13 THE BAIT

Thirty minutes later, Evan and I were standing in the middle of the dirt road that ran between the Oy Vey Corral and the Spooner Ranch, hunting for bear prints.

One of the main reasons I had asked Evan to help me with the investigation was his tracking ability. While he had spent much of the morning looking for where Sasquatch had gone after coming into the house, I was interested in where Sasquatch had been before breaking in.

I wanted to figure out why Sasquatch had come into the house at all the night before, given that it had never happened before—and why the bear had been so intent on getting into the McCrackens’ room rather than any other. It seemed to me that learning where Sasquatch had been earlier in the evening might help explain that.

“Bears can be much harder to track than a lot of other animals,” Evan told me, squinting at the ground. “People think it should be easy, because they’re so big. They assume that a big animal is going to leave giant footprints all over the place, but that’s not true. Bears walk on the soles of their feet, like we do, and the soles are soft. So unless a bear is walking over loose dirt or mud, it won’t leave a track at all.”

Evan had quickly determined that Sasquatch had come down the front path to the house from the dirt road, but tracking him down the road was proving difficult. The road was mostly hard-packed dirt, baked by the sun, so not ideal for finding tracks. We were moving along it slowly, pausing often for Evan to inspect something closely. Usually, it was a mark on the ground that didn’t look like much of anything to me.

“Now, a deer or an antelope really walks on its toes,” he explained. “A hoof is basically a giant toenail. Or sometimes two big toenails. All the weight is focused on that one point. So even though a deer is much smaller than a bear, it’s far more likely to leave a track. Plus, deer poop like crazy. So it’s not hard to see where they’ve been.” Evan pointed to the road ahead. Sure enough, there were little black pellets of deer poop everywhere. But I could also see a few hoofprints. They were pairs of lopsided triangles, like someone had pressed two carrots into the ground.

“Is it weird that Sasquatch was walking down the road?” I asked.

“Not really. Bears use the roads a lot around here. For the same reason humans do. They’re easy to travel on and they’re usually the shortest route from point A to point B. That’s why you get so many bear jams in Yellowstone. The problem is, the bears sometimes walk along the roads for miles, so it can be tough to find when they got on or off. And cars mess up the tracks.” He pointed to some tread marks in what little loose dirt there was. “This road isn’t busy, but there’s already been a few vehicles on it this morning. Looks like a few pickups and an RV.”

I gaped at him, impressed. “You can even tell what kind of cars have been down here?”

“Sometimes. Pickups tend to have different tires than regular cars, because around here, they’re often going off-road. Those tracks are wider, with thick tread marks. As for RVs, they weigh so much they make deeper tracks. Plus, the tires tend to have less tread because people drive them for hundreds of thousands of miles.”

I looked back and forth down the road. Because it served so few people, there was almost no traffic on it. We hadn’t seen a single car all morning. “If this road only goes to you and the Spooner Ranch, why would there be an RV on it?”

“Because RV drivers get lost. All the time. Even with GPS. Plus, cell service can be spotty out here. At least once a week we have someone show up at our door asking if we know how to get to Yellowstone. Or thinking that our house is their hotel.” Evan suddenly let out a gasp of surprise and pointed to the side of the road. “Hey! Look!”

I followed his command but couldn’t tell what had gotten him so excited. “What?”

“Sasquatch left some tracks!” Evan dragged me to the roadside. There, in the soft dirt of the shoulder, were a few roundish, flattened areas, each with a few smaller divots in front of it. Bear tracks.

The roundish areas were from the soles of the bear’s feet, while the smaller divots were from the pads of the toes. Each rounded part was the size of a salad plate, indicating an enormous bear. “Sasquatch?” I asked.

“It has to be. There couldn’t be two bears that big around here. They’d kill each other.”

The tracks were clear enough that even I could read them. Given the toe divots, it was easy to determine the orientation of the feet and, thus, what direction Sasquatch had been going. The bear had approached the ranch house from the south.

Sasquatch had walked along the edge of the road by the Spooner Ranch for a while, which made the job of following his trail much easier. Evan and I followed it, moving far more quickly than we had before.

The Spooner Ranch sloped uphill away from the road. They were raising bison too, although their herd looked to be smaller than the Krautheimers’. Every now and then, a bison would be grazing so close to the fence that I could have reached over and touched it. The young calves were skittish as we passed, but the older bison were nonplussed by our presence. They didn’t even look up from their grazing.

“Sorry we didn’t get to finish searching Jasmine’s room today,” Evan said. “I don’t think we’ll be able to get back in there. Arturo held on to that master key.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I just needed to see the bunkhouse. I don’t think there’s much point to searching the rooms anyhow.”

“Why not?”

“Well, if you’d gone through all the trouble to steal a necklace like that, would you just leave it in your room?”

Evan scratched his head. “I guess not. That’d be the first place anyone would look for it.”

“Exactly. I mean, there must be a million places to hide a necklace on your ranch. You could bury it and mark it with a rock, or hide it in a hollow in a tree.…”

“So then, the fact that we didn’t find the necklace in any of the ranch hands’ rooms doesn’t mean they didn’t take it.”

“Right.”

“Is there any point to searching the rooms of the other guests, then? Like Pete and Ray? Or Karina?”

“Probably not.”

“We should still search my sister’s room, though,” Evan said. “She’s evil.”

“She seems perfectly fine to me.”

“You don’t live with her. Trust me, you’re lucky to be an only child.”

The sound of hoofbeats rang through the still air.

“Speak of the devil,” Evan grumbled.

Melissa and Summer came trotting down the road. Summer was astride Powder Keg once again—the horse had fully recovered from our action that morning—while Melissa was riding Sassafras.

Evan glowered, although I suspected it was really an act. I figured having an older sister wasn’t nearly as bad as he claimed. As an only child, I often felt it would have been nice to have a sibling.

“What are you guys doing all the way out here?” Melissa asked.

“Nothing,” Evan said a little too quickly.

Both girls narrowed their eyes suspiciously.

“I haven’t seen you this far from a video game since summer vacation began,” Melissa told her brother.

“You’re investigating something, aren’t you?” Summer asked me.

“No,” I said, trying to make it sound like it was the truth.

“Don’t lie to me, Teddy,” Summer said. “It’s not cool to lie to your girlfriend. You’ve been questioning the adults all morning about what they were up to last night, and now you’re out here poking around on the edge of the road when there’s a million other things you could be doing. What are you trying to figure out?”

I weighed whether or not to keep lying to Summer. The fact was, I didn’t want to. I knew that J.J. might be upset at me for telling her the truth, but I hated the idea of keeping a secret from her. So I decided to split the difference and just leave J.J. out of it. “I’m trying to figure out what happened to your mother’s necklace.”

“We know what happened to it,” Melissa said. “Sasquatch ate it.”

“Maybe not.” I quickly laid out my questions about the case as we continued down the road, and explained why Evan and I were following Sasquatch’s tracks.

While I talked, the girls dismounted their horses and walked with us, leading the horses by their reins. When I finished, Summer said, “Well, I don’t know who took Mom’s necklace, but I think I know how they did it.”

“How?” Evan asked.

“They came through the secret underground room,” Summer said. “It goes right under our bedroom.”

“But there’s no way to get from the secret room to the bedroom,” Melissa said.

“Are you sure?” Summer asked. “The entrance you came through was pretty well hidden. So maybe there’s another doorway you don’t know about.”

Melissa and Evan considered that as we followed the tracks.

“Maybe,” Melissa finally conceded.

“No,” Evan said confidently. “There’s no way. We’ve lived in that house our whole lives. If there was another access to that room, we’d know about it.”

“Would we?” Melissa asked. “If no one had ever told us about the secret room under the kitchen, do you think we would have ever figured out it was there?”

“I would have,” Evan said defiantly, although I could hear a hint of doubt in his voice.

Summer gasped as something occurred to her. “I think the thief might have even been down there with us last night!” She turned to Melissa. “Remember when we heard that noise and you said it was probably just an animal that had gotten in? Well, maybe it was the thief! They were hiding down there, waiting for everyone to go to sleep, so they could then come up into the bedroom and steal the necklace!”

All of us considered that as we walked down the road.

“If someone did go through there to access your room,” I said, “how would they get back out through the kitchen again? Jasmine closed the trapdoor after we all came out. It was so heavy, it took three of us to lift it. And there was a table on top of it.”

Melissa and Evan both chimed agreement with this, but Summer was undaunted. “Maybe the thief was a lot stronger than us. Like Zach. I bet that guy could have lifted the trapdoor if a car was parked on top of it.”

“But it couldn’t have been Zach,” Melissa argued. “He was in the living room with everyone else when we came back out.”

“Well, someone as big as Zach, then,” Summer said, undeterred. “Was anyone missing last night when we came out of the cellar?”

“Gavin,” Evan said.

All of us looked to him, trying to recall if this was true or not.

“No,” Melissa said finally. “He was in the living room with everyone else.”

“Was he?” Evan challenged. “The guy says, like, three words a month. If he’d left the room, would anyone really have noticed?”

“We’ve known Gavin most of our lives,” Melissa countered. “He would never have stolen that necklace.”

“So your only proof is a gut instinct?” Evan asked snidely. “We don’t know Gavin. Not really. He’s never exactly been friendly.”

“He’s just quiet,” Melissa said.

Evan shrugged. “For all we know, the guy could be a drug dealer or a bank robber.”

“No way.” Melissa kicked a rock down the road. “He’s been working for Mom and Dad our whole lives. If he was a bank robber, don’t you think we’d have noticed?”

“Not if he was a really good bank robber,” Evan said. “Maybe he’s been robbing people blind the whole time and we’ve never suspected a thing.”

I said, “If he’s been robbing banks, he hasn’t been spending much money. He doesn’t have many possessions.”

“How do you know that?” Summer asked suspiciously.

“Evan told me,” I said quickly, not ready to admit that I’d been snooping around the bunkhouse.

“I did,” Evan agreed, backing me up. Then he said, “Although, not having stuff isn’t proof that Gavin’s not a criminal. A smart thief wouldn’t go off and spend all their money right away. He’d hide it somewhere.” His face suddenly lit up with excitement. “Like in the old gold mine! That’d be the perfect place! No one’s been in there in years!”

“That’s ridiculous,” Melissa told him. “Gavin is not a bank robber. Or a criminal of any kind.”

“Well, someone here must be,” Evan said. “Because Summer’s mom’s necklace got stolen last night.”

We arrived at the driveway for the Spooner Ranch. It had a much fancier entrance than the Oy Vey Corral. Two iron gates were set into stone pillars, with an SR logo on each of them. It looked as though it had been built recently. The barbed-wire fence that stretched out on both sides of the gate also looked newer than the one around the Krautheimers’ property. A surveillance camera was situated atop the stone pillar on the right. Despite all the money that had been put into the gate and the fence, the driveway to the house was still unpaved.

The dirt road between the ranches continued on into the distance.

“Does anyone else live on this road?” I asked.

“No,” Melissa replied.

“Then where does this even go?” Summer inquired.

Melissa said, “It dead-ends about three miles away, right around the Idaho border. There’s a backcountry trailhead. Some of the most incredible hiking in the area, and barely anyone visits it. All the tourists just go right into the park.”

Evan stopped walking suddenly, noticing something ahead. “Holy cow,” he gasped. “Look at their garbage shed.”

At first glance, the shed looked virtually the same as the Krautheimers’. It was a simple wooden structure designed to protect their garbage cans from bears. It was set alongside the road, close to the gate, where the garbage trucks could access it. For garbage day, the trash would have to be brought down from the house and placed there. The wooden doors had four separate latches on them to confound the bears.

But a bear had definitely tried to get in anyhow. There were dozens of claw marks furrowing the doors.

Evan hurried over to examine them. The rest of us followed him.

The furrows were a half inch deep in the wood, all in sets of four parallel lines, one for each of the bear’s claws. One of the latches had been ripped off, although the others had held. It also looked as though the front left corner of the shed had been gnawed on.

“These marks look like they were made last night,” Evan observed, then pointed to the ground. There were multiple, overlapping salad-plate-size paw prints in the loose dirt. “And that’s definitely Sasquatch.”

Summer sniffed the air. “Do you guys smell cupcakes?” she asked.

The moment she said it, I realized that I smelled it as well.

So did the others. “It’s vanilla,” Melissa said.

“Uh-oh,” Evan said. He started undoing the latches on the garbage shed.

“What’s wrong?” Summer asked him. “Is there something bad about vanilla?”

“Maybe.” Evan unlocked all the latches and swung open the shed doors.

There were four garbage bins inside, two black for regular garbage and two blue for recycling. The smell of vanilla was coming from one of the black ones. A dozen bees were buzzing around it, lured by the scent. Evan flipped up the lid.

A thick cloud of flies swarmed out. Evan peered into the bin and said, “Yeah. That’s not good.”

The rest of us joined him. The bin was mostly empty, except for some items lying at the bottom. There were several plastic wrappers for bulk hamburger meat, each having held five pounds. A few chunks of meat were still on the wrappers, which was what had drawn the flies.

There were also two empty one-gallon jugs of vanilla extract, which had attracted the bees. With the lid open, the smell of even the residual vanilla extract was extremely pungent.

“That’s a lot of vanilla extract,” Summer said. “I bake sometimes, and it’d take me years to use all that. What would anyone need that much for?”

“Bear baiting,” Melissa said, concerned.

I frowned at the very thought. Baiting is a trick, often used by hunters, to lure animals out so they can shoot them. It isn’t considered very sportsmanlike, so it’s illegal in most states.

Summer turned to Melissa, surprised. “You mean, your neighbors were trying to lure bears here?”

“Looks that way,” Evan said. “Bears love the smell of vanilla. They can detect it from miles away, so this would lure them from all over the county. And then, obviously, the meat would be to feed them.”

“Back away from the garbage,” said an angry voice behind us.

Evan and Melissa stiffened, as though they recognized the voice—and feared it. Evan dropped the lid shut and we slowly turned around.

One of the biggest men I had ever seen in my life stood on the other side of the fence on the Spooner Ranch. He looked to be in his forties. His shoulders were as broad as an ox’s, his muscles bulged beneath his shirt, and he had an angry scowl on his face.

But the thing that really concerned me was that he was aiming a shotgun at us.