The Box and the Bone (2 page)

Bucky grinned. “Not papers,” he said, “something heavy with lots of pieces. Like gold nuggets, maybe.”

“Yes,” Eddy said. “Like a bag full of gold nuggets.”

“Well, whatever it is it must be pretty valuable or they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of burying it,” Carlos said.

The three PROs stared at each other and then at the box. “Well, I’m betting on gold,” Bucky said. “Looks like we found ourselves some gold, dudes. I’ll bet it’s—” Suddenly he stopped and listened, and right at that moment Carlos heard it too. Somewhere, not far away, someone was yelling Bucky’s name.

“Bucky,” the voice called. “Bucky. You’d better get home. Right this minute.”

Muttering something under his breath, Bucky quickly shoved the box back into the hole and began to kick dirt over it. “It’s Muffy,” he said. “Look out. Here she comes.”

T
HE MYSTERIOUS TIN BOX
was back in the hole and covered with dirt, and the three PROs had picked up their shovels and were pretending to dig in other places when Ducky’s sister, Muffy, appeared on top of the basement wall.

Muffy Brockhurst was nine years old, blond, blue eyed, pug nosed, and very dangerous. Not in the way her brother was, maybe—as in “black your eye and bloody your nose” dangerous. But Carlos knew from experience that, in her own sneaky way, Muffy could be just about as much trouble.

Standing on top of the wall with her hands on her hips she stared down at Carlos and Bucky and Eddy. “You better get home right now, Bucky,” she said. “Gary’s been waiting for you for a long time and Mom is really mad. You’re probably going to get grounded.” Gary Harding was a college student who worked part time as a math tutor. Once or twice a week he came to the Brockhursts’ for a couple of hours to try to keep Bucky from flunking fifth-grade math. From what Carlos had heard, it was a pretty hopeless cause, but Gary kept trying because Bucky’s parents kept paying him.

Still standing on the wall, Muffy tipped her curly blond head from one side to the other and smiled her most dangerous smile. “Another clubhouse, huh?” she said. “Another big, old, super-secret clubhouse.” Her tone of voice was definitely sarcastic. Sarcasm was one thing that Muffy had an above-average talent for.

Watching Muffy, Carlos was trying to keep his shoulders from lifting in a nervous sort of twitch, when Bucky whirled around. Grabbing him and Eddy both by the fronts of their shirts, he jerked them toward each other so hard they almost bumped heads.

“Shh,” Bucky whispered. “Don’t mention the box. And don’t touch it till I get back. Okay? Just leave it right where it is until we decide what to do with it. Until all three of us decide, I mean.” Then he took off running across the Pit to where Muffy was waiting.

For a while after Bucky and Muffy had disappeared, Carlos and Eddy just went on standing there staring after them. Then, at the very same time, they turned and stared down at where the box was buried. Then Carlos sighed, grinned at Eddy, squatted down beside the hole, and began to brush away the dirt. Began—and then stopped. He looked up at Eddy. “Well, I found it,” he said.

Eddy nodded encouragingly. “Yeah, sure. You found it. Go ahead.”

When the box was partly uncovered, Carlos wiggled his fingers into the dirt until they were around the handles and pulled up—hard. A moment later the old tin box was sitting right there on the ground between them. Eddy reached out and jiggled the padlock.

“Can you open it?” Carlos asked. “You got any tools with you?”

Eddy, who really liked fixing things, usually carried a bunch of handyman stuff around with him in case something needed fixing. Carlos had seen Eddy fix everything from bicycles to wristwatches with stuff he carried around in his pockets.

Eddy nodded. “I got some stuff, but I don’t know if I can open this thing.” He reached in his pocket and brought out a small screwdriver and an even smaller pair of pliers.

It wasn’t easy. Eddy put the screwdriver into the padlock’s keyhole and turned and twisted. And when that didn’t work he began to use the pliers too.

“Wish we had the key,” Carlos said.

Eddy shrugged. “Probably wouldn’t work even if we had it. The whole thing is rusted together. I think we’ll just have to pry it apart.” Using the pliers to grab hold of the padlock, he began to twist it from side to side, but for quite a while nothing happened. It wasn’t until he’d tried three or four times, biting his lip and straining until his knuckles turned white, that there was a grating sound, a click—and the padlock fell apart. The mysterious tin box was open.

F
OR A MOMENT AFTER
the padlock fell apart Carlos and Eddy sat frozen, like they’d been shot by some sort of a paralyzing ray gun. The reasonable part of Carlos’s mind was thinking,
I’ll bet it’s just worthless junk, like rocks or something.
But at the very same time another eager-beaver part was babbling,
Gold! Maybe gold nuggets that have been buried there since the gold rush. Or jewels even. Diamonds and emeralds.

Then, at the very same moment, he and Eddy both reached out, took hold of the lid, tugged—and it came open with a creaky, rusty squeak.

Carlos noticed the smell immediately. A musty, metallic odor that drifted up from among a bunch of small bags. Small, leathery bags that seemed to be full of something lumpy—and very heavy.

“Nuggets,” Carlos whispered.

“Yeah,” Eddy breathed.

But it wasn’t nuggets—it was coins. Lots and lots of old, discolored, unfamiliar-looking coins. One by one Carlos and Eddy emptied the old, leathery bags out into the lid of the box and examined each bagful one at a time. Some of the coins were nickels and dimes, although the pictures weren’t the same as on modern coins. There were larger ones, too, like quarters and half-dollars, and some that weren’t familiar looking at all. Nearly all of the coins were covered by a crusty black film. All except the ones in the smallest bag.

There were only three coins in the smallest bag. Large, reddish yellow coins with a woman’s head on one side and an eagle on the other.

Carlos was a little disappointed. He really had been expecting diamonds, or at least gold nuggets. He shrugged and grinned at Eddy. “No nuggets,” he said.

Eddy was turning one of the yellow-brown coins around in his fingers. “Yeah, but gold, maybe. I think these big ones might be made of gold.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. My dad had a coin collection once. He talks about it sometimes. And he has all these books about coin collecting. I think maybe the gold ones looked sort of like this. I’ll take one home with me and see if it’s like the ones in the books.”

“But we told Bucky we wouldn’t take anything. What if …”

Eddy nodded and put the coin back into the bag. “Yeah. You’re right.” He looked around nervously. “And we better get out of here. Somebody else might come along any minute and see this stuff.”

Carlos agreed. He’d been feeling a little nervous, too, ever since they’d opened the box. And he went on feeling that way until everything was back the way they’d found it. All the coins back in their bags, the bags back in the box, the broken padlock more or less stuck back together, and the box reburied under a nice smooth layer of dirt.

They were on their way across the cul-de-sac to Prince Field when Carlos asked Eddy if he thought they should tell Bucky about opening the box. Eddy said no right away.

“Yeah,” Carlos agreed, “I think so too. You know old Brockhurst. If we told him, he’d be sure to say we took some stuff. You know, to keep for ourselves.”

Eddy nodded. “Yes. I think we’d better just pretend we don’t know anything. And we’ll have to pretend we’re really surprised when the padlock breaks as soon as I start trying to open it.” He grinned at Carlos. “We’ll both be
really surprised
!”

They looked at each other and smiled and then they both did a
big surprise
number.

“Holy cow!” Carlos said. “Would you look at that! It broke.”

Eddy made his eyes wide and buggy. “What do you know. Coins! Look at all those crazy old coins!” Then they laughed again, punched each other in the shoulder, and ran the rest of the way back to Prince Field.

I
T WAS AN HOUR
or so later, while Eddy and Carlos were still practicing batting and pitching at Prince Field, that Dragoland had another visitor. The new visitor had four feet, a sleek, narrow muzzle, and a beautiful plumed tail. It was Nijinsky, the Grant family’s collie dog, and he was carrying an especially large and juicy bone.

And not long after Nijinsky disappeared into the basement pit, still another visitor came down the path. A four-year-old visitor with a curly black ponytail, a polka-dot playsuit on backward, and her shoes on the wrong feet. It was Athena Pappas and she was on her way to play house in the dry fishpond at Dragoland.

Athena was pulling a red wagon and singing in Greek—a song her father always sang while he was working on his sculptures.
“Kato sto yialo,”
Athena sang.
“Kato sto periyiali.”

The wagon was full of all the things a person would need to play house in a fishpond, like a whisk broom and a piece of chalk, a doll family, and lots of doll-sized dishes and furniture.

Athena parked her wagon beside the edge of the fishpond, took out her doll family, and lined them up so they could watch. She went on singing as she carefully whisked away a lot of dead leaves and outlined all the different rooms with chalk on the nice clean cement.
“Kato sto yialo. Kato sto periyiali,”
she sang over and over again as she worked.

When all the rooms were carefully drawn in chalk she was ready to unload the furniture. It was going to be a very beautiful house with everything in the right place.

She arranged all the beds in the bedrooms first. There were three beds. One real Barbie doll bed made of beautiful pink plastic and two other homemade shoe-box ones. In the bathroom she put an oval-shaped asparagus bowl. Athena hated asparagus but she liked the bowl a lot. It was just the right size and shape for a bathtub. And because she’d gotten a whole kitchen set for her last birthday, the kitchen was best of all, with a sink and stove and refrigerator all made of pink plastic.

After all the furniture was in place and her collection of tiny plastic vegetables and fruit was stored away inside the refrigerator, the house was ready for the doll family to move in. Except for one thing. She’d almost forgotten about her new tea set.

Athena took a last little box out of the wagon, the one that held the new tea set, and looked around the fishpond house. That was when she realized she had a problem. The tea set needed to be on a table and she’d forgotten to bring one. She had remembered to bring a nice white linen napkin for a tablecloth—but nothing at all that would make a good table. For a moment she thought about going all the way back home to find something she could use for a table—but then she remembered something important.

What she remembered was bricks. She was sure she remembered seeing some loose bricks down in the Dragoland Pit. And a nice big brick would do just fine for a table for her fishpond dollhouse.

Athena had climbed partway down to the floor of the Pit before she began to hear a strange noise. A scratching, scraping noise. It sounded like someone was there already, digging a hole. Boys, probably. The people who dug in the Pit were usually boys. Athena frowned. Boys, particularly some of the ones who lived at Castle Court, were creeps. But when she got to the bottom of the stairs and looked around, her frown turned into a happy laugh. It was only Jinsky.

“Jinsky,” she squealed. Athena loved animals—all animals. And Jinsky was one of her favorites. Jinsky liked her too. Even though he was busy digging, he stopped long enough to look back over his shoulder and wag his beautiful tail. Then, as Athena ran toward him across the floor of the Pit, he went back to the serious business of burying a bone.

Athena was fascinated. She’d never seen Jinsky bury a bone before. He was digging with both front feet and making the dirt fly out between his hind legs. Being careful to step over the great big bone where it was waiting beside the hole, she moved carefully around the shower of dirt and squatted down to watch. She hadn’t been watching for long when Jinsky’s toenails began to make a different sound. Like fingernails on a blackboard, only worse. And that was when Athena found the perfect table for her doll family’s house.

Jinsky didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he seemed quite pleased when Athena pulled the dirty old box out of the hole. With the box gone there was a whole lot more room to bury his bone.

Athena climbed back out of the Pit—carefully because the new table was pretty heavy. She would have opened it up and dumped out whatever was making it so hard to carry, but she couldn’t because it was shut with a padlock. Athena knew about padlocks. Her brother, Ari, had one on his bicycle chain.

So she trudged slowly and carefully out of the Pit and all the way back to the fishpond. When she got there the heaviness didn’t matter anymore, and neither did the rusty, dirty ugliness. As soon as she’d brushed off some of the dirt and covered the old box with the clean white napkin, it looked just fine. Then she arranged the tea set carefully on top of the new table and the doll family sat down to have a nice tea party.

A
LL THAT MORNING WHILE
Carlos and Eddy practiced batting and then went swimming in the Garcias’ pool, Carlos kept thinking about the coins in the tin box. He talked about it, too, to Eddy, while they were lying in the sun beside the pool waiting for Bucky to get through being tutored.

“They must be really valuable coins,” Eddy said, “or, like you said, why would somebody go to the trouble to bury them?” Suddenly he sat up and began to put on his shoes. “I’m going to go home and look for those books. You know, the ones my dad has about coin collecting. Maybe we can find out how valuable they are.”

Eddy took off running and Carlos went on lying in the sun. He must have dozed off for a while because the next thing he knew, Eddy was back, shaking him and saying, “Hey, Carlos. Wake up. Wait till you hear what I found out.”