Skeleton Tree Read online

  “Ah yes. These trees grow fast,” Ms. Francine said, shaking her head. She closed her hands over the silver locket she always wore around her neck.

  “Wait a minute, who’s Princy?” Jaxon said.

  “The skeleton, dumb-dumb! I call him Princy because he has those puffy sleeves and that shiny gold hat. Oh, and he lives in this huge castle where everyone dances all the time and drinks tea from fancy cups. But really, he doesn’t have a name.”

  Stanly and Jaxon looked at each other. Ms. Francine laughed.

  “What did I tell you?” she said. “We see what we want to see.”

  An image of a skeleton in a crinkly black cloak floated behind Stanly’s eyes. He shook his head to make it go away, but it stuck there. Like someone had sealed his ears shut with superglue.

  After breakfast, Stanly and Miren went outside and watered Princy. Stanly would have rather been taking photos, but he suspected Jaxon had given up on his idea of trying to document the skeleton’s growth. Why else would he have volunteered to stay inside and help Ms. Francine with the dishes? Oh well, it didn’t matter anyway. At this rate, there was no way he was going to win the Young Discoverer’s Prize. Not if every photo he took disappeared.

  While Stanly and Miren sat watching and sipping frozen orange juice from a can, the skeleton started to rumble. It heaved and trembled, and then the top part of a pelvis broke through the mud. Stanly froze in place, heart getting pinched between his ribs.

  Beside him, Miren jumped up and punched the sky. “You can do it, Princy!”

  She flung her arms around the skeleton’s rib cage. Stanly was sure the brittle bones would crack under her weight, but they didn’t. Instead, the skeleton peeled its hands away from its face and patted Miren’s back.

  In the daylight, the skeleton’s eye sockets didn’t look quite as black and swirly as they had the night before, but they still reminded Stanly of caves. Caves that went on and on without end. He didn’t see any sign of the black cloak, either.

  That part weirded him out more than anything. How could something be there one minute and then disappear the next? Like it had never even existed? Probably because he’d imagined the whole creepy cloak thing in the first place.

  “Just one more bucket, please!” Miren said for maybe the hundredth time. Princy had gone still after patting Miren’s back, and she was determined to make him move again. Stanly wanted to go inside and talk Jaxon into helping him take more photos, but Miren looked so skinny and sick in her Stripy Pony nightgown, he couldn’t say no.

  “Fine, just one more.”

  Miren and Stanly poured bucket after bucket of water onto the skeleton and waited. By eleven, it had grown two more inches. Now, whenever the wind brushed past, the bones made a sound like branches rattling on a dead tree. Maybe it was a tree, like Ms. Francine said. Only this one was made of bone instead of wood.

  “Lunchtime!” Jaxon called later from the kitchen window. “Cookies and cucumber sandwiches.”

  Stanly helped Miren inside, shocked at how much time had passed. She was so sleepy after all the watering that Ms. Francine put her to bed. She couldn’t even stay awake long enough for lunch. After that, Stanly ate his cookies in silence, feeling bad for leaving Jaxon alone with Ms. Francine on their super sleepover weekend and confused about the bones.

  “Maybe we should play some Ancient Aliens Attack!,” Stanly said when he’d devoured his last cookie. “You can show me that moon fort you built that looks like a bologna sandwich.”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Jaxon said, peering at the bones through the picture window. “Sorry I acted like such a wuss last night.”

  “What? You didn’t, it’s fine.”

  “No.” He swallowed a lump of cucumber sandwich. “I know how much you want to win that prize. And … I think we should try again.”

  “Are you sure?” Stanly said, half hoping he was kidding. He wanted more than anything to see his dad, but he was also really freaked out.

  “Yeah.” Jaxon spent a long time dusting all of the crumbs from his plate onto his napkin. “I’m sure.”

  After lunch, they went back outside, iPad at the ready. Stanly could tell Jaxon was trying to be brave for him. He kept giving the skeleton funny looks, but he never once said he was scared.

  “Maybe if you take a picture from behind, he won’t have time to duck,” Jaxon said. He handed Stanly the iPad, his hands only shaking a little. “I’ll distract him.”

  Jaxon waved his arms around and shouted out stuff like, “Hey, you big bag of bones, over here!”

  Stanly got into position and lined up his shot. Everything looked normal through the lens. He held his finger over the button. He was about to press down when the image with the cloak crept into his head. Suddenly, his stomach went all wobbly and he wished he hadn’t eaten so many cookies. Maybe he should have told Jaxon about the cloak. But no, that was stupid. The cloak wasn’t even real.

  “Did you get one?” Jaxon called. “My arms are getting tired.”

  “Just a sec!” Stanly pressed the button, and the iPad counted down and then made that little shutter noise.

  “What’s it look like?” Jaxon ran up behind Stanly, and they both stared at the picture they had captured. Before it could change, Stanly made a copy and saved it to the home screen. It was the back of a skeleton, poking halfway up out of the ground. There was no cloak and no creepy, cavern eyes. Relief washed over Stanly’s skin.

  “Whoa, what’s that?” Jaxon said, backing away from the screen.

  “What?” Stanly looked closer. In the picture, there was something glittering in the grass near the skeleton’s pelvis. A long, curved blade.

  “That’s it, I’m out of here. Sorry, Stanly!” Jaxon’s eyes lingered for a moment on the grass. In real life, not in the photo. “It doesn’t make any sense,” he said under his breath.

  Stanly followed his gaze, a cool wind snaking up his T-shirt. Jaxon was right; it didn’t make sense. No matter how hard he looked, he kept coming to the same conclusion.

  In the photo, he could see the blade reflecting back the light from the iPad’s screen. But when he lowered the tablet and looked at the ground right in front of him, there was nothing. Just mud and shadows and dark green grass tickling white-washed bones.

  Rain battered the roof and made the lights flicker, like any minute the power might go out.

  “I’m just saying, it’s creepy.” Jaxon counted to five over and over while he waited for Stanly’s computer to load. “People will think it’s a prank.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” Stanly dragged a bucket from the garage and put it under the leak next to his bed.

  “Might as well wait till you get a better shot. One people will take seriously, right?”

  Stanly didn’t answer. It was one thing for Jaxon to wait; the contest was just fun and games for him, but for Stanly it was different.

  “Hey, look at this,” Jaxon said, half standing and banging his knees on Stanly’s keyboard. “There are already some entries for the Young Discoverer’s Prize online. Check it out.”

  “Online?”

  “Yeah, people post entries on the website, and kids from all over the world can like them or leave comments.”

  “Are you serious? Let’s see.”

  Jaxon clicked the link. As usual, Stanly’s old PC took ages to load.

  “This first kid found a shark tooth buried on a beach in Florida,” Jaxon said, scanning through the pixelated photos. “He already has fifty-two likes.”

  “What? How can we ever catch up to that? And that’s not even a real discovery; it probably came off somebody’s necklace.”

  “Hang on, look at this.” Jaxon clicked on the next entry. The photograph showed a boy holding up what looked like a leg. “Dinosaur bone, uncovered in the Sahara Desert.”

  “That could have come from a baby dinosaur, I guess,” said Stanly, not impressed. “One hundred twenty-five likes! What is wrong with people? It’s probably not even from a real dinosaur
. I bet it’s a camel or something.”

  Jaxon scrolled through the rest of the entries. Thirteen so far. When he reached the bottom, he got a mysterious look on his face. It was the same half smile he got whenever he was reading one of his Darby Brothers’ mysteries.

  “You know,” he said, weighing his words, “your picture might be weird, but it’s definitely more interesting than any of these.”

  “I thought you said people will think it’s a prank?”

  “Maybe, but none of the others include growth charts or notes. I mean, it’s probably a crazy idea, but—”

  That was all Stanly needed to hear. He grabbed Jaxon’s iPad and pulled up the submission form for the Young Discoverer’s Prize.

  “Hold it, I didn’t mean we should submit it right now. We don’t have our notes ready.”

  “We can get them ready.” Stanly typed in his information as he was talking. “Look, you can keep adding to your entry until the deadline. We might as well post it now, so we can get as many likes as possible.”

  “I don’t know … ”

  Stanly uploaded the photo. There was only one box left to fill out. “What should we call our entry? If we say it’s a human skeleton, won’t they send the police or something?”

  “Holy crab cakes, Stanly! I can’t believe this didn’t occur to me sooner. If someone sees a picture of a dead human body in your backyard, what are they going to think?”

  Stanly shrugged. He was willing to take that risk.

  “Forget about pranks,” Jaxon said. “They’re going to think you’re a murderer, that’s what. This is just like Darby Brothers’ Mystery #17, The Accidental Frame-Up.”

  “Enough with the Darby Brothers already.”

  “Fine, I’m just saying, I’ve changed my mind. Posting this picture is a bad idea. A dangerous idea.”

  Stanly nodded, but while Jaxon had been talking he’d already typed out “Skeletus animatus” in the final box. The iPad made a whooshing sound as he pressed the submit button.

  “Tell me you didn’t just do that.”

  Jaxon lunged for the iPad, but he was too late. They both watched as, before their eyes, a new entry popped onto the big monitor.

  Posted at 1:59 p.m., Skeletus animatus.

  A bolt of lightning flashed outside the window. As it did, Stanly’s stomach twisted into a knot, like there was a clown inside him trying to turn his guts into balloon animals. Maybe Jaxon was right. Maybe the police would come pounding on his door, shouting—

  “Time for hot cocoa!” Ms. Francine burst into the room, making Stanly drop the iPad and almost pee his pants. “I added a pinch of salt, just the way you like it.” She tilted her head at Stanly. “Why so frightened, little Stanly? It’s only a thunderstorm. In Kyrgyzstan, we would pray for lightning like this to come down and melt all the snow.” She wiggled her bushy eyebrows at him. When he still didn’t move, she picked him up by the collar and hoisted him into the hall. “Come on, my wee goats, let’s eat!”

  “You can’t eat cocoa,” Stanly said after he’d been forced into a seat at the dining table. “Besides, we were busy doing stuff. At least let me go get the iPad.” Ms. Francine ignored him. She poured each of them a cup of thick hot chocolate topped with marshmallows.

  They ate in silence, Jaxon and Stanly at the table, Ms. Francine sitting on the windowsill. She twirled her locket in her clawed hand and stared outside, where the skeleton tree swayed back and forth in the wind.

  “Who’s in your locket?” Jaxon said after a while, blowing on his cocoa. It was clear they weren’t going to get out of this without making a little conversation. “Can I see?”

  “Smart boy. How do you know I keep someone hidden in there?”

  “People always keep important pictures in lockets. Like in this one Darby Brothers’ mystery, where James and Oliver’s grandma—”

  “You talk a lot about these Darby Brothers. What makes them so great? You have mysteries, too.” Ms. Francine batted a hand at the skeleton. “You can solve them without this James and Oliver.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Take some advice from an old woman. Live the life you have, because one day. Poof! You won’t have it anymore.”

  She opened up the locket and showed them a black-and-white picture of a baby on one side, and a man with a bristly mustache and a fuzzy hat on the other.

  “Papa died when I was three or four.”

  “You don’t remember which one?” Jaxon said.

  “Three or four might not seem like so long ago when you are little, but try telling them apart when you’re as old as me.” She flicked the side of her crooked nose. “Papa passed away in his favorite chair. He was playing chess, and I sat in the windowsill, watching. I loved to watch Papa play chess. The way the line in between his brow would crease.”

  “Who was he playing?” Stanly said.

  Ms. Francine shrugged. “You know, this one and that one.”

  “You don’t remember that, either?” Jaxon said.

  “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.”

  Stanly watched the way her eyes lingered on the skeleton. A tear rolled down her cheek.

  “You will see,” Ms. Francine said, and she clanked her empty mug on the metal tray.

  “Where’s Miren anyway?” Stanly said.

  “Ah yes, little Miren is tired after so much excitement. I went to wake her up, and you know what she said?” Stanly shook his head. “ ‘Go away, it’s the day of the royal ball and Princy is about to serve tea.’ ”

  “She said that?” Jaxon said.

  “Well, come to think of it, it was hard to tell with all the snoring.”

  Jaxon offered to help clean up the dishes once they’d finished their cocoa—he was always annoyingly polite like that—but Ms. Francine shooed them back to Stanly’s room. “Go, have fun. Let the old lady do the cleaning.”

  “Finally,” said Stanly once they were back in his room. “Let’s see if anyone liked the photo yet. Then, when we’re done, we can make those charts you were talking about.”

  Jaxon didn’t answer. He was too busy staring at something on the floor.

  “What is—?” Stanly started, but then he saw the muddy footprints leading from the window to the bed. And that wasn’t all. There was a wet handprint on Stanly’s PixelBlock pillow. In the exact spot where Jaxon’s iPad had been just a few minutes before.

  They spent all day Sunday searching for Jaxon’s iPad. The power went out three times, which didn’t help. Even worse, Miren insisted on searching, too, which meant she mostly dragged Stanly around the house, telling him dumb stories about kids in her class Stanly had never met.

  “And then Isaac, that’s the one who eats boogers, sent a letter to Natalie saying how he really liked her new shoes, the ones that light up and have wheels, but Natalie hates Isaac, because of the boogers, and so she threw it away, and Isaac found it in the trash can, and he cried so much Miss Gadd had to call the nurse.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Stanly.

  And to top it all off, it was raining so hard they couldn’t even search outside.

  “How could you lose an iPad?” Mom said after she’d dropped Jaxon off at home later that night. “I told Deb we’d pay for it, by the way.”

  “But, Mom—”

  “What else could I say?” Mom gnawed her bottom lip. “Look, I know you didn’t mean to, but you’re almost a teenager, and I expect you to be more responsible than this. Especially—” Her voice got all crackly and she stopped talking.

  Stanly wanted to tell her about the footprints, but he couldn’t spill his secret. Not when he was so close.

  She drove in silence the rest of the way home. When he got out of the car, it was so dark Stanly could barely see to get inside. Mom still hadn’t replaced the bulb that burned out in the garage door opener. “I’ll find it, Mom, I promise.”

  At first, he wasn’t sure Mom had heard. Then she found him in the dark and pulled him close. Her wet cheeks pressed against his. She held him
like that for a breathless moment, and then she went inside to run water for Miren’s bath.

  Later that night, Stanly had logged on to play PixelBlock when he saw a message from Jaxon flashing at the bottom of the screen.

  Check out the Young Discoverer’s website.

  NOW!!!

  Ants skittered from the top of Stanly’s head all the way down his spine, or at least that was what it felt like. He typed in the web address and waited for the page to load. If only his computer wasn’t some relic from a hundred years ago.

  Finally, the picture of a boy holding a dinosaur tooth from the ad came together pixel by pixel. He didn’t see anything new on the home page, so he clicked on the link to view the entries.

  He half yelped, half laughed as soon as the screen loaded. Out of twenty-seven entries, Skeletus animatus was number one. It already had 341 likes, and it’d been on the site for less than a day. Stanly could already imagine what it would be like when he called Dad and told him he’d won the contest. Then later, on the plane ride home from their awesome trip, Dad would turn to him and say, “I’m sorry, buddy, for being such an idiot. I’m coming home.” Only it would sound better than that, because Dad always knew just how to put things. Because it would be real.

  DARBYFAN#1: Can you believe it????? We’re sure to win now!

  STANTHEMAN64: No way! How did it happen so fast?

  DARBYFAN#1: Read the comments section!

  Stanly scrolled down and was amazed to find fifty-three comments from people all over the world.

  DINOLOPOLIS20: What an amazing find! I’ve never seen anything like it.

  TEAMDIGBOTS: Incredible! I mean, it can’t be real (right?), but it’s still super cool. How did you make the picture move like that? If it were a gif I’d understand, but it’s a plain old jpg. I checked!

  Stanly clicked back to his chat with Jaxon.

  STANTHEMAN64: What do they mean move?!?!?!

  DARBYFAN#1: You got me. All I see is the same old picture.

  Stanly scrolled back up so the picture filled the screen. A skeleton torso with its back to him, the blade peeking through the grass in the bottom corner. He could understand why some people would think it was fake. If he didn’t know better, he might say it was a super-realistic Halloween decoration, the kind Jaxon’s dad put in his haunted house.