Vampire Lodge (16 page)

Then Jimmy said, “You know, Kevin, you
really were getting carried away with all that vampire
stuff.”

Kevin stood there before
them all, feeling like a perfect fool.
Boy, did I make an idiot out of myself!
he realized, his face turning pink in
embarrassment.

“
I wish I knew what was
going on here,” Wally said, brushing some of his long hair out of
his eyes.

“
Wait a minute!” Kevin
said. Wally reminded him! “You’re in on it! You’re in on it with
Bill Bitner! I know you are!”

“
In on what?” Wally
asked.

“
I’ve seen you in the
woods, digging for Count Volkov’s gold brick treasure!” Kevin
exclaimed. “By the forked trees!”

Wally held his hands out, looking at
Aunt Carolyn. “I don’t know what he’s talking about. True, Mr.
Bitner’s sent me out to dig, which was kind of strange. But I
wasn’t digging up any treasure. Bill told me to dig for a broken
water pipe.”

“
A broken water pipe?” Aunt
Carolyn asked suspiciously.

“
Yeah, that’s what Bill
said.”

“
Well, that’s funny because
he never told me anything about any broken water pipe,” Aunt
Carolyn said. “And all the water’s running fine at the lodge. There
isn’t any broken water pipe.”

Wally shrugged. “I have to admit, it
sounded pretty funny to me, digging for a water pipe in the woods.
But that’s what he told me to do, and since he’s my boss, I had to
do it. And one thing he did say, he told me that he wasn’t sure
where the county water lines ran, but he knew the junction ran by a
forked tree, just like the kid here said. And that’s what we’ve
been doing for the past few weeks, digging holes at every forked
tree we could find in the forest.”

“
That’s baloney, Aunt
Carolyn!” Kevin jumped right back in. “He’s lying! I know because I
saw Bill Bitner painting crosses on some forked trees—in
blood!”

“
Kevin!” Becky said.
“You’re an idiot! Listen to what you’re saying!”

Wally laughed, still addressing Aunt
Carolyn. “Look, I don’t know what this kid’s talking about. Sure,
Bill marked the forked trees in red, any tree that we dug at but
didn’t find a water pipe. We’d mark the tree so we wouldn’t
accidentally dig at the same tree twice. But it wasn’t blood, it
was just red paint.”

Kevin stalled again.
Red paint?
Well, actually
he had to admit it. He never examined the markings closely enough
to be sure that it was blood. So far, Wally’s explanation was
making sense.
I guess it
was
just red
paint,
Kevin realized.
I guess I’ve made a big mistake.
But,
then, he thought of something else. “What about the wooden stakes?”
he remembered. “I found a box of wooden stakes, and everybody knows
that’s what you need to kill vampires with.”

Aunt Carolyn rolled her
eyes. “Kevin, there are boxes of wooden stakes all over the lodge.
I’m running a campground here, remember? Those stakes you’ve seen
are
tent stakes.
We have to have lots of them to loan to campers so they can
pitch their tents.”

But then Kevin remembered something
else that also went back to vampires. “Tell me this then,” he said
to Wally. “Every time I saw you digging, it was during the rain.
Everybody knows vampires can’t pass through running water, or rain
either.”

Wally laughed. “We dug in the rain
because the ground is softer when it’s wet. That’s all.”

Tent stakes,
Kevin glumly thought.
Soft ground.
So he’d made yet
another
error in
judgment. He felt absolutely stupid now. How could he have been so
wrong about so many things?

But then—

He remembered one more
thing.

“
All right,” he challenged.
“Maybe I was wrong about that other stuff, but what about the
forked trees?”

“
I told you,” Wally
replied. “Bill Bitner instructed me to dig only at forked trees
because he said that’s where the broken pipe would be.”

“
Broken pipe my eye!” Kevin
shouted back. “That’s where Count Volkov’s treasure is buried! At a
forked tree! I know because I read it in his diary!”

“
Count Volkov’s
diary?
“ Aunt Carolyn
questioned.

“
Yes! I read
it!”

“
Where?”

“
In the secret
room!”

“
What secret room?” Aunt
Carolyn asked.

“
You mean you don’t know
about the secret room behind the panel?” Kevin asked. “At the end
of the hallway behind the kitchen?”

“
Kevin,” his aunt
responded. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Kevin looked at her.
She’s telling the truth,
he realized. If she was lying, he’d be able to tell by the
sound of her voice and the look in her eye.

“
Kevin?” Aunt Carolyn asked
more slowly this time. “Are you telling me that you’ve seen Count
Volkov’s diary?”

“
Yes! I found it just a
little while ago. And it said his treasure was buried at a forked
tree! The diary is in the secret room behind the panel!”

“
I don’t know anything
about any secret room,” Aunt Carolyn said, tapping her foot.
“Either Kevin has a wild imagination, or Bill Bitner has been
keeping things from me.”

“
That has to be it!” Kevin
exclaimed. “Because
I’m
 not lying—there really is a secret room.”

“
All right, Kevin,” Aunt
Carolyn agreed. “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Show me
this secret room.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

“
Follow me!” Kevin wailed,
and ran back across the court. Everyone else followed, and only a
minute or two later, Kevin was guiding them down the hallway behind
the kitchen.

“
This sounds pretty silly,”
Kevin,” Jimmy said. “You’re going to be in a lot of trouble if
there’s no secret room.”

“
There is!” Kevin
insisted.

“
Aunt Carolyn,” Becky
whined. “My bother’s a dope. He’s making all this up because he
wants attention.”

“
No I’m not!” Kevin yelled
at her. “Look!”

And with that, he pressed
on the panel, and—
click!
—then it swung open.

“
Well I’ll be,” Aunt
Carolyn said. “I’ve owned the lodge all these years but I never
knew this passageway existed.”

“
Yeah, well Bill Bitner
found out about it,” Kevin said, and then he turned on his
flashlight. “Come on.”

Everybody filed behind Kevin as he led
them down the damp, lightless passageway.

“
Look,” Jimmy noticed. “A
door.”

“
The door to the
secret room,
” Kevin
corrected, and then he opened the door and pointed his light all
around.

“
The kid’s right,” Wally
said. “There really is a secret room. Bill never told me anything
about it.”

“
He never told me, either,”
Aunt Carolyn said. “Kevin, lead the way.”

With pleasure,
he thought. He took them into the dark room,
shining the flashlight over the brick walls. Then he said, “The
diary’s right here, on this desk.” And he pointed the flashlight
right at it.

Aunt Carolyn slowly
approached the desk, her eyes wide in amazement. She picked up the
old diary, flipped through it, read some passages. “Kevin,” she
said. “This is extraordinary! It’s been hidden for all these years,
but
you
managed to
find it.”

“
Sounds to me,” Wally said,
“that Bill Bitner found it first, and he didn’t tell
you.”

And this suddenly made
perfect sense to Kevin.
Of course Bill
Bitner didn’t tell anyone,
he
realized.
Because he wants to keep The
Count’s treasure all to himself.
“Read
right here, Aunt Carolyn,” he instructed, pointing the light on the
last page. “That’s where The Count says where his treasure is
buried.”

Aunt Carolyn’s face concentrated as
she read the final few sentences in the diary. “You’re right,
Kevin. It says here that the treasure is buried at… a forked
tree.”

“
See?” Kevin said
triumphantly. “I told you.”

“
And Bill had me digging
out there for it and he never told me,” Wally said. “He had me
believing I was looking for a broken water pipe. How do you like
that?”

Aunt Carolyn nodded to herself. “No
wonder he agreed to continue working for me so cheaply. He needed a
reason to be on my property, so he could find the treasure. He
never told me about any of this. I think we better go find Mr.
Bitner right now. He’s got a lot of explaining to do.”

They all filed back out of the room
and back down the hall to the kitchen.

“
Let’s take my car,” Wally
volunteered. “He’s probably out there right now, digging around
another forked tree looking for the treasure.”

“
Good idea,” Aunt Carolyn
consented. “But, Kevin, it’s cold outside. Go get your coat on
first.”

“
Okay,” Kevin said, and
then he dashed up the stairs to his room.
All right,
he admitted to
himself.
Aunt Carolyn’s not really a
vampire, and I was wrong about all that other stuff too. But one
thing I
was
right
about was the treasure! It’s out there somewhere, and we’ve got to
find it before Bill Bitner does!

Kevin pulled on his coat,
but something snagged his vision before he could leave the
room.
What?
he
thought. Why had he stopped? He wasn’t sure why, but the next thing
he knew he was looking at one of the forest paintings hung on the
wall in his bedroom. He looked at it for a long time, stared
hard…

It wasn’t anything like the other
paintings which depicted Count Volkov’s arrival to America. It was
instead just a dull landscape painting.

Just a bunch of trees in
the woods,
he saw.

But then he saw something
else.

One of the trees in the painting
was—

I don’t believe it!
he thought.
It’s… a
forked tree!

Sure enough, there in the painting
were a dozen or so trees, with autumn leaves. But one of the trees,
one right out in front, was forked—two trunks growing out of a
single trunk.

Wait a minute,
Kevin thought.
Maybe,
just maybe—

He slowly put out his hand, and
pressed on the wall panel where the painting hung. And—

click!

The wall panel moved!

A panel,
he thought.
Just like the
panel downstairs. It’s another secret door. And secret doors lead
to secret rooms…

The door’s hinge creaked as it swung
open.

And all at once the image of what
Kevin was now looking at hit him like a coconut falling on his
head.

“
Everybody! Up here!” he
shrieked at the top of his lungs. “Come quick! I found
it!”

And then Kevin took one slow step into
the room. But it wasn’t the treasure he’d found…

Sitting there before him was a dusty
coffin with chains locked around it.

Count Volkov’s
coffin,
Kevin realized in creeping
terror.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

“
It’s—it’s a
coffin!
Becky shrieked at
the top of her lungs when she looked inside. Then she began to
shiver, and she ran out of the bedroom and scurried
away.

“
Wow,” Jimmy murmured,
shivering himself.

“
This is pretty freaky,”
Wally said. “The kid found
another
secret room, only this one has a coffin in
it.”

Finally, astonished, Aunt Carolyn
muttered under her breath, “I don’t believe it…”

But all Kevin could think
was this:
It was a trick, to hide The
Count’s coffin. Not at a forked tree in the woods, a forked tree in
a painting. And-and—

And… what?

He’s in there,
Kevin thought.
Count
Volkov is in that coffin right now… and he’s still
alive!

“
We have to open it,” Aunt
Carolyn said.

“
No!” Kevin bellowed. “The
Count is inside!”

Aunt Carolyn ignored him; instead, she
turned to Wally. “Wally, do you think you can break that
chain?”

“
Not without boltcutters,”
Wally replied, “or a good saw. But we probably won’t have to break
the chain. We can break the lock. Look how old it is. It’s almost
rusted through.”

Kevin couldn’t believe what he was
hearing. They wanted to open Count Volkov’s coffin! “You can’t open
it!” he shouted. “If you do that, you’ll let him out!”