The Fossil Hunter of Sydney Mines (7 page)

“It's all right. It was a…distant relative.” He grabbed the serving bowl and scooped out a second helping of boiled dinner. “This is delicious, Pat. It's been a long time since I had good corned beef.”

“My pleasure,” Grace's mom said, sipping her wine. “It's nice to have company again.”

For Grace, dinner seemed to go on forever. Stanley was asking her mom all kinds of questions about how she was feeling, what had she been doing, how things were going—blah, blah, blah. He didn't even flinch when he bit into one of the cement scones, not even a twitch! He was putting on the nice-guy act and she'd had enough.

“Who was it?”

Stanley stared blankly at Grace. “Who was what?”

“Your relative?”

“Oh. Ah, it was an aunt, a great aunt…on my father's side.”

“What was her name?” Grace asked, putting on her sweetest smile. “Did she live around here?”

“
Grace.
” Her mom's voice was raised to the
watch it
level.

“No, no. That's okay.” Stanley held Grace's gaze. “It was Great Aunt Beatrice. She lived in Baddeck.” He patted his shirt pocket and stood up abruptly. “I think I left my cell in the car and I need to make a quick call. Excuse me, ladies? I'll be right back.”

“Oh, of course,” Grace's mom said.

Grace watched Stanley from under her lashes. She could have sworn he gave her a dirty look as he passed by, but it disappeared almost immediately. Was she imagining things?

Grace's mom frowned at her across the table. “What are you up to?”

“What did I do?”

“You know perfectly well!” she scolded. “What's all this third-degree business?”

“I was just making conversation.”

“Hmm…well, we could do with a little less of that from here on in,” she said. “I'll just finish up here and then we'll get the tea on for dessert as soon as Rick gets back.”

Grace broke up pieces of her uneaten biscuit with her fork.

“A bit tough, weren't they?”

“Just a little,” Grace said.
More like frozen hockey
pucks!

Her mom shrugged. “At least the corned beef was tender.”

Grace nodded, deciding not to mention that the vegetables must have boiled forever—they were so waterlogged that they disintegrated as soon as she touched them with her fork.

Grace and her mom waited…and waited. It seemed like Stanley had been gone for ages. Grace wiggled impatiently in her chair. Who would he be talking to all this time? Men never talked on the phone longer than they had to. Not her dad, anyway. Jeeter either. She grabbed the empty serving dish on the table. “I'll get the dessert.”

Grace walked through the swinging door into the kitchen and froze. Rick Stanley was standing by the open doorway of the basement. She couldn't tell if he was going down or coming back up.

“What are you doing?”

Stanley spun around. “Uh, looking for the bathroom.”

“That's the basement! Bathroom's here.” She jabbed her elbow at the open door to her left.

“My mistake,” he murmured. He glanced down into the dark cavern of the basement. “Your light is out.”

Grace's mom entered the kitchen as Stanley finished speaking, catching the end of what he had said. She rushed over to the open basement door and shut it. “We don't go down there…Jonathan's office is in the basement…” she trailed off.

“Oh.” He nodded sympathetically. “That's right—I think you may have mentioned that when we talked before. I can fix that light, if you like.”

“I, um…no, thank you,” Grace's mom replied. “Not right now.”

“You know,” Stanley added, stroking his chin, “if you're putting off going down there because you don't know what to do with everything, I could help you sort it out.”

“Go through his things?” Grace's mother looked shocked. “Oh, no, I couldn't.”

“I understand,” he said. “It's just that there could be fossils or documents that Jonathan may have wanted to go to the museum.”

“Oh, I hadn't thought of that.” Grace's mom leaned against the basement door.

“He sure loved the museum,” Stanley added, his voice softer.

“Yes, he certainly did.” Grace's mom's eyes glazed over. She wrapped her arms around herself, like she had a chill.

“Are you sure you don't want me to fix that light anyway?” he asked, reaching for the doorknob.

Grace's Spidey senses were tingling. Stanley seemed determined to get into the basement for some reason. “No!” she cried.

The exclamation startled Grace's mom out of her trance. “Thank you, Rick,” she said firmly, “but we can do that another day, perhaps. There's no hurry, since we don't go down there.”

“No problem.” His hand lingered on the doorknob. “Call me when you're ready. I can help.”

“I know I can't put it off forever. But I locked it after….” she trailed off. “For the life of me, I can't remember where I put the key. I'll have to find it first.”

“Sure,” Stanley said understandingly. “Just let me know if you need some help.”

She nodded. “Now, who's ready for dessert?”

“Thanks, Pat,” Stanley said, “but I couldn't eat another bite. Not after two helpings of dinner.” He patted his stomach. “I should get going.”

“Well, it was good of you to come by,” Grace's mom replied. “We really appreciate your concern for us. You're always welcome here.”

“I'll be sure to take you up on that.” Stanley turned to Grace. “Take it easy, kid. Drop by the museum anytime.”

Grace attempted a smile, but she was sure all she'd managed was a grimace—if her mom's frown was any indication. But she couldn't help it.

After Stanley left, Grace's mom made her help with the cleanup. Every second seemed like an hour. She had to tell Fred, Mai, and Jeeter about Stanley.

Finally in her room, Grace fumed at her dead walkie-talkie and slapped it into the charger. Her mom was now sitting by the phone in the living room, so she couldn't call anyone for a private conversation.

The fossil museum was her dad's creation and here Stanley was, acting like he owned it! Plus, he'd tried to sneak into her dad's office—hadn't he? Her mom would say her imagination was going wild. But why else would he want to go down into their grungy old basement? What was he after?

Chapter
9

MAI HELD UP HER WALKIE-TALKIE. “HAS EVERYONE GOT THEIR RADIOS
charged up?”

Grace nodded, anxious to get going. She
had
to find something today—it might be her last chance to figure out what had really happened to her father. She'd basically interrogated her mom on the whereabouts of her dad's office key as they'd eaten their way through the blueberry grunt last night. But all she'd gotten was a stomach ache from the gluey blue muck.

Mai hadn't even been all that impressed with her Rick Stanley story. It had kind of lost something in translation when she'd whispered it over the bathroom stall in an extended washroom break. But Mai had at least agreed that the timing was pretty strange for him to show up all of a sudden.

“All charged,” Fred chimed in. “I also replenished the choco stash. You know, just in case.” He patted his backpack.

“That's great, Fred.” Mai shook her head. “I'm sure your chocolate cakes will come in handy when you're gushing blood from some cut you got tripping over a rock.”

Jeeter held up his walkie-talkie. “These things are from the stone ages. How come you guys don't use cell phones? I already had one of those.”

“The walkie-talkies work down in the tunnels,” Mai said, pointing at the ground. “No cell phone towers down there.”

Jeeter grunted and got on his bike. Grace, Mai, and Fred followed his lead and the four of them started pedalling away from the school grounds.

They headed out of town, through Florence, and toward Point Aconi. As she sped down the quiet roads, Grace's mind was racing as fast as her bicycle, wondering what they might find out there. It seemed like she'd only blinked and they were on the winding Point Aconi Road.

They hid their bikes behind some trees at the barricade where the road had been closed due to the sinkhole. As they prepared to hike around the gaping crater, Grace automatically lifted her hands to adjust her hat, then let them fall again. She kept forgetting it was on someone else's head.

“This is a weird place for your dad to go alone, isn't it?” Jeeter stated. “Besides, wouldn't he have had trouble getting past security?”

“I hate to say it, but I agree with the Jeetman for once,” Fred said, staring out beyond the barricade as he munched on a chocolate bar. “It
is
kinda weird. I mean, who goes out into woods with killer sinkholes everywhere?”

Leave it to Fred to be Mr. Drama
, Grace thought. It
was
strange, though, she admitted to herself. She remembered it had been pouring rain the day of her dad's accident, which would have made it even more dangerous. What had been important enough to make her dad go against his own advice?

“Hey, Grace, what's the plan again?” Jeeter asked.

“We'll split into two teams so we can cover more ground,” Grace replied. She switched on her walkie-talkie and tucked her knife into her pocket.

“Great,” Mai said cheerily. She walked over to stand beside Jeeter. “You and Fred can be Team One and Jeeter and I will be Team Two.”

Mai's batting eyelashes were getting a little annoying, Grace thought. “No, Jeeter and I will go through this break in the trees. It's closer to the strip mine and it'll be more dangerous. You and Fred can go through that opening over there,” she said, pointing to a gap in the treeline a short distance away. “That way's safer.”

Mai glared at Grace, her smile nowhere in sight. Was she going to say no?

“Sounds great to me,” Fred said, shooting a smirk at Jeeter. “I like safer!”

“But you'll still have to watch out for security guards around any paths or clearings—there's probably a lot of them,” Grace instructed. “Lock channel three on hands-free. That way we can hear one another if anything happens.”

“Sure, Grace, whatever you say,” Mai said flatly. “Like always.” Without another word, she disappeared through the trees.

“Hey, wait up!” Fred called as he scrambled off to catch up with her. “Last one there is a rotten…” His voice faded as he disappeared into a sea of green.

This is getting crazy
, Grace thought as she and Jeeter made their way into the dense woods.
Fred is jealous
of Jeeter; Mai is jealous of me
. It was so not like that between her and Jeeter. He wasn't her boyfriend or anything. He just, well, really knew what she was going through, that's all.

The path was rockier than Grace had expected. The branches were so close together that it was like night under their treetop canopy—everything looked smudged. She could barely see Jeeter when she looked behind her, and they were just a few metres apart.

The only sounds were Mai and Fred's heavy breathing echoing eerily over the airways. That, and the occasional grunt as Fred tripped over a root, or his own feet.

“Watch it, Fred!” Mai complained loudly. “You almost knocked me over again!”

“Sorry,” Fred called back. “I didn't see you.”

“Shhhh,” Grace hissed into her walkie-talkie. “Do you guys want to get caught? That's it! Radio silence from now on—I'm switching off!” She flipped the power button on her walkie-talkie and it went silent.

“Man, you'd think they could hold it together for half an hour,” Jeeter said. He turned his radio off, too.

“I know they're a bit hard to take sometimes.” Grace vaulted over a fallen log, her feet crunching on dry twigs and leaves as she landed. “But they're still my best friends.”