  “A killer hatchet?” Carlos asked uneasily.

  “Yeah. You know. Great, neat, awesome. That is, I can use it if I can sneak it out of the garage without my dad noticing.”

  “Why? Won’t your dad let you borrow it?”

  “Not anymore he won’t,” Bucky said. “Not since I chopped up a bunch of junk when I was practicing making a Boy Scout campfire. It sure looked like a bunch of junk to me, but it turned out to be this expensive antique my mom just bought at a garage sale. Sooo…no more hatchet time for the old Buckaroo.”

  Carlos laughed. That was Bucky for you. Making a campfire out of an expensive antique sounded just like Bucky Brockhurst.

  “Chopping down all that stuff just might make enough room for first base,” Bucky said. “But it won’t be easy. That’s a lot of trees. And I can’t help till tomorrow. I got to go to town with my folks this morning. They’re going shopping and then we’re going to a movie. I don’t know when we’ll come back. Let’s do it tomorrow. Okay?” Then he laughed and made a loud “brrr” noise. “Wish we had a chain saw,” he said again. “Brrr!”

  Carlos sighed. “Okay, tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll start tomorrow. Maybe Eddy will be home tomorrow and he can help too.” Carlos really wanted Eddy to be there when they started.

  It was when Carlos was saying good-bye that he realized he’d been hearing funny noises for a while now. Clicking noises and a loud breathing sound, like somebody was listening in on one of the other phones. But Rafe and Gabe, Carlos’s brothers, had gone to the restaurant with his dad, so no one was home except his mom and little sister. His mom wouldn’t listen in on someone else’s conversation. Of course Susie might—not that it was likely. Susie wouldn’t be at all interested in a conversation about baseball diamonds. At least that’s what Carlos thought.

  After he hung up the phone Carlos headed for his room to change his clothes. It was while he was sitting on the floor pulling on his socks that he happened to notice a sports catalog under his bed, so he scooted over and pulled it out.

  The PROs were going to need a lot of new equipment to go with the new baseball diamond. The next thing he knew he’d been sitting on the floor with one sock on for a long time, picking out the balls and mitts and bats they would have to buy. In fact, he got so busy deciding among Rawlings and Cooper and Wilson that he forgot all about the mysterious breathing noise he’d heard on the telephone.

  Chapter 3

  WHILE CARLOS WAS STILL sitting on the floor picking out the best catcher’s mitt, the front door opened at number one Castle Court and Kate Nicely came out carrying a large paper bag.

  Kate, who was in the same fifth-grade class as Carlos, had straight brown hair, fierce blue eyes, and a brown belt in karate. Everybody at Beaumont School knew about Kate’s brown belt, just like they knew that Kate Nicely and Aurora Pappas were best friends.

  Kate closed the front door carefully with one hand while balancing her paper bag with the other—and stumbled over Nijinsky. Nijinsky was a collie dog who lived across the cul-de-sac with the Grant family. He was on the front porch waiting, as he did every morning, for the Nicelys’ poodle to come out and play. Even though Kate had almost fallen on him, Nijinsky, who was a very friendly dog, wagged his beautiful collie tail and put up a paw to shake hands.

  “It’s no use waiting,” Kate said as she shook his paw. “Fifi isn’t coming out today. She urped all over the kitchen floor last night and Mom thinks it might be something catching like distemper.”

  Nijinsky’s ears drooped and his forehead wrinkled. “Don’t worry,” Kate told him. “It’s not really distemper. It’s just lizard poisoning and I don’t think it’s fatal.” She leaned forward, lifted Nijinksy’s drooping ear, and whispered, “She ate one of Carson’s favorite lizards last night. But don’t tell. No one saw her do it but me.”

  Kate smiled as she gave Nijinsky a last pat and picked up her paper bag. As she started down the steps she was thinking that talking to animals was another weird habit she’d picked up from Aurora, not to mention the rest of the Pappas family. Weird—but interesting. That was how you’d describe the whole Pappas family, all right—weird but interesting.

  A minute later, as Kate was about to knock on it, the front door of number eight Castle Court flew open. A very small girl with a dark corkscrew ponytail flew out and almost ran into her. Athena Pappas was still wearing her pajama bottoms, her T-shirt was on backward, her feet were bare, and she had a big carrot in one hand. She dodged around Kate and slid to a stop.

  “Hi,” she said breathlessly. “Aurora’s waiting for you.” Then she waved the carrot and went on running.

  “You’re late,” Kate called after her. “I’ll bet Prince is mad at you.”

  Aurora’s little sister, Athena, who was only four years old, was crazy about animals in general, and horses in particular. And even more particularly, Prince, the Andersons’ old Shetland pony. Every morning since she was two years old Athena Pappas had insisted on visiting Prince before she would eat her breakfast. In fact, Athena’s prebreakfast visits were kind of a neighborhood joke.

  Kate grinned, thinking about what would happen if Athena were a Nicely instead of a Pappas. At the Nicelys’ nobody did anything until after they’d eaten their breakfast. A proper breakfast with napkins and place mats and gooey oatmeal in the wintertime. Kate was
still watching Athena running toward the pony pasture when Aurora came to the door.

  Aurora Pappas, who was a month older than Kate Nicely but quite a bit smaller, had Alice-in-Wonderland hair and large cloudy gray eyes. She was wearing a backpack over a long paint-smeared T-shirt that hung down almost to her knees. Probably one of her mom’s. Aurora’s mom, who was an artist, wore paint-smeared T-shirts a lot.

  “Hi,” Kate said. “You ready?” She pointed to her paper bag. “I’ve got all my stuff. You got your stuff?”

  Aurora nodded slowly. “I think so. And you know what? I think…” Her huge cloudy eyes widened and a faint smile flickered across her face. “I really, really think…” She paused and her eyes got even wider. “I think this will be the day.”

  “Yeah,” Kate said firmly. “I think so too. Let’s go.”

  Kate Nicely and Aurora Pappas walked down the gravel path between the Pappases’ two big old cherry trees and turned to the right on the circular sidewalk. When they were almost to the vacant lot that everyone called Dragoland, Aurora smiled and pointed. “Look,” she said.

  Across the cul-de-sac three little girls were hanging over the fence at the Andersons’ pony pasture. The two blond ones were Anderson grandkids. The one with the brown corkscrew ponytail was, of course, Athena. Athena was patting Prince’s old head where it hung down low over the fence.

  “Shhh,” Kate said. “Don’t let her see us.” She grabbed Aurora’s T-shirt and pulled her down the narrow path that led back to the Weedpatch. Aurora followed quietly. When they were safely behind a tall bush they stopped and peered out through the thick leaves. Athena was still standing on the bottom rung of the fence.

  “Good,” Kate said. “She didn’t see us. That’s a relief.”

  Aurora nodded. “Yes,” she said. “She’s really too young to be a unicorn maiden. And besides, she hasn’t had her breakfast.”

  Chapter 4