her gesture of pack kinship.
Tuesday, Beau was looking pretty tired during history. After class she stopped him.
“Everything okay with your grandmother?”
“She was a little worse, but she’s doing better now.”
“Did you find a gun in your grandmother’s room?” she asked, trying to force a smile. Mostly she wanted to figure out if he’d had any time to think about what his grandmother had said and get suspicious of her, Katelyn.
“No.” He flashed a disbelieving smile. “Granny wasn’t loaded. I did find something else interesting, though.”
“What’s that?”
“The missing book.”
She stared at him, mind racing.
He grinned. “Yup, like some crazy old hoarder, my grandma was the one who had In the Shadow of the Wolf out from the school library. Heaven only knows how she got it or when. For all I know she checked it out when she was still in high school.”
He was trying to be funny, she registered that, but she couldn’t connect on that level because all she could think about was the book and what it might say about the Hellhound. “What did you do with it?”
He reached into his backpack. When he handed it to her, she swore her fingers tingled on the old leather cover.
“You can take it home and start reading,” he said. “I didn’t know where to start, but you did that paper.”
“Thanks,” she said quickly, tucking it against her chest.
“Let me know what you find.”
“Of course.”
Never.
All through training with Justin she was miles away, thinking about the book in her backpack and praying that no one went snooping and discovered it. They were working on her sense of hearing and she just couldn’t get it to go into overdrive, too busy focusing on what she might find in its pages. Justin seemed distracted, too, and sent her home early. When she finally made it into her room, she slipped the book out of her backpack. It was dusty and worn, the white letters stamped into the blue cover practically illegible.
She flipped it open, eager to read the secrets it kept. But the print was tiny and there didn’t seem to be any kind of table of contents. No index, either. She was going to have to read from the beginning.
The entire first page was one paragraph.
Welcome, Gentle Reader, to the myriad stories of the founding of Wolf Springs. This bucolic town, nestled in the beauteous mountains of the Ozark Region, was first settled by Spanish missionaries, in hopes of converting the local savages to the joys of the Gospel, as set down by our Lord, Jesus Christ. Ah, what a task lay before the good padres, faced with the stubbornness of the primitive innocent—
“C’mon, c’mon,” Katelyn muttered, skimming the rest of the long-winded introduction. She turned the page.
— for is it not true that salvation can only be found in a society based on Christian values?
With a groan, she flipped back to the first page and picked up where she had left off.
And as many have often surmised, the soul of the childlike native must also be brought to the Lord—
The book progressed from describing the attempts of the missionaries to convert the natives to a detailed description of the building of each structure in the town. The dry goods store. The barber shop.
The blacksmith also ran a foundry, kept busy by hunters who requested peculiar casings for their ammunition. Horses for hire were stabled there as well.
She remembered that when she’d been in the sick room at school, Mr. Hastings had called Sergeant Lewis about Mr. Henderson’s absence. And he had described Mr. Henderson’s house as “by the old stables.”
She made a second mental note, and kept on reading.
And then . . . a secret.
The Lost Mine of Wolf Springs. A Discussion.
The author laid it all out — the Madre Vena, the claims by Xavier Cazador to have found it in the nineteenth century. The outlaw, Jubal DeAndrew, who had threatened to kill him if he didn’t reveal where it was.
It is said that a painting of the mine’s entrance was created by Xavier Cazador for Jubal DeAndrew. In the foreground stood a heart-shaped boulder, and in the background one could view a silvery waterfall. But the true artistry of the painting lay in this: a false signature could be scraped away, and beneath it one could learn the longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates for the mine.
Her mouth dropped open. She had been right about the sketch, and the painting of her grandfather’s that had been stolen showed the mine’s entrance. Was