“I thought you were a ghost,” Raleigh said for what must have been the twentieth time since we’d knocked on the door. “My god, you look so much like him. You look exactly the way he looked when I met him.” He stared at Zander for a long moment, then looked away. “What are you kids doing here, anyway?” He looked up at Pucci, who was inspecting the clutter of knickknacks on his mantel. There were four huge candelabras, one on each wall, tall wax candles burning away in them, and the faded red wallpaper was scarred by old ports and wires that had once connected to the Muller Machines.
“We’re kind of in trouble, Raleigh,” I told him. “BNDL’s looking for us and there’s this map and we thought maybe you could tell us if Dad ever went to Arizona, to a place called Drowned Man’s Canyon.”
Raleigh was sitting straight up in his chair, staring at us. “BNDL? Drowned Man’s Canyon?” he asked. “Tell me everything.”
I did, leaving out the part about the man with the clockwork hand. The Explorer had risked a lot to get the map to us, and I think we had all started feeling protective of him.
When I was finished, Raleigh looked up. “I’ll say you’re in a lot of trouble. These people are very dangerous.” He ran a hand through his crazy hair, not meeting our eyes, and tucked a new wad of dramleaf behind his lower lip. I could see the relaxation wash over his face as it took effect. “You shouldn’t be fooling around with these things.”
“But what are ‘these things’?” I asked him. “We can’t figure it out. Obviously they think that Dad made a secret map and that he knew where the treasure is. But there isn’t anything on the map. Did he know about the treasure of Drowned Man’s Canyon, Raleigh? Did he go there?”
Raleigh didn’t say anything. He just wheeled himself over to the fireplace and poked at the fire halfheartedly. He had regular firewood—Raleigh had inherited a lot of money when his parents died and he must have been able to buy firewood on the black market—but it wasn’t a very good fire and the room was quite cold.
When he turned around, his eyes settled on Zander. “I still can’t believe how much you look like him,” he said again. Zander smiled, embarrassed. I just felt irritated, the way I always did when people commented on Zander and Dad’s similarity. But then Raleigh looked at me and said, “And damned if you don’t look exactly like Veronique. ‘Nika,’ I always called her. God how I miss her. Him, too.” Raleigh’s eyes filled with tears and we looked away while he got ahold of himself.
“In answer to your question,” he went on after a long moment, “yes, your father went to Arizona, looking for the treasure. In fact…” He started to wheel himself over to a big bureau on the other side of the room and then stopped and said, “Kit, do me a favor and open the second drawer from the top. There should be a stack of photographs there.” I opened the drawer and started hunting under the piles of envelopes and mail for the photos. “This chair isn’t working well,” Raleigh said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with it.”
“Don’t you have a set of IronLegs?” M.K. asked him. Zander and I glanced at each other. I’d wondered why Raleigh was using the old-fashioned chair, too, but neither of us had had the nerve to ask.
“Ah, they’re over there, against the wall.” He pointed to the mechanical brass braces leaning up against the far wall. “They don’t work, either.” He smiled sheepishly. “Nothing works around here. Your father had a knack for mechanics. I don’t. I should get them to a shop, but I just…” Raleigh looked embarrassed. “I don’t know. I can’t seem to get around to it. It’s not like I have anywhere to go. Maybe I should become a Neo and use one of their crazy devices.” We’d heard about strange new leg braces made by Neo engineers that allowed the user to stand and walk without any clanking or awkwardness.
“I’ll take a look,” M.K. said. “I’m good at things like that.” She went over and started inspecting the braces as I found the stack of photos and brought them to Raleigh.
“Here we go,” Raleigh said. He flipped through them and laid a couple down on the table. “We shouldn’t have kept these pictures, of course. But your dad had some film from somewhere and he knew how to develop it. That’s why I keep them hidden. Anyway, there we are: the treasure hunters.”
The picture showed three young men laughing into the camera, squinting against the bright sun that washed everything with a bleached, sandy light. I recognized Dad right away, even without his beard. He was the tallest of the three, his blond hair almost white from the sun, his eyes crinkling with happiness, but only a small smile on his lips. I would have known Raleigh, too; even then he’d had a roundness that was the opposite of Dad’s tall slimness. Raleigh’s brown hair was cut short and he was grinning from ear to ear, looking as though he’d just told a dirty joke. The other boy in the picture had light hair like Dad, a pointy chin, and thin, rangy build. He was making a funny face and holding a walking stick. “That’s our school friend John Beauregard,” Raleigh said. “What a group we were. We’d heard about the golden treasure of Drowned Man’s Canyon and we were convinced we were going to find it. We’d practically started spending the money. Your father and I were going to use it to finance a trip to the New North Polar Sea. Hah! We didn’t find it, of course, but we sure had a good time trying.”
Raleigh pointed to another picture of Dad, leaning against a solid rock face. “There he is, the intrepid explorer. It was the summer after our second year at the Academy. We hitched rides, jumped trains, whatever we had to do. It was easier to get around then. The government didn’t care so much about what people did. Took us three weeks to get out there.”
“But obviously you didn’t find the treasure,” Zander asked after he’d gone through all the photos.
“No, but your dad had some ideas,” Raleigh said. “It was the legend of Dan Foley that first got us interested in Drowned Man’s Canyon, but there were all kinds of other stories about that part of Arizona, crazy stories…” He trailed off.
“What stories?” M.K. asked, looking up from the leg braces, which she’d disassembled on the carpet.
“Oh, weird things. Some people think that there are aliens in the canyon, or that a race of giant ant people lives in tunnels inside the rocks. We met an Indian guide who told us that the ghost of Dan Foley haunts the canyon, that there are other ghosts that appear in the night and take you away. I have to admit, some of those stories scared the bejeezus out of me. But your father was very interested in them. He said it showed there was something there.” Raleigh waited for a minute before saying, “He believed there was a secret, undiscovered canyon somewhere near Drowned Man’s, a canyon that contained Dan Foley’s treasure. And he believed the stories supported the idea that it was there. Not that they were true, but that the stories had been created to keep people out of the canyon. He went back to Drowned Man’s Canyon, you know, just before he met your mother. Nika.”
There was a long, thick silence. “Do you remember her at all?” he asked us finally.
“A little,” Zander and I said at the same time. M.K. didn’t say anything; she’d been only a few months old when our mother had died.
“He was so in love with her. She was so in love with him, too. She was smart, Nika, one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. She understood all about the Muller Machines, how they worked, how they had malfunctioned. Your dad was so proud of her.”
“He never talked about her,” I said angrily. “It was like she never existed at all. I didn’t even know that, about the Muller Machines. He never told us that.”
“It broke his heart,” Raleigh said simply. “I think it hurt too much even to say her name.” He took a deep breath. “Anyway. He went out there again. Alone.”
I wanted to ask him more about our mother, but instead I took the two pieces of the map out and laid them on the table.
“There aren’t any other canyons here,” Zander said. “But maybe he made this map before he’d found it.”
“If he had found the treasure,” Raleigh said, “we would have heard about it. Your father was scrupulous about bringing his findings to museums.”
I looked at the picture of the three boys again. They were standing in front of a desert landscape, red-brown rocks and a waterfall behind them. A dark shadow fell across the right-hand side of the picture. “Wait a second, Raleigh,” I said. “Who took this picture of the three of you? There’s a shadow there.”
Raleigh looked surprised. “Oh, didn’t I tell you? There were four of us. Your father and John and I and…”
A dark look passed across his face as though he was remembering something especially unpleasant. “Leo Nackley.”