Diamonds in the Boathouse: A Double Trouble Mystery By Rivkah Small Jewish kids will love this suspenseful Jewish mystery book of danger, diamonds & secrets, by popular Jewish children's author Rivkah Small. A double trouble mystery with double the fun & double the action! Buy Diamonds in the Boathouse at a special online price at www.targum.com

Chapter Two

Rest time at camp. What could be more the taste of summer: boys lying on their beds reading or playing their Game Boys, clusters of boys talking together, occasionally being “shh”ed by counselors, and everyone eating something.

Only one boy in Bunk Hei seemed separate from the scene. He was lying on his back, hands behind his head, staring vacantly at the ceiling. Meir thought he remembered that the boy’s name was Avrohom Asher, and that he was the only boy in the bunk from Lakewood. Maybe he felt left out. Meir would have stopped to talk to him — just to say something — but there was business he had to discuss first with Shloimy. He made a mental note to try to talk to Avrohom Asher afterward sometime.

Shloimy, the only boy not in relaxation mode, was tapping his foot impatiently as Meir approached. “What took you so long?” he demanded.

Meir showed him a large bag of Doritos. “This called for food.”

“Food!” Shloimy exploded. “Food at a time like this?”

“Yeah, I meant to ask you about that. You have a sneaky look about you, and you call it ‘a time like this’? I don’t know what the big deal is. As I see it, it’s pretty simple: we found a nice little lost pack of diamonds. We return it to Rabbi Horowitz, get a reward if there is one, and be on our way. We maybe get mentioned in the local paper under a big heading, ‘Ten-year-olds find lost treasure worth —’ whatever it’s worth.”

“Meir, you don’t understand,” Shloimy began in an undertone. “There’s something fishy going on here.”

“Fishy?” Meir asked, rolling his eyes. He tore open his bag of Doritos, made a quick berachah, and popped a few into his mouth.

“Yeah — why and how would someone just lose a packet of diamonds in the old boathouse? Also, it wasn’t just lost there — it was stashed there. I saw how far you flew through the air trying to get it out. Somebody rammed it into the boat pretty tightly. That’s not somebody walking along who drops something.”

Meir had to agree. “That’s pretty smart,” he told his friend. In school neither one was the top of the class, so he wasn’t used to incisive reasoning from Shloimy.

“The problem with you, Meir, is that you don’t have a sneaky mind.”

It was true. He didn’t have a sneaky mind. It was a big problem sometimes. “So what do you think happened there?”

“Well, it’s obvious that some diamond smugglers or thieves are using the old boathouse as a pickup place for stolen goods.”

Meir stared. “You think so?” he asked, forgetting to lower his voice.

Shloimy shushed him. “It’s obvious. The question is what do we do about it.”

“Well, if someone put them there, someone else will probably come get them, right?”

Meir said. “A thief would probably come at night. We should go there tonight, hide, and watch who comes. Then we should run back to the camp office and call the police.”

“Good idea,” Shloimy said approvingly.

“Too bad we don’t have a cell phone.”

“It might not get reception in the woods anyway.”

The boys decided to meet back at the boathouse at nine, at which time it would be fully dark. Shloimy felt they should each go alone, in order to attract less attention from their counselor and other staff, because of course they were supposed to be getting ready for bed at that time.

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The campgrounds were very eerie in the dark. Though Meir walked home from yeshivah in the dark all winter long, and liked it, country dark was so much darker than city dark. When he got far enough away from the bunks, he turned on his flashlight, but the yellow light only made it even spookier, as it accentuated the dark area outside the beam.

There were all sorts of rustling noises in the underbrush, and Meir imagined each noise was the thief, somehow forewarned that they were coming to hunt him out and trying to get them first. That was completely ridiculous, though, because no one but he and Shloimy knew they were going to the boathouse tonight. Where was Shloimy?

Meir wondered as he reached the boathouse. They should have met each other by now. He hoped Shloimy wouldn’t be late, leaving him to meet with a thief all alone.

Meir selected a nice outcropping of bushes, near but not too near the tumbledown shack, to hide behind. He settled himself down on the damp earth, thinking he should have brought a sweatshirt to sit on.

He turned off his light and waited. There was a rustling, louder than all the other rustlings of the night. Finally, it must be Shloimy. Meir almost called out from behind the bushes to tell his friend where he was, but he stopped short as he caught sight of a tall figure holding a flashlight and striding quickly in the direction of the boathouse.

Meir’s face broke out in a sweat. Who could that be?

Maybe it was the camp caretaker, that was it! It was just one of the maintenance men doing some rounds of the grounds at night. But the man wasn’t moving his light from side to side like a watchman, out to inspect things. He was walking too quickly. Hurrying up to the shack, the man looked around into the dark until Meir’s heart almost stopped, and then slunk into the boathouse. The door creaked loudly in the darkness. What could he be doing inside?

Meir’s heart was pounding. What should he do? Run back to the camp and call the police? Tie the door from the outside to trap the man inside? But what could he tie it with? Meir didn’t want to be there when the tall man came out. He was no brave Shloimy — but then, where was Shloimy? Meir got off his knees, turned on his flashlight, and began to run back to Bunk Hei as fast as he could go.

As he ran, Meir passed a pickup truck on one of the small roads that wound through the camp. He hadn’t noticed it on the way to the boathouse earlier. Maybe he hadn’t been paying attention. There were some words on the driver’s door, but they were unreadable in the dark. Without slowing down, he flashed his light at the license plate, made a mental note of the letters and numbers, and kept running.

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