The Hole in the Wall (8 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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“Maybe they just left a candle burning when they left,” she said, turning to look at the pale ribbons of light the upper story windows cast on the yard.
“And a log on the fire,” I added.
“Well, nobody’s answering the door, so we might as well go,” Ma said.
We hurried back along the trail, wondering out loud where our friends had gone so suddenly. “Surely tomorrow there’ll be word around town,” Ma said. I hoped so. I didn’t like not knowing what happened to Cluster.
When we got home I stooped to retrieve my hidden souvenir pebble. It wasn’t hard to find—it winked at me when I poked my head under the steps. Nice pebble.
It was past our bedtime, so Ma sent me straight upstairs. Barbie was already in bed reading. At first she didn’t sound concerned when I told her everyone at the commune had been abducted by aliens, or else maybe put into the witness protection program, or else maybe buried in a mass grave under a slag pile in the gore.
Barbie just rolled her eyes at me. “Sebby, you’re outrageous. Did it occur to you that they just decided to go somewhere? Like, a concert? Or a long weekend vacation?”
Then I remembered to tell her about the ORC sign on the lodge door, and reminded her about the water test, but she was still being stubborn. “Goofball, Boots Odum has been trying to buy Zensylvania out for years. Maybe he just made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.”
Ma came upstairs and kissed us good night. “Lights out, now. Time to stop talking and go to sleep.”
“I second that,” Grum called from the bedroom formerly known as mine.
Pa wasn’t home yet, so the house was perfectly quiet when the phone rang. Not even a whole ring. Just a chirp. A sound that always made me happy even if it stopped me from getting to sleep.
“Jed!” I blurted.
“Praise the Lord for good news,” said Grum.
“Amen,” said Ma.
Barbie sighed and jiggled happily in the bottom bunk.
The day after Jed ran off, Ma filed a missing persons report with the police, but they said there wasn’t much they could do since he’d turned eighteen. About a month later, he called for the first time. He didn’t stay on the phone long and wouldn’t answer any questions. He just told Ma how he’d be calling every so often and letting the phone ring once to let us know he was okay, because he didn’t want us to worry. Whatever number he called from, it never showed up on Caller ID. We had no clue where he’d gone or whether he’d taken Stupid with him, but we were glad to know he was okay. Well, maybe not all of us. Pa said Jed must have gotten himself into some kind of serious trouble with the law to be sneaking around like that, and we were better off not talking to him. But I believed in my brother.
Jed was always thinking about other people. Like the time he rescued Grum’s prize cuckoo collection. Grump had given her most of the clocks when he was stationed in Germany after the war. Sentimental value didn’t mean much to Pa. When he was moving Grum in with us, he threw her clocks in the dump heap even though Grum begged him not to.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Mother,” Pa argued, in what was, for him, a tender voice. “You know there’s no room in the house for all your crap.”
True, there wasn’t any room. Between the windows, doors, and cupboards, we hardly had enough space for a calendar downstairs. Upstairs the house had mostly roof for walls, no place for clocks with pendulums that need to hang flat. The bunk beds barely fit in the window dormer.
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way, son,” Grum said, with her chin trembling stubbornly. “You just don’t want me to keep the clocks because you hate them.”
Also true. We’d all heard Pa’s funny stories about the naughty things he’d done to silence the cuckoos when he was a kid. Like following Grum when she wound the clocks and unwinding them after her. Or jamming Popsicle sticks behind the birds when they popped out. Hanging the clocks upside down. No matter how many spankings he got from Grump, Pa kept trying to shut up the cuckoos.
Pa always got everybody laughing silly when he told his childhood cuckoo stories. The way he told them, it was hard not to laugh. He’d act out the parts, mimicking his little boy self and Grum and Grump like a comedian on TV. But if you really thought about what was happening, it wasn’t that funny.
We waited nervously to hear what Pa would say back to Grum. He sucked on his teeth for a while before answering. “Mother, do you really think that if there was a way to keep those clocks for you, I wouldn’t?”
Jed had been pacing around with his hands in his pockets, kicking rocks and acting like he wasn’t paying attention, but he was really churning over every word. “Are you saying you would keep them, Pa, if we can find the space?”
“What do you think I’m saying!” Pa returned.
And that’s when Jed came up with the idea of moving himself and Grum’s cuckoos out to the castle. Pa benefited from the deal. He kept the couch.
Thinking about Jed and Pa and their disagreements made me wonder again which one was right about Stanley Odum. Now that an ORC sign had showed up on the commune door, I was starting to lean toward Jed. How could a bunch of people disappearing overnight be good? What kind of an offer couldn’t they refuse from Boots Odum? What good could that guy be up to, mining mysterious rocks and keeping it all a big secret? On the other hand, Pa always said that there are some things we aren’t supposed to know. For our own good. So I still wasn’t sure who was right. But one way to find out was in my hand.
As I waited to fall asleep, I held Odum’s blinky pebble next to my cheek. It felt warm and relaxing, like sucking my thumb used to feel before Pa trained me out of it. A memory popped into my head from when I was little, sitting on Pa’s shoulders. It was just me and him working on the castle on a Saturday because Ma had taken Barbie to Daisy Scouts, and Jed was in the gore raking leaves for Grum.
“Whaddya say we put the finishing touches on this beauty and surprise the rest of the clan?” Pa had suggested, and now he was letting me place the last fieldstone in the vaulted ceiling. Best moment of my life so far.
It made my heart ache along with my stomach and teeth and growing bones to think about how Pa had changed. How everything had changed. Suddenly it was the present that didn’t seem real . . . Grum tiptoeing around with her osteoporosis, Jed gone nobody knew where, Pa always blowing up, the house practically falling down around us, the gore nothing but churned dirt, to say nothing of eggs turning to stone and neighbors disappearing. And not a thing I could do to change any of it. So I didn’t let myself think about the present. I just went back to putting the last stone in the castle.
Until I went flying.
Seriously! All of a sudden it was like I was sucked off Pa’s shoulders and out into space. I couldn’t see a thing. I couldn’t hear, taste, smell—all I could do was feel myself flying in circles. First in one direction and then swinging the opposite way, like a figure eight. I couldn’t see the shape, only feel it, because I was on the inside looking out, not seeing myself. The swooping went on and on until my whole body began to vibrate.
Finally, a familiar feeling. I knew exactly where I was. I was in bed, Ma shaking my shoulder in the gray light of a stormy morning.
“Sebby, Sebastian Daniels. Up’n at ’em!”
“Maaaaa-aaa! It’s Saturday!”
“Chickens don’t know that. And don’t forget to close the doors.”
Getting up was always a shock, but that day it was even worse, with the blankets pressing down on me, the light burning my eyes, the cigarette and mildew smells stinging my nose, and the cookie dough still bowling in my guts. For once I actually wanted to get up. Up and out of that suffocating house, away from Pa’s jackhammer snoring. And forget that crazy dream. Man, it felt so real.
When I went downstairs, Ma was in her cloud of cigarette smoke, reading her Bible as usual early in the morning. But something was different. Her reading glasses. That was it. She didn’t have them on, but she was staring at the page anyway.
I heard a little plop sound on the paper.
“Ma?” I looked at her. She didn’t look at me. “Go do your chores, Seb.” Her words sounded pinched.
“Ma, what happened?”
She didn’t look up, didn’t speak. There came another little plop, and this time I saw the tear glisten before sinking into the page she was reading.
Then I noticed something that made me feel like a big glass of ice water had been dumped over my head. The baggie with the egg in it sat next to Ma’s Bible. Pa hadn’t delivered it to the university after all.
“Oh, Ma, don’t cry. It’ll be all right.” I didn’t know that it would, but at the moment it was my job to make her feel better, not the other way around.
Pa had probably only made it as far as the Do-Drop-Inn last night. His truck had a hard time not turning in at the tavern. I knew, because I’d been with him more than once when an invisible power turned the steering wheel that way instead of toward the grocery store for milk. Ma must have been mad when he got home. They must have gotten into it. Maybe while I was stuck in that wild dream.
As I walked slowly to the door, the cold-water feeling was heating up fast inside me, boiling into anger. I wanted to run upstairs and pound Pa’s face in while he slept. I wanted to grab a knife and stab him. I wanted him to hurt. No, I wanted him to never wake up. And then I wanted to puke because all those crappy feelings made me realize something.
The way I felt right then was exactly the way Pa talked a lot of the time.
I never get into fights with guys who pick on me at school, no matter how hard someone presses my buttons, because I’m afraid. Not afraid of getting hurt. Afraid of what I might do if I ever get started pounding on some bully. I get so mad, I might never stop. I just might pound and pound and pound until there’s nothing left.
I could curl up and take a beating every day for the rest of my life, but that didn’t change what I was inside. Inside, I was just like Pa. With that thought churning in my stomach, I went out to see how many eggs I could kick around today.
It was still raining hard, and I had to leap mud puddles on my way to the chicken coop. The water runoff had left mini canyons and craters all around the yard, so I had to watch where I landed.
When I opened the door, Barney greeted me with the wimpiest little
doodle-do
I had ever heard, and no hens took to the air. No hens sat on their nests. No hens were anywhere in the coop, and no eggs, either. Had a fox gotten in? But how? I hadn’t left the outside door open yesterday. I hadn’t! It was shut tight when I came in. I didn’t see any signs of a predator. No clumps of feathers or trails of blood around, and we would have heard the commotion anyway. Once when a wild dog got a hen, Barney let the whole world know, and the hens joined in.
Those hens had to be around here somewhere. Probably had enough of me stealing their future chicks and snuck off to lay their eggs in a secret hidey-hole. Our hens never went far, though. They liked being fed. So out I went to look for them, in the pouring rain after all. Shoot. Why hadn’t Ma told me to wear my raincoat? I grabbed an empty feed sack to hold over my head as I searched the chickens’ favorite hiding places.
Nope, no sign of them under any of the bushes or the porch steps or perched on Jed’s castle. Not even a lonely feather. And the dish next to the lawnmower was half full of Jed’s Stupid Cat’s food. The chickens would have cleaned that up if they’d gone near it.
Ouch. My stomach hurt. Those dough rocks were doing somersaults. Pa would blame me for this. He’d make me pay. Oh, I wished I knew where to find Jed. I’d run away and stay with him. He’d understand.
I was searching high and low for the third time when Barbie came outside—in her raincoat
and
carrying an umbrella. “Ma wants to know what’s taking you so long. She wants the new eggs now so she can take them—hey, why are you looking at me like a beggar?”
“I’m dying of cookie dough poisoning. And all of the chickens have been kidnapped by Colonel Sanders.”
“Sebby! You lost the hens? You’re dead all right.” She was looking under the porch. I was glad I had taken Odum’s pebble to bed. Now it was safe in my pillowcase.
“I already looked
everywhere.
Three times. The chickens aren’t
anywhere.
”
“You look three times for your sneakers every morning, too, and they aren’t anywhere in the house until someone else points at them.” Yeah, that was true. My sneakers have invisible cloaking powers that only work on me.
She checked all the bushes and Jed’s castle and the cat food corner, then she headed into the henhouse. I followed her. “Shish, there’s no use. I’m telling you, they aren’t—what are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
It looked like she was going to the feed closet at the back of the building, but there was no way the chickens could get in there.
“Why look there?” I said. “The chickens can’t get in. I never, ever leave that door open, or the chickens would eat—”
I was interrupted by a howl and a blur of gray and white fur that shot out of the closet, between Barbie’s feet, and out the henhouse door. Which I’d decided to leave open for the moment in case the chickens showed up and wanted back in.

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