Action! by Carolyn Keene

me, the darkness showing through the gaping holes.
    Harold screamed again, and used both hands to shove himself away from the skeletons.
    “Harold, no!” I cried. “You have to stay still until the medics get here!” I gently held him by the shoulders until he calmed down.
    “Sorry, Nancy. It’s just that seeing those things right next to me …” He let his words trail off.
    “I know,” I answered. “I felt like I was going to jump out of my own skin!”
    Harold kept himself turned away from the horrible piles of bone. But I could see curiosity in his eyes. “Are they who I think they are?” he asked without looking at the skeletons.
    I took a deep breath and turned back to the skeletons. I forced myself to study them. One still wore the remnants of leather boots. The boots were almost entirely gone, but I could see the sharp silver spurs still gleaming in the light. The other skeleton lay half on top of a gun with an ivory handle. I recognized it immediately. Esther Rackham had left behind an identical gun when she died. It was in the River Heights Historical Society museum. Everyone had always assumed that it was a gift from her husband, Ethan Mahoney. But now I saw the truth—that gun hadn’t belonged to Esther at all. It had belonged to one of her brothers. They must have had matching guns!
    I glanced back at Harold and nodded. “The Rackham boys!” I answered. “One of them still has hisgun. It matches Esther Rackham’s famous ivory-handled pistol.”
    “No matter what else is going on, you always find a mystery to solve, Nancy,” Harold said. He coughed, then winced in pain. “I guess now we know what happened to the Rackham Gang, huh? Looks like they never left town.”
    I nodded. “We still don’t know what happened to all the money they stole, though,” I said.
    I gazed around the narrow chasm, shifting into sleuthing mode. Every inch of the place was now as bright as day. On the wall that I had rappelled down hung bits and pieces of old rusted chain. Clearly there had once been a chain ladder leading down to this chamber from the main cave above us. And at the bottom of the old ladder I spotted something that made my heart pound with excitement: a rotting wooden chest. At one time the chest had clearly been bound with brass, but now most of the brass joints were hanging off the ancient wood. But I knew what it was anyway. It was the chest that the Rackham boys had stolen from Ethan Mahoney’s office on the riverboat. I’d seen pictures of that chest from the police reports about the Great River Heist. For a long time after the heist, there had been a poster with a picture of the chest, advertising a reward for anyone who found the stolen money.
    But nobody had known that the chest was nearby the whole time—right down here in this secret cave. I stood up and walked over to look into the chest.
    Empty. The money was gone!

Truth and Lies
     
    N ancy, what’s going on down there?” Bess shouted. She sounded as if she was a mile away, and her voice bounced around the stone shaft. “We heard screaming.”
    “Harold’s fine!” I yelled back, my own voice echoing strangely too. “So am I. But you’ll never guess who we found down here!”
    “The Rackhams?” Luther asked. Even from this far away I could hear the wonder and excitement in his voice.
    “Yes! Well, their skeletons, anyway,” I yelled back.
    “I hear the ambulance,” Bess called. “We’re going to meet them. We’ll get someone down to you ASAP.”
    “Hear that?” I asked Harold. “You’ll be above-ground in no time.”
    “Great,” he answered. His eyes wandered toward the skeletons, then quickly jerked away.
    I wanted to take a closer look at them—to see if there was anything else besides the spurs and the gun on their bodies. But there would be time for all that after Harold was safe aboveground.
    I turned all my attention to Harold. I noticed that the cut in the center of the lump on his forehead was