The Secret of the Silver Mines Page 8

  At the mention of the enemy’s name Wyn and I snapped back to attention. We had been drifting off into that wonderful place of Theo’s teenage years: of silver and hockey and adventurers. We glanced at each other, both aware that we were still far from our goal.

  “Does Lyon Brown have anything to do with that box?” I asked desperately.

  The old man fixed me with a glare.

  “Never mind this box!” He threw it into a corner, startling us. “It’s time for you two to leave.”

  “But what if…?” started Wyn.

  “Leave!” he snapped.

  We both hoped he would say something else before we left, perhaps tell us to come back tomorrow, or to forgive his bad mood. But he said nothing. He stared into the flames, lost again somewhere, perhaps in that wonderful time so long ago when he could have been so much more than he was ever allowed to be.

  11

  Caught!

  A whole week went by during which Wyn and I never once got inside the old man’s house. We tried several times, but whether we knocked on his door after school or late at night, we were greeted by silence. Left to wonder about everything we had been told, we considered telling my parents and Frank and Joe. But it just didn’t seem right. Larocque had shared something with us that we knew was not for others to hear, at least not now. Not until it could be solved.

  Eight days after our last meeting with the old man, Wyn and I met on our way out of school. People had started teasing us about spending so much time together, and at our last hockey game everyone had noticed that we didn’t seem to want to check each other. That sort of thing made us even more anxious to get to the bottom of Theobald Larocque’s secret. Someday, we vowed, everyone would know the truth.

  “We have to make something happen tonight,” said Wyn, the cold air blasting at us as she shoved her hip against the double doors and snapped one open. “I can’t wait much longer.”

  “I know what you mean. We have to go up there and we have to get in.”

  “Well, we can’t say we’re studying in the library any more.”

  “No.”

  There was a long pause.

  “I’ve got it!” said Wyn suddenly. “Have you ever noticed that Great-grandpa stays up past midnight? We have to go late at night, very late, after everyone’s gone to bed.”

  I certainly had noticed that the old man was a night owl. The big window in my bedroom looked straight across at his house. Many nights I had gone to sleep gazing out at the shadows moving around in front of the fire on the upper floor. It made me wonder if that was why I dreamed about Larocque and old Cobalt so often.

  “What do you mean? Get out of bed and meet there?”

  “Sure. Wear your clothes to bed, warm ones, and meet me at the house at midnight.”

  I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it, how I’d get out of the house without Mom and Dad hearing and blowing up at me like a couple of volcanoes. But I knew for certain that I was going the second Wyn brought up the idea.

  “Sure,” I said. “Midnight. Larocque’s house.”

  I had a bit of a shaky supper. Mom and Dad seemed to be watching my every move. Twice I asked for the silver to be passed when I meant the sauce. They gave me funny looks. Then I caught the tablecloth between my knee and a table leg when I was getting up and deposited every plate we had used on the floor. Nice move, Cyclone.

  My mother checked on me twice that night. A bit unusual, I thought. I had decided to put my pajamas on over top of my clothes. That way, everything would at least appear normal if they came in to talk to me, though they likely would have wondered why I looked like a baby whale, since I had put a thick sweater on too—there’d be no chance to get a coat.

  I lay very still in bed, listening to them downstairs in the living room. As on so many other nights, they spent quite a bit of time speaking about the Larocque case. I could feel my father’s frustration. He kept saying that no one had told him anything he could use in court. And the old man “wouldn’t even show himself to me long enough to spit on me.” He had been putting in long hours, looking at old Brown mine records in the local museum, interviewing Larocque relatives (including Wyn’s parents), searching for suspicious assets in local bank accounts, and trying to get a search warrant for the old man’s home. But even the local Ontario Provincial Police seemed to be attempting to foil him. Mom was taking it easy on him. It was almost as if she sensed he was losing and that before long we would all be headed home.

  Eventually their conversation petered out, and then they moved towards their bedroom. I could hear their feet stepping along the carpet in the hallway, and then their door closing. There were a few more muffled exchanges, and then silence.

  I waited.

  Half an hour later, just before midnight, I carefully sat up in bed and took off my pajamas. I rolled them up, stuck them under my covers, and bunched everything in the shape of a body. Then I placed a pillow where my head might be. I wanted it to look like someone was sound asleep in my bed…preferably me. Would this really work? I had no idea. But I had seen it in the movies lots of times and I could only hope.

  Since any expedition to the front door would take me past my parents’ bedroom, I had only one choice…out my window. At first it wouldn’t budge, but when I applied pressure it slammed open like a gun going off, and the noise echoed all the way out into the Cobalt cold. I leaped back into bed beside my lifeless body.

  No sound from the parent-cave.

  A few minutes later I rose again and slipped out the window. After pulling it down on my fingers from the outside and then falling a good two metres to the hard ground at the end of a hair-raising high-wire performance on the drainage pipe, I was sprinting up the hill towards the haunted house, freezing cold. I wondered how Wyn had done, and if the old man would even speak to us.

  The light was still on in Larocque’s home. I scaled the wall, dropped down into the front yard, and stood as still as I could. No sign of Wyn Dixon. Just as I was wondering if I should call out for her, I heard her calling for me.

  “Dylan. Dylan!”

  She was over by the cellar entrance again, whispering as loud as she could. She hadn’t seen me. This was going to be priceless. I edged forward and came up behind her. For a minute I just watched her. She was an interesting girl, this hockey-wizard and sleuth. I reached out…and snapped my hand over her mouth, like a villain snagging his prey.

  The scream she let go would have raised every dead miner the tri-towns had ever known had my hand not been strategically placed. Almost instantly, though, it was my turn to scream, big time. Wynona Dixon could bite!

  Somehow I managed a huge silent yelp, the world’s record for the loudest scream without any sound.

  “Dylan, you twerp!” snapped Wyn.

  “Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch!”

  “Serves you right.”

  “Just having a little fun.”

  “Fun? We’ve got a job to do here. Help me open these cellar doors.”

  But I was frozen in place. I thought I’d heard something. “What’s that?” I whispered, looking around. For an instant I thought I saw a dark shape moving along the yard wall. Wyn squinted into the darkness. The lights were out in the town, there was almost no moon, and we could see only a few metres in front of our faces.

  “It’s nothing,” said Wyn. “Don’t worry about it. Let’s just think about how we are going to do this. We have to get back in the way we came the first time. And then we have to convince him to let us come upstairs. Are you ready?”

  “Ready,” I said.

  We both bent over to grab the cellar door handles. But as I did, I felt a hand rest gently on my shoulder. That Wyn—all that talk about this being a serious job. I’d never fall for the old clammy-hand-on-the-shoulder-in-the-darkness trick. Nice try.

  “Uh, Wyn, that’s not very scary. Remove your paw, pl
ease.”

  “I was about to say the same thing to you.” She sounded a little spooked.

  We turned and looked at each other. Both of us had a hand on one of our shoulders! Large hands! We screamed. No muffled cries or silent shrieks this time: just good old-fashioned scared-right-out-of-your-shorts shouts. And when we turned to see the freaks who had grabbed us, we were even more petrified.

  It was the parental units.

  “Hi, Dylan,” said Dad.

  “Miss Dixon,” said Mom.

  “We uh…we uh…is my hair standing straight up?” I asked.

  “Interesting place to visit at a quarter past midnight on a school night. Any thoughts from you two on the subject?” queried my father.

  “We were going to visit old man Larocque,” I said, trying to think of something brilliant to say, “for, uh…no particular reason.”

  “Other than that we’ve been here before and he’s talked to us,” admitted Wyn sheepishly.

  “He’s talked to you!” snapped Dad. “He’s talked to you!!”

  “Yes, sir, he has.”

  “Oh, don’t call your father ‘sir,’ Dylan, you twit,” said Mom, really steamed at me, “just explain…and this had better be a good one.”

  “He didn’t tell us anything valuable,” said Wyn.

  “Right,” I said.

  “Which means he did,” sighed my father.

  “Well, nothing you can use in a court of law.”

  “A court of law? Did he tell you where the silver is?”

  “No,” said Wyn and I simultaneously.

  “Remember what your grandfather said about lying?” asked Mom. My grandfather had been a great friend, a hockey nut extraordinaire, a centre just like me. But he’d died last year in the middle of the season. He had always pushed me to “do the right thing,” as he put it.

  “Yes, yes, I do,” I said. I felt like saying that they hadn’t exactly been big on the truth lately either, or at least that they weren’t being true to themselves. Did they really believe it was right to take Edison Brown’s side? But I let it pass. I figured I was already in enough trouble. If I didn’t want them to put me in my room with only bread and water for about a year, I’d better keep my trap shut.

  “All right, we’ll talk about this later,” said Mom. “Now, I’ll run Wynona home and you get back to bed. Though you’ll have to sleep with the guy who is in there now.”

  “I think he’s got about as much going for him in the brains department as you do tonight,” said Dad, giving me a gentle nudge towards our house.

  As we moved forward we suddenly heard a sharp noise, a rap on the upper-floor window. We turned and looked up. A shadowy, mask-like face peered out for an instant and then was gone.

  “It’s him!” shouted Dad.

  “He’s watching us,” shrieked Mom.

  We all walked quickly away without looking back, down the rocky hill towards our house.

  Just before Wyn got into the car she turned to me and quickly whispered something in my ear, with a look of sadness on her face.

  That night, as I tried to sleep, I couldn’t forget what she’d told me. I was afraid she was right.

  12

  Theo’s Trick

  “He’s angry,” Wyn had whispered.

  If he’s angry then that’s the end of it, I thought. There would be no answers to all our questions, no secrets revealed, no chance to play detective and help solve this thing. It was a depressing thought, and the following two weeks were equally depressing. That made three boring weeks in a row.

  On top of everything else, I was grounded. Not just for visiting Larocque’s house and lying about it (I wasn’t too proud of that last fact), but also, as they say in the movies, “on suspicion.” Suspicion that I was “withholding evidence.” The parental units were pretty sure Larocque had told me things that could be important to the case. They were right, of course. I wasn’t too proud of that either. But I figured I was in the same situation Mom said Dad were in when we first came up here—dealing with “a moral issue.” I could do what was right and tell the truth, but that would break the trust Larocque had put in me, and maybe even give Edison S. S. Brown more firepower for his case, something I really didn’t want to do to the old man. On the other hand, if I just kept my mouth shut I wasn’t being fair to my parents, and despite their many flaws, they had always been fair to me.

  There was only one solution. Wyn and I had to get the story out of Larocque. And we had to hope that, when it was all told, Edison Brown would be the big loser.

  My parents had hardly ever grounded me, and they didn’t seem to have the heart to really keep me down for too long, so after a few days of being confined to the house after school they started letting me out again. But they watched me like two hawks. And I had to admit that that made sense, because I immediately started getting itchy to find a way back into the old man’s house.

  For the first week or so I passed the time playing hockey and going to a couple of movies with Frank and Joe at the New Liskeard theatre. I started spending more time with those guys again. They really didn’t have as much interest in the Larocque case as they’d pretended. They’d just given me a hard time because of what they’d heard their parents say. Most kids could care less about things that happened in the past. But that didn’t make sense to me any more. I had been learning for some time that the past is really only the present, long ago, and also that it affects things that happen now. Larocque wasn’t some character from a history book. He was a real human being, with just as many hopes and dreams and problems as any of us, and maybe more. It didn’t matter whether you were thirteen or in your thirties or one hundred years old, we were all human beings. And someday we’d all be part of history.

  Christmas was approaching, and so was my birthday. I would be fourteen on January 11 and Wyn, believe it or not, would turn the same age just fifteen days later. It was like a reminder that time was running out. I had even heard my dad saying that if he didn’t make much more progress on the case we would be leaving soon—he could handle things just as well from Toronto if no one would speak to him here.

  Lately he had been getting desperate: scouring the area with Mom in the cold, looking for hiding places for the silver, becoming angry with the police over difficulties getting legal entrance into the old man’s house, and actually going door to door to ask questions. He had even interviewed Miss Dixon and me.

  Wyn and I hadn’t talked to each other much for a couple of weeks. Neither my parents nor hers looked too kindly on our influence over each other. But every day in class I would notice her, or she would glance at me, and all those memories of the old man’s amazing story, told so vividly to us that it seemed we had both been back in the silver-rush days with him, would come flooding into our minds. Then, about ten days after my grounding had been lifted, Wyn walked slowly past me at my locker and whispered, “Meeting. Cobalt. At the bench down by the lake.”

  Half an hour later we were sitting on the bench together, huddled in our thick coats and toques (I had permanently given up the RoboCop outfit) because of the biting-cold weather. We talked for a long time, both looking out over the lake, trying to figure out how we might accomplish about a million impossible things: elude our parents, get the old man to talk to us, and then use whatever he told us to help solve his problems. I sometimes wondered why I was doing this, why I cared so much about it. For Wyn it was obviously about family. For me it had something to do with her, and with the way I’d come to feel about Larocque, but mostly I just knew that at the end of this whole thing, like at the end of a rainbow, there would be a hidden treasure, a gleaming stack of silver. It had been secreted away somewhere out there in this rugged landscape for nearly a century. I just couldn’t rest until I found it.

  We were both staring off in the same direction, and for a few moments our conversation ground to a halt.
All we could hear was the wind blowing off the lake. But suddenly there was a sound right beside us. We both turned immediately towards it.

  Someone, dressed in a long black coat, with a dark hood covering an old miner’s cap, had sat down on the bench near me. His face was turned slightly away. Then he slowly moved his head and looked at us.

  It was Theobald T. Larocque.

  We both almost jumped into the lake.

  “Great-grandpa?” asked Wyn, when we had finally calmed down.

  “I saw you here by the lake from my window. You know, this is the first time I’ve come down here in almost fifty years. There’s a nip in the air, isn’t there?”

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “I’m fine. Just don’t blow my cover. I have the feeling you two are not on your parents’ Christmas lists right now, am I right?”

  Wyn and I laughed.

  “That makes three of us at odds with the law.”

  “Great-grandpa, we have just a couple of questions for you. I wonder if—”

  “You don’t need to ask,” he said. “I’ve decided to tell you some more. Actually, I’ve decided to tell you everything. I think it’s for the best. But we’ll see how far I get. There are some parts of this I just can’t face.”

  Then he did something that made our eyes grow wide. He reached under his coat and pulled out the little wooden box. His hands seemed to be shaking, but not from the cold. He looked out over the lake.

  “I guess we’ve all been having a problem with telling the truth lately. When I told you about old man Brown swindling me out of my silver, I changed things a little. You see…the day before I went to see him at the Matabanick Hotel, I went to see a man, a notary as they called them in those days, who had the power to sign a land claim for me. And I got him to sign it…giving me sole right to that silver-bearing land.”