The Box and the Bone by Zilpha Keatley Snyder Page B

isn’t it?”
    “No, it isn’t. It’s a great place to walk a dog. You can just walk around and around down here. See, like this.” She grabbed Lump’s leash and began to limp around the Pit. Carlos went back to where the other two PROs were watching, leaning on their shovels. The three of them went on leaning on their shovels while Susie walked around the Pit a couple of times, limping a little and acting very strange. Then she and Lump climbed back out and disappeared.
    “Weird,” Bucky said. “Okay, you dudes. Get back to work.”
    A little later the PROs gave up on the clubhouse area and began to move out around the whole Pit looking for places where the earth had recently been disturbed. Carlos was beginning to dig in a new spot when Eddy came over and stood next to him.
    “Don’t look now,” he said. “But over there, to your right, in that bushy place. Somebody is hiding in those bushes and looking over the wall. With binoculars. I’m sure I saw some binoculars.”
    “Oh yeah?” Carlos said. He checked on Bucky to see if he had noticed, too, but he seemed to be busy digging. “I’ll check it out,” he told Eddy. But by the time he’d eased over to the wall the bush was empty. The binoculars, and whoever had been looking through them, had disappeared.
    Carlos went back to digging, wondering if the person in the tree had been Susie again. Except—as far as he knew—Susie didn’t have any binoculars. And if it wasn’t Susie, who was it? The whole thing was beginning to give him a slightly creepy feeling.

Chapter 15
    “T HAT’S A BAD SCRAPE ,” Brigitta Garcia, Susie’s mother, said as she unwrapped a large-size Band-Aid. “How did it happen this time?”
    “It was Lump’s fault,” Susie said. “He pulled me down. He just happened to see Carlos and he took off like a rocket and jerked me off my feet.”
    “Well, perhaps you ought to let the boys walk Lump from now on,” her mother said.
    “But I like walking him. Dad lets me do it.”
    Her mother finished packing up the first-aid kit before she said, “Well, I’ll talk to your father about it. But it seems to me that walking a dog who weighs more than you do is not a good idea.”
    Susie limped out onto the back deck and collapsed in a chair to wait for her knee to stop hurting. Actually, it had been Muffy’s idea, and it hadn’t been a good one. Pretending to be walking Lump in the Pit so she could check on what the PROs were doing would have been dumb even if she hadn’t fallen down and skinned her knee. Because those creeps obviously weren’t going to be doing anything important while she was there. The whole thing had been stupid.
    She hoped Muffy had had better luck. Peeking over the wall with your mother’s opera glasses made a little more sense than trying to pretend you were just an innocent dog walker—instead of a spy. She sighed. As soon as her knee felt better she would have to go back to the Pit—but without Lump this time—and go on following the PROs.
    While Susie was collapsed on the back deck waiting for her knee to quit hurting, the three PROs were still going over every inch of the Pit floor, searching and digging. Carlos was just about to suggest, for the third or fourth time, that they give up and do something else, when Bucky suddenly yelled, “Look. I told you so. There he is.”
    Sure enough, there he was. The four-legged suspect, Nijinsky, was standing at the Pit entrance— and he was carrying the same big bone. But when Bucky yelled he turned around and disappeared.
    Bucky threw down his shovel and started toward the stairs. Halfway there he stopped and looked back. “Come on, you goons. Get a move on. We have to follow him.”
    Why? Carlos was thinking. Why do we have to follow him? And when they caught up with Bucky, Eddy asked more or less the same question. “What do we want to follow Nijinsky for?” he asked. “You think he has the box on him, or something? Like in his pocket,