The Hole in the Wall (17 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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“Who, me? I thought you did it.” The shock made me fall off my bike. Groan, groan, my aching back. I must have slept on it wrong. No, wait, Barbie stood on it wrong with those heavy rocks yesterday. No wonder my back killed.
“I didn’t do it. And Ma says she didn’t do it. So who did it?”
“Maybe one of his drinking buddies?”
Barbie nodded. “Makes sense. We’d better hurry—there’s just enough time to save the chickens before we have to get ready for church.”
Our plan was to load up the wheelbarrow and the little red wagon with all the chickens and haul them to the cavern in one trip. Celery came fluttering to sit on my sneaker the moment I walked inside the henhouse. “Ahoy, mate,” I said, petting her head as Barbie opened the closet.
But Barbie was the one who swore like a parrot. “Someone’s been in here!”
My perfect sister, swearing? I never heard of such a thing. “This can’t be good.” I ran to see.
All the stuff had been neatly put away on the shelves. We pulled down the things in front of the hidden door only to see that the barn boards had been replaced by a big piece of plywood. Nails with broad heads had been spiked into the studs an inch apart. That plywood wasn’t going to come off without a lot of work.
“Pa must have done this last night, before he . . . you know!” I said.
“I guess so. But where did he put the chickens? I hope he didn’t just leave them where they were!”
Me and Barbie looked at each other, then tore around the corner to search the coop. There all the hens were, right where they belonged: sitting on their nests like sculptures on display.
“Whoever did this has a sick sense of humor,” Barbie said.
I went along the rows and waved my hand in front of their eyes, which moved. “They’re still alive!”
“How will we get the sick hens to that cavern now?” Barbie said.
“Maybe we can find a place to squeeze in between the wall and the cliff behind the coop?” I said.
Barbie nodded, but doubtfully. “Maybe, if we can clip away some vines.”
We went out to look. Celery didn’t want to let go my foot so she went along for the ride.
This time Barbie and I both cussed like parrots at what we saw. Someone had wedged rocks into the gap between the building and the mountain. Mortar oozed out between the stones. It was still damp to the touch. My heart felt like a balloon with all the air gone out of it. How were we going to save the chickens now?
15
We went back inside the coop to talk it over. I sat in the wheelbarrow with my soul mate in my lap and pet her head forlornly. “I’m sorry, Celery. I’d love to save your aunties. I really would.” I felt worse than I had when we found the chickens petrified to begin with. At least then I thought they were dead and didn’t have any reason to hope. Now I knew they were alive, and could be saved, if only we could get them to the cavern.
“There has to be another way,” Barbie said.
“Because where there’s a will, there’s a—” I said, mimicking Grum’s voice, and then it came to me: “A ladder! We can take Pa’s extension ladder into the gore and climb up to the tunnel from there.”
Barbie wasn’t having that. “Oh, Sebby. Bad idea. Even if Ma and Grum didn’t catch us trying to drag that heavy ladder and all those chickens over there, the goons would. Plus it would be suicidal trying to climb up all that loose dirt. But another entrance is a good thought. Those tunnels probably have other ways in. Remember all those passages that went off to the left?”
“Yeah, off to the left . . . that would be down . . . no, up—” I crossed my eyes, thinking.
“Toward the commune!” Barbie realized. “Too bad Cluster’s gone. We could ask her if she knows of any caves back there that we could try. It could take us days to find an entrance on our own. And then, more days to find our way to the cavern. If there’s even a way at all.”
She was pretty right, because me and Grum’s binoculars hadn’t spotted any caves when we were on our Zensylvania reconnaissance missions. But then again, we were more focused on windows than holes in the ground. Anyway, I had another idea.
“There may be someone else up in Zensylvania who can help us,” I said, excitedly, since it would allow me to kill two birds with one stone, as Grum would say. Although really we were trying to keep the birds alive. “Jed.”
“Jed? At the commune? You mean, like, now?”
“Yeah, still,” I said, and then explained in a big long sentence with no breath (so Barbie wouldn’t have a chance to cut me off) the reasons why I thought he’d been living there all this time. “So, we should go up there right now, find him, and have him explain what the heck.”
And then in her own big long sentence of revenge Barbie talked me out of my idea because if our runaway brother had been living at the commune all this time, wouldn’t A) Cluster have let it slip to us, or B) Jed have moved away with the rest of the commune, or C) he have at the very least gotten out of there before Odum’s goons fenced him in?
“What do you mean, fence?” I said.
“The fence they already had half built yesterday afternoon. Don’t you remember us talking about it on the way to skating? How, like, dozens of goons were up on Kettle Ridge cutting branches and unrolling this thick wire mesh all around the tree trunks at the edge of the property?”
Uh, no. I vaguely remembered voices buzzing in the SUV, and one of them might possibly have been mine, but the major thing I remembered from that ride was hiding my petrified pet chick and planning how I was going to explain it to Barbie.
Yesterday afternoon seemed like a long time ago now.
“Oh, yeah, good point about the fence,” I said, taking her word for it. “But where else could Jed have been to know about that cookie dough in my guts? Can you answer me that?”
Barbie thought a moment, slowly turned, and pointed toward the boarded up feed closet.
I banged my hand on my head. Why didn’t I think of it first? “Of course! He’s been living in the tunnels this whole time!”
“Well, not necessarily. He could be living anywhere, but if he knows other entrances to the tunnels, he could easily sneak back here to keep an eye on us. Or an ear.”
“So to save the chickens, we have to find Jed.”
“Fat chance of that! No, we have to find another entrance to the tunnels. C’mon, Seb, when you and your spaceship brain are out exploring, have you ever seen another cave nearby?”
That question did it. Duh! Of course I’d seen another cave. Many a time. It didn’t lead to the tunnel where Celery got her life back, but it might work the same magic. It was in the same chunk of mountain.
So I told Barbie about the Hole in the Wall, and we decided to take the petrified hens there. We had to do
something
with those chickens, whether or not we could save them. We couldn’t just leave them sitting on their nests with their pathetic eyes and let Ma find them like that. She already thought Odum had kidnapped them anyway, so why not take them to the gore to live? (Or not.)
But first we had to suffer through the weekly butt torture better known as church. There was no getting out of it with the Ma and Grum tag-team ironing the dress pants and pointing to the shower. It was only an hour of sitting on the hard pew but it felt like eternity on my aching back. Slouching usually made it better, but that day it only made the pain worse. So did jiggling.
“It’s all the jiggling you do that makes your butt hurt,” Jed once told me. “Resistance is futile. You might as well sit still.” This was easy for him to say. After he started high school, Ma let him choose whether he wanted to go to church anymore, and he chose to sleep in.
Anyway, I tried his advice and sat straight up without jiggling. It made Barbie seem awfully short all of a sudden. But the hour lasted just as long as ever.
My teacher said hello in the vestibule after the sermon. Ms. Byron goes to the same church we do. Pa had been surprised to hear that a kneejerk liberal feminazi even went to church. Funny, I didn’t see
him
there.
“Why, Sebastian, I think you’ve grown six inches since Friday,” Ms. Byron said. Her eyebrows nearly hit her Sunday hat.
“Only three inches,” Barbie said.
“He’s finally decided to listen to his old grandmother and stand up straight,” Grum said proudly. “Praise the Lord.”
As we crossed Kettle Ridge on the way home, I couldn’t resist staring out at the gore, as usual. Barbie craned her neck to look out my side, too, squinting with her hand over her eyes. Remembering yesterday, I scanned the faraway cliff on the narrow end, looking for the tunnel we’d nearly fallen out of, but it just blended into the mass of endless grayness. The boulder in its mouth probably made the tunnel impossible to see from the outside anyway.
A motion in the middle of the stripped area caught my eye, though. A silver car on Odum’s Gash. And a black one. And a red truck. A whole scattering of vehicles, heading in. You could see them blipping between the slag piles. Barbie leaned closer. She practically climbed on my lap, pressing her nose against the window.
“What do you see?” I said, resisting the urge to shove her back over to her own seat. We were nearing the edge of the kettle top now and would soon lose the view.
“What do you see?” Ma echoed, looking at us through the rear-view mirror. The SUV made the turn down the hill, and the road weaved through pines intertwined with viney shrubs.
Barbie punched my arm. I guess I shouldn’t have said that. “Oh, just some cars in the gore,” she answered Ma.
“That’s unusual for a Sunday,” said Ma. True. ORC never saw much activity on the weekends. Just a goon here and there, changing guard shifts, and Boots Odum himself went in sometimes to check on things. Most of the employees had weekends off and never went near the place until Monday morning.
“They must be godless heathens,” said Grum.
Ma laughed but said, “Now now. Judge not lest ye be judged.”
They had themselves a fine time exchanging Bible verses the rest of the way home, and I kept thinking about Jed. If Barbie had been right, if he’d been keeping an eye on us from the tunnels, he could be living way over on the other side of the mountain behind us. Those tunnels could go for miles and miles.
We made the turn past Ma’s sign:
SORRY, NO EGGS
and instantly I realized what Barbie had been gawking at in the gore. That was Pa’s truck I’d seen blipping between slag piles! It had been in the driveway when we left, but not now.
“How did Pa get past the security gate at ORC?” I whispered in Barbie’s ear as we walked to the house. “Do you think he finally got himself a job there?”
“Seb, it’s Sunday. He has no reason whatsoever to be at ORC.”
She had a really good point. That couldn’t have been Pa. “Don’t worry, Shish, there are lots of red trucks in the world. Pa’s probably over at the Do-Drop-Inn as usual.”
“Probably,” Barbie said. But she didn’t sound convinced.
I barely tasted the weekly Crock-Pot roast and potatoes we had after church, I ate so fast. Barbie was shoveling the food in too. We were in a hurry to get going. Besides, swallowing without chewing made the food less painful. And that wasn’t a joke about Ma’s cooking. I felt like I had four hundred new molars.
“All right,” said Ma the second I took my plate to the sink, “it’s Sunday afternoon and I haven’t seen anybody named Sebby doing any homework all weekend.”
“I was planning on getting that done tonight,” I said. Assuming Barbie would tell me the assignments. While my classmates had copied them into their agendas on Friday, cartoon superheroes jumped out of my pencil. Don’t blame me. I am weak and superheroes are strong.
“You were, were you?” said Ma. “I was planning on your getting that done this afternoon.”
“Jeez, Ma, it’s not your homework! Pa’s gone one day and now you want to tell me what to do every minute!”
Barbie put her head in her hands in despair. I guess I’d gone a little overboard.
Grum didn’t say a word for once, but she didn’t need to with that look on her face. She let her glasses slide down her nose and challenged Ma over the tops of them.
Ma was going to blow, I thought. But she spoke calmly and even sounded amused. “This morning in church your teacher asked me if I received the letter she mailed home last week requesting me to check and sign your homework each day. And I had to tell her that somehow her correspondence had escaped my notice. Now, how did that happen, Seb?”
I looked at my feet. My toes waved their sympathy.
“That’s what I thought. As long as I have to sign your homework because you weren’t taking responsibility for it yourself, my darling son, then, yes, I will be telling you what to do. Now sit your derriere down and get that homework done without another word of sass, or you’re grounded for a week.”
So I had a choice. I stared at her, squinting and biting on my lips, trying to decide what to do. It took about three seconds. “All right,” I said. “I’m grounded. C’mon, Shish.” And out the door I went.

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