Return to Black Bear Mountain Read online

  “Bro, you can fondle the flora later. We’ve kinda got an urgent mystery to solve, in case you hadn’t noticed,” I chastised him.

  “Oh, that’s not all I noticed,” he said with a cocky grin. “I think Aleksei may have planted a clue to where his hideouts are.”

  “I feel like there’s a bad pun in there, but I don’t quite catch it,” I said, wondering what Frank was up to. “I know those are one of the non-native flowers Aleksei brought with him from Siberia, but we already established that.”

  “We know he planted a bunch of the seeds to make the mountain feel more like home when he first got here, but what if they’re not just decorative? What if…” Frank got up and dashed another few yards down the hill.

  This time I ran after him. His destination? Another identical yellow-flowered shrub exactly twenty feet away.

  “They’re trail markers!” I said.

  “We’ve passed patches around the mountain with a variety of different Ural Mountain plants where Aleksei cultivated little flower gardens in the woods. And there are other places where they’ve gone wild and are scattered around randomly—” Frank began, but by this time I knew exactly where he was going.

  “Only these are spaced at precise intervals with only regular native plants growing around them in between.”

  “There’s so much other vegetation around here that to an untrained eye, it just looks like normal mountain forest. Only someone who already knew what to look for would notice the pattern in the anomalous specimens.” Frank grinned proudly. “That or an expertly attuned naturalist.”

  “My apologies for ever doubting you, bro,” I said. “If I could give you an honorary doctorate in flower power, I would.”

  “Let’s follow the Yellow Shrub Trail!” he said, marching ahead.

  “Just please tell me Black Bear Mountain doesn’t have evil flying monkeys, because skunks and bears are bad enough,” I groaned. “Oh, and I refuse to skip.”

  The trail grew harder to follow as the brush grew thicker, and there were some other, smaller baby shrubs here and there, where seeds must have fallen naturally. Sure enough, though, there was a bigger one of the same size every twenty feet.

  I didn’t have to skip to follow the trail, but I did have to whack. The brush soon grew thick enough that the only option was to hack our way through with my hatchet.

  “This job would be a lot easier with a machete,” I griped.

  We’d planned the trip knowing we might have to do some bushwhacking, and we’d packed a machete for just that purpose—only we packed it in the bag the bear ran off with.

  “I really hate that bear right about now,” Frank muttered as he disentangled himself from yet another thornbush.

  Every so often we’d get a faint whiff of skunk. I couldn’t tell if the smell was just stuck up my nostrils or what. I know it’s not unusual for the woods—this was skunk home turf, after all—but it was still disconcerting after our recent Close Encounter of the Stinky Kind. Knowing our luck so far, there were probably skunks sleeping under every rock, just waiting for us to step on them so they could spray us.

  Thankfully, if there were, we didn’t see them. The other thing we didn’t see was Aleksei’s hideout. We hadn’t seen much of anything except for trees and dense undergrowth.

  “Talk about off the beaten path,” I groaned, my socks squishing inside my boots from the overgrown marsh we’d just trudged through.

  We were covered in dirt, sweat, and scratches, and I was just about to toss down my hatchet and take a nap under one of Aleksei’s yellow-starred shrubs when we finally emerged from the brush.

  “Finally, a change of scenery,” Frank said, picking one of the little yellow flowers from the trail-marking shrub at the edge of the brush.

  Twenty feet later we found ourselves on the edge of a little ravine with a large fallen tree stretched across it like a bridge. What we didn’t find was another yellow, star-flowered shrub.

  “Either the Yellow Shrub Trail is a dead end—” I began.

  “Or Aleksei has a hideout on the other side of that ravine,” Frank finished optimistically. He pointed to a neat row of tall bushes. “See how those elder bushes are growing in a line? They wouldn’t grow that way naturally. Someone had to plant them. I bet what we’re looking for is on the other side!”

  “Well, let’s go find out,” I said, stepping carefully onto the fallen tree. I’d had one tree almost fall on me today; I didn’t want to fall off another one.

  When we pushed through the bushes on the other side, there was a tiny, vine-covered cabin. It was well enough camouflaged that you’d never see it from a distance, and even if you stumbled right upon it, you might not notice it unless you were already looking.

  “That’s it!” Frank mouthed excitedly. We didn’t know what we would find inside, and it was best not to announce our presence.

  Brush had grown up around it like it hadn’t been tended in a while. When we stepped closer, you could see where it had been recently stepped on and pushed aside by a large animal. Or a person. And from the way the disturbed brush led straight to the closed front door, I was betting on the latter. I tried peeking through one of the vine-covered windows, but the shutters were closed, blocking my view. We were going to have to go in blind.

  I gently placed my hand on the door and looked at Frank, who nodded. Then I pushed, and the door opened with a groan.

  And then… silence. The cabin was empty.

  It was also itty-bitty. There was a stone fireplace against the back wall, a little built-in table on one side, a wooden sleeping loft barely large enough for someone Aleksei’s size to squeeze into on the other side, and a couple of bare shelves.

  “I know tiny houses are all the rage, but this kinda makes me question the trend, especially for a dude as big as Aleksei,” I commented. Our burly friend had a big heart and an even bigger body. “This is barely bigger than a cubby for someone his size.”

  “Judging by all the dust and mouse droppings, I don’t think anyone has used it for a long time,” Frank said, squatting down to examine one of the boot prints in the dust. “Until the last few days, that is. These prints are fresh.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed as I puzzled over the trail in the dust. “And they lead in one direction. Straight to the fireplace. Whoever entered never left.”

  I could feel the hairs on my arm rise from the weirdness of it.

  “There aren’t exactly a lot of places they could have gone,” Frank observed, looking around the claustrophobic little space. “Not unless they climbed up the chimney.”

  “Either that, or this tiny house isn’t as tiny as it seems,” I said, thinking about one of Aleksei’s other hobbies.

  We both smiled as we pulled out our flashlights and knelt down by the fireplace to investigate the stone for anything that looked or felt out of place. I had to reach my arm as far up the chimney as it would go before I felt the chain.

  I yanked. Stone creaked against stone as the fireplace floor rose.

  We knew Aleksei was fond of traps and disguises. His tiny cabin in the woods contained both. The fireplace was really a trapdoor.

  8 BIG THINGS, SMALL PACKAGES

  FRANK

  LOOKS LIKE ALEKSEI’S TINY HOUSE isn’t so tiny after all,” I said, shining my flashlight through the fireplace trapdoor into the enormous cavern below.

  “Whoa, he must have built the cabin right on top of an entrance to a natural cave system.” Joe stepped onto the rope ladder attached to the inside wall. “Here goes something.”

  “Be right down,” I called, as Joe reached the bottom. First I wanted to close the cabin’s front door so as not to tip off anyone who might be tracking us. A gust of breeze carried the smell of forest flowers into the cabin. That and skunk.

  I shook off my sense of unease and followed Joe through the trapdoor. A second chain dangled next to the ladder. I gave it a tug and the trapdoor closed back up again. Aleksei sure made inventive use of all those decades of mounta
in seclusion.

  The cavern was ten times the size of the cabin and three times as high, with an arched opening at one end that looked like it might lead to a side passage. There was a handmade bed at the other end of the cavern, along with jars of preserved and dried food and a few cracked glass jugs that might have once contained water. Partially burned candles had been set into little cubbies in the cavern walls.

  “Looks like this was Aleksei’s doomsday cave,” Joe said. “And from the look of these boot tracks, he wasn’t the only one to use it.”

  “Someone else has definitely been here very recently,” I agreed, noting how the dirt had been swept aside near the bed as if someone had pushed it and then moved it back—which was exactly what I did next.

  Hidden underneath was a square hole about four inches by four inches in size. Nestled inside was a little wooden chest.

  “I think you’ll want to see this,” I called to Joe, who was exploring the opening on the other side of the cavern.

  I waited until he was by my side to pull the box from the hole and lift the lid. I knew instantly from the rainbow twinkle of prismatic light that refracted back when Joe’s flashlight hit it that this was where Aleksei’s demantoid garnets had been. Why do I say had been? Because the only thing left was some sparkling green garnet dust at the bottom of the box.

  “The gems are gone,” Joe said. “And I think I know who took them.”

  He shined his light down at the boot prints leading away from the garnets’ hiding spot. “I noticed a pattern in the boot tracks over by that opening.”

  The pattern jumped out at me now that I knew to look for it. “The right boot makes a distinct track, while the left boot leaves a slight drag mark behind it.” I took a second to think about what it meant. “Whoever was here had a limp.”

  Joe nodded at me encouragingly. Then I had it. “Dr. K!” I declared. I walked toward the opening, trying to discern more clues from the boot prints.

  “The tracks move around the cave like he was here for a while before leaving. We know from the one-way tracks in the cabin that he came in the front door but didn’t exit,” I deduced. I shined my light into the opening, illuminating the entrance to a naturally occurring subterranean tunnel that twisted out of the cavern into darkness. “This tunnel passage is the only other exit I see. Dr. K must have gone down here—wherever it leads.”

  “You don’t think Dr. Kroopnik could have stolen the garnets for himself, do you?” Joe asked. “He’s Aleksei’s best friend.”

  “I—I don’t know. This wouldn’t be the first time someone staged their own disappearance on Black Bear Mountain in order to get away with a crime. It’s straight out of Aleksei’s playbook, actually. We’re going to have to locate Max to find out.” I turned my flashlight back toward the tunnel opening.

  We were both stepping in that direction when the sound of the cabin door closing carried down to us from above. We froze and looked up at the trapdoor. What we heard next was the muted thud of footsteps on the cabin’s plank floor. There was also a slight draft of breeze drifting down into the cavern from the fireplace. It carried with it the unmistakable odor of skunk.

  “That sure doesn’t sound like a skunk,” Joe whispered nervously.

  It suddenly hit me why the faint odor of skunk we kept smelling on the bushwhacking trek to the cabin had unsettled me so much. It wasn’t skunk we were smelling. It was whoever had gotten sprayed by the skunk we’d run into in Dr. K’s research station.

  “That has to be the perp who ransacked Dr. K’s lab,” I whispered with a sinking feeling in my gut. “They must have been tracking us from a distance with binoculars the whole time. We led them right here.”

  Joe winced at our gaffe. “It’s not going to take Stinky long to see the tracks going in but not out and reach the same conclusion we did about the trapdoor in the fireplace.”

  The footsteps stopped right at the fireplace. The next thing we heard was the cold metallic CLICK-CLACK of a gun being racked.

  I gulped. My Swiss Army knife and Joe’s hatchet weren’t going to do us much good against a gun-wielding assailant.

  “Time to make our exit,” Joe said, echoing my thoughts.

  “Hopefully the exit is down here,” I said, making a beeline for the opening. “Because that’s our only option.”

  Our footsteps echoed off the stone walls as we snaked our way through the narrow tunnel toward an unknown destination.

  “I see light!” Joe called a few minutes later as the sound of the perp’s footsteps began to echo into the underground lair from somewhere behind us.

  Sure enough, there was an exit straight ahead. Vines cascaded over it from the outside like a natural curtain, disguising it from view. A handmade wooden grate that Aleksei must have used to keep animals out had been pushed aside.

  “Freedom!” I exclaimed, my heart lightening as I parted the vines, allowing the fresh breeze to sweep away the stale cave air and sunlight to pierce the darkness, temporarily blinding me.

  “Um, by freedom, did you mean the side of a sheer cliff with no way down?” Joe asked dubiously from behind me as I blinked the spots away from my eyes.

  I instantly wished I hadn’t, because I was looking straight down at a fifty-foot drop into a canyon filled with sharp rocks.

  9 NOWHERE TO GO BUT DOWN

  JOE

  THE CAVE DR. K USED AS an escape route didn’t just lead to a dead end. It led to a dead drop. A torn bit of rope dangled from a rusty piton that had been driven into the lip of the cave. There had been a way down. Once. I had no way of knowing how long the rope had been, but it must have led to a place where someone could safely descend the cliff. Wherever that place was, we couldn’t see it, let alone try to reach it.

  “How did Max make it down without the rope?” I wondered aloud.

  “I’m a little more concerned with how we’re going to make it down,” Frank fretted as the echo of Stinky’s footsteps through the cave grew closer. We had a few minutes at most to devise an escape.

  A flash of white fabric caught my eye in the trees on the other side of the canyon. I quickly unzipped our remaining backpack and pulled out my cell phone. The phone may have been useless without reception, but the camera still worked.

  “You’re taking pictures?!” Frank squeaked.

  “Just getting a closer look,” I said, zooming in as far as the camera would go. “The bear took our binoculars, so I’m improvising.”

  The white object grew larger as I zoomed. At first I thought it was a white sheet tangled up in the limbs, but as I got closer, the cords dangling from the edges came into view. “I think I know how Max got down. He jumped.”

  “He what?!”

  “With a parachute.”

  “He didn’t leave two others lying around, did he?” Frank crouched down and began looking for something in the pack. “If we don’t do something fast, we’re done for.” He stood up, holding one of the emergency flares the bear had graciously left behind. “Hopefully this will slow Stinky down.”

  I grinned. “Nice thinking.”

  He ran a few yards back down the tunnel, lit the flare, and tossed it as far as he could. A thick cloud of smoke instantly filled the back of the cave. All that smoke in such a confined space would definitely leave our pursuer coughing, and might even force whoever it was back until it cleared.

  I lay on my stomach, stuck my head out of the cave entrance, and peered down. Heights don’t usually bother me, but looking down at the jagged rocks in the canyon far below made my head spin. I took a deep breath to center myself and studied the cliff, looking for an alternate way down that didn’t involve plunging to our doom.

  There was no way to see it standing up, but from my stomach, I could tell that the cliff face didn’t drop straight down from the cave. The lip of the cave jutted out a few feet like a little awning over a narrow ledge hidden behind the vines about ten feet below. If we could get down to it, we might be able to find another route off the cliff. Or at
least maybe a place to hide. Only there was no way to climb down from where we were—not with the rope Aleksei had tied to the piton at the mouth of the cave ripped away—and trying to jump onto a two-foot-wide ledge of rock from a story up definitely wasn’t an option.

  “There’s a small ledge down there. If we can get down to it, we might have a chance.” I stared at the torn bit of rope and groaned. We’d had plenty of rope we could have replaced it with, but— “The rope was in the pack the bear took, wasn’t it?”

  “Have I mentioned that I really hate that bear?” Frank asked in return, confirming my suspicion.

  I was pushing myself back to my feet when I noticed the paracord survival bracelet on my wrist. I wasn’t used to wearing it and had almost forgotten it was there!

  “Thank you, Last Chance General Store!” I said, unraveling the bracelet as quickly as I could. “There should be just enough cord in here for us to lower ourselves down.”

  I popped the clasp with the little compass into my pocket for safekeeping and went to work securing the paracord to the piton with a knot. I tied the other end to our remaining pack to turn it into a makeshift harness.

  Luckily, Frank and I had lots of experience tying knots over the years, because you never knew when a good knot might help you out of a bad spot. And we were in a bad spot for sure. I could hear Stinky coughing somewhere farther inside the cave, and the sound was growing closer. The smoke screen from Frank’s flare had slowed our pursuer down, but it hadn’t stopped them.

  Normally a daring drop from a cliff face onto a narrow ledge ten feet below would require a bunch of safety gear. We wouldn’t have had time for it even if we’d had the gear. This was one of those absolute-last-resort, definitely-don’t-try-this-at-home-unless-there’s-a-real-life-gun-toting-villain-chasing-you-type situations. Why was it my bro and I seemed to get ourselves into so many of those? That was an unsolved mystery for another day. Just then it was time to drop off a cliff.