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  “I don’t see why Natasha doesn’t just forget about the whole ballet thing,” Rudy said. “It’s just a waste of everybody’s time.”

  “Well now, I wouldn’t say that. Not at all. I think your mother has been very brave to hang on to her dream that way even though she’s had such a hard time and—”

  Rudy laughed. “Okay, okay, I take it back.” He knew better than to criticize Natasha even a little when Murph was around. “But I still think trying to make ballerinas out of the M and M’s is a waste of time.”

  Murph chuckled. “Oh, well. It gives them something to do, doesn’t it?”

  “Not to mention something else to fight about,” Rudy said, with more bitterness than usual. “It’s the truth. Every time they practice it turns into a big blowup. You know—about who’s wearing whose leotards, or hogging too much room at the barre, or who just pirouetted into somebody else’s space.”

  Murph chuckled again, but after he put the plates on the table and sat down, he looked at Rudy and stopped smiling.

  “Hmm,” he said. “A bit downcast and melancholy at the moment, aren’t we, Rudy Drummond? Particularly when one considers that this very morning marks the arrival of summer vacation and three months of relative freedom.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Summer vacation. Great! I’m all excited.”

  Murph poured some cream in his coffee, stirred it, and then sipped without taking his eyes off Rudy. Finally he asked, “Could all this uncharacteristic lack of good cheer have something to do with Barnaby Crookshank?”

  For a crazy moment Rudy thought Murph actually knew. His mind racing, he took a big bite of pancake and pretended to be too busy chewing to say anything. It was true that Murph sometimes seemed to be able to tune in on things that most people would miss, but that didn’t mean he could really read minds. And if you ruled out actual mind reading—just how much could he possibly know?

  “Ahem.” Murph cleared his throat and Rudy swallowed hard and came back to the question.

  “No,” Rudy said. “No. Why should the fact that I’m not exactly flipping over school’s being out have anything to do with Barney? It’s just that… It’s just that… Well, it’s too hot in Pyramid in the summertime. And too many tourists. And there’s practically nothing for guys my age to do in this one-horse town in the summertime. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just bored.”

  Murph’s smile said that he knew Rudy was talking nonsense. And it was true, of course. Nobody knew better than Murph just how good Rudy had always been at thinking up things to do, or to build, or to do research on. Murph had been particularly involved in the research projects—like tracing the roots of some of the Pyramid Hill families who went back to the gold rush, or the biography of Will Rogers, or the one on snake charmers in India. And, of course, the research on the lives of other talented or famous people who had been illegitimate. Murph had been especially helpful with the Famous Bastards project.

  So it was nonsense to pretend the problem was simple boredom, and Rudy was about to admit it by shrugging sheepishly when Murph’s smile suddenly turned into a quizzical expression that said, “So come on, tell me what’s really bothering you.” And that was none of his business.

  “Look, Murph,” Rudy said. “Stop bugging me. Nothing’s wrong. All right?”

  “Sure thing,” Murph said. He got up and puttered around the stove for a while, chatting about the pancakes and whether they were up to his usual standard, as if he’d forgotten all about giving Rudy the third degree. But as soon as he sat down again he said, right out of the blue, “So, who is this Lewis kid? Ty, I think they call him. The one with the spiky hair.” Sometimes it really did seem like Murph Woodbury was a mind reader.

  “Tyler Lewis?” Rudy said. “What’s he got to do with it?”

  “I don’t know. I’m asking you. I’ve just seen him around a lot lately. Sometimes with you and Barney and sometimes just with Barney.”

  “Yeah,” Rudy said. “Well, he’s just this dude from Southern California. L.A., I think. His folks moved up here last summer to start a new real estate business. He’s in some classes with Barney and me. He’s… What can I tell you about Ty Lewis?” Rudy’s laugh felt a little bit forced. “Well, to put it in Ty-wanese… he’s a rude dude.”

  “Ty-wanese?” Murph asked.

  “That’s what Barney and I call the way Ty talks. Ty uses a lot of slang. I mean, when Ty first started hanging out with Barney and me, half the time we couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. So we started saying he spoke ‘Ty-wanese.’ Get it?”

  Murph nodded. “Got it. So this new kid speaks a language all his own. And he’s rude?”

  Rudy laughed. “Rude means great. In Ty-wanese, that is. Great. Awesome. Like, you say ‘Hey, that is one really rude jacket’—or whatever. And ‘dude.’ Well, everyone is ‘dude’ to Ty. Even girls.”

  “I see,” Murph said in the supersolemn way that looked like he was taking something extraseriously but really meant just the opposite.

  They ate in silence for a few minutes before Rudy asked again, “Why’d you bring Ty up? What’s he got to do with anything?”

  Murph shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m way off base, but it’s just that you and Barney have been close for so long, and now this new kid comes along. Thought maybe the two of them have been ganging up on you, or something.”

  Rudy made a surprised face and asked, “What makes you think that?”

  “Well, partly something I overheard the other day, I guess,” Murph said. “When the three of you were sitting on your veranda. Sounded to me like this Ty kid was trying to put you down, and maybe Barney was going along with it, at least a little.”

  “Aha!” Rudy said, shaking his finger at Murph. “You’ve been ‘studying humanity’ again. Where were you this time? At a keyhole? Or peeking through the curtains?”

  Murph grinned. “Don’t recall. But there was some teasing going on, wasn’t there?”

  “Nothing important, I guess. I can’t remember.” Rudy tried to look unconcerned even though a small dark cloud of worry had suddenly floated into the back of his mind.

  “Er—what was it exactly that you heard?”

  “I don’t recall the exact words but”—Murph paused while he poked at the last of the hash brown potatoes on his plate—“the Lewis kid seemed to be carrying on about you objecting to something they were planning to do.”

  The small dark cloud suddenly mushroomed. “Planning?” Rudy asked.

  “Um.” Murph nodded. “Some sort of a money-making project, I gathered. Didn’t hear what exactly.” The cloud dwindled. “The Ty kid started jumping around flapping his elbows. Made it harder to make out what he was saying.”

  “Yeah.” Rudy shrugged. “That was supposed to be me.”

  Murph looked puzzled. “The flapping elbows meant you? Why’s that?”

  Sometimes Murph was unbelievably out of it. “A chicken.” Rudy explained with exaggerated patience. “When you do this”—Rudy flapped his elbows—“that’s supposed to mean chicken, Murph. That’s me, according to Ty. He gets on my case a little sometimes. But I get on his too. It’s no big deal.”

  “Well, why was he calling you chicken? If I’m not being too curious.”

  Rudy shrugged. “Yeah, you’re being too curious. But then, what else is new? Murphy P. Woodbury is famous for being too curious. Right?”

  “Guilty as charged,” Murph said, grinning. “But with extenuating circumstances. Authors should be allowed to plead curiosity, like a madman pleads insanity. Same sort of situation. Can’t help themselves. So I’ll ask again. What was it this Ty was pestering you to do that you didn’t want to?”

  Rudy shrugged and filled his mouth with pancake again. While he chewed he thought about Murph’s question and possible good answers. There weren’t any actually, at least not any that were true. On the one hand there was a part of his mind that could almost wish that Murph had overheard what Barney and Ty were planning, but since he hadn�
�t that was the end of it. He, Rudy Drummond, wasn’t going to turn into a fink at this stage of the game, particularly not when finking would mean getting Barney in trouble.

  He swallowed and said, “I’m not sure what it was that particular time. Probably he was just talking up some daredevil stunt he wanted to do. Like going down Cliff Road on our skateboards, maybe. Ty likes to do dangerous stuff.”

  “Dangerous,” Murph muttered. “Dangerous hardly describes Cliff Road on a skateboard. Suicidal is more like it.” But after Rudy assured him that they weren’t going to do the Cliff Road thing he finally changed the subject and quit asking questions. And a little later, when the food was all gone, Rudy said good-bye and thanked Murph and went home—with a lot on his mind.

  There were several things he’d been planning to work on that morning, but for some reason he wound up flaked out on the shady side of the veranda. In the big woven rope hammock he sipped a Pepsi and thought about Murph and what he’d guessed, which was pretty amazing, and what he apparently hadn’t guessed, or at least not yet.

  What Murph had been right about was that he, Rudy, had a big problem and that it had something to do with Barney. But what he didn’t know was that the whole Barnaby Crookshank-Rudy Drummond partnership—or connection, or brotherhood, or whatever you want to call it—was, just possibly, about to end. And if it did end it would be because Rudy was about to chicken out on something that was really important to Barney. Because Rudy was not about to spend the summer prospecting for gold in the abandoned hard-rock mine called Pritchard’s Hole.

  Rudy put one hand up across his face and bit his lip to shut in something that could have been a lot like a moan. He didn’t think any sound had actually escaped, but Ophelia, who had come back from escorting the M and M’s to the baby-sitter, suddenly got up on her hind legs and snuffled nervously in his ear. Rudy patted her and pushed her down and went on trying to cope with the feeling that someone had just dropped a bowling ball on his midsection, and that a dark tunnel with a tiny flickering light seemed to be imprinted on the inside of his eyelids.

  Quickly opening his eyes, he tried looking at something else. Anything to blot out the tunnel thing. At the sunlight filtering through the leafy limbs of the dogwood tree, or Murph Woodbury’s rusty roof, or down at Ophelia, who was stretched out beside the hammock looking up at him anxiously. But none of it helped. The stomach pain went on and so did the ache in his throat, which felt as if it had squeezed shut to hold back something that was pushing to get out.

  Stop it, he told himself. Stop it. Stop it. Over and over again until the pain and the crazy panic began to fade slowly away. Rudy sighed. Obviously he had a screw loose when it came to certain things and lately it seemed to be getting worse. Of course, he never had been what you might call fearless when it came to physical-type heroics. But in the past when he started losing it he’d usually managed to put on a good front by joking around or something. But in recent years there had been times when something would happen and all of a sudden he’d hit the panic button in pretty spectacular ways.

  Like a couple of years ago when Mrs. Hopper’s cocker spaniel had her puppies under the house and she’d insisted that Rudy crawl under to get them out. Or even that time just last December when he’d crawled into the storage area under the stairs to hide some Christmas presents and Moira had locked him in. That kind of silly harmless thing was all it took and suddenly he was in the midst of a full-fledged case of the screaming meemies. And he did mean screaming. And now, to make matters a lot worse, in just the last couple of months, the nightmares had started—about the same time Barney and Ty had begun talking up the gold-mining scheme.

  It had all started sometime in April when Barney and Rudy arrived at school and Ty was waiting out front for them. After he looked all around as if he thought someone might be trying to spy on them, he started in about this old man he’d met in his dad’s real estate office.

  “This real old dude named Rooney came in my dad’s office yesterday,” he whispered, “because he owns some land that he wants to sell. But Dad was busy at the time, so the old guy started talking to me. I was terminally bored at first, but then, when I got the drift of what he was saying, I really began to listen. See, this dude lived in Pyramid Hill when he was young and worked at a mine. Pritchard’s Hole, he called it. And he says that he knows for a fact that there’s a rich vein of gold in that mine that no one ever knew about except him. And he’s dead sure it’s still there.”

  Barney had been enthusiastic right away, but Rudy… Well, from the very first moment Rudy hated the idea a lot. He couldn’t say why exactly, but he was pretty sure it was all related to the same problem that caused him to hit the panic button about ridiculous things like the crawl space under a house, or the storage closet in his own home. But whatever it was, or wasn’t related to, he had known immediately that nothing—not even the sure and certain promise of a million dollars in gold—could make him go down into the old Pritchard mine.

  Pritchard’s Hole! Murph had told him all about it. The story was that it had been called the Hole by miners who worked there because the owner, Old Man Pritchard, was so stingy he wouldn’t put in enough supports to make it into even a halfway safe place to work. So it had always basically been just a big hole in the ground, even back during the years when it was a productive mine. Rudy had seen the boarded-up entrance before, a hodgepodge of rotting wooden posts and planks set into a steep rocky cliff-face out beyond the Catholic cemetery. Picturing that entrance made him shudder and there was no way he was ever going to set foot inside it.

  But, of course, that wasn’t what he’d told Barney and Ty. All he said to them was that it couldn’t be true about the gold because if it were, lots of other people would know about it and all kinds of prospectors would have been looking for it ages ago.

  But Ty had an answer for that too. “But nobody else ever knew about it,” he said. “Rooney kept it a secret because he was doing some ‘high grading.’ High grading?” he repeated, like he didn’t think Rudy knew what that meant. “You ever hear of high grading?”

  “Sure,” Rudy said. He hadn’t lived in the gold country all his life for nothing. “That’s when a miner sneaks some gold out of a mine where he’s a hired worker and keeps it for himself instead of turning it over to the owner.”

  “Yeah,” Ty said. “So this Rooney dude had been sneaking out these big nuggets and he’d already high graded enough stuff to buy himself some land, when he got in a fight at a saloon and almost killed this other dude. So he went to prison and when he got out he didn’t dare come back to Pyramid because this dude he’d drilled was out to get him.”

  “So why doesn’t he try to get the gold himself,” Rudy asked, “if he’s so sure it’s still down there?”

  “Beats me,” Ty said. “Except he’s pretty old and crippled. And, of course, he couldn’t just go out and hire somebody to get it for him, because, if you want to get technical, it doesn’t legally belong to him. All he wanted was to have my dad sell his land and he’d forget about the whole thing, but then, when we got to talking, he decided to let me in on the secret if I’d promise to send him fifty percent or something like that. He even drew me this map that shows exactly where the vein is.”

  “So we have to send him fifty percent?” Barney asked.

  Ty shrugged. “Or something like that. How’s he going to know how much we find?”

  So then Rudy asked to see the map, but Ty wouldn’t show it to him. “Nobody sees the map unless they’re in on the project one hundred percent. So—are you in or out, Drummond?”

  “I don’t know.” It all sounded pretty unbelievable, not to mention illegal and dangerous. He reminded Barney about what had been pounded into them by parents and teachers ever since they were born—that nothing in the world was more dangerous than fooling around in an old mine. The whole area around Pyramid Hill was riddled with old mines and every kid who had ever grown up in the gold country knew how dangerous they were. It was
the truth, too, not just another adult superstition like don’t cross your eyes or they’ll stay that way, and don’t watch too much TV or your brain will rot. Old mines were full of snakes and spiders, shafts that went straight down forever, flooded passageways, crumbling walls, hidden crevices, and endless, endless…

  It was starting up again—the pain in his stomach and the feeling that he was about to start screaming—but this time he was able to stop it before it really took over, by using the “think about something else” method. Something great—the greater the better. This time what he thought about was Barney.

  Chapter 3

  BARNEY. THE FIRST time Rudy met Barney was in the kindergarten room at Pyramid Elementary. It wasn’t the first day of school, because when the school year started Barney had been away on the rodeo circuit with his parents. By the time he came into the classroom with his grandmother, all the other kids were already feeling like old hands. Mrs. Peters, the teacher, introduced Barney to the class and talked about how glad they all were to meet him, but when Belle Crookshank left, Mrs. Peters went into the hall with her. That left Barney standing all alone up by the chalkboard. Right away the other kids sort of gathered around staring at him to see if he was going to cry—like a lot of them had on their first day.

  But Barney didn’t cry. He just stood there with his chin out and with a bunch of his dark-blond hair hanging down over one eye. He didn’t look exactly happy, but you got the feeling that he wouldn’t have cried if all the kids in the room had suddenly turned into three-headed monsters.

  Thinking about monsters gave Rudy an idea. He put his arms straight out in front of him, made a crazy face, and started staggering around the room stiff-legged, bumping into people. When everybody stopped staring at Barney to stare at Rudy he stumbled up to Barney and said, “Hi. I’m Rudy the zombie. Come on, let’s zombie.” At first Barney just grinned and ducked his head, but by the time the teacher came back into the room everybody was staggering around being zombies, including Barney.