The Raven Read online

  I didn’t hesitate, this being the first time in memory I’d been let go without having to clean up after a trip. Which is how I got to where I am now: sitting on the front porch while my mom cooks up a late dinner for me and Dad.

  Apparently, my dad was right about getting out of Dodge: The reporters have moved on, leaving phone numbers, if we happen to think of a scoop to give them. Probably they got bored of our three restaurants and one bar, or Mayor Blake drove them half crazy with his ambitions for the town. Either way, besides a list of reporters to call back, I’m a free man. Skeleton Creek is back to normal, at least for the moment.

  “You should have seen Gladys Morgan take to the press,” my mom told me. “I’ve never known that woman to talk for so many minutes in a row in all my life.”

  We chatted about the books and the town librarian, the fishing and the storm that blew through, but I couldn’t bring myself to mention the man in the rain gear. I couldn’t tell her or my dad. I don’t even know why. I mean really — why not tell them? I guess it feels like once I do it’ll lead to Sarah, and when that happens everything will come crashing down around us.

  I don’t feel like a liar. More like a withholder of certain facts. I have to believe there’s a difference. Then again, it’s just like a liar to make a deadline for when he’ll start telling the truth.

  We just need a little more time to bring this Crossbones thing to a close. A week, maybe two, and I’ll tell them everything. It’s just that first I have to get Sarah back home with a few unscheduled stops along the way — stops I haven’t even figured out yet.

  As soon as I can scarf down some dinner, I’ve got some work to do. For starters, I’m putting the webcam on my laptop into full swing starting tonight. Even in low-res recording mode it’ll fill half my hard drive overnight, but at least I’ll know if someone is watching me. With all these new people floating in and out of town and the Raven hiding in the woods, who knows who might try to set up their own surveillance on me?

  I need to reach out to Sarah as fast as I can. Her film camp runs four more days, then she’s driving back home to Boston. I need to email her the Raven sighting I recorded, get her take on the man in the rain slicker. But I also need to send her a scan of the other Raven. Being up all night in a tent at least gave me a chance to really look at it carefully. It’s no less confusing than the Skull Puzzle, which led us to the missing Jefferson library books. Maybe this Raven Puzzle will lead to an even bigger mystery.

  It’s two sided, same as last time. But somehow, it’s even scarier looking than the Skull Puzzle.

  Flames, haunted roads, castle towers, a nickel? Where does a guy begin solving a puzzle like this? There is one image that’s a dead giveaway: the nickel. That’s Thomas Jefferson’s old home, Monticello. It’s in Virginia. At least we know one of the locations the Apostle is trying to lead us to, even if Sarah will have no idea where to look once she gets there.

  This is a scan of side one:

  This is a scan of side two:

  Sarah will have no idea where to look once she gets there.

  The skull from the earlier puzzle has been replaced by a raven, the four corners by clues I can’t even begin to understand. Ghost Room floors, stone markers, wisps of wind — the Apostle’s methods of recording definitely lean into the bizarre. But there is one encouraging bit of news on this side of the Raven Puzzle: the words.

  West to East and Follow the Trail of the Apostle! tell me that long ago, the Apostle was on a journey very much like the one Sarah is on now. Originally, he went east to west, which we already knew. But now we’re finding out he also traveled west to east, dropping clues on his way back. Which means Sarah can do the same thing.

  If we can figure out what the clues mean, Sarah can follow the trail of the Apostle all the way back to Boston.

  And we might just find the most valuable Crossbones treasure of them all.

  My worries?

  The Apostle is trying to trick us.

  The ghost of Old Joe Bush will haunt our every move.

  And the Raven will try to stop us.

  Tuesday, July 12, 10:00 p.m.

  I finally got to my room after a dinner of cold chicken, potato salad, and red Jell–O with tiny marshmallows floating inside. I fired up the laptop and found two emails from Sarah. Quickly, I read them, deleted them, and scrubbed the memory for traces of contact. My parents have backed off a little on their feelings about me communicating with Sarah, but just the same, I can’t take any chances they might be checking in on me.

  This is the problem with long-distance communication: Most of it happens digitally. Voice mails, emails, text messages — those are the currency of my secret ongoing connection to Sarah Fincher. Add to that the isolation of the river outside Skeleton Creek and the insane shooting schedule Sarah is keeping and it’s a miracle we talk at all. The best I could do before leaving with my dad had been a quick message:

  Sarah’s second email was more blunt.

  I sent Sarah the Raven video, along with this note:

  Tuesday, July 12, 11:11 p.m.

  11:11, a bad omen. I hate when I look at the clock and find numbers doubled up like that. Gives me the creeps.

  Sarah must have been sitting at her computer editing video clips when I emailed because she responded less than twenty minutes later.

  She posted the video of the Raven in the woods. Seeing what I recorded, along with the additions Sarah made from past sightings, just about knocked me off my chair. At the end, she starts analyzing the Raven Puzzle.

  It appears she’s already hot on the Apostle’s trail.

  If something’s happened to me, and someone is reading this after I’ve disappeared (or worse), get to a computer and take a look.

  You can meet the Raven for yourself.

  It will help you realize what we’re up against.

  sarahfincher.com

  Password:

  MELANIEDANIELS

  Wednesday, July 13, 11:00 a.m.

  No rest for the weary.

  My dad was pounding on my door at 7:00 and yelling for me to get out of bed, breakfast was on the table. Sometimes I hate that he opened a fly shop in town financed by a fraction of the gold I found on the dredge. Maybe if I’d left that gold there I’d still be sleeping right now and my dad would be out of town at his old job. Times like these, it feels like the world is caving in on me, like I need a secret corner where I can be alone with my thoughts.

  After I watched Sarah’s video last night I tried to stay awake, but I was just too exhausted from the night before. The good thing about being that tired? I slept like the dead, just what I needed. I was refreshed, ready to figure this thing out while my dad is away from the shop all day on a float.

  When I left the house this morning, my mom gave me a list of reporters to call.

  “Get it done, kiddo. If you don’t, they’ll just keep calling the house,” she told me, shaking her head. “The mayor is the worst of the bunch. He called four times yesterday looking for you.”

  Why am I not surprised? First the dredge, now the Jefferson library books. Mayor Blake is a shameless promoter when it comes to getting Skeleton Creek on the map. A lot of folks are starting to wonder if he’s gunning for a bigger position, like mayor of Boise or governor of the entire state. I can already imagine the platform he’d run on:

  City income in Skeleton Creek up 10,000 percent. Job growth through the roof. Tourism exploding.

  He won’t mention that any of this had to do with my finding Thomas Jefferson’s missing books, and millions in gold. Somehow, like every politician, he’ll make it sound as if he had an awful lot to do with it.

  My dad took off with a retired couple for a few hours, mumbling to himself about what a day it was going to be with two people bored enough to try fly-fishing for the first time. He guessed they’d be experts at tangling up their lines and casting into the trees. It’s always a tough day on the river with a husband and wife who don’t know what they’re doi
ng. I actually felt sorry for him as he left, leaving me to watch the shop all day. He was nice enough not to make me tie flies while he’s gone, which is saying something since he’ll probably go through a dozen an hour with those two. Looking at the list of reporters I was supposed to call didn’t even make me want to trade with him — it was that bad on a raft with an old couple, zero fishing experience between them.

  The first interview was with the Philadelphia Enquirer, a nice lady who was more excited than I was about the discovery of the books. She had a cool accent and she laughed a lot. Apparently, she’d been an amateur sleuth for years herself and envied my finding such an important treasure. Two more East Coast papers, the Associated Press, the Oregonian, the Seattle Times, the Boise Herald — all of them asking the same question over and over again: How’d you know where to look?

  I dodged this line of questioning better with every phone call I made, but it was hard not to lie. Mostly, I played dumb just to be safe, which made me a super lame interviewee (this tends to shorten up the conversations).

  I’ve still got three more papers to call, smaller ones, I think, but I’m starving. Plus, I want to go look at the gaping hole in the library floor again.

  Wednesday, July 13, 1:21 p.m.

  The hole is still there.

  It’s still boring, too.

  Why anyone would think ripped-up floorboards in an old library would make a good tourist attraction is beyond me, but if someone can sell it, that someone is Mayor Blake. And he’s got enough money in the Skeleton Creek coffers to put a nice rope around it and go all interactive, so that will help.

  Wait — speaking of Mayor Blake, he just walked into the fly shop.

  And he’s not alone.

  Wednesday, July 13, 2:00 p.m.

  “This here’s Mr. Albert Vern,” the mayor said when he came in. His southern accent has kicked up a notch, a sure sign he really is thinking about running for higher office. “You’ll never guess where he’s from. Go on now, guess!”

  I guessed he was from the Boston Red Sox, recruiting me to play baseball.

  Albert Vern looked at me as if to say, “Quite a mayor you’ve got here. You wouldn’t happen to know how I could get away from him, would you?”

  “The Washington Post!” the mayor told me, completely proud of himself for hobnobbing with national media. “Mr. Vern is from the Washington Post! Ain’t that something else? Right here in Skeleton Creek. And it gets better — he’s staying for the whole week!”

  I nodded and tried to act friendly, but my insides were churning. In fact, they’re still churning. I don’t need a big-city reporter hanging around, watching my every move. If he’s working for the Post, he must be pretty good at snooping out the truth.

  “Do you have any golden stone flies with rubber legs?”

  This was the first thing Albert Vern asked me, which led the mayor to glance at him like he’d lost his way coming through town and needed directions. It didn’t take long for me to realize Albert Vern was an outdoorsman when he wasn’t reporting.

  “I can hardly wait to get out on the river” were his next words, the mayor’s cue to leave us fishermen alone.

  “You two get to know each other. That’s real good. I’ll be just outside, checking my messages.”

  Mr. Vern sighed with relief when Mayor Blake was gone, explaining that he’d already endured a tour of the town and an exhaustive description of recent events.

  “Tell me what’s working and I’ll take a dozen,” he said, explaining that he’d long been a traveling reporter for the Post, casting a line on rivers from New York to western Canada. “I could tell you a fishing story or two.”

  I was really starting to like this guy. No tough questions, just a request for the best flies we had to offer.

  “Something wrong with your back, Mr. Vern?” I asked, starting to warm up to a fellow writer. He was twisting around like there was a kink in his spine.

  “Threw my back out picking up my bag at the airport — happens all the time. I’m used to it.”

  “How long does it last?” I asked. The poor guy looked feeble, like I could knock him down with my pinkie finger.

  “Usually a day or two. But I think the mountain air is helping. I’ll be fine.”

  A real trouper, this guy, which I also liked, but then the questions started.

  “So you’re the one who found the most famous missing books in the world?”

  I began picking out flies, dropping them into a plastic container.

  “It was an accident, really. I just had a feeling, Mr. Vern.”

  He laughed and I could tell it jolted his back by the look on his face that followed.

  “Well, I hope you have the same feeling about those flies you’re picking out. I’d like to land some fish tonight.”

  He asked me to call him Albert and hoped we could go fishing together one evening, just talk about this and that. He was more interested in a vacation than a story, or so he said. Casting, he told me.

  I have to be very careful with this guy. I can imagine slipping up and saying something I shouldn’t or being just stupid enough to show him the Raven Puzzle if I need help. The river has a way of lulling my senses to sleep.

  Before I could worry too much, Mayor Blake rang the bell on the door, returning from checking the messages on his phone. Albert Vern paid for his flies, and the two of them left for pie. The shop would be quiet for at least an hour — the perfect time to do some research.

  For once, I wanted to beat Sarah to the punch.

  Wednesday, July 13, 4:12 p.m.

  BINGO on the first location! And more good news to boot.

  First, the drawings I figured out.

  The Ghost Room:

  And the tower with the skeleton inside:

  An hour of searching online for skeletons in churches and castles led me nowhere. Turns out there are thousands of castles, even more churches, and … let’s see … billions of skeletons. Nothing worth reporting on ghost rooms, either. I was at a dead end, and I actually thought about doing some work around the shop. Luckily, Edgar Allan Poe came to the rescue. The old dude saved me once again.

  I had been looking mostly at the tower and the skeleton, because that was marked number 1. My hope was that number 1 meant closest to the West Coast: the first stop on Sarah’s journey back home.

  The idea of a skeleton lying in a stone building started to get me thinking about “The Cask of Amontillado,” a wicked cool Poe story I’ve read at least a dozen times. It’s a story where one guy lures another guy down into this chamber, then chains him up down there (yikes!). After that, this nut job builds a stone wall in front of the opening, so there’s, like, this small room with a man chained up inside. The guy starts freaking out, but the stones are pretty thick so no one can hear him screaming. I guess he goes crazy and starves to death behind the wall or tons of rats find him. At least that’s what I think happens.

  Either way, it totally clued me in! The skeleton in the tower wasn’t just lying there. It was in the wall, just like in the story. So I started searching for masons who went missing, ghost stories revolving around missing people, legends of people being buried alive in towers and churches.

  The crazy thing about what I discovered? The story of this tower has some eerie similarities to the made-up story of “Amontillado.” And there’s a lot of information out there about it, too.

  The tower is part of St. Mark’s Church in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

  Building on the church started in 1868, and the main structure was finished without any disturbances. Eighteen years later, people started clamoring for a bell tower. They wanted a real showstopper, something no one in the area could build, so they imported two masons from Sweden who knew what the heck they were doing. Just like in Poe’s story — two guys!

  It gets better.

  So these two masons worked on the tower for a while until one day the church parson, Dr. Rafter, came by to check on the work. When he did, there was only one mason,
not two, and the one guy was acting strange.

  The next day? Both masons were gone. (Cue thunderbolt.)

  It was more than thirty years before they started building again, which is when the real trouble started. The new masons heard unexplained hammering in the walls and words they couldn’t understand drifting into the air. Churchgoers swore they heard a whispered message they could understand:

  There is a body in the wall!

  Jump ahead to 1966, when a very old man showed up at the church to confess his sins. He confessed (I’m not making this up!) that when he was a young mason, he and a fellow Swede were hired to build the tower, but his friend fell down the stone stairs leading to the basement and broke his neck. Afraid he’d be tried for murder, the remaining mason stuffed the body against one of the unfinished walls. Then he used cement and stones and basically built this dead guy into the tower itself.

  I gotta say … that’s just wrong. And SO Edgar Allan Poe it’s not even funny.

  The reverse side of the Raven Puzzle has this drawing:

  The Ghost Room. That’s a real place in St. Mark’s Church. Upstairs in the tower, a room where voices come through the walls. And under one of the floorboards?

  A message from the Apostle.

  Dad’s here. Dang. Gotta go.

  Wednesday, July 13, 10:07 p.m.

  When my dad got back from the river he put me to work unloading the boat. The retired couple had broken a shop record, losing thirty-one flies on their way down the river. To top it off, they lost a fly rod — not on a big fish, which we would have cheered. No, the husband just dropped it right in the river and let it float away. How is this even possible, you ask? It requires a rare set of circumstances, but it does happen.