The Hole in the Wall (21 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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“Sit down, Claire, and make yourself comfortable,” Boots Odum said with a nod toward the daffodils. “I’ll get the paperwork for you to sign and see if I can rustle us up a cup of coffee while we wait.”
Ma didn’t sit, though. She stepped between Barbie and me and pulled us close. “Where they go, I go.” I squeezed her arm to thank her. She squeezed back.
That dahlia bulb nose turned bright red. Obviously Boots Odum didn’t like being contradicted. His lips pressed tight and he said, “The scanning room is designed for the patient and the doctor. Dr. Mills is not going to hurt your kids.”
“There won’t be any scanning of these precious bodies until you tell us why,” said Ma, locking Barbie and me under her arms. “I’m not letting you do some top secret classified experiment on my kids without knowing what it is! You’re about two inches away from a lawsuit, Boots.”
Hoo, boy, he didn’t like being called that. He stiffened like an adrified chicken with its mouth open, unable to cluck.
Just then a jazz riff played in his shirt pocket. He took the phone out and glanced at it before rolling his eyes and tossing his head impatiently. “Look, I’m trying to help you, Claire. I have a lot to do right now, and you’re not making it any easier.” He flipped the ringing phone open as he lifted it to his ear and said irritably, “Yes, what is it?” He stepped away and turned his back to us, carrying on his conversation in hushed tones.
“It’s fine, Ma,” Jed said gently, touching her arm. “Really. We’re just checking to make sure there isn’t any—anything seriously wrong. It’s like an X-ray or an MRI. It won’t hurt the twins. Believe me, I’ve been scanned plenty of times. Saved my life.” He crossed his heart.
Boots Odum turned briskly and said, “Doctor, we have a situation developing in Section A. I must trust you to take things from here.” And with not so much as a glance at us, he scanned his hand and took off running down the hall, heels clickety-clacking an urgent beat.
My stomach flipped when I saw that someone’s hand needed to pass a test to get
out
an ORC door, not just
in.
I closed my eyes and prayed we’d be allowed to leave. Never thought I’d be so homesick for the musty air of our teeny tiny house. And Grum. She’d tell these people what’s up and what’s down.
Dr. Mills’s eyelids fluttered rapidly as she watched the door slide closed, and a vein in her neck pulsed. She put her hand there in a way that made me think of Miss Beverly. “Mrs. Daniels, may I have your permission to scan Barb and Sebby now?”
Ma nodded numbly. Jed sat her down, and the doctor handed her a clipboard with papers to fill out.
“Barbara, please wait here until I’m finished with your brother. Sebastian, please follow me.”
We crossed the infirmary and entered a wide door. The doctor sat at a desk with a control panel and computer monitor over it, built into a wall made of green tinted glass.
“Before you go into the scanner, Sebby, I need to ask you a few questions,” she said, pulling up a roller stool for me to sit on. She wanted to know all the diseases I’d ever had (none, except colds, chicken pox, and growing pains) and all the bones I’d ever broken (none, except Barbie’s arm once by accident when I jumped on her). Then she asked about everything I’d had to eat or drink for the past few days, how many times I’d gone to the bathroom, and what everything looked like when it came out.
“Do you want to know about—?” I gave her the universal barf signal.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Tell me about your nausea.”
I made it as descriptive as possible, kind of hoping to gross her out, but she kept a straight face the whole time. Since I didn’t know how much to trust her, being ORC’s secret quarantine doctor and all, I did leave out a few details. Such as, how the barf raisins looked through the magic glasses. Which I didn’t tell her about borrowing from her boss. Or, where I happened to be when the cookie dough came up. Because I didn’t think it was any of her business that we had an amazing secret tunnel on our property. And I didn’t talk about my adventures with Celery since I didn’t eat or drink her. In fact I wasn’t planning to eat chicken or eggs ever again.
“Now please remove your clothing,” the doctor said.
I was afraid of that! “All right, but don’t look.”
She smiled a little and turned her back. When I said I was ready, Dr. Mills pressed a button. With a ringing sound, the glass wall opened wide. “Step inside, please.”
The scanner’s insides looked like a fancy shower with lots of doodads and gadgets on the walls and ceiling. “Cool!” I pressed my nose against the glass and made faces.
“Very attractive,” said Dr. Mills. “Now stand in the middle and hold still, please.” I heard her like she was talking in my ear.
I did as she asked, and Dr. Mills started the machinery. It sounded kind of like a band playing slow music. Beams of all different colors came at me from every direction, something like the disco ball that sends light bouncing all over the Skate Away, except this light was warm. With my eyes closed I pretended I was at the seashore. Surfing. Uh-oh, wipeout! Dragged in the undercurrent. Up for air just in the nick of time. What happened to the beach? It’s gone—nothing in sight but water water everywhere. And sharks!
Aaaahhhh!
“Sebastian, could you please hold still,” said a voice.
Whoops, there went my brain making stuff up. I should have pretended I was a rock at the beach. “Sorry, doc,” I said, and smiled apologetically.
“Oh, my! Could you open your mouth wider, Sebastian? A little more? Yes, and tip your head back. A little to the right. Yes, that’s perfect—hold, please.” The scanning machine clicked and whirred and played some more dance music as colors came beaming out of the light jets into my mouth. It made my eyes cross trying to watch until the doctor asked me a question.
“Sebby, have you been to the dentist recently?”
“No, but interesting you should ask. My teeth have been killing me. I didn’t tell you before because my grandmother said it wasn’t a mysterious debilitating illness. She said I was getting my twelve-year molars.”
“Indeed, you have those
and
your wisdom teeth.”
“What? I can’t have my wisdom teeth yet. I’m still a dumb kid.” I knew a little about wisdom teeth because Jed had just gotten his first one shortly before he disappeared.
“Oh, you’re not dumb,” the doctor said. She kept asking me to pose this way, then that way. It seemed to take forever before she finally said, “Okay, finished,” and the door slid open.
As I jumped into my clothes I asked, “Doc, what were you looking for? What’s wrong with me? Besides wisdom? It’s my bones, isn’t it. I’ve grown, like, six inches since Thursday.”
“That is an unusual growth spurt, isn’t it,” she said.
“Does it have anything to do with the raw cookie dough I shouldn’t have eaten?” I asked. She didn’t respond. “I’d really like to know, doc. They’re my bones.”
“I’m sorry, Sebby, but I’m not at liberty to discuss the situation with you at this time.”
She escorted me to the seating area and invited Barbie in for a scan. Ma jumped up. “Wait, Dr. Mills—aren’t you going to tell me if my son is all right?”
Hey, yeah! Maybe the doctor would be at liberty to discuss my situation with the Higher Power of Ma.
With her hand on the door, the doctor turned to Ma. “Please be patient for a while longer, Mrs. Daniels, while I complete the scans of your daughter and yourself. Mr. Odum will discuss the results with you after we have had a chance to analyze the data.”
“Stan will discuss it with me? You’re the doctor, aren’t you?”
Dr. Mills smiled. “Try not to worry, Mrs. Daniels.” Then she made eye contact with Jed and flashed him a quick smile. That must have meant something to him, because he took Ma’s hand and whispered, “It’s okay, Ma, Sebby will be all right.”
All right, maybe, but completely wiped out from the colored-light attack and posing. I flopped down onto the row of chairs next to Ma and put my head on her lap. As she ran her fingers through my curls I fell into a sound sleep. When I woke up, her lap had slipped out from under me, and Barbie stood over me with her hand across my mouth.
I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and looked around. Jed stood behind the counter where the doctor had washed her hands. The lights went out, and he said, “Whoops, sorry,” before they came back on. Something in the ceiling beeped. The video camera stopped still, its lens turned upward.
“Hurry, follow me,” Jed whispered urgently. He crossed the room and pulled aside a set of closed curtains. My chin dropped at what I saw: a wall of cages holding animals like in a pet store. A horned owl sat still as a statue, except it slowly moved its head to follow the motions we made. A Doberman on the bottom row sat frozen like a statue except its skinny tail, which it wagged like crazy when it saw us. All of the animals had wires and tubes hooked up to them, and monitors flashing numbers behind their cages.
“Isn’t that one of Ma’s chickens?” Barbie said, pointing to what looked like one of Celery’s aunties.
We both looked accusingly at Jed. The bald spots in his beard reddened. “I’ll explain all that later. No time now. C‘mon, it’s the next bed.”
Jed closed that curtain and hurried to yank the next curtain aside. And this time I froze with the shock. A cold feeling drained down my neck all the way to my feet.
“Pa!”
He was in a hospital bed tipped like a teeter-totter with his head up, his arms still out to the sides like a cheerleader, and his feet poking the sheet at the same angle we’d first spotted his shoes that night outside Jed’s castle. The only thing that moved was his eyes. They flitted around rapidly when he saw us, but it was impossible to tell what he was thinking.
“It’s a
hard
life, isn’t it Pa,” said Jed.
“What happened to him?” I didn’t laugh at Jed’s joke that time. My lower lip wouldn’t stop quivering. I took a few small steps toward Pa, my hand out.
“Pa’s suffering from adrium poisoning, just like in my legs.” Jed spoke very fast, in a hushed voice. “The adrium has spread through his entire body. He’s almost completely paralyzed.”
“How did he get here?” Barbie asked. Exactly what I wanted to know.
“Long story,” Jed said. “Tell you later.”
“He’s like the chickens,” I said. “What happened to him? And them? And you?”
Jed peeked out around the curtain before answering in a whisper. “Stan hasn’t figured it out yet, but I have, and I’m not telling him or he won’t be able to resist getting his hands on our property. He has connections—and if Ma won’t sell out willingly, he’ll get the courts to force her. Seb, Barbie, we have to work together. I’ll tell you what I know, but you two need to use your brains and be careful what you say. Can you do that?”
He was shaking me by the shoulder now.
“Jeez! I know how to keep my mouth shut.” I bit my lips shut to prove it.
“All right. See, there are microscopic particles of adrium left in the waste slag after extraction from the ores. Those particles want to get back to an adrium vein. It’s like a magnetic force, and very, very powerful. What Stan doesn’t realize is that we have the mother lode on our land. A pure adrium vein. All that leachate water from the gore fights its way onto our property because it’s attracted there. Pa got poisoned because he spent the night passed out in a leachate puddle in the yard.”
Huh? I didn’t get much of that, but Barbie nodded as he spoke, like she’d already figured it all out too. She said, “And the chickens also soaked up that leachate stuff when they went into their hidey-hole, right?”
“Right. There’s a lot more to it, but we don’t have time to dawdle. Quick, Seb—how did you get rid of that contaminated dough you ate?”
But I was still trying to figure out his explanation. “What’s the adrium got to do with Ma and Pa getting into a fight? Do you know how much money Boots offered to buy—”
Barbie reached out and pinched my lips shut. “It happened in the tunnel behind our henhouse. Sebby heaved up the dough in the big cavern near the wall where you left us the warning letter. He had a petrified, I mean
adrified,
chicken stuck to him—long story—and the chicken was cured too. All the
stuff,
the
adrium,
just flew right out into the walls. That cavern looks like living jewelry when you wear the magic glasses.”
“I get it! Back to the mother lode . . .” Jed huffed out all his air and rolled his eyes back, looking up at the ceiling. “Oh, crap. Why’d I have to go seal that barrier up so tight? It’s going to take half the night to rip it down. By then Pa could be dead.”
19
“Dead?” me and Barbie echoed. The owl hooted on the other side of the curtain. Eerie!
Jed nodded grimly. “When only part of the body is affected, you can usually live with it. Like me. And Stan—he lived half his life with an adrified hand.”
“So that’s why he has amazing bionic fingers!”
“It’s not something he advertises on his billboards, but, yes, Seb. Anyway, different animals have different levels of tolerance. Birds are tough. That owl’s been here longer than I have. Humans aren’t tough. Last week there was a . . . well, an industrial accident. Three guys got soaked. All dead in twenty-four hours. Pa’s not going to make it much longer without some sort of miracle cure.”

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