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Quarry

What an all around great book! Cam and Jack are easy characters to relate to and the book is captivating in the way it intertwines both mystery and lacrosse while adding a bit of humor here and there.

The search for the cause of the killings of the people found in the quarry is very entertaining and suspenseful. What also makes this book so superb is the fact that the lesson, "Working hard pays off with success", is embedded throughout the story. The lacrosse team plays well because they practice hard, while Cam finds the truth to the mystery through some good, tough detective work.

The book is so complete in so many aspects that it can only be put down after you’ve read it through.

-- Sean McAvoy, age 13

Quarry is another amazing book by Robert Holland. This book includes a mixture of mystery and athletics and I really like how he used a sport like lacrosse and I also liked the way Cam and Jack use their intelligence and their athletic ability to solve the mystery of the quarry, and save their lives.

There is another mystery that Cam and Jack discover, one that goes back to the 30’s. While they solve the old and new puzzles, they still need to make their lacrosse team better for their senior season.

-- Brian Hall, age 13

Chapter One

The Quarry

The high whining roar of a car engine blasted through the silence, howling as it came closer, and both of us whirled and looked up toward the sixtyfoot high cliff on the left hand side of the quarry as a car shot out of the woods and went airborne, slowly pivoting forward, the engine screaming, the wheels spinning. Seconds later it landed upside down in the water and sent what looked like about an eight foot high tidal wave in all directions.

Only when we understood that we were about to get wet did we turn and look for high ground. There wasn’t any. We were standing in a big open lot that had once been used as the landing area for the blocks of granite.

"There!" I shouted and Jack and I ran toward a pile of the blocks that had been left behind.

Spurred on by the roar of the wave crashing up over the edge of the quarry behind us, man, did we run. We jumped up onto the first block and then the second and finally the third as the water poured past.

"Cam, that was awesome!" Jack shouted. "Can you believe what we just saw?"

All I could do was shake my head.

The water, once it hit the flat open area, spread out quickly and no more than a sixinch flood swirled past the blocks where we stood, and even that dissipated quickly as the water, as always, sought its own level. Some ran off into the woods, the rest sank into the sandy soil. I looked out at the car as it nosed down, the water driving the air from the inside in big spurts, the car sinking lower and lower until it slipped beneath the surface.

"Say something, Dude!" Jack said.

I couldn’t talk. I didn’t have any words to fit what I had just seen. I looked back up toward the top of the cliff where two men in suits stood on the edge, looking down at the water. They turned our way and I grabbed Jack by the arm.

"We gotta get out of here!"

"What?"

I jumped down off the granite blocks, "Just run!" I took off for the woods with Jack right behind. In seconds we had made it into the cover of the trees and I could hear Jack cursing as the branches whipped back at him. For the first time ever, I thought maybe being fiveten had some advantages over being sixthree like Jack, because I could get lower more quickly. But I’d also spent a lot more time in the woods. Jack was kind of an open ground guy who favored lawns and paved surfaces.

I spotted a cluster of boulders up ahead and ran that way, getting behind the rocks and pulling Jack down out of sight as I took out my cell phone and punched in nineoneone, told the dispatcher what we had seen, and closed the phone.

Jack started to talk and I put my hand over his mouth and shook my head. Then we waited and I held my breath so my breathing would not interfere with my hearing as I listened for the sound of someone coming through the woods. Some people can do that without making any noise, but I was guessing that guys in suits weren’t in that category.

Then, in the distance, from the direction where the car had gone over the edge, I heard an engine start, followed by the sound of tires spinning on a gravel road, the stones clattering against the underside of the fender wells.

The sound faded quickly and the quiet closed around us. It could be a trick, a way to decoy us out into the open, but I didn’t think so. They needed to get away fast, because they had to know that every kid alive had a cell phone and would already have called for help.

"It’s okay," I said.

"Good! That’s good. I thought I was gonna bust."

I grinned.

"Can you tell me what’s going on here?"

"There were two guys in suits standing on the edge of the quarry where the car went over. They got a good look at us and my guess is that what we just saw was a mob hit."

"You mean like in the movies?"

"Only not a movie," I said.

"Which makes us witnesses."

"Yeah."

"And they saw us."

"They did."

"This is not gonna make my mother happy."

"Might be smart not to tell her," I said.

"Smart is a good thing."

"It has its uses."

"Do you think they can identify us?" Jack asked.

"I’m hoping they were too far away."

"Could you identify them?"

"Yeah."

"But you’ve got that long distance vision thing, and maybe they don’t."

"Probably not." I was pretty sure they didn’t because according to what I’d read, only about one in a hundred thousand humans can see as well as I can, which is about half as well as a redtailed hawk.

We walked back down to the edge of the quarry and now, in the distance, I could hear a siren. I looked out at the still water and for the first time I got an idea of how big the place was. My guess was something close to twenty acres, surrounded by sheer cliffs that plunged straight into the water with no shoreline. The only access to the water was where we stood. I turned and looked up at the cliff where the car had gone airborne but from where I stood I could see no sign of what had happened and it was hard to believe we hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

"How high is that cliff, you think?"

"Sixty feet or so."

Jack swiveled his baseball cap forward to shade his eyes from the steadily brightening sky. "Would you jump from there?"

"Are you nuts?"

He grinned. "Be a heck of a rush."

"All you have to do is hit the water the wrong way and you could break your neck."

"You think?"

"Even if it didn’t kill you, you might break a leg or your back or ... or worse."

"Worse? What could be worse?"

I pointed to my crotch.

"Ouch!" Jack said. "I never thought about that."

I took off my hat and rubbed my hand over my sandy buzz cut hair. "Were you really thinking about jumping?"

"Sure."

"Do you know anything about abandoned quarries?"

He shrugged. "You mean beyond the fact that there’s nobody here?"

"Duh ..."

"What’s to know?"

"A lot, a whole lot," I said.

"Like what?"

"These things are usually full of mining equipment. When they finish they just leave it there because it’s too much trouble to haul it back up."

"How far down would it be?"

"It depends ..."

"Yeah, got it. It depends on how deep the quarry is."

"Right."

We heard the siren clearly now.

"Where does the water come from?" Jack asked.

"Dad says it’s ground water and springs. He says that in deep quarries they have to keep pumps going all the time so the place doesn’t fill up. It’s one of the reasons they quit. They can’t stay ahead of the water."

"I can’t believe how clear the water is," Jack said.

"Look around the edges. There’s no shore. The rock just goes straight down. With no sand or mud to get stirred up by the wind, the water stays clear."

"Oh man, if you fell in at the far end you’d have to swim all the way back here to get out."

"That’s another problem."

I glanced around at him, dressed as usual in his homey clothes, baggy jeans nearly falling off, sneakers laced but untied. He sure didn’t look like a guy from a swim team. I shook my head and looked down at his shoes, wondering how he’d managed to run through the woods without tripping. It seemed almost miraculous.

"We could jump into the water here, swim over, dive down, and see if there’s a dead guy in the car," Jack said.

For Jack, who could swim like an otter and float like a cork, it was no big deal. But while I could swim just fine, floating wasn’t exactly in my bag of tricks. In fact, I floated about like a large stone.

"We’d need some equipment," I said. "A boat and ropes, lots of ropes, and ..."

"No way, Dude! It’s easy."

"Do you remember how cold the water is this time of year? It’s not like a pool."

"There’s gotta be some way to get down there first," Jack said, "I hate to give up a chance to be famous."

"Famous? You’d risk you life just for fame?"

"Hey, easy for you to say, Dude. But then you’re captain of the lacrosse team. All I do is swim and nobody ever comes to our meets."

"You get more than we do at lacrosse."

"No way."

"Anyway, it doesn’t matter because you get all the college scouts."

"Huh?"

"The colleges. They send scouts."

"Where’d you hear that?"

"At your last meet I met a guy from Ohio State."

"No way ...."

"Those guys are always looking for talent. But he wouldn’t tell me who he was there to watch."

He slapped his hand on his thigh. "That is so awesome!"

"Good thing he left before you changed, though."

"What’s that supposed to mean?"

"I've been meaning to say something about this for a while now. You gotta lose the prison pants."

"Prison pants?"

"Don’t you know that’s where the homey look comes from? Guys in prison can’t have belts because they might commit suicide. So their pants always hang low. When they get out of prison and come back home they still wear their pants halfway down their butts. It caught on."

"Where do you come up with stuff like this?"

"I read the papers."

"Papers? Oh, man, what century are you living in? Nobody reads papers, they go on the Net."

"The point is, Jack, you gotta change your look. You don’t find any homeys on college swimming teams."

"Preppy. They all dress like preppies."

"So if you have to do that to get a full free ride through college, is that a big sacrifice?"

"This is a matter of style, Dude!"

I looked up at him, staring into his blue eyes. "Is it?"

"Man ...." Jack shook his head. "You don’t leave a guy much room, do you?"

"There are two options: win or lose."

"So?"

"Winning is getting the free ride. Losing is not getting it and always wondering why you didn’t get it."

"What’re people gonna think?"

I shrugged. "Who cares, man? Especially when it comes to clothes. But I’ll tell you this. Last year you wouldn’t have seen any of the guys on the lacrosse team dressed the way you are. Coach wouldn’t have let ‘em on the bus."

"No way. He’d do that?"

"He had a dress code."

"You mean like coat and tie?"

I laughed. "No, khakis and polo shirts. He said it was like camouflage. Anyone watching us get off the bus couldn’t tell anything about us, except that we looked organized. We looked like a team and not just a bunch of individuals."

"What about at school?"

I looked off over the quarry and then turned and looked back at him. "Who are you trying to impress? The girls?"

"Why not?"

"Think about it."

Down on the road the siren shut off and we could hear the car making its way toward us.

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