The Box and the Bone

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  Diane took off her painty green sweater, put it on Athena, buttoned it all the way down the front, and rolled up the sleeves into big fat doughnuts around Athena’s wrists. Then she kissed her three more times and went back to her poached egg. Athena ran down the hall to the bathroom.

  When Athena got back to where her wagon was waiting in the front yard she was feeling better. Diane’s sweater was painty and it had raggedy elbows but it was nice and warm—and long. So long it went down almost to her feet. Feeling nice and warm made Athena forget about being angry at Aurora and Ari, and the wagon, and Muffy and Susie. She began to sing her favorite song again as she went across the lawn.

  “Kato sto yialo. Kato sto periyiali,” she sang as the wagon bounced behind her across the bumpy lawn. When she got to the sidewalk she stopped to think.

  Yesterday, she’d played all the things she could think of about the fishpond house. Today it might be more fun to find someplace new. Someplace where she could make an even better house for her doll family. Maybe there would be a better place at Beaumont Park. Turning the other way she started down the sidewalk toward the avenue. The park would be a good place to play.

  But Athena had gone down Beaumont Avenue for only two blocks when it started to rain. Just a few big fat drops at first, but then more and more. She was almost to the big church where Susie’s family went every Sunday, when the rain began to come down very hard and fast. People were coming out of the church, putting up umbrellas, and hurrying to their cars. Athena stopped under a tree and watched until the people were gone.

  The rain was coming down harder and harder all the time. Big drops were coming right through the tree and falling on Athena and her wagon and the doll family too. She began to run. With the wagon banging along behind her she ran up the sloping ramp that led to the porch in front of the church door.

  It was better under the little roof. Pulling the wagon up next to the church’s big double doors, Athena picked up the doll family one by one and dried them off on the sleeve of Diane’s sweater. Then she leaned against the door and waited for the rain to stop.

  But it didn’t stop, and after a while the wind began to blow so hard that the rain started coming right in under the little roof. Athena was leaning back further to get away from the rain when suddenly the door began to move—and when she pushed harder it moved some more. Pulling her wagon behind her, she went on in.

  Inside the big church doors there was a room with tables and pictures around the walls, and some other doors that led to an even bigger room with a very high ceiling. Leaving the wagon in the first room, Athena went on in to look around. It was very beautiful inside the church. She looked at all the benches for sitting on and at all the statues and pictures and candles. Then she went back to the smaller room to wait for the rain to stop.

  While she was waiting Athena looked at the pictures and notices on the walls and tried to read what they said. She could read words like you and call and school and children.

  The word children was on a box that sat up on short wooden legs near the front door. There was a picture of children on the box too. Lots of skinny little children with sad eyes and thin, hungry faces. Athena looked at the picture of the sad, sick children for a long time, and at the box behind it.

  The box was like a bank for saving money, with a narrow hole in the top to put the money in and with one wall made of glass so that you could see how much money was inside. The money was all mixed up together so it was hard to tell, but it didn’t seem like there was very much. Not enough to buy food for all the skinny little children in the picture. Looking at the little bit of money made her feel sad.

  After a while Athena remembered that she had some money too. She had two pennies in her playsuit pocket. She pulled up Diane’s sweater, reached into her pocket, and dropped the two pennies into the hole on the top of the box. It was fun dropping the pennies into the hole. And afterwards, when she looked at the pictures of the hungry children and then at her own two pennies lying there in the box with the other money, she didn’t feel quite so sad.

  Athena had to wait in the church for a long time. Every now and then she went to the church door to see if the rain had stopped. After a long time it almost did. The sidewalks were still wet and the sky was gray and cloudy, but not much rain was coming down. She closed the door quickly and went back inside to get her wagon and the doll family.

  The family had been waiting very patiently. Athena picked up the mother doll and the little girl doll and made them sit down beside each other. “Look,” she made the mother doll say, “look baby. The rain is stopping. We better go home right now.”

  “Oh no,” the girl doll said. “I don’t want to go home yet. I want to stay here in the church. Let’s go see all the statues and candles. And the money for hungry children. I want to see the money box for hungry children.”

  Athena played with the girl doll for a little while longer before she finally pulled her red wagon out through the church’s doors. The rain was all gone, the sun was shining, and she was feeling especially happy.

  Chapter 14

  WHEN CARLOS AND EDDY saw Nijinsky with the bone, they forgot, for the moment, about hurrying over to Bucky’s. Instead they went back and squatted down on each side of Nijinsky to do a more careful inspection. Just to be sure the bone was the same one that they’d found the night before, buried where the treasure chest had been.

  Carlos and Eddy leaned closer. With some dogs it might be dangerous to get so close in a bone-chewing situation, but with Nijinsky you didn’t have to worry. He only wagged his tail and stopped chewing long enough to let them have a good look.

  “Yep,” Carlos said. “It’s definitely the same shape, and see all that gunk stuck to it? I remember all that gunk.”

  Eddy wrinkled his nose and made a gagging noise. “And the smell too. I definitely remember the smell.”

  “Well, I guess Nijinsky was the one who dug up the treasure. You know, when he was burying the bone.”

  “It looks that way,” Eddy said. “At least we know that he must have been the one to put his bone there.”

  Carlos sighed and nodded. “Well, anyway, I guess we better go tell Bucky.”

  “Yes. I guess so,” Eddy said.

  As they started back across the cul-de-sac Carlos asked, “What do you think he’ll do to Nijinsky when he finds out?”

  Eddy grinned. “Oh, he’ll give him the third degree.” He got a mean look on his face and said, “Okay, dog. You better start talking—or else.”

  “Yeah,” Carlos said. “Or else—the torture chamber. Bring out the red-hot pokers, Igor. And the thumbscrews.”

  Eddy did an Igor the hunchback number and whined, “Too bad, Boss. No can do thumbscrews. No thumbs.”

  They were still laughing when they rang the Brockhursts’ bell and Bucky shot out the door.

  “Okay, dudes,” he said, “let’s go. I’m ungrounded. Let’s go find that treasure. Let’s go dig up …”

  Carlos had been saying “er, er, er” for quite a while before Bucky shut up long enough for them to tell him about Nijinsky and the bone.

  As soon as they’d convinced him that it was, for sure, the very same bone, Bucky said. “Well, all right. That means … Well, I guess that means that …”

  “Well, for one thing it means that Nijinsky has been back to the Pit since we were there last night,” Carlos said.

  “That’s right,” Eddy agreed. “But that’s about all it means for sure. It doesn’t prove that he had anything to do with—”

  “What do you mean?” Bucky said. “Sure he did. His bone was in the hole, wasn’t it? And our treasure chest was missing from that same hole. That sounds like a pretty good clue to me. Come on. Let’s go look. Maybe he buried the treasure somewhere else in the Pit.”

  Carlos didn’t think that was too likely. That would have to mean that Nijinsky dug up the treasure and carried it away and buried it someplace else. And then came back and buried his bone in the first hole.
Not too likely. Nijinsky seemed like a fairly smart dog, as dogs go, but not all that smart. But there was no use arguing with Bucky so the three of them headed back to the Pit.

  On the way Bucky wanted to stop at the Grants’ to see the bone but Nijinsky had disappeared. And so had the bone. So they went on to the Pit and started digging.

  The first place they dug was in the corner where they’d started the new clubhouse and found the tin box. “Just in case we missed the right spot in the dark last night,” Bucky said. “Everybody dig where you were digging before. And don’t stop until you’re down to the really solid stuff.”

  In Carlos’s part of the circle that didn’t take long. But he was still whacking away at the “solid stuff” when he heard something and looked up in time to see a huge, shaggy shape come flying over the Pit wall, dragging something behind it. The shaggy shape was Lump and the something he was dragging at the end of his leash turned out to be Susie.

  As Susie landed on her hands and knees she turned loose of the leash and Lump came bounding toward Carlos whining with happiness. Carlos braced himself for a slobbery kiss attack. Then as soon as he’d gotten Lump to more or less cool it, he went to see if Susie was hurt. She was still sitting on the ground looking at her knee, but when Carlos came over she jumped up.

  “You all right?” he asked her.

  “I’m okay. I’m okay,” Susie said, even though she obviously had a skinned knee. “Hey, I didn’t know you guys were in here. I was just taking Lump for a walk.”

  Carlos grinned. “Down here in the Pit? Funny place to walk a dog, isn’t it?”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s a great place to walk a dog. You can just walk around and around down here. See, like this.” She grabbed Lump’s leash and began to limp around the Pit. Carlos went back to where the other two PROs were watching, leaning on their shovels. The three of them went on leaning on their shovels while Susie walked around the Pit a couple of times, limping a little and acting very strange. Then she and Lump climbed back out and disappeared.

  “Weird,” Bucky said. “Okay, you dudes. Get back to work.”

  A little later the PROs gave up on the clubhouse area and began to move out around the whole Pit looking for places where the earth had recently been disturbed. Carlos was beginning to dig in a new spot when Eddy came over and stood next to him.

  “Don’t look now,” he said. “But over there, to your right, in that bushy place. Somebody is hiding in those bushes and looking over the wall. With binoculars. I’m sure I saw some binoculars.”

  “Oh yeah?” Carlos said. He checked on Bucky to see if he had noticed, too, but he seemed to be busy digging. “I’ll check it out,” he told Eddy. But by the time he’d eased over to the wall the bush was empty. The binoculars, and whoever had been looking through them, had disappeared.

  Carlos went back to digging, wondering if the person in the tree had been Susie again. Except—as far as he knew—Susie didn’t have any binoculars. And if it wasn’t Susie, who was it? The whole thing was beginning to give him a slightly creepy feeling.

  Chapter 15

  “THAT’S A BAD SCRAPE,” Brigitta Garcia, Susie’s mother, said as she unwrapped a large-size Band-Aid. “How did it happen this time?”

  “It was Lump’s fault,” Susie said. “He pulled me down. He just happened to see Carlos and he took off like a rocket and jerked me off my feet.”

  “Well, perhaps you ought to let the boys walk Lump from now on,” her mother said.

  “But I like walking him. Dad lets me do it.”

  Her mother finished packing up the first-aid kit before she said, “Well, I’ll talk to your father about it. But it seems to me that walking a dog who weighs more than you do is not a good idea.”

  Susie limped out onto the back deck and collapsed in a chair to wait for her knee to stop hurting. Actually, it had been Muffy’s idea, and it hadn’t been a good one. Pretending to be walking Lump in the Pit so she could check on what the PROs were doing would have been dumb even if she hadn’t fallen down and skinned her knee. Because those creeps obviously weren’t going to be doing anything important while she was there. The whole thing had been stupid.

  She hoped Muffy had had better luck. Peeking over the wall with your mother’s opera glasses made a little more sense than trying to pretend you were just an innocent dog walker—instead of a spy. She sighed. As soon as her knee felt better she would have to go back to the Pit—but without Lump this time—and go on following the PROs.

  While Susie was collapsed on the back deck waiting for her knee to quit hurting, the three PROs were still going over every inch of the Pit floor, searching and digging. Carlos was just about to suggest, for the third or fourth time, that they give up and do something else, when Bucky suddenly yelled, “Look. I told you so. There he is.”

  Sure enough, there he was. The four-legged suspect, Nijinsky, was standing at the Pit entrance—and he was carrying the same big bone. But when Bucky yelled he turned around and disappeared.

  Bucky threw down his shovel and started toward the stairs. Halfway there he stopped and looked back. “Come on, you goons. Get a move on. We have to follow him.”

  Why? Carlos was thinking. Why do we have to follow him? And when they caught up with Bucky, Eddy asked more or less the same question. “What do we want to follow Nijinsky for?” he asked. “You think he has the box on him, or something? Like in his pocket, maybe?”

  Bucky gave Eddy a cold stare. “Can’t you figure anything out? He obviously came here to bury the bone again. Right? And he left because we were here. So now he’s probably going to bury it someplace else. Like”—he made his face say, “Now listen carefully, you retards,” as he went on—“like in one of his other burying places. Like, for instance, in the place where he buried something else just last night.”

  Carlos didn’t know if Bucky could be right—but then again, he supposed he could be. He looked at Eddy and shrugged and the two of them followed Bucky across the Pit and up the stairs. They got to the sidewalk just in time to see Nijinsky turning into the Andersons’ driveway.

  “There he goes,” Bucky yelled. “Come on. Get a move on.”

  Two little Anderson grandkids came out to watch as Carlos trotted through their front yard. He felt stupid running across their lawn following Eddy, who was following Bucky, who was following a dog with a big, stinky bone in its mouth. He didn’t blame the Anderson kids for looking bewildered.

  The kids were still staring wide eyed as the whole procession turned to the right and ran right on through the Andersons’ property, along the Prince Field fence, and on out through a grove of trees. They had passed the Andersons’ old deserted barn and were starting up the hill toward Castle Crag when Eddy caught up with Bucky and tried to talk to him.

  “Look, Brockhurst,” he panted, “I don’t think … Why are we? … I mean, what’s the point of? …” But Bucky, and a few yards ahead Nijinsky, just kept on jogging. So Carlos and Eddy kept on going too.

  A little way past the big old jagged boulder known as Castle Crag, Nijinsky suddenly stopped and sat down. Dropping the bone, he licked his chops and turned to look back over his shoulder. And then he grinned. Carlos was almost sure of it.

  But when Carlos started to walk up to where he was sitting, Bucky held him back. “Shh,” he said. “Maybe this is it. Maybe he’s going to start digging.”

  “This is what?” Eddy asked.

  “This is where he buries things. When he doesn’t bury them in the Pit.” Bucky made a sarcastically patient expression like “I’m making this as clear as I can,” and said slowly, “Don’t you get it? This is probably where he buried the box.”

  But then Nijinsky quit grinning, picked up his bone, and went on running. They were quite a way past Castle Crag when it started to rain.

  “Hey,” Carlos said, “it’s raining. We’d better head for home.”

  “Forget it,” Bucky said. “A little sprinkle won’t hurt you. That’s all it will be this time of y
ear. Just a little sprinkle.”

  A few minutes later the rain was coming down in bucketfuls, the wind was howling, and the three PROs were squeezed back against the trunk of a pine tree, soaking wet, cold, and miserable.

  Nijinsky had disappeared. They hadn’t seen him go. He’d been there right in front of them just a minute before, but then, while their eyes were full of rain, he suddenly was gone. They huddled under the tree and shivered for a long time while the rain seeped down through the branches and dripped off their ears and the tips of their noses.

  Nobody talked for quite a while, but at one point Carlos said, “I wonder where Nijinsky got to?”

  “Huh,” Bucky said. “He’s probably somewhere around here digging right this minute. Dogs aren’t afraid of a little rain. If you guys weren’t such dweebs we could be out there watching him dig up the treasure.”

  Carlos wiped the rain off his face and said, “Feel free, Brockhurst. Go right ahead.”

  “Sure,” Bucky whined, “and have you guys sneak off on me while I’m gone.”

  So nobody went anywhere. The three PROs waited under the tree, getting soggier and soggier, for a long time.

  Chapter 16

  AFTER THE RAIN STOPPED, the sky got blue again. The sun began to shine and went on shining until it turned red and went down behind the hills. Athena sat on the Pappases’ front steps and watched the sky and sun. She was really waiting for the Nicelys and Aurora to get home, but they didn’t, so she watched the sun go down instead. But when it began to get dark and cold she went indoors and sat in her favorite place under the piano and practiced writing her name in the dictionary.

  Nick and Diane were still working in their studio and Ari was busy working on his journal. Athena couldn’t find any paper to practice on so she was writing in the big dictionary. She had decided to write her name on every single page, and she was already on page twenty-three when Aurora came home.