Missing on Superstition Mountain by Elise Broach

Author:Elise Broach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)

“Well…” Henry paused. He peered into the darkened hallway again, making sure his parents hadn’t heard him.

“What?” Delilah persisted.

Suddenly the phone call seemed like a mistake to Henry. What if she told her mother? They would all get in trouble then.

“You’re not telling me something,” Delilah complained. “After I helped you look through the newspapers and the books! After I went with you to Emmett’s house! That’s not fair.”

“No, I am telling you,” Henry said. “That’s why I called.”

“Then what is it? C’mon, just say it.”

Henry took another breath. “We went up the mountain. Simon, Jack, and I did, a few days ago. Josie ran away, and we followed her, and we went up there, and Jack fell off a rock down into a canyon, and when Simon and I climbed down to get him, we found him on this ledge with three”—he gulped—“with three skulls.”

The other end of the line was so quiet that Henry thought maybe she’d hung up. “Delilah?”

“Are you sure they were real? I mean, human?”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Henry said. “It was unnerving.”

“Wow,” Delilah said. She was quiet again. Finally, she said, “So you think they’re the skulls of those three Texas boys? And they’ve been missing all this time?”

Henry nodded, then remembering the phone, said, “That’s what we think. And now we can’t figure out what to do. Simon thinks we have to call the police. But if we go back up the mountain with the police, and the skulls aren’t there, it will be a catastrophe.”

“Yeah,” said Delilah. “And your parents will be really mad at you. I guess you can’t know for sure the skulls are from those boys, right?”

“No,” Henry agreed.

“But if they’re not from those boys, they’re from three other people.”

“Right,” Henry said. “So then we were thinking maybe we should go see that Sara Delgado girl, the one Emmett told us about, who lives near the cemetery. And try to figure out what happened to her on the mountain.”

“Why?” Delilah asked. “How will that help?”

“Well, depending on what she says, we can decide if it’s safe to go back up there.” Henry thought it sounded like a stretch even as he explained it.

“I don’t know,” Delilah said. “She sounds pretty messed up.”

“Yeah.” Henry felt bleak.

“But okay,” Delilah said quickly. “That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. I want to talk to her.”

“Me too.”

“So then we should go to the cemetery and see what she has to say.”

“Yeah,” Henry agreed. “Hey—you said you had something to tell me. What was it?”

“Oh, right, I do.” Delilah took a breath. “It’s nothing compared to yours, but I was reading that library book I brought home, the one on Arizona legends, and it has some true stories too—or at least, the true stories the legends are based on. And one of them is about this guy, Adolph Ruth.”

Henry had clamped the phone so close to his ear, it felt hot. “That name…”

“It was in the historical society booklet, I’m pretty sure. One of the first disappearances on the mountain.

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