CHAPTER X

Another Voice?

Everybody piled out of the car to look and exclaim over what had happened. The fire, apparently, had swept down from the national forest, making a path of destruction as far as the vault and no farther. The vault itself had not been touched. It was built into the hillside, and the laurel and ivy growing up and around the statue were as green as ever.

“Even the fire was afraid of that statue,” Honey said with a shiver. “Judy! Judy! Did you hear it—speak?”

“What? The statue?”

“More likely it was a ghost,” declared Horace. “Those children did knock loud enough to wake the dead.”

“Stop it!” Judy scolded him. “Can’t you see you’re frightening them?”

She had overcome her first impulse to laugh at the children’s mistake. Now she wanted to cry for sympathy. They had been so eager to meet their uncle. Now only the blackened ruins of his home were left. Not even a chimney remained standing.

Mrs. Riker was shocked into silence at first. But soon she was trying to tell the children how she remembered the house. She hadn’t seen it for many years, she said. Perhaps it hadn’t been as large as she had pictured it in her imagination. Her main concern now was for the man they had come to visit.

“Can it be he’s dead?” she wondered.

The name on the vault was plain. It was simply _Paul Riker_ with the date of his birth and then a blank. The stone tablet bearing the inscription was just below the figure of Shiva, the Destroyer.

Penny and Paul were gazing up at the statue almost as if it were alive.

“I’m scared,” Penny whispered.

“No wonder,” her brother answered. “I ought to have known better than to run up to an old tomb. It was a dumb mistake.”

“But a logical one,” Judy consoled him. “I might have thought it was a little house myself if I hadn’t recognized that statue from a picture I saw in a magazine. In India there are temples to Shiva, or Siva. I’m not sure of the name.”

“I remember!” cried Penny, brightening up as she thought of it. “It was Sita. Oh, no, that’s the name of the—”

“You know nothing about it,” her mother told her severely. “I know nothing myself except that Mr. Riker was fond of collecting things. It is like him to have a Hindu idol on his tomb. Years ago he was converted, as he called it, to mysticism. I remember some of the things he used to say. He and my husband’s father used to have long conversations about the journey a spirit must take before it reached nirvana, whatever that is. Well, perhaps he has taken it. Life was the journey, Uncle Paul used to say, and death the reward.”

She sighed, and added, “I only hope his nephew hasn’t followed in his footsteps.”

“His nephew?” asked Judy.

“Mom means _my_ uncle,” Paul explained. “There’s old Uncle Paul and young Uncle Paul.”

“Perhaps I should have told you about my husband’s brother,” Mrs. Riker continued. “He and my husband were boys when they quarreled—”

“What was that?” Honey whispered suddenly, moving closer to Horace. “Did you hear a footstep?” She shivered and he put his coat around her. The rain seemed to be turning to snow. Unmindful of it, the children continued to gaze up at the statue.

“Did it move?” Judy heard Paul whisper.

“It’s the light, Paul,” his mother said. “It’s really made of cement.”

“The same as sidewalks?”

“I think so. Anyway, it isn’t alive. It didn’t move, and it couldn’t have spoken to us.”

“Something did.”

Judy looked suspiciously at Horace. Had he learned to throw his voice? That could be the answer to the talking trees as well—except that Horace hadn’t been there.

“Oh dear!” thought Judy. “I’m off on the wrong trail again.”

“Let’s go,” Honey suggested. “I’m cold.”

But Horace had an idea.

“The caretaker’s cottage must be back down the road. I think we passed it without seeing it. Maybe he can explain it.”

“What is there to explain?” asked Mrs. Riker sadly, starting down the steps. “Tombs aren’t built for the living.”

“Sometimes they are. Sometimes people prefer to choose their own monuments while they’re still alive, and it looks as if that’s the way your uncle felt about it. There’s no death date under his name,” Horace observed. “I think the vault is empty.”

Judy hoped it was.

“Come on, let’s go back to the car,” Honey urged. “If a voice spoke to us now, I really would run.”

“The children thought they heard one,” Judy called after her teasingly.

“It scared us,” Penny confessed. “We thought it was Uncle Paul’s ghost. It said, ‘Go away.’”

“You know, dead people do come back,” Paul put in gravely. “It’s magic, I think. We know, on account of Daddy.”

“We saw him,” Penny added.

“When was this?” asked Judy.

“Just a little while ago,” Penny said serenely, and she and Paul ran down the steps to join their mother and Honey in the car.

Judy would have questioned them further, but now as she idly tried the heavy oaken door of the vault, to her amazement, she found it unlocked.

“What have we here?” she exclaimed as she swung the door open upon a concrete floor surrounded by four stone walls. In one swift movement she stooped and picked up a tiny green object that lay on the bare concrete.

“Is _this_ the green doll Penny was talking about?” Judy wondered.

“Could be,” Horace said. “The thieves may be planning on storing the loot from other robberies here. Let me have a look at it.”

“Later,” Judy whispered, slipping the little green object into her pocket. “There’s something strange going on around here, and I need time to think about it.”

She swung the heavy door closed. Open, it would be a temptation to small boys and girls who, like herself, were fond of shivery adventures.

“Come on,” Horace urged her. “The vault is empty, and you’re just scaring yourself and getting all wet standing there. I want to interview that caretaker and find out what’s up.”

“I doubt if you will,” Judy said, turning reluctantly to follow him down the long steps back to the car.

The vault, somehow, had a strange attraction for her as it did for Blackberry. The cat was climbing around it, exploring the statue, and the roof, and Judy longed to join him. If the bushes weren’t so wet she knew she could scramble up there, too.

“We’ll come back, won’t we, Horace?” Judy asked.

“It depends on what the caretaker has to say. The sky’s cleared a little and I can see the top of his cottage. We did pass it,” he observed. “The fire didn’t touch it or the trees around it.”

“I hope it’s warm inside,” Judy said. “The air is getting colder by the minute.”