Free The Furies by Mark Alpert Page B

property to build a house or business.” She closed the notebook. “So you remember the directions?”
    â€œYeah, oak tree named Mary, then twenty paces toward the creek. Rock shaped like a teardrop.” He opened the driver-side door but paused before stepping out of the car. He was worried about leaving Ariel alone. “You gonna be okay by yourself?”
    She rolled her eyes. “Go on, get the box. You’ll have to dig with your fingers, but it won’t be buried too deep.”
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    John was a city boy. Although there were lots of parks and hiking trails near Philadelphia, he never visited them. Walking through the woods wasn’t fun or relaxing for him; it made him nervous. He stayed alert as he climbed the dirt trail up Mount Misery, his eyes flicking from tree to tree. He imagined soldiers hiding behind the tree trunks, taking aim at him with their carbines.
    After about ten minutes he found the oak tree. It was tall and massive, with a gnarled trunk at least three feet wide. The name Mary was at eye level, written in old-fashioned letters, each four inches high. The person who’d carved it into the trunk had probably died a hundred years ago. John turned east and looked down at the creek, which was two hundred feet below him. The eastern slope of Mount Misery was so steep that the trees on the hillside were curved near the ground, their trunks bent like the letter J. Going twenty paces in that direction was going to be harder than he thought. If he wasn’t careful, he’d tumble all the way down.
    He left the trail and cautiously stepped down the slope, leaning backward to keep his balance. The ground was covered with dead leaves, which made the footing treacherous. He moved slowly and grabbed any handhold within reach—low branches, saplings, roots protruding from the dirt. Then his right foot slipped and he fell backward and his butt hit something hard. It was a smooth gray rock, about two feet across, shaped like a teardrop.
    John crouched next to the rock and got a good grip on its rounded edge. With a grunt he flipped it over, exposing a bowl of dark dry soil. Fortunately, the dirt wasn’t hard-packed; he could sink his fingers into it and scoop out big handfuls. The digging was so easy, in fact, that it made John suspicious. If no one had touched this cache in twenty years, the dirt under the rock wouldn’t be so loose and powdery. He concluded that someone else had been digging here recently, maybe in the past few weeks. There was a good chance that the iron box was gone, already taken.
    But no, it was there. After excavating about ten inches of soil, John felt the box’s cold lid. He dug faster, widening the hole until he could slide his fingers around the box and lift it out of the earth. It was the size of a shoe box and weighed at least thirty pounds. The lid was decorated with the same symbols he’d seen in Ariel’s notebook, the lightning bolts and teepees and backwards B’s and P’s and R’s. There were two rusty latches securing the lid, and after a bit of effort John managed to unclasp one of them. He was working on the other when he heard someone above him yell, “Hey!”
    Startled, he looked up. A National Park Service ranger in a gray-and-green uniform stood at the edge of the dirt trail, peering down the slope. He was tall and thin and red-faced, with a long nose and big ears under the brim of his ranger hat. And he carried a semiautomatic pistol in his belt holster. “What are you doing?” he shouted. “Did you dig that up?”
    John couldn’t deny it. The hole was right there and the box was smeared with dirt. But he gave it a try anyway. “No, this is mine,” he said, putting a defensive tone in his voice.
    â€œIt’s a federal crime to take artifacts from a national park.” The ranger’s right hand hovered near the pistol in his holster. “Now put that thing on