Potion Problems

by Cindy Callaghan

  “That seems like a lot of hallowed ground to cover,” I said.

  “Ruh-roh,” Darbie said. “We are not splitting up and looking for clues. Let’s get that straight right now. This ain’t Scooby-Doo. You’d think they would notice that every time they do that, a Creeper finds Shaggy and Scooby and chases them. In this scenario, since there are only three of us, I’m Shaggy and Scooby. So, the Cemetery Creeper is definitely going to find me and chase me.” She added, “You’d both be fine.”

  “No one is splitting us up,” I said. “Right?” I asked Hannah.

  “That won’t be necessary. We only need to go to one.”

  “How do you know which one?” I asked.

  “I submitted a form to each of these—an electronic request asking if the Silverses were buried there.” She added, “It’s pubic information.”

  “And you found the right one?” I asked.

  Hannah pointed to the map. “Ye Olde Wilmington Graveyard.”

  “Then let’s get ready for an outing.”

  We started walking down the street to my house.

  Darbie was quiet until she said, “Hannah would be Velma. And Kell, you’re Daphne.”

  * * *

  We dropped off our backpacks, I picked a deed for Darbie—“Do something kind for an elderly person”—and Darbie loaded herself down with snacks and put on her Rollerblades. By the time we were ready to leave my house, it was nearly four o’clock.

  “I don’t know why you can’t just walk,” Hannah said.

  “This is way more fun. And we could get there twice as fast if you did it too,” Darbie said. “You know it’s getting dark earlier, and I do NOT want to be in Ye Olde Wilmington Graveyard after dark. We can’t afford to waste time in transit.”

  Hannah and I looked at each other, and a second later, we were both in Rollerblades too.

  * * *

  We rolled past Charlotte’s house. She was out front practicing juggling a soccer ball.

  She waved. “Hannah Hernandez, you look pretty today. And Kelly, you are a wonderful neighbor. Is your little brother home? Maybe he and I can play a board game.”

  Darbie said, “What about me? Don’t you have something nice to say to me?”

  “Thanks for saving my life, Darbie O’Brien. I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you.”

  “Any time,” Darbie said.

  “Where are you guys off to?” Charlotte asked.

  Darbie spun her body around to skate backward and said to Charlotte, “Out and about. That’s how we roll. Ha! Get it?” She turned back around and said more softly, probably to herself, “Man, I’m funny.”

  Hannah didn’t look like she was having too much fun, tottering along on her skates. Hannah was good at pretty much everything she tried, so when there was something she wasn’t great at, look out.

  “I don’t know if this is really much faster,” Hannah said.

  Darbie yelled to her phone. “Hey, Darbie’s phone, how much faster is roller-skating than walking?” No response. “Drat,” she said.

  I said, “You’re right about the dark.” The sun was getting low, and it was getting cold. “We have to hustle.”

  * * *

  Maybe we hadn’t thought through the footwear as thoroughly as we should have, because when we switched from pavement to graveyard grass, we had to sort of march along, which looked funny and was tough on the ankles.

  “This place is bigger than I thought it would be,” Hannah said. “I think we have to—”

  “Oh, lemme guess,” Darbie said. “Shag and Scoob, you go that way.”

  I said, “Sorry, Darb, but there’s no way we’ll be able to cover all this ground if we stick together.”

  Just then there was a crackling of leaves behind some trees nearby.

  “Did you hear that?” Darbie asked. “The Creeper isn’t waiting until I’m alone. Bold move.”

  “It’s probably a squirrel or something,” Hannah said, and verbally laid out the sections we would each search, so that we wouldn’t miss any headstones and we wouldn’t overlap.

  There was another crackle.

  “Did you hear that?” Darbie asked again. “Maybe we should come back when it’s light out.”

  “Don’t be a baby,” Hannah said. “We can do this.”

  Just then a pinecone zoomed at us, barely missing Darbie’s head.

  “Luckily the Creeper has bad aim,” Darbie said.

  Hannah said, “That was no Creeper.”

  “No,” I confirmed, then yelled, “Just creeps! Two of them!”

  Frankie and Tony came out from behind a tree, laughing hysterically.

  “You following us?” Hannah asked.

  “Yup,” Frankie confessed without a smidgen of regret. “And, Hannah, you clomp around like a newborn giraffe on those things. I didn’t think there was anything you weren’t awesome at.”

  Hannah glared at him. “Oh, shut up.”

  “Since you’re here, as weird as it is that you stalked us, you can help us find the tomb of Mrs. Silvers’s oldest relative before it gets dark,” Darbie said.

  “This is when a normal person would ask why you’re in search of an old witch’s ancestor, but we’re not going to do that.” Frankie asked Tony, “Are we?”

  “Nope,” Tony agreed.

  “Good,” Darbie said. “Frankie, you can be Fred, and, Tony, I guess you’ll be Shaggy. But, wait, that leaves me as . . . well, whatever. Let’s just look.”

  “And fast,” I added. “I really don’t want to be in here when it’s dark.”

  We went off in the directions Hannah identified and studied the names on the tombstones and mausoleums. Tony tagged along with me. I was nearly convinced that he liked me without Love Bug Juice.

  “What are we looking for?” he asked.

  “A letter,” I replied. “It’s hidden in the tomb of Mrs. Silvers’s oldest relative.”

  “That makes perfect sense,” he said.

  “I found it!” Darbie called. “One point for the Scoob.” She patted her own back.

  Racing there on Rollerblades in the grass wasn’t easy, but I did my best. I kind of half ran, half rolled. Tony grabbed my elbow at one point when I nearly fell. I smiled when he did that.

  We gathered around the tombstone.

  Darbie read to us. “ ‘Beulah Silvers. 1699 to 1755. Beloved mother, wife, schoolteacher.’ ” She slid her phone out of her back pocket. “I wanna get a pic of this.” She aimed the phone and—“Drat. Still dead.”

  “Where’s the letter?” I asked. I felt all around the top and edge of the tombstone and the grass under it. “It’s just a rock. How are we going to find a letter in a rock?”

  “What about one of those cement buildings?” Frankie asked.

  “None of them are Silverses,” Hannah said. “This has to be it. Keep feeling around, Kell. Is there a crack? Or a latch that slides a drawer or something?”

  I continued to feel, and then I even knocked on the rock, trying to find a hollow space. “It’s solid,” I said, then added, “We better go. We only have a little bit of daylight left.”

  Then we heard a noise. It wasn’t someone walking on leaves or throwing pinecones. This was the distinct sound of lock tumblers clicking into place.

  The big, strong, metal lock of the Wilmington Cemetery gate closing for the night.

  27

  Boys in the Know

  Oh no,” I said. “Is it locked?”

  Frankie and Tony ran ahead of us because they could run on the grass faster than we could march-skate.

  A cemetery van drove down Olde Wilmington Road, away from the cemetery. Frankie shook the gate and called after the van, but it didn’t turn back. He shook the gate again. “That’s about as locked as locked gets,” he confirmed.

  Hannah looked like she was going to be sick. “My dad is gonna kill me,” she said.

  “Let’s not exaggerate, Hannah-Hippie-Hopscotch,” Darbie said.

  “Fine. I’ll be in a lot
of trouble. Okay?”

  “This is why one of us needs an older sibling,” I said. “To rescue us in times like this.”

  “Don’t worry. Since I’m a hero and everything, I can call my cousin Rex. He’ll be here in a second.” Darbie took out her phone and—“I keep forgetting this thing isn’t working.”

  “We’ve gotcha covered, girls,” Frankie said. “Tone, you want to make the call?”

  “I already texted—”

  “Oh, rub it in,” Darbie said.

  Tony finished, “The cavalry is on the way.”

  “Now would be a perfect time for you to tell us what’s going on,” Frankie said.

  “Going on?” I asked, and made my best confused face and looked at Hannah.

  Hannah said, “Going on? What’s going on?”

  Darbie added, “Don’t know what you mean. Why can’t three girls roller-skate to a cemetery without getting the third degree?”

  Finally, a big white pickup truck with the Rusamano Landscaping logo pulled up in front of the gate.

  “Hey, Pete!” Frankie called.

  “Yo, Pete-ster!” Tony called.

  Pete-ster? Maybe Tony was starting to relax around me.

  Darbie asked Tony, “That Pete-ster doesn’t look strong enough to break this iron fence. What is he, like, seventy or eighty years old?”

  “Nah,” Tony said. “He just has gray hair. He’s like thirty-five-ish.”

  “Um, that’s practically elderly,” Darbie remarked. Then she called, “Hey, Darbie’s phone, how old is considered elderly?”

  No answer from her phone.

  “Drat. I miss it so much. It’s like withdrawal.”

  “What happened to it?” Frankie asked.

  “Payback,” she said.

  “Your phone isn’t working because it’s mad at you?”

  “Something like that. You figure you save someone’s life when they’re about to choke on a walnut that karma would be on your side, you know? But not in my world.”

  Pete, a Rusamano Landscaping employee covered in mulch, came to the iron gate and asked, “How do you get yourselves into these jams?”

  Darbie asked Pete, “You gonna do like a Hulk thing and stretch these iron bars?”

  Pete grabbed a ladder off the truck and slid it over the fence. “This is probably easier, plus I won’t rip my shirt by turning big and green.”

  Darbie said, “I like you, Pete-ster.”

  Tony climbed up and jumped down to the ground on the other side. Then he went to the truck to get a second ladder so that we wouldn’t have to jump down in skates, which would probably have meant broken legs, ankles, and knees.

  Frankie climbed to the top of the first ladder and said to Hannah, “Okay, come on.”

  She tried to step on the first rung with skates. It wasn’t going to work. She took them off and tried again, but Frankie moved the ladder so she couldn’t step up.

  “What the heck, Frankie?”

  “Tell us about this letter business. What are you really doing here looking for Mrs. Silvers’s relatives’ tombstones?”

  “Or what?” she asked. “You’re gonna leave us here?”

  “You wouldn’t dare,” Darbie said.

  “You can’t be serious,” I added.

  He pulled the ladder up. “Our work here is done, Pete,” he called over to the truck.

  Pete started the engine.

  “Fine,” I said. “We found a Secret Recipe Book that makes potions and we’ve been giving them to people, but we can’t seem to make Coach stop these insane workouts he’s been giving us because he’s afraid the other team will beat us; and Charlotte found out and videoed the Book and threatened to make it viral, so we entranced her; and in order to figure out all the rules of magic, we need to find the original authors of the Book; we have two—Señora Perez and Mrs. Eagle—but we need the third, whose initials are RS, which we thought was Mrs. Silvers, Regina Silvers; and the legend says that she hid a letter about the magic in the tomb of her oldest relative, which is why we’re here, but it isn’t here, so maybe she isn’t RS after all.”

  The boys didn’t say anything for a beat. Then it was Tony who spoke first. Of all the things he could have said, he asked, “Why didn’t you just ask Mrs. Silvers instead of the cemetery-hopping?”

  We fell silent. Darbie said, “Well, that makes more sense when you put it that way.”

  28

  Hound Dog

  Why didn’t we think of that?” Hannah asked when we got back to my house.

  “It’s not like Mrs. Silvers and I were really having a ton of deep conversations here,” I explained. “I’ve only just started talking with her a tiny bit in the last few weeks. How do you think she would feel if I asked, ‘Hey, can you tell me where your relatives are buried?’ And she’d be like, ‘Why do you want to know?’ Then I’d say, ‘Well, because I figured you wrote a book of potions, and rumor has it that’s where the last rule of magic is hidden. Did you write a potion book when you were a kid?’ ” I gave Hannah a look.

  “Yeah. It sounds weird,” Hannah agreed.

  “But I thought of another way we could find out for sure,” I said. “Why don’t we get Mrs. Silvers and Señora P together, and we can see if they know each other. You know, if they talk about old times.”

  “That sounds good,” Darbie said. “But . . . how are we going to get them together?”

  “Mrs. Silvers has been walking a lot. I thought we could get her to walk up the street to La Cocina.”

  “And how are you going to do that?” Hannah asked.

  “With this.” I held up my mom’s old gadget—a compact CD player—and earbuds. “I’ll give her this and tell her how she can wear it while she walks, and I’ll offer to go with her up to the street to show her how it works. You guys will be there and invite us in to La Cocina to see something.”

  “And, presto! We’ll see if the two old cats know each other,” Darbie said. “I like it, except that I’m going to give the elderly cat the Discman and walk her up the street, and my phone will work and that’ll be that.”

  * * *

  The next morning Darbie went to Mrs. Silvers’s house, while Hannah and I went to La Cocina. We gave Darbie my phone and dialed Hannah’s. She put it in her pocket so we could hear the whole thing.

  She knocked on the heavy wooden door with the brass knocker.

  Mrs. Silvers answered it. “Hi, Darbie. Do you have mail for me too?”

  “No, actually, I brought you this.”

  “What is it?”

  “I saw that you’ve been walking, that your knee is a lot better. You put these in your ears like this, and it plays music. I have an Elvis CD in there now.”

  “Oh, I like Elvis, but I don’t know. I don’t do well with those electronic gizmos.”

  “Well, I can show you. Let’s give it a try.”

  “That sounds like it would be all right. Let me get a sweater.”

  There was a second of silence. Then Darbie said, “Like this. How does that feel?”

  “It feels okay. Like I have something in my ears.”

  “Perfect. Now, can you hear the music?”

  “I can! It’s ‘Hound Dog.’ I love this song.”

  “Is it too loud?”

  “No. It’s just right.”

  Each time a new song came on, Mrs. Silvers announced it. About five minutes later, we saw them coming up the street. As planned, Hannah and I came outside La Cocina.

  I said, “Hi there! You wanna come in and look at the cauldron that Señora P is going to let us borrow for the Felice Foudini show?”

  “I would love to see it,” Darbie said. “Wouldn’t you?” she asked Mrs. Silvers. “And you can sit for a minute and rest before we walk back home.”

  “Oh, okay. That sounds good.”

  I held the door open for her. She sat in an elaborately carved wooden chair with a worn golden cushion.

  “Have you ever been here?” Hannah asked Mrs. Silvers.
<
br />   “Oh sure.”

  Darbie said, “I think I’ll get Señora Perez to help with the thing. The stuff.”

  “That’s a very good idea,” I said. “You should.”

  “Do you know Señora Perez?” Hannah asked her.

  Mrs. Silvers nodded. “Of course, this is a small town.”

  Her expression didn’t let on anything.

  Señora P, with that crow, shuffled out behind Darbie.

  “Hola,” she said to Mrs. Silvers. “Was there something I could help you with?”

  “Me? Oh, no. I’m just taking a little rest. It was this one”—she indicated Darbie—“that needed you for something.”

  “You do?” she asked Darbie.

  Darbie stuttered. “Uh, yeah. I wanted to ask you about something. A thing. Some stuff. But now I forget.”

  Señora P eyed Darbie knowingly. She tilted her head as if to say, You’re up to something. She handed her a small paper bag in which I figured there were Moon Honey drops. “Well, let me know when you remember.” With that, Señora P and her crow headed back toward the beaded curtain.

  “Wait,” I said. “I wondered if Mrs. Silvers went to the same pool you did when you were a kid, but then I couldn’t remember the name of it.”

  Señora P turned around. “It is the same pool that is there now, to this day. Shelby Pool: the home of the Sharks. You know it because you go there too.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Good point. Thanks for the clarity. I thought maybe it had changed names over the years.”

  “That surely does happen,” Mrs. Silvers said. “And I know the pool well. Used to work at the snack bar, I did. And could I swim.”

  “Could you?” Darbie asked.

  “Quite well.”

  “Could you?” Hannah asked Señora Perez.

  She chuckled. “I was not very good. I liked to stay where I could stand.”

  On that, Mrs. Silvers stood. “I think it’s time for me and Elvis to go.”

  “Okay. I’ll take you,” Darbie said.

  “I can do it, Darbie, but thank you, and thank you for the music machine. I like it.”

  “You’re welcome,” Darbie said. Then her phone vibrated in her pocket. She pulled it out. “Yay! It works again!”