When thirteen-year-old Addie Boucher opens a wooden box in her family’s attic, she finds nineteen letters from a dead outlaw — her great-great-great-grand-uncle Billy, who rode with Curly Bill Brocius and helped bury a fortune in stolen church silver in Skeleton Canyon in 1881. His last words to his sister Ada: follow the A-rock to the sweet spring, and from there a Boucher will know the rest.
A hundred and forty years later, Addie is that Boucher. And her family is about to lose their house.
With her three best friends — loyal Gabe, methodical Marcus, and the quietly formidable Sam, whose Chiricahua family has deeper roots in this country than anyone — Addie follows Billy’s map into the Peloncillo Mountains of southern Arizona. What they find is real: the canyon, the spring, the hidden cache, and a fortune that has been killing everyone who reached for it since 1881.
But they also find Dell Hunt — the last descendant of Billy’s partner Zwing, who has spent fifty years hunting the same gold and will not be stopped by four thirteen-year-olds.
And they find the question nobody in a hundred and forty years has ever thought to ask: whose hands did it pass through to get here?
Drawn from the true legends of Cochise County, Arizona, The Bones of Skeleton Canyon is a story about treasure, history, and the hardest thing four kids have ever had to do — walk up to a fortune and choose to leave it in the dark.
