The Hole in the Wall (15 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

BOOK: The Hole in the Wall
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“Look there!” Barbie said, pointing to it. “Some kind of park! People who work for ORC must go there during their breaks.”
“No, nobody goes there,” I said. “It’s really out of the way. It just looks close to ORC from up here.”
“How do you know that?” She stared at me. I looked away. “Never mind, I can guess,” she said. “That’s where you disappear to all the time when Ma’s trying to get you to do your homework, isn’t it.” I shrugged. I knew I was busted, but after all we’d been through today, I didn’t care anymore. If she wanted to go to my hideout, I’d take her.
And then she had to go and yank on my arm, trying to drag me back the way we came. “Hurry up, Seb. We gotta go tell Ma. She can get the police to collect all the evidence and find out what happened to Jed!”
I would have wrung myself free, except I was afraid I’d spin off in the wrong direction and fall off the edge of the world. But I did dig in my heels so she couldn’t drag me another inch. Oh, cheese, there went my toes, right through the tips of my sneakers.
“Just what do you plan to tell Ma?” I said.
“Everything! She has a right to know what’s on her own property, Seb.”
“She also has a right to ground us forever when she finds out
everything.
Do you really wanna be stuck in the house when we could be out looking for Jed?”
“Let’s just follow the rules, okay? Let the adults handle it. In case you didn’t notice, Sebby, we’re just kids. We can’t do anything.”
“Oh, yeah? That’s what you think. I mean, well, I may be just a kid, but”—I pointed the ol’ Daniels eyebrow in the direction of the gore—“I happen to know my way around this place. And believe me, nobody who follows the rules is gonna find out any of Boots Odum’s secrets. After we know something for certain about Jed, then we can tell Ma. I promise.”
Barbie finally let go of my aching elbow and crossed her arms to stare me down. “Okay, what do you have in mind?”
I was glad she said that, because if she hadn’t I was gonna hafta try and bend back her wrist. If I could get her on her knees, I could make her do anything. Unfortunately, there was also the risk of missing her wrist and getting my
blankety-blank
kicked.
“Well . . . ,” I said, “we don’t want Ma coming to look for us. So . . . the first thing,” I said (making it up as I went), “is to get home in time for spaghetti night, or there won’t be a second thing.”
We hurried home, talking it over on the way. We’d return to the cavern after supper, we decided, and bring the rest of the chickens so whatever was petrifying them could leave their bodies. Ma would never even have to know what had happened to them. Sweet! And we’d board up the hole in the feed closet so the hens couldn’t get out again. Something back there had to have caused the petrifying problem, we figured.
We’d get fresh batteries for the flashlight tomorrow so we could look around for more clues in the tunnel and cavern. And then we’d sneak into the gore to look around at the base of the cliff below the tunnel. If there was any sign of Jed in sight, we’d find it.
Along our walk home we came across Celery sitting on a rock, shivering. She fluttered onto my sneaker and rode the rest of the way back to the henhouse. Barney was thrilled to see her. I propped Jed’s protest signs against the hole in the closet to keep Celery out of there during supper time.
We had no idea what hour it was, so we hurried into the house. Grum sat in her rocker, clicking her false teeth over her yarn ball. Ma hunched over the sink clanking pots and pans. The pillow and the cushions on the couch looked as if Pa had just gotten up. Everything seemed normal. The tunnel, the cavern, the rock wall, the boulder—none of that seemed real. Not the visit from Odum, not Ma’s fight with Pa, not him leaving.
Maybe none of that had happened. Maybe I’d imagined all of it. The whole day. No, three whole days! Maybe I’d just now gotten out of bed Thursday morning and was on my way to tend the chickens. They’ll all gather around my feet when I walk in, squawking for their corn.
“Good, just in time to wash your hands for supper,” said Ma with a smile over her shoulder. Her glasses were all fogged up with steam, making me think of the magic glasses that had shown us the secret world hidden in the rocks. I felt in my pocket for them, and instead something crinkled under my hand. Jed’s letter. Just as good. It proved the chaos was all real.
Humming, Ma turned to stir something on the stove. And then the hum broke right out into an old rock ’n roll song. Not a sad sort of my-life’s-gone-wrong song, either. A dancing-in-the-streets sort of song. You’d think she’d be in a sad mood after what happened with Pa, not knowing what the future would be, but I hadn’t seen her looking this happy in a long time. No, I’d never seen her looking this happy. She looked younger and perkier, as if weights had been lifted off her face.
Barbie and I made faces at each other. I shrugged. She shrugged back. Then we smiled, just happy to see Ma happy.
Grum looked up and smiled at us smiling at each other. “So, what have you two been up to?” She always wanted to know that.
“Oh, not much. Just goofing around outside,” I said. “What have you two been up to?”
“Let’s see. Your mother and I rented a family movie for tonight, then we both had a little nap, and now I’m keeping her company while she makes supper.”
“Cool,” I said, mostly about the family movie. We hadn’t watched one in months. Pa never liked the ones Ma let us kids watch, and he’d get all ornery if we cut into his time with the remote control, so we just gave up and did other things.
While Ma pulled the garlic bread out of the oven, Barbie reached the plates down from the cupboard and handed them to me. I set them on the table without bribery or blackmail.
Now Ma looked at me suspiciously. Or maybe it was just concern. “Hey, Seb, how’s that stomachache of yours? I was thinking, maybe we should take you to the walk-in clinic in Exton tomorrow. They’re open Sundays, and they take the government insurance for kids. Grum says if there’s a big copay, we can sell some cuckoo clocks.”
“That’s right, we can,” Grum chimed her agreement. She had just made herself comfortable on the couch with her feet up on Pa’s pillow and was channel surfing the home shopping stations. “Some things are more important than keepsakes. On Monday we’ll ride to Exton to sell them and stop on the way home to get Sebby some good sneakers.”
I was really touched. “Thanks, Grum, but you don’t have to sell any clocks. Well, maybe one, for sneakers, if you really want to, but not for doctor bills because guess what? My cookie dough came up a few minutes ago!” I announced this with a flourish of the forks I was setting on the table. “Ma, I hope you made a lot of food.”
It was typical Saturday night spaghetti, Ma style. She’d boiled the noodles to death and burned the sauce. The meat-balls were tiny hard lumps of beef that made my molars ache, with so many chunky onions in them that I started burping before I was even done eating. Best meal of my life.
After we got done cleaning up, it was already getting dark outside. Barbie and I grabbed our sweatshirts and headed for the door to rescue Barney’s harem and block off the tunnel.
“Where do you two think you’re going at this hour?” said Ma, squatting in front of the DVD player. “Don’t you want to watch the movie?”
Me and Barbie winced at each other. The disappointment in Ma’s voice was painful to hear. My stomach swam with a feeling I knew well, guilt.
“Of course we want to, Ma,” said Barbie. “We just forgot you had a movie, that’s all.”
“That’s right. We can . . .
play outside
tomorrow,” I said more to Barbie than to Ma.
“Kids don’t play outside like they used to,” Grum said.
She sat with her string in her rocker while Barbie and I cuddled with Ma on the couch. I felt warm and safe and, for the first time in a long time, like everything was going to be all right.
And then, when the movie was almost over, the phone rang. I felt Ma stiffen as we waited, hoping not to hear another ring so we’d know it was Jed, letting us know he was okay.
It rang again, and a third time. Who could be calling at this hour? A call this late could never be good.
“Sebby, will you get that?” Ma said, since I was on the kitchen side of the cuddle.
I didn’t want to get the phone. I was afraid it would be Pa calling to ruin the good mood everyone was in. But Ma asked me to, so I answered it, cautiously. “Hello?”
“Sebby, good, it’s you. Listen, I don’t have much time. Don’t let anyone else know it’s me.”
It was Jed! “What’s wrong?” I whispered into the phone. Something in his voice made me picture him looking over his shoulder, but I couldn’t imagine what he was afraid of seeing. I looked over my shoulder into the living room. They had paused the movie and the three of them were talking about something that had just happened.
“Things have gone too far,” Jed said. “As long as you have that cookie dough in you, you can’t stay home. Get off the property or who knows . . .”
“But—”
“Look, I can’t explain. Just do as I say.” And click. He hung up.
“Who was it?” Ma asked.
“Oh, just a courtesy call.” I smiled to myself. That should do it.
“How rude!” said Grum. “Up is down and war is peace, too. Those telemarketers . . .”
That night I was so tired, I don’t even remember going upstairs. I just remember waking up in the dark not knowing where I was, with my bunk shaking, my back aching, and an awful noise filling my head. It was Barbie having one of her nightmare howls, and Ma trying to shake her out of it.
“Barbie, wake up, honey.”
“Where’s Pa!” Actual words. She was awake now.
“He’s not here. Don’t worry, it was just a dream,” Ma soothed. “You can go back to sleep.”
Maybe she could, but now I couldn’t. I lay there thinking about everything: Celery, the other chickens, the secret tunnel, Pa, Boots Odum, Jed. Especially Jed. How did he know about the cookie dough? He must still be around Kokadjo! And why did he warn me? He didn’t give me a chance to tell him I’d heaved. Was I still in danger? Should I still get off the property, like he said? Maybe spend the night at the Hole in the Wall? But if our property was dangerous, the gore probably wasn’t any safer. Maybe I should sneak into one of the outbuildings up at the commune. There were plenty of places to hide up there.
And then I realized. Of course! The answer had been right under my nose the whole time. Or right next door. Zensylvania. Where if you sat in the right tree with a pair of binoculars on a clear day, you could see in our kitchen window. That’s where Jed must be. And as soon as I knew everyone had fallen back to sleep, I was going to ride my bike up there and find him.
14
I would have gone to find Jed right then if it hadn’t been for Grum’s cuckoos. They all chose that moment to go off, the one in her bedroom and all of them out in Jed’s castle. Everyone in the house was so startled, we added screams to the noise. Good thing Pa wasn’t there.
We waited a minute for the cuckoos to get past the hour and quiet down, but it was a minute without end. Grum’s bed creaked and the light showed under her door. She was up fiddling with the cuckoo in her room. It stopped, but the ones in Jed’s castle kept going and going.
“Someone’s been fooling with those clocks again!” Grum called.
“Not it,” I said.
“Me neither,” Barbie said.
Grum knew that me and Barbie used to have fun playing with the cuckoos when Jed first moved out to the castle. We’d set the pendulums all out of sync, and after a while they’d all sing together. “Like magic,” Barbie said.
“No, they synchronize because their motions send perturbations through the walls,” Jed said. I asked him if that was anything like ESP, and he said he wouldn’t be surprised if the same theory applied, but he meant that they vibrated themselves into unison. I sure missed listening to Jed. But with any luck I’d be hearing his voice again real soon.
“Sebby,” Ma called in a groggy voice, “go do something about that racket.”
And then I had a thought that scared the idea of going to Zensylvania straight out of my head. “Ma, what if someone’s out there?”
The light in her room came on. She appeared in the doorway tying her robe, her hair sticking out all over and night cream splotched on her face. “Seb, where’s your baseball bat?”
“Uh . . . Yankee Stadium?” Which in my imagination was located across the road in a certain cave where Babe Ruth hung out with outfielders from another galaxy.
“Never mind.” Ma went back in her room and emerged with Pa’s hunting rifle. “You kids stay here with Grum. Lock yourselves in her room till I get back.”
Grum appeared in her doorway looking skeptical. “Claire, is that thing loaded?”
“Well, I, ah, don’t know,” Ma admitted. She didn’t like guns. She didn’t even know how to use one.
“Find me some bullets, then. I’m going with you.” Grum held her hand out for the gun. She was a good shot. When she lived in the gore she used to pick squirrels off the bird feeder from her bedroom window.

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