Lost Cipher (15 page)

CHAPTER 30

When the dinner bell rang at six o'clock sharp, Lucas perched on his bunk to wait, while George took up his position on the front porch. Lucas heard the doors of the other cabins slamming and the chattering of campers crossing the lawn and heading for the dining hall. Part of him wished he could join them. He hadn't eaten anything since Creech's breakfast at the crack of dawn, so he tried not to think of the food he'd be missing. He was happy George had made it to lunch at least. He doubted the younger boy would have skipped another meal to head back to Moccasin Hollow, and dinnertime was their only chance to escape.

A minute after the bell rang, George slipped back into the cabin.

“Okay, they're coming,” he said, before disappearing back out onto the porch.

Lucas scooted under his bunk, cramming himself tightly against the wall while George pulled the covers down to hide him better. A few seconds later, he heard Maggie's voice from out in the lawn.

“Dinnertime, George. You and Lucas, c'mon.”

“Lucas is still in the shower, but he'll be out any second. We'll be up there as soon as he's dressed.”

Lucas was hoping the delay would give them at least a half-hour head start back to Creech's.

“Tell you what, George.” It was Aaron's voice. “Why don't you go on up, and I'll wait on Lucas. I know you're starving.”

George paused long enough to make Lucas think the offer of a hot meal would be enough to make the younger boy abandon their plan. Finally, George spoke up, “I'll hurry him up. I
never
miss dinner. Well, unless I'm stuck in a cave, I guess.”

There was silence for a moment, and Lucas wondered if the counselors were afraid to leave them alone after their last escape.

Finally, Maggie said, “Okay, George, we'll make sure they save something for you. Just don't be too late. The last dinner is kind of a big deal.”

“Oh, don't worry!” George said cheerfully. It was another minute before he came through the door. “Okay, they're gone. Thanks for making me the big liar again.”

Lucas immediately threw the blanket off and popped up from the bunk. “They goin' up the hill?”

“Yeah, but something's got them all charged up,” said George. “They were talking up a storm the whole way.”

“Probably still mad at us for runnin' off,” said Lucas.

“Naw, I don't think it's that. More like really happy.”

“Well, good for them if they are, but we gotta go.”

“Are we really doing this?” asked George, giving Lucas one last chance to come to his senses.

“We have to,” said Lucas, lacing up his boots. “Let's go.”

They went out the back and jogged up the entrance road to the office. Across from the parking area was a three-sided shed where Aaron stored the four-wheeler. The trailer was already attached, but George checked to make sure it was secure while Lucas unloaded a half-dozen cans of paint to make room for a rider. He hopped into the seat and was relieved to see the key in the ignition. The camp's four-wheeler was a little different than the ones he'd ridden before, but looking over the various switches on the handlebars, he convinced himself he could figure out how to drive it.

“Jump on,” he said to George.

George clambered into the little trailer and sat facing forward, his hands immediately clutching the rails in a white-knuckled death grip, even though the engine wasn't running yet.

Lucas turned the key to the start position and pushed a button labeled “Start.” The engine began to turn over but didn't catch. He tried the button again, but the engine only sputtered.

“Gas?” guessed George.

Lucas unscrewed the gas cap on the tank between his knees. He rocked the four-wheeler so that he could see the fuel sloshing around. The tank was at least half-full.

“Nope. It's something else,” he said. He knew they were losing valuable time. Aaron wouldn't wait until dinner was over to come looking for them.

He flicked another button, but it only turned the lights on and off.

George got out of the trailer. “How 'bout this one?” he said confidently. He jammed his thumb down on another button in the center of the handlebars.

The four-wheeler's horn blasted across the valley.

“Jeez, George!” whispered Lucas frantically. “It's
only
got a picture of a horn on it!”

They jumped behind one wall of the shed and peered up the hill, waiting to see if the noise had alerted any of the counselors. After a full minute, they came out of hiding.

“It's gotta be something simple,” said Lucas. He climbed back into the driver's seat and noticed another switch above the start button. He flicked the switch up and then tried the button again.

The engine turned over once and began idling steadily.

“It's the kill switch, for shutting off the engine,” he explained to George. “We gotta flip it back on to start it up. You ready?”

George climbed back onto the trailer and grabbed the rails.

The engine seemed loud in the quiet valley, but Lucas also knew how noisy the dining hall was at dinnertime. Just to be sure though, he puttered down the entrance road at a crawl, making sure not to rev the engine until they were well out of earshot. No one would hear them leave.

At the end of the camp's long entrance road, Lucas turned onto the highway that headed over the crest of the Blue Ridge and gave the four-wheeler some gas. The little machine kept moving, but its engine revved so high that he thought it might explode. With his left foot, Lucas lifted up the shifter to find a higher gear. The front wheels jumped off the ground, and the four-wheeler jerked forward so hard that George lost his grip and somersaulted backward off the little trailer. He landed on his feet on the pavement but tumbled backward onto his rear end.

“Jeez, I thought you said you could drive one of these things!” he yelled. He scrambled to his feet and ran to the shoulder where Lucas had pulled off. He examined the back of one arm and sucked a breath in through his teeth. “Jeez, that hurt!” He had a raw and bloody scrape the size of a half-dollar on his elbow.

“Sorry, George, this one is a little different.”

Just then a big RV lumbered up the road past them. Lucas hadn't counted on dealing with other vehicles. He had to get to Creech's quick, but the four-wheeler wouldn't keep up with real traffic, especially hauling George and the trailer. He'd have to pull to the shoulder any time a car came up behind them.

George dabbed at his bloody elbow with his T-shirt and brushed some gravel off his backside.

“You want to go back?” asked Lucas. “You could walk it from here.”

George's eyes were watering a little, and Lucas could see him think about it for a second. But the younger boy clenched his jaw and shook his head.

“Good,” said Lucas. “Sit facing backward this time. That way you can tell me if there's a car coming.”

“Sure,” George grumbled, “and that way I can
face
-plant instead of
butt
-plant.”

Once George was aboard, Lucas pulled the four-wheeler back onto the road and immediately found second gear. Every time he switched gears, the machine lurched violently, and George let out a little shriek, but Lucas quickly got the hang of driving it.

He only had to pull off twice for cars before they made it to the crest and started down the other side. At the top, Lucas yelled to George to hang on and finally put the four-wheeler into high gear. Before long, they were going almost as fast as a car could on the twisting road, but Lucas was still anxious to get off the highway and onto the back roads where the little machine belonged. He guessed the first turn to Creech's was only a few miles from the ridge. Lucas hollered at George over his shoulder.

“Do you remember where we turn?” he asked.

“Pull over!” George yelled back.

“Not yet, George,” Lucas hollered back. “I think it's still up a ways.”

“No! Get off the road! Now!”

A roaring from behind him made Lucas glance over his shoulder.

An enormous logging truck was barreling down the mountain and gaining on them fast.

Lucas started to wheel the four-wheeler to the side of the road, but the shoulder had disappeared. On his side, a face of rock crowded the yellow line, and across the other lane the hillside fell off steeply behind a guardrail. There was nowhere to go but forward. Lucas tried to slow to take a curve, but a blast from the massive truck's air horn echoed off the rocks next to him. He gave the four-wheeler more gas.

“Faster!” screamed George.

“I can't,” Lucas shot back. “I'll lose it!”

The truck bore down on them. When the horn wailed again, the noise was so close that Lucas almost lost his grip on the handlebars.

“He's nuts!” yelled George.

The truck's brakes hissed just behind them. Lucas scanned the shoulders frantically, looking for even the smallest space to bail off the road.

Suddenly, a yellow sign appeared in the trees and shot by.

Runaway Truck Ramp 1,000 Feet
.

Lucas had seen the ramps back home—a giant stair step of sand built to stop a truck with overheated brakes. He saw the opening on the shoulder at the end of a long straightaway and squeezed the throttle, pulling ahead of the eighteen-wheeler for just a second.

But the trucker was fed up. Despite the double yellow line down the center of the road, he eased the big rig out into the center of the road.

“Slow down, Lucas!” hollered George. “He's going around!”

The truck started past them, so close that Lucas smelled the freshly logged timber piled on its trailer. He let off the gas a little, and the truck began to slip by faster.

But before it could pass them, a motorcycle roared around the curve in the oncoming lane. The massive truck's brakes hissed and the rig jerked back into Lucas's lane, forcing him off the road just as they reached the little opening for the ramp.

“Hold on, George!” Lucas screamed over the sound of screeching brakes and a final warning blast of the truck's horn. But George was screaming too loud to hear him, as the truck's big tires nearly grazed the edge of his tiny trailer.

Lucas jerked the wheel to the right, and the four-wheeler plunged off the road and onto the ramp, out of control.

CHAPTER 31

At first they seemed to glide across the top of the gravelly sand. But when Lucas hit the brakes, the front wheels of the four-wheeler sunk in, and they jolted to a brutal stop. Lucas flew over the handlebars. George's trailer jackknifed upward, shooting him high into the air, still screaming. Ten feet beyond the four-wheeler, they tumbled to a stop in the ramp's deep bed sand.

For a few seconds, they lay there, staring up at the clouds and listening to the growling gears of the truck winding down the mountain. Lucas started to ask if George was all right when a radio on their little machine crackled to life.

“Lucas…George…out there?” It was Maggie's voice, masked by static and breaking up.

Lucas sat up. He hadn't noticed the radio before, but now he saw it strapped below the dashboard, its red light glowing when Maggie spoke.

“I don't know…you boys are up to…where you are.”

The radio clicked off for a second, then Aaron's voice came through the static, angrier.

“…wheeler better be…one piece!”

George scrambled to his feet, but Lucas stopped him.

“Just ignore it, George. We answer, and we're going to have to tell 'em where we are. They'll pick us up before we get to Moccasin Hollow.”

“If we even
get
to Moccasin Hollow,” George groaned. He brushed some sand out of his hair and checked himself for more scrapes. “We almost got killed!”

“A few more minutes, and we'll be on back roads, George. No more trucks.”

Before he hopped back into the driver seat, Lucas reached down and clicked off the radio. It took them a few minutes to dislodge the four-wheeler from the deep sand, but aside from some fresh scratches on the front fenders, it was still in good shape.

They took a right turn onto the dirt road at the crossroads where Lucas had seen the old woman selling honey that morning. There was no sign of her now, just her clapboard stand and the logs with the empty, sagging board between them. Lucas stopped the four-wheeler in the little gravel lot and let the engine idle. He read the historical marker across the road.

St. Mary's Chapel, established on this site in 1798. Destroyed by fire 1864.

Lucas recalled the other letters he'd been able to decipher and pointed to the sign.

“I think Beale used the church in his directions,” he told George.

“How do you know?”

“M-A-R-Y was in the code too. Like the girl's name—Mary. I bet it said
St. Mary's
.”

“Kind of a stretch if you ask me,” said George skeptically.

Lucas pointed out the narrow concrete bridge that had taken them onto the road to Creech's farm, and ten minutes after crossing the creek, they rounded a curve and spied the wide spot in the road where the ambulance and Maggie's truck had been parked. Creech's mailbox sat next to a tree tacked with a
NO TRESPASSING
sign. Where the sign had read,
VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED
, Creech had scratched out
PROSECUTED
and painted SHOT! in bold red letters.

Through a jungle of blackberries and wild roses at the edge of the road, Lucas could just make out the trail to Creech's house. If he hadn't used it that morning, he would never have seen it.

He glanced at the sun. It was only a couple hours from the top of the ridge across the valley from Moccasin Hollow. Two hours till dark.

“We'll drive up the trail,” he told George. “It'll save time.”

“Aren't we trespassing? Again?”

“You remember what Maggie said. It's mostly an act.”

“Yeah,
mostly
,” said George doubtfully. “Maybe he's
mostly
a bad shot too.” Still, he stayed on the trailer, and Lucas started up the rough path. They took it slow up Creech's narrow trail, and after a few minutes, they broke out of the woods, bringing the house into view across the broad meadow. Lucas scanned the farm for any sign of Creech. He half expected to see the old man burst out onto his front porch, gun in hand, but he was nowhere in sight.

Lucas looked at the giant tree rising from behind the house. No other tree in sight was even half as old. It had to be the oak from the code.

He tried to imagine the scene as Beale had seen it. No farm, no house, only the lonely oak watching over the mouth of a wild hollow at the foot of the Blue Ridge. A solitary guard watching over Beale's treasure.

They crossed the final hundred yards to the house and parked the ATV by the front steps. Creech was nowhere to be seen, so they stepped up onto the porch. The front door was open, letting them see through the screen into the parlor. They listened for a few seconds but heard no sound from inside the house. Lucas rapped on the screen door and called out the old man's name. Then he did it again louder, but still there was no response.

“I guess we try around back,” he said.

There was no sign of him there either. Behind the house, the only movement came from the leaves of the orchard trees whispering in the breeze pouring down from the mountains above the hollow. The two boys stopped beneath the canopy of the huge oak and scanned the rest of the little farm. For all they knew, the old man was way up in the hollow, miles away.

“Maybe he went back up there to get his shotgun,” George ventured, pointing up into the mountains.

“If he did, he's gotta be back before dark,” Lucas replied. Still, he knew if Creech didn't return soon, they'd never have time to get back to camp before nightfall—or before Maggie or Aaron tracked them down first.

And just because Lucas was certain this was the oak from the cipher, the treasure could be anywhere near the big tree. Only the rest of Annie Morris's book would tell him exactly where, but that was locked up tight in Creech's desk. And if it wasn't still in the ground, if Creech somehow had it, there was still a chance the old man would help him. Either way, he needed Creech to show up soon.

Just then, a crow cawed from the big rock looming behind the outhouse.

“Or maybe he's in there,” George said, pointing at the little shed under the rock.

“He's got a real bathroom, remember?” said Lucas. “Why would he be in there?”

It was the first time Lucas had paid much attention to the outhouse. From where they stood, he could see a tiny window in the shape of a moon carved in its door. Like the main house, the little shack was well cared for, with fresh paint and a solid-looking roof.

Why care for an old outhouse if you don't even need it anymore?

It was built right up against the big rock too, where it would have been next to impossible to dig the hole.
And uphill from the house?

“That outhouse don't even make sense, George.”

“If you say so, Lucas,” replied George. “I mean, no offense, but you've probably got a little more outhouse experience than me.”

“Yeah, I do,” replied Lucas, still staring at the little outbuilding, “and I ain't ever seen one uphill of a house and built right next to a big ol' rock.”

“So what are you saying?”

Lucas grinned at George. “I'm saying maybe that ain't no outhouse. But maybe it's a hole.”

Before George could reply, Lucas was sprinting uphill toward the little shack.