MISSING ON SUPERSTITION MOUNTAIN

CHAPTER 1: JOSIE RUNS AWAY 
The day Josie ran away was the beginning of everything—the bones in the canyon, the haunted mountain, the buried treasure, the town full of secrets—but the Barker boys didn’t know it then. All they knew was that Josie was missing, again, and they had to find her. It would be harder here, in this strange place in the middle of the desert. But they had no idea how hard, or what else they would find while they were looking.
Josie and the Barker boys had just moved to an old brown-shingled house in Superstition, Arizona, a town in the shadow of an enormous, craggy mountain called Superstition Mountain. So far, the Barker boys didn’t much like it. The house itself was all right. It had belonged to their great-uncle, Hank Cormody, or “crazy Uncle Hank” as Mr. Barker called him. Uncle Hank was a former cattle wrangler, gambler, and scout for the U.S. Cavalry, who had shockingly left the house to Mr. Barker in his will. The timing for a move was good. Mr. Barker’s stonemasonry business in Chicago was slowing down—cause for many worrisome, muffled, late-night conversations between Mr. and Mrs. Barker when they thought the boys weren’t listening. Since Mrs. Barker was a medical illustrator who could paint pictures of arthritic hips and diseased kidneys anywhere, a hasty decision had been made that a free house in a cheap part of the country was exactly what the Barker family needed.
Which, mostly, it was. The house had a bedroom for each of the boys and a big finished basement, one side of which was crammed full of Uncle Hank’s belongings (taped boxes and musty furniture that Mrs. Barker had banished from the upstairs). On the wall was a dartboard, which was a nice surprise because Mrs. Barker never would let the boys get a dartboard, but she could hardly say no when one was hanging right there, with a fistful of pointy darts in the center. Another good thing: Uncle Hank’s backyard didn’t end in another backyard, or a street, or a driveway, like other backyards. It ended in a vast, rolling nothingness of hills and fields. The boys liked that—the sense that there were no limits, and if somebody hit a ball over the scrubby border of trees and bushes, it might go sailing on forever.
But…well, there were lots of buts. The house was far from their friends in Chicago. It was far from the park where they played baseball. It was far from the hill where they used to sled and have snowball fights in the winter. Why, Arizona didn’t even have winters! What kind of place didn’t have snow? Worst of all, their new house was in this strange town, full of strange people, where nobody looked or talked or seemed the least bit like the people back home.
Excerpted from MISSING ON SUPERSTITION MOUNTAIN by Elise Broach. Text copyright © 2011 by Elise Broach. Illustrations copyright © 2011 by Antonio Javier Caparo. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt & Company, LLC. All rights reserved.