when I was a girl, the Witching Hills.”
“Witching Hills?”
She stood. Tyler hadn’t really started to get tall yet, but he could easily look her in the eye. It was hard just now, though, because she was staring at him like he had called her a name. “I said, don’t play with me, boy. You know about these things. I can tell by how you look, how you listen-the questions you ask. You have the same look as old Octavio when he first came.”
“You knew Octavio Tinker?”
“Knew him? Men in my family built most of that crazy house of his. I was a young woman when Octavio first came, so I remember him very well, yes. He was always asking my grandmother for stories like you ask me. Her people were from the Yaudanchi tribe… but I told you that already, too.” She smiled again. “Yes, you are a lot like him-you even look a little like him. He loved that name, Las Lomas Embrujadas . And just like this rich ladron Stillman, Octavio wanted to buy the old mine and the land around it to add to what he had already bought. But my grandfather wouldn’t sell, no. Ha!”
Tyler had already started to ask another question when he suddenly realized what Grandma Paz had said. “Hang on. Octavio wanted to buy the mine from your grandfather? You mean the haunted mine you were talking about?”
“That’s what they called it, yes. I didn’t say it really was haunted.” She frowned, as if wishing she hadn’t started the conversation. “But… way back then, my grandfather let some men dig there for the silver. He didn’t sell the mine to them, he just
… how do you say it…? Leased it. But those men didn’t stay long!” She laughed. “No, not long at all! That’s where it got the name! They were scared like rabbits! Never came back!”
Tyler shook his head in confusion. “Hold on. You mean there’s a piece of land here, on this property, that has a haunted mine? A place where people see ghosts?”
“They used to. Nobody goes there anymore. Too dangerous.” She nodded. “And not just ghosts. All kinds of things. Magic animals.” She shuddered and crossed herself.
“But you’re saying it’s on your property. Not ours.” It sounded like she was talking about the Fault Line. He couldn’t make sense of it.
Grandma Paz stared at him again. “You’ve been here two summers and you still don’t know which are the Magic Hills?” She pointed away from Ordinary Farm to a line of hills some miles away to the west, blanketed in purple and brown shadows as the sun sank behind them. “ Those are Las Lomas Embrujadas,” she said. “And down at the bottom of the biggest one is the place they tried to make their mine.”
“But I thought all the magic places like that were on our farm-you always say what a dangerous place it is!”
“It is! Where you live- Valle del Torbellino, it’s called, Valley of the Whirlwind. My grandmother’s people said that in the old, old days, Whirlwind broke open the ground there to find his lost son, and that was how the opening was made into the Land of the Spirits!”
“So you have an opening like that on your land, too? Then why did you say all those bad things about Ordinary Farm?”
She shook her head in disgust. “Octavio’s land, Gideon’s land, is very bad all over. Our land here is fine as far as you can see. Only out there, in the north… ” she pointed to the distant hills, “are there bad things. We don’t go there, so no problem. The cows are happy, the milk is sweet, and the ghosts don’t bother us. That is why we live here. That is why I would never live where you live.” She nodded her head as if she had proved a difficult and unlikely mathematical theory.
Tyler turned to head back to the house, his head full of complicated and confusing thoughts.
“Don’t step in the chicken poop!” Paz cackled.
So the Carrillos have had haunted tunnels in their hills all along
… he said to himself. A sudden thought made him stop and hold his breath. He was so stunned by the idea that the world around him seemed to have suddenly gone silent.
Does that mean that their haunted mine is… is connected to the Fault Line somehow? Underground? Which would mean it’s connected to Ordinary Farm, too.
That put everything in a different light. Everything.
The Haunted Mine. The Witching Hills. The- what had Paz called it? -the Valley of the Whirlwind. The whole place is weird-the whole valley! If Octavio didn’t want outside attention, it’s no wonder he started calling these places things like “Standard Valley” and “Ordinary Farm”…
Because this place had never been ordinary.
Chapter 26
In the evenings after dinner Lucinda liked to lie on her air mattress in Carmen’s room and listen to the warblers and bluebirds flitting through the trees that shaded the Carrillos’ back yard. Their chiming songs soothed her and reminded her that although she might not be where she wanted to be, on Ordinary Farm, she was still in a very nice place, surrounded by friends like Carmen and Alma and the rest of their family. But today the birds were silent, as if the distant thunder that had begun half an hour or so ago had frightened them away.
“What, another storm?” Carmen looked up from the laptop she had to share with her brother and sister, the subject of much power-struggling among three Carrillo kids. “This has been the wettest summer in, like, forever.”
“It never rains very hard,” said Alma. Carmen’s little sister was stretched on the floor, drawing with pastels. “And it smells so good afterward. Like growing.”
“As long as I don’t have to go out in it.” Carmen frowned. “Speaking of annoying things, where did Steve and your brother go, Lucinda? They ran off after dinner while they were still chewing.”
Lucinda made a face. “I think they’re doing something in the garage. Last time I went past I heard a lot of banging and clattering.”
“Building a spaceship out of old soft drink cans, probably,” Carmen said.
“No,” Alma corrected her, “I think Steve said they were getting stuff together to… ” She paused and looked up as the door of her room opened.
Silvia Carrillo leaned in.
“Carmen, m’hija, your father and I promised we’d go have some dessert with the Sotos. We’ll be back about nine-thirty, but if we’re not I want you getting ready for bed then and you can read ‘til we get here, okay? Grandma Paz is in her room watching television if you need her.” She shut the door and a moment later they heard her go out the front door.
Lucinda had been trying to read but she was feeling distracted. Maybe it was the smell and feel of the coming storm, but she hadn’t been having much luck with “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” anyway. Those kids were in a magical place, too, but everything seemed to come pretty easy to them, and when things got bad the wonderful “Jesus lion” (as Carmen called him) always showed up and fixed things.
I wish we had a magic Jesus lion, she thought. I’m tired of trying to figure out all the answers by ourselves.
Mr. Walkwell wasn’t Aslan, of course, but he was the closest thing they were going to get-after all, he was practically a Greek god! Lucinda thought that was true, anyway. From what she’d learned on the internet and in books he seemed to be a faun, a kind of Greek forest spirit, but every time she had worked up the courage to ask him more about his background, one look at his weathered face and his dark, watchful eyes made the words clog in her throat like lumpy oatmeal. There was so much she would have liked to ask him-were the gods real? Had there really been a Hercules? And a Jason and the Argonauts, like that funny old movie Tyler loved so much? But this afternoon, as she had stood with Ragnar at the fence between Cresta Sol and Ordinary Farm, she didn’t even consider asking him. There were far too many other things to think about-serious things. Life and death things.
“You should not risk coming back, Ragnar,” Mr. Walkwell said. Here at the edge of the property and in broad
