CHAPTER ONE
Red Dirt Summer
Theo Delgado knew the exact shape of his whole town by heart, because he had spent half his life looking down on it from the top of Sutton Ridge.
From up there, Cutter Cove sat in the bottom of the valley like a marble that had rolled into a bowl and stopped. Hills ran all the way around it, low and green and humped over like the backs of sleeping animals, and the town filled the middle — the water tower, the flat silver roof of the school, two church steeples, the one traffic light that had been stuck blinking caution since before Theo was born. His grandfather claimed the whole valley was the bottom of something that used to be a volcano, way back, a million years of it worn down to hills and red dirt. Theo could never tell if Abuelo actually believed that or just liked the look on his face when he said it.
Either way, Theo liked the idea of living in the bottom of an old volcano. It was the kind of fact you could do something with.
He was flat on his back in the ridge grass with his bike dropped beside him, and the July heat leaned down between his shoulder blades like a hand. The dirt under him had baked hard as a flowerpot. Red dirt got on everything in Cutter Cove — shoes, tires, the knees of your jeans, the back of your neck — a rusty orange his mom had quit trying to wash out of anything years ago. Behind him the cicadas sawed in the trees, that long climbing buzz that meant it was too hot to do much of anything but lie still.
So Theo lay still, and he let his brain wander where it wanted, which was west.
Past the far rim of the valley, in the low gap where the hills dipped down, you could just make out the old mine when the light was right. From the ridge it was only a paler patch of ground past the tree line, a few hard square shapes that used to be buildings and two flat shines that were water.
He had named those two flooded pits a long time ago, back when he still named things. Side by side, catching the sky, they looked like the valley had lain down on its back and was staring straight up. So, he had called them the Eyes. He had never told anybody that. Some things you kept.
Everybody else just called the whole place the Chamberlain pits, after the creek that ran through it, though nobody had pulled anything out of that ground since before Theo was alive. Abuelo had worked out there as a young man, hauling a heavy white rock called barite that got crushed up and trucked off to oil wells a thousand miles away. Theo had never quite worked out what an oil well wanted with a truckload of crushed rock. He had worked out the rest of it, though, because he had grown up standing in it: when the mine shut down, the town got smaller. The money got thin. Half the houses on Abuelo's old street sat empty now, curtains still hanging in some of them, and the Delgados counted change at the end of the month like most everybody who had stayed.
That was the part people from the nicer towns up the highway never got about Cutter Cove. It was not a place that had never had anything. It was a place that used to have something, lost it, and then had to go on living in the exact same spot, looking at the hole where it had been. Theo thought that was about the saddest thing in the world, and also, quietly, one of the most interesting, which was more or less how he felt about everything.
A red-tailed hawk slid out over the fields below him, not flapping, just tipping on the heat coming up off the ground, and Theo watched it and thought about what the cove must have looked like from up there back when the mine still ran. All the trucks. The lights burning all night. All those men who had somewhere to be at six in the morning. Abuelo said you could hear the crusher going from town, a low grind underneath everything, day and night, and that when it finally quit for good the quiet had felt wrong for about a year. Theo tried to imagine missing a noise that big. He was good at imagining things. It was pretty much his whole deal, according to his teachers, who did not always mean it as a compliment.
Two summers back, a boy from Malvern had gone swimming in the near pit on a dare and never come up. After that the county strung a chain-link fence around the whole site and bolted up a sign, and after that people mostly stopped talking about it. That was how Cutter Cove handled nearly everything it did not like: build a fence, look away, wait for it to go quiet.
Somewhere out past that fence, Theo figured, Whistle was probably sweeping.
Sweeping was the main thing people in town knew about Whistle. He did not have a house, not really — he stayed in one of the run-down company places out by the mine, the little board houses where the miners used to live — but most mornings he turned up on somebody's sidewalk downtown with a push broom, sweeping like he was on the clock, which he never was. He talked while he worked, low and fast under his breath, and when the words ran out, he would trail off into an actual whistle, which was where the name came from. Kids at school did the impression. Grown-ups said poor old Whistle in a voice that never sounded all the way sorry.
What nobody said, because it made a worse story, was that Whistle turned out to be right a lot more than a crazy man had any business being.
He had told half the diner the Petree barn would burn a good week before it did. He had warned Mr. Sikes his well was fixing to go dry, and by August it was dry. Abuelo said not to make anything of it — a broken clock is right twice a day, mijo — but Theo kept a list in the back of his head anyway, every time the town crazy man had turned out to be the only one telling the truth. The list was longer than he liked.
The trouble with a town like Cutter Cove, Theo had decided, was that it had made up its mind about everybody in it a long time ago and hardly ever changed it back. Once you were the crazy man, you stayed the crazy man for good — even on the days you happened to be right. Maybe especially those days.
He was still turning that over when the quiet got run over by a noise like a chainsaw picking a fight with a lawnmower.
He did not have to sit up to know it was Kai.
Kai Ellison rode a dirt bike his uncle had basically fixed, which meant it ran and that you could hear it coming from the next zip code. He came over the top of the rise standing on the pegs with both feet off, hit the flat going way too fast, and for one bright second Theo honestly thought he might land it clean. He did not. The back end stepped out, Kai said a word that would have gotten him grounded until Christmas, and the whole bike went down in a long sideways skid that fetched up about four feet short of Theo's head.
The engine ticked in the heat. Dust hung in the air and came apart slow. On the strap of Kai's backpack, the little action camera he almost never shut off blinked its steady red light, filming the sky.
“Please tell me it got that,” Kai said, flat on his back now too. “Tell me the camera got that.”
“You almost ran over my head.”
“See, that would have made it an even better video.”
Kai peeled his helmet off and sat up, hair pasted flat with sweat, grin full of dirt. He was four months older than Theo and carried on like it was four years, a fact he produced any time it might win him something.
“You have been up here for like two hours,” he said. “Nadia texted the group four separate times. She has decided you fell down a hole.”
“I turned my phone off.”
“Who turns their phone off?”
“People who do not want four texts about falling down a hole.”
“What did she want?”
“Just that you were ignoring the team and it was, and I am quoting her, inconsiderate.” Kai did the finger quotes and everything. “She used the team voice.”
“There is no team voice.”
“You know there is a team voice.”
There was a team voice. Theo let it go.
Kai nodded like they had settled something, and then he went quiet, which was the loudest thing he ever did. He picked at the grass. He flicked a nugget of dried clay off down the slope. He thumbed the camera off and back on. Theo could always tell when Kai was sitting on something, because sitting on things was the one trick Kai had never in his life managed to land.
“So,” Kai said, way too casual. “You hear about Whistle this morning?”
Theo turned his head.
“What about him.”
“He came busting into the Gas-N-Go about tore the door off the hinges. Talking a mile a minute, even for Whistle.” Kai was up on his knees now, the words speeding up the way they did when he had been holding a good one. “My mom was standing right there in line. She said he was going on and on about the pits. About how he found—” Kai stopped, because he could never once resist the pause, “—a house. Out at the mine. Down in the ground.”
Theo waited for the rest of the joke. Kai built a joke like a ramp; there was always a landing coming.
This time there was not one.
“A house,” Theo said.
“Down in the ground,” Kai said again, nodding, like saying it twice would make it behave. “A whole house, he says. And here is the part that got me. He says a man ran him off. Somebody nobody in town has ever laid eyes on, out at the mine where there is not supposed to be a soul. Chased Whistle clean down the road hollering after him.” Kai sat back on his heels. “Hollering that it was poison out there.”
The cicadas kept up their sawing. Down in the bottom of the valley the caution light blinked its slow yellow blink, on, off, on, the way it had Theo's whole life.
Theo thought about the list. The barn. The well. Every time the crazy man had been the only one in town telling the truth. He thought about a house sunk down in a place where there was supposed to be nothing but red dirt and cold black water and forty years of everybody agreeing, very politely, not to look.
Something lifted in his chest, that particular feeling he got at the start of things, before anybody had gotten around to telling him yet why it was a bad idea.
He got up and grabbed his bike.
“Come on,” he said. “Let's go find Nadia.”
Because if Whistle was right — if the crazy man was right just one more time — then there was a house buried out at the Chamberlain pits, a man nobody knew standing guard over it, and exactly three kids in the whole town willing to believe it was down there at all.
And Theo already knew, the way you know the first drop of a roller coaster the second before it lets go, that they were going out there to look.