But this secret garden is a more serious affair. The benches are stone and the different species of flower are ceremoniously marked with plaques: “Butterfly Mariposa Lily (Calochortus venustus),” “Douglas Iris (Iris douglasiana),” “Prickly Phlox (Leptodactylon californicum).” I’m beginning to realize that these are all native species of California when a funny thing begins to happen.
As I stand there, squinting at the lettering of the little bronze plaques, the flowers seem to be extending themselves somehow to me, growing toward me, and growing farther, growing longer, and then . . . sprouting new buds, and new stems, and new leaves, and flowers. As if the lifetime of each is sped up into seconds, a lifetime . . . and then another and another. The speed of the blooms is rapidly expanding, blossoming before me and all around me, forming a kind of archway, a floral and foliage archway, forging itself before my astonished eyes.
And then, there, in the middle of the archway, they appear. One by one.
“Dagnabbit! You were fast, fast I tell ya! Quick as lightning!” Beaumont slaps his knee, his eyes twinkling. “I said, that’s my kin, all right. Right there! The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. One time I grifted my own way out of a grift! Way back in ’33, why, these two fellas were fixin’—”
“Not now, Beaumont!” Plum interrupts. “Dear child, how frightened you must have been.”
“Frightened?! Just look at her! She outsmarted that skinny skunk in two seconds. Yessir, my kin. Right there. Wiley!” Beau lights his corncob pipe.
“Huzzah, huzzah!” August and Sturdy raise their martini glasses in a toast.
Maxine croons, “It was as best as it could be . . . as best as anything can be in this foul and cruel world—”
“Oh, let’s all just throw ourselves in the soup then!” Beaumont shakes his head.
“No need to throw ourselves in the soup, dears. Remember, they’re not out of the woods yet. . . .” Plum admonishes.
“Not even close! I don’t even know which end is up! First, the wedding gets hijacked. Then Winston Churchill appears in a bathtub and then Humphrey Bogart shows up in the alcove and tells us everything is not as it seems!”
“Nothing ever is . . .” Maxine mourns. “Nothing ever was. And nothing ever will be—”
“Enough with the funeral march, let’s get crackin’!” Beaumont puffs. “I bet he means someone’s been duped!”
“Duped? What is duped?” August ponders.
“I think he means deceived, deluded, beguiled,” Sturdy replies.
“Hornswoggled! Bamboozled! Hoodwinked! Swindled! Scammed!” Beaumont is now just yelling out words.
“Well, obviously. I mean. There’s been a heist. There continues to be a heist. Even now. As we speak. In fact, we’re kind of just wasting time right now,” I add.
“‘There will be time, there will be time . . .’” Maxine laments, “‘To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time . . . Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea . . .’”
“Doom and gloom! Doom and gloom!!” Beaumont snaps.
“My dear, there are deceptions.” Plum comes forward. “And then there are deceptions within deceptions.”
“Like double-deceptions!” Beaumont exclaims, excited.
“Unfortunate, unfortunate,” August and Sturdy agree.
“You must listen to this Humphrey. These words carry wisdom. . . .” Plum nods, fading into the foliage behind her.
“Wait! Who is deceiving us? Why won’t any of you be clear?”
The archway, the roses, the ivy all envelop the fading ghosts and I am left alone again in the middle of the secret garden.
A deception within a deception.
What on Earth could it mean?
1
THE RAIN HAS turned into a light drizzle now, causing me to wonder if this is a good thing or a bad thing, in terms of heist thwarting. If the roads let up, maybe there is a chance we will be saved. Or, on the other hand, maybe it means the Midwestern Mastermind and his tweedle army will be able to steal away, taking all the treasure and possibly our lives with them.
You see, positives and negatives.
Tiptoeing my way back through the brambles of the secret garden, I begin to hear a strange noise coming from the general vicinity of the loading dock. One by one, unmistakably now, I hear the sound of loaded engines roaring to life. The sound of each like a slumbering giant awakening to the drizzling night. Then, one by one, I see the headlights of each truck, as if each one is a signal.
“Come on, we’re leaving.”
No. It can’t be. They can’t be heading out already! The heist can’t be over. We can’t have failed that quickly, or that finally. And what about the witnesses?
I look up to the light in the rows of arched stained glass windows of the chapel hall. The lights inside are flickering, no sign of a change within.
Chapel or loading dock?
Loading dock or chapel?
Maybe I should just stay here and do nothing.
Maybe the problem will take care of itself.
This is the last thought I have before I hear it.
2
“EVAAAAAAAAAA!!” THE SOUND of it echoes off the stone walls, and there, running toward me basically the fastest I’ve ever seen him running anywhere, is Henry.
“Henry! Here, I’m over here! What’s happening? Where’s Zeb?” I yell back.
Henry collapses in front of me, collecting his breath, his shoulders moving up and down, desperate.
“They have . . . They have . . .” He exhales. “They have Zeb.”
He catches his breath, looking up at me, panicked.
“What? Who has Zeb?” I ask, holding Henry by the shoulders.
“The guards. They nabbed him when we tried to rescue Binky.” Now he looks at me. “Where were you, by the way?”
“I failed,” I answer.
“I’ll say.”
“No, you don’t understand. I ran into the Midwestern Mastermind—”
“You what?” Henry says with a start.
“I had to fool him. I had to think fast. I told him my name was Daffodil. I pretended I didn’t know anything . . . look, it’s a long story. What do we do about Zeb?”
“I’m not sure. We have to save him.” He looks up at me.
“Wait. How did you get away?” I ask him.
“I ran, obviously. It’s not exactly my forte.” He looks at himself, covered in sweat.
“Well, how did they get Zeb?” I ask.
“We almost had her, Eva. Binky. She was scared to come with us, but we really almost made it.” He sighs. “It doesn’t matter now. They’re all leaving. The whole caravan. Can’t you hear them?”
And it’s true. There beyond the walls the lights beam all around, and the sound of what appears to be an army of trucks ricochets off the cobbled stone.
Why would they take Zeb? Where are they even going? “Henry, we have to make a decision here. I mean, I don’t think we can outrun those trucks. Some of them are already leaving.” I look at him.
The two of us letting this sink in.
“I mean, what are we gonna do? Hurl ourselves onto the windshields?” I ask him.
The sound of the motors reverberates against the hillside. The lights, a million different floodlights, search down the long winding driveway.
“We need a strategy. Think, Henry. Think!” I am just grasping for straws now.
Henry closes his eyes and I know what he’s doing. I keep my mouth shut, hoping somehow in the silence the gears in his brain will start to shift. Maybe there will be a drop, and then another drop, and then a river.
Maybe there will be something, anything, to stop this seemingly endless parade of vehicles down the snaking drive to the sea. As I take in the myriad of white trucks, about twenty of them, I notice a little one at the end. Not white. No, this one is a black truck. And it’s not a truck,
exactly, but an SUV. And inside the SUV is not a tweedle-guard or an estate sale of oil paintings but a boy. A boy sits in the passenger seat of the mean-looking onyx SUV.
He is looking more grim than I have ever seen him. More troubled than I ever thought he could.
Though his scowl makes him nearly unrecognizable, his blue streaks give him away.
That boy is Zeb.
3
HENRY AND I stand there, our jaws dropped to the ground.
“Eva, do you see what I am seeing?” he asks.
“Yes.”
It’s hard to tell through the glare off the windshield, but it looks like Binky is in the back seat and Zeb is in the front, both of them bound and gagged. There’s a tweedle-guard in the back seat, but there is not a tweedle-guard in the front seat. Nope. In the front seat, driving, is the Midwestern Mastermind.
He watches as the trucks before him pull out in a line. Even from here I can sense his impatience.
“Henry, what are we—”
But before I can finish the sentence I see Henry bounding down the hill, through the foliage, to the loading dock.
“Henry?!”
“Shhh. Eva,” he yell-whispers back at me. “I have an idea. Follow me and keep quiet.”
So now the two of us are whisper-yelling and running down through the brambles.
“Does it involve teleporting ourselves over to the front gate?” I ask, keenly aware that we have a timing issue.
“That part I haven’t figured out yet,” he admits. “Here! This way!”
The lights from the panoply of trucks cut across the grass and the road but send everything else into darkness, allowing Henry and I to peer around the corner into the loading dock.
Henry focuses on a little door across the dock.
“There! We need to get in there!” he whispers.
“The utility closet?” I frown.
“Exactly.” He turns to me. “All right, I’m going to need you to make a run for it. Listen, Eva, get as far out there as you possibly can.”
“But, Henry, how—”
“Eva, I don’t care what it takes, just get out there. In front of the very first truck. Do you understand?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Before I can even finish my shrug, he’s off bounding toward the utility closet, ducking behind everything there is to be ducked behind. There’s so much chaos on the drive out, no one seems to notice. Between the heavy loads of the trucks, the inclement weather, and the mud, this is definitely not the operation our diabolical mastermind envisioned.
To put it bluntly, this thing is moving like molasses.
If the Mastermind was angry to be thirty minutes off schedule, I can’t imagine what he’s going through now.
As I try to find a path down the hill to somehow get in front of the first truck, I look back and see Henry in a blur, grabbing things off the shelves in the storage closet as if he’s suddenly morphed into a tornado. I’m trying to figure out exactly what he’s doing but that is not a good thing to be doing while running and . . .
THWAM!
Oh God.
What just happened?
4
IT TAKES ABOUT three seconds for me to actually process all this information. First second, something is wrong. (That was the THWAM.) Second second, I think maybe I just fell. (That was gravity.) Third second, I just fell in something really gross. (Oh, that’s mud.)
Yes, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I just fell face-first in the mud. Yuck. My face is literally covered in it. I have to “de-mud” my eyes to even see out of them. And yes, my mouth, too. What’s that taste, you ask? Dirt. That is dirt that I am tasting.
I try to spit the taste out of my mouth, trying not to think about the fact that my mouth, lips, and ears are caked with a combination of rain, dirt, and grass. This is humiliating. Yes, I know, there’s no one to see it. But trust me, it’s humiliating all the same.
If there are Gods, or angels, or even great programmers in the sky, they are laughing at me right now. That is for sure.
I look up to the heavens.
“Really?! Really?!”
But nobody answers me. They all just sit there in their gold thrones, or clouds, or nerd basements in the sky.
I peer through my mud-glasses at Henry. He’s bent over something fidgeting. It’s impossible to tell what it is but, whatever it is, he’s got that look I’ve seen a million times before.
It’s the three-story-marble-run look. The Lego-robot- factory look. Next to him on the ground are the supplies. The materials to his experiment. And I am crossing my fingers.
One of the headlights catches me, and I realize that . . . probably in my new “mud outfit” . . . no one can see me.
Ah!
No one can see me.
The mud! It’s like an invisibility cloak!
Down the driveway, making its way through a particularly muddy patch, I see the first truck. It’s hard to tell on this giant rolling hill how far it is but, if I were to put it in city terms, I’d say it’s about six city blocks down the hill, as the crow flies. So, while they’re winding their way through turn after turn on this unnecessarily undulating driveway, I guess I can try running a straight path.
In my mud suit.
Here I go.
5
LOOK, I’VE NEVER been very much of a runner. For instance, in school each spring we have to run the six-hundred-yard dash and I don’t mind telling you that is a day I have tried in a myriad of different ways to happen to not be there.
Maybe I have a cold.
Maybe I have a field trip that only I know about.
Maybe I have to study at home for a different test that is really much more important.
Maybe I hit my head and realize I’m actually from another dimension and my name is Zergon from the planet Zlog and my spaceship is waiting down at the lighthouse!
Tried it.
Points for creativity but no dice.
So, you see, every year I end up slogging my way through the six-hundred-yard dash. Dreading it before. Dreading it during. Then, dreading it immediately after for the next year. It’s like this one thing that was perfectly designed to make me hate life.
So, that is why, dear friends, the idea of me making a mad dash down what looks like six city blocks, covered in mud, running through mud, is particularly poignant. This is like if you made an egg eat an egg salad. It’s full of grimacing, and it’s painful to watch.
About a third of the way down the mud I hear a
WHOOSH
whiz by, over my head.
I look up to see whatever it is, but whatever it is, it’s traveling at lightning speed and I am traveling at . . . Eva speed. (Don’t make fun!)
My dress shoes, which are now just mud shoes, are slipping off my feet with the gloop and the glop of the mud sticking to them and trying to glue my feet to the ground. The fancy dress I picked out just for this wedding occasion is also not exactly improved by the caked-earth look.
Let’s face it. I basically just look like a mud monster.
WHOOSH.
Now I hear another mystery item zinging by over my head. But this time, when I look up, I see a streak of light across the sky. Like a mini comet. The comet streaks above my head and soars over all the way to the farthest gate. About a city block in front of the first truck. Whatever the mystery whooshing item is, it sticks into the ground where it lands. Still glowing.
Wait, is that a glow stick?
I pick up the pace, “running” through the gloopy gloppy mud, making my way down the hill toward the glowing item of intrigue.
I have to get there before the first truck. I have to get there before the first truck. Run, Eva, run. Remember Winston. Never, never, never give up.
I can do this.
I
CAN
DO
THIS!
And . . . there goes my shoe in the mud.
Don’t worry about it, Eva.
YOU!
/> CAN!
DO!
THIS!
And . . . there goes my other shoe.
6
BY THE TIME I make it to the mystery glowing whoosh I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with it. It’s a puzzle I am supposed to put together on the fly. Before the first truck can pass me, in the mud, in the drizzle, before Zeb and Binky escape into the night forever.
No pressure.
As I get closer I realize the whooshing was made by some sort of arrow contraption Henry must have made with a kind of exploded thing on the back. Like an arrow set off by a chemical reaction. A rocket arrow? A mini rocket? And I look closer at the arrow, realizing it’s actually the wood part of a plunger.
Oh, Henry.
There seems to be a scribbled note on the side of the plunger/arrow/rocket. An arrow, with the words written next to it: “Tie us together. Throw at driver. Wait till truck at gate.”
“Tie us together?”
I look at the other plunger/arrow/rocket, the first one. Attached to it is a tiny plastic bag filled with something milky and gooey, some sort of liquid. I look at the second plunger/arrow/rocket. Yes, there is a little tiny bag, too, filled with something brownish and oily.
I look back at Henry, all the way up the hill, his silhouette framed in front of the loading dock.
He waves to me. Then gives me the thumbs-up.
I guess this is Henry’s way of saying, “You got this.”
I take a closer look at the two bags of mystery goo in the plastic baggies. What in the world is in these things?
I look back at Henry.
Another thumbs-up.
Okay, here goes. I tie the two little baggies together. Test it. Making sure it holds tight.
I really hope I don’t screw this up, whatever this is.
Gulp.
The first truck seems to have made its way over the last of the muddy patches. Its engine revs and the blinding lights begin turning toward me, there, at the very end of the driveway, just to the side of the gate. I’m squatting down like a mud creature, just two eyes staring down the glowing eyes of the truck.
Henry & Eva and the Famous People Ghosts Page 11
