Applewhites at Wit's End (10 page)

Chapter Twenty

A
mosquito landed on Jake's arm and he swatted it. He was sitting in his sanctuary atop a vine-shrouded boulder in the woods, having slipped away while Ginger was busy talking to Lucille. It was the only place in the whole of Wit's End that he was safe from her. Nobody knew of this place where he always came when he felt the need to be alone. Not even Destiny had ever found him here. But somebody was very close right now, moving noisily through the woods in his direction. He parted a curtain of leaves and saw E.D., her back to him, peering anxiously this way and that, apparently looking for something.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

She jumped and spun around. It took her a moment to see him. He should have kept quiet, he realized. She might have gone on past.

“
Shhh
!” she said, and whispered, “Did you see him?”

“See who?” Jake whispered back.

“The man in the suit.”

Jake shook his head. “Nobody came by here.”

“Rats,” E.D. said in her regular voice. “I really did lose him. What are you doing up there?”

Jake sighed. “It's my secret hideaway. At least it
was.
”

“Where's Winston?”

“I closed him in my room. I can't bring him out here with me—you never know when he's going to bark at something.”

“If he'd been here with you, he would have scared the guy off.”

“Yeah, and brought my stalker right to me. She knows that if she finds Winston, she'll probably find me. And she has a free period now.”

“Ginger?”

“Of course Ginger. She's like a burr. Or a leech.”

“I think it's cute.”

“You wouldn't think it was cute if you were the one she was stalking! Lucille's been doing the songwriting workshop in Wisteria Cottage, so Ginger's taken to leaving stuff for me on my bed! Flowers, cookies, songs—all of them dedicated to me—notes on lavender paper. She thinks it's my favorite color because of my room.” Jake sighed, and then realized what E.D. had said. “
A man in a suit
?
In the woods?
”

“Suit and tie! He was skulking around by the pond with a clipboard taking notes. It's weird.”

“Yeah. Seriously weird.” Jake remembered the black car he and Destiny had seen. “Like that car.”

“What car?”

“A plain black car. It started up the driveway one morning. First day of camp, I think it was. Destiny and I thought it was Archie, back from getting groceries in Traybridge, but when we went to see, the guy backed up and drove away. Fast.”

“Why didn't you tell anybody?”

“What's to tell?”

“Was he wearing a suit and tie?”

“I didn't get a look at the driver. I barely saw the car before it took off.”

E.D. shook her head. “I don't like it. Something's going on, and I want to know what. A guy in a suit skulking around with a clipboard, a car that takes off the moment somebody sees it, and the strange way Dad's been acting.”

“What do you mean strange?”

“Like how he reacted to the way Q cut the grass.”

Jake laughed. “That was pretty funny.
Q
after
Q
after
Q
all over the place. Kind of like crop circles!”

“Yeah, but that's exactly the kind of stunt Dad should have
admired
. The kind of thing he might have done himself when he was a kid. Instead, he hollered and fussed and made Q cut all the rest so it would look like a plain, ordinary lawn. When did Dad ever care about a lawn? And another thing: he's started going out to the mailbox to collect the mail—
getting up way before noon to do it
.”

That, Jake thought,
was
strange. “Maybe he's expecting a check and wants to be sure nobody else gets it.” He stretched and climbed down off his boulder. “Don't tell anybody about my hiding place, okay?”

E.D. looked around her. “Tell anybody? I couldn't find it again if I tried.”

“We should go back. It's nearly lunchtime.” Jake watched E.D. start back the way she'd come. “Wrong way,” he said. He grinned. Could be, he thought, he'd found a crack in E.D.'s organized perfection.

“Right!” she said. “Of course.”

Jake led the way back toward the Lodge. Apparently he hadn't lost his sanctuary.

That night Jake sat in the dark barn wondering where E.D. was. She'd never missed a theater workshop before. Maybe she'd finally decided David wasn't worth the humiliation of getting up onstage and going through a scene like some kind of robot. Jake thought it was strange that somebody who could come up with a completely bogus story in two seconds on the phone—like she'd done with Mrs. Montrose when she told her the camp was full—could be so incredibly stiff and awkward onstage speaking memorized lines. It was good that she didn't know the kinds of things David said about her behind her back. If he ever said them to her, Jake intended to deck him.

The stage lights and the houselights had been turned off in the barn. Outside, the sun had fallen below the tree line, but it would still be light for a while yet. Inside, it was hard to make out where Randolph Applewhite was sitting, a slightly darker shadow among the shadows of the rows of empty theater seats.

Randolph's voice came now from the darkness in front of them. “Tonight we're going to play a theater game called Harbor. Half of you will be on one side of the stage and half on the other. I've placed chairs in a line stage left and chairs in a line stage right. Those chairs are docks, and the stage is the harbor. You'll be boats heading from a dock on one side of the harbor to a dock on the other side. The object is to get safely to your new dock without sinking anyone else or getting sunk.”

“How will we keep from crashing into each other?” Harley asked.

“That's the whole point of the game. Each of you will decide what sort of boat you are and what sort of noise that boat would make. As you cross the harbor, you'll make your sound so that the other boats will know where you are, and at the same time you have to listen for everybody else.”

“Who wins?” David asked.

“Trust him to ask,” Q whispered to Jake.

“Nobody
wins
,” Randolph said. “This is theater, not sports. Either you all win or you all lose. The successful working of a harbor requires that boats move around without running into one another. The whole point is to get safely to an empty dock on the other side of the harbor. If there's a collision the game starts over again. But—
listen up; this is important!—
no matter how often you have to start over, there is to be
no talking
. No talking during a round, no talking in between. No sounds except the boats. Understood?”

“Understood,” they all answered.

“Okay then. Everybody up. No more talking as of
now
.”

Jake scrambled to his feet as everybody else was doing, cracking elbows with Q in the process.

Randolph's voice came from the theater seats. It had grown even darker now so that it was no longer possible to see him at all. “Pick a side, find a chair, and sit down. Be thinking about the kind of boat you want to be and what sound it would make. When I say Go, the game will begin.”

Jake began moving like a sleepwalker, his hands in front of him, aware of the sounds of movement around him: of chairs scraping on the stage floor, of grunts and yelps as people bumped into one another. Someone brushed past his hands, but he managed not to run into anyone, and he found a chair by knocking into it. He sat.

“Go!” came the command. Jake stayed sitting for a moment as the others rose around him, beginning to make their boat sounds, before he decided to be a sailboat, making a whispery, blowing sound between his lips meant to be the sound of his hull slipping smoothly through the water. He rose and began moving slowly, straining to see the movement of the others he could feel and hear around him. He was surprised how unsettling it was not to be able to rely on his eyes. And how hard it was to make sense of all the boat noises. Next to him was a puttering engine sound, ahead of him on the other side of the stage a loud foghorn sound of a very large ship. That would be Q.
“Splish, splish, splish”
came from his left—a rowboat maybe?
“Vroooooommm! Vroooooommm!”
ahead and to the right. David. And then, inevitably, Jake thought, the sound of people colliding. Groans rose from all sides of the stage.

“End of round one,” Randolph called.

“Don't be so loud,” someone said. “I can't hear anybody else.”

“Not my fault—”

“No talking! Take your places again.” A pale light glowed from the seats as Randolph switched on a flashlight briefly. “Not great. That was only forty-five seconds. You've been used to working as individuals. But plays are not just assemblies of individuals. This game is designed to create an
ensemble
. I assume you all know what that means. Theater is a collaborative art. You need to rely on yourselves, of course, but also on one another. When we begin again, remember to listen to the others and assert yourself at the same time. Listen. Share the space. Cooperate. And remember the goal.”

The second round lasted very little longer than the first. Jake had been sunk by
Vroooooommm!
, who had been too loud and moving too fast to hear the sound Jake was making or even the
Putt, putt, putt
Jake had been trying to avoid. David had been making so much noise, he must have been expecting everyone just to get out of his way.

In the third round everyone was temporarily blinded by a sudden flash of light. “Everybody freeze!” Randolph shouted. He wouldn't have needed to tell them, Jake thought. They were all dead in the water. Randolph came to the stage with his flashlight and took Harley's camera from him.

“I needed to see where I was!” Harley said. “I was afraid I'd fall off the stage.”

“So change docks with somebody at the back. Who's willing to come to the front?” In the light of the flashlight, Harley and Samantha changed places, and they began again.

Not being able to talk through what had happened in each round, everyone had to figure out for themselves how to do it better. “Can we change what boats we are?” Jake risked asking when he'd been hit again and everyone was stopped. His whispery sound was apparently too hard to hear among all the other boats.

“Do you get to change roles halfway through a play?” Randolph asked.

It took an unbelievable fourteen rounds before they finally found their way to the docks on the opposite sides of the stage without any collisions. Everybody cheered, and Randolph turned the lights back on, which blinded them all over again.

“Remember this!” Randolph said. “
Ensemble!
And just for the heck of it, see if you can get back to your bunks now without your flashlights.”

“Will we be doing scenes again tomorrow?” David asked.

“Tomorrow we work with improvisation.”

As the campers headed out of the barn, the spotlights that illuminated the barn's parking area were turned out. Jake was always surprised at how dark night in the country was. The light in the windows of the Lodge did little more than show the direction they needed to go. One by one the boat sounds started up around him, though it wasn't really hard to see each other. David's
Vroooooommm!
and Q's foghorn were in front of Jake, the two boys crashing into each other as they went.
Both boats,
Jake thought,
should be at the bottom of the harbor by now.
A moment later Ginger
splish, splish
ed into him.

Chapter Twenty-one

E
.D. hurried down the dark hallway, her spiral notebook clutched to her chest, and stood for a moment at the closed door of her parents' bedroom. Before
Eureka!
started they had always left the door open, but her mother insisted on keeping all the bedroom doors closed now in case any campers happened to go upstairs. She didn't want the campers to know that nobody (except E.D. of course) ever made their bed in the Applewhite household. E.D. took a deep breath. With the door closed like this, going into her parents' room felt like spying.
You
are
spying,
she reminded herself.
That's the whole point.
She wanted to find out what was going on with her father. In the Petunia Grantham mysteries, Petunia was always finding critical information by digging through people's trash. There had been nothing useful anywhere else. This was E.D.'s last resort.

She opened the door and slipped inside, shutting it quickly behind her. Her father was in the barn doing the theater workshop. It was the counselors' night off (Cordelia had insisted they get one a week), so she had dragged Hal to town to see a movie. Everybody else was over at Zedediah's watching television. E.D. turned on the overhead light.

There was one wastebasket in her parents' room, and it was nearly full. Perfect. Her father's hysteria about housekeeping had apparently not carried over to his own bedroom. She upended the contents onto the rug. There were plenty of crumpled tissues, a sock with a hole in the toe, some catalogs that should have been put in the recycle box, and several crumpled envelopes and balled-up sheets of white paper.
Petunia Grantham strikes again!
she thought. Gingerly, she fished these out of the pile.

None of the envelopes had been mailed. There were no stamps, no return addresses, not even the address of Wit's End. On each envelope was the name Randolph Applewhite, spelled out in letters that had been cut from magazines or newspapers and pasted in place, like ransom notes from a kidnapper. It gave the envelopes a threatening air.

She smoothed out one and slipped it into her spiral notebook. The others she put back with the rest of the trash. Then she picked up one of the balled-up sheets of paper and carefully straightened it out. It had been printed on what looked like an ink-jet printer. There was not much on it, but what there was sent a shiver up her spine.

15A NCAC 18A.1004 PERMITS

No person shall operate a summer camp within the State of North Carolina who does not possess a valid permit from the Department.

It had to have been copied from an official document. Department of what? She thought back to the months of preparation for
Eureka!
, trying to remember whether anyone had ever mentioned having to have a permit or having to deal with the state.

Hurriedly, she opened another crumpled sheet.

15A NCAC 18A.1001 DEFINITIONS

“Summer Camp” includes those camp establishments which provide food or lodging accommodations for groups of children or adults engaged in organized recreational or educational programs.

She wondered how many children constituted a group.

“Department” shall mean the Secretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources or his authorized representative. “Sanitarian” shall mean a person authorized to represent the Department on the local or state level in making inspections pursuant to state laws and regulations.

State laws and regulations. What kinds of laws and regulations? She pulled open another wad of paper.

15A NCAC 18A.1005 PUBLIC DISPLAY OF GRADE CARD

Inspections of summer camps shall be made in accordance with this Section at least once during each season's operation. Upon completion of an inspection, the sanitarian shall remove the existing grade card, issue a grade card, and post the new grade card in a conspicuous place where it may be readily observed by the public upon entering the facility.

There was no official grade card posted where it could be observed by the public—or anywhere else. She spread the last page out on top of the others.

15A NCAC 18A.1008 GRADING

The sanitation grading of all summer camps shall be based on a system of scoring wherein all summer camps receiving a score of at least 90 percent shall be awarded Grade A; all summer camps receiving a score of at least 80 percent and less than 90 percent shall be awarded Grade B; all summer camps receiving a score of at least 70 percent and less than 80 percent shall be awarded Grade C; and no summer camp receiving a score of less than 70 percent, or Grade C, shall operate.

Official language was stupidly repetitious and obvious, E.D. thought. Were they writing for five-year-olds? But then she looked again at the last part. Without a grade of at least C,
no summer camp shall operate
. Did that mean the state could shut them down?

Were these messages warnings or threats?
Threats.
Why else the cut-and-pasted letters on the envelope? And why was her father keeping these messages a secret? He was engaging in a classic cover-up, E.D. thought with a sinking feeling in her stomach. She had once done a research paper on political cover-ups. She knew where they led. Nowhere good.

She also knew it was illegal to put anything other than actual mail into somebody's mailbox. So whoever was doing it must be waiting till after the mail had been delivered. Who could it be?

E.D. flashed, suddenly, on the first morning of camp. The phone call from Mrs. Montrose about the rejection of Priscilla. “Tell your father he hasn't heard the last of this.” These messages were exactly the sort of thing Mrs. Montrose would do. But was she just threatening, or had she actually turned them in to the state?

The man in the suit. The plain black car Jake had seen.
Mrs. Montrose
must
have turned them in. They were being watched by “the department”!

E.D. folded the smoothed-out pages and put them in her spiral notebook. She gathered up the rest of the trash and put it back in the wastebasket. She knew something nobody else except her father knew. Something he didn't want the rest of the family to know. The question was, What should she do about it?