Fool's Gold by Zilpha Keatley Snyder Page A

to do.
    He was going to have to start thinking about why that word “chicken” had made him so angry. It had, all right. He’d started losing it the minute he’d thought of calling Ty a chicken—and the reason, of course, was that getting angry took the place of admitting the truth. The truth! Which was, of course, that it wasn’t Ty Lewis who was the real major-league, world-class chicken. But that was exactly what he definitely wasn’t going to think about.
    And he wasn’t going to waste time making up excuses for himself either. Useless excuses about not wanting to do something that was not only dangerous but also against the law, which did not mean you were chicken—it only meant you were sensible. Useless because he knew—knew absolutely—that the reason he couldn’t and wouldn’t and never would—no matter what—go down into that hole in the ground was because the very thought of it scared him to death. And that had to mean something.
    Rudy jumped to his feet, started across the room, tripped over Ophelia, crashed into the dresser, hopped around holding his right knee and his left elbow while saying a few unprintable things under his breath, and then managed to make it out the door. He stormed down the hall, through the kitchen and the studio, into the living room, and out the front door. Standing on the veranda he looked down Lone Pine toward town, but there was no sign of Natasha and the M and M’s. Wasn’t that just like women. Always underfoot when you didn’t want them to be and never there when you needed them. Like when you really needed somebody—anybody—to talk to.
    It was strangely quiet on the veranda too. The weird silence that he’d noticed in the house seemed to be everywhere. No noisy tourists around and not even any traffic sounds drifting up from downtown. Nothing except for a faint, familiar sound—the clickety-clack of a typewriter. Murph.
    Murph came to the door looking even more rumpled than usual. His corkscrew hair was standing out all around his head and he was wearing a ratty old bathrobe over his usual jeans and long-sleeved undershirt. For a moment his eyes looked blank and unfocused, as if he were having trouble relating to what his eyes were seeing. As if his mind was still busy with whatever it was he’d been writing. But then he got back to normal.
    â€œRudy,” he said, smiling warmly. “Come on in.”
    Rudy felt guilty. Although he’d always been in the habit of visiting Murph pretty much whenever he felt like it, he’d never done it before when the typewriter was going. He’d always kind of felt that, since Murph was a writer who very rarely got it together to do any writing, it didn’t seem right to interrupt him when he did.
    â€œI—I guess you’re busy,” Rudy said, starting to back away.
    â€œWell…” Murph began, and then stopped and gave Rudy his narrow-eyed “student of humanity” stare. “No,” he said. “Not very busy. Come right on in, my boy. I was just about to knock off anyway and have a bit of refreshment. How about joining me in a cup of coffee?”
    Rudy thought of saying that he didn’t think they’d fit—but then decided against it. Somehow he just didn’t have the energy to wise off even when such a cheap shot presented itself. Instead he just nodded, gulped at the lump in his throat, managed a squeaky, “Thanks,” and followed Murph into the kitchen.
    By the time they were both seated at the table with cups of coffee—with a lot of milk and sugar in Rudy’s case, since Murph’s coffee was always industrial strength—his voice, at least, had gotten back to normal. But what he started talking about, of course, had nothing to do with what had made him desperate enough to interrupt the writing of the great Murph Woodbury novel. What he started talking about was Heather