by Mike Rich
Henry’s best guess, and it was only a guess, based strictly on the sluggish swaying of the train and the slowing steam belch from the locomotive, was that they were covering the final mile or two before their last stop on the east side of the Mississippi River.
East of St. Louis. Gateway to the West.
And in between the slowing chug of the coal-driven engine, and the whoosh of steam billowing into the air, the only other sound had been . . .
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
Which was more than unsettling in itself.
It had already been at least a few minutes since they’d found the perfect cavern deep within the haphazardly stacked boxes in the storage car. All four of them had quickly wriggled their way in, knowing they’d completely disappeared from view, trying their best to stay quiet.
Which wasn’t easy.
All they could do was look at each other with eyes trying to say what they were thinking. Henry and Mattie had already shared about a hundred glances.
It was the waiting, of course. The wondering where the Dark Men were and why they were even there.
“When’s George gonna get here?” Mattie finally asked with a faint voice lower than a whisper. “He has to know we’re not up there, doesn’t he?”
“You think George is gonna be able to do anything?” Ernie raised his eyebrows as he whispered back. The look she returned didn’t exactly scream confidence.
Jack stayed quiet, content just to shake his head and let out a deep breath. Just seeing him slightly uncertain was enough to concern Henry.
“What are we gonna do when the train stops?” Henry asked him. “They’re gonna be out there waiting for us.”
Jack still didn’t say anything, nor did anyone else. Silence, it seemed, was the only plan any of them had right now—though Henry knew they’d have to come up with a better one soon.
“Maybe they couldn’t get through the door?” Mattie asked hopefully. “You did get it locked.”
“Fat chance of that,” Jack finally whispered.
Chiiiiiiiikuuuuuuuuh . . . Chiiiiiiiikuuuuuuuuh . . .
The steel wheels were beginning to screech a bit more loudly, signaling that a full stop was fairly imminent.
“Jack?” Henry asked, but got nothing in return. “Jack, c’mon!” he tried whispering a little louder. “What do we do?”
“The four of you leave very soooooooooooooooon . . . that’sss what you do.”
A cold and icy voice answered Henry from the other side of the storage boxes behind which they were hiding. They all gasped in unison. None of them had heard a sound since they’d hidden in the small mountain of large boxes, yet here the man was, unseen but right there in the same car as them.
He’d known precisely where they were. Had gotten through the locked door, past Jack’s open-door diversion, without making even a hint of noise. From the closeness of his voice, Henry guessed, the Dark Man was no more than three feet away from him.
“Pleassse, please,” Grace’s scratchy voice continued. “None of you have anything to fear . . . at leassst not for now.”
Ernie and Mattie squeezed their eyes closed, much like Henry had tried to do so many times during the worst of his nightmares.
“You ssssssee,” Grace hissed almost softly, his face unseen. “Mr. Doubt right now is already ahead of you, on his way at this moment to ssseize Skavenger’s next clue.”
Henry hadn’t moved in minutes, but he was still breathing too quickly. He shared a quick glance with Jack, waiting for whatever they might hear next.
“And . . . in the extreme unlikelihood,” the voice continued, “that his guesssss turns out to be incorrect, the four of usssss will be following . . . the four of you. In case your assumption proves more accurate.”
Mattie’s eyes lifted toward Henry and she silently mouthed the words, “They’re all there? Right now?”
From the other side of their hiding spot, Grace answered her as if she’d stood up and shouted the question.
“Yessss, dear,” his words slid through the creases of the wardrobe trunks. “We are.”
A second later, they heard the sound of four quiet but very distinct taps on four boxes—enough distance separating them that they could only have come from four men.
Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock.
Now it was Henry’s turn to close his eyes, not knowing if any of the rest of them were doing the same. Not caring. Just wanting Grace to finish whatever he needed to say—wanting to avoid the nightmare of seeing him.
“Ssssstill there?” Grace asked. “Because that’s what the four of us are about to be for the rest of your journey. Sssstill here. Not gone. Never gone.”
Henry opened his eyes just in time to see Jack look his way, shaking his head at the Dark Man’s words.
“Good luck, young hunters,” the scratching and hissing voice went on. “Don’t bother trying to look for ussss. Just be content to know that we will be watching you. Every minute of however many days you might have left.”
C h i i i i i i i i i i k u u u u u u u u u u h chiiiiiiiiii—whoooooooooooooosh—
WHUMP.
The train stopped, but not before Henry finally heard the sound of the quartet of Dark Men slowly walking away. Wanting to be heard, it seemed. Before they were gone, though, Grace offered them all one last message:
“Welcome to Ssssssaint Louisssss.”
FOURTEEN
The Door and the Pair of Fathoms
IT WAS STILL barely dawn, and yet it felt like they’d been up a full day. The bone-chilling twenty minutes they’d all just experienced together had made sure of that.
Exactly when the four of them should get off the train had turned out to be a tricky decision of its own, especially after Grace’s warning.
But while the thought of emerging from the big cavern of boxes wasn’t appealing at all, the kids also knew they couldn’t just stay on the train. Eventually they crawled out, thinking it smart to get outside while a good many disembarking travelers were still there to provide cover. Grace had promised it would be a waste of time for the youngsters to look for the Dark Men; and sure enough, they didn’t see any of them.
They did, however, find George the porter, absent for the past terrifying twenty minutes, frantically searching for them in the crowd of busy passengers and piles of steamer trunks.
Mattie didn’t want George worrying too much, so even though they were still shaken by the morning’s events, she’d simply told him that they’d gone back to explore the caboose for a while.
The four of them then thanked George for all his help and said their good-byes. They repeated the same story they’d told him a few days earlier: that they were meeting relatives in St. Louis and he needn’t worry about them further.
It was a fairly short excursion from the train station to the levees of the booming Missouri port city, filled within the last few years with wide-rutted dirt roads and squatty, quickly built structures.
It was in St. Louis that they hoped Skavenger had planted his next riddle, even though they all knew the stop stood a very good chance of being their most dangerous one yet. The checklist of things they had to keep in mind was getting longer by the minute. The Dark Men were following their every move, they’d been threatened in New York by twin adult men, and their next clue might be two fathoms underwater.
Ernie, whose head spun around like an owl all morning in search of Grace, said they needed to at least have a talk about whether they really, really, really wanted to walk right up to the not-exactly-discreet location awaiting them.
But Jack put an end to that conversation before it even got started. To heck with Doubt and his crazy Dark Men, he’d said. They’d come halfway across the country and they weren’t about to turn back now. Once they solved the next clue, they’d just do a better job of hiding from them. Mattie agreed in an instant.
Henry had been struck by her response.
He remembered how calm she’d seemed that night at the V
anderbilt Estate, even though—he knew now—she’d just encountered the Dark Men. Out of sight, out of mind was how Mattie seemed to deal with problems.
With Jack and Mattie so firm in their conviction, there was nothing to do but keep to the plan. And so, they’d continued to stride right along the grassy banks of the Mississippi, the steady murmur of the majestic chestnut-colored river helping to soothe their nerves. Until, that is, they caught sight of their destination: a series of huge docks and boat landings where dozens and dozens of massive steam-driven riverboats awaited their next paddle journeys.
One in particular stood out. Simply because it was easily the very largest of the bunch.
Getting on board that steamboat, though, presented a bit of a challenge. Henry knew the four of them looked ratty enough when they’d left New York, and three days in a dusty railcar hadn’t done much to improve their appearance. Or their scent, for that matter.
Jack, however, declared that if sneaking onto a train in New York had worked, the same would probably hold true on a Mississippi riverboat.
It was good thinking, Henry had to admit—right up until they came face-to-face with the loading supervisor and discovered he wasn’t exactly cut from the same cloth as George the porter. Even the sight of Mattie’s winsome grin had failed to sway him.
So, with Plan B now in effect, they waited forty-five minutes until the loading crew began delivering luggage to the passenger rooms, and then scurried up a catwalk that put them in the boiler room.
There they found Joey and two other boiler room workers, each of whom perked up at the sight of a small offering of money out of Henry’s pocket. Not only did they agree to let them stay, but Joey offered to let them use the workers’ bathroom for a cleanup session.
It didn’t take long for the foursome to realize that the safety of the boiler room was a really, really good thing. Even though Skavenger’s clue had said they could only search from noon until midnight, they agreed their best move was to stay right where they were until nightfall, when exploring the ship would hopefully be safer.
Joey, as it turned out, was the friendliest of the three boiler room workers. During his lunch, which featured some kind of overly smelly fish, he’d given them an impressive history lesson on the great Mississippi steamboat on which they were hiding.
Coated in sweat that looked like it would never dry, he’d said she was the biggest and the best of the boats exploring the Muddy Miss. The riverboat was three hundred feet from the bow to the back paddle. Henry could tell Joey took a lot of pride in it.
The forty-seven first-class staterooms were also the best around, Joey had gone on to tell them. Lots and lots of stained glass and fine paintings of the surrounding countryside.
Apparently, the first of these riverboats actually had been built in New York decades earlier, but it had been lost to fire.
So they built another, and then another after that, each one larger and more impressive than the one before it. This one was number eight.
The only thing that had stayed the same with each of the eight legendary Mississippi steamboats had been the name.
Natchez.
The name that had been on the bottom of the clear beer glass at the Jennings Establishment. The name that Mattie had gambled was meant to point them to a boat and not a town.
It was those instincts and smarts that had gotten them this far in the hunt, so none of them questioned her suggestion. She’d been right before, and they trusted her to be right this time too. Besides, it made sense.
Still, though, it was the clue’s use of the word “fathoms” that had them extremely worried about the prospect of an underwater search, which would now have to wait until the dark of night.
Mattie asked Joey what the depth of the river was right around the Natchez—both right there where it was docked and later that evening when it was scheduled for a dinner cruise.
Without blinking as he munched down the last of his odorous lunch, Joey replied matter-of-factly, “’Bout a Mark Twain here, prob’ly not much more’n that out there in the middle.”
The four of them had swapped a befuddled look.
“Mark Twain?” Henry asked, just as confused as the rest of them. “What’s he got to do with it?”
Joey smiled. “Not him.” He looked at the four New York kids. “A ‘Mark Twain’ is a river term. It means two fathoms . . . twelve feet. ‘Mark’ is the measurement, ‘Twain’ means two. That’s why ol’ Sam Clemens chose it for his writin’ name. ’Cuz of how much he loved this here river.”
He looked both ways as if someone might overhear him, adding, “Rumor has it they wouldn’t let anyone have his usual stateroom today, the one he stays in from time to time. Number 36. Got it locked up tight. Nobody knows why.”
Joey winked at the four poker faces looking back at him. Stunned poker faces, but pretty good ones nonetheless.
Three hours later, with the sun having gone down and the music wafting from the top deck, the four hunters found themselves standing in front of Stateroom 36. The door was whitewashed the same color Tom Sawyer had convinced his friends to paint a fence with, and the similarity seemed like a good omen to Henry.
Mattie reached into a pocket under her cape and slowly removed the cloth-covered empty glass once owned by Mr. Jennings of New York, but no longer. She held it up to a corridor lantern.
“Through the Natchez door and then two fathoms deep is where you’ll find it,” Mattie read the last part of the clue with a growing smile. “Door . . . 36. Two fathoms deep . . . Mark Twain.”
She let out a deep breath, just as she had during the previous moment of truth at Vanderbilt’s front door.
“Well, I think we’re right where we’re supposed to be.” Mattie reached up and rapped on the door a little too forcefully for Ernie’s liking.
“Cripes, Mattie! You wanna borrow a hammer?” he said, looking both ways down the hall, his head still on a swivel as it had been the entire day.
“I barely touched it!” she insisted, probably too loudly as well.
“Shhhh,” Jack hushed them both.
Thankfully, the hallway was both empty and dimly lit, though not as dim as Henry would have liked. He’d been giving his own neck a steady workout, looking this way and that for any sign of Doubt or his shadowy accomplices.
There was no answer at the door.
No sound of footsteps approaching from inside. Only the muffled churn of the boat paddles and the calming sound of a banjo quartet from up above.
“You knock this time,” Mattie instructed Henry.
“Me?”
“YES, YOU!”
Okay, okay! Don’t forget, we prob’ly got a person or two we don’t want to see while we’re down here. Even though there’s a pretty good chance they’re seeing us right now.
Henry tapped on the door so softly the four of them had trouble hearing it.
“Oh, for gosh sakes,” Mattie muttered and then knocked twice as loudly as she had a few seconds ago.
Again there was no answer.
Footsteps rose from the far stairwell and the four of them froze, waiting to hear if the sound grew louder or softer.
Luckily, the rhythmic pattern began to fade and was pretty much gone with the sound of a topside door opening. The banjos seemed to be picking things up a little, the door slowly muffling the growing celebration as it closed tight behind whomever had walked through.
“Maybe we should come back in a few minutes,” Henry suggested, able to breathe again, right as Jack reached for the knob and gave it a turn.
No, no . . . Joey said the room was locked ti—
Same as with the humble, small home of Cornelius Vanderbilt the Second, the door easily opened with a light whooshing sound, revealing the room’s dimly lit interior.
Ernie shook his head. “Huh, an open door. Guess Mr. Smelly-Fish-for-Lunch doesn’t know the ways of the great Hunter S. Skavenger, does he?”
Jack pushed open the door the rest of the way, allowing s
ome of the hallway light to spill inside. It was difficult to see too much—except for one thing positioned against the far wall of the room, just under an open window. It was a not-so-large desk, maybe five feet wide and three feet deep, illuminated by a pair of cream-colored wall lamps.
Henry could hear the soft pulsing sound of the rear paddle slapping the river through the open window.
Course, that could just be your heart thumpin’ a mile a minute. Calm down, okay?
Jack held a hand out behind him, signaling for the rest of them to wait until he was certain no one was inside. He then lowered it, and they all quietly walked in.
The contents of the room were fairly spare—as if the guest, or guests, preferred few distractions or temptations. The latter quickly proved to be unlikely, once they discovered an overflowing ashtray filled with half-smoked cigars.
“Henry!” Mattie whispered to him, dipping her forehead toward the desk. Before he could move any closer, though, the sound of another round of footsteps began to rise from outside in the hallway, and these were undoubtedly moving toward them.
Ernie closed the door, the latch softly clicking just as the thump, thump, thumping passed by. His cheeks puffed with relief. “Whew, close,” he muttered to Jack as they headed over to the desk.
Henry and Mattie were already there, their eyes growing wide at the expected, yet unexpected, discovery perfectly centered on the chestnut-leather writing pad below them.
It was a book.
Just not the book they’d expected.
The book Henry thought they’d find—and Mattie as well—was a nine-year-old edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
That book title had made perfect sense to Henry from the minute they’d left New York. It had to be Skavenger’s favorite adventure! But this . . . this is not that.
“Henry, I don’t understand.” Mattie looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “I’d heard that he’d written a new book, but . . .”
Henry couldn’t say a word yet—the title of the book made sure of that.
A wise-beyond-his-years young boy grinned up at them from the light green binding. Two trees and a pair of fence posts formed the first letter of the boy’s name and the announcement of a new adventure.