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Fool’s Gold

Zilpha Keatley Snyder

Chapter 1

THE ONLY LIGHT came from a small flickering flame. There was no sound except for the faint gurgle of something slimy that oozed down the walls and trickled underfoot. He was all alone. The others had been with him only a moment before, but now they had disappeared. He turned back, shouting their names, but there was no answer. He shouted again and the sound returned to him in a jabbering chorus. Something, perhaps his own gasping breath, disturbed the tiny flame and it sank lower, wavered, and as he tried desperately to shield it with his cupped hands, died completely away. The heavy, smothering darkness was suddenly shaken by a terrible sound. Someone was screaming.

For a moment his mother’s voice blended with the blind panic of the dream, but then his eyes opened and relief surged through him. It was only a nightmare—and not a new one. Only a slightly different version of a dream he’d been having over and over again since early spring. Some of them hadn’t been too bad, but this one had been a real killer. Sitting up, he struggled to focus his sleep-blurred eyes and to force his lips into something like a smile.

His mother was standing in the door in her nightgown, her eyes wide and startled in her sleep-rumpled face. “What is it, Rudy? Did you have another nightmare?”

“Yeah.” He took a deep breath, shook his head to clear it, and managed a slightly more typical grin. “Yeah. A real killer this time. X-rated.” His grin widened. “Or at least ‘parental discretion advised.’” Doing a pathetic little-kid face, he whined, “How come you let me watch that kind of stuff, Mom?”

Sitting down on the edge of his bed, Natasha put her hand on his arm. “What were you dreaming about?”

Rudy rolled his eyes thoughtfully and then shook his head and shrugged, hoping to give the impression that he couldn’t remember, without actually having to lie about it. He didn’t want to get into what the dreams were like, because that would be certain to bring up—

There it was—the one question he didn’t dare get into. Not with anyone—and particularly not with his mother. Trying desperately to think of a good way to avoid answering, he stared at his mother’s face. Usually Natasha was pretty good-looking for her age, which was around thirty-three, but at the moment her face was puffy with sleep and bare of makeup and her hair looked as if it had been combed with an eggbeater.

“Arrghh!” he said, cringing back against the headboard. “The invasion of the living dead.”

Her reaction was typical—a glare that gradually turned into a giggle. If you could get Natasha to laugh she usually forgot about doing the stern-parent bit. She swatted at him, got up off his bed, and went out. At the door she stopped and said, “Well, I might as well stay up. It’s past seven and I promised Frank I’d be at the store at eight thirty for the back-room inventory. Let the girls sleep a little longer. And don’t forget to remind them about this afternoon. Okay?”

Rudy said okay and then collapsed under the blankets—to give himself time to shake off the last dark shadows of the dream. It took a few minutes and some careful thought control. The thought control went like this: Don’t even think about the nightmares—or what’s causing them. Think about something really great instead—something like my impersonation of Michael Jackson at the Graduates Talent Assembly last Thursday—and how everyone had cracked up—even solemn old Stephanie. Yeah, that helped. Thinking about old deadpan Stephanie’s giggle wiped out all kinds of gruesome memories—even memories of… Don’t think about it.

It took a while, but it worked. By the time he climbed out of bed he was himself again even though the whole thing—the nightmares and what he knew was causing them—was sneaking in and out of his conscious mind as he began his Saturday morning breakfast routine. Like a robot operating on only one cylinder he got out the cereal and milk, cleaned up the mess where Ophelia (the poodle) had barfed on the floor, and even came up with a new threat to make his sisters stop fighting.

“Death!” he yelled suddenly when the usual screams and thuds and high-pitched yelps finally began to get through to him. The yelps were from Ophelia, who always got hysterical when Moira and Margot started fighting—like about a dozen times a day. “Death! Terminal death, if you two don’t chill out and eat your breakfast.”

To his surprise it worked. His sisters, half sisters, that is, dropped their weapons—a dust mop and a fly-swatter—and sat down at the table. Moira, the skinny brown-haired one, was eight and the oldest by one year, but they were a fairly even match. Margot, blonder and chunkier, was fiercer and could punch harder, but Moira was quicker on her feet and a lot sneakier.

They both looked at Rudy with Barbie-doll eyes while he stared back, giving them his Nazi-officer bit, chin jutted out and eyes narrowed to cruel slits.

For a moment a stranger might have thought that he’d really scared them, but he knew better. They were too used to him. They’d had too much experience with the Rudolph Drummond Baby-sitting Method, which had always depended on all kinds of dramatic impersonations and lots of creative threats.

Moira’s round blue eyes finally blinked. “What does terminal mean?” she asked.

“Shhh!” he whispered, then, doing his German accent, “Don’t zay anyzing. Zee enemy iss listening.”

That gave them something to think about. They were still glancing nervously over their shoulders when Rudy tuned them out again and went back to cleaning up the breakfast mess, and to his own thoughts and problems. The problems were definitely taking over and he was feeling more and more miserable as he scrubbed out the sink and swept up the cereal that had been spilled during the fight. It wasn’t until he had finished and was putting away the broom that he began to cheer up.

The mirror helped. Natasha had mounted a mirror on the broom cupboard door and it was when he caught sight of his reflection that he finally began to snap out of it. He had to admit that one thing he did have going for him was his looks. Of course, he wasn’t exactly muscle-bound, but his face was not all that bad, that was for sure—a little bit narrow and bony maybe, but with great eyebrows and eyes and… He was turning his head to study his best camera angle when somebody giggled.

Rudy turned to see the M and M’s (Rudy often referred to Margot and Moira as the M and M’s) watching from the hall doorway. He slammed the closet door and went after them doing a Frankenstein number—hunched shoulders and dragging foot—but as soon as they disappeared down the hall, shrieking and giggling, he dropped the chase and headed for the front porch to see if anything had changed overnight.

Nothing had. The street was still narrow and twisting. Next door, at the big old Woodbury house, the tin roof was still rusting away, and nothing grand and exciting had sprung up overnight on any of the vacant lots. Well, maybe tomorrow. Or the day after that. Or five years from now. Or fifty.

He sniffed the air. Nothing new and different there either. Just a typical June morning in the awesomely quaint and historic California gold-rush town of Pyramid Hill in the beautiful Sierra foothills. At the present time, 8:32 A.M. plus 17 seconds, according to his state-of-the-art Timex watch—his graduation present—the air was still fresh and fairly cool. However, a bright sun was clearing the mountain ridges to the east, and from almost fourteen long years of experience he knew that hot and dusty were just around the corner.

He had just started to go back in the front door when, warned by the sound of screaming voices and running feet, he jumped back barely in time to avoid becoming a traffic victim. A hit-and-run by two girls and a poodle.

Still plastered back against the veranda wall, he yelled, “Margot! Moira! Come back here. I forgot to tell you something.”

They heard him all right, but they went on running, down the porch steps and out onto the street, with Ophelia right behind them barking her crazy head off.

Actors need to be able to project their voices, and great projection was another of Rudy’s natural acting talents. Taking a deep breath and squinching his eyes shut with the effort, he let loose a mega-force bellow. “Stop!”

When he opened his eyes the M and M’s were frozen in mid-step, with Moira still holding up one fist and Margot still clinging to the back of Moira’s T-shirt. The screaming had stopped and so had the yapping. Rudy strode across the porch. On the top step he folded his arms and stared down sternly at his sisters.

“All right, you hoodlums,” he said, a judge looking down from the bench at guilty prisoners. “The verdict is in. Six months for disturbing the peace! And if you tear that shirt, Margot, you’re going to get five years at hard labor.”

Margot only tightened her hold. “But she took all the money, and half of it’s mine. Mom said so.”

Moira’s smile was full of phony sisterly understanding. “I know it’s half yours. I was just going to keep it till lunchtime. So you wouldn’t lose it.”

Rudy was beginning to pry Margot off the T-shirt when, from next door, there was the sudden sound of a screen door slamming and scuffling footsteps.

“Rudy. Rudy Drummond. What’s going on, boy? Somebody committing mayhem on your premises?”

Murphy Woodbury was leaning over the railing in his usual ratty old jeans and undershirt, his gray hair standing up in quivering corkscrews. Under his sagging eyelids his eyes were, as always, shiny with curiosity. “What was all that screaming and yelling I just heard?” he asked.

Rudy sighed and, grabbing each of his sisters by a wrist, he turned back, pulling them after him, with Margot still attached to the back of Moira’s shirt.

Murph, who was probably around sixty years old, had lived most of his life in the big old rambling house next door to Rudy. The Woodburys went back to the original gold-rush pioneers and Murph’s father and grandfather had lived there before him. According to Natasha, Murph had gone away to live in a city for a while when he was a young man and he’d had a wife with him when he came back. But the wife hated living in Pyramid and there had been a divorce, and Murph went on living alone in the old Woodbury house. Murph made his living by renting some property he owned in town—which was a good thing, since he never seemed to make any money at either of his other two jobs. Murph’s jobs, to hear him tell it, were “author” and “student of humanity.” Which meant that he spent a few minutes now and then banging away on his ancient typewriter, and the rest of his time doing what he called studying humanity. There were other people in town, a lot of them in fact, who called it snooping into other people’s business. But Rudy had never minded Murph’s curiosity—not until lately, anyway.

He and Murph had always spent lots of time together. For one thing Murph was always around, since he didn’t go to work every day like most people, and for another he knew a lot about nearly everything, and there wasn’t anything he didn’t know about Pyramid Hill and everyone who lived there. And he was a great storyteller. Rudy couldn’t even begin to count the hours he’d spent in Murph’s backyard or kitchen with Murph helping on one of Rudy’s research projects. Or else eating—Murph was a great cook—or just talking. In those days visiting Murph had been one of Rudy’s favorite pastimes. But sometimes, particularly recently, his snooping got on Rudy’s nerves.

Murph chuckled. “No. That can’t be true. Two such lovely little ladies actually engaging in physical combat? You must have been mistaken.”

Murph was full of it. No one who lived within a block of the M and M’s could help but know how much they “engaged in physical combat.” But the “lovely ladies” bit did seem to work on Margot at least, who smiled sheepishly, let go of Moira’s T-shirt, and put her hands behind her back.

Not to be outdone, Moira began giving Murph her movie-star special smile. “You’re right, Mr. Woodbury. We weren’t fighting. At least I wasn’t. I was just trying to keep Margot from losing her lunch money.” She edged closer to the porch railing and whispered behind her hand. “She loses tons of money all the time.”

“Is that right?” Murph whispered back. “Tell me about it. How much money would you say your sister has lost this last month?”

“I see.” Murph nodded solemnly. “That’s a lot all right. Fancy a little girl like her losing that much money.” He winked at Rudy, which was probably supposed to mean that Moira’s wild stories were harmless and amusing, but Murph didn’t have to live with them every day. Rudy didn’t wink back. Lately the M and M’s had been getting on his nerves even more than Murph was.

“Here,” Rudy said, prying the money out of Moira’s fist and giving half of it to Margot. “Now, don’t lose it. And you guys are supposed to come back here right after lunch. You’re only going to stay at Eleanora’s in the mornings from now on. That’s what I was supposed to tell you. Mom said she told you, but you’d probably forget if I didn’t remind you.”

“I did too,” Margot said. “I remembered it better than she did. I even remembered that Mom said you were going to baby-sit us every afternoon, and read to us and play games too.”

“Right.” Rudy couldn’t keep a certain amount of bitterness out of his voice. “Every afternoon I’m good old big-brother Rudy, the baby-sitter. But every morning at”—he glanced at his watch—“nine o’clock I turn into a bloodsucking vampire. So get out—before I start getting hungry.” He jumped at them, doing a fangs and claws bit, but they ignored him and started off down the street still glaring at each other. It wouldn’t be long, however, before they’d forget it and be best friends again—until the next declaration of war.

“Sure. And tomorrow too. Like always.” Natasha worked in Fraser’s Antique Store, which, because of the tourist trade in Pyramid Hill, was always open on weekends. It was a lousy job for a mother. In fact, it was a lousy job in a lot of ways and she hated it, but as she was always saying, with three kids to raise all by herself, what was she going to do?

“Well, it’s a lousy job,” Murph said, like an echo of Rudy’s thoughts. He sighed and shook his head. Murph had always been like a father to Natasha, going out of his way to help her whenever he could. Especially when she’d really needed help, like when she came back to Pyramid Hill pregnant with Rudy, and later when she was married to Art Mumford. Not to mention right after he went off and left her alone with three kids to take care of.

Murph sighed again and then suddenly switched to his usual straggly old grin. “Well now,” he said. “Speaking of getting hungry, I haven’t had breakfast yet. How about joining me in an old-fashioned chuck wagon breakfast?” Of course, Rudy had just eaten, but only cold cereal, and Murph was practically famous for his huge cowboy breakfasts just loaded with delicious calories and cholesterol.

Tipping up an imaginary Stetson and squinting his eyes, Rudy became Windy Dayes, one of his most famous impersonations. Windy was a favorite local character, a weather-beaten old cowboy who spent his time hanging around downtown, bending people’s ears with long-winded cowboy-type stories. Lots of people tried to imitate Windy, but no one could do it as well as Rudy. So now he hitched up his pants, drawled, “Waal now, pardner, ah don’t mahnd if I dew,” and bowlegged it toward Murph’s back door.

Chapter 2

IN THE CLUTTERED old kitchen Rudy sat down at the round oak table while Murph puttered around, putting strips of bacon in the frying pan and cracking some eggs. He was pouring pancake batter on the grill when he started in on the baby-sitting thing.

“So you’re going to be spending a lot of time babysitting your sisters this summer? Natasha told me about it. Said you volunteered.”

“That’s going to help Natasha a lot. Save her quite a bit of money too. Right noble offer on your part.”

Rudy shrugged again and said nothing. He wasn’t going to be drawn into explaining why he’d volunteered his services. It was one question that nosy old Murphy Woodbury would just have to guess about.

After a few moments of silence Murph went on about the M and M’s. “So, this time the battling ballerinas were fighting about money,” he said. “It’s always something, isn’t it?”

“Some ballerinas,” Rudy said. As far as he could see neither of his sisters had much natural talent, but they’d been taking ballet almost since they started walking and they were always tearing around the yard in ratty tutus and doing clutzy jetés and arabesques up and down the veranda. But Natasha seemed to think they were really talented.

The thing was that Natasha—whose real first name had been Linda before she changed it—had been a ballet dancer before she started having kids and had to give it up. But she kept her hand in by practicing almost every day, not to mention naming her kids after famous dancers. She also taught some, but since there wasn’t too much interest in ballet in Pyramid Hill, she mostly just taught her own kids. Including Rudy at one time, until he found out how some people in Pyramid felt about boys taking ballet.

“I don’t see why Natasha doesn’t just forget about the whole ballet thing,” Rudy said. “It’s just a waste of everybody’s time.”

“Well now, I wouldn’t say that. Not at all. I think your mother has been very brave to hang on to her dream that way even though she’s had such a hard time and—”

Rudy laughed. “Okay, okay, I take it back.” He knew better than to criticize Natasha even a little when Murph was around. “But I still think trying to make ballerinas out of the M and M’s is a waste of time.”

“Not to mention something else to fight about,” Rudy said, with more bitterness than usual. “It’s the truth. Every time they practice it turns into a big blowup. You know—about who’s wearing whose leotards, or hogging too much room at the barre, or who just pirouetted into somebody else’s space.”

Murph chuckled again, but after he put the plates on the table and sat down, he looked at Rudy and stopped smiling.

“Hmm,” he said. “A bit downcast and melancholy at the moment, aren’t we, Rudy Drummond? Particularly when one considers that this very morning marks the arrival of summer vacation and three months of relative freedom.”

Murph poured some cream in his coffee, stirred it, and then sipped without taking his eyes off Rudy. Finally he asked, “Could all this uncharacteristic lack of good cheer have something to do with Barnaby Crookshank?”

For a crazy moment Rudy thought Murph actually knew. His mind racing, he took a big bite of pancake and pretended to be too busy chewing to say anything. It was true that Murph sometimes seemed to be able to tune in on things that most people would miss, but that didn’t mean he could really read minds. And if you ruled out actual mind reading—just how much could he possibly know?

“Ahem.” Murph cleared his throat and Rudy swallowed hard and came back to the question.

“No,” Rudy said. “No. Why should the fact that I’m not exactly flipping over school’s being out have anything to do with Barney? It’s just that… It’s just that… Well, it’s too hot in Pyramid in the summertime. And too many tourists. And there’s practically nothing for guys my age to do in this one-horse town in the summertime. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just bored.”

Murph’s smile said that he knew Rudy was talking nonsense. And it was true, of course. Nobody knew better than Murph just how good Rudy had always been at thinking up things to do, or to build, or to do research on. Murph had been particularly involved in the research projects—like tracing the roots of some of the Pyramid Hill families who went back to the gold rush, or the biography of Will Rogers, or the one on snake charmers in India. And, of course, the research on the lives of other talented or famous people who had been illegitimate. Murph had been especially helpful with the Famous Bastards project.

So it was nonsense to pretend the problem was simple boredom, and Rudy was about to admit it by shrugging sheepishly when Murph’s smile suddenly turned into a quizzical expression that said, “So come on, tell me what’s really bothering you.” And that was none of his business.

“Look, Murph,” Rudy said. “Stop bugging me. Nothing’s wrong. All right?”

“Sure thing,” Murph said. He got up and puttered around the stove for a while, chatting about the pancakes and whether they were up to his usual standard, as if he’d forgotten all about giving Rudy the third degree. But as soon as he sat down again he said, right out of the blue, “So, who is this Lewis kid? Ty, I think they call him. The one with the spiky hair.” Sometimes it really did seem like Murph Woodbury was a mind reader.

“I don’t know. I’m asking you. I’ve just seen him around a lot lately. Sometimes with you and Barney and sometimes just with Barney.”

“Yeah,” Rudy said. “Well, he’s just this dude from Southern California. L.A., I think. His folks moved up here last summer to start a new real estate business. He’s in some classes with Barney and me. He’s… What can I tell you about Ty Lewis?” Rudy’s laugh felt a little bit forced. “Well, to put it in Ty-wanese… he’s a rude dude.”

“That’s what Barney and I call the way Ty talks. Ty uses a lot of slang. I mean, when Ty first started hanging out with Barney and me, half the time we couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. So we started saying he spoke ‘Ty-wanese.’ Get it?”

Murph nodded. “Got it. So this new kid speaks a language all his own. And he’s rude?”

Rudy laughed. “Rude means great. In Ty-wanese, that is. Great. Awesome. Like, you say ‘Hey, that is one really rude jacket’—or whatever. And ‘dude.’ Well, everyone is ‘dude’ to Ty. Even girls.”

“I see,” Murph said in the supersolemn way that looked like he was taking something extraseriously but really meant just the opposite.

They ate in silence for a few minutes before Rudy asked again, “Why’d you bring Ty up? What’s he got to do with anything?”

Murph shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m way off base, but it’s just that you and Barney have been close for so long, and now this new kid comes along. Thought maybe the two of them have been ganging up on you, or something.”

“Well, partly something I overheard the other day, I guess,” Murph said. “When the three of you were sitting on your veranda. Sounded to me like this Ty kid was trying to put you down, and maybe Barney was going along with it, at least a little.”

“Aha!” Rudy said, shaking his finger at Murph. “You’ve been ‘studying humanity’ again. Where were you this time? At a keyhole? Or peeking through the curtains?”

Murph grinned. “Don’t recall. But there was some teasing going on, wasn’t there?”

“Nothing important, I guess. I can’t remember.” Rudy tried to look unconcerned even though a small dark cloud of worry had suddenly floated into the back of his mind.

“I don’t recall the exact words but”—Murph paused while he poked at the last of the hash brown potatoes on his plate—“the Lewis kid seemed to be carrying on about you objecting to something they were planning to do.”

“Um.” Murph nodded. “Some sort of a money-making project, I gathered. Didn’t hear what exactly.” The cloud dwindled. “The Ty kid started jumping around flapping his elbows. Made it harder to make out what he was saying.”

Sometimes Murph was unbelievably out of it. “A chicken.” Rudy explained with exaggerated patience. “When you do this”—Rudy flapped his elbows—“that’s supposed to mean chicken, Murph. That’s me, according to Ty. He gets on my case a little sometimes. But I get on his too. It’s no big deal.”

Rudy shrugged. “Yeah, you’re being too curious. But then, what else is new? Murphy P. Woodbury is famous for being too curious. Right?”

“Guilty as charged,” Murph said, grinning. “But with extenuating circumstances. Authors should be allowed to plead curiosity, like a madman pleads insanity. Same sort of situation. Can’t help themselves. So I’ll ask again. What was it this Ty was pestering you to do that you didn’t want to?”

Rudy shrugged and filled his mouth with pancake again. While he chewed he thought about Murph’s question and possible good answers. There weren’t any actually, at least not any that were true. On the one hand there was a part of his mind that could almost wish that Murph had overheard what Barney and Ty were planning, but since he hadn’t that was the end of it. He, Rudy Drummond, wasn’t going to turn into a fink at this stage of the game, particularly not when finking would mean getting Barney in trouble.

He swallowed and said, “I’m not sure what it was that particular time. Probably he was just talking up some daredevil stunt he wanted to do. Like going down Cliff Road on our skateboards, maybe. Ty likes to do dangerous stuff.”

“Dangerous,” Murph muttered. “Dangerous hardly describes Cliff Road on a skateboard. Suicidal is more like it.” But after Rudy assured him that they weren’t going to do the Cliff Road thing he finally changed the subject and quit asking questions. And a little later, when the food was all gone, Rudy said good-bye and thanked Murph and went home—with a lot on his mind.

There were several things he’d been planning to work on that morning, but for some reason he wound up flaked out on the shady side of the veranda. In the big woven rope hammock he sipped a Pepsi and thought about Murph and what he’d guessed, which was pretty amazing, and what he apparently hadn’t guessed, or at least not yet.

What Murph had been right about was that he, Rudy, had a big problem and that it had something to do with Barney. But what he didn’t know was that the whole Barnaby Crookshank-Rudy Drummond partnership—or connection, or brotherhood, or whatever you want to call it—was, just possibly, about to end. And if it did end it would be because Rudy was about to chicken out on something that was really important to Barney. Because Rudy was not about to spend the summer prospecting for gold in the abandoned hard-rock mine called Pritchard’s Hole.

Rudy put one hand up across his face and bit his lip to shut in something that could have been a lot like a moan. He didn’t think any sound had actually escaped, but Ophelia, who had come back from escorting the M and M’s to the baby-sitter, suddenly got up on her hind legs and snuffled nervously in his ear. Rudy patted her and pushed her down and went on trying to cope with the feeling that someone had just dropped a bowling ball on his midsection, and that a dark tunnel with a tiny flickering light seemed to be imprinted on the inside of his eyelids.

Quickly opening his eyes, he tried looking at something else. Anything to blot out the tunnel thing. At the sunlight filtering through the leafy limbs of the dogwood tree, or Murph Woodbury’s rusty roof, or down at Ophelia, who was stretched out beside the hammock looking up at him anxiously. But none of it helped. The stomach pain went on and so did the ache in his throat, which felt as if it had squeezed shut to hold back something that was pushing to get out.

Stop it, he told himself. Stop it. Stop it. Over and over again until the pain and the crazy panic began to fade slowly away. Rudy sighed. Obviously he had a screw loose when it came to certain things and lately it seemed to be getting worse. Of course, he never had been what you might call fearless when it came to physical-type heroics. But in the past when he started losing it he’d usually managed to put on a good front by joking around or something. But in recent years there had been times when something would happen and all of a sudden he’d hit the panic button in pretty spectacular ways.

Like a couple of years ago when Mrs. Hopper’s cocker spaniel had her puppies under the house and she’d insisted that Rudy crawl under to get them out. Or even that time just last December when he’d crawled into the storage area under the stairs to hide some Christmas presents and Moira had locked him in. That kind of silly harmless thing was all it took and suddenly he was in the midst of a full-fledged case of the screaming meemies. And he did mean screaming.

Fool’s Gold

Zilpha Keatley Snyder

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2