Free Caching In by Kristin Butcher

Chapter One
    Chris and I duck behind a tree and hope the group of people up ahead hasn’t seen us.
    â€œDearly beloved,” we hear. “We are gathered here today, in the presence of these witnesses, to join this man and this woman in holy matrimony. Marriage is a commitment not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently and solemnly. It is—”
    â€œJeez, man! Are you kidding me?” Chris peers around the tree. He’s not exactly whispering. “It’s a wedding!”
    I haul him back. “Shut up. Somebody will hear you.”
    â€œIt’s a freakin’ wedding!” Chris exclaims again, without turning down the volume.
    â€œI can see that,” I say.
    â€œBut this is a cemetery! Who gets married in a cemetery?”
    â€œThem, obviously.”
    â€œBut why? Tell me why, Eric. It’s a cemetery!”
    â€œHow the heck should I know?” I growl through gritted teeth. “Why don’t you yell a little louder and ask them?”
    Finally, he gets the message. But Chris is not what you’d call patient. After a few minutes, he flops against the tree and grumbles, “I didn’t sign up to spend the afternoon at a freakin’ wedding.”
    I pull my GPS from my pocket and check the screen. “Well, we don’t have a lot of choice. According to the coordinates, the cache is on the other side of those people, so we wait for them to finish their wedding, or we come back later.” Then I add, “And hope nobody gets there before us.”
    It’s that last bit that convinces Chris to stay. If someone were to beat us to that cache, it would eat him alive.
    Chris and I started geocaching about a year ago after I read an article about it. It was something different to do, and all we needed was a GPS . So we went to the website and joined up. The longitude and latitude coordinates for the hidden caches were right there. All we had to do was load them into our GPS and go where they took us.
    Geocaching is kind of like hunting for treasure. Not that the stuff in the caches is all that great. Usually they are filled with plastic toys and other junk like that, but it doesn’t matter. We have a good time just hunting for them and reading the logbook to see who’s been there before us. Sometimes we take whatever is inside and replace it with something else, but mostly we just add our names to the log and put the cache back where we found it.
    The better we get at geocaching, though, the bigger the challenge we want. Lately, we’ve started focusing on caches with puzzles and clues and lots of twists. And ones that nobody else has discovered yet. Being the first names in a cache’s logbook is important—especially to Chris.
    I glance sideways at him. He’s totally zoned into his phone. I don’t know if he’s texting someone or playing a game, but he’s quiet. That’s all I care about.
    Though I don’t say so, I feel dumb hiding behind a tree in a cemetery. It’s not the sort of place fifteen-year-old guys hang out on a Saturday afternoon—unless they’re planning to rob a grave or something. I think about what to do if someone sees us. Beat it out of there, I guess. The geocaching rules are pretty clear about making sure nobody spots you opening a cache.
    At last we hear applause. Chris and I peer around the tree in time to see the bride and groom kiss.
    Then the wedding guests start hugging the bride and thumping the groom on the back. Cameras are clicking all over the place as people take turns getting their pictures taken with the newlyweds. Everyone is smiling so hard, you’d think they were in a toothpaste commercial.
    The bride and groom pose by one of the headstones, and then the bride crouches down and sets her bouquet on the grass in front of it. She’s crying. One of the guests passes her a tissue. She dabs at her eyes and smiles. The groom helps her up. She buries