Wyn and I were shocked. We actually turned and looked at each other. Could this really be true?
“But…” the old man paused. Then he gathered himself and told us something remarkable.
The notary Theo had found that hot, mosquito-filled day long ago was lying on the ground, propped up against one of the many stumps still visible in downtown Cobalt…drunk on a bottle of moonshine whisky. He had once been a successful lawyer and a town mayor in southern Ontario, but his drinking problems had driven him out. Coming north where no one knew him, he’d set up office in Cobalt and tried to make a living, offering his services as a lawyer and a notary capable of signing legitimate land claims. He’d stayed away from drinking his first week in the north but before long was back at his bad habits. He soon lost his office and spent whatever sober time he had trying to find his own fortune in the woods. Mostly he could be found in the Haileybury bars, or staggering around on the muddy Cobalt streets. No one sought his signature on a land claim any more.
Theo knew all about him. All about him. And when he saw him lying there that day just before the sun set, he knew he had hit a jackpot as big as his silver treasure. He ran to the nearby post office, bought a couple of sheets of paper, and quickly scribbled out his land claim. Then he leaned down, presented himself as a twenty-one-year-old miner, and asked for a signature. It was given with a smile.
The next day, when Theo arrived at the royal suite of the Matabanick Hotel, there were actually three men waiting for him: fat little Lyon Brown, the squirrel, and the drunken lawyer…except he wasn’t drunk now, and he was spitting mad. After Brown delivered his harsh terms to the boy, he made him produce the land claim paper and ordered it not only burned but burned right there and then, by young Theo Larocque himself.
As the boy pulled the paper from his pocket, his eyes filling with tears as he thought of the fortune that was about to go up in smoke, and of his dear dead parents, two fascinating facts came suddenly into his mind as if a guardian angel had sent them. The first was that he had two pieces of paper in that pocket, one blank and exactly the same size as the land claim he had written out and gotten the drunken man to sign. The second was that the sleight of hand his father had taught him many years ago was about to come in very handy indeed. His dad had been an amateur magician and loved to make things vanish up the sleeves of his coats, never to be seen again. For an instant his father didn’t seem dead any more. He was as alive as if he were standing there, showing him how to perform this lifesaver of a trick.
And so he palmed the real land claim, and this is how he did it. Moving in such a way as to cause all three men to stand in a close bunch directly in front of him, he held both papers in front of their faces so they looked like one. Then, moving the papers slightly off to the side, he took the lighted match and held it up so close to their eyes that it nearly burned them. While their gazes were riveted on the flame, the boy stuffed the real land claim up his sleeve and out of sight. Then he drew the blank paper and the match together and, with a well-acted look of sadness on his face, burned it to ashes.
“Yes! ” cried Wyn.
The old man looked down at the box. He opened it and drew out a piece of paper.
“This,” he said, “is that original note. It says I own land in Cobalt…from which twenty-seven million dollars of silver was drawn in the first part of the twentieth century.”
Wyn and I were shaking with excitement. The old man had proof right there in his hands that the Brown family had ripped him off. Not only could he keep his $250,000 worth of silver, now worth who knows what, but he might even be able to sue one of the wealthiest companies in Canada!
For some reason, the old man looked as sad as ever.
“But Great-grandpa, I don’t understand. You have him where you want him. You have all the evidence you need right there. We should tell Dylan’s dad!”
“NO!!” shouted Theobald T. Larocque, in a voice fit for a haunted house. Wyn went silent.
The old man didn’t speak for a few minutes.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally, very quietly, “I shouldn’t have shouted at you. It isn’t your fault. You just don’t understand…fully. It isn’t as easy as it sounds. There are more problems. An ultimate problem. And it’s personal. I…I can’t…I don’t know if I can tell you.”
He fumbled with the paper and stuffed it into the box, just as he had tucked it into his sleeve long ago. Then he struggled to his feet, planting his cane in the snow. He turned and walked towards the hill that led to his house.
About ten metres away he paused for a few seconds. “Come tomorrow, if you dare,” he said, so quietly we barely heard him. Then we watched this remarkable, ancient man move upward with strong steps.
We were both thinking the same thing. Oh, we’re coming, Theo, even if we have to skip school to do it.
13
Sins of the Fathers
And that was how we did it: we skipped school for a whole period right before lunch. The class itself lasted fifty minutes, and every day we had an hour to eat, so combined we had almost two hours to get to Larocque’s house and back for our first class after lunch. We each had come up with ten dollars from our allowances: it would get us a round-trip to Cobalt by taxi. We knew we would never be missed, nor would our parents find out: all because of a brilliant teacher we had, named Marcus O’Brien. In fact, he was too brilliant. That’s why we chose his class to make our great escape.
Every day the redheaded O’Brien would take attendance the moment his students arrived, and then he would turn his head and launch into involved mathematical formulas on the blackboard. There were many days when his head never turned back until the class was over. Or at least if it did, he seldom noticed that anyone else was even in the room. Wyn and I were betting that he wouldn’t see us slip out the door.
We weren’t exactly proud of what we had to do. But desperate problems call for desperate measures. We told all our classmates—we couldn’t be betrayed by giggles or loose lips—and the second after Marcus the Mathematical Marvel turned his head, we were off.
Racing down the hallway, we ducked down low as we went past the principal’s office and then met the waiting taxi at the door. We had made arrangements with the cabbie the day before, a guy Wyn knew named Griffin Angus who was pretty cool about things. He played in a rock band in the area and knew a good adventure when he saw one. Grif took us to Cobalt on the double. Traffic jams were never much of a concern in the tri-towns.
We had just one regret. We were going to have to explain everything to our friends later. Everything. I could almost hear them snickering. What the heck were you guys doing for those two hours, anyway? We didn’t know what we’d say. Perhaps we could put them off for a while. There’s nothing like a good mystery, so maybe we could leave them in suspense but promise we would explain when it was safer.
We asked Grif to let us off at the bottom of the hill, then we piled out of the back seat and ran up to Larocque’s house. The front door was actually ajar, as though he was waiting for us. In an instant we were up the stairs and on the sofa beside him. He didn’t hesitate this time. He just started right in.
Theo worked in the mines for Lyon Brown for eight years, in his youth. At first he was given the dirtiest jobs, and though he gradually ascended in the pecking order, he was constantly passed over for any sort of important promotion. But he didn’t care. He did what he was asked, worked hard and learned the mines from top to bottom, every inch of every shaft, every level, every cage, and every hoist-house he ever had anything to do with. Even as he got older and bigger he was still known as “the Mole,” fearless underground, capable of digging and hacking out passageways quicker than anyone else. He seemed capable of going into holes that were narrower than his shoulders: it was as if he could make himself thirteen again whenever he needed to. But no matter what he did, he always kept one fact firmly in his mind. When he turned twenty-
one, legally an adult and old enough to claim his 1 percent, he was going to confront Lyon Brown instead and produce the paper that gave him the right to his whole fortune.
But old man Brown hadn’t become a multi-millionaire by being stupid, and he proved it the day Theo Larocque knocked confidently on his door near the end of those eight years of hard work. It was during one of the boss’s infrequent visits to Haileybury. There were just two of them in the royal suite this time, and that was exactly the way Theo wanted it. He wasted no time producing his old land claim, shaking a little, but with a defiant look on his face.
Lyon Brown actually laughed. Laughed right in his face. Then he put Larocque in the predicament in which he would remain for the rest of his days. He explained that he had run a check on the young man and on his mother and father. “For insurance purposes, one might say.” He had traced the family back to England and discovered something about his parents that he knew the young man would not want revealed.
“Do you know how your parents died? Do you know what they were doing?” he snarled.
“No, I never did,” said Theo. The question had made him tremble. All his life he had wondered why his parents had just vanished, on some sort of trip in a foreign land.
There had been a look of expectation on Brown’s face; now it turned into a smile.
“I didn’t think so. Well, try to claim this land and you will! And so will the rest of this town and every town around here! It will shock you…and them. Your money will mean nothing to you then.”
His voice turned to that sickly-sweet one he had used when Theo first met him, the one that made him sound like a bad actor. “But let us be reasonable men before anyone does anything stupid. I will give you your 1 percent. You can live comfortably on it. And I will give you a slightly better job at the mine. I promise you will never have to go underground again. Unless you want to, of course.”
Then his snarl came back. “But…claim the land…and you will live as an outcast!”
The look on Lyon Brown’s face said he wasn’t kidding.
As Wyn and I sat listening in Cobalt’s haunted house, and Marvellous Marcus O’Brien worked out another tough formula in the Haileybury grade-eight math class, Theobald T. Larocque was caught in the web of the problem that Lyon Brown had created for him long ago.
“I still don’t know what he found out about my mother and father. I think about it every night. Why wasn’t I told exactly what happened to them when they died? Brown said he had the evidence locked in a safety deposit box. I have no idea if his grandson still has it. But I will never shame my parents, not so long as I live. If I were to bring forward my land claim as evidence…that Edison Brown pup might just respond by destroying the memory of my dear parents for the world to see. I can’t do that to them.”
“But what if Edison Brown doesn’t have that evidence?” asked Wyn.
The old man turned to me. “Would you take that chance? Would you do that to your mother and father?”
“But they aren’t alive any more,” said Wyn.
The old man looked into the flames. “They are to me.”
“My grandfather is kind of like that to me,” I said quietly.
The old man smiled. Then his face turned grim again. “So you see, we are at a standoff. I have something Brown wants, and he might have something I need…. But I will never tell him where the silver is and he will never find it! He will die first!”
Wyn plucked up her courage. “But surely you want the silver to be found someday?”
“Yes. Yes, I do. And someone will find it. Maybe it will be you two.”
Wyn and I stared back into the old man’s eyes as he looked at us.
“When I am dead and gone, no one will care or be hurt in any way by what my parents may have done long ago, God rest their souls. Then all can be revealed. And it will be, to those who have the brains, those who care enough to understand. I will leave a trail that will lead to my treasure. Someone will figure it out, I’m sure! And when the silver is found, I want it to be given to the people of Cobalt…to rebuild our once magnificent town!”
The old man paused and then nearly spat out his next sentence.
“And I want Edison Brown sued until his grandfather’s skeleton squirms in its coffin!”
As Wyn and I raced down the hill a few minutes later, freaked out again by what the old man had told us, we wondered why he had finally decided to spill his guts.
“I think he wants us to figure it out,” shouted Wyn.
“I think he does too,” I replied.
Once we were in the taxi we spoke quietly.
“But maybe not now,” whispered Wyn, “maybe he’s telling us because we’re still kids. It seems to me that he needed to tell someone, so someone could tell everyone else when he’s gone.”
“And he knows we have a pretty fair chance of being around for a long time. He likely thinks we care enough about it and have enough time to figure it all out. And he probably thinks it will take us a while to find it, well past his death.”
“But I’m not waiting. I want to know now!” said Wyn defiantly.
“Same here!”
We were silent for a while after that, but we were both thinking the same thought as Grif wheeled his cab through North Cobalt and into Haileybury. Adults always think kids are in too much of a rush. They always have as much fun as they possibly can and tell us to wait. This time, neither Wyn nor I was willing to do that. We wanted to get some clues out of Larocque about where that silver was, and then…we were going after it!
The taxi screeched to a halt outside the school, exactly one minute before our next class began. We rushed out and flew through the doors. I glanced at my watch: fifty seconds to bell time. Around the corner and down the hallway. Thirty seconds. Past the principal’s office without even ducking. Twenty seconds. The classroom door came into view. Ten seconds. Pull it open and whip inside.
Brrrringgggggggggggg!
14
The Lights Go Out
That was the last school day before Christmas. For about a week Wyn and I had to put on hold any hopes for talking to the old man again and pursuing the lost silver. We still couldn’t tell our parents anything about it, and there was no way that we’d get away with a visit to the haunted house over the holidays. We were just expected to be around our families too much. So we let the time pass.
We had a couple of chances to talk a little. One of the things we figured out about Larocque was that Brown had been even more unfair to him than we had first thought. Wyn’s mother told her that Lyon Brown gave Theo a job as an inspector after his first eight years of employment, but then closed his mine about nine months later, in the early winter. Theo had quickly found a job with another mine, but by the end of the First World War the business wasn’t what it used to be. Cobalt was heading downhill. Lyon Brown had gotten out with his money.
We figured that the old man had never even cashed in on his one percent. His contract was likely only for the Browns’s Cobalt mine and due to him only past the age of twenty-one. He hadn’t even collected for ten months.
Theo Larocque worked for forty-four more years in the mines. He was known at first as a pleasant enough person, but he slowly became more and more bitter about something…something no one knew anything about. Long before he retired he wasn’t leaving his house much. Then he hardly ever left. And after his wife died—of a broken heart, they said—he became the monster of Cobalt, up in his haunted house, refusing to die and frightening all the kids by his very presence in that glowing room on the upper floor. The mines all closed and the town began dying around him. Rumours began growing about him…and about some sort of hidden treasure.
One thing that kept our minds off the mystery during our Christmas break was a hockey tournament. That was fun because Cobalt and Haileybury joined forces for the games, and Frank, Joe, Wyn, and I were all cho
sen for the team, with the excited “Bunny” Larocque behind the bench. He turned out to be another great-grandchild of Theobald’s, a different family line than Wyn’s, a third cousin of hers. I watched him closely when he spoke to the team. I could see the old man’s intensity in his eyes, and I often wondered if that was what Theo had been like, long ago. Then it occurred to me that maybe that same intensity was in one Wynona Dixon!
We lost the tournament in the final. Some of the parents thought we should have won. But Wyn and I weren’t at our best. A few of the students from Marcus O’Brien’s class apparently spread the idea that we had something else on our minds.
They were right. School would be back in session in about three days. That meant going back to work on the Theobald T. Larocque case, too.
It was easier said than done. The first week went past, and we hadn’t even come up with a scheme to get to the house. Skipping O’Brien’s class again was just too risky. We didn’t trust ourselves to be lucky twice. Then, one day, a break came out of the blue.
I was sitting at my desk, plowing through some homework right after school so I could watch a little TV later on. I was battling with a particular problem from geography class, trying to remember the capital of New Brunswick. That was always a tough one. I stood up and walked around as I thought, which always helped. But when I crossed in front of my window I happened to notice something outside, down by the lake, and the contest between Fredericton, Moncton, and Saint John got dropped like a hot potato.
Two seconds later I was downstairs, snatching up the phone in the kitchen and calling Wyn.
“He’s there,” I whispered into the phone.
“Where?” she asked.
“Down by the lake. Meet you in five minutes!”
It was easy to give Mom and Dad the slip. I knew they’d watch me go out the door and see me head down towards the lake, not up the hill in the direction of the haunted house. The only window from which they could see the bench where Theobald T. Larocque sat waiting was in my bedroom, and they’d have no reason to go up there.
The Secret of the Silver Mines Page 9