Revenge of Superstition Mountain

by Elise Broach

  When they finally made it back to the road, Simon began pedaling even faster.

  “Can we slow down now?” Jack whined. “My knee hurts. It’s BLEEDING.”

  “No,” Simon said. “Don’t stop.”

  “But—” Jack started to protest.

  “We’ll put a Band-Aid on it,” Delilah told him. “But we have to get to your house first.”

  “Do you think he’s following us?” Henry asked, struggling to keep up.

  “He might if he sees our bike tracks,” Simon said.

  Delilah glanced over her shoulder. “Look, he stopped the car. He’s probably poking around.”

  Henry felt a wave of relief. He tried to think if they’d left any sign that they’d been there. “We took everything with us, didn’t we?”

  “Sure,” Simon said. “Oops! Even the room key.” He pulled the rusty brown key to room five out of his pocket and turned it over in his palm.

  Henry stiffened. “You took that?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Simon reasoned. “The doors weren’t locked, and there were other keys missing.” Then he added apologetically, “I forgot to put it back after we looked in the cellar.…”

  Henry shuddered, thinking of the black cellar and the slithering blanket of rats. Weeks ago, when Simon fell through the floorboards, who could have known that’s what was down there? He thought of the granola bar they’d dropped into the cellar. That was something they’d left behind … but surely it had been devoured by now.

  Still marveling over their discoveries in the ghost town, they rode the rest of the way home.

  CHAPTER 7

  PAST LIVES

  THE NEXT MORNING, Henry woke up early, after a night full of terrible dreams. He couldn’t remember all of them, but the last one, the one that had awakened him bolt upright, with his heart seized in terror, was this: Josie had followed the boys to the ghost town, and before they could stop her she leapt into the cellar of the Black Cat Saloon. At first she was chasing the rats, but then they turned on her, swarming around her. The boys were desperately trying to get her out, reaching as far as they could into the hole and calling to her, and she looked like she was just about to jump into Henry’s arms when out of nowhere, the librarian Julia Thomas came into the hotel and also leaned over the hole. When Josie saw the librarian, her back arched and she yowled in fury, just the way she had outside the meeting of the historical society. But then as the rats surrounded Josie, getting closer and closer with their twitching noses and plump haunches and sharp teeth, the old Julia Thomas, the one from the picture, emerged from a dark corner of the cellar and held out her arms. Josie leapt into them, and the old Julia Thomas clutched her against her old-fashioned, high-buttoned dress, and disappeared back into the darkness. In the dream, Henry was leaning so far into the cellar he thought he might fall, screaming “Josie! Josie!” But she was gone. All he could see were the rats.

  Heart pounding, Henry slid out of bed and wandered down the quiet hallway toward the kitchen. Josie lay in the doorway in a pale rectangle of morning light, watching him with her golden eyes. Henry felt a rush of love and relief. He knelt on the carpet and stroked her silky head, scratching behind her ears. She leaned into his fingers, curving her neck, and he could feel more than hear the warm, humming motor of her purring. Then, abruptly, her ears flattened and she rolled onto her back, batting his hand with her paws.

  “Okay, okay,” Henry said, trying to scratch her soft belly, just below the patch of white. But Josie leapt up and darted into the living room, finished with him.

  He thought about the old ink picture of Julia Thomas with the cat on her lap. It looked so much like Josie! Right down to the distinctive white spot on her neck. How was that possible?

  “Is that you, Henry?” Mrs. Barker’s voice drifted through the open door of her study. “You’re up early.”

  “Yeah. I had a bad dream.” Henry walked over to her drafting table, rubbing his eyes. She was already hard at work, carefully sketching the contours of a heart with thick, bulging arteries. Her latest project was a series of illustrations for a book on heart disease.

  Mrs. Barker slid her arm around him and pulled him against her, kissing his shoulder. “What was the dream about?”

  He frowned, not sure how much to tell her. “I can’t remember all of it. Something bad happened to Josie.”

  “Oh, that must have been scary! Well, she’s lying there in the hallway. Did you see her?”

  He nodded, leaning against his mother’s warm body, watching her draw. There was something soothing about the way her hand moved over the paper, so deftly, with such certainty. It gave him a hypnotic, tingly feeling, like having somebody stroke his hair.

  “What’s wrong with that heart?” Henry asked. It was strange to him, knowing nothing about what a heart looked like, that he could still know instantly there was something wrong with the one his mother was drawing. The tubes running through it were bloated and thick. They looked ready to explode.

  “It’s a condition called atherosclerosis,” his mother answered. “Thickening of the arteries. It can cause a heart attack.”

  “Atherosclerosis,” Henry repeated, liking the long, round sound of the word.

  His mother kept drawing, and the poor, diseased heart took shape under her hand.

  “Mom,” he said after a minute.

  “What, honey?”

  “Do you think it’s possible for somebody who lived a long time ago to come back to life? In another person?”

  “No,” his mother answered.

  Somehow this wasn’t quite what Henry was looking for. “Not ever?”

  “No, sweetie. Not ever. Death doesn’t work that way.” He waited for her to say more, but she continued drawing, absorbed in the picture taking shape on the page. “Why do you ask?”

  “I was just thinking about it,” he said slowly. “We saw a picture.…” He tried to think of a way to tell her and not tell her at the same time. “It was in a book at the library—a picture of that woman Julia Thomas, the one whose grave Emmett found when he went to Phoenix. She lived here in the 1800s.…”

  “Mmm-hmmm,” his mother murmured, intent on her work.

  “Mom.” Henry touched her shoulder, wanting her to pay attention. A flash of irritation crossed her face, but she stopped drawing, balancing the pencil in her hand. “What is it, Hen? What are you worried about?”

  “The Julia Thomas in the book, who lived in the 1800s, has the same name as the lady who works at the library … and looks just like her!”

  At that moment, Mr. Barker leaned in the doorway, a steaming cup of coffee in his hand. “That woman at the library? I didn’t care for her. You’re telling me there was another one of her, a hundred years ago? Isn’t that the way it always is! The people you’d like to have reincarnated are gone for good, but the rotten ones keep coming back like a bad penny.”

  Mrs. Barker laughed but shook her head at him. “Don’t give Henry ideas.”

  “What does that mean?” Henry asked. “Reincarnated?”

  Mrs. Barker sighed. “Brought back to life in another form. Reincarnation is the belief, in some religions, that when people die, they can return to life. In the form of other people or animals.”

  “Really?” Henry looked at his father. “Do you think that can happen?”

  “No,” Mrs. Barker interjected firmly.

  Mr. Barker sipped his coffee. “Well, I don’t know, Hen … the world is a complicated place, and different religions for many centuries have had the belief in reincarnation. Hinduism, some parts of Judaism, Native American religions…” His eyes sparkled, warming up to the idea. “Now, isn’t it interesting that all those different religions, from all over the world, have a common belief in past lives? In the possibility of the dead returning, as a new person, or as an animal? Okay, maybe it’s a little wacky, but I’ve got to say, I think there’s a lot we don’t know about death.”

  Mrs. Barker put down her pencil and turned away from
the drafting table to look at him, her mouth set in an impatient line. “Jim.”

  He laughed at her. “Oh well, you heard your mother.” He picked up the empty mug on her desk. “More coffee?”

  “Yes, thanks,” she said, slightly mollified. She returned to work, while Henry trailed his father into the kitchen.

  “So you think people can be reincarnated? What about animals?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, Henry. But if people can come back from the dead, I don’t see why animals wouldn’t be able to.”

  “Dad,” Henry began, carefully, “the other thing about this picture of the old Julia Thomas, the one from the 1800s, is that she had a cat. A cat that looked just like Josie, Dad! With the white mark and everything—the one on her neck that’s shaped like Florida.”

  His father laughed. “Is it shaped like Florida? I’ve never noticed that.”

  Henry slumped into a kitchen chair, ready to give up. It seemed impossible to make either of his parents understand.

  His father refilled the mug for his mother and then walked over to the table, ruffling Henry’s curls. “What’s the matter, Hen? Why all this interest in reincarnation?”

  Henry shook off his hand in exasperation. “Because the woman in the old picture, the woman who lived in the 1800s, looked just like the librarian! And her cat looked just like Josie!”

  Mr. Barker studied him. “Okay, okay. That is weird. You’ll have to show me the picture—now I want to see it for myself.”

  Henry squirmed. This was exactly why Simon would have told him not to say a thing. He tried one last time. “Do you think Josie could be a reincarnated cat from the 1800s? Who used to live right here in Superstition?”

  Mr. Barker appeared to consider this. “Well, they do say cats have nine lives,” he offered cheerfully. “And Josie certainly seems to feel at home here in Arizona. Speak of the devil, here she is.”

  Josie padded softly into the kitchen, then jumped onto the table—where she was never, ever allowed—to sniff the placemats. Mr. Barker ran his hand down her back, and winked at Henry. “Shhhh, don’t tell your mother.”

  “Why do you think Mom doesn’t believe in reincarnation?”

  “Well … your mother has a particular kind of imagination,” Mr. Barker declared philosophically. “A wonderful head for knowledge, but no sense of the mythical.” He headed down the hallway with her mug of coffee.

  Henry was left face-to-face with Josie, who crossed the table till her nose was almost touching his and stared at him with her golden eyes. Had she really once belonged to the old Julia Thomas? Had she lived in the shadow of Superstition Mountain more than a century ago? It might explain why she was so comfortable in the cemetery … and why she seemed to just know things that none of the rest of them did.

  CHAPTER 8

  HIDDEN PICTURES

  BY THE TIME his brothers woke up, Henry could hardly wait to look at the picture from the hotel again. All he could think about was the image of the cat nestled on Julia Thomas’s lap, and how much it looked like Josie. While Simon and Jack were sleeping, he had called Delilah twice, only to be told by her mother—first patiently and then with a hint of annoyance—that she too was still asleep. Finally, everyone was awake, and Delilah immediately came over on her bike, with her hair still in a messy braid from the day before.

  She joined Simon and Jack at the kitchen table for breakfast, while Henry told them all about reincarnation. Unfortunately, Mr. Barker wasn’t around to lend supporting evidence; he had already left for work at his masonry shop in town, where he mixed concrete for sidewalks and patio paving stones. But at least Mrs. Barker was so absorbed in her sketches that she didn’t pepper the discussion with skeptical remarks.

  Simon, as it turned out, already knew about reincarnation. “But I don’t think that’s what people mean when they say a cat has nine lives,” he said. “I think it means that they don’t die easily.”

  Henry thought about this. “Well, it could mean both—they don’t die easily, and when they do, they come back for another life.”

  “Cool!” Jack exclaimed. “So you think Josie is a GHOST cat? She lived a long, long time ago?” He ducked under the table, where Josie had fled when he stampeded into the kitchen minutes earlier, and scooped her up in his arms. “Are you a GHOST, Josie?” he yelled into her face. “Are you?”

  Josie shrank back in disgust and squirmed, pressing both paws against his chest until she leveraged herself free. She leapt through the air to the floor and streaked off.

  “She hates it when you do that,” Henry said mildly.

  “Yeah, ’cuz she’s a GHOST!” Jack exclaimed. “Ghosts don’t like to be touched.”

  “Boys,” Mrs. Barker called from her study, “what are you yelling about?”

  Simon glared at Jack. “Nothing, Mom. Jack is just goofing around.”

  Delilah seemed lost in thought. “I didn’t think reincarnation meant that you came back as yourself. I thought it meant you came back as somebody else. Or as something else, like a person coming back as an animal.” She hesitated. “I used to wish my dad would be reincarnated as something. Since we moved out here, there’s been this hummingbird…” Her voice trailed off.

  “What?” Henry asked. He loved hummingbirds, with their tiny faces and their shimmering colors and their wings that beat a thousand times a minute. It always seemed impossible that they were real.

  Delilah looked at the floor. “I don’t know. It comes to the feeder on our deck every single day, and sometimes it stays in front of the sliding glass doors with its wings beating and just watches us. It makes me think of my dad.”

  Simon seemed about to say something dismissive, but then he looked at Delilah and, to Henry’s surprise, said only, “Well, lots of religions do believe in reincarnation.” Delilah shot him a grateful glance, and Henry wished he had been the one to say that.

  “I think hummingbirds are … exquisite,” he chimed in.

  Delilah laughed. “You know so many funny words, Henry.”

  It wasn’t quite the response he had hoped for. “Where did you put the picture?” he asked Simon, wanting to change the subject. “Let’s look at it again.”

  “It’s still in my backpack.” Simon led the way to his bedroom and knelt next to his bed, pulling his backpack out from underneath it. The wooden frame of the picture burst through the open zipper. Carefully, he slid it out of the backpack and set it down on the carpet. “Close the door,” he told Jack.

  Jack shut the bedroom door and they all dropped to the carpet, leaning over the pen-and-ink drawing. It was faded and stained, but the image of Julia Thomas was unmistakable.… Her dark hair fell neatly from a center part, gathered into a bun at her neck. Her eyebrows were thin and arched, just like the librarian’s, and her eyes had a burning intensity. On her lap was the cat, sitting upright in the curve of her arm. Its ears were pricked and its light eyes gazed impassively out of the picture. The white spot on its neck had the familiar dangling-sock shape of Josie’s.

  “Yep,” Jack declared. “It’s Josie.”

  Simon rolled his eyes. “Do you know how common black cats are? Even black cats with white spots!”

  “But, Simon…” Henry hesitated. “It’s not just the coloring. Look at the cat’s expression! It’s exactly like Josie’s.”

  “So what are you saying, Hen? You think Josie lived here a hundred and thirty years ago? And then died and came back to life as our pet? Seriously?”

  Henry sighed. “I don’t know. But it would explain a lot, don’t you think? How Josie seems to know her way around out here, even on the mountain. How she finds things, like that tombstone in the graveyard that had our name on it, or that piece of Uncle Hank’s stationery in the gold mine.”

  Simon pursed his lips in exasperation. “It would make more sense to say that she’s related to Julia Thomas’s cat—that that cat was her distant ancestor. But I still wouldn’t believe it. The cat in this picture must have lived in Arizona more than a
hundred years ago. Mom and Dad got Josie from a shelter in Chicago.”

  Henry shook his head. “If Josie were just related to the black cat from the saloon, the way we’re related to Uncle Hank, that wouldn’t explain how she knows so much about this place. And it wouldn’t explain the weird reaction she had to the librarian.”

  Simon paused. “But think about that, Hen. If Josie were really Julia Thomas’s cat, and the librarian is so similar to the first Julia Thomas, why would Josie have acted so upset when she saw her?”

  Henry couldn’t think of a good answer to that.

  “Well, Henry’s right about one thing,” Delilah interjected. “This cat looks exactly like Josie. I wonder who drew the picture—it isn’t signed. Do you think it says on the back?”

  Gently, she turned the picture over on the carpeting. The back of it was a thin piece of wood, which must have been what the paper was mounted on, Henry decided.

  “Can we take this off and look?” Delilah asked. “Without wrecking the picture?”

  “Let’s try,” Simon said. “The frame is broken anyway.” He carefully pulled the sides of the frame away from the picture, loosening the piece of wood until he could remove it. “There,” he said. “Did the artist sign it?”

  He set the piece of wood aside and they all stared. Underneath it, pressed against the back of the drawing, was a small, folded piece of ivory-colored stationery.

  “Hey, there’s something here. A note or something,” Simon said slowly. He lifted it and pinched it open with his fingers.

  “What does it say?” Jack cried, bouncing forward on his knees. “Read it to us!”

  Simon’s eyes widened as he read aloud: “The canyon entrance is on the eastern wall, behind a group of large boulders. Two cottonwood trees grow opposite the boulders. The entrance is narrow, no wider than a man’s shoulders. Continue toward the horse until the bent tree threads the needle.”

  “Those are the directions to the gold mine!” Jack yelled.

  “Shhh, Jack,” Simon hushed him. “But yeah, these are the same directions … and look! There’s a map too.” He turned the note for them to see a small, simple map sketched beneath the instructions. Squinting at it, Henry could see that it showed the little secret canyon with the rock horse and entrance to the mine. Above the map, several lines of crisp ink handwriting crossed the paper, delicate and slanting.