The Exact Location of Home (14 page)

Except in the mornings when I'm trying to look like I'm coming from there, I don't like to walk by the apartment. I'm still afraid I'm going to forget we don't live there anymore, take the porch stairs two at a time, and barge in on whoever lives there now. I don't know who moved in. Somebody who has enough money to pay Mrs. Delfino's son his rent on the first of the month, I guess.

I look up the block to see if there's a new car parked outside. It's hard to tell with street parking because if it's busy, people park any old place. There's a blue pickup truck
that I don't recognize, though. And a yellow Nissan Sentra. And something that looks like it might be an old convertible. They could definitely afford to pay rent on time.

And then I see something awful. Gianna and Ruby. Practically running up the street toward the old apartment. Ruby stops to smell the flowers Mrs. Delfino planted by the porch, while Gianna hops up the steps and knocks on the door. She turns this way, and I duck behind one of the huge hedges near big house on the corner.

Through the prickly branches, I see her knock again, harder, and peer in through the storm door. Can she see that all our stuff is gone? Is somebody else's stuff in the kitchen?

She looks around and finally goes back down the stairs where Ruby's waiting. They walk back toward Gianna's house, and I breathe out one huge whoosh of a relief. No one new has moved in. No one is living in our apartment.

And Gianna hasn't found out.

When I get to the library, it's busy enough that no one asks if I need help when I sit down at one of the public computers and log onto the geocaching website. I enter “Senior Searcher” in the search box and wait.

I so hope there's a new entry. A new cache Dad planted or a new one that he found—something to show me he's still in town.

Finally, the page loads. Nothing new. Dad's not geocaching these days. What's keeping him so busy? Too busy for his hobby. Too busy to call. Too busy to bother caring about me.

I check the coordinates for the last cache I wrote down, and it's a good thing because the latitude was fine but the longitude is totally wrong. I look around for a pencil to write it down, but the only one on the desk is broken.

“Here.” A smiley face pencil with a bright yellow background appears in front of my nose. I turn around, and there's Gianna. She holds the pencil up to her face and smiles a big cheesy grin.

“See the resemblance?” She holds the pencil out to me again. I take it. “I'm sorry,” she says. “I know this is important to you, and I shouldn't have given you such a hard time about it. So I'm here to help.” She turns so I can see her backpack on her back, green with huge purple flowers on it and bulging at the seams. “I have water, trail mix, a bunch of little plastic animals that Ian doesn't play with any more—those are to leave in the caches in case we want to take something—rain ponchos, a topographical map of Lakeland and the surrounding townships, and a first aid kit. In case you find any more hostile geocache guards like the bats.”

“They weren't hostile, really. I didn't get bit. I just have to have the shots because one touched me.” I look at her there with her exploring gear.

“Come on,” she says. “Ruby's waiting at the park. It's a good skipping day.”

I use the smiley pencil to write down the coordinates for Dad's last cache. I stand up and tuck the GPS unit into my backpack. It's hard to stay mad at someone who passes out smiley face pencils.

“It's actually not much of a skipping day,” I say. Wisps of smoke-gray clouds are moving fast across the sky as we head for the park. “Too windy.”

Gianna turns so her massive backpack almost bumps me off the sidewalk. “You have a crummy attitude. You ought to just skip stones like the rest of the world and see what happens. Everything doesn't have to fit exactly. Everything doesn't have to be perfect. Sometimes, rocks skip—and they skip darn good—when the waves are big and the wind is blowy and they skip anyway. Even if
you
think they shouldn't.”

Ruby waves to us, and we jog across the grass, past a couple toddlers fighting over a dump truck in the sandbox, to meet her.

She hands me a stone and grins. “I challenge you to a skip-off, Kirby Zigonski.” She curls her arm into her body and flings her stone like a Frisbee. Her stone skips once, gets caught on a wave, and takes a hard right turn. I think it's going to just plunk and disappear, but it takes at least seven or eight more tiny little skips before it sinks.

There's applause behind us. Mr. Webster again. “That's some skipping arm you have.”

“She practices a lot,” Gianna says. “We're here almost every day after school.”

“My wife used to enjoy this park so much when she could get out more,” he says, looking into the waves. “She loves watching the birds.”

“Me, too.” Ruby skips another stone—nine this time—and Mr. Webster claps.

She curtsies, waves to an imaginary crowd, and points to me. “Your turn.”

I look down at the stone she gave me. Really, it has great properties for skipping. It's the size of one of the school cafeteria chocolate chip cookies—just big enough to cover my palm. It's perfectly flat and round, without even the tiniest bump or crack to mess things up. But then the wind gusts, and the waves kick up.

“It's not going to work. I forfeit.” I drop the stone at my feet. Nothing's going to work until I find my dad and he can come fix this mess. And I want to get on with it. “Can we go now?”

Gianna nods. But she bends down and picks up the stone I dropped. I turn to leave the park, but she tugs on my backpack. I stop.

“You should keep this one,” she says. “It's perfect. Just keep it. For a better skipping day.” She unzips my backpack and drops the rock inside. It clunks against the GPS unit.

“Now let's go look for your Dad.”

The GPS unit points us toward Flying Bridge Marina, over the river off Bridge Street. As soon as we cross the bridge, Ruby heads for the docks, even though the arrow wants us to go another 128 yards to the south.

“I want to see if there are still boats in.” The wind that comes from the south all summer long has changed seasons; it's blowing out of the north, kicking up three or four foot waves on the lake. Any boats still in the water are going to be bouncing like crazy.

“Just one sailboat,” Gianna says as we turn the corner of the marina building. She points to the lone mast silhouetted against the clouds, tipping back and forth in the swells.

“Oh, look!” Ruby points to the end of the last dock. No boats at that one, but a great blue heron stands on the last weathered plank, like it's getting ready to do a trick off a swimming pool diving board. It turns to look at us, and its long beak points out toward the islands.

“He looks worried,” Ruby says. “I bet he knows the meeting is coming up soon.”

“Right.” I snort out a laugh. “Maybe he's been making posters.”

Ruby whips around and looks so mad I take a step back. Ruby never gets mad. “Just because something isn't important to you doesn't mean it's not important,” she says.

“I … sorry.” I watch the heron bend its long legs, lift its wings, and pump them to lift its body from the gray boards. It flies off toward Smugglers Island, toes pointed
behind it. When I turn back to Ruby, she's gone—past the last dock on the rocky beach, skipping stones.

“I know you've been busy,” Gianna says and tugs my sleeve to start walking toward Ruby. “But you should know that she's spent hours—bunches of hours—working on posters and getting people signed up to go to that meeting. It's important to her, even if it seems weird to you. And you ought to understand about that sort of thing.” She nods at the GPS unit in my hand, still pointing past Ruby's stone-skipping spot down the lake.

I nod, just as we reach Ruby. “It is important,” I say. She looks up. “I'll be there, Ruby. At the meeting.”

“You will?”

“Yep—promise.”

“Thanks.” She smiles and backhands one last stone. It skips about twelve times.

“How do you always do that?”

“I expect it to skip,” she says, lifting her backpack from the pebbles. “I believe. Sometimes that's enough.”

“Well, you can believe all you want, but unless we walk another nintey-six yards that way, we're never going to find this thing.”

“Aren't the railroad tracks up here?” Gianna asks as we start off again. “That's a weird place for a geocache.”

We're walking right along the tracks now. There's no train noise, but Ruby keeps checking behind her. “This can't be right,” she says. “Are you sure you entered the numbers the right way?”

“Yeah, I checked twice. They're right.”

“What's the cache called?”

“Train Wreck.”

“That's encouraging. Did this one have a clue on the website?”

“Yeah. And I brought it, but you're only supposed to use that if you're stuck.” I look down at the GPS unit. It says we're within three yards of the cache. I look around. Aside from the railroad tracks we're walking on, there are a bunch of prickly bushes on our right and about a five-foot drop-off to the lake on our left.

Gianna peers into the bushes but gets thorns stuck in her hair. “Ow!”

Ruby helps her untangle. “I'd say this qualifies as stuck. Get figuring, oh great code-master.”

I pull out the notebook paper from my back pocket. I wrote the code down in pencil. It's already faded to a tired light gray, but I can still make it out.

ZKDW PLJKW KDYH EHHQ D PRQXPHQW ODQGHG LQ WKH ODNH.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

DEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABC

I set to work with Gianna's smiley-face pencil while she and Ruby poke around the bushes.

“It's probably not even legal to have a geocache here,” Ruby says looking up and down the tracks.

“Hold on.” I'm halfway through the code. “In a minute we'll know if we're on the right track or not, but I'm sure I—”

“Ow!” Gianna's hair is stuck again.

“Here.” Ruby starts untangling.

“Okay, I've got the clue, and we're definitely in the right place. Liste….”

“Shhh …” Ruby says and stops untangling. “Listen.”

By the time I stop to listen, it's louder. And there's no mistaking what it is. A train. Coming this way.

“Ow!” Gianna tries to tug her hair out of the thorn bush but it just gets more tangled.

“Hold on,” Ruby says. “There!” Gianna stands up, and all three of us stare up the tracks at the front of a train heading in our direction. It's coming slowly. But it's coming.

“Thorn bushes or lake?” Ruby says peering over the drop-off.

“Lake,” Gianna says, eyeing the thorn bushes that tried to eat her hair. “We can climb down—look.” She sits on the edge of the bank, then flops over onto her stomach and finds a foothold in the rocks. She looks over her shoulder. “Come on … the water's barely up to these top rocks, even with the waves. We can wait down here.”

The train's slowed down—we probably would have had time to backtrack and get out of the way, but now Ruby and I are halfway down, too. I find a good handhold in the rocks and stretch my right foot down toward the flat rocks below. I'm almost there, so I just let go and jump down. My foot lands on a slick of slimy green algae and flies out from under me. I go down hard on my knees just as a big wave splashes all the way up to the rock wall.

At least I kept the clue dry.

“What's it say?” Ruby asks as I stand up and try to wipe lake slime off my knees.

“It says—”

“Hold on!” Gianna shouts. “Train!”

The train—made up of eight rusty freight cars, rumbles past above us. The rocks tremble like there's an earthquake. The whistle blasts. Then the train clicks and chugs its way south to some other old railroad town.

“Okay.” Gianna leans in close to me.

“It says, ‘What might have been a monument landed in the lake.'”

“In the lake?” Gianna says, and together, we turn and stare into the waves. “Hey!” Gianna bends over, unlaces her red high tops, and pulls them off, along with her monkey banana socks.

“Careful!” Ruby says as Gee slides out onto the slimy stuff. The cold water turns her skin bright red. Her toenails are painted green, so her foot looks all Christmasy.

“Grab my hand, okay?” Gianna reaches out and I take it. She leans way over into the water. “Got it!” She stands up clutching a perfectly flat rectangle of white rock about the size of a cell phone and hands it to me.

“It's marble,” I say, running my hand over its cold smooth surface. I look out and see bigger slabs in the water. “What might have been a monument landed in the lake …. I bet a train dumped a load of marble here!”

I turn and start to climb up the rock face again, but Ruby tugs my sweatshirt. “Look.” She points to a corner of pink plastic sticking out from one of the crevices.

I pull it free, brush off a couple dried-up spiders, and pry off the lid. “It's more rocks.” I pick up another chunk of marble and see a folded paper underneath. “There's a note in this one!” I slide out the single piece of unlined white paper, unfold it, and read.

Congratulations! You have found the Train Wreck cache. You've also found the site of a great Lakeland disaster. In the spring of 1897, there was a tremendous rain that made the ground soft. When a train carrying marble from the Quarry in Eastville rumbled through on that afternoon, the earth under the tracks gave way, and the train derailed, spilling its cargo into the lake. The largest pieces still rest on the bottom, while many medium sized slabs have been taken for garden stones. The smallest remain—reminders that nature will always get the best of us.

To log your find, please remove one piece of marble from the container. Take it home with you or plant it in another geocache along the way to see where it ends up. Then find another piece of about the same size. Write your name and the date on it, and leave it in the cache for the next brave soul who finds Train Wreck.