Golden Ghost (9 page)

Reacting to their riders' indecision, both horses kept their front hooves propped while their back legs danced, shifting from side to side.

“Go on, girl,” Jen urged Silly. “Find her.”

“If they'd even caught a glimpse of her,” Sam complained, “that whole herd instinct would have kicked in, but I don't think they know where she's gone.”

Jen made a sound a lot like a growl. “And anything in town could have made that creaking sound.”

It was true. Ahead, one bare cottonwood branch rubbed against another. Behind them, a shutter on the schoolhouse moved, and over to the left, a rusty chain had broken, but still suspended a wooden sign.

“We'd better get to work,” Sam said, but Jen was still surveying the town, shaking her head.

“I have to find her,” Jen insisted.

“What we have to find is artifacts. This assignment—”

“You look,” Jen said, whirling Silly away from Ace. “I'm going to check out that ravine. That's where she went before.”

“Je-en,” Sam heard her voice pull her friend's name out in a beseeching way. She didn't want to be left alone here.

Jen sighed, as if she at least understood. Then, she pushed her glasses up on her nose with an impatient index finger. Then she glanced at her watch.
“Give me thirty minutes.”

Sam could tell it wouldn't be worth her breath to argue, so she stayed quiet.

Just then the raven croaked three times and Sam gave a nervous laugh.

“Good thing I don't believe in omens,” she said.

“Oh, don't be such a baby,” Jen scolded her. “You'll be fine.”

“That's what they all say,” Sam shouted as Jen rode away. “In horror movies,” she added, as Silly's white tail vanished around the corner of the schoolhouse. “And then…” Sam yelled louder, but she heard only her echo and Silly's hooves clattering on the rock-strewn path into the ravine.

Besides, what happened in horror movies when someone was left all alone didn't bear thinking about.

“O
kay,” Sam told Ace as she dismounted and ground-tied him. “I'm not going to do all the work for both of us.”

Ace swung his head around to watch her loosen his cinch. His head bobbed.

“Yeah, see,” Sam said. “You wouldn't do it all either, would you?”

Ace blew through his lips, losing interest. He stamped a front hoof, then turned back and loudly worked his tongue against his bit.

“I get the hint,” Sam said and eased the gentle curb bit from his mouth.

What she would do, Sam decided, was scope out the places she deemed most likely to have interesting and portable artifacts.

She scanned this side of the street. General store. Assay office. Sheriff's office. Icehouse. Battle-Born Saloon.

She didn't want to go inside any of them alone, but she had nothing to fear, not really.

“General store,” she pronounced loudly. Mrs. Ely wanted them to compare and contrast what they found with modern life. She was certainly familiar with a modern grocery store, so this would be the easiest place to start.

The store lacked a door. As she stood in the place one might have hung, she wished she'd brought Blaze along. But Jen calling her a baby still stung, so she drew a deep breath and stepped inside.

The store didn't have a single window, so it was dark as night. Sam's hand moved instinctively for a light switch, but she caught herself before she touched anything. Instead, she stood with both arms crossed over her notebook, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the shadows.

She let her other senses take over. It was colder in here than it was outside. That would make it fine in the summer, but in the winter, there'd better be a stove to keep people warm. She took a careful sniff of the air. At first she smelled only dust, but then caught the scent of some herb that smelled like a combination of black pepper and oregano.

She took one careful step and felt the boards beneath her boots bend. Someone had cared enough to put in a wooden floor, but it hadn't stayed flat.

A big solid table sat in the middle of the store. She could imagine someone rolling out cloth to be
measured there. Or maybe stacking provisions, counting them up and tallying their cost for a miner moving on to California.

She blinked and noticed broken shelves slanting across one wall. One end was still attached, but the other ended in an avalanche of cans and broken bottles on the floor. She didn't see any whole bottles. Maybe, before Nugget's gate was in place, bottle collectors had come in and taken the relics.

Using her toe, Sam nudged a couple of cans. Next time she'd bring the flashlight in with her. She didn't really want to touch one of the cans if they weren't bringing them in for class.

“Okay,” she said. And though her voice was quiet, it might as well have boomed.

She turned back toward the door and gasped as spiderwebs floated before her eyes. No. She took a step back and looked upward. Here near the door she could see that the rafters were festooned with cobwebs, as if decorated for a Halloween party. She just knew they'd be sticky, and the idea of getting them in her hair was creepy.

Sam sidled out the door. When she exhaled so loudly that Ace looked up with an answering snort, Sam wondered if she'd been holding her breath.

She walked over, lifted Ace's head, and kissed him on the nose.

“Good boy,” she said, but when the gelding pulled away she realized she wasn't comforting him at all.
She was comforting herself.

Proving to herself she wasn't scared, she bypassed everything until she reached the Battle-Born Saloon. From the street yesterday, she hadn't noticed that slats of absolutely modern plywood had been hammered to form a sort of lattice over the window.

“Shoot, and Mrs. Ely is worried about
us
moving pieces of glass and stuff,” she muttered.

All the same, Sam managed to see inside, because the window let some light into the cavernous room and way in the back, the glow of more light wavered in bars. Squinting, she didn't see the long mahogany bar or crystal chandeliers she was expecting. Over in the corner, though—Sam moved a little closer—that might be the remains of a player piano.

Oh, wow! What a great artifact that would make!

She could almost imagine tinkly Western music.

“Buffalo gals won't you come out tonight, come out tonight, come out tonight.” She murmured the only saloon song she knew and tried not to imagine ghoulish gamblers and the spirits of dancing girls frolicking to her tune.

Ghosts or not, she was going in.

Sam moved to the saloon's swinging doors and gingerly shoved them with her shoulder.

Sam stepped back and looked at them. They sure didn't swing anymore. In fact, they felt so solid, she wondered if they were bolted or nailed closed from
inside. And something in there smelled like hay.

Hay? That couldn't be right, but she was determined to find something interesting to brag about when Jen returned. That meant she had to go in there.

Actually, the familiar scent of hay convinced her it wouldn't be so creepy inside.

Sam squatted and peered under the doors. Hay was strewn over the wooden floor, which was probably like the one in the general store underneath.

It didn't smell as dusty and neglected as the store, but maybe there was just less stuff in there. Sam sawed her lip against her teeth.

“Do it,” Sam ordered herself, then held her breath as she lowered her head and duck-walked under the doors.

She was inside. Sam stood slowly. “Okay, I did it.”

As she had before, Sam let her eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. This place was brighter. With her gaze fixed on the bulky dark object that really did look like a player piano, she took a step.

Suddenly, the floor caved in with a splintering crash. Boards grabbed at her boots, clawed at her calves, then suddenly she was up to her knees in the saloon floor.

She didn't scream, exactly, but Sam heard the echo of her own squawk.

She wasn't the only one, either. Tiny toe-nailed feet scurried nearby and overhead dark wings fluttered.

Bats. Sam closed her eyes and fisted her hands. She would not cover her head. Bats didn't fly into your hair. They had radar, right?

But what lay under this saloon? She was knee-deep in whatever it was, and though the rats didn't scare her much, she didn't want terrified rodents darting up her pant leg. Or snakes.

Rattlesnakes hibernated in the winter in a big, cozy, poisonous ball.

Sam lunged upward, aware that she was swinging her arms in a way that was just as useless as the weird keening sound forcing through her lips.

Only when she'd jerked loose of the boards and raced back toward the light did she see what had happened. She studied the strewn straw and splintered boards. More plywood, modern wood, right in that spot, not like the rest of the floor at all.

Someone had purposely replaced a section of floor with plywood that would collapse under a weight as light as hers.

No, wait—maybe the plywood covered treasure. Sam stood on tiptoe and peered in. It looked as if the dirt beneath the floor had been dug out a little, but there were no old canvas moneybags spilling gold coins. In fact, there was nothing but dirt.

The floor had been booby-trapped.

And now Sam knew why. She smelled horses.

Stepping carefully, testing each inch of floor before she let her weight down, Sam made her way
toward the light in the rear of the saloon. A glow from outside surrounded the player piano and fresh wood showed where the old finish and years of grime had been cut away. Rats didn't inflict damage like that, but a cribbing horse did.

Behind the piano lay fresh straw and a bucket. Rails that had blocked the open wall were scattered on the floor.

Sam knew she was looking at a makeshift stall. She knew why Golden Rose hadn't looked wild and tangled. But Sam's discovery had solved one mystery and created another.

If the last of the Kenworthy palominos had been a captive for two years, who had been her jailer?

S
am spent about ten minutes searching the makeshift stall for clues. If there were any, she decided, it would take a professional to find them. She'd hoped for a rope or halter, even a feed sack, but she found nothing. Whoever came to tend Golden Rose was careful not to leave hints to his identity.

Except for tracks.

Jake had given her a few tips on reading tracks, but the skill remained as much a challenge to her as did algebra. Still, as Sam stood in the straw and peered out through the open back of the saloon, she saw two sets of hoofprints. Only one set was shod.

Jake could have read the tracks like a road sign. After a minute or two of study, he would have known when the tracks were made, the weight of the rider, and how fast the horse was traveling.

Sam could only pick her way around the tracks to keep from obliterating them.

When she returned to Ace, she found him a few feet from where she'd left him, half asleep. The little bay mustang stood with one rear hoof cocked and eyelids drooping. “Getting bored?” she asked, but Ace ignored her.

Because her horse was so sleepy, she probably shouldn't worry that he'd wander off. But she had visions of Jen herding a galloping Golden Rose back into Nugget. Even though Ace had learned to live with humans, he was a mustang. His urge to run was strong. She didn't want to test it against his training.

She could tie him, but the only hitching rail was near a watering trough. The water inside almost had to be rainwater, and certainly pure, but Sam refused to take a chance. Brynna had warned her not to water horses here. If she did anything to harm Ace, she'd never forgive herself.

While Ace dozed, Sam listened. It had been nearly an hour since Jen left. She'd promised to be back by now, but Sam was pretty sure Jen hadn't been hurt. She was just carried away by the chase. Sam wasn't worried, but she was eager to show Jen the stall and get her best guess on who'd kept Golden Rose confined here.

Could it be a clue that yesterday, she and Jen had met up with Jake and Ryan, both riding shod horses near Nugget?

As soon as Jake popped into her mind, Sam thought of his mother, Mrs. Ely.

She swallowed a moan. She and Jen still didn't have an artifact, let alone a map of where they'd found it.

Since she was standing right in front of the store labeled
Ice
, she decided to go inside. She wondered where the ice had come from. Maybe during the little town's glory days, blocks of ice had been cut from the La Charla River and carried this far by horse-drawn wagon.

She fidgeted a minute as she looked at the tilted gray doorway. There was nothing to fear in there, she was sure. There shouldn't be much inside to attract mice. Or snakes, or any other kind of animal she'd be afraid to face.

She felt confident she'd be alone in the ice shop, but she wondered about traps. Surely the one in the saloon had only been dug to keep out people who might find Golden Rose.

If the keeper of Golden Rose had sabotaged this place, too, he'd be sorry. Sam considered herself a nice person, but those moments in the saloon, when she'd imagined snakes coiling around her ankles, had been terrifying. If she felt that way again, she'd hunt down whoever was doing this and show him how it felt to be scared.

Standing in the doorway to the icehouse, Sam was really glad she'd been feeling paranoid. Although it looked like every other structure from outside, inside it was completely different.

The icehouse floor was about five feet lower than the doorway. If she'd just sauntered through the door, she would have taken a hard fall. At least she would have landed on sawdust, though.

That's what reminded her of what she already knew. In the old days, they'd piled blocks of ice up to floor level. They'd covered the blocks with sawdust to absorb the water. The back portion of the little building was for doing business, so the floor there was at ground level.

That part of the store was cluttered with some kind of furniture. She couldn't quite tell what, because of the darkness, but it looked like there was a back door, too. Maybe business was done out the back door.

Feeling brave because she hadn't been tricked, Sam jumped down to the floor and started looking around. The remains of a wooden table that had crumbled away from three of its four legs leaned against the right-hand wall. She guessed it had fallen from the upper level.

Trapped between the tilted tabletop and the rock wall was what she'd been looking for all along. She just hadn't known it.

Sam's fear fell away at the sight of an old newspaper. She and Jen would have the coolest artifact of all. Yellowed with age and brittle, the newspaper had already broken into fragments. She couldn't tell if it had been a single sheet of newsprint, or more.

Using her fingers as carefully as if they were tweezers, Sam lifted each delicate piece of paper and slid it into the plastic bag Mrs. Ely had recommended she bring.

Even though the largest pieces were about the size of her palm, Sam couldn't tell if this was a local newspaper, printed and distributed in Nugget, or something left behind by a traveler. Either way, it would be fun to reassemble it like a jigsaw puzzle.

When she'd lifted all the pieces bigger than dust, she sealed the bag.

She was feeling pretty proud of herself when she realized the jump down to the icehouse floor had been easier than the climb up would be.

Sam tilted her head up and surveyed the ground-level floor. She could climb up there and go out the back door more easily than the front door, if she could slip past the jumble of furniture.

Holding the plastic bag in her teeth, Sam used the rocks in the wall as steps and the edge of the floor for handholds. She swung up almost as easily as if she'd been mounting a horse.

“Piece of cake,” she said, though she doubted anyone would have recognized the words, which had to work past her teeth and the bag.

Blinking into the darkness, she could see that the furniture was piled like a barricade in front of the door.

Except it wasn't furniture.

Sam's heart beat faster. Chills rushed down her arms as her body recognized the shapes before her mind did.

They're—

No. They're too small.

Shaking her head, Sam tried to come up with another use for rectangular wooden boxes. She couldn't, because her stomach made a sickening plummet. She knew exactly what they were. Coffins.

The shiver that shook her might have been caused by all the ice piled in here a hundred years ago.

Why were there coffins in the icehouse?

It was bad enough thinking that they were here so that their contents wouldn't decompose in the desert heat. It was worse, far worse, that they were so small.

“They're empty.”

Startled by her own voice and the bag falling from her teeth, Sam jumped. She steadied herself against the rock wall so that she wouldn't fall back to the lowered floor.

Of course they were empty. Slowly, she bent and retrieved the plastic bag by touch. All the while, she kept her eyes on the coffins.

As if they're going to do what?
she mocked herself silently. The wooden lids weren't going to creak open and snap closed on her wrist. No weird supernatural gravity would suck her inside and keep her there.

They were just old wooden boxes.

She could hear the wind outside, the gentle ping of the bell at the abandoned schoolhouse, and the sound of Ace's hooves shifting on the dirt street. This was real life, not the horror movie she'd thought of as Jen rode away.

Sam concentrated on a skinny opening between the two stacks of coffins. Placing her boots heel to toe, she might make it through without knocking them over. Creepy or not, the caskets were valuable. If she knocked them to the sawdust-covered floor below, they'd break apart.

“Take it easy,” Sam told herself.

Even as she stepped between the caskets, balancing like she was on a tightrope, she wondered why Ace was so restless, out on the street.

Her boot heel touched her boot toe. Almost out. Another step. Another.

Almost there. Two more steps and she breathed fresh air. All she had to do was duck through the doorway and she'd be safe.

Cobwebs trailed against her cheek as she bolted free of the icehouse.

Outside, Sam stood for a minute with her hands on her hips. Then, ignoring the raucous raven in the graveyard, she returned to Ace. With the greatest care, she slid the plastic bag containing the newspaper fragments into her saddlebags.

She'd just buckled the bag closed when she heard Jen's scream.

“I'm coming!” Sam shouted once, then bolted toward the ravine.

Clumsy in her boots, she ran just the same, over the dusty stone paths through the abandoned garden. Once her boot sole skidded and she almost fell. She slowed just a little. She'd be no good to Jen with a broken ankle.

In the winter light, the ravine glowed rust-purple. For a second, Sam thought she heard a whisper of water among the cascade of rocks, but the sound was quickly covered by a voice.

“I'm okay,” Jen shouted.

Sam's eyes hunted and found her friend. She was afoot.

“Now you tell me,” Sam gasped.

About halfway up the boulder-littered path, Jen held Silly's reins with the big mare dancing at the end of them. Her ears pointed forward, but she looked to one side, eyes rolled to show the whites. She acted as if there was so much to fear, she couldn't focus on just one thing.

Sam didn't allow herself to relax. She knew Jen hadn't screamed because she'd fallen off her horse.

“What happened?” Sam shouted as she kept walking, arms out, balancing as she picked her way over the big rocks.

“Come look.”

Jen's skin was no paler than usual, but she looked sick. When she forced a smile, her lips trembled.

“It's no big deal,” Jen managed. “I'm truly embarrassed. You can check with my parents to verify this, but I don't believe that I've ever, in my entire life, screamed.” Jen pushed her glasses up on her nose. She threw one white-blond braid over her shoulder, then did the same with the other. “Maybe because it's a ghost town….”

“Jen, it doesn't matter. Something startled you,” Sam began making an excuse for her friend. “It happens.”

“Oh, no. ‘Startled' isn't it,” Jen said, still wearing that queasy expression. “Look.”

Grabbing a leaf-bare sapling for balance, Sam climbed up a little higher so she could peer in the direction Jen pointed.

The white, blade-shaped object was a bone, but Sam didn't recognize it as a shoulder until she spotted another part of the skeleton nearby. Leaning against an ocher-yellow boulder, with eye sockets dark and staring, was a horse skull.

Sam swallowed hard, then glanced up the ravine, wondering if the horse had fallen. “Maybe it was running from a predator, and with all these rocks—”

“I don't think that's likely. I'm afraid something else is going on,” Jen said. She took a deep, shuddering breath. “Take a look at this.”

Wrinkling her nose, Jen squatted and moved her index finger in a floating circle above the speckled brown body of a ground squirrel.

As if her mistress had reawakened her early terror, Silly squealed and yanked at the reins, pulling Jen over backward.

Jen rolled on her side and shoved to her feet.

“Just knock it off!” she shouted, giving the reins a sharp tug.

Surprised, Sam started to tell Jen that hurting Silly was no way to make her settle down. But Jen knew that.

“You've already proven you're the dumbest horse around today,” Jen said as Silly's hooves scrabbled and her forefeet lifted a few inches off the ground. “Do you know what she did?” Jen said over her shoulder. “We were within
yards
of Rose, and idiot girl here pinned her ears, lashed her tail, and started backing around like she wanted to kick!”

Maybe Silly was jealous
, Sam thought, but she only said, “And Rose took off?”

“Of course she took off!”

While Jen continued to scold her mare, Sam looked away. Jen would never hurt Silly, but she might take out her embarrassment over her scream on the palomino.

“Do you really think that's helping?” Sam asked. Then, she returned her gaze to the ground squirrel, but she heard Jen's frustrated sigh.

What could kill both horses and ground squirrels
? Sam wondered.

The skeleton was from a horse long dead, but the
squirrel must have died recently.
Very
recently, she thought, or it would have been eaten by a coyote or other scavenger.

“I'm not bringing you next time. Do you hear?” Jen asked Silly.

Next time, she might know exactly where to find Golden Rose, Sam thought. Next time, the mare might be standing in a stall, just waiting for them to take her home.

“Jen,” Sam said, touching her friend's arm. “I know where Golden Rose has been all this time.”

“Oh sure, where?” Jen asked skeptically.

“In the Battle-Born Saloon.” Sam gestured toward Nugget's main street.

Jen's pale eyebrows rose higher than the top of her glasses frames.

“Really,” Sam said. “I know where, and I know how she was kept there,” Sam said smugly.

Just then a rock tumbled down from the highest point in the ravine. When Sam looked up, she saw a rider silhouetted on the rim.

“And now,” she said on an indrawn breath, “I think I know by
who
.”