“Our new meeting place.” He grinned, and suddenly I felt a giddy happiness, like I was a kid again swinging through the air.
He left for class, and I watched him jog down the trail. Just as he disappeared, I remembered my talk with Aunt Winnie and wondered if I should I have told him about it. Nothing seemed too important, except what she didn’t tell me.
It was time for swim class, but I barely had a chance to dread it because Lindsey rushed up, skipping with excitement. “Cecily’s teaching a craft workshop for people who haven’t found their gift yet, and guess what we’re learning?”
I tried to come up with things people did at regular camp. “Whittling?”
“Making stuff from gimp, like your mother’s key chain.”
My spirits lifted. “That’s great—if I have to spend another morning learning to swim, I’ll sink.”
The craft class was held at our own Hawthorne House. Several girls from the other dorms came, along with Ivan from the Thornes. I suspect he only came to support Cecily. All the other guys chose swimming.
Cecily gave us long strands of any two colors we chose, and we sat on couches in the downstairs parlor. Despite the open window, the room kept its dismal air. The fireplace was made of dark red brick, and above the mantel the portrait of an old pilgrim glowered down at us.
Lindsey giggled. “He must be the source of all the gloom in this house.”
“You can read about him in one of Hawthorne’s books,” Cecily said. “But I can tell you his story while we work.”
It didn’t take us long to learn how to weave the gimp. The first lesson was the box knot, and once we got it, we simply made it over and over.
While I twisted and wove the gimp, Cecily stood by the portrait. “Hawthorne wrote about this guy in a book called The House of Seven Gables, which was based on this house. This is the picture of Colonel Pyncheon from colonial days.”
“Who was he?” asked Ivan. He was hopelessly tangled in his gimp, and he sat back to listen to the story.
“The founder of the family home.” Cecily turned her back on the scowling portrait. “He accused a local carpenter of being a witch so he’d be executed and his land sold. As you can guess, the old colonel bought the property and built this house on it.”
“Was the carpenter really a witch?” Lindsey asked.
Cecily’s face darkened. “According to Hawthorne, the man set a dying curse on the old colonel, and it came true.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“The family never found the deed to a huge amount of land they might have owned. The curse wasn’t broken until several generations later when a descendent of the carpenter came to live here and fell in love with one of the colonel’s descendents. Their love broke the curse, and they found the deed hidden behind this portrait.”
Lindsey sighed. “I like happy endings.”
My key chain was almost done, and Cecily showed me how to finish it off. I was still carrying my mother’s key chain in my pocket, and I brought it out to show her.
“You should put it on a cord and wear it around your neck,” she said. She pulled off a length of shiny blue gimp to match the key chain and slipped it through the loop on the end. “It shows you’re a legacy.”
“What’s a legacy?”
“That’s what we call campers whose parents came to Camp Hawthorne.”
I remembered Cecily told us her mother came here.
“To hear my mother talk about this place, you’d suppose it was the most amazing place in creation.”
I thought it probably was. I slipped the key chain under my T-shirt. It felt good to have it close.
After class we helped wind the gimp on spools. “Cecily, why aren’t you teaching a real class?” I asked.
She blushed. “Mine doesn’t meet during the day.”
“What’s your gift?”
“Ah, sort of talking.”
Talking—that made sense. She was a really strong talker.
“To animals, I mean. It sometimes works on people.”
“Animals?” Lindsey said. “That’s fantastic.”
“Well, it’s more like being able to transmit and receive impressions.”
Ivan perked up at the mention of animals. “Have you ever talked with farm animals? My family keeps dairy cows, and I’ve always wanted to know what they’re thinking.”
Cecily laughed. “Cows are pretty dense. They mostly think of grass.”
“That explains a lot,” Ivan said.
Chapter Sixteen
Ivan raved to everyone at lunch about Cecily’s gift. “Imagine—with a gift like that you could talk to horses. Horses!”
Coop grew pale during this talk. He’d been at the lake all morning, and I wondered if he had a touch of heat stroke, but after lunch he edged up next to Cecily while we were washing the dishes out back.
“I can talk with chickens,” he said, his voice so soft we almost didn’t hear him.
Cecily was kneeling over a bin of soapy water, but she sat back on her heels. “Chickens?”
“Yeah, could it be—you know—a gift?”
I was almost glad I hadn’t found my gift yet. It was killing Coop to talk about it.
“Well, I don’t see why not,” Cecily said, bounding up and shaking him by the hand. “Glad to know you, Coop. It’s been a long time since a new animal-talker joined us. The others will be thrilled.” She reeled off the names of half a dozen campers from other dorms. “We’re having our craft class tonight at the fire ring by the lake. You’ll be surprised at all the critters that jabber away at night.”
I left them discussing the interesting wildlife at Camp Hawthorne. It was getting harder and harder to believe I had a gift.
I returned to the dining hall and found Lindsey standing in front of the point chart.
“We have a robotics competition this afternoon,” she said. “Eugene says we need a solid win to catch the Fellows.” She paused and studied me. “Stella, have you noticed you aren’t taking those deep breaths as much?”
I took an experimental breath, and it was true. I didn’t feel the need to fill my lungs and hold it every few minutes like I did last school year. “Cecily said the air of this place works on people. Do you think the air really makes a difference, or was it just one of her expressions?”
“I don’t know. Ellen didn’t believe anything at first, and now look at her.”
“Jayden, too.” We were silent a moment.
“Stella, promise me one thing—you won’t feel bad if I find my gift.”
“Of course I won’t.” Inside, however, I was groaning. Lindsey probably knew her gift already and didn’t want to hurt my feelings.
Jayden, carrying a long thin case, joined us at the board. When he saw me looking at it, he held it out. “It’s a flute case. All the telekinetics learn an instrument.”
“Karen plays the bugle, doesn’t she?” I asked.
“And the drums.”
That explained our wake-up call the first day.
We walked together to the Twain House for the robot competition. I hadn’t been inside the house yet, and it was as fancy inside as it was outside. The front door opened to a deep foyer with stairs whose carved railings spiraled up to the second floor. The ceiling was painted red with intricate designs of black and silver.
All the teams were gathered in the library, and we found the Thornes at the far end, where green light filtered through the plants in a glass alcove.
Ivan rushed up to us. “Where’s Eugene?” he asked.
“He’s checking out the dig site again,” Jayden said. He glanced at me, eyebrows raised, and I knew he thought something important was going on.
Cecily clapped her hands. She waited for Joanne and her friends to settle down, while the rest of us sat on the floor around her. “All right, Thornes. Today is the annual robotics competition. Camp Hawthorne has a long legacy of inventors, and some of the things they made are still secret.”
Ivan was havin
g a hard time sitting still, and I noticed his arms were covered in spots. “What happened to your arms?” I whispered to him.
He looked down and jumped straight into the air. “It’s spreading!” he cried. He tore off his shirt, and I saw red bumps scattered thickly over his back and chest.
“It’s chicken pox.” Cecily’s voice cut through the surprised chatter. “You need to show Mr. Parker.”
Lindsey offered to go with him since she’d had chicken pox already. Ivan stared at his arms in disbelief as she shepherded him toward the door.
After his departure, Cecily explained how we would build our robot on the base from last year, but most of it didn’t make sense. She divided us into squads, and I hoped the others would know what to do. Jayden and Freddy were in my group.
Our squad leader was named Roderick. He wore thick glasses and squinted at us. “Our task is to make an arm to sweep up objects,” he announced. “We’ll add a pressure sensor for walls.”
I didn’t understand a word he said, but Freddy started sifting through the bin of structural pieces. “Would this work?” he asked, holding up a bar of metal with holes cut in it every couple inches.
Roderick inspected it. “Needs to be longer.”
Jayden found more bars and a handful of nuts and bolts. “We can connect three bars together to make a longer arm,” he said.
Once he started putting them together, I saw what he was doing. “What if it worked on a hinge?” I asked. “We could loosen the bolt on this piece so it would bend.”
“Brilliant,” Roderick said. “Now, we need to add a scoop on the end.”
I went back to the bin for parts, but Ellen was there with her arms buried up to the elbows. “I’m seeing if I can use my gift to find pieces buried in a pile,” she said. “Tell me what you need.”
I secretly hoped it wouldn’t work. “We need something broad like a scoop.”
“Is that all? Here.”
She handed me the perfect piece, and she didn’t even smirk.
“Thanks,” I said. I couldn’t figure Ellen out.
Jayden fastened the scoop to the end, and Roderick added the pressure sensor. I had to admit it looked pretty good. We dubbed it the “super sweeper” and took it to Cecily. I felt proud when she admired the hinge effect.
We hung around while she snapped our super sweeper onto the main robot. “Are there a lot of people with ESP who are good at stuff like this?” Freddy asked.
“Sure, Thomas Edison was one of us. He was a friend of Twain and did one of his earliest film experiments in this house.”
“Really?” said Freddy, his ginger eyebrows shooting up. “Buckeye assigned us one of Twain’s books today. I thought it’d be about Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, but it was totally different. It was about a guy who time-traveled to the middle ages and set himself up as a wizard because he had all kinds of modern know-how.”
I thought Lindsey would like to hear about that book. Ever since Freddy brought up time-travel on our hike, she insisted it would be the next great invention—her idea of super-advanced science. But Lindsey didn’t return until the squads had finished their parts and Cecily had added them to the robot.
We were starting the first test run on the competition board when Lindsey squeezed in next to me.
“Where have you been?” I asked. “Was Ivan worse than we thought?”
“No, I just helped Mr. Parker bring his clothes from Hawthorne House. He’s going to bunk here so Buckeye can keep an eye on him.”
The robot whirred to life and began its slow progression, but Lindsey stared beyond it to the glass alcove where the green leaves shimmered in the afternoon sun. “Stella, I talked with Mr. Parker and told him about my gift.”
“What? You found your gift?”
“I’ve known for a while. I can transfer thought.”
“Like reading minds?”
“Sort of, but it has to be a willing communicator.”
That gave me a creepy feeling. “Have you been reading my mind all this time?”
Lindsey smiled at me. “Of course—we’re best friends, after all. You even caught some of my thinking, didn’t you?”
She was right.
I hardly paid attention after that to the competition. In a daze I watched our robot face off against the various teams. I only realized the tournament was over when the Twains began jumping up and down, signaling their victory.
We walked to the dining hall for dinner, and I asked Lindsey if I needed to talk anymore since she could just transfer brain waves around. She laughed at me. “We’ll always need to talk, Stella.” She told me she would begin craft classes with Mr. Parker’s group tomorrow. I imagined I’d be the only one left swimming in the lake.
We had a campfire that evening. I sat with the other Thornes and watched the gray smoke rising into the dusk. I hoped Grandma was all right back home. I’d written to tell her about our robot, but we weren’t allowed to tell our families about the ESP part of camp, unless they already knew about it, like Cecily’s family. It felt strange keeping a secret from Grandma.
After we sang the camp song, Mr. Parker greeted everyone. “We’ve had an exciting day with our robot competition.” He paused while the Twains burst into cheers. “And Eugene reports that we found some important artifacts at the dig today.” The Thornes let out whoops for him.
“They found a colonial shoe buckle,” Jayden told us in an undertone.
“Shush, we’re supposed to keep it secret,” Cecily said.
Jayden looked at me, and I knew he was thinking about “P’s Correspondence.” Could there be a connection—our dig site somehow mixed up with an alternate history? I shook my head. A colonial shoe buckle didn’t prove anything.
Mr. Parker continued, “And now for another one of our Camp Hawthorne traditions—campfire stories.” He introduced a CIT from Longfellow House named Vangie, who began the evening with a poem by Longfellow. It was one of those quiet poems that made me stare at the fire and think. Her words kept rolling over and over again in my head—Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, is our destined end or way; but to act, that each to-morrow find us farther than to-day. Mr. Parker let everyone reflect quietly for a while.
Next, Eugene came forward and told a whopping ghost story about a proud beauty named Alice. In a hollow voice he recounted how she spurned the love of a poor carpenter, who used his strange powers to hypnotize her until she went insane and died. “And her ghost haunted the house ever after,” he concluded, his low voice sending prickles across my scalp.
“That’s one of the family curses I told you about this morning,” Cecily whispered.
Lindsey squeaked. “I’m not going to sleep all night.”
We finished the evening with s’mores. I felt like an old pro, spearing my marshmallow and crisping it over the fire. With the blaze of stars overhead and the gentle crackling of the fire, a feeling of calm washed over me. I pushed my worries about my gift way back in my mind and instead thought about my parents and how they probably ate s’mores just like this. I imagined my mother threading needles for Aunt Winnie and my dad hatching his pranks. I let the gooey chocolate melt in my mouth. Tomorrow I would find out more.
Chapter Seventeen
The next morning I snuck away again to Aunt Winnie’s cabin before anyone else woke up. The sun was just rising, but Aunt Winnie was already wheeling around her yard, feeding the chickens.
“Thought I might see you today,” she said, as she handed me the bucket of corn.
I told her about Lindsey finding her gift. “And now I’m the last one in Hawthorne House who doesn’t know what they can do. Except for Ivan, but he has chicken pox. What if I don’t have a gift at all?”
A chicken fluttered to Aunt Winnie’s lap, and she stroked it slowly. “Seems to me you’re always rushing around trying to find out stuff—about your parents and your gift. Have you ever stopped to consider there might be a reason you aren’t finding things?” She looked up at the pines whispering in the mor
ning breeze and paused as though listening to them. “Let me tell you a story, child. Come here and sit on this bench.”
A lump was rising in my throat, but I sat next to her.
“A long time ago, my people lived in the deep south. They were slaves and didn’t even know it, until a man named John Greenleaf Whittier came to town. He said no one had a right to own another person, and the moment he said it, we knew he was right. My great-grandfather was only a boy, but he wanted to run away that night. He had a friend on the plantation—a girl—and she could see what might happen. What might happen, you understand?”
I didn’t really understand, but I nodded.
“Eudora was her name, and she saw that if he ran away first thing, there would be trouble. But if he waited, there might be a way. Well, Mr. Whittier went back home, but he didn’t forget the people down south, and one night a friend of his visited the plantation and told my people he had a plan to smuggle them away north, where they could live free. Eudora looked in the future, and she knew it would work, but she also knew she had to stay behind.” Aunt Winnie stopped and searched my face. I squirmed because I knew she was trying to tell me something, but it didn’t make sense.
“What happened?”
Her eyes stared into mine for another moment.
“My great-grandfather and his family got away, and Mr. Whittier brought them to live on this land. A few years later, the Civil War came along, and all the slaves went free. My great-grandfather went back, and he found Eudora. She’d grown into a beautiful woman by then, and they got married and raised their family in this very cabin.”
“So, Eudora was your great-grandmother?”
“She was—and she had a rare gift. The same one Mr. Hawthorne had—the gift that helped him write all those stories. He could see what might happen.”
I thought of Jayden and his ideas about “P’s Correspondence.” “Can people with this gift change what will happen?”
“Knowledge always changes things.”
I was afraid to ask the next question, but I had to know. “Aunt Winnie, do you have this gift?”
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