Hide and Seek Read online

  Katy Grant

  Katy Grant

  Published by

  PEACHTREE PUBLISHERS

  1700 Chattahoochee Avenue

  Atlanta, Georgia 30318-2112

  www.peachtree-online.com

  Text © 2010 by Katy Grant

  First trade paperback edition published in 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Cover design by Maureen Withee

  Book design and composition by Melanie McMahon Ives

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Grant, Katy.

  Hide and Seek / written by Katy Grant.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In the remote mountains of Arizona where he lives with his mother, stepfather, and two sisters, fourteen-year-old Chase discovers two kidnapped boys and gets caught up in a dangerous adventure when he comes up with a plan to get them to safety.

  ISBN 978-1-56145-723-6 (ebook)

  [1. Coming of age--Fiction. 2. Kidnapping--Fiction. 3. Family life--Arizona--Fiction. 4. Divorce--Fiction. 5. Survival--Fiction. 6. Arizona--Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.G7667757Gr 2010

  [Fic]--dc22

  2009040519

  For my husband Eric,

  with all my love

  —K. G.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  More about Geocaching

  Chapter 1

  It was a perfect afternoon. The sky was a deep, deep blue and there wasn’t a cloud anywhere. The sun was warm on the back of my neck and my shoulders—T-shirt weather. A great day for hunting hidden treasure.

  I pushed my mountain bike out of the shed and was ready to take off when my little sister came racing down the back steps of the house.

  “Hey, Chase! Are you going to the river to look for crawfish? Wait for me, okay? My bike doesn’t have a flat anymore.”

  There was no way I wanted Shea along today. She’d slow me down.

  “I’m not going to the river, Shea. I’m going on a really long bike ride. Stay home, alright? Trust me, you’d be bored.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me and crossed her arms. “That’s the lamest excuse I’ve heard this century. You know I can keep up.”

  That was true. She’s only ten, but she’s a tough little kid, and she loves doing outdoor stuff as much as I do. But there was one thing I knew she liked just as much as being outdoors. “Anyway, Rick needs you to help out at the register, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah. Because he’s doing inventory. Don’t you want to help us?” she asked.

  “Maybe later. If I get home in time.”

  Shea still thought it was fun to work in our family’s store. For her, it was almost a game, like playing house. When I was her age, I thought it was fun too. Now it’s a lot of work.

  Shea is just as good at working the register as my older sister Kendra or me. She always sits behind the counter on a stool and counts change and gives all the tourists fishing advice.

  Not that there’d be any tourists today. All the tourists had gone home to Phoenix after Labor Day. I knew Rick would be lucky to sell one carton of night crawlers all afternoon.

  I swung one leg over my bike. When Dexter saw what I was up to, he raced over, his ears pushed forward and his tail spinning like a windmill.

  “What’s in your backpack?” Shea asked me as I rolled through the gravel. “It looks heavy.”

  “A water bottle and some trail mix and stuff.” I didn’t tell her exactly what stuff because that would give away what I was doing, and then she’d definitely want to come along. Dexter ran ahead of me. He knew if I was on my bike, it was going to be a fun afternoon.

  “Why don’t you want me to know where you’re going?” she asked suspiciously.

  “I’m not exactly sure where I’m going. Just out for a ride, alright? Tell Rick I’ll be home by six!” I yelled over my shoulder. It was four o’clock, so that gave me two whole hours.

  Whew! Finally. Freedom. All summer I’d been cooped up in our store with my family, working the register and stocking shelves. Selling bait, tackle, soft drinks, marshmallows, or anything else tourists need when they’re camping.

  Got any hand sanitizer?

  Yes sir, second aisle on the left, top shelf.

  Do you guys sell popcorn?

  We sure do. Did you want Jiffy Pop or a bag of already-popped?

  Besides the store, my family also owns six cabins, and we’re booked solid almost every weekend in the summer. The cabins have to be cleaned, the store shelves have to be stocked, the woodpile has to be replenished. There is always something to do.

  All three of us kids help out. We have to in the summer. My friends can’t believe how much work our parents expect us to do. But it’s not like we have a choice. If we complain or “have an attitude” about it, my mom and stepfather give us the standard lecture that we’ve all heard a hundred times about how this is a “family-owned” business, and “since you’re a part of this family, you have to do your share.”

  So I pretty much just keep my mouth shut and get all my chores done as fast as I can. But it’s enough to drive a guy crazy. When summer finally ends and the tourists go home, school starts, and then I’m stuck in a classroom all day. Sometimes you just need to get out and breathe.

  This was going to be the first geocache I’d ever done completely on my own, so I’d planned everything carefully. Shea was right—my backpack was heavy. It was full of stuff I might need: a stainless steel water bottle, a plastic bowl for Dexter, some trail mix, beef jerky, binoculars, some extra AA batteries, and a Swiss army knife. And then the items to trade for the geocache, and my GPS so I could find the treasure.

  Dexter and I headed north on the 373. “Get in the gravel, Dext,” I told him. His ears perked up, and he trotted over to the side of the highway and stayed on the shoulder. Pete Dawson passed by in his old Bronco and tooted at us. I waved back. Other than that, there wasn’t a car in sight. The only people on the 373 are either driving into Greer or driving out of it, because once you get through town, the highway just ends.

  Dexter had a pattern. He’d run ahead of me about twenty feet, then stop, sniff, and squirt. Run, stop, sniff, squirt. He wanted to make sure every animal for miles around knew this was his rock, his tree, his highway. He stopped at one patch of grass and sniffed for so long I passed him on my bike.

  “Anyone you know?” I called over my shoulder. He squirted and ran ahead of me.

  I pulled off the highway and Dexter stopped, too, waiting a little ahead of me to see if I was coming. I shrugged off my backpack and pulled out my handheld GPS. My fourteenth birthday was last week, and Dad had given it to me as an early birthday present the last time I saw him in August. “In case you ever
get lost up there in the boonies,” he’d said. He still finds it hard to believe Mom moved us up to the White Mountains after she married Rick. Dad would never leave Phoenix.

  He wasn’t really worried about me getting lost. He knew I’d been wanting a GPS of my own so I could try geocaching. We did a few together around Phoenix and he thought it was pretty cool. Today was the first chance I’d had to use my new GPS around here. It had taken me a while to figure out all the different features.

  I turned it on and waited for it to find the satellites within range. People take GPS systems totally for granted, but there is amazing technology behind them. This little thing in my hand was picking up signals from satellites orbiting the earth, way up there in the sky.

  I had found the coordinates of the cache I was looking for on the Internet and entered the waypoint into the GPS, so now I could see that we were 5.2 miles away from our destination. I switched screens to the navigation page, the one that looks like a compass, and the arrow pointed slightly northwest. Okay. We were going in the right direction.

  Five miles out there and five miles back. That would take a good forty-five minutes to an hour at least. Probably even longer, depending on how rough the terrain was and how fast I could go. Plus I’d need time to find the geocache. I might find it in a few minutes, or it could take me half an hour. And there was always a chance I might not even find it today. I’d be lucky to be home by six. But I’d better try to be. After six o’clock, I’d start running out of daylight fast.

  I slung my backpack on my shoulders and we took off, still heading north on the 373. I held the GPS in one hand, propping my wrist against the handlebars for balance when I needed to, but I really only needed one hand to steer with. We were coming up to Sheep’s Crossing, and I watched the navigation arrow point west.

  “Turn!” I yelled to Dexter, and he turned left, like he knew exactly where we were going. Now we were off the highway and onto a winding mountain road. One side dropped off to a sheer hillside covered by thick stands of trees. On the other side, cabins were tucked away behind spruce, firs, and ponderosa pines. Most of the cabins were rentals that were full all summer. A few of them were vacation homes for Phoenix residents, but they all looked empty now. We passed two new cabins under construction.

  This stretch of road was nice and shady, and the air felt cooler here among all these tall trees. The road was climbing pretty steeply now, and I had to stand up and pedal to get up enough momentum. I was panting a little, taking in deep breaths of the warm, piney air that the evergreens gave off in the afternoon sun. I was having trouble holding the GPS, so I slipped it into one of the big pockets in my cargo shorts. Anyway, I knew we were going in the right direction. Our geocache was hidden somewhere out on this road—3.9 miles away to be exact.

  After a while, we’d gone far enough that there were no more cabins in sight—just a narrow road that kept winding up the mountain. I was really out of breath now and pumping so hard that I could feel the strain in my leg muscles. I hoped I wouldn’t have to get off my bike and push if the hills got too steep.

  Finally the road leveled off and I could sit back in the seat again. I caught my breath, filling up my aching lungs with cool mountain air. Dexter trotted along, having the time of his life—run, stop, sniff, squirt. He never got tired. He’s part German shepherd, part something else. His back has the black saddle like most shepherds, and his legs are tan, but his ears flop down instead of standing up, and his fur is short. But he’s smart like a German shepherd, and he’s a great tracking dog. He’s always on the trail of some interesting smell.

  When we came to the top of the hill, the road rose up out of the trees, and now we were in open meadows. All around us was wide-open space as far as the eye could see. Patches of dry, straw-colored grass rippled as a slow wind passed over them. Overhead, the sky was so intensely blue that I felt like I could dive right into it. I took a deep breath. “Hey, Dexter, notice something?” I yelled to him as he ran ahead of me. Now that we’d leveled off, I could pick up speed. “We’ve got the mountains to ourselves again. No tourists!” I whooped at the top of my lungs.

  Mom and Rick don’t like us to say anything even slightly negative about tourists. Rick always calls them our lifeblood. “We couldn’t survive without them,” he says. “So smile and tell every one of them to come back soon. And remember— they don’t have to come to Greer. They could take their dollars to Christopher Creek or Forest Lakes or Pinetop-Lakeside. But we want them right here in Greer.” Get your rear to Greer! our postcards say on the little metal stand by the door.

  I know we need them. But it’s so crowded in the summer. I have to admit that the fall and spring—the “lean months,” as Mom and Rick call them—are my favorite times. It’s so peaceful up here when there aren’t crowds of people around.

  I caught up with Dexter at a trailhead with two wooden posts on either side. The hiking trail stretching out in front of us was a dark ribbon cutting through the swaying grass of the open meadow. I stopped to check the GPS. The navigation arrow pointed west, straight ahead in the direction of the trail. We were 2.3 miles away from our geocache. We went across a little footbridge over a dry gulley, and then the hiking trail followed an old railroad bed. The trail was paved with a bunch of rust-colored cinder rocks that crunched under my tires. Even on a mountain bike, the cinders were a little hard to ride on, and I could feel the jarring pressure as my hands gripped the handlebars.

  Now all around us were open fields, and we could see for miles and miles. According to the GPS, we were at an elevation of 8,562 feet. Up here, there weren’t a lot of trees, but there were little stands of white-trunked aspen clustered together. Their leaves were still pale green, fluttering silver in the breeze. The aspen hadn’t started to turn yet, but pretty soon the whole mountain would be covered in yellow, gold, and orange. The only sound we could hear was the low rustle of the wind waving the branches of the trees above our heads.

  I was glad to have Dexter to keep me company. I’d thought about having Chris come along today because he’s never been geocaching. He’s my best friend at school, but he lives about fifteen miles away from me, so we don’t get a lot of time to hang out together after school unless one of us plans on going home with the other. But part of me wanted to be alone to do my first geocache with my new GPS. Could I go out on my own and guide myself to my destination, and then get home safe again? It was something I wanted to try.

  My uncle first took us geocaching a couple of years ago when he came out to visit us from Nashville. He showed me how to look up geocache locations on a website and put in the waypoint on his GPS. Then he took Shea and me out and we found a few caches around Big Lake.

  My older sister Kendra thought it was weird. “You mean people just hide a bunch of junk in some container for strangers to find later? What’s the point?”

  Uncle Andy raised one eyebrow at her. “What’s the point of Dance Dance Revolution?” he asked, to tease her, because at the time she was totally addicted to that game.

  “It’s good exercise,” she told him.

  “Well, so is this, because you’re walking around. Plus you’re outside.”

  Shea and I loved it. “It’s like hide-and-seek,” she said. The cool thing is that non-geocachers—muggles—can pass right by a hidden cache without even knowing it’s there. It’s like a secret club. And there are over 300,000 geocaches hidden all over the globe. Pretty amazing, considering this sport has only been around since 2000. That was when GPS systems got a lot more accurate and people started using them to guide them to different locations. I haven’t hidden my own geocache yet, but I’m going to soon. That’ll be pretty cool.

  “Dexter, want to find some treasure?” I asked, and his ears pushed forward. We stopped and I took out my water bottle and his plastic bowl. I took a swig, then poured some for him. At first he wasn’t interested. He was busy sniffing at a patch of dry grass. Then he came over and sniffed the bowl and took a long, sloppy drink, his muz
zle dripping beads of water when he held his head up to look around.

  My eyes scanned the meadows around us, and then I spotted them. Elk! A whole herd of them. They were a good five hundred feet to the north of us just over the rise of a hill, grazing in the field.

  “Wow!” I whispered to Dexter. “There must be thirty of them!” I dug inside my backpack for my binoculars. It doesn’t matter that I’ve lived in the White Mountains of Arizona almost my whole life, and I see wildlife at least once or twice a week. I still think it’s exciting.

  I watched the elk herd through my binoculars for a while. I wished we could move closer, but I knew if we tried to, they’d see us and move off into the trees. We were far enough away that Dexter didn’t really notice them—if we got close enough for him to see them, he’d want to chase them. It was better to keep a safe distance. All the elk still had their reddish brown summer coats, but pretty soon they’d be shedding those for the darker coats of winter. I could see several calves standing near their mothers, but their coats had lost their baby spots.

  September and October are rutting season, and whenever I’m outside during this time of year, I can usually hear elk bugling. It’s this loud, blaring moo that starts out in a really low pitch and gets higher and stronger as it goes on. It sounds sort of like a really bad bugle player blowing one long, outof-tune note for a full thirty seconds. The horrible sound of it is enough to make your eardrums cringe, but the elk sure seem to like it. I guess it means love is in the air.

  “We better get going,” I said, as if Dexter was the one holding us up. I stuffed the binoculars inside my backpack and we took off down the hiking trail, with me bumping along through the cinders on my bike and Dexter trotting ahead of me. Every now and then I’d stop and check the GPS. The navigation arrow still pointed west, pretty much straight ahead, so I knew we’d find the geocache somewhere along this trail.

  We were getting closer and closer—.7 miles, then .4, then .3. Pretty soon we were down to a matter of feet. At that point, I got off my bike and left it beside the trail because it was easier now to navigate on foot. I kept my eye on the screen, and with every step I took, the number of feet ticked down like seconds on a watch: 62 feet, 59, 53, 48, 44 feet—and then I was within 23 feet of the geocache. Now I didn’t really need the GPS anymore, so I slipped it into my pocket. It had brought me to within a matter of feet of the waypoint I’d marked, but I had to find the hidden cache on my own.