The Hole in the Wall (11 page)
Read The Hole in the Wall Online
Authors: Lisa Rowe Fraustino
Tags: #Technology & Engineering, #Mining, #Family, #Action & Adventure, #Environmental Science, #Mines and mineral resources, #Juvenile Fiction, #Family life, #Mysteries & Detective Stories, #General, #Supernatural, #Science, #Twins, #Fiction, #Soil pollution, #Brothers and sisters
On one of my spins, the computer screensaver on Odum’s desk caught my eye. My brother’s cat! Or at least I thought so. Stupid’s face flashed briefly on the screen, then split apart into dots and stripes that twisted and turned. Then they became the cat again.
“Quick, Barbie, look, it’s Stupid!”
“What now? Everything’s stupid to you.”
“On the computer. It’s Jed’s cat! Oh yeah, that reminds me, Ma said to stop giving him milk. It’ll make him sick.”
“What are you talking about? I didn’t give the cat anything.”
“That’s what I said. Must be Grum, then. She doesn’t want Stupid to get osteoporosis.”
“Well, I doubt that was Jed’s cat you saw here, anyway,” Barbie said.
By now the screen saver had moved on to other pictures. “Wait until it comes back around and you’ll see,” I said.
She crossed her arms and jiggled her foot nervously as she waited through photos of places around Kokadjo, B.O. and A.O. Meanwhile, I sat down—Celery didn’t seem to mind that—and pawed through some things on Odum’s desk, papers and books with big words I didn’t get. I rifled through the closest science book.
“Shish, what’s an isotope?”
“No clue. Look, Seb, waiting for the cat is taking too long. Can we go now?”
“What about turbulence? Or chirality?”
“That would be the sound your head will make when Boots Odum catches us in here. Will you hurry up?”
I spun the big globe on the desk. It had pins pricked into it here and there around the world. One was exactly where Kokadjo would be if Kokadjo were big enough to be on a globe. There were pins in every continent and ocean. Why had Boots Odum marked those places?
I jumped up to study the maps on the walls. One had a picture I’d seen in school of the continental divides showing all the tectonic plates. That map had a pin stuck in the Atlantic. And in very faint colored pencil lines, someone had drawn a swirling pattern with shading to make it look three-dimensional. Beginning at the pin and going underneath the ocean. All the way back to a pin marking Kokadjo. Around the edges of the map were newspaper clippings about natural disasters all over the world—earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis.
“Oh . . . my . . . Godzilla,” I said. “Look at this, Barbie. Does this mean what I think it means? ORC’s mining is causing all this damage!”
Barbie took a quick look and shook her head really fast. “No way,” she said. “Impossible. Boots Odum is just . . . just an artist. A really good artist. This must be his plan for a painting.”
The sketch was beautiful, just like all of the artwork Miss Beverly had shown us in the house. But what if it was more than that? What if whatever ORC was mining did have some powerful connection to other places in the world? It could be like when you pull a loose thread on the front of a sweater, and you wind up with a hole in the back. And somehow the cookie dough in my guts had put me in the middle.
Okay, now I was good and scared. “Hold the door, Barbie, I’m gonna make a run for it.”
“About time!”
We’d have been out of there in a flash if a dog in the next yard hadn’t picked that moment to start barking its head off. Was it barking at us, or was someone coming? I held my breath to listen.
Footsteps crunched on the gravel walkway leading to the barn.
10
“Hide! Someone’s coming!” I said, looking frantically around the room. The closest escape was the bathroom with the painting that liked me. Not a good idea.
“In here!” Barbie slid open the folding closet doors at the far end of the workshop, and we burrowed into the hanging coats as the barn door creaked open.
“Stanley? Stanley?” Thank goodness, it was Miss Beverly. I pictured her twisting her sorry neck around, searching for him. “Good afternoon, dear,” she said toward the bathroom door. Her voice sounded stretched out, worried. “Forgive me for intruding, but I heard you out here, and thought you could use a cup of coffee after being up all night trying to find an antidote for, you know. . . .”
She walked into the room, her footsteps creaking the wood planks, then lightly knocked at the bathroom door. I could hardly hear it with my heart thundering in my ears. I held my breath, hoping she wouldn’t discover that Boots wasn’t in the john after all. Even though his latest masterpiece was.
“I’m sorry, Stanley,” she said with tears in her voice. “I know you told me not to use those eggs, but I thought you just meant for cooking. They were the only ones we had in the house, and they looked perfectly fine, so I didn’t think it would hurt to use them in the balm recipe. Who would have thought it would . . . oh, please don’t be mad. . . .”
Now I was holding my breath so I wouldn’t miss a word. Eggs? Our petrified eggs? Miss Beverly had used them, and now Boots was mad at her? Why? What had gone wrong? If I wasn’t trespassing I’d have popped out and asked her.
Miss Beverly waited a moment, then sighed, and said, “Okay, Stanley, I’ll leave you alone to work. Dinner’s at six.”
We would have been home free if Barbie hadn’t picked that moment to let out her perfect bloodcurdling scream and bolted out of the closet. Straight into Miss Beverly.
Miss Beverly backed away, covering her face as if she didn’t want to be seen, then uncovered, stood tall, and smiled meekly.
“Barbie!” she said. “Why, you gave me quite a scare! And Sebby! What are you kids doing here?”
I was fighting with the coat I’d been standing in, trying to get out of it, and tripping over all the junk in the closet. Milk crates and pails full of doodads, a bunch of furniture, and office supplies, just to name a few.
Miss Beverly seemed not just surprised, but nervous to see us. Her hand fluttered around the hair behind her right ear. Something about her seemed very different. She looked five inches taller, that’s what! Most of it was her neck, sticking straight up.
“Miss Beverly! What happened to your . . .” Oops, I better not say hump. I didn’t know what to say. Grum had told us enough times to go ahead and lie around the house slouching and not drinking our milk if we wanted our backs to look like question marks without answers for the rest of our lives. There wasn’t any cure for osteoporosis.
From the top of her dahlia bulb nose to the bottom of her long, white, unwrinkled neck, Miss Beverly turned red. “It’s, oh my, ’twas my own fault, really. Stanley warned me not to use the . . . , but, oh dear, I can’t really say, I’ve said too much already. . . .”
She stepped outside, looked nervously around the yard, came back into the barn, shut the door behind her, and said, “You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here.” With her long neck she looked ludicrous, like Alice in Wonderland when she grew tall.
“We actually came to visit you,” I said, “and we—” I looked to Barbie for help, but she was looking warily into the closet. I was on my own. “We were on our way to see you and just stepped in here to get out of the rain.”
Miss Beverly opened the blinds and let the sun in. “Would you like to try that again?”
Hey, when did the sun come out? The only thing I could think of to do next was cock my left eyebrow. A unique charm I got from Pa. He said the ol’ Daniels eyebrow could get a fella anything he wanted from the ladies.
Sure enough, Miss Beverly melted into a smile. Then she looked closer at me and squinted. “Sebby, do you have something hidden under your raincoat?”
“What?” My hand went to Celery’s head, and I imagined those chicken eyes moving. “Oh, that. It’s . . . kind of embarrassing, actually. It’s a . . . rare medical condition.”
“Oh, dear. I’m sorry to hear that,” Miss Beverly said. Then, after an awkward pause, “Look, you children are welcome to visit me at the house anytime, but Stanley doesn’t allow guests in his workshop. He usually keeps it locked when he’s not here. He must have gone off in a hurry. He did leave the place a sight.” She stiffly bent to pick up the empty paint cups.
On her way to the garbage can she paused in front of the map with the swirling patterns sketched under the ocean back to Kokadjo. To turn her head she twisted her whole body around, not just her neck. “Such an imagination he has,” she sighed, tracing her finger along the lines.
And then my sister surprised me. Instead of taking the chance to get out of there unscathed, she started pulling items out of Odum’s closet, saying, “Sorry, Miss Beverly, don’t worry, I’ll put everything back. I just have to find out what bit me!”
Out came a lampshade, lawn chairs, computer parts, pails of rocks and bones—bones? no, fossils—while Miss Beverly fussed. “Something bit you? Oh, dear! But if you just . . . Barbie, please don’t. Child, I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Dear, if Stanley comes home and finds you—”
She put her hand to her heart and gasped.
“That bit you?” I said.
We were gaping at the statue of a poofy giant poodle. It would have been cute if not for the horrified look on its face, its mouth in a wide-open howl of terror. The dog was made of beautiful white stone, every hair carved in place, except for a missing tail and one broken ear, complete with severed blood vessels. The sculptor had a sick sense of humor. The details looked so real, my skin prickled with the heebie-jeebies.
Barbie was blushing now. “Well, my hand definitely got caught in some teeth. Sorry, Miss Beverly.” And she hustled to bury the dog again.
Miss Beverly started to shake her head but stopped and put her hand to her neck, her lips set in a grim line while I helped Barbie return everything the way we found it. All but one thing that might possibly have fallen into my raincoat pocket. And then Miss Beverly shooed us out. I stayed as far away from the bathroom as possible, just in case Celery still had any funny ideas about getting together with the Easter egg.
On my way past the computer, the screen saver flashed a photograph that made me jump. It was Miss Beverly when she was younger, at a dog show with a blue ribbon around her neck and a poofy giant poodle licking her face! A dog that looked just like the statue! Yikes! Get me out of here!
I was a superhero blur of motion. Celery didn’t have a chance to resist.
Miss Beverly walked with Barbie to meet me at the front gate. “You’ll have to come back soon for some Easter candy,” she said, feeling her neck and massaging the back of it with her fingers. Her eyes had welled up with tears. I felt bad for her.
“Does your neck hurt?” I said.
She made a painful noise that I took as a yes.
“I know how you feel,” I said, my arms over my chick bump. “I’ve had a stomachache for days from eating raw cookie dough.”
Miss Beverly blinked hard, took a tissue from her housecoat pocket, and dabbed her eyes. “Raw cookie dough? Sebby, that’s not good for you!”
“Oh, he knows,” Barbie said.
Miss Beverly used the tissue to blow her nose, sniffed, and said, “Stanley will figure out how to set things right. He always does.”
The wind shifted, shaking the leaves overhead and sending a burst of water down on us.
“See? It was raining.” I gave her the charming Daniels eyebrow again. She smiled a little. Pa was still good for something.
By now it was almost time for Ma to pick us up. As we ran back to Skate Away, Barbie said, “This one time I won’t tell on you, Seb, because I’d get in just as much trouble for going along. But don’t expect me to cover for you. You’d better get a story ready for when Ma asks what happened to your raincoat. Or why you suddenly have a twin chicken. Or what’s in your pocket.”
Innocently I peered down around the chick bump to the lump in my telltale pocket. Oh, booger. I didn’t want Barbie to notice that. She has a little problem whenever I borrow stuff without permission. Even if it isn’t her stuff.
“Don’t worry, Shish,” I said. “If Boots still needed these, he wouldn’t have left them with a bunch of fossils in his closet, would he?” I pulled out the broken glasses and showed them to her. They only had one arm. Except for the cracks in the thick, milky lenses, they looked like the ones he’d put on to gaze around our yard the day he stopped for eggs.
She pushed my hand away and peered over her shoulder, as guilty as if police were watching us from behind every tree. “Oh, Sebby. Wasn’t it enough for you to walk away with his paints?”
“Very funny,” I said, scrunching my shoulder blades. My back tingled where the paint had landed. It felt kind of nice, like a massage.
Getting into the SUV I made sure Ma didn’t see my back with the new improved color scheme.
“Did you have a good time skating?” she asked.
Barbie stared at me with her arms across her chest. She’d never tell a lie.
I avoid lying whenever and however possible. “Oh, Ma, you know we always have a good time when we go skating.”
“Awww, that makes me happy,” said Ma. “Money well spent. And speaking of spending money, while I was at the grocery store I noticed a big empty space on the shelf where the Zenwater usually is.”
“See?” I gave Barbie a so-there punch in the arm. “Not only did the Dogstars disappear, so did their business. Now aren’t you worried, Shish?”
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