Action! by Carolyn Keene Page B

have hopped into the harness as soon as Sally got out of it. He came rappelling down to meet me about a minute after I saw Sally reach the top of the cavern. That didn’t surprise me. I had been half expecting Luther to just jump down here to see the Rackhams!
    What
did
surprise me was that Chief McGinnis from the River Heights Police Department was lowered down right after Luther.
    “It’s the Rackhams, all right,” Luther said as he stripped off his harness. He slowly circled the skeletons, gazing at them in wonder. He turned to study the empty chest. “No money left at all,” he murmured. “This changes everything!”
    “It sure does,” Chief McGinnis agreed from a few feet above us. He swung awkwardly down to the ground. I bit back a smile. Our police chief isn’t the most agile man in town; I was astonished that he’d come down here at all. “It means that after the Rackham boys stole this money, someone else stole it from
them!”
    “No,” Luther told him. “It means the person who hired them to steal it from Mahoney stole it back.” He pointed up to the opening of the cavern, where Harold had recently disappeared. “He did it!”
    “Who, Harold?” I asked.
    “Harold?” Chief McGinnis repeated, baffled.
    Then I realized what Luther meant. “He isn’t talking about Harold,” I explained to the chief. “He’s talking about the character Harold plays in the movie—Ethan Mahoney.”
    “Right. Ethan Mahoney,” Luther agreed. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.” He knelt down and ran his fingers lightly over the empty chest that was supposed to have held the stolen money.
    “So you’re saying the reason the money isn’t down here with the boys is because Ethan took it back?” I asked. “I don’t get it. Why would Ethan hire anybody to steal his own money?”
    Chief McGinnis frowned. It looked as if he didn’t get it either.
    “It wasn’t his own money,” Luther reminded me.
    “Oh, that’s right!” I cried. I felt as if my brain had been flooded with the bright lights we used for filming. “The money really belonged to the railroad, didn’t it?” I turned to Chief McGinnis. “Ethan Mahoney got paid in advance for a big anvil order,” I explained. “But after the robbery, he supposedly didn’t have enough money to make the anvils, or to repay the railroad the money they had already paid him.”
    “Ah,” Chief McGinnis said. “So Ethan got to keep the money without ever delivering the goods. And no one could blame him, because he claimed to have been robbed by the Rackham Gang. Clever.”
    “I’m sure Ethan promised a share of the money to these poor fellows.” Luther shook his head as he looked down at the skeletons of John and Ross Rackham. “But he double-crossed them.”
    “Killed them, you mean,” Chief McGinnis said.
    “Dead men tell no tales—isn’t that the saying?” I asked. “This way, Ethan was sure that no one would ever find out the truth.” Something itched at the back of my brain. “But what about the mountain lion attack? And Esther?”
    “I always had a hard time believing that Ethan was attacked by a mountain lion,” Luther said slowly. “It was the one part of the story that never made sense. A mountain lion would be a very long way fromhome around River Heights. Even back in Ethan’s time.”
    “True,” Chief McGinnis agreed. “We don’t have cougars in this neck of the woods.”
    “But something happened to Ethan,” I argued. “He had injuries that people saw, didn’t he? The mountain lion story had to come from somewhere.”
    “Well, we know Ethan and Esther got married,” Luther said. “We know that the town believed Ethan was attacked by a mountain lion, and that Esther saved him. That much is documented in the story that ran in the paper, and in diaries of other people who lived in River Heights at the time.”
    “All right. So let’s assume that Esther was here with Ethan,” I said. I felt as if an electric