Turn Left at the Cow

by Lisa Bullard

  “Trav, don’t you miss your mom?”

  I was smart enough to know we were still talking about her mom, not just my mom. So instead of snapping out the “no” that jumped to my lips, I made myself think about it.

  And the truth was, I did miss my old mom. But I wasn’t sure she really existed now; I was pretty sure she’d been permanently replaced with a new 2.0 version called Married Ma, a ma who didn’t belong to just me anymore. A ma I didn’t always recognize.

  But part of the problem was, she didn’t seem to recognize me anymore, either. I couldn’t seem to morph into the right shape to fit in with her new happy family. I was no longer who she wanted me to be.

  So I told Iz the truth again. “She proved that what I want doesn’t really matter. I was just supposed to fall into line with all her changes because I’m the kid. I’m still too mad at her to miss her. And right now all the things I’m learning here about my dad feel way more important than thinking about her and all that stuff, anyway.”

  Iz thought about that for a minute and then nodded. “I want you to know I didn’t mean everything I said to Kenny. I mean, I am done with the money hunt for me—but I know you still have to find the cash, to prove you haven’t had it all along. And to figure out more about your dad. So I want you to know I’ll still help you look.”

  The note in my pocket suddenly seemed to be burning through to my skin. I looked around, but everybody else had vanished while we were talking, so I reached back and pulled it out, smoothing it out on my knee.

  “What’s that?” Iz peered over my arm.

  “I found it in the truck last night,” I said. “After . . . after everything, when I was waiting for Gram to finish cleanup.”

  Iz leaned in a little closer to read the note, and I suddenly really needed to know if her hair still smelled of strawberries. I bent my head just to take a small sniff.

  And next thing I knew, she jerked her head up and jackhammered into my chin. And I gotta say, the girl had a hard head. Seriously, the tooth fairy was going to owe me bigtime, because I had a fortune full of loose teeth rattling around inside my skull.

  I was massaging my chin, wondering what a broken jaw felt like, and Iz was giving me this puzzled look while she rubbed the top of her skull. I wasn’t sure if the look was because she’d read the note or because she had caught me sniffing and was trying to figure out when I’d turned into a golden retriever.

  She finally repeated the end of the note in this low voice and pointed at the cut-out gun. “‘Or you’ll be sorry’? Trav, this is kind of scary. Have you shown anybody else?”

  “I was waiting to show you first,” I said, and I realized as I spoke that it was true. “I’m hoping it’s just somebody’s stupid idea of a joke. I was thinking that maybe that Svengrud kid made it—he seems to have it in for me.”

  “Cody?” Iz looked over the note again. “I don’t know. He’s pretty in-your-face. This secret-note thing doesn’t seem like his style.”

  I shrugged, but she was right. It was tempting to blame somebody I already hated, but the note writer could be anybody.

  “Maybe . . . maybe you better show it to Deputy Anderson,” Iz said. “I mean, if somebody is making threats against you, that’s the kind of thing he should know, right?”

  I shook my head. “That guy thinks I’m as big a troublemaker as my father was—he can’t see me as anything but bad news. Gram even admitted earlier that he just doesn’t trust our family. Besides, he’s another one who thinks I have the stolen money. If I show him the note, he’ll just use it as an excuse to hammer me with more pointless questions about where I’ve got the money stashed.”

  “So what are you going to do? It’s not like you can bury money you don’t have,” Iz said.

  “Yeah, there’s that,” I agreed. “For a while I thought I’d just ignore this. But now that the weather has turned better . . .” I squinted up at the sun. “I maybe have an idea. Do you think I could get Kenny to take me out to the island this afternoon?”

  “I’ll ask him,” said Iz.

  “You’ll ask him?” I could hear the surprise in my own voice.

  “Look, you hang around the two of us long enough, you’ll see me and Kenny go at it again, sooner or later,” she said. “That’s just us. Everybody else is used to it. We’ve been that way since we were babies. One time when we were eight, he got so mad that he set my Barbies on fire. We both get real mad, but afterward, we’re always buds again.”

  Me and Ma seemed to have a permanent “mad” on. It was hard for me to picture getting over a fight that easily.

  “Travis, lunchtime.” Gram was waving at me from her yard next door. I stuffed the note back into my pocket and stood up.

  “But what do you want to do on the island?” Iz asked.

  “I’m still working it out,” I said. “But I’m hoping I’ll know when we get there.”

  CHAPTER 18

  I had scarfed down three tuna melts by the time Iz called to tell me Kenny was up for a cruise as soon as they finished lunch. I cleared the table and then asked Gram if I could borrow some scissors, glue, and a blank piece of paper to make a card for Ma. I didn’t think Gram bought it, but I guess she figured I couldn’t get myself into too much trouble with those items. I mean, what diabolical scheme could I be up to? A fight-to-the-death game of rock-paper-scissors?

  Rather than make her any more suspicious, I waited until she wasn’t looking before sneaking an old newspaper out of the recycling bin and a plastic bag out of the drawer. Fortunately my father’s old Monopoly game was stored on a shelf in his room, so I’d already gotten what I needed out of there. I’d also nabbed the newspaper article that explained the cops’ theory on how the whole thing went down and pointed the finger at my father. I grabbed a shovel out of the shed and hauled everything else in a paper bag to Kenny’s boat.

  Iz was right; somehow she and Kenny had made up. They weren’t going to win a Nobel Peace Prize or anything, though; it was more like after the Stanley Cup finals, when players who had pummeled one another bloody on the ice still lined up to shake hands.

  “Righteous—did ya bring snacks?” asked Kenny once we got to the island, gesturing to the bag I was holding.

  You gotta admit the guy was consistent with his priorities. I pulled out the cookies Gram had handed me as I’d headed out the door.

  “Score!” said Kenny, digging in.

  Iz watched while I emptied out the rest of the bag onto Fairy Rock. “Is this for what I think it’s for?” she asked, grabbing a piece of newspaper just as a gust of wind started to whip it away.

  “What’s that?” Kenny mumbled around the entire cookie he had just shoved into his mouth as I pulled the cut-and-paste note out of my pocket. I set it on top of the other stuff, weighing it down with a small rock so it wouldn’t blow off.

  “Somebody really wants me to give up the bank cash I don’t actually have,” I told him. “They sent me this little love letter asking me to pretty please hand it over.”

  Kenny picked up the note and read slowly; I couldn’t help but remember what he’d said about his reading problems and wondered if the alphabet-soup approach with all the cut-out letters was giving him even more trouble than usual. But eventually he set the note back under the rock and said, “Bro, that’s just cold.”

  “Since you don’t have the money, you’re going to write a note back and bury that instead?” Iz asked.

  I nodded. “Somebody wants to play chicken with me, so I guess I’ll play chicken. Only way to see how serious they are. And my chicken-poop-bingo win kind of proves the chickens are on my side, right?”

  “So what are you going to say?” Kenny picked up the shovel and rammed the tip of it into the sand. “Maybe just put the word psych in big letters? Or ‘Gotcha, loser’?”

  “Nah, I’ll be polite. I’m gonna say, ‘I don’t have a clue where the stupid money is, but if you find it, please feel free to stick it up your—’”

  “Okay, I get wh
ere you’re going here,” Iz interrupted. “Look, Trav, if this is just some idiot having fun, then I agree it’s tempting to yank his chain. But in case this is somehow a real threat, you don’t want to tick him off, right?”

  I didn’t know—I thought I was pretty much okay with ticking him off at this point.

  “Hey—I’ve got it,” said Kenny. “Once the note is buried, let’s hide out here on the island until the bad guy shows up to find it. Then we’ll nab him!”

  I watched Iz open and then close her mouth. I could tell she’d instantly seen the problem with Kenny’s plan and just as quickly decided not to be the one to point out the flaw in his thinking.

  “You know the note writer will circle the island first to see if somebody’s already out here. Once he sees your boat, he’ll give up and come back after we’re gone,” I said.

  Kenny thought a moment longer. “If we were all half-fish like Iz, we could swim out here. Then there wouldn’t be the boat to give us away.”

  I shook my head at him. “I know I can’t bring it like Iz.” I shook my head at her, too. “And before you say you’ll swim out by yourself to play girl detective, uh-uh. This guy really could mean business.”

  Iz shrugged, but I could tell she was seriously considering the Nancy Drew thing. Then she said, “Aunt Jen has really good binoculars for bird watching. I guess we could spy on the island from home, and circle around it in Kenny’s boat once in a while, to see who shows up with a shovel.”

  “If he’s smart, he’ll wait until dark, but I think that’s the best we can do,” I said. “And if we do miss him, I’ve got another idea for bringing this guy into the open.”

  I handed Iz the anonymous note. “Try to figure out this map he’s drawn. I think this thing sticking up here is Fingers-to-Heaven. I can’t make sense of the rest of it. But you know every rock and piece of driftwood on this place.”

  I sat down next to Fairy Rock, using it like a craft table while I went to work with the scissors and glue. Kenny and Iz bent their heads together over the map and then wandered off into the trees, their voices drifting back even though I couldn’t see them anymore.

  They returned to the beach as I was gluing on the final letter. “I’m pretty sure we know where X marks the spot. You about ready?” Iz asked.

  I handed her the note. Then I pushed to my feet and pulled the Monopoly money out of my pocket, pretending to fan it the way bigtime rollers in Vegas always do in the movies. “We’ll just wrap it around this funny money, stick it into the plastic bag, and bury it.”

  Iz looked over what I’d written and she frowned. Then she read it aloud for Kenny’s sake. “‘Here’s a down payment. If you want to talk about the other cash my father left behind, we need to do that in person.’”

  “Touché!” said Kenny. I cut my eyes to Iz but she wasn’t paying any attention to him, just staring at my note.

  “I don’t know, Trav,” she said slowly. “I really think you’re asking for it.”

  I shrugged. “Whatever. I need to know who I’m dealing with, and this is the only thing I can think of to draw him out.”

  “Kind of like a draw in football, right? Fake him out and then make him play the game your way instead of his.” Kenny picked up the shovel and led us past Fingers-to-Heaven to the spot they’d decided was the X on the map. “Let’s get this sucker into the ground. How deep you wanna go?” He started gophering down with the shovel, heaping up a pile of dirt in record time.

  “I’d say make him dig to China, but what’s the point? We want him to find it before Christmas, right?” I slipped the note and Monopoly money into the plastic bag and dropped it into the hole. “That’s good enough.”

  Iz and I watched while Kenny piled the dirt back into place even faster than he’d dug it out. Then we trailed back to the beach.

  “Whoa, sunstroke—I gotta rest a minute, man.” Kenny collapsed spread-eagle onto the sand with a big sigh as if I really had made him dig to Beijing. He threw his arm over his eyes to shade them.

  I pulled out the bag of now-almost-gone cookies and sat down with my back against Fairy Rock.

  “So.” Iz plopped down next to me. “You really think this is a good idea?”

  I shrugged and looked over at Kenny. My own head was feeling a little dizzy; I didn’t know if it was from the glare or from all the maybes that kept swirling through my mind.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about it.” I handed Iz the bag of cookies. “But I can’t figure out if the note writer is somehow a part of the whole bank robbery or if the note’s just somebody’s idea of a sick joke or one of those fake-outs you see in mystery stories.”

  Iz swallowed a bite of cookie. “Red herrings, you mean?”

  “Yeah, red herrings. Something that seems important but just distracts you from the real mystery. I mean, the real mystery is, did my dad really rob the bank, and if so, is he the one back here spreading the loot or has somebody else gotten his hands on it? Like I was thinking, what if somebody from town actually already found the money, but wanted to keep the whole big bunch of it and not just settle for the little reward? And when I turned up, it looked like the perfect chance to safely start spending the cash because I would be blamed.”

  Kenny let out this snort, but with his eyes hidden behind his arm, I couldn’t tell if he was questioning my reasoning or if it was just some weird kind of snoring.

  I brushed cookie crumbs off my hands and reached into the paper bag again, pulling out the yellowed newspaper article about the bank break-in.

  “I was reading some of this stuff from that box you found under Gram’s bed.” I handed Iz the clipping. “You were right when you talked about my dad having an accomplice. Maybe the accomplice wrote the note.”

  Iz took the last bite of her cookie and looked back and forth from the newspaper photo of my dad in his military uniform to me a couple times. Maybe she was seeing that thing people kept mentioning—how much we looked alike?

  “Or this note writer could be somebody who’s been looking for the money all these years and never found it, so he’s trying to spook me into giving it up,” I said. “I mean, think how mad you were when you first met me, ’cause you thought I had come here to ace you out of the reward.”

  Iz’s cheeks turned a little pink but she nodded. “That’s why I don’t know if it’s such a good idea to answer him back like you did.” She reached out and placed her hand on my forearm. I had thought the sun was hot, but this was a whole different kind of warm. “Are you sure you want to leave that note? There’s still time to dig it up again.”

  “Even if the accomplice is just one of the possibilities for the note writer, I can’t miss the chance to connect with him,” I said.

  “But if it is the accomplice, doesn’t that guarantee he’s dangerous?” Iz asked.

  I tapped the newspaper. “It says in here that it was a bank burglary, not a bank robbery. I Googled them this morning because I didn’t know the difference. Robbers break in when there are people around, waving guns and stuff. Burglars, they do their thing at night, when nobody’s around to get hurt. I don’t think this note writer really wants to hurt anybody. I think he just wants to scare me. Once he finds out I’m not going to scare that easily, maybe he’ll have to come talk to me. That’s my chance to find out more about my dad.”

  Kenny suddenly sat straight up and blinked at the two of us. “We better get our butts out of here. Like you said, the bad guy’s not gonna show while he can see the good guys’ boat on shore.”

  Iz dropped her hand and I looked over at her worried face. “Yeah, time to go,” I said. I mean, us macho guys, we had to play it cool around the girls, even if we were a little freaked, right? But when Kenny got up and walked away to pull the anchor out of the sand, I reached over to nudge Iz’s hand with mine.

  “I just have to know,” I said, too low for Kenny to hear. “The accomplice is the only one other than my dad who knows what really went down, right? If there’s a chance there’s som
ebody out there who knows the truth about my father, I have to do whatever I can to find out.”

  Iz nodded at me once again. But the worry didn’t leave her face the whole time we bounced back home. She just stared toward the island where we had left the Monopoly money and the note waiting for whoever was going to show up to pass Go and collect the $200.

  CHAPTER 19

  The more freaked Iz looked, the more stoked I got. I could just tell that something was going to go down soon. Maybe I’d called somebody’s bluff. Or maybe I’d set myself up for the big chicken in the sky to squirt green poop all over the bingo square I happened to find myself standing on at that moment. But at least I was taking some action instead of waiting around to get punked. I was sure that we’d be able to nail the note writer and find out what he knew about my dad.

  When we hit shore, Kenny ran up to his house to find the binoculars. Iz and I were supposed to keep watch over the island.

  Iz stared out at the water. “So besides not really knowing who you might be messing with, there’s this other thing . . . Trav, sometimes parents, they . . . they just aren’t who you need them to be.” She turned to watch me bounce around on the dock, working off a sudden adrenaline buzz. “Have you thought what it could do to you if you find out something about your father you don’t want to hear?”

  Like, for instance, that he was a bank robber? Too late—she’d already let that cat out of the bag my first morning in town. But I decided to cut her some slack; after all, she had to be walking a minefield for me here, being willing to talk about parents who let you down. I mean, just look at the source of her own chromosomal soup.

  But I couldn’t let anything or anyone—including Iz and her worries—stop me. I’d come to the End of Nowhere determined to learn “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” about my old man. So even though it was turning into one of those “be careful what you wish for” moments in life, I had to keep going. So what if the final package of facts pretty much bit the big one? I’d still be learning about the guy who’d contributed to my DNA but not my college fund. And I could handle the truth. Whatever it was. Right?