The Stirlings and the Missing Statue

Chapter Twenty: But, Just a *Little* Life, Okay?

    It wasn't that he hated his older brother or wished him any harm. But, were one of his siblings or parents were to be missing, he felt some kind of relief that it hadn't been anyone else. There was some kind of calmness he felt without constantly being on guard and ready for a barbed insult about his weak limbs, his soft voice, or his predilections for nerdy fandoms. He wanted Declan to be found, safe if at all possible, but he figured that it was a good idea no one bothered to ask him many questions—he wouldn't have anything nice to say anyway.
    When the Consulate agent in Oaxaca began to list the contact numbers for a dozen local police stations throughout the state over the phone for their mother, the frantic nature of the situation became palatable. Normally a relatively blasé parent, Dr. Stirling had taken to shouting and pleading with both local and state police to find her baby. Mitchell and the other two siblings had decided that they would help as much as possible, but their mother, and more so their father, had come to blame the entire country for the misplacement of their child, rather than admit any fault from either of them or their four children.
    "¿Escuchaste los aullidos?"
    Mitchell was snapped into the sudden awareness that one of the local officers had seated himself on the same bench along the police station wall and was badgering the youngest Stirling.
    "He said Did you hear the...howls?" Ez said. "I think. I don't know if I know that word."
    "Howling, yes," the officer confirmed. He leaned forward so he could see all of the children together and showed them the strange and expectant smile he'd worn since they'd all arrived at the station.
    "I...why are you asking me? Howling?" Mitchell asked, his voice still soft and lacking any real volume.
    "The howling of the dog," the officer added. When he received blank stares from Mitchell and then Ez, he flicked his questioning eyebrows at Callum.
    The boy nodded.
    "No," Ez began before she saw that Callum had disagreed with her. "What? You heard howling?"
    Callum nodded again and widened his eyes at his sister, trying to tell her something silently.
    Ez, after a moment of perplexed frowning, got it and spoke without thinking. "Oh! In the hidden ca...cave."
    "Yes!" The officer nearly jumped from the bench but caught himself, so the action ended up looking like a man lunging during a game of musical chairs. "Yes, yes. La Cueva de los Ladrones. Y el perro...perdóname. The Hunter's Dog."
    "That place has a name?" Mitchell asked.
    The officer laughed boisterously, enough to draw the attention of his fellow officer, the two state police officers who had been obliged to come all the way down to this dingy local office for un turista desaparecido, and of course, the two distraught parents, who were all sitting around a desk piled high with stacks of papers stuck into file folders and the wrappers of the two local officers' lunches. The state officers, both mustachioed and muscular and completely tired of listening to the Stirling parents and having the local officer translate, looked further annoyed by the officer's laugh and each shot a warning look of disapproval his way.
    "Lo siento," the laughing officer offered to them with a wave. "Pendejos," he offered to Mitchell under his breath.
    "Those pendejos are trying to find my brother," Ez growled.
    The officer laughed again but not as loudly. "If you think they're trying to find your brother, señorita, you are kidding yourself. They will do whatever they can to make this," he gestured to their parents and then to them, "go away." He chuckled softly and tugged at the handle of Mitchell's backpack where it sat in the boy's lap.
    Mitchell pulled it away from him but with caution. He didn't want to raise any thoughts in the man for inspecting his innocent pack. Unperturbed, the officer angled himself on the bench again to look at all of them.
    "What's the Hunter's Dog? Who's the Hunter?" Ez asked. She'd seen Mitchell's face when the officer had touched the bag and silently agreed to draw his attention back to whatever story he was trying to tell them.
    "The legend of the Hunter and his Dog...Hunter goes into the cave, never comes out. Poor perro stands outside, day and night, howling, howling, ha-woooo-lying. But he never comes. People say he found the Thieves' treasure but the ghosts who are trapped there, they wouldn't let him leave. Not without paying the price."
    The other officers had tensed when the laughing officer broke into a low mimic of a wolf's howl. Their mother was on the phone again and crying. Their father was pouring over a topographical map with the taller of the two state officers.
Mitchell gulped. "What's the price?"
    "His life, niño, his life."
    "But who were these thieves?" Callum asked. He'd leaned forward so that the four of them were practically curved into a story-circle like Mitchell had been forced to participate in during elementary school.
    "You say you saw gold? Old coins?" the officer asked, holding the fingers of one hand together in a circle and bouncing the gesture in front of his face.
    This time Callum gulped. He knew the coin in his pocket and the dozens more in Mitchell's bag would be taken as evidence or, at the very least, property of the state. Mitchell couldn't let them have the knife either. It was his now. To save his brother from giving them all away, Mitchell nodded. "They looked like old Spanish money. Conquistadors."
    "¡Conquistadores, sí! Y también...there were pistoleros, bank robbers, who hid their goods in Cerro Gordo. They say even Zapotecas used Cerro Gordo's tunnels as vaults."
    "But ghosts?" Ez's voice dripped with skepticism. Despite her own brother disappearing practically in front of her eyes, it would take a lot of convincing to get Esmeralda Stirling to believe in anything but science. "They obviously weren't very good at their jobs if they died in there. Killed each other, didn't they?"
    At the word died, Mr. Stirling's head snapped up and he glared over the desk at his children. "Don't answer any of his questions, kids. Not unless one of us is with you."
    The officer with them sucked air in through his teeth and pulled back onto the bench. Mitchell clutched his bag more tightly and his siblings straightened their backs so the foursome was seated in a nearly perfect line. Satisfied, Mr. Stirling returned to the map with the other officer and resumed his feigned-educated pointing.
    "Se muerto...under mysterious circumstances," the officer said from the corner of his mouth. "Or so they say. That's how we'd put it in the report, anyway."
    Mitchell focused on the young man's qualified use of English and how flippant he seemed about the whole ordeal. He wasn't much older than Callum and even though he had a similar build to Mitchell's, the man's belly swelled behind a too-small uniform shirt and bulged a bit over his belt. On his ring finger, a large gold band sat comfortably behind the knuckle.
    "Tu hermano...he didn't take nothing from el cuevo, did he?" the officer asked, looking more shocked than worried.
    "Even if he did," Ez whispered, "there's no such thing as ghosts and there's no reason it would have gotten him..."
    "You almost said killed, didn't you?" Mitchell asked.
    Ez's face went slack and she bit her lower lip inward. "No. Taken."
    "So you think someone took him, then? No ghost?"
    The officer's question seemed curiously similar to a line of questions they'd already answered. No, they'd said before, they hadn't seen anyone near the cave but the four of them. They didn't see anyone take Declan. Callum had sensed the true nature of the officer's question and told him as much. For the last time, he'd added.
    The officer nodded and shot a look over to the other local officer that said he'd failed to get anything further out of the dumb gringo kids. He pushed himself up from the bench and stretched his back, his shirt coming untucked in the front and revealing a stained white undershirt. He stopped to tuck in his shirt again and shook his head with another laugh.
    "Your brother, he must have taken the wrong thing from los ladrones. They're angry with him. They want it back."
    He walked away and joined the other officers, leaving the three Stirlings in an uneasy silence. They'd wanted to tell their parents, the officers, even each other what they'd seen and heard in the caves; they wanted to save their brother. But something whispered in the backs of their minds, telling them they must not betray their own secrets. The treasures hidden among them, some of them known to each other and some of them not, must not be delivered unto the unworthy or worse, upon the innocent. The Stirling siblings had taken the treasures of Los Ladrones de Cerro Gordo, and they would have to pay the price.