Missing on Superstition Mountain (14 page)

“Well,” Henry continued, “it took years for searchers to find his remains, but they also found his wallet, and inside—”

“Inside was a note that had ‘
veni, vidi, vici
' written at the bottom,” Delilah finished. “Which means ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.' It's Latin.”

“So?” Simon looked puzzled.

“Yeah, so?” Jack echoed. “Why's that important?”

“Because in the note, Adolph Ruth said that he'd found a … mine.” Henry hesitated, looking at Delilah. “At the time, people thought he'd found the lost gold—that ‘
veni, vidi, vici
' meant he'd discovered the Lost Dutchman's gold mine.”

“Really?” Jack cried, leaning on the top of the desk so hard it tipped forward, then thumped down with a jolt. “Do you think this little bitty paper means Uncle Hank found
GOLD
?”

“I don't know.” Henry stared at the tiny slip of paper in Simon's hand. Had his uncle really written those words?

“Well, it could just be a coincidence,” Simon said, but Henry could tell he was thinking the same thing Henry was: the day had been too full of coincidences.

Simon put the piece of paper back in the box, followed by all the coins except one, which he slid into his pocket. Then he glanced up the basement stairs, lowering his voice. “All right, this is what we're going to do. I'll get Mom to let me use the computer and figure out what kind of coin this is. Henry, you're the fastest reader, you check the library book for stuff about those three Texas boys and about the other disappearances on the mountain. See if there's any pattern. Delilah, we'll have to leave from your house on Monday. Will either of your parents be there?”

Delilah shook her head. “It's just my mom, and she has to work.”

“Good,” Simon said. “But we're going to need an excuse to spend the whole day at your house.”

Delilah thought for a minute. “We're digging a vegetable garden in the back. My mom would love it if you guys helped with that.”

Simon smacked her shoulder appreciatively. “That's a great idea! That could easily take the whole day.”

“But I don't want to dig a garden,” Jack whined. “I want to go up the mountain!”

“We won't really dig the garden,” Simon told him in exasperation. “We'll just
say
that's what we're doing, so we can be gone all day without Mom bugging us.”

“Well, we'll have to dig some of it,” Delilah said.

“Yeah,” Henry agreed. “Otherwise, it'll be
obvious
we were doing something else.” He felt doubtful about the whole scheme. What if Mrs. Barker asked if Delilah's mom was going to be home? They couldn't lie to her! It was okay to mislead her once in a while, but they didn't usually out-and-out lie. And she was very unlikely to let them go to Delilah's if she knew there was no grown-up around.

“Everybody has a job but me,” Jack said anxiously. “What should I do?”

“Nothing!” Simon said. “Just try not to get in trouble for the weekend. Can you do that?”

Jack's lower lip quivered. He plopped down on the carpet and glared at his sneakers.

“Jack—” Simon began, and Henry was about to intervene, but Delilah got there first.

She knelt next to Jack. “I know what you can do. You can make a list of things for us to take up the mountain. Kind of like a survival kit. And then we'll fill up a backpack at my house on Monday.”

Jack brightened, then said glumly, “But I can't write all that.”

“You can draw pictures,” Delilah suggested.

“Okay,” Jack agreed. “I can do that!” He reached in the open drawer and took one of the pieces of paper that had
Henry Cormody
emblazoned across the top.

“Good,” Simon announced, snapping the lid of the metal box and putting it back in the desk drawer. “Let's get to work.” He bounded up the basement stairs with Henry, Delilah, and Jack close on his heels.

*   *   *

Henry spent the afternoon with the volume of Arizona history from the library open across his lap, thumbing through the thin pages. There was only a short chapter on Superstition Mountain, and it was mostly focused on warfare between the Spanish and the Indians. The Spanish had explored the mountain looking for gold up until the mid-1850s. There was a rumor about a gold mine, discovered by the Spaniard Miguel Peralta, and a purported battle with the Apaches that was called the Peralta Massacre because it left so many Spanish dead. But the book said both the gold mine and the battle were “unconfirmed,” and had become “one of the many legends about Superstition Mountain and its colorful, mysterious past.” According to the book, the disappearances began in the late 1800s, and with the exception of Adolph Ruth and a few prospectors, they were again considered “unconfirmed.” The three Texas boys weren't mentioned at all.

Henry thought back to the blindingly white skulls perched on the ledge of rock. It seemed so long ago that they'd found them. He scooted the heavy book off his lap and wandered into his mother's study. She was at her drawing table, leaning over a large sheet of paper, deftly shading a small disk of bone.

“What's that?” he asked.

“A kneecap. Patella,” she added, her pencil making soft scratching noises across the page. “Don't they have beautiful names? This is the fibula, and here's the tibia.” Her pencil traced the contours of two long bones on one side of the paper.

“Mom?”

She didn't look up. “What is it, Hen?”

“You've drawn skulls, right?”

“Of course. Those can be hard.”

“Why?”

“Because you have to get the proportions exactly right. We all have an instinctive sense of what a human face should look like, you know? Even when it's just bones, not a face, everybody has a sense of where the eyes, nose, and mouth should be … how they should fit in relation to each other. With other bones, people don't have a clue.”

Henry slumped on the floor, watching her hand on the page. He took a breath and asked carefully, feigning indifference, “Have you ever drawn a skull that had a dent in it?”

“Sure,” his mother said. “That's a common kind of skull fracture. It's called a Ping-Pong fracture.”

“Really? Why is it called that?”

Mrs. Barker stopped drawing, her hand hovering over the page. “Hmmm … I don't know. Maybe because those fractures are usually the size of a Ping-Pong ball? Or maybe it's because the surface of the skull caves in the way a Ping-Pong ball does when it gets dented. I bet that's it.”

“How do you get a Ping-Pong fracture?” Henry asked.

Mrs. Barker turned back to the paper and started sketching again. “Any number of ways. Bumping into something sharp. Falling and hitting your head. Getting banged on the head with something.”

Henry nodded slowly. He pictured the skull on the cliff, with its shallow indentation. What had happened to that boy? Had he fallen and bumped his head? Or did somebody hit him on the head and kill him?

He stood up suddenly.

“What, nothing more about skulls?” Mrs. Barker asked.

“Nope,” Henry said. One good thing about his mother—she found bones so interesting herself that it would never have occurred to her to wonder why he was asking so many questions.

“All right, I'm finished for the day,” his mother said, leaning back in her chair just as Simon and Jack appeared in the doorway.

“Hey, Mom, if you're done, could we use the computer?” Simon asked.

“Till dinner? Please?” Jack added.

Mrs. Barker wavered. “What for?”

“We're trying to figure out what kind of coins are in Uncle Hank's collection,” Simon replied. That sounded so legitimate, Henry realized, because it happened to be true.

“Well, I guess,” Mrs. Barker conceded. “But just until dinner, and no messing around with any of my files, or your father's, okay?” As she left the room, she added, “I don't know how much luck you'll have—the internet was down earlier today.”

“Thanks,” Simon said. He tugged the coin out of his pocket and held it up to Henry and Jack. “Come on,” he whispered. “Let's find out where this is from.”

They all crowded around their mother's computer, and Simon navigated quickly to the internet.

“How can you look it up if you don't know where it's from?” Jack demanded. It was a fair enough question, Henry thought—like looking up a word in the dictionary to figure out how to spell it, which teachers were always telling you to do, ignoring the fact that if you didn't already know how to spell it, it was very difficult to look it up.

“Watch,” Simon said. “I'll Google the words on this side.” Squinting at the tarnished surface of the coin, he typed “hispan et ind” and “coin” into the search area and hit the return key.

The computer ground and whirred for several seconds, then a long list of matches appeared. Near the top were “Spanish Silver Milled Coinage” and “Spanish Dollar.”

“Wow, you found it!” Henry cried. “It's from Spain!”

Simon shrugged modestly.

“Now let's see if we can find this exact coin. I can't see the date on it, can you?” He handed the coin to Henry. Henry took it over to the lamp on Mrs. Barker's drawing table and scrutinized it beneath the white blaze of light.

“One … eight … something … four.” He turned excitedly to his brothers. “It's really old! At least a hundred fifty years, don't you think? Maybe more.”

“Ooooh, is it worth a lot of money?” Jack asked. “Is it real silver?”

“It's definitely real silver. That's what they used back then,” Simon said. “Hey, here are pictures. Is it one of these?”

Henry carried the coin back to the computer and held it in the glow of the screen, next to a column of photos showing silver coins on black backgrounds. The coins were similar, with the profile of a severe-looking man on one side and an elaborate design on the reverse, a shield with a crown over it, flanked on either side by columns. Henry scanned the photos. The coins in the picture were crisper and cleaner; the one in his hand was so faded and dark.

“Wait,” he said, pressing his index finger against the screen. “What about that one? It's the same, isn't it?”

Simon took the coin and held it next to the image, comparing them, then flipped it over. “Good job—that's it.” He bumped fists with Henry.

“Who's the lady with the ponytail?” Jack wanted to know.

“It's not a lady, it's a man,” Simon told him. “Back in the old days, the men had long hair like that.”

“Like Henry used to have,” Jack said, turning to Henry and adding helpfully, “when everybody thought you were a girl.”

Henry frowned. “Nobody would have thought these guys were girls.” They looked too brave and noble, long hair or not.

“Nope,” Simon agreed. “They were kings.” He peered at the screen more closely. “And anyway, I don't think it's a ponytail. It looks like a ribbon. Listen, this is what it says on the coin in English.” He pointed to the caption below the picture of the coin and read, “‘Ferdinand the Seventh, by the Grace of God.' That's on the front, and ‘King of Spain and the Indies' on the back. That must be what ‘
Hispan et Ind
' stands for: Spain and the Indies.”

A Spanish king! Henry squinted at the man's profile.

“Does it say how much it's worth?” Jack asked, bouncing impatiently.

“Let's see.” Simon typed “Spanish dollar what's it worth” in the search area and tapped the return key. He scanned the results and then said, “That's weird. Even though it's so old, it's not worth much money. Here's one from 1802, probably older than ours, in much better condition, and its only value is forty bucks.” Simon sighed in disappointment. “That coin collection is nothing special.”

Henry bristled. “Yes, it is! It belonged to Uncle Hank. That makes it special. And the coins are still really old, from a whole other country. Anyway,” he added, “they might tell us something about the mountain.”

“Yeah,” Jack cried, leaning against Simon's shoulder to get closer to the screen. “And forty dollars is
A LOT
! Where does it say that?”

Simon squirmed free. “Jack—”

“Boys!” Their mother's voice drifted down the hallway. “Would one of you please set the table for dinner?”

“It's Jack's turn,” Simon answered.

Henry expected Jack to protest, but he merely seemed annoyed. “Don't look at stuff without me,” he warned.

Simon obligingly closed the windows on the computer and slipped the coin back into his pocket. “I wonder how Uncle Hank got a Spanish coin.”

“Maybe he found it on the mountain,” Henry said thoughtfully. Skulls, coins, treasure … what else was up there? He wondered.