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covered with mud and his jeans and shoes were soaked from the rainwater in the bottom of the hole.
    Like a mining engineer, he studied his excavation. "Do you think it's deep enough?"
    "Another week and you'll be shaking hands with the Chinese," I said.
    "Be serious, will you?" Parker started gathering little sticks and laying them over the hole. "Come on, Armentrout," he muttered, "get some leaves and help me cover it up."
    When Parker was finally satisfied, we sat down on a boulder near the fort. With the sun shining down through the thinning leaves, it was just like old times-until Parker suddenly turned to me and said he remembered where he'd seen the dead man.

7
    "R EMEMBER THAT DAY last summer when we were going to work on the fort but your mother made you go the dentist instead?" Parker asked.
    I nodded. As soon as school let out in June, Mom was always dragging me off somewhere horrible. The dentist, the allergist, the math tutor. If it were up to her, my whole vacation would be spent in boring air-conditioned offices, little boxes where somebody is always poking needles in your arm or adjusting your braces or drilling you on fractions and percentages.
    "Well, I rode my bike out here anyway," Parker said. "Just me and Otis. And I saw that gray van again. The guys on the motorcycles were sitting around like before, smoking dope and drinking beer."
    He looked up from the stick he'd been whittling. As usual, his hair almost hid his eyes and he had to toss it back to see me. "The dead man was in the van. I
saw his face when he left." Parker paused. "Of course, he wasn't dead then."
    "No," I said, trying to sound sarcastic, but Parker didn't notice.
    "I was hiding in the woods, right over there behind that tree." He pointed and Otis ran off, thinking Parker was throwing something for him to fetch. The poor dog sniffed around, even pawed at the dead leaves, and finally came back with a stick Parker must have thrown last week.
    "He was real close, Armentrout, not more than a few yards away," Parker said.
    I raised one eyebrow, a skill I've worked hard to develop. "Come on, Parker," I said. "You think the dead man is some guy you got a glimpse of way last summer?"
    Parker frowned and threw the stick for Otis. "There was another man driving the van, older, kind of slick-looking."
    He paused for a moment, his frown deepening. Suddenly he snapped his fingers and leaned toward me. "I've seen him too!" he said. "You know where? At the Olde Mill!"
    "So?" I said. "Lots of people buy antiques there."
    Parker tossed his hair back, too excited by his own thoughts to pay any attention to all the cold water I was throwing at him. "What if Evans is involved in some kind of drug thing?" he asked.
    "You've been watching too much TV," I told him. Why couldn't he just forget about the dead man? It was a nice afternoon, and I wanted to enjoy the sun while it lasted. Before long it would be too cold to lounge around in the woods like this.
    Parker straightened up and glared at me. "Just listen to me, Armentrout, will you? A few nights ago, I went over to the shop, looking for Pam. I was walking up to the back door when Evans came out with another man. They talked for a few seconds, the man put some boxes in the back of a snazzy-looking BMW, and then he left. Pm sure it was the same guy I saw driving the van."
    "So what's that got to do with drugs?"
    Parker sighed as if I were too stupid to talk to. "Don't you see? The guys in the van are dealers. We've seen them here in the woods selling stuff."
    "But where does Evans fit in?" I was thinking about what Mom had said. Maybe Parker was so jealous of Evans that he was making up stuff about him, first thinking he was a murderer, now thinking he was a drug dealer.
    "It's just a feeling I have," Parker said. "The boxes could've had something in them, I don't know." His voice trailed off, and he started picking at the frayed edge of a hole in his jeans.
    For a while neither of us said anything. Otis