Amazingly, just before dinnertime-Dale's and Lawrence's folks' station wagon had just pulled in the drive a quarter of a mile away and honked at them-Mike's shovel broke through into darkness.
Old, cool air swept out of the ten-inch hole they had opened into the hillside. Always optimistic, Lawrence had brought a flashlight along. They widened the hole a bit and played the flashlight beam inside.
It was no mefe gopher hole. An entrance shaft littered with dusty bottles and other hasty filler material appeared to open to a wider, deeper space beyond. The boys could see dark wood that might have been a crate or the edge of a bar. A dark curve was certainly an old tire, possibly a wheel still on a Model A entombed there just as Uncle Henry had always said.
The boys started digging away at the hole, enlarging it, tossing clods and stones downhill toward the creek, when suddenly they stopped as by silent consensus. Cordie looked up from where she was sitting in the shade across the creek. Her new jeans from Meyers' Dry Goods looked crisp and stiff on her. She brushed dust off her saddle shoes.
Mike pulled the shovel back and looked at the other four boys. "It's real," he whispered. He set the shovel down and rubbed his lower lip. "But there's no hurry, is there?"
Kevin leaned on his short spade and ran a hand through his crew cut. The scar on his temple near the hairline was small and white and almost invisible. "I don't see why there should be any hurry," he said. "It's been there thirty-some years. It can keep."
Dale nodded. "Uncle Henry really wouldn't want all those people and reporters and tourists and stuff swarming around here. Not now. Not with his back still healing and all."
Harlen folded his arms. "I don't know," he said, looking from face to face. "There might be something valuable in there."
Lawrence shrugged and grinned. He had been clawing wildly at the dirt, working hard to open the entrance tunnel wider. Now he pushed some of the dirt back in place. "Don't you get it, Jim? It'll always be there. It's not going anywhere. If the stuff is worth something now, think of how much it'll be worth if we come back in a few years and dig it up." He started pushing more earth back over the foot-wide opening. "It'll be our secret," he said, grinning at them and setting his glasses higher on his small nose. "Just ours."
They worked to conceal the tunnel with as much effort and enthusiasm as they had shown in finding it. They filled it in, tapped the dirt down, returned heavy stones to their original places by dragging them back uphill, set sod and bushes back in place, and even moved a root back that they had laboriously pulled aside. They stood back to admire their handiwork for a moment-it looked raw now, but in a week or two it would be grown over again--by autumn no one could tell that they had ever dug here.
Then they started up to the house for dinner.
Mike paused on the cow path up the hill and looked at Cordie, still sitting on the opposite hillside and stripping leaves from a branch. "Coming?" hesaid.
"Boys," she said, shaking her head. "When God didn't have no more parts for smart, he made dumb."
They waited in the long shadows of the hillside while she crossed a log across the creek and climbed to catch up.
The investigation into the strange events of the week of July 10-16 had gone on visibly for weeks and were still going on, although elsewhere and out of sight and at a much less urgent level now.
The central event turned out to be the disappearance of Mr. Dennis Ashley-Montague and his servant. When the limousine was found at Bandstand Park long after midnight on the night of the fire, abandoned, the Free Show projector still throwing a blank rectangle of white light onto the side of the Parkside Cafe, the Sheriff's Department, the Oak Hill police, and eventually the FBI had become involved in the manhunt. For weeks, FBI men in tight black suits, skinny black ties, and polished black Florsheims had been seen walking the streets of Elm Haven, hanging around the cafe, and even drinking Pepsis in Carl's and the Black Tree--"blending in" and picking up local gossip.
There was enough local gossip.
There were a million theories to explain the theft of Ken Grumbacher's truck, almost certainly stolen by Dr. Roon, the former principal, the fire, the grave-robbing of several bodies from Mr. Taylor's funeral home, and the disappearance of Elm Haven's patron millionaire. Rumor had it that forensic experts had found not just the bones of Dr. Roon and the missing corpses in the collapsed ruins of Old Central, but had found the shards of enough bones to make one think the school had been in session when the building burned. Some days later, word in the barbershops and beauty salons was that tests had shown that many of the bones were old, quite old, and more theories centered around the strange behavior of Calvary Cemetery's former groundskeeper and the school's custodian, Karl Van Skye. Mrs. Whittaker had it on good authority from her cousin in the Oak Hill police department that Mr. Van Syke's gold tooth had been found in a charred skull amidst the ruins.
Ten days after the fire, on the same day that wrecking cranes came to knock in the last of the charred brick walls, and bulldozers arrived to load the bricks into dump trucks and fill in the surprisingly deep basement of Old Central, word in the Parkside Cafe and on the party lines was that the FBI had made a breakthrough in the case. It seems that the 1957 black Chevrolet belonging to Justice of the Peace Cong-den had been seen on Grand View Drive, near Mr. Ashley-Montague's mansion, on the day J.P. was reportedly killed, four days before the fire in the grain elevator and five days before the Old Central fire and the disappearance of the millionaire. Mr. Caspar Jonathan ("C.J.") Congden was wanted for questioning by the FBI.
Jim Harlen may have been the last person to see C.J. in Elm Haven-Harlen saw the sixteen-year-old peeling rubber toward the Hard Road in his Chevy just after ten a.m. on the morning that the rumor of his being wanted for questioning came up. He did not return.
Kevin told the police, the Sheriff's Office, the FBI, and his father the story about he and Harlen awakening to the sound of the generator running and coming out just in time to see the truck being driven away. Neither boy knew for sure what made the driver swerve toward Old Central.
Several days after the fire, it was the sheriff who found pieces of metal in the wreckage with .45 caliber slugs in them. Kevin subsequently confessed that when he saw the truck being stolen, he had run in and grabbed his father's .45 and fired several shots after it. He didn't think that was what caused the driver to lose control, but he wasn't sure.
Ken Grumbacher shouted at his son for such irresponsibility and grounded him for a week, but seemed quietly proud of his boy's actions when discussing them with the other men over morning coffee or while transferring milk to the new bulk tanker. The truck had been adequately insured.
All of the other kids-except perhaps Cordie Cooke, who blended into the darkness later that night while the town was watching the fire department lose to the fire, and who was not seen again for more than a week-were questioned by parents and police. Mike's and Dale's and Lawrence's parents were shocked that their children had received burns and scratches in trying to pull open the jammed door of the truck before it exploded, trying to rescue the driver, whose identity they were not certain of. Jim Harlen stayed with the sheriff that Saturday night, and his mother was properly shocked and impressed by the report of her son's actions when she arrived home from Peoria the next morning.
Mike's grandmother, Memo, did not die. Instead she began showing marked improvement, and could whisper a few words and move her right arm by the second week in August. "Some old people, they put up good fight," was the prognosis of Dr. Viskes. Mr. and Mrs. O'Rourke spoke to Dr. Staffney about finding specialists to oversee therapy needed for her full recovery.