“You know,” Jimmy said. “If a person fell all the way down there—”

  “They’d get killed,” Kevin finished.

  “Wow.”

  They went back to where they’d left their kites in the clearing. Kevin looked up at the sky, which was growing darker by the second. “Guess what?,” he said. “Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea. Look at the sky. It looks like it’s going to start raining any second.”

  “I think you’re right,” Jimmy said, also glancing upward. The wind jerked his box kite in his hand.

  And sure enough—

  “Run!” Kevin yelled.

  The darkening sky opened up, thunder rumbling overhead, and a second later, it started raining harder than either of them had ever seen.

  They dashed back toward the woodline with their kites. The rain made the air look like it was full of tiny, moving slits. More thunder rumbled, the sky got even darker, and then several whip-like streaks of lightning cracked overhead. Kevin and Jimmy made it back to the woods just in time, otherwise they would’ve been drenched right through their clothes.

  “What a storm!” Jimmy exclaimed.

  ““Yeah, and look at the lightning!”

  More whips of lightning cracked across the sky, and then the rain was falling so hard they could hear it beating against the ground. “We better get back to the lodge,” Kevin suggested, “and fast.”

  They both ran back down the trail in the teeming rain. At least the heavily branched trees overhead blocked out a lot of the rainfall. They trotted on for several minutes, over a carpet of wet leaves, without really paying attention to where they were going. Then Kevin stopped.

  “What’s wrong?” Jimmy asked.

  Kevin looked around, unsure of himself. “This doesn’t look right,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Kevin looked around some more, rubbed his chin. Then his eyes went wide with apprehension, and he said, “I think we’re on the wrong trail.”

  “What!” Jimmy exclaimed.

  “Yeah,” Kevin said. “I think we’re lost.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Lost, Kevin thought. The word sounded dreadful in his head. And he was sure now: this wasn’t the right trail—it was straighter and wider and took fewer turns, and Kevin could easily tell that it led in a direction that was opposite from the way they’d come. They could hear the rain pelting the trees limbs overhead, and still more thunder and lightning. Even this deep in the woods, they were getting drenched.

  “What are we going to do?” Jimmy asked fretfully.

  “I don’t know,” Kevin said. “But we’ve definitely got to get back to the lodge. I guess we better just start walking, and hope we get back going the right direction.”

  “But what if we can’t?” Now there was a hint of panic in Jimmy’s voice. “What if this path just leads deeper into the woods? We could wind up walking for miles and never find our way back to the lodge.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Kevin tried to assure him, but he wasn’t even certain himself. Sometimes he’d hear stories on the news about kids who’d get lost in the woods, and the police would have to send out search parties, and sometimes it would take days or even weeks before they could find the kids. But Kevin decided not to mention this to Jimmy, who was close to panicking already. Why make things worse? If we got lost, Kevin very grimly realized, and they had to send out search parties, Dad would be so mad I’d get grounded for a month! And that wasn’t even the worst fear.

  What if we got lost, he thought next…and never got found?

  Now Kevin was beginning to feel a little bit of panic himself. “We’ll just keep walking,” he said. “Don’t worry. We’ll find our way back.”

  “I hope so,” Jimmy muttered

  They followed the path. Instead of crunching over the leaves, their feet now squished over them. The rain poured down. At least their kites were made of plastic and not paper—otherwise, they’d be ruined by now. It was hard to concentrate: the rain was pouring down so hard, Kevin couldn’t hear himself think from the steady, driving noise of it, and the rain clouds had darkened the sky very quickly, which made the woods even darker, almost like nighttime.

  More thunder, then.

  And more lightning…

  Kevin flinched. He was trying real hard not to show it, but it seemed that with each additional step he took along the soggy path, the more afraid he got. Each crack of lightning was so loud and abrupt, it sounded like the sky was exploding and falling apart into giant, jagged pieces that he could almost visualize falling down on them.

  Kevin had been through these woods many times in the past, but never during a thunder storm. Nothing about this path looked familiar, and they just seemed to be getting more and more lost as they trudged on through the puddles, the dripping branches and wet leaves, and the rain. What if we don’t find our way back before dark? Kevin wondered. What if we wind up having to sleep out here all night?

  It was just one more thing Kevin didn’t want to think about. Sleeping in the cold woods all night, in the rain. And—

  He remembered the animal heads he’d seen hanging on the wall back at the lodge. One of the heads was a bear…

  Bears, he thought, his fear swelling up more and more till he could feel his heart racing in his chest. The path curved around, and then—

  Wait a minute, Kevin thought. He stopped, the rain pelting his shoulders and the top of his head.

  “What is it?” Jimmy asked, shivering.

  Kevin squinted forward. Then he suddenly shouted with glee when he realized what he was seeing. “Look! A sign!”

  Jimmy squinted forward too, till he could see it. “All right!” he shouted.

  Nailed to a tree just a few yards ahead of them was a wooden sign with black, painted letters that read: LODGE, and then an arrow pointing down the path.

  “Boy, are we dopes,” Jimmy said. “All this time we thought we were lost.”

  “Yeah, but this path really just took us in a big circle right back toward the lodge,” Kevin realized now, “and we didn’t even know it. Come on. And when we get back to the lodge,” Kevin added, “whatever you do, don’t tell Becky about us thinking we were lost.”

  “Of course I won’t tell her!” Jimmy said. “She’d think we were idiots!”

  That was for sure, and so would their dads. But Kevin felt an incredible wave of relief. We’re not lost after all, he thought. We’ll be back at the lodge in just a few minutes. And to make matters even better, just as they started out in the direction of the wooden sign, the rain began to let up, and the thunder and lightning stopped. “We’ll try flying our kites again tomorrow,” he told Jimmy. “With any luck, the weather will be better.”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy said. “And at least I got to see the bluffs today. They’re really cool. And—”

  thunk

  Kevin and Jimmy stopped in their tracks. They both stood with their heads tilted, their kites dripping as they listened.

  “That sounded like a car door closing,” Kevin noted.

  “Yeah, but—”

  Jimmy didn’t even need to finish. We’re in the middle of the woods right now, Kevin thought. What would a car be doing in the middle of the woods, especially right after a rain storm?

  Maybe it was their imaginations, but then Kevin walked toward a stand of trees at the edge of the path. Through the trees, maybe twenty yards away, he could see—

  Another path, he realized.

  “Look!” Jimmy whispered.

  An old, faded blue car was parked on the other path. A figure had gotten out of the car and was now—

  shick, shick, shick

  The very first thing Kevin noticed was the big forked tree; in other words, a tree that had grown out from a single stump but had split into two trunks. The forked tree looked like a craggy V pointing upward toward the dark sky.

  And the figure was—

  Digging a hole in the ground with a shovel!

  Kevin remembered earlier in the day, when he’d seen Bill Bitner in the back hallway at the lodge. Holding a shovel, he recalled. Kevin squinted; it was hard to see. The woods were dark, and it was still raining a little, but a minute later he recognized the figure.

  And it wasn’t that old crab Bill Bitner at all.

  It’s Wally, Kevin saw.

  Wally Eberhart, the young groundskeeper who worked for Bill. The guy my sister’s got a crush on, Kevin added in thought.

  And right now Kevin could see Wally digging a big hole in the ground.

  Or maybe he wasn’t digging just a hole…

  Maybe he’s digging a grave, Kevin thought.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Did you see that?” Jimmy asked, trotting down the path past the sign.

  Kevin trotted right along with him. “Are you kidding? Of course I saw it. That guy Wally was digging a hole right by that forked tree.”

  “But why?” Jimmy questioned. “It doesn’t make any sense. Why would the guy be digging a hole in the middle of the woods while it’s raining?”

  “I don’t know,” Kevin said, huffing and puffing as he continued to trot back down the path.

  I don’t know, he thought to himself. But I’m going to find out…

  It was just another few minutes before they got back to the big gravel courtway in front of the lodge. Kevin and Jimmy stopped for a few moments at the front steps, leaning over with their hands on their knees, to catch their breath.

  “What are we going to do now?” Jimmy asked. “Should we tell your Aunt Carolyn that we saw Wally digging that hole?”

  “I don’t know,” Kevin said. “Maybe we should wait awhile on that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because what would we say?” Kevin posed. “We’d sound stupid. Let’s wait awhile, give ourselves some more time to find out what’s going on.”

  Jimmy paused as he was shaking the rainwater off his kite. “Yeah,” he agreed. “Now that you mention it, maybe that’s a better idea.”

  “Let’s stow our kites and get back inside,” Kevin said, happy that his friend agreed with him. He didn’t want to say the rest, the strange, eerie feeling that Wally wasn’t just digging a hole.

  The hole that Wally was digging, after all, looked pretty big, and wide.

  And maybe it was oblong shaped, though Kevin couldn’t be quite sure.

  But there was one thing he was sure of—

  It looked like Wally was digging a grave, Kevin thought again.

  The idea made a shiver crawl up his back, and he shuddered a moment, standing there at the base of the big stone steps.

  “Hi, boys,” Aunt Carolyn greeted when they entered the dark foyer.

  “Hi, Aunt Carolyn,” Kevin returned. He kept his fingers crossed that she wouldn’t realize they’d been out to the bluffs during the storm.

  “You boys are drenched!” she exclaimed, noticing their wet clothes. “Where have you been?”

  “Oh, we were just walking around outside, and it started raining,” Kevin said. One thing Kevin didn’t like to do was lie, but what he’d said wasn’t really a lie, was it? After all, they had been walking around outside, and it had started raining. So it wasn’t really a lie at all.

  And where had Aunt Carolyn been anyway, for all the time that had passed after their fathers had left the lodge to go on their fishing hike?

  All of a sudden, it seemed to Kevin that there were several really strange things going on around here.

  “Well, it’s too bad about the rain,” Aunt Carolyn said. “But it does seem to rain a lot around here this time of year. You could have gone out to the bluffs for some kite-flying.”

  Kevin didn’t say anything.

  “But I think,” Aunt Carolyn went on, “it might be a good idea for the two of you to go back up to your room and get changed into some dry clothes. Dinner will be ready in less than an hour.”

  “Okay, Aunt Carolyn.”

  “And tell your sister, too.”

  Kevin nodded, then he and Jimmy headed up the wide, winding stairs to their room.

  “I still want to know what that Wally guy was doing digging holes in the woods,” Jimmy said.

  “Yeah,” Kevin agreed. “Right in front of that forked tree, and while it was still raining!” What could he possibly have been digging for? What could be so important that he’d be digging holes in the rain?

  They changed into dry jeans and flannel shirts, then combed out their wet hair. By then, the storm had started up again; Kevin could hear the thunder slowly rumbling outside, and then heavy rain began to patter against the roof. It wasn’t the thunder or the rain that bothered Kevin the most—it was the lightning, and the way it would crack and boom in the sky without any notice.

  Kevin knocked on his sister’s closed bedroom door. “Hey, Becky!”

  “Yes, Kevvie?” she asked from the other side.

  I HATE it when she calls me that! “Dinner will be ready soon.”

  “I’ll be down in a little while,” her snide voice replied. “I still need a little more time to get ready.”

  “Get ready?” Kevin questioned. “What do you mean?”

  “Just mind your own business, you little twerp!”

  Kevin and Jimmy headed for the stairs. “What does she have to get ready for?” Jimmy asked.

  But Kevin thought he already knew. “I’ll bet she’s in there putting on her best clothes, in case that Wally guy comes back around.”

  “Jeeze, girls are weird.”

  “Tell me about it,” Kevin said. “You ought to have one for a sister.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Aunt Carolyn, holding the curtains open a few inches, was glancing out one of the front bay windows when they boys came downstairs. “My,” she said, “your fathers certainly picked a terrible day to go camping and fishing. I hope they decide to come back to the lodge.”

  “They probably won’t, Aunt Carolyn,” Kevin said. “They’re die-hard campers. And, besides, they brought ponchos and rubber boots and lots of other kinds of rain gear.”

  “Well, it doesn’t make much sense to me,” Carolyn went on. Her white hand released the heavy drapes, which fell back into place just as another spike of lightning crackled across the sky. “They could catch terrible colds in weather like this.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Kevin said.

  She turned then, with a strange look on her face. Kevin couldn’t believe how pale she was, and her black clothes and long black hair made her look even more pale. “Is your sister coming down?” she asked.

  “She’ll be down soon,” Kevin said. “I think she’s up there getting all dressed up.”

  “I can’t imagine why.”

  “She’s got a crush on that Wally guy,” Jimmy said.

  “Oh, I see,” Aunt Carolyn coyly remarked. “Well, he seems to be a nice enough young man.”

  A nice enough young man? Kevin thought in objection. He’s creepy, just like Bill.

  A few minutes later, they were all seated in the big, gloomy dining room. In the high windows, they could see the lightning flashing. Eventually, Becky came down, dressed ridiculously in one of her very best dresses, and her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail with a bow on it. Kevin and Jimmy smiled at each other.

  “He’s not here,” Kevin said.

  “Who?” Becky smirked her reply.

  “Wally, your Prince Charming.”

  “Oh, you’re so stupid,” Becky moaned, and sat down.

  “And he won’t be here any time soon, either,” Jimmy said. “He’ll probably get washed away in the rain. We just saw him in the woods, digging holes.”

  “Digging holes?” Becky said.

  “That’s right,” Kevin added on. “In the middle of the woods, in the rain.”

  “Why would Wally be digging holes in the woods?” Becky countered from her place at the table. “I’ve never heard anything so stupid in my life. You two are just making it up, like you do everything else.”

  “It’s true,” Jimmy said. “We saw him out there about an hour ago.”

  “You did not!” Becky exclaimed.

  “We did too,” Kevin said.

  “What’s this about digging holes?” Aunt Carolyn suddenly remarked, appearing from the kitchen. She set down steaming dinner plates before each other them: t-bone steaks, baked potatoes, buttered lima beans.

  Becky smirked. “Kevin and Jimmy said they saw Wally digging in the woods a little while ago.”

  “Not just digging,” Kevin corrected. “He was digging a big oblong hole. Coffin shaped.”

  “There you go with your stupid vampires again,” Becky scoffed.

  “Hey, I didn’t say anything about vampires,” Kevin came right back. “All I said was that the hole was shaped like a coffin, and it was your big lover boy Wally who was digging the hole.”

  “Kevin, shut up!”

  “Now, kids,” Aunt Carolyn interrupted. “The dinner table is no place to argue.”

  But Becky grumbled on, “All Kevin ever talks about is stupid vampires, I’m sick of listening to him.”

  Aunt Carolyn looked up very slowly and smiled. “So Kevin’s interested in vampires?”

  “Well, sort of,” Kevin admitted. “I think they’re pretty cool.”

  Aunt Carolyn’s smile seemed to hover before her face. “Well, then, tonight, before you go to bed, remind me to tell you about the local legend.”

  “What local legend?” Kevin asked over his steak.

  “The local vampire legend,” Aunt Carolyn said.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Kevin could scarcely think of anything else all throughout dinner. A vampire legend? Here? What could it be? And could it have anything to do with the strange painting he’d seen in the foyer? The painting of the men in the rowboat, with the box of gold bricks and—

  And the coffin? he wondered.

  Kevin felt charged up with excitement. He couldn’t wait to hear about it.