The Secret of the Silver Mines Page 10

  On the way down the hill I spotted Wyn rushing out her door, throwing that red coat on as quickly as she could. In minutes we were both sitting beside the old man.

  “Happy birthday,” he said to me. Tomorrow was the big day.

  That struck me as a positive start. Maybe the old man was about to give us a present? A few clues would hit the spot, better even than a new video game at this point.

  “My mother never believed in birthday presents, so I never did either.”

  My heart sank.

  “It’s the way you treat the person the whole year round that matters.”

  For the next hour he didn’t say a single thing about the silver or the trail he had said he was going to leave behind. Nothing that sounded like a clue came out of his mouth. But he talked. Boy, did he talk. Maybe he had been lonely lately, or maybe he was really feeling his ancient age and was worried that time was running out. He just couldn’t seem to stop. It poured out of him at great speed. We had never seen him like this before.

  Mostly he talked about Cobalt and Haileybury, about his wife, his hard times in the mines, about the famous fire of 1922 that swept across the towns like the fallout from a nuclear bomb, killing many of his friends and incinerating almost every building. The towns were never the same again after that, he said. The silver wasn’t as plentiful by then anyway, but the fire destroyed all the grand old buildings, and they weren’t rebuilt. The Wild West frontier town just died. He remembered how it was reported in the Sudbury paper (the Cobalt Daily Nugget had left for North Bay) by a writer named Leslie McFarlane.

  “You kids should know that name,” he said. “He wasn’t a very big man, but he was big in here.” He tapped his chest over his heart. “And he did a lot for you kids.”

  “He did?” asked Wyn.

  “He grew up in Haileybury. And he wrote the most famous books for kids the world has ever known.”

  “Which ones?” I asked.

  “The Hardy Boys. They were given life by him, a boy who grew up in this town. He used a different name, mind you. I read those books and my kids loved them and so did my grandkids. You may have read some too.”

  Wyn and I nodded.

  “Their adventures could just as easily have happened here as in Bayport. I often thought Leslie was thinking of the lakes and this whole area when he wrote those mysteries. The Hardy Boys were always finding treasures in strange places. Often in caves, it seems to me.”

  Suddenly the old man stopped rattling on. He apologized for having to leave and stood up, using his cane, while muttering something about “the Mole” having to get back to his hole. Then he bade us goodbye and walked away. As we watched him go up the hill we both noticed that he was walking more slowly than usual. He didn’t seem to have that surprising energy that had made him seem different from anyone we had ever met. It worried us a little and took our minds off the fact that a long talk with the old man hadn’t moved our plans ahead even the tiniest amount. Our only hope was that he was going to make a habit of coming to this bench by the lake.

  But over the next couple of days he didn’t show. I watched like a guard dog. Every five minutes I was at home I checked. I even ran upstairs a whole bunch of times during my birthday party, making my mom, dad, and everyone on the hockey team (except one) wonder what the heck I was doing. My excuses got a little lame. I told them at least four times that I was headed to the washroom. And another time that I had to comb my hair. That was a real laugh. They all just cracked up at that one because my hair always looked like someone had just thrown it down on top of my head. A comb was definitely not a Dylan thing.

  After three days without seeing the old man, I got totally frustrated. Not long before bedtime I told Mom that I wanted to go outside for a few minutes, because I just felt like pacing around. The instant I was out the front door I noticed Wyn coming out hers. Then she looked up at the haunted house. From where I was standing it looked as though she had turned into a statue. She wasn’t moving a muscle, like she was in shock. She was staring up the hill. I turned too and glanced towards the house.

  All the lights were out!

  It was hard to say who started running first. We were both off like a flash, not even thinking for a second about our parents. Halfway up we heard four voices calling us but we didn’t turn.

  When we got to the front door we yelled for him and got no response. We forced open the door and went inside, shouting to him as we flew up the dark stairs. When we reached the landing it was evident that the fireplace, that huge furnace, was dead. We found Theo lying on his sofa, barely breathing, his eyes wide open. He was trying desperately to speak to us, but he couldn’t make a sound.

  Our parents were hot on our heels, but as soon as they arrived, anger turned to concern. An ambulance was sent for, and everyone waited for it to arrive. The old man would only take Wyn’s hand, though he stared with great interest at her father and mother. He wouldn’t even glance at John and Laura Maples.

  He made it to the Haileybury hospital. But just barely, said the doctor. Within a short while they had him full of tubes and resting quietly, drugs and painkillers lulling him to sleep. It seemed like there was little hope. He was dying. And he couldn’t even say goodbye. I looked into his eyes under his drooping lids and wondered if he was thinking about old Cobalt—the mines, Grey Owl, and Cyclone Taylor…and the answer to where the silver was hidden. Now, it would be lost forever.

  There was silence in the car on the way back home. Everyone felt bad. Mom and Dad had never thought of the old man as their enemy. Both had felt guilty as heck about everything to do with the case, and now they felt even worse. They had often imagined what he looked like and had heard stories about the frightening monster who lived at the top of the hill. But as he lay there holding his great-granddaughter’s hand, he only seemed frail and very old, and everyone’s heart went out to him. Mr. and Mrs. Dixon were stunned too. They couldn’t stop staring at him. Afterwards they confessed that they had never seen him face to face.

  At home Dad asked me to come into the living room. We had to talk. I feared the worst. Another grounding, a chewing-out? But Dad must have felt like he was the one on trial. He spoke quietly. The case was going to wind up soon, he said. The police had finally given him the right to search the old man’s house; he had absolute proof that Theo had never punched out that last day at the Brown mine; and one or two Haileybury folks who didn’t like the old man had come forth with some potentially incriminating evidence. It wasn’t a great deal to work with, but arguably enough to win the case for Edison Brown. Dad’s voice was almost breaking. Brown himself was in the north right now to help wrap things up, having arrived earlier in the day. It wouldn’t be long before we were back home in Toronto.

  A couple of months ago that would have made me feel like I was walking on air. But now it felt unbelievably deflating. Mom came into the room and put her hand on my shoulder, but I just got up and went upstairs.

  That night I dreamed about old Cobalt and Haileybury again. But there wasn’t any silver or hockey or Hardy Boys. I was simply walking along muddy Lang Street as it met Cobalt Square near the lake. Coming the other way was a boy about my age. He looked sad and a little ragged, but he had a determined look on his face. As we passed each other he smiled at me.

  It was Theo.

  He leaned over and whispered something into my ear.

  “Here’s where it’s hidden,” he said. Then he just floated away, lifting right off the ground and disappearing into the air.

  When I woke up the next morning, I had a plan. It was a desperate one. But the time for action had come.

  15

  Leaving a Trail

  I laid it all out for Wyn in the lunchroom the next day. She had been the one to suggest our first bold move: walking right into the old man’s house. Now I had an equally daring idea. First I told her the news about my dad finding evidence he th
ought he could use against Larocque, and then that Edison S. S. Brown was in Haileybury right now.

  “We’re going to confront him, Wyn.”

  “We are?”

  “Of course. We’re going to tell him what we know, or at least some of it, and ask him to leave the old man alone. He likely won’t. But we might be able to put ourselves in a bargaining position if we do something else.”

  “What?”

  “When Dad was talking with me, he said the name of the people whose house Brown’s staying in—they’re in Florida for the winter. I looked it up in the phone book—we should break in!”

  “What?”

  “We should get inside the house before we talk to him and find whatever papers he has on the case. Maybe there’s something he knows that we can use against him.” Wyn didn’t hesitate. She was immediately up for it. And that was a good thing because I sure wasn’t about to do it on my own. We both repeated about five times that we knew it was wrong, but never once even suggested that we shouldn’t do it. We decided to make our move at about six o’clock, when Brown would likely be out for dinner. We would meet at five-thirty at the school and then do the deed.

  Our folks weren’t obstacles any more. Both sets of parental units felt so bad about what had happened, and what was about to happen, that they were letting us do as we pleased for a while.

  Wyn and I had decided to wear dark clothes for our adventure, like people do when they’re breaking into buildings on TV shows and in the movies. We arrived nervous and excited, flashlights in hand. Within fifteen minutes we were outside Brown’s house. There were no lights on inside. We were in luck.

  Everyone in Haileybury always bragged about the fact that they could leave their doors unlocked and never fear being robbed. In fact, it was one of the things they often kidded me about—in Toronto, they all said, you probably have to slap about ten locks on the front door and “pack some heat” in the house. We often secured our door at home, but with just one little turn of a single lock. We didn’t own a gun, not even a hunting rifle (though many people in Cobalt did), and I had never heard of a robbery on our street. Our neighbourhood had a park across from our house where mothers and fathers and hundreds of little kids gathered every morning to talk and play. It was interesting how one place gets such a wrong idea about another. Is that a Canadian thing? I remembered how ridiculous my ideas about Cobalt and Haileybury had been. Hick towns where hicks live and nothing ever happens, I’d thought. Wow, was I ever wrong.

  When we got to Brown’s back door, after slithering around like snakes alongside his hedge and up the front walk, it was locked as tightly as Larocque’s old wooden box. A small window near the door was our next option. Wyn tiptoed over and grabbed the old frame. She shoved it upwards and, lo and behold, it opened. It was a tight fit, and I had to boost her up, but minutes later we were inside. Wyn landed quietly, but then I crashed down with a thud. We both waited in the darkness of the kitchen, holding our breath. No one seemed to be around.

  Flicking on our flashlights we began a search. Slowly we made our way through the ground-level rooms and then up the stairs. The first two rooms we came to were bedrooms, but then we found the den. Inside there was a desk, and on the desk a briefcase. Bingo.

  Quietly opening the briefcase we found a folder marked “Larocque.” Most of the files were just legal stuff we didn’t understand, but then we came upon something we understood perfectly. At first it seemed only slightly promising: an old, large, yellowed envelope with big letters typed on the outside: “Confidential. For Lyon Brown ONLY.” Our hearts began beating faster as Wyn opened it. And when we saw the title of the file inside, we knew we had struck gold…maybe even silver! We had to control ourselves—we both felt like shouting out loud and laying a smacking good high-five on each other.

  It was a tattered old folder and the title read: “Evidence of the Misconduct of the Parents of Theobald T. Larocque.” We opened it up. Inside there were several blank pages. Wyn and I looked at each other. We couldn’t hold back any more. We did our high-five.

  A groan came from the other side of the room. A human groan.

  “Wh…what…who’s there? WHO’S THERE!?” boomed a deep voice.

  Wyn and I lit out for the door, scrambling across the room, the file still in Wyn’s hand. Smart girl. But the door slammed shut just as we reached it, and the light came on. Standing in front of us, looking sleepy from an early evening nap, was Edison S. S. Brown.

  “Children?” he said, and he almost laughed.

  “We aren’t children!” snapped Wyn. She knew who he was, and she could barely look at his face. She wasn’t about to be insulted by him.

  “Who are you?” he said gruffly. “I’m going to call the police.”

  “I’m Wynona Dixon, and Theobald Larocque is my great-grandfather. And you are a crook, not him. Call the police if you want.”

  “How about you, young man, what do you have to say for yourself?”

  I didn’t know what the heck to say. “I, uh…I’m….”

  “He’s my cousin, Dylan Larocque. And he hates you just like me,” said Wyn, spitting out her words.

  “Hate?” said Edison Brown coolly. “Now that’s hardly a positive thing for a young person to carry around in his or her heart. But I don’t blame you for being angry. I would be too.”

  “You would?” I asked.

  “Of course. My grandfather wasn’t the nicest person in the world, I know. And I’m sure he wasn’t fair to your great-grandfather. And I have no desire to humiliate Theobald Larocque. But he stole from us…and I don’t believe in stealing. I was going to ask you whether you did or not, but, uh, given the evidence before us….”

  Wyn and I felt a bit embarrassed. He did have a point.

  “I don’t either, Mr. Brown,” I said after a pause, “but is it stealing to take back something that was yours in the first place?”

  Brown laughed. “I don’t understand. The silver was never your great-grandfather’s.”

  “But we have evidence. Let me explain,” said Wyn.

  Brown held up his hands. He wouldn’t even listen. “I think you two have done enough tonight. Give me that file.” He took it without looking at it. “Listen, I know what it is to be proud of your family, and I admire your guts for what you did tonight. I won’t call the police, don’t worry. But go home. Let the adults work this one out. There is no place for kids in this story. You just don’t understand the complexities involved.”

  “I understand perfectly,” said Wyn.

  “And so do I!” That was me talking, though I could hardly believe it.

  “And my great-grandfather understood when he was our age, too. Do you know what ripped off is, Mr. Brown? Do you know what that means? You don’t have to be an adult to understand that.”

  We both turned to go. But then I had a brainstorm, right there in Edison Brown’s house, just as we were about to leave the den. I turned back to him and looked him in the eye.

  “Will you answer one question?”

  “If you make it a brief one.”

  I paused for a second. My heart was pounding like a drum machine. Then I took a chance.

  “What do you know about that file in your hand?”

  Brown looked down. “This one?” He turned it over and glanced at the words on the front. “Oh, this. An interesting story, actually, though it doesn’t amount to much. My grandfather, on his deathbed, asked that it be burned. In fact, he asked me to do it. I was just a child then, you know, kind of like you two. And I didn’t do it. I don’t know why. Something just told me it wasn’t the right thing to do. I guess I just liked the envelope too much and the dramatic words on the front. And this is exactly as it was when it was handed to me—a folder with nothing but blank sheets inside. I heard it said later, from one of my grandfather’s assistants, that Larocque’s parents had gotten lost in a dese
rt on a vacation and were never found again. That was all.”

  Wyn cracked a huge smile. “Thank you, Mr. Brown.”

  “Yes,” I said, almost laughing out loud, “you aren’t so bad after all.”

  “Thank you!” said Brown. “What do you mean by that?”

  “We really must be going. And you’re right. It is wrong to steal. And to lie.”

  We almost raced down the stairs, and Brown kept talking to us all the way.

  “My grandfather’s last word was ‘Larocque.’ He knew who had cheated him!”

  “He was ashamed!” I shouted back, and then said to Wyn, “Ashamed when it was too late.”

  “The money doesn’t matter!” Brown was calling from the upper landing, raising his voice as we got farther away. “It’s the principle involved. The morals. I will fight this to my last dying breath. I will do whatever it takes!”

  On the street outside Brown’s house, Wyn and I were shouting for joy. We were doing cartwheels and jumping into the snow, acting like real idiots. Edison Brown had nothing on Theobald T. Larocque’s parents. Nothing! Blank sheets! Nada! Zero! Zilch!

  But several hundred metres down the road we started to calm down. Then everything began to sink in. This knowledge had come too late. Not only would we be unable to find the silver and give it to Theo, his family, and his town, but the old man himself would never even know that his own parents’ names had been blackened without evidence. It was a terrible fact. Theobald Larocque was barely alive, unable to speak. We had almost everything we needed now—Theo would tell us exactly where the silver was, if he only…could. We felt incredibly sad, and totally frustrated. This was way worse than hitting a goal post.

  Wyn reached into her pocket and took something out. I knew what it was right away. It was Theo’s old land claim. She had grabbed it before the police came to go through the haunted house. We sat on a snowbank and just stared at it.