“Where’d you hear that?” Roni asked. It had been only a couple of hours since she and Brian had witnessed the explosion. How could Eric have gotten the news so quickly?
“One of my dad’s construction engineers went out there. He told us.”
“Yeah, right. I bet your dad wrecked the cave himself.”
Eric threw back his head and laughed. “My dad? He’s so scared of dynamite he won’t go within a mile of the stuff.”
Roni felt herself go all cold inside. “How did you know the cave was dynamited?” she asked.
“How else would you cave-in a cave?”
Roni didn’t know what to say. Then Eric surprised her.
“You’re kind of different, aren’t you?”
“What do you mean?” said Roni, cautiously pleased that he was noticing anything at all about her.
“I mean, you’re into saving the dead Indians. And I heard you got involved in some kidnapping a while ago.”
Roni shrugged modestly. “I like to check things out,” she said.
“You’re, like, Mystery Adventure Girl. You went into that cave the other day. You like dark spooky places? Hey, you want to see something really cool?”
“Sure, but don’t we have to get going pretty quick? We have to go to class pretty soon.”
“This won’t take long,” Eric said. He stepped over to the oak-paneled wall and ran his fingers along the seam between two of the heavy panels. Roni heard a click, and the panel slid aside to reveal a hidden doorway about four feet high.
“I found this one day when we were cleaning,” he said.
Roni looked inside. The opening led to a dark, dusty, narrow passageway.
“Check it out,” he said.
Curious, Roni ducked her head and entered the passageway. She became immediately uncomfortable—it reminded her too much of the cave. She started to back out when she heard the click of the panel closing behind her.
23
thirteen steps
The scariest thing about visiting people in hospitals, Brian thought, was that the person might be dead. This had happened to him once when he had gone to visit his grand-mother. He had known that she had cancer and didn’t have long to live, but that didn’t make it any less horrible when he stopped by Mercy Hospital to find her room empty. He had then found his mother sitting in the waiting room, crying, with his dad’s arm around her.
Brian felt that little tingle of fear in his belly as he waited for the elevator, even though he didn’t know Dr. Dart that well. You just never knew.
The elevator doors opened and out stepped Professor Bloom.
“Bain!” The professor stopped in surprise.
“Hi, Professor,” said Brian.
“What are you doing here?” asked Professor Bloom.
“I came to see how Dr. Dart is doing.”
“I see. I was just visiting him myself. The poor man seems to be a bit addled.”
“I was hoping he’d be better today.”
“I fear that is not the case.” The professor looked at his watch. “Don’t forget, you are due in class in one hour. The unfortunate Dr. Dart was supposed to visit our class today, but I have instead arranged for one of his associates to be on hand. Do not be late.” He thumped the rubber tip of his cane on the floor for emphasis.
“I’ll be there,” Brian said.
The professor stalked off quickly with his cane held like a rifle over his shoulder. Brian stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for the third floor. When the elevator doors opened, Brian nearly collided with a tall, fast-moving blond woman. Brian turned to look at the woman as she got into the elevator. It was Jillian Greystone. Their eyes locked in mutual astonishment as the elevator doors slid closed.
First Professor Bloom, then Jillian Greystone. That was a weird coincidence, Brian thought.
And then he remembered that he didn’t believe in coincidences.
At first, Roni wasn’t scared. Eric had to be just joking around. The panel would open any second and he would laugh and she would get mad and . . . what was he waiting for? Five seconds was maybe a little funny. Fifteen seconds in utter darkness was un-funny.
“Hey!” she yelled, banging her fist on the panel. It felt as solid as the trunk of an oak. “Cut it out, Eric! Not funny!”
She listened, but heard no response.
Fifteen seconds was un-funny; thirty seconds was verging on scary. She felt along the edges of the panel but could find no knobs, levers or hidden catches.
Sixty seconds was even scarier than thirty seconds. Roni could feel her heart pounding.
“LET ME OUT!” she shouted. She braced herself against the opposite wall and kicked the panel as hard as she could. All she managed to do was stir up dust and practically break her foot.
She wished she had her scented candle, but she had left her backpack in the front hallway.
Coughing and limping, Roni worked her way along the narrow passageway. It had to lead someplace. She moved slowly, sliding one foot forward at a time, feeling along the walls with her hands. She imagined Eric standing outside in the hall, laughing. What did he think he was doing? Fear gave way to anger, and with each sliding step Roni swore that when she got out of there, she would kill Eric Bloodwater. No, killing was too easy. She would imprison him in an underground tomb with nothing but liverwurst and asparagus to eat. She would—
Roni let out a yelp as her right foot met nothingness. She flailed about with her arms, searching for something to grab onto, but she couldn’t stop herself from falling forward into the dark.
Brian walked down the hall to room 313 and peeked inside. Dr. Dart was sitting up in bed talking to a dark-skinned man with a bandage wrapped around his head. At first Brian thought the dark-skinned man was another patient, but then he realized that it wasn’t a bandage on the man’s head—it was a turban.
“I’m not a ghost, Dr. Dart. I’m a Sikh,” the man said.
“I don’t care how sick you are,” said Dr. Dart.
“I’m not ‘sick,’ ” the man said, laughing. “You’re the one who’s sick. I’m a Sikh. This is our traditional headwear.”
“Where are you from?”
“I’m Indian.”
“Indian? Last time I saw you, you were dead!”
“I’m not dead, Dr. Dart,” said the man. “I’m your doctor. Doctor Singh.”
Brian stepped into the room. “Hi,” he said.
Dr. Singh turned and said, “Can I help you?”
“I just came to visit Dr. Dart,” Brian said. “How is he?”
“He’s had quite a blow to the head,” said Dr. Singh.
“Stop spinning like that,” said Dr. Dart.
“So you think somebody hit him on the head?”
“At first we assumed that he had fallen and hit his head on a rock,” said Dr. Singh. “But when I reexamined his wound, I noticed that it had very smooth edges, almost as if he’d been hit with a pipe, or a heavy rod of some sort. A rock would have left a more jagged wound.”
“It was a ghost,” offered Dr. Dart.
Dr. Singh smiled, but his forehead wrinkled with concern. “Just try to relax, Dr. Dart. I’ll be back to check on you shortly.” Dr. Singh left the room.
Brian approached the bedside. “Hi, Dr. Dart. Do you remember me?”
Dr. Dart focused his eyes on Brian. “Yorick? Is that you?”
“It’s Brian Bain,” said Brian.
“Dr. Brain! Have you seen Yorick?”
“Um, not lately. Dr. Dart, you know Jillian Greystone?”
“Jillian?” He looked around wildly.
“Who exactly is she, Dr. Dart?
Dr. Dart’s eyes welled with tears. He said, “She’ll never forgive me, you know. I love her, but she hates me!”
“Why? What did you do?”
Dr. Dart looked away, and for a moment Brian thought he saw a glint of sanity in his eyes. “I forgot she was a human,” he said. “I forgot she had feelings.”
; “Do you remember anything more about what happened to you?”
Dr. Dart put his index finger in his mouth, digging between his teeth. He pulled his finger out of his mouth and looked at it.
“They put rocks in your mouth when you’re sleeping,” he said, showing Brian a tiny, dark oblong shape, smaller than a peppercorn, stuck to the tip of his finger.
Roni landed hard, scraping her knee on the floor and banging her head on the wall. She lay there for a few seconds wondering if she was mortally injured. Except for the pain in her knee and head, she seemed to be okay. She sat up and felt around, trying to figure out what had happened. She felt a step, and another, and another, and another. She had fallen down four steps onto a landing.
Groping around in the dark, she found another set of steps leading down. Counting, she carefully descended the next staircase. Thirteen steps. Good thing she hadn’t fallen down that one.
The passageway went off in two directions at the bottom of the steps. Roni flipped a mental coin and turned to the left. Sooner or later, she told herself, I’m going to get out of here. But another part of her remembered reading that one resident of Bloodwater House—Crazy Farley—had disappeared, never to be found. She imagined herself stumbling across his body. Somehow, once she thought of it, she couldn’t think about anything else. What would it feel like to step on a dried-up dead person? What kind of crunch would it make?
Just as she was having that unpleasant thought, someone shrieked in her ear and she was blinded by a brilliant flash of light.
Roni screamed and ran straight into a wall.
“GotchaGotcha!” squealed two identical voices.
Brian found Dr. Singh standing at the nurses’ station.
“Dr. Singh?”
“Yes? Oh, Dr. Dart’s young friend.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Brian asked. “Why isn’t he getting better?”
Dr. Singh frowned and his turbaned head bobbed on his thin neck. “Head wounds can produce unpredictable effects,” he said. “But I’ve never seen a case quite like Dr. Dart. This morning, with his other visitors, he was quite lucid. He was talking about going back to that cave where he was injured. Something about some Native American artifacts. He is very passionate about his work!”
“He’s kinda out of it right now,” Brian said.
Dr. Singh did his bobblehead thing again and said, “Yes, he seems to be experiencing both auditory and visual hallucinations, almost as if he were drugged.”
“He says somebody has been putting rocks in his mouth,” said Brian. He held out his hand. In the center of his palm was the tiny black seedlike object Dr. Dart had picked from between his teeth. “Why would he have rocks in his mouth?”
“That was not funny!” Roni said, touching the fresh bump on her forehead.
Sam and Owen giggled. They were all standing in the narrow passageway, now illuminated by a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Roni could see that there was a bulb hanging every ten feet or so, each with a pull-cord switch hanging just above head level. If she had known they were there, she could have turned them on at any time.
“It’s not nice to scare people,” Roni said.
“But it’s funny,” said Owen. Or Sam.
“How does your mom tell you apart?” Roni asked.
“She calls us both SamOwen,” said SamOwen.
“Sometimes she calls us OwenSam,” said OwenSam.
“Your big brother is an ass,” Roni said.
“She said ASS!” squealed SamOwen. The twins collapsed in a giggling fit.
Roni waited for the hilarity to subside, then said, “I just meant he isn’t very nice to have locked me in here.”
“He locked us in here once, too,” said one of the twins. “Only we figured out how to escape. Now we have a special name for him. Do you want to hear it?”
“Uh, sure,” said Roni.
“POOPHEAD!” shrieked the twins.
Roni laughed. “Good name,” she said.
“We have other names, too. Do you want to know what Poophead’s secret name is?”
Roni braced herself for another shriek.
“Fenton,” said SamOwen.
“Fenton?”
“Yes. We all have secret names. My secret name is Tyler, and his is Preston.”
Roni smiled. When she was their age, she’d had a secret name, too. She’d called herself Zenoba, Queen of Glymmerland.
“You want to know what our dad’s secret name is? It’s Fitzroy!” said the twin on the left.
“And our mom’s secret name is Camillia,” said the other.
“Now your secret names aren’t secret anymore,” Roni said.
“You won’t tell anybody, will you?”
“Your secrets are safe with me. Now, how do we get out of here?” she asked.
“You can get out lots of ways,” said SamOwen.
“How about the closest way?”
One of the twins ran a few yards down the passage and slid open a panel similar to the one by which she had entered. Roni quickly followed and found herself standing in the front foyer.
“Now,” she said, “where’s your brother?”
“He’s gone,” said Sam. Or Owen.
“Gone where?”
“I think he went to school.”
24
old bones
On the way to the school Roni stopped at the Quik Mart and bought a megasize grape slushy. It was a little tricky transporting it on her Vespa. She had to hold it between her legs as she drove. By the time she got to the school, her thighs were practically frostbitten, but she hadn’t spilled a drop. Carrying her backpack in one hand and the slushy in the other, she walked in and scanned the classroom for Eric Bloodwater. It took her a second to find him slumped in a desk near the back of the room. Without hesitating, Roni walked up behind him.
“Hey, Poophead,” she said.
Eric looked around, startled, as Roni popped the plastic lid off the slushy and poured it over his black curls.
Eric let out a yelp and jumped straight up out of his seat.
Roni turned her back and went to the far side of the room and sat down, her face burning. Everybody in the room was staring at her. She didn’t care.
Purple and completely soaked, Eric stalked out of the classroom, nearly colliding with a startled Professor Bloom in the doorway.
Brian, sitting at the next desk, leaned over to Roni and asked her, “How did it go?”
“Shut up,” Roni said, not looking at him.
A few rows over, Gennifer Kohlstad and Franny Hall were talking and giggling and looking at her, no doubt enjoying the fact that this beautiful summer day they were forced to spend in Dullsville had been interrupted by a moment of drama.
Professor Bloom, checking his watch, looked over the rest of the class and nodded. “With the exception of Mr. Bloodwater, we all seem to be here,” he said. “As you may know, Dr. Andrew Dart was supposed to be here today to discuss the archaeology of Bloodwater Locality.” He cleared his throat. “However, because of his unfortunate accident, Dr. Dart will not be able to join us. Instead, we are fortunate to have one of Dr. Dart’s illustrious colleagues—” He nodded toward the back of the room.
Roni turned to see who he was looking at.
“—Miss Jillian Greystone.”
Jillian Greystone had changed her clothes since Brian had last seen her. She was now dressed in ragged jeans with dirt ground into the knees, and a rather dirty and sun-faded chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Several turquoise-and-silver bracelets hung from her wrists. On her head was a floppy, wide-brimmed canvas hat with a feather jutting jauntily from the band, and over her shoulder hung a beat-up leather satchel.
Brian thought she looked great—like a warrior woman in denim and turquoise. And he was relieved to find out that she worked with Dr. Dart. Maybe she wasn’t the mad bomber after all.
On the other hand, Dr. Dart had said that she hated him. Maybe they were professional rivals.
“Thank you, Professor,” said Jillian Greystone as she strode toward the front of the room in her battered Red Wing boots. Professor Bloom got up from his desk and offered her his chair. Jillian Greystone, a good two inches taller than the professor, shook her head. Instead, she plunked down her satchel, sat down on top of his desk, then drew up her long legs and crossed them Indian-style.
Professor Bloom started to say something, changed his mind and withdrew to the side of the room, scowling. Jillian Greystone ignored him. She propped her elbows on her knees and looked over the class. Her eyes stopped on Roni and Brian, and her face did the same thing it had done back at Indian Bluff: her eyes went big, her forehead rose and her mouth formed an O.
Brian waggled his fingers at her.
Jillian Greystone’s expression returned to neutral and she looked over the rest of the class. Satisfied, she cleared her throat and spoke.
“My name, as Professor Bloom mentioned, is Jillian Greystone. Please call me Jillian. Now, what do you think of when you hear the word archaeologist?”
Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Then Gennifer Kohlstad raised her hand and said, “Old bones.”
“Old bones,” repeated Jillian. “Very good. What else?”
“Indiana Jones,” said Brianna Wipsted.
“T. rex!” shouted Liam Dressler, a sixth-grader.
Brian liked Liam. It was good to have someone smaller and more immature in the class. Took the pressure off.
“Very good,” said Jillian, “although Indiana Jones is more of a grave robber than an archaeologist. As for the dinosaurs, that is a specialized branch of archaeology known as paleoarchaeology. But today I’m going to talk about a very specific area of archaeology—the study of graves, buildings, tools and pottery from past human cultures here in the Bloodwater Locality. Oh, by the way”—she smiled and spread her arms—“I wore my working clothes today so you could see what a real archaeologist looks like. We spend a lot of time on our hands and knees digging in the dirt. Now, I’d like to begin by talking about the Native American peoples who lived in the Bloodwater Locality about one thousand years ago . . .”
The Bloodwater Mysteries: Skullduggery Page 7