GRACE DOUBLE-CHECKED HER GEAR: FLASHLIGHT, MATCHES, pocket knife, caving rope, rock hammer, and gloves—all there. She grabbed her trusty Dalhousie University baseball cap. Her thoughts flipped back to the day her dad had given it to her. She squeezed her eyes tight and tried to stop the memory from coming. The strategy usually worked, but not this time. It had been three months ago, on her birthday—the worst day of her life.
That morning he’d made her favourite breakfast, blueberry pancakes.
“Here’s part one of your present,” he’d said after she’d blown out the candles on her pancakes and they’d eaten so much they could hardly move. He’d pulled out a baseball cap that was embroidered with the letters DAL, short for Dalhousie. It was identical to the one he’d worn every day. He had earned his doctorate in geology at Dalhousie and she was going to do the same.
“I love it,” she’d said.
Then he’d left for work with his trusty fossil bag over his shoulder, just like every other day. It had seemed so normal, but it was the last time she’d ever seen him.
She had anxiously waited for him to come home that night. There had been a knock on the door and she’d run to open it. Her smile had quickly faded as she stared in shock at two police officers.
Her mother had sent her upstairs.
Shore Road. Car crash. Ocean. No body. The words had drifted up to her as she huddled in her room.
Now, as she packed her fossil-hunting gear in her bag, she felt the sting of tears, just as she had that fateful evening. Shaking her head, Grace tried again to rattle the memory to the back of her brain—into that dark corner where she locked away all those memories. This time it obediently returned to its hiding place and she sighed with relief.
KCHHHHH!
Grace’s walkie-talkie squawked loudly. It must be Fred, finally. She’d told him to radio her as soon as he got home.
“Fred, come in,” Grace said into the walkie-talkie. Within seconds, there was an answering crackle.
“Roger, Grace. Fred here.”
“Radio Jeeter and Mai. Tell them to meet us at Black Hole in thirty minutes.” Grace paused, trying to calm her stuttering heartbeat. “It’s an emergency!”
“What’s going on?”
“I’ll fill you in later. Get moving, okay?”
“Sure thing, Grace. Over.”
Grace flung her battered backpack over her shoulder, grabbed her hat, and raced out the door. “Darn,” she muttered, making a U-turn back into the house. She ran to the kitchen counter and scribbled a note for her mother:
Gone to Jessica’s to study. Math test. Back by nine. Yes, I ate already. Love, G.
This should cover my tracks for a few hours, Grace thought. A shiver of guilt rippled through her as she re-read the note. Well, it wasn’t a total lie. She had eaten already. She slapped the note on the fridge and headed out the side door. Of course Mr. Stuckless was watching from his window.
“Hi, Mr. Stuckless!” Grace waved and gritted a smile at their next-door neighbour as she passed by his window. Nosy old goat, she thought, backing her bike out of the garage. He must be stuck to that window. He probably has a portable toilet under him so he never has to move! She hopped on her bike and coasted slowly down her driveway.
She picked up speed and was soon flying down Queen Street. Without a thought, she took her hands off the handlebars to put on her hat and reached up to tug her long blonde ponytail through the back of it. Hands dangling at her sides, she thought about what had happened that day. Her head was spinning. Who could have done it?
Playing the day back in her mind, she tried to remember the last time she’d been at her locker. Had there been anyone hanging around? She couldn’t say for sure, but she didn’t think so.
Grace was so lost in thought as she zipped down Pitt Street that she nearly missed the turnoff. Checking behind her to make sure no one was watching, she veered past a pair of rusted gates with a faded danger sign and onto a forgotten path that ran through an overgrown field called the heaps. Gangly alders and tall elephant ear plants immediately hid the streets from view.
She cycled slowly and scanned the ground with her eyes, always on the lookout for sinkholes. They could appear anywhere, even here in the fields where the old coal wash plant used to be.
Perched above a spiderweb of coal seams at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in Cape Breton, the town of Sydney Mines had a labyrinth of coal mining tunnels—both commercial and illegal bootleg tunnels—running beneath its surface. The commercial mines were hundreds of metres deep and stretched for kilometres out under the ocean, but they had been shut down for many years. They had been flooded with sea water long ago. The bootleg tunnels were usually shallower, and often ran directly from miners’ backyards into the coal seams. As the years went by, the miners had kept digging under their homes, making longer and wider tunnels to extract more coal. For many of the poverty-stricken residents of Sydney Mines, illegal mining had been the only way they could heat their homes and survive. The tunnels were long since abandoned, their coal extracted. Some of them had collapsed.
Coal also meant fossils and there were plenty of those in Sydney Mines too, if you knew where to look. Grace had been a fossil hunter practically since she could walk. Back then her dad used to call it hunting for dinosaur bones. He would take her to Lachman’s Beach, where it was flat and sandy. She’d found her first fern fossil there. Her dad had chipped it out of a large piece of broken slate with his rock hammer. Grace had proudly donated it to the fossil museum when it first opened.
Several years ago, Grace had taken Mai and Fred to the museum to show them all the fossils she’d donated. As soon as Fred had seen her name on the “Donated by” plaque, he’d decided he wanted to have his name on a plaque too. They’d been fossil-hunting together ever since.
Grace, Mai, and Fred had found this perfect clubhouse last year. They’d been cutting across the heaps one day, when Fred had almost fallen in a sinkhole. The hole had been created by the earth collapsing over an abandoned bootleg mine. When they’d climbed down to investigate, they’d been amazed to discover tunnels at the bottom they could walk through.
Before they found Black Hole, Grace and her friends’ fossil hunts had been above ground at places like Lachman’s Beach, Florence Beach, Sutherland’s Corner, and the old strip mine at Halfway Road. Exploring the bootleg mining tunnels that were connected to Black Hole was way more exciting than hunting for fossils along the beaches. Many of the bootleg mines stretched all the way under the town. But rooting around in illegal caves was much more dangerous than fossil-hunting on the beaches. Grace knew it; they all did.
Ducking behind a huge oak tree, Grace hid her bike behind some foliage and skidded down a nearby bank. At the bottom of the slope was a pile of old lumber. Grace carefully moved the pieces of wood aside, revealing the hidden entrance to Black Hole.
Grace turned on the electric lantern she and her friends kept at the entrance and soon the inky walls of the mine were bathed in a soft glow. Deeper in the cave she could see the outline of the logs they had set up as benches and the rough wooden table they’d made. Fossils and other treasures they’d found on past expeditions were tucked in scattered hollows of the cavern walls.
As Grace waited for her friends, the sounds of water gurgling in the brook that ran through the hideaway and the slow drip of water trickling down from the ceiling were the only noises interrupting the silence until—
“Ouch!”
“Good grief, Fred. Do you have to hit your head on that log every time?”
“Come off it, Mai. It’s not every time.”
Grace sighed in exasperation. “Will you guys keep it down?” she frowned at her bickering best friends as they entered the cave. “It’s supposed to be our secret headquarters!”
“Well, blame Fred—he makes such a racket,” Mai said, brushing dirt from one of the logs before perching daintily on its edge. Her smooth caramel skin glowed in the shadowy light.
“Where’s Jeeter?” asked Grace.
“He said he’d be here later,” Fred replied, tossing his pack on the wooden table with one hand and hauling up his baggy jeans with the other. “I told him to come right away, but he didn’t seem too worried about it.”
“What’s the big rush?” Mai asked. “Fred said it was an emergency, but I figured he must have been exaggerating, as usual.” She tucked her shiny black locks behind her ear and threw Fred a playfully mocking look.
Grace grinned at Mai. It was so easy to get Fred going—it had been ever since they’d all become best friends a hundred years ago, way back in grade three.
Fred muttered something about not being appreciated and began digging around in his backpack. His chunky build and round cheeks were telltale signs of his favourite hobby: munching on chocolate. He pulled out three bars and tossed one to Grace.
She tossed it back. “Allergic to peanuts, remember? One bite and I’d be barfing my guts up.”
“Oops, sorry,” he said, grabbing another. “So what’s going on, Grace?”
Grace’s face turned serious as she ripped open her chocolate bar wrapper. Tension bubbled back to the surface as she answered. “You’re not going to believe this!”
Mai leaned forward. “What?”
Grace tossed a piece of paper onto the table. “I found this in my locker today.”
Mai gasped and Fred’s mouth stopped mid-chew as they read the note:
