“Yeah, that’s what Bill said.”

  “Well, that’s funny because he never told me anything about any broken water pipe,” Aunt Carolyn said. “And all the water’s running fine at the lodge. There isn’t any broken water pipe.”

  Wally shrugged. “I have to admit, it sounded pretty funny to me, digging for a water pipe in the woods. But that’s what he told me to do, and since he’s my boss, I had to do it. And one thing he did say, he told me that he wasn’t sure where the county water lines ran, but he knew the junction ran by a forked tree, just like the kid here said. And that’s what we’ve been doing for the past few weeks, digging holes at every forked tree we could find in the forest.”

  “That’s baloney, Aunt Carolyn!” Kevin jumped right back in. “He’s lying! I know because I saw Bill Bitner painting crosses on some forked trees—in blood!”

  “Kevin!” Becky said. “You’re an idiot! Listen to what you’re saying!”

  Wally laughed, still addressing Aunt Carolyn. “Look, I don’t know what this kid’s talking about. Sure, Bill marked the forked trees in red, any tree that we dug at but didn’t find a water pipe. We’d mark the tree so we wouldn’t accidentally dig at the same tree twice. But it wasn’t blood, it was just red paint.”

  Kevin stalled again. Red paint? Well, actually he had to admit it. He never examined the markings closely enough to be sure that it was blood. So far, Wally’s explanation was making sense. I guess it was just red paint, Kevin realized. I guess I’ve made a big mistake. But, then, he thought of something else. “What about the wooden stakes?” he remembered. “I found a box of wooden stakes, and everybody knows that’s what you need to kill vampires with.”

  Aunt Carolyn rolled her eyes. “Kevin, there are boxes of wooden stakes all over the lodge. I’m running a campground here, remember? Those stakes you’ve seen are tent stakes. We have to have lots of them to loan to campers so they can pitch their tents.”

  But then Kevin remembered something else that also went back to vampires. “Tell me this then,” he said to Wally. “Every time I saw you digging, it was during the rain. Everybody knows vampires can’t pass through running water, or rain either.”

  Wally laughed. “We dug in the rain because the ground is softer when it’s wet. That’s all.”

  Tent stakes, Kevin glumly thought. Soft ground. So he’d made yet another error in judgment. He felt absolutely stupid now. How could he have been so wrong about so many things?

  But then—

  He remembered one more thing.

  “All right,” he challenged. “Maybe I was wrong about that other stuff, but what about the forked trees?”

  “I told you,” Wally replied. “Bill Bitner instructed me to dig only at forked trees because he said that’s where the broken pipe would be.”

  “Broken pipe my eye!” Kevin shouted back. “That’s where Count Volkov’s treasure is buried! At a forked tree! I know because I read it in his diary!”

  “Count Volkov’s diary? “ Aunt Carolyn questioned.

  “Yes! I read it!”

  “Where?”

  “In the secret room!”

  “What secret room?” Aunt Carolyn asked.

  “You mean you don’t know about the secret room behind the panel?” Kevin asked. “At the end of the hallway behind the kitchen?”

  “Kevin,” his aunt responded. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Kevin looked at her. She’s telling the truth, he realized. If she was lying, he’d be able to tell by the sound of her voice and the look in her eye.

  “Kevin?” Aunt Carolyn asked more slowly this time. “Are you telling me that you’ve seen Count Volkov’s diary?”

  “Yes! I found it just a little while ago. And it said his treasure was buried at a forked tree! The diary is in the secret room behind the panel!”

  “I don’t know anything about any secret room,” Aunt Carolyn said, tapping her foot. “Either Kevin has a wild imagination, or Bill Bitner has been keeping things from me.”

  “That has to be it!” Kevin exclaimed. “Because I’m not lying—there really is a secret room.”

  “All right, Kevin,” Aunt Carolyn agreed. “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Show me this secret room.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “Follow me!” Kevin wailed, and ran back across the court. Everyone else followed, and only a minute or two later, Kevin was guiding them down the hallway behind the kitchen.

  “This sounds pretty silly,” Kevin,” Jimmy said. “You’re going to be in a lot of trouble if there’s no secret room.”

  “There is!” Kevin insisted.

  “Aunt Carolyn,” Becky whined. “My bother’s a dope. He’s making all this up because he wants attention.”

  “No I’m not!” Kevin yelled at her. “Look!”

  And with that, he pressed on the panel, and—click!—then it swung open.

  “Well I’ll be,” Aunt Carolyn said. “I’ve owned the lodge all these years but I never knew this passageway existed.”

  “Yeah, well Bill Bitner found out about it,” Kevin said, and then he turned on his flashlight. “Come on.”

  Everybody filed behind Kevin as he led them down the damp, lightless passageway.

  “Look,” Jimmy noticed. “A door.”

  “The door to the secret room,” Kevin corrected, and then he opened the door and pointed his light all around.

  “The kid’s right,” Wally said. “There really is a secret room. Bill never told me anything about it.”

  “He never told me, either,” Aunt Carolyn said. “Kevin, lead the way.”

  With pleasure, he thought. He took them into the dark room, shining the flashlight over the brick walls. Then he said, “The diary’s right here, on this desk.” And he pointed the flashlight right at it.

  Aunt Carolyn slowly approached the desk, her eyes wide in amazement. She picked up the old diary, flipped through it, read some passages. “Kevin,” she said. “This is extraordinary! It’s been hidden for all these years, but you managed to find it.”

  “Sounds to me,” Wally said, “that Bill Bitner found it first, and he didn’t tell you.”

  And this suddenly made perfect sense to Kevin. Of course Bill Bitner didn’t tell anyone, he realized. Because he wants to keep The Count’s treasure all to himself. “Read right here, Aunt Carolyn,” he instructed, pointing the light on the last page. “That’s where The Count says where his treasure is buried.”

  Aunt Carolyn’s face concentrated as she read the final few sentences in the diary. “You’re right, Kevin. It says here that the treasure is buried at… a forked tree.”

  “See?” Kevin said triumphantly. “I told you.”

  “And Bill had me digging out there for it and he never told me,” Wally said. “He had me believing I was looking for a broken water pipe. How do you like that?”

  Aunt Carolyn nodded to herself. “No wonder he agreed to continue working for me so cheaply. He needed a reason to be on my property, so he could find the treasure. He never told me about any of this. I think we better go find Mr. Bitner right now. He’s got a lot of explaining to do.”

  They all filed back out of the room and back down the hall to the kitchen.

  “Let’s take my car,” Wally volunteered. “He’s probably out there right now, digging around another forked tree looking for the treasure.”

  “Good idea,” Aunt Carolyn consented. “But, Kevin, it’s cold outside. Go get your coat on first.”

  “Okay,” Kevin said, and then he dashed up the stairs to his room. All right, he admitted to himself. Aunt Carolyn’s not really a vampire, and I was wrong about all that other stuff too. But one thing I was right about was the treasure! It’s out there somewhere, and we’ve got to find it before Bill Bitner does!

  Kevin pulled on his coat, but something snagged his vision before he could leave the room. What? he thought. Why had he stopped? He wasn’t sure why, but the next thing he knew he was looking at one of the forest paintings hung on the wall in his bedroom. He looked at it for a long time, stared hard…

  It wasn’t anything like the other paintings which depicted Count Volkov’s arrival to America. It was instead just a dull landscape painting.

  Just a bunch of trees in the woods, he saw.

  But then he saw something else.

  One of the trees in the painting was—

  I don’t believe it! he thought. It’s… a forked tree!

  Sure enough, there in the painting were a dozen or so trees, with autumn leaves. But one of the trees, one right out in front, was forked—two trunks growing out of a single trunk.

  Wait a minute, Kevin thought. Maybe, just maybe—

  He slowly put out his hand, and pressed on the wall panel where the painting hung. And—

  click!

  The wall panel moved!

  A panel, he thought. Just like the panel downstairs. It’s another secret door. And secret doors lead to secret rooms…

  The door’s hinge creaked as it swung open.

  And all at once the image of what Kevin was now looking at hit him like a coconut falling on his head.

  “Everybody! Up here!” he shrieked at the top of his lungs. “Come quick! I found it!”

  And then Kevin took one slow step into the room. But it wasn’t the treasure he’d found…

  Sitting there before him was a dusty coffin with chains locked around it.

  Count Volkov’s coffin, Kevin realized in creeping terror.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  “It’s—it’s a coffin! Becky shrieked at the top of her lungs when she looked inside. Then she began to shiver, and she ran out of the bedroom and scurried away.

  “Wow,” Jimmy murmured, shivering himself.

  “This is pretty freaky,” Wally said. “The kid found another secret room, only this one has a coffin in it.”

  Finally, astonished, Aunt Carolyn muttered under her breath, “I don’t believe it…”

  But all Kevin could think was this: It was a trick, to hide The Count’s coffin. Not at a forked tree in the woods, a forked tree in a painting. And-and—

  And… what?

  He’s in there, Kevin thought. Count Volkov is in that coffin right now… and he’s still alive!

  “We have to open it,” Aunt Carolyn said.

  “No!” Kevin bellowed. “The Count is inside!”

  Aunt Carolyn ignored him; instead, she turned to Wally. “Wally, do you think you can break that chain?”

  “Not without boltcutters,” Wally replied, “or a good saw. But we probably won’t have to break the chain. We can break the lock. Look how old it is. It’s almost rusted through.”

  Kevin couldn’t believe what he was hearing. They wanted to open Count Volkov’s coffin! “You can’t open it!” he shouted. “If you do that, you’ll let him out!”

  But Kevin’s warnings went ignored, and already—ping! ping! ping!—Wally was striking the lock on the coffin’s chains with a hammer from his toolbelt.

  “No!” Kevin shouted.

  ping!

  “No!”

  ping!

  “You can’t!”

  ping—CRACK!

  And that’s when the old, rusted lock broke in half.

  The chains slid off the top of the coffin and clanked to the floor. Then Wally put his hand on the lid and began to raise it.

  Kevin shrieked till he was bug-eyed. “Don’t open it! You’ll let Count Volkov out, and he’ll kill us!”

  Very, very slowly, then, the coffin lid raised, its decades-old hinges creaking like nails across slate.

  Higher and higher, Wally lifted the lid.

  Higher…

  Higher—

  “Don’t do it!” Kevin screamed a final time.

  But Aunt Carolyn leaned over, smiling at him. “Kevin, don’t be silly. There are no such things as vampires. Don’t you see? It was all a trick.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kevin wailed.

  Aunt Carolyn went on, “Count Volkov isn’t in that coffin.”

  “Then what is!”

  “It has to be the—” she started but didn’t finish.

  “You got to be kidding me!” Wally exclaimed when he’d fully the coffin lid. His long hair hung in front of his face as he stared into the opened coffin.

  Then Aunt Carolyn finished, “It has to be the treasure, The Count’s gold bricks…”

  Kevin, terrified, expected to see a white, long-nailed hand snap out of the coffin and grab Wally’s throat. But that didn’t happen at all. Wally remained standing there, staring down. Then Aunt Carolyn walked up to the coffin too, and so did Jimmy.

  “Wow!” Jimmy said. “Look at that!”

  Only then did Kevin step toward the coffin himself. He looked down inside of it, and his jaw dropped.

  She was right, he thought.

  It wasn’t Count Volkov who lay in the coffin…

  The coffin, instead, was full of solid gold bricks.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  “Kevin,” Aunt Carolyn began to explain. “Yes, there really was a Count Volkov, and he came to America a hundred years ago just like I said in the story. But he wasn’t really a vampire. He was a rich eccentric.”

  “What’s eccentric?” Kevin asked.

  “It means he was an oddball,” Wally answered.

  Then Aunt Carolyn continued, “That’s why he had this lodge built, and that’s why he painted all those sinister vampire paintings. And as far as the story goes—well, he invented it himself. He wanted people to think he was a vampire.”

  “Why?” Kevin asked, thoroughly confused.

  “So people would stay away and not bother him,” Aunt Carolyn replied. “The whole vampire story was a decoy. The Count was afraid people would try to steal his gold, so he made up the story about him being a vampire so—”

  “So people wouldn’t come anywhere near the place,” Kevin finished.

  “Exactly,” Aunt Carolyn said. “But when he was old and knew that he was dying, being a man of intrigue, he had to leave some clue, so that’s why he wrote the passages in the diary about the forked tree. Count Volkov has been dead for decades.”

  Only now did Kevin finally understand. The Count wasn’t really a vampire. He was just a rich weirdo, he realized now. He painted the pictures himself, so people would think he was an evil vampire and stay away.

  But—

  “Look at all this gold!” Kevin exclaimed, looking again into the coffin. It looked like there were at least a dozen gold bricks sitting in there, sparkling in the light. It must be worth a fortune!

  “There’s a lot of money in there,” Aunt Carolyn said. “It’s been a local legend for a hundred years, but you found it—”

  “That’s right,” a craggy voice interrupted. “This kid found it, but I’m going to take it.”

  Everyone in the room turned then, to the figure that was now standing in the doorway.

  It was Bill Bitner, holding a shovel up like a weapon.

  “I’ve been searching for that gold for months,” he said, his face lined with hatred and greed. “This punk kid may have found it, but I’m taking it. It’s mine.”

  “It’s not yours!” Wally shouted. “It’s Carolyn’s! It’s on her property, so it belongs to her! You have no legal right to it, and you can’t take it!”

  “Yeah, I can, Wally,” Bill Bitner said with his greedy grin. He looked like a maniac standing there, his clothes drenched from the rain earlier, and a crazy gleam in his eyes. Then he raised the shovel up over his head. “I’m taking it, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me!”

  “You’re not taking anything, old man,” another voice suddenly sounded from behind.

  Another figure stepped into the room and immediately snatched the shovel out of Bill Bitner’s hands.

  “Dad!” Kevin exclaimed.

  Yes, it was Kevin’s father who walked into the room just then, his clothes, too, as well as his fishing hat, damp from the previous rain, and his cheeks pink from being in the cold weather for the last day. “I overheard everything,” he said. Then he turned to Bill. “And you’ve been working here under false pretenses the whole time, so why don’t you just get out of here unless you want some real trouble.”

  Bill Bitner glared back at them, then grumbled under his breath and ran out of the room.

  “Is everybody all right?” Kevin’s father asked, setting the shovel down.

  Everyone nodded, relieved to see him.

  “You came just in the nick of time, Dad!” Kevin exclaimed. “Bill was going to hit Wally with the shovel and steal the gold.

  “Thanks, Mr. Bennell,” Wally said.

  “No problem,” Kevin’s dad said, “And I don’t think we’ll have to worry about Bill Bitner anymore.”

  But then Jimmy stepped up. “Where’s my dad, Mr. Bennell?”

  “After we overheard what was going on in here, he went back downstairs to call the police, Jimmy. We tried calling earlier from a ranger’s station but the phone lines got knocked out from the storm, so we rushed back to make sure everyone was okay. But the phone lines have been fixed now.”

  Kevin looked out the window, and saw Bill Bitner running across the front yard. “Shouldn’t we chase him, Dad?”

  “No, that’s not necessary,” his father said. “It won’t take the police long to find him and pick him up.” Then he walked up to the coffin, looked in it, and smiled.

  “Wow,” he said. “Look at all that gold!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Later, they all sat around the big, roaring fire in the fireplace. Everyone was there: the two fathers, Wally, Becky, Kevin, Jimmy, and, of course, Aunt Carolyn. Kevin’s dad was explaining why they turned back in the first place. “The weather was so bad, it rained almost the entire time we were out. We didn’t catch a single fish!”

  “And it was just too cold,” Mr. Grimaldi added, “so this morning we packed up our gear and headed back, and that’s when we came across the ranger’s station, and he let us use his phone.”