CLIFF-HANGER

A MYSTERY IN MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK

GLORIA SKURZYNSKI AND ALANE FERGUSON

To Joni Alm

beloved daughter, sister, and friend.

Everything blooms under your touch.

Copyright ©1999 Gloria Skurzynski and Alane Ferguson

Cover illustration copyright © 2007 Jeffery Mangiat

All rights reserved.

Reproduction of the whole or any part of the contents is prohibited without written permission from the National Geographic Society, 1145 17th Street N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.

Maps by Carl Mehler, Director of Maps; Thomas L. Gray, Map Research; Jehan Aziz and Michelle H. Picard, Map Production

The cougar used as a design element throughout this book is from a photograph of a petroglyph taken by George F. Mobley, NGP. The petroglyph is carved into a sandstone wall near the Four Corners area of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona.

The legend on pages 102–104 is adapted from “The Children and the Hummingbird” in Spider Woman Stories, by G. M. Mullett. Copyright © 1979 The Arizona Board of Regents.

Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press and Daisy Mullett Smith.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to living persons or events other than descriptions of natural phenomena is purely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Skurzynski, Gloria

Cliff-Hanger / by Gloria Skurzynski and Alane Ferguson

p. cm.—(A national parks mystery; #2)

Summary: Twelve-year-old Jack and his younger sister visit Mesa Verde National Park, where they delve into the park’s history while gradually uncovering the mysterious past of their family’s teenage foster child Lucky.

ISBN: 978-1-4263-0965-6

1. Foster home care—Fiction. 2. Mesa Verde National Park—Fiction. 3. National Parks and Reserves—Fiction. 4. Mystery and detective stories—Fiction. I. Ferguson, Alane. II. Title. III. Series.

PZ7.S6287Wcl 1999 98-8716

[Fic]—DC21

Version: 2017-07-06

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors are extremely grateful to the staff

and rangers at Mesa Verde National Park

for all their generous and gracious help:

Larry Wiese, park superintendent;

Will Morris, chief interpretive ranger;

Linda Martin, supervisory park ranger;

Kathy Fiero, archaeologist; Marilyn Colyer, naturalist;

and Jane Anderson, Steve LaPointe,

Nancy Lomayaktewa, Patrick Joshevama,

Tsuyesua Kelhoyouma, Clyde Benally,

Chad Benally, John Lenihan, Mona Hutchinson, and Gretchen Ward.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

AFTERWORD

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

A pair of uniformed officers scanned the truck-stop restaurant, their guns snug in their holsters. Moving only his eyes, the man in the booth looked around. Nearby, a group of ranchers joked with a waitress, who held a full tray perched on her hip.

Pushing his fingertips against his forehead, the man quickly lowered his head. “Behind you. Cops. Two of them,” he said softly to the girl with him.

“Are they on to you?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” Reaching across the table, he gave her hand a quick, hard squeeze. “But I can’t take the chance. I’m sorry, baby. You know what you have to do. Make it good.”

The man stood. The girl waited until the waitress was only a foot away from their booth. Suddenly the girl shot to her feet, colliding with the loaded tray. Soup, salad, and drinks went flying. Dishes crashed to the floor, shattering into pieces.

“Look what you did!” the girl screamed at the waitress. “I’m burned! The soup scalded my skin!” Shrieking, she fell to her knees. All eyes were on her as the man moved toward the door. No one saw him leave.

No one but the girl.

CHAPTER ONE

The sheer cliffs of Mesa Verde cut into the thin, blue air like the blade of an ax. Jack stared at the photograph of the bluff, with its sand-colored stone splintered by fingers of juniper and pine. It was there that the Ancient Ones had once lived. The Ancestral Puebloans. The People. Against all laws of gravity, they had built their homes on ledges that rowned the mesa. Imagining what it must have been like to live on those dizzying cliffs, Jack traced his finger along the picture to the valley 500 feet below. He envisioned himself as one of the People, a warrior who hunted deer and carried his kill across his shoulders, returning to feed his family. Jack looked again at the impossibly narrow path that led to the cliff dwellings. One false step, he realized, and he would have fallen off the side and been crushed onto the valley floor.

“I’ve got news!” The bedroom door banged as Jack’s sister burst into the room, flushed with excitement. Ashley leaped onto his bed and gave it a bounce, which sent Jack’s Photography Today magazine flying. “You want to hear?”

“Wait a minute. Aren’t you supposed to knock?”

“I know. But this is important! It’s about our trip to Mesa Verde National Park and the killer cougar.”

“Hold on—the cougar didn’t kill anybody.”

“Whatever. The point is, something’s happened that’s going to change our whole plan!”

“What?” Jack felt his stomach tighten. He’d been counting down the hours to the trip, scheduled for the next morning. He didn’t like surprises.

“Don’t look so grouchy, Jack. This is good.” Ashley took a breath, which allowed Jack a moment to catch his own breath, even though he’d hardly said a word. “Mom just got a call. From Social Services.”

Immediately, Jack’s fists tensed in resistance. He didn’t want to hear the words he knew were about to come out of Ashley’s mouth, as sure as summer followed spring.

“We’re getting a little girl! She’s on her way now.”

“You call that good news?”

“You know it is. Hey, way to be excited,” Ashley told him, shaking her head with disapproval. She was the one who was easy with people, always eager to share her life with someone new. But Jack wasn’t so open. Especially now. “Anyway, the best part,” Ashley went on, “is that she’s coming real soon. As in any minute now.”

“We can’t get a foster kid tonight,” Jack cried. “It’ll screw up everything! The rangers at Mesa Verde told Mom that with all the visitors streaming into the park, she needs to get there and calm things down before something worse happens. We can’t stay home now.”

“Jack, that’s what’s so great!” Ashley’s smile was wide enough to crinkle her cheeks. “We’re taking her with us! Mom said the girl was dumped at a truck stop down by Cokeville, and no one else can shelter her right now. It’s an emergency, Jack. She’s coming here—it’s already settled.”

“Great. Just great. Now I’ll get stuck baby-sitting some little girl, and I’ll never get to take any good shots,” Jack complained, mentally hanging on to that picture of the cliff dwelling in the photography magazine. It wouldn’t do much good to moan about it now, since his parents had already said yes to the foster child.

Sure, it was important to help people in need, but sheltering kids during emergencies often turned Jack’s life upside down. He liked things to be neat. Orderly. In place. He wanted to feel in control. Now his trip and his whole life were completely messed up. Well, maybe not his whole life, but—

“Quit looking so mad!” Ashley, whose hair hung down her back in a braided rope, chirped, “Mom says the foster girl won’t slow anything down at all. So, are you going to come out into the living room and meet her when she comes, or are you just going to sit here looking like a grump?”

“I don’t know.” Jack threw his magazine onto the bed where his T-shirts and shorts and socks lay in neat piles, ready to go into his duffel bag. Next to them was his camera with four rolls of film, a package of lens-cleaning tissues, and an extra lens cap, just in case he lost one. “I gotta finish packing,” he decided. “I can meet her in the morning.”

“Up to you!” Tossing her braid in protest, Ashley left the room.

Jack unzipped his duffel bag and started putting things inside it. Just because I don’t want another foster kid right now, does that make me a bad person? he wondered, feeling a little guilty. His sister, Ashley, who was only ten and a half, loved it when new kids came crashing into their lives. Their father, Steven Landon, welcomed the extra children—he’d once been a foster kid himself. Their mother, Olivia Landon, would have taken foster children full time, instead of just for short-term emergencies, if she hadn’t worked at such a demanding job. Olivia, a veterinarian, frequently was called to national parks to help solve problems concerning wildlife, which was exactly the reason they were heading for Mesa Verde National Park in the morning.

Two days earlier, a cougar had attacked a boy hiking a nature trail. All of Mesa Verde was in an uproar, so the park officials had done what many of the other parks around the country did when they had animal trouble—they’d called Olivia Landon for help.

Often when Olivia traveled to the parks as a consultant, Steven and Jack and Ashley went with her. Now there’d be another person tagging along. Jack sighed. Why did foster kids always need help at the worst possible times?

When everything was stowed inside his duffel, Jack sprawled across the foot of his bed and picked up Photography Today. Once more he turned to the picture of the cliff dwellings, trying to figure out whether the photographer who took the picture had used a color filter on his lens. There was so much to learn about photography. His dad was still learning after 20 years behind a camera lens. Jack lost himself in the pages of the magazine, reading article after article about zoom lenses and filters and fancy, expensive tripods.

Once again his door banged open. “I know you’re not happy about this, but trust me, Jack. You gotta come,” Ashley said. Even though she was trying to speak softly so she wouldn’t be overheard, excitement bubbled up through her voice.

“No, I don’t gotta,” Jack answered.

“But she’s here,” Ashley murmured. “She’s fantastic! Wait till you see her, Jack. Her name’s Lucky.”

“Sounds like a dog.”

“A dog!” Ashley started to giggle. “Some dog. Come on, Jack. I left her all alone in the living room. Mom and Dad and the social worker are in the kitchen talking—about Lucky, I bet.”

“I’m ready for bed.”

“Come on—quit stalling.” Ashley stomped her foot impatiently. “If you won’t come, you’re being rude. Lucky really wants to meet you. Rude! Hear me?” The door slammed loudly behind Ashley’s retreating figure.

“Yeah, and close the door on your way out,” Jack muttered sarcastically. He slid off the bed onto his knees. If Ashley told their parents that he was being impolite to one of the foster kids, he’d get into trouble. “Fine, just…fine! I’ll go meet her. Then will everyone just leave me alone?” Grumbling to himself, he pulled on a pair of jeans, but danged if he’d wear shoes. Bare feet ought to be good enough for meeting some little girl named after a dog.

The extra-long T-shirt he used for sleeping hung down almost to his knees, and the jeans were too short because he’d been growing a lot lately, and he’d already packed his new ones. As he glanced into the mirror, he saw that he looked kind of weird, but he didn’t care. Barefoot and tousle haired, with a droopy shirt and outgrown jeans, he slouched down the hall to the living room.

At first he didn’t see her. Then he heard her voice. “You’re Jack, right?” she asked, smiling.

Perfect white teeth. Warm smile. Jack barely registered the dimples because his attention was caught by her eyes—fringed with thick, dark lashes and as green as the four-leaf clover she wore on a chain around her neck. He’d never, not once in his whole life, seen anything—anyone—like her.

“It’s great to meet you,” Lucky told him softly.

Stunned, he blurted, “They said you were a little kid! How old are you?” and immediately felt like a jerk. What a way to start a conversation!

“Sorry to disappoint you. I’m thirteen,” she answered. “And you’re what? Fifteen?”

Ashley burst out laughing. “Fifteen! Come on, Lucky. He’s only twelve.”

Jack stammered, “I’m practically thirteen.”

“Practically? Oh, yeah, right,” Ashley snorted. “You won’t be thirteen till—”

Before Ashley could finish, Lucky broke in, “I bet I thought you were older because you’re so tall. You’re a whole lot taller than I am. You could pass for high school, easy.”

He straightened his spine as far as it would go until he realized that stretching himself made his too-short jeans rise up even higher above his ankles.

“I bet you’re glad you came to meet her now, aren’t you?” Ashley snickered, “Some dog, huh, Jack?”

Still smiling, but looking puzzled, Lucky asked, “Dog? What do you mean?”

“Oh, just that my dumb brother Jack said that with a name like Lucky, you must be a—”

Jack leaped to his feet so fast he felt his own teeth rattle. He grabbed his sister’s arm and growled, “Come with me, Ashley. Now!”

“Why? Where?”

“We’re going to get Lucky a drink.”

“That would be great,” Lucky murmured. “A Coke, if you’ve got one. Or, water’s fine.”

Ashley writhed under Jack’s grip as she argued, “Both of us don’t need to go….”

“Yes, we do!” Eyes blazing, Jack dragged his sister into the hall.

“What’s wrong with you?” she demanded. “What did I do?”

He lit into her with a hissing tirade of furiously whispered words, telling her how she’d humiliated him and that she’d just better figure out when to keep her mouth shut if she knew what was good for her. Stung, Ashley looked at him, wide-eyed. “I was only teasing, Jack. Geesh, when did you get so sensitive?”

Clamping her arm even tighter, Jack ordered, “I don’t want you embarrassing me in front of Lucky. Now, you go back into that living room and talk nice to her while I get the drink. But don’t you say one word about me to her. Don’t even think about it. Got it?”

“Who wants to?” For the third time in an hour, Ashley flounced off. Glowering, he watched her go. Then he turned toward the kitchen. Almost at the door, he stopped abruptly because he heard the social worker mentioning Lucky’s name.

“…such a beautiful girl,” Ms. Lopez was saying. “That hair—all those auburn curls!”

“Yes, she’s very pretty,” Olivia agreed.

Ms. Lopez continued, “And as striking as Lucky is, you’d think someone somewhere would have noticed her and remembered her. But the police can’t track her, and she won’t tell us anything about herself except for that ridiculous name. Lucky Deal—what kind of a name is that?”

“Obviously fake,” Steven answered.

“Making it impossible to trace,” Ms. Lopez added.

Jack knew it was wrong to eavesdrop, but he couldn’t stop himself. He stayed hidden behind the wall, listening intently as Ms. Lopez talked to his parents.

“She’s a charmer, but at times she can act quite odd. We’d interrogated her—unsuccessfully, I might add—and we’d begun filling out the papers to bring her here. All of a sudden she jumped up and demanded to make a phone call. It had to be right then, she insisted, that very minute. She created a huge fuss, yelling that even if she was a juvenile, she was entitled to one phone call.”

“Was she?” Olivia asked.

“No, but we let her use the phone anyway. Since she refused to tell us who she was calling, we wanted to trace it.”

“Who was it to?” Steven wondered.

“We didn’t find out. But we do know she dialed the number of a phone booth in Park City, Utah.”

Hesitating, Jack decided this was not the time to walk into the kitchen and rummage through the refrigerator for a soft drink. The last words he heard as he turned away were a warning from Ms. Lopez.

“It sounds as if your assignment at Mesa Verde is an important one, Olivia, and I can’t tell you how grateful we are that you’re willing to include Lucky in your plans at the last minute like this. Our agency is hoping that a trip to a beautiful park might be just the distraction she needs to let down her defenses and tell you about herself. But….”

“But what?” Olivia asked.

“You’ll need to be careful. There’s something not quite right about Lucky.”

“Meaning?” Steven asked.

“Meaning—watch your back. Lucky’s a handful. Cougars aren’t the only creatures that can turn on you.”

CHAPTER TWO

Jack tossed restlessly. Lying flat on the edge of the cliff, he clutched brittle rock with his fingernails as he stared down a vast chasm to the canyon floor. Then the rock crumbled into sand, shattering his safe handhold, plunging him into peril. He was falling. He heard the wind, heard Lucky’s voice whisper, “Mesa Verde.” Or maybe it was the wind that sighed the words as they streamed around him: “Flying. Flying. To Colorado.”

With a start, he rose out of the terrifying plunge of his dream to find his fingers curled stiffly around the edge of his quilt. Still, the soft voice whispered inside his head, even after he convinced himself he was awake and was no longer dreaming. Jack rolled out of his bed onto his feet and padded to the bedroom door, opening it just a crack.

A small, arched alcove in the hall held one of the Landons’ telephones. Lucky stood there, hunched over, cradling the receiver, speaking in low tones with her back turned toward Jack’s door. Barefoot, she’d wrapped herself in a terry cloth robe Olivia had lent her. As she pressed the phone against her ear, the robe’s full sleeve slid back to reveal her wristwatch. Jack had noticed the watch earlier in the evening. He remembered thinking then that it was a large, chunky-looking one for a girl to wear. More like a man’s. Now he could easily read the glowing digital numbers: 2:10 a.m. The middle of the night.

“It’ll be OK,” she was saying softly. “Don’t worry so much. I can handle them.”

She hung up then. When she turned around and noticed Jack, she jumped in surprise. No smile this time: Her startled eyes turned as cold as green ice. “What did you hear?” she demanded.

He stammered, “Nothing. Just, like, something about you can handle—I don’t know what.” His eyebrows drew together as his mind focused on her and on the telephone that now lay back in its cradle. She shouldn’t be here, calling someone in secret. The last of his sleepiness evaporated as his mind finally comprehended what was happening. “Wait, what are you doing? Who were you calling?”

It seemed to Jack that a lot of different looks flitted across Lucky’s face, as if she were searching for the right one. Suddenly, her face turned soft, pleading.

“Shhhh!” She pointed toward Steven and Olivia’s bedroom door. “Quiet! Please?” Then, gesturing toward the living room, she tiptoed down the hall, away from where the rest of the Landons were sleeping. Jack followed, not sure what he should do, but knowing he could call out for his folks in an instant if he needed them. For now, he wanted to understand what Lucky was up to.

She motioned for him to sit on the couch, then perched on a footstool opposite him, gazing at him like someone about to ask a favor. Keep it together, Jack warned himself. Stay cool. Get information. “So,” he asked softly. “What’s going on?”

“I…I don’t know if I can tell you,” she whispered. Then, a beat later, she added, “I don’t know if I should.”

“What is it?”

Lucky stayed silent.

“Is it something bad?”

“Yes.”

Bad! Jack’s stomach squeezed. With a foster kid that could mean all kinds of things, problems that Jack wouldn’t know how to deal with. “Listen,” he began, “maybe I should get my folks—”

“No!” Lucky said the word with such force that Jack blinked. “I’m sorry, it’s just—I need to tell someone, and I thought, since you’re so….” She took a breath, then shook her head. “But not anyone else—not your folks and not the social workers. Your mom’s already all upset about the cougar and all the problems at Mesa Verde. She couldn’t handle this, too. She’d send me back, and that could get me killed.”

“Killed! Wait a minute, wait a minute. I don’t get this. I need to go one step at a time. Who was on the phone?”

“Maria. She’s my friend from where I used to live.”

Jack turned on a small table lamp, which sent a flare of light through the room. He had to be able to see her better, to make sense of the words going into his head. “Maria—is she the one who’s trying to hurt you?”

“No. Jack, Maria was almost killed by gang members.”

“Gang members?”

“We were together—Maria and me—when we saw the gang do a crime. They found us out.” Lucky squeezed her eyes shut, but continued. “We tried to run, but they caught us and said that if we ever told, they’d find us both and kill us. Maria started screaming. They didn’t like that. They beat her up real, real bad.” She shuddered, barely whispering the last words. “I was faster. I got away.”

“Gang members?” Jack knew he sounded incredulous, but he couldn’t help it. Ms. Lopez had warned his parents to be careful of Lucky. Maybe he should be, too. His thoughts must have shown on his face, because suddenly, her green eyes pierced him like a laser. “You think I’m lying? You think I’m making this whole thing up?”

Now it was Jack’s turn to stay silent.

“You want me to prove it? Is that what it takes for you to believe?” Pulling up the right sleeve of the robe, Lucky revealed a nasty bruise, like an ugly shadow, on her forearm. “They gave me this,” she told him.

She must have been hit, and hit hard. Nothing short of a hard punch could have left such a mark. Quickly, Lucky pulled the sleeve back down and looked up at him again with her eyes wide. Stunned, Jack stared back. “I’m sorry,” was all he could think to say.

“When I first met you, Jack, I thought I could trust you. But I guess you’re not any different from everyone else. You need proof. If a bruise is what it takes for you to know I’m telling the truth, then I guess that’s what it takes. I want you to believe me. I need you to.”

“I do.” Living in Jackson Hole, Jack didn’t see much of the harsher side of life that some of their foster kids had dealt with every day. Jack’s own life was safe and well ordered. His mother and father cocooned him in love in a way that seemed quite ordinary to Jack, until he peered into others’ lives and saw the turmoil and pain. He should never forget just how fortunate he was.

“You know what bothers me the most?” Lucky asked him.

“What?”

“It bothers me when I think that it should have been me that’s in the hospital. Not Maria. I got away because I’m quick.”

“Lucky, you can’t feel bad about that. Things just…happen. I’m glad you made it.”

“But it’s not fair,” she wailed softly. “That’s why I have to call her, so I know she’s OK. I feel so guilty!” Hugging her sides tightly, Lucky crumpled into herself. “You know what just happened? Maria told me that the gang left a message. She said they’re still looking for me, and if I come back, I’m dead. That’s when I told her not to worry, that I could handle them. But the truth is, I’m scared.”

Perplexed, Jack asked, “What about the police? Tell them what’s going on. They’d protect you.”

Lucky shook her head and gave Jack a look full of pity. “You don’t know much about gangs, Jack. They have spies everywhere. You might not believe this, but some cops are gang members. I don’t trust anyone anymore.” She drew in a breath, then placed her hand lightly on his. “Except, maybe, you. I think I can trust you. You won’t tell anyone about Maria, will you Jack?”

“But my parents—”

“If you tell them, they’ve got to go to Social Services. It’s their responsibility. If you don’t say anything, then they won’t have to make that decision. It’d be like you’re protecting your parents, too.”

Jack figured that if his mother and father found out Lucky had made a call, they’d be bound by law to tell Ms. Lopez. It was better, Jack decided, to protect all of them. “I won’t tell,” he promised.

“Not Ashley, either? She seems sweet, but I don’t want her to worry—”

“Especially Ashley,” Jack added hastily. “You don’t know her yet, but she’s a blabbermouth. No, I won’t tell a soul.”

“Good. Thanks, Jack,” she breathed. “You just saved my life.”

What was he supposed to say to that? “Uh…I didn’t really…I mean…. Hey, is all your stuff packed? We’re leaving for Mesa Verde pretty early, like in five hours. We ought to get some sleep.”

“All right. Good night, Jack,” she answered. “And…thanks! So much.”

Jack hurried down the hall to his room. Now it was 2:35 a.m. The red digital numbers on his bedroom clock pulsed second after second; he squeezed his eyelids tight, wondering how he’d ever get back to sleep.

He couldn’t erase the image of Lucky gazing up at him with those big green eyes, looking so defenseless—on the outside. But what was she like on the inside? He remembered Ms. Lopez telling his parents they should watch her. He pictured prim, kindly, gray-haired Ms. Lopez—not the kind of woman to make things up, but, then again, not a woman who’d known the whole story. Lucky could have confided in Ms. Lopez, but she hadn’t. She’d trusted Jack. Only him.

Flipping onto his stomach, he burrowed his face deep in the pillow. Whatever happened, he knew he was on Lucky’s side.

CHAPTER THREE

They flew in a deHavilland jet from their hometown of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to Denver, Colorado. That particular plane had eight rows of two seats each on both sides of the aisle. “Would you rather have an aisle or a window seat?” Lucky asked Jack. Did that mean she wanted to sit next to him? he wondered.

“Go ahead, sit right there, Jack,” his mother told him. “Dad and I will be across the aisle from you two, and Ashley can have the seat in front of you. There are plenty of empty seats.”

Feeling awkward, noticing how bony his knees looked—why had he worn shorts?—Jack slid into the seat next to Lucky. “Good. We can talk,” she said, feeling for the seat belt. Jack moved away from her, mashing himself against the armrest.

She stayed silent while the plane took off from Jackson airport, while the flight attendant went over all the instructions about what to do in case of an emergency, and even after the Fasten Seatbelt sign went off. Jack searched his brain for something to say, something that wouldn’t sound stupid. He thought of giving Lucky more details about the cougar attack at Mesa Verde, but he remembered Lucky’s bruise and decided he didn’t want to talk about any kind of assault. Maybe he could ask her about Maria. No, Jack doubted he could talk without being overheard, which meant he’d better save that topic for another time. He was just about to ask Lucky if she’d been following the NBA basketball play-offs when Ashley’s face popped up over the back of the seat in front of them.

Ashley crossed her arms on the top of the seat, planted her chin on her arms, looked brightly at Lucky, and asked straight out, “How’d you ever get a nickname like that? Is it your real name? I never heard of anyone named Lucky.”

Jack gave Ashley his fiercest, big brother “keep quiet” stare, but Lucky only laughed and answered, “I never heard of anyone else either. I’ll tell you how it happened: I was about five years old. We were living in Las Vegas, and I wanted to play one of the slot machines because they looked really fun. You know—all those cherries and plums and lemons whirling around. You know, Jack?”

He really didn’t. He’d never seen an actual slot machine—only a video game his friend had.

Lucky went on, “My dad said, ‘Lacey, the slots are a sucker’s game. Don’t waste that shiny quarter I gave you on the slots. Buy a pack of gum. At least you’ll have something for your money.’”

Jack and Ashley exchanged glances. So her real name was Lacey! Their parents didn’t know that, and even the social worker, Ms. Lopez, hadn’t been able to find out Lucky’s name. And now she’d slipped up and said it right out loud.

“But I kept begging my dad—please, please, please!—and finally he let me play a quarter. ‘Just one quarter,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’”

“So what happened?” Ashley asked, wide-eyed.

“I hit a hundred-dollar jackpot. All these quarters came tumbling out of the machine and fell all over the floor.”

“Wow!” Ashley exclaimed, impressed, but Jack asked, “Isn’t it illegal for kids under eighteen to gamble in Las Vegas?”

“Sure,” Lucky answered, grinning at him. “But the guards didn’t catch me—my dad made sure of that. So then, while we were picking up the quarters, my dad told me, ‘From now on I’m going to call you Lucky. You’re my good-luck charm.’ Right after that he bought me this.” She touched the four-leaf clover pendant that hung around her neck.

From across the aisle Olivia said, “Ashley, sit down the right way. You need to face forward.”

“I will in a minute, Mom. Just give me one more minute.” Grimacing, Ashley said, “Moms! They’re always bugging you. Hey, Lucky, what did your mom think? I mean, did she get mad ’cause your dad let you do something illegal?”

For a long moment Lucky looked out the window. When she turned back toward them, her large green eyes brimmed with tears. “My mother was already dead by then.”

“Oh!” Ashley murmured, dropping lower in her seat. “How…how did she die?”

Lucky answered in a husky voice, “She worked as a magician’s assistant in a big Las Vegas show. She was so good! But one night while they were performing, the magician’s white tiger mauled her. She died from the wounds.” The tears welled up even more, spilling over Lucky’s lower lids, running in rivulets down her cheeks.

“That’s so awful!” Ashley wailed.

Steven Landon reached across the aisle and tapped his daughter’s shoulder. “You need to sit down, Ashley. If we hit any unexpected turbulence, you could bounce right up and slam against the ceiling. People get hurt bad that way.”

As Ashley sank into her seat, Lucky rubbed the tears from her cheeks. “Do you have a tissue?” she asked Jack.

Fumbling in the pockets of his shorts, he searched for something that could wipe up tears. A rumpled Kleenex—it didn’t have to look brand new, as long as it was clean. But all he could find was a cash-register receipt for a Slurpee from 7-Eleven. “Sorry,” he mumbled, with honest regret.

“It doesn’t matter. I just get…emotional…when I think about my mother,” she murmured.

“Yeah. Sure. No wonder.”

Lucky leaned forward, “Excuse me, Jack. I’ll just slip out to the lavatory and get myself a tissue.”

“OK.” Jack swung around and hung his knees over the armrest so that his feet, in their big sneakers, dangled in the aisle. The corners of Lucky’s lips twitched ever so slightly with amusement as she moved past him. When she was gone, Jack smacked his forehead with the heels of his hands. Why hadn’t he stood up to let her get past! That’s what he should have done—stand up, step into the aisle, and get out of her way. He groaned inwardly. How stupid his feet had looked dangling in midair! Why did he keep coming off so geeky?

“Mom, Dad!” Now Ashley was in the aisle.

“Can’t you just sit still?” her father demanded. “You keep bobbing up and down. Your mother’s trying to work out a plan for Mesa Verde. It’s important, Ashley. Some people have even demanded that the cougars be taken out of the park.”

“Taken out?” Ashley cried. “They can’t do that, can they?”

Olivia looked up from a stack of papers she’d been reading and patted Ashley’s hand. “No, but it shows you how scared folks get when they realize the damage a wild animal can do. Anyway, what did you need to tell us?”

“Oh, yeah. Well, it’s about Lucky.” Leaning over her parents and talking in a loud stage whisper, Ashley told them, “I know how you can find out who she is. First, her real name’s Lacey. Second, her mother got attacked by a magician’s white tiger in Las Vegas.”

“Oh, Ashley!” Olivia looked at her daughter.

“A white tiger?” Steven exclaimed, and laughed out loud. “She’s feeding you a story, sweetheart.”

“Honest, Dad! You should have seen her. She was crying and everything when she told us about it. Wasn’t she, Jack?”

Hesitant, Jack nodded.

“I mean,” Ashley went on, “how many people get killed by a white tiger in a big Las Vegas show? It must have been in all the papers, don’t you think? You could check it out real easy, even though it happened—let’s see—at least eight years ago.”

Olivia turned to Jack and asked, “What do you think, Jack? Do you buy into that fantastic story?”

What did he think? He believed it. No one could fake tears like that. Lucky had to be telling the truth. But if Jack admitted that and they were able to trace Lucky’s background, she’d be returned to wherever it was the gang was waiting to hurt her.

“I…I don’t know.”

Olivia sighed. “OK. When we change planes at the Denver airport, I’ll call Ms. Lopez and tell her what you just said. We’ll see what she can find out. Now, kids, let me get back to my reading. I’m almost out of time, and I’ve got to learn everything I can about what happened at Mesa Verde.”

In one of the molded plastic seats in the Denver airport terminal, Jack found the sports section of that day’s Denver Post. Since someone had left it behind, he supposed it was OK for him to pick it up and read it. That evening the Utah Jazz—Jack’s favorite team—would be in the NBA play-offs. Jack read the predictions about who would win, including the Las Vegas odds: four to three, favoring the Jazz in the series.

If gambling odds could be printed in the paper, Jack thought, trying to convince himself, it probably wasn’t so bad that Lucky had played the slot machine. Just that once, when she was little and probably didn’t know any better. Especially since she didn’t have a mother to keep an eye on her.

He checked his watch. They’d be boarding in about twenty minutes, getting onto the smaller plane that would fly them from Denver to Durango. He looked around for his family. His father was watching the news on the television monitor mounted just beneath the ceiling.

His mother was walking toward a bank of pay phones.

Curious, because maybe she was going to call Ms. Lopez about Lucky, Jack made his way toward the phones, sidestepping through throngs of travelers in the busy airport. For a few minutes they kept him from seeing his mother. When he caught sight of her, she was punching numbers into the telephone keypad. Lucky stood close behind her.

Oddly close. Slightly to the side. She seemed to be staring intently at Olivia’s fingers as they dialed.

“What’s she doing?” Ashley asked from right beside Jack.

“Where’d you come from? And what do you mean? What’s who doing?”

“You know who I mean—Lucky. She’s practically on top of Mom, but Mom doesn’t know she’s back there. I bet Lucky’s trying to hear what Mom’s saying on the phone.”

“Mom hasn’t started talking yet,” Jack protested.

“Well, when she starts. I better get over there. If Lucky hears Mom talking to Ms. Lopez, she’ll know I squealed on her.”

Ashley darted through the crowd until she reached Lucky. The two of them immediately walked off together, so if Lucky had been trying to eavesdrop, she hadn’t heard much.

The plane they flew in to Durango had only 21 seats, total, in rows of two seats together on one side and single seats on the other. Ashley sat with Steven, Lucky with Olivia, and Jack was by himself in one of the single seats across from Lucky, with no one to talk to and a lot of time to think.

He took out his camera from his backpack and loaded a roll of film. As soon as they got settled at Mesa Verde National Park, he was going to ask Lucky if he could take her picture. Until now, Jack hadn’t been at all interested in taking pictures of people. Like his dad, he liked to shoot wildlife—with a camera. A couple of times he’d tried to take pictures of football games or hockey, but he never seemed to click the shutter at just the right fraction of a second. His sports pictures always turned out wrong, with one player’s arm across another player’s face, or a blurry streak where someone had raced past his lens.

Now he wanted to photograph Lucky. Watching her out of the corner of his eye so she wouldn’t catch him staring, he thought about how he’d frame her against the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde. He wished he’d brought his photography magazine; it had an article about shooting portraits in a landscape environment.

“Here we are,” Olivia announced as they climbed down the stairs from the plane onto the tarmac—Durango was too small an airport to have a Jetway. “Durango, Colorado.”

“You get the baggage, Jack,” Steven told him.

When they entered the building, Lucky turned around as if she were looking for something. “I have to find a rest room,” she announced.

Pointing to a sign, Olivia said, “Over that way. Don’t be too long, though. We’ll meet you at the rental car desk, and then we’re off to Mesa Verde.”

“You bet. I can’t wait!” With a small wave, Lucky moved quickly down the corridor.

“Hold on, Lucky,” Ashley called out. “I’ll go with you.”

Lucky turned, and Jack saw another whisper of a look—maybe impatience or maybe even anger—pass across her face. “I’d like to go alone, if you don’t mind,” she said sharply.

“Why?” Ashley asked.

It seemed as though Lucky couldn’t come up with an answer. She stared at Ashley, stone-faced, her mouth pressed into a straight line. Olivia, sensing Lucky’s annoyance, cheerily said, “How about this—I’ll go with the two of you.”

A beat of silence, followed by a terse “Fine” from Lucky.

As the three of them disappeared down the hallway, Jack turned the scene over in his mind. The whole interaction between Ashley and Lucky and his mother had been odd. Why was Lucky resisting their company? Suddenly, the answer hit him: She must have wanted to break free and find a pay phone so she could check on Maria. That had to be it. He smiled to himself, warmed by the secret knowledge that only he and Lucky shared. In a way, it was hard being the one person who understood her whole story. The rest of the Landons were bound to find her behavior strange, which concerned him. Still, he’d vowed to keep her secret, and he meant to honor that promise.

For some reason it always seemed to take a lot longer for luggage to be unloaded at a small airport than at a large one. Jack stood watching the empty conveyor belt snake its lazy way around its track until the first bags appeared. A large cooler with duct tape wrapped in silver stripes pushed through the baggage opening, followed by two flowered totes and a green suitcase with wheels. Jack had just spied one of the Landon bags when a “Hey!” behind him made him jump.

Whirling around, Jack almost bumped into his sister. “Ashley, where’s Lucky?”

“Still with Mom. I want to tell you something weird. About Lucky.”

“What about her?”

“I don’t know how to say it. It was just…kind of strange, the way she was acting. For one thing, she kept looking around her all the way to the rest room. Up front, sideways, but she was only moving her eyes, like she didn’t want anyone to know she was checking the place out.”

Jack felt a surge of impatience. “So? Is that supposed to mean something?”

“Well, I’m wondering if she used to live here.”

“That’s not it.” Jack jerked his mother’s suitcase off the conveyor belt and set it down hard.

“You don’t know that,” Ashley said, her voice rising. “And why are you getting so touchy? I thought maybe you’d seen the same thing, and we could tell Mom and Dad and then maybe they could find out if Durango is her real home.”

“What is it with you, Ashley?” he demanded, grabbing another bag. “It’s like you’ve turned into a spy or something. Why don’t you just leave her alone?”

Now it was Ashley’s turn to look at him in stony silence. She might have said more, but right then Steven walked up. “Great. Our luggage made it. You two wait here with the suitcases while I go pick up the rental car.”

“What kind of car did you get, Dad? Is it a red one?” Ashley asked hopefully.

“Yeah. A Lamborghini,” Jack added.

“No, we can’t fit in that, so pick a Rolls Royce,” Ashley joked.

“A Hummer.” Jack was getting into the spirit of it, glad the tension with his sister was melting. “A Hummer with Utah Jazz seat covers and its own television and VCR inside.”

Steven laughed. “You got it. I’ll make it a red one. Meet me out front, guys.”

CHAPTER FOUR

It turned out to be a white Ford Taurus, just like most of the other rental cars—not that Jack had expected anything racier.

Ashley wedged herself into the middle of the backseat between Jack and Lucky. Jack had to peer around his sister every time he wanted to say something to Lucky. That didn’t happen often, because Olivia kept up a steady stream of talk.

“Isn’t this a beautiful place? It’s a lot more mountainous than Jackson Hole, although I think they’re close to the same altitude. Which reminds me, Jack and Ashley, both of you have to write reports since you’re missing school. Ashley, yours is to be on an animal that lives in Mesa Verde, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

Olivia turned around from the front seat. “There are a lot of interesting animals in this park—coyotes and badgers and lots of mule deer and elk. Have you ever stood next to an elk, Lucky?”

When Lucky shook her head no, Olivia slipped right into her lecture mode. She loved to share information about her job at the National Elk Refuge. “Well, let me tell you, they are huge! A lot bigger than you might think. My head stops right at a bull elk’s shoulder, if you can picture that.”

“Mom, I don’t want to do a report on elk,” Ashley broke in. “What else is there? Give me something with teeth.”

“OK, how about a black bear? They have them in Mesa Verde. And, of course, the cougar. Did you know the cougar is also called a mountain lion and a puma? They’ve got several names for the exact same animal. That might be interesting to mention, Ashley, if you do your paper on Felis concolor, which is, as you can probably guess, the scientific name for a cougar.” Olivia was growing excited. “Hey, really, cougars would be great for you to write on, since I’ve already gathered a lot of information. I could highlight some of the data….”

Ashley rolled her eyes at Jack to show she did not want to talk about school reports. Jack agreed. What was the use of getting a couple of days off if they had to worry about homework right from the start? Homework could wait. School would be over at the beginning of June—just two more weeks.

“How do you know about all those animals, Mrs. Landon?” Lucky asked.

“It’s my job. I specialize in endangered and threatened species. You heard about the cougar attack I’ve been called to investigate?”

Lucky nodded. “I heard a little, but not much. What’s going on?”

Running her fingers through her hair, Olivia sighed. “It’s really tragic, Lucky. Last week a little boy was walking with his family down a trail, and he got too far ahead of them. There was a scream. When the parents came around the bend….” She paused, shaking her head. “It’s not the way cougars usually behave. That’s what’s so frightening.”

“Was the boy all right?” Lucky asked.

“He had quite a few bites around his face, but I understand he’ll make it. The park hunted down the cougar and caught it. I was asked to examine it, to check for disease or age or any other cause that could explain such an attack.”

Olivia turned back toward the front of the car but twisted around again when Lucky said, “I bet it took lots of years in school to learn all that you know about animals.”

“Uh-huh. A whole bunch of years,” Olivia admitted. “But it doesn’t seem long when you’re doing something you love.” She paused, then asked, “Where do you go to school?”

Lucky didn’t miss a beat. “Home schooling.”

“Where’s your home?”

Lucky shrugged and smiled. “Wherever.”

“Do you travel a lot?” Olivia pressed.

“Mom!” Jack protested. Talk about a grilling! His mom was sounding like the FBI. Next she’d be pulling out the truth serum. “Lucky doesn’t have to answer that,” Jack said.

“Actually, I’d rather not,” Lucky murmured, very polite and still smiling.

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