“What time should I pick you up?” Dad is driving the others and me to the Lighthouse trailhead in a few minutes. We’ve gathered in our living room.
“Oh, we didn’t talk about that.” I look toward X and Glinda. They’re the ones who know how far we need to go to return the Plano points.
“Five o’clock, Lucas,” X says. “Pick us up at the trailhead at five.”
“A little late in the day to finish a hike,” Dad says, frowning slightly. “But I need to run into town to respond to an e-mail. I’ll do that and be back for you at five o’clock.”
Respond to an e-mail . . . That means he got a job offer. Where, I wonder.
Dad looks at each of us. “Everyone have plenty of water? Food?”
“I got plenty,” Bobby Ray says.
“He always has plenty of everything,” Héctor says. “’Specially toilet paper.”
Dad laughs. “Well, all right then. Get in the truck. I’ll be right out.”
The trailhead is busy with hikers, bikers and horseback riders.
“You bring the points?” X whispers. He’s walking behind me. Héctor’s in front. Glinda’s in the lead, with Bobby Ray close behind.
“In my pack—and you’re not getting your hands on them till we get there. You’ll take off running and leave the rest of us in your dust.”
I hear quiet laughter behind me.
Our hiking boots make a loud scuffing sound. The other people on the trail are taking their time. Looking at the cliffs, the marshmallow clouds on the horizon. Listening to birds sing, looking through binoculars at wildlife. But not us. The U-Turn Crime Stoppers Society is on a mission.
“Let’s take a break,” Bobby Ray wheezes.
We’ve been walking almost an hour, and Glinda has set a fast pace. For a girl with short legs, she’s a speed demon.
“Plenty of time for a break on the way back,” she says, tromping ahead.
When we reach a place on the trail that runs alongside a dry creek bed, Glinda hesitates, looking at X.
“Yeah,” he says, nodding. “This looks like it.”
“Finally,” Bobby Ray says, collapsing on a boulder.
X walks up to me, holding out a palm. “Hand ’em over, Warden Cassie.”
“Warden? I’m nothing like her.”
“Oh, yeah?” He raises an eyebrow at me.
I look around cautiously before unzipping a pocket on my backpack, but the stretch of the trail we’re on is quiet. Even though I’ve wrapped the points in tissue to protect them, I handle them carefully.
“Wait,” I whisper, looking X in the eyes. “I, uh, I’m sorry I acted like una fresa. It was the tattoos. I thought they meant you were in a gang.”
“Una fresa?” he says, grinning.
I feel my cheeks start to burn. “Héctor’s teaching me Spanish.”
Glancing at his tattoos, he shrugs. “My friends were doing it. So, you know.”
“Yeah,” I say, nodding. “I do know.”
“Show us,” Glinda says, walking up close to us. “Let us see the points, too.”
“Wow, five thousand years old.” Bobby Ray touches one of the points with a fingertip.
“Yeah, and see how pretty they are.” I turn one of the points so it reflects the light.
“Look,” Glinda says. “There’s patterns in them, like miniature landscapes.”
“Okay, c’mon, Héctor.” X slips the points into his pocket. “The rest of you keep watch. You need to warn us, screech like a red-tailed hawk. I’ll do a meadowlark call when we get back there.” He points out a cluster of mesquite. “You answer like another meadowlark when it’s all clear.”
He and Héctor walk quickly across the dry creek and disappear in thick mesquite and sagebrush.
“Meadowlark,” Bobby Ray says, looking at me. “What’s its call sound like?”
Glinda just rolls her eyes.
Bobby Ray decides to take a water break, accompanied with two granola bars, the diet kind, of course, so Glinda and I end up standing watch.
“You look that way,” Glinda says, pointing up the trail. “I’ll watch down this way. And keep your field glasses in your hand so people will think we’re bird-watching. Whatever you do, don’t arouse the suspicions of a park ranger. They’ll be on the trails, too.”
Birds don’t interest me. I focus my binoculars instead on the Lighthouse, which isn’t far away. I even spot the trail on the canyon wall that Dad climbed down. As I follow the canyon wall to where we’re standing, I see other animal trails leading down from the rim. Dozens of them.
“Ohmigosh—” I watch a tawny streak racing up a nearby trail.
“What?” Glinda rushes to my side. “You see a park ranger?”
“No—a bobcat. I saw a bobcat.”
Her shoulders sag in relief. “Geez, you scared the pee out of me.” She looks up and down the trail. “You notice how empty the trail is?”
No one’s in sight, in either direction. “Where’d everybody go?”
“I don’t think that’s the right question,” Glinda says, her forehead wrinkling. “Why’d they go is what’s worrying me.”
“Kind of late in the day,” Bobby Ray says, joining us. “Probably headed back to eat supper.”
Glinda frowns. “It’s not that late.”
A niggling buzz starts up in my head, like a pesky fly that won’t leave me alone. I train my field glasses on the sky. The marshmallow clouds on the horizon look like they’ve been toasted over a campfire. More black than white.
“Uh-oh, check out those clouds.”
“Aw, man,” Glinda mutters. “That’s not good.”
Bobby Ray looks where we’re looking. “Oh, crap. You bring a rain slicker? I did, I got one.” He starts fumbling with his pack.
“Hold up. If they get back here quick, you might not need it.” Glinda looks toward the creek bed. “Where are they?”
“Yeah.” Bobby Ray looks at his watch. “They’ve been gone a long time.”
I check my watch, too. “Dad’s supposed to pick us up in an hour. We barely have enough time to get back to the trailhead.”
Ten minutes pass. It starts to sprinkle.
“You hear any birds?” I whisper.
Glinda and Bobby Ray swivel their necks, listening.
“The clouds are getting darker, too,” Bobby Ray says.
I look toward the horizon, what there is of it. The canyon walls are so close, not much sky shows.
“Look.” Glinda points up the creek bed. The sand is turning darker between the rocks. “That’s water seeping from upstream. Must be pouring up there.”
“We have to go get them.” I step into the creek bed. “We won’t get across this creek if we don’t go now.”
We encounter X and Héctor not long after we leave the trail. X is carrying Héctor on his back.
“What took you so long—?” Glinda spots the bloody sock wrapped around Héctor’s right leg.
“Did he get snake-bit?” Bobby Ray says. “Oh, geez, did you suck out the blood?”
“Not a snake bite,” X says. “Héctor had a hard time finding the exact spots where he found the points. I think the archaeologists had done more digging.” He pauses, setting Héctor on a rock. “Then he fell off a boulder and stabbed his leg on a mesquite stump.”
Opening his backpack, Bobby Ray pulls out a small first-aid kit. “My mom’s a nurse. She makes me carry this everywhere. I never got to use it before.”
“Wow,” Glinda says, examining the kit. “That’s cool.”
Bobby Ray looks at Héctor. “This is going to hurt, but I have to do it.” Removing the improvised bandage, he pours water over the wound, then sprays it with antiseptic spray.
“Does it hurt, Héctor?” I sit down next to him.
“A little.” His face looks pale.
Bobby Ray puts a clean dressing on Héctor’s leg and wraps it with an Ace Bandage. “There, all done.”
“We need to hurry.” X looks in the direction we came from. “That creek will flood.”
“Too late,” Glinda says. “It’s probably impassable already.”
Given her size, Glinda wouldn’t be able to ford anything too deep. Héctor, either. Any of us, for that matter. I remember hearing somewhere that it doesn’t take a lot of water to knock someone off their feet.
“Yeah, we can’t go back that way.” I look at Glinda. “What do we do? Which way do we go?”
“Nowhere—we stay put,” Bobby Ray says. “You read that in all the safety bulletins. If you get lost, stay put.”
“Yeah,” Glinda says. “I bet they’ve already put the word out on their two-ways. They’ll come find us.”
“But we can’t stay here,” X says. “They find us here, they’ll know we were the ones that took the points and brought them back.”
Héctor’s eyes well up. “I don’t want to go to jail. . . .”
I look at Glinda again. “You said the Lighthouse Trail connected with lots of others. Which one’s the closest?”
“I . . . I’m not sure. I never left a trail before. And the brush is so thick.” She turns in a slow circle. “I don’t know where we are . . . exactly.”
No one speaks. The clouds on the horizon get bigger. The sky changes to a greenish gray. The air turns cold.
Bobby Ray looks at us, his eyes huge. “We need to find shelter.”
“We go up,” I say, looking at the canyon wall where I saw the bobcat. “We climb to the rim. There’s an old house up there where we can wait out the storm.”
I lead off, jogging toward the canyon wall. “Hurry! We have to make it up before that storm reaches us.”