Meddling Kids

by Edgar Cantero

  She smiled. “Yeah. Thanks for asking.”

  She clacked her heels, saluted, and left Captain Al’s house.

  —

  As she hurried down the stairs she noticed nobody had gotten inside the car yet. The rain had ceased and the sun channeled a shaft onto their striped station wagon as if Heaven were appointing a quest to it.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Kerri handed her a white envelope.

  “This was inside the car,” she said.

  “I left the window open a slit,” Nate explained. “It was beginning to smell.”

  Andy flipped the envelope in her hands. The front side bore the letters BSDC.

  “Someone followed us here?” she said, surveying the junkscape. Andes of car parts and rusted metal rose against the yellow afternoon.

  “They may have left it while we were parked in town,” Nate conjectured. “It was between the seat and the door; I just didn’t notice it until now.”

  Andy opened the envelope. It contained a single sheet of paper with a short message written in caps: “STOP PROCRASTINATING. GO TO THE LAKE.”

  “So what now?” Kerri asked.

  “We go to the lake,” Nate answered.

  “Why, because an anonymous note told us to?”

  “We were planning to go anyway, weren’t we?”

  “We could also go see Dunia Deboën, or talk to the deputy. There’s only a few hours of daylight left; we should put off the lake till tomorrow.”

  “We could go today and camp for the night,” Andy suggested.

  “Whoa!” Kerri checked the other two, then backtracked to make sure she hadn’t put an exclamation point too many there. “That’s quite a crash therapy, isn’t it? We were supposed to be taking it easy; now we’re talking about spending our first night at the lake?”

  “What’s there to fear?” Nate said. “You think we’re fighting a big evil corporation. Worst that can happen is a CEO in a chupacabra costume.”

  Kerri turned to Andy. “Okay, you decide; what do we do?”

  “I decide? No, I don’t. I told you, I’m not the leader; we do things together.”

  “I’m for going to the lake, Kerri isn’t; you’re the tiebreaker,” Nate recounted. “So, what do we do?”

  Suddenly Andy found herself between Kerri and Nate, both with their arms crossed, expecting leadership from her.

  She queried the dog. “Tim?”

  The Weimaraner sat down obediently, awaiting command, a kerosene breeze blowing at his ears.

  Andy checked the handwritten message in her hands again.

  “STOP PROCRASTINATING.” Those two words did it, actually. She took offense that easily.

  “Let’s go back to HQ and get our camping gear. We’re going to the lake.”

  The road to Sleepy Lake sprouted northwest of Kerri’s neighborhood in Blyton Hills as a paved parkway crossing through ranks of semiordered cedars. Old people used to promenade along this part, as far as the wooden bridge if they felt adventurous, but the road went on farther than most locals cared to remember. It turned north soon after the bridge and tunneled through groves of older, less civilized trees; it crossed two ravines, or the same ravine twice, and finally reached the junction where once trucks filled with machinery and clean-faced mineworkers used to leave the lakebound path, taking the better branch to the shaft on Sentinel Hill. The worse branch continued northwest, slaloming the hills as it climbed upriver, burrowing its way through the forest, and along fifteen miles it managed to lose most of the features that defined it: road signs and milestones first, then asphalt, then gutters, then the respect of varmints, then a good five or six feet in width. And by the time it was but a shrunk, fickle snake of a dirt track serpentining among the massive, twisted roots of gigantic firs, the woods ended and a sunblast came crashing through the last line of trees.

  Andy floored the brakes, bringing the amber cannonball to an earth-grinding stop ten feet from the water, a tail of dust and scared insects surrounding it. She had been driving too fast and had misjudged the breadth of the lake bank.

  A bright sun glimmered off the surface of two hundred square miles of water.

  “Okay,” Andy admitted. “It wasn’t a pond.”

  —

  Tim jumped out of the racing-striped caravel and ran to conquer the New World.

  Andy’s sneakers felt the soft, grassy shore. In all her experience on the road, she could remember few places, including tundra deserts and national parks, where man had left as shallow a print as in Sleepy Lake. She could not tell precisely why. It was possible that pioneers first scouting the Pacific Northwest had once reached that spot, registered the lake in their notebooks, and moved on, anxious to finish charting out Oregon before dinner. But it was also likely that the place itself conspired to erase what little trace people had left throughout history. There were signs of human presence—a dock not far on the east bank, and the timorous shape of the house crouched under the firs on the faraway isle, but somehow the lake had taken them over, successfully convincing the visitors that the dock and the house were original features of the world, waiting to be found.

  The three humans wandered around the car, timidly nearing the water, and took in the immensity of the lake that memory had surprisingly not exaggerated. It was in fact hard to size up: its edges broke into gulfs and capes, with heavily wooded peninsulas blocking a complete view. The opposite shore was far enough away to appear grayed out, even against the rainwashed sky.

  At what might well be the geometric center of the lake, or not by a long shot, the tiny elongated isle lay low under the weight of colossal trees, whose original seeds had long ago flown from the mainland and landed with uncanny precision there to colonize it. A few pointy dormer windows spied from among the treetops.

  “So here we are,” Kerri stated.

  Andy scrutinized her profile, sunlight on her freckles and her orange hair glowing. She smelled the trees and the petrichor off the grass; listened to the Shanghai of birds; checked the summits of the firs rocking gently in the cold, damp air, looking like what the top of every tree is, no matter the size: a willful, sun-hungry bud.

  “It doesn’t look that bad,” she judged.

  Kerri just went “Hmm” and studied the landscape with a biologist’s eyes. An iridescent dung beetle caught her attention.

  Nate was apparently covering the shore to the right of the car, therefore Andy wandered to the left, toward the edge of the bay where a pile of white polished rocks forming a rough cliff jutted into the water. She remembered this pile as being big enough to build a fortress, but it rose only three feet. She leaped to the top, small crayfish scuttling from under her feet and splishing into the water.

  The lake bank had narrowed down to just a few yards there, and a natural path poked into the woods. She peeped inside, from the forest mud that the sun had lost all hope of reaching, up the umber pillars of the living cathedral, toward the vault of embracing branches of yellow leaves.

  No slaughtered animals. No hanging bodies.

  Something crashed into the lake behind her, splashing stinging cold water. Tim waded back to shore around the cliff, overly amused, giving Andy a transient look that said, You were right—this is the best. Place. Ever!

  Then he ran away, zooming through the shallows and spraying water and mud like a herd of buffaloes all along the shore and eventually over Kerri, who was squatting for a close-up on the insects farther up, and who resignedly stood up and shouted after him: “If you so much as whimper next time I put you in a bathtub, I’ll kill you!”

  —

  The bank was widest on the right side and drier, so that was where they made camp, and as they unloaded the gear from the Chevy and pulled up the tent, the virgin land grew slightly hostile, like a general frown from the earth and the trees at the visitors’ insolence of coming uninvited. But it stopped bothering Andy once she’d started hammering the poles, like a boisterous announcement of their intention to stay. And the ominous
sentiment she had anticipated from the lake never fully manifested that evening. Instead, what little uneasiness the motion of the firs and the burbling of the miniature waves breaking on the shallows had cast upon her mind was gradually nudged aside by the clanging of stacking cooking pots, the texture of her canvas rucksack, the bright colors of the gear they had exhumed from Kerri’s closet just an hour ago. And all this sensory feed was growing a new sensation inside her: something alien and unexpected tingling under her touch that, far-stretching though it felt, had all the characteristics of what people call bliss. Because she was just starting to realize, Nate and Kerri and herself, they were camping in Blyton again.

  They had settled near the right end of the bay, not far from the old dock sticking out of the rocky horn, and that whiny structure was the only thing objecting to her complete happiness. For at the dock there was a rowboat, and oars inside.

  The three gathered on the platform, staring alternately at the boat and the lonely isle ahead.

  “Is this a clue?” Nate finally asked.

  “Maybe,” Andy said. “You said no one came fishing here.”

  “No one but us, that I know of,” Kerri argued.

  The boat knocked gently on the dock’s pole, self-consciously, bound by a piece of rotting rope.

  “Okay, so shall we go take a look at the isle?” Andy said, taking the hint.

  “May I remind you,” Nate started, “that we’re here because an anonymous note told us to come, and now here’s an anonymous boat inviting us to go even farther?”

  Andy couldn’t think of a counterargument.

  “It’s okay, I’m just saying,” Nate excused her. “I’m in.”

  “If we’re trying to retrace our steps,” Kerri argued, “let me point out that we never rowed to the isle until the very last day of the case.”

  “We didn’t find a boat until the last day,” Andy said.

  “Which in retrospect should’ve been a big red flag,” Nate added.

  Tim trotted by, nosing the warped boards, finding the humans in silent deliberation.

  “Isn’t it a little late already?” Kerri argued. “It’s like a ten-minute row. And there’s an hour of sunlight left, possibly less. I’d rather pass,” she decided. “It’s okay, you two go. I’ll stay.”

  “No, no way,” said Andy. “I’m not leaving you alone.”

  “I’ve got Tim.”

  “I don’t like splitting up the team,” Andy insisted. “And we can’t afford it anymore. We’d need a fourth man.”

  KERRI: Better a fourth woman.

  ANDY: Why?

  KERRI: Because if it were a fourth man, he and Nate would go, and you’d be all, “Ugh, why do the boys get to explore the isle? I can do anything boys do,” and you’d want to go with them and leave me.

  ANDY: I never did that.

  KERRI & NATE: Yeah, you did.

  Andy tried to think of a comeback and desisted after a second.

  “Also,” Peter inserted during the subsequent pause, “what’s with the no-splitting-up policy? It’s a sound strategy; it covers more ground.”

  NATE: (Aloud, for the girls.) I agree with Andy, though. We shouldn’t split up.

  “Fuck off, Nate,” Peter said. “And by the way,” he continued, stepping into the circle and thumb-pointing Andy, “how is she calling the shots?”

  The party had fallen silent.

  “Nate? Don’t pretend you can’t hear me; it hurts enough that not even the dog notices me,” Peter complained. “Answer me this: Who died and made her—right, wait, no, let me rephrase that: How are we going to solve this shit if—”

  “We are not going to solve it!”

  Nate paused, then noticed the furrowed brows on the girls, the eyebrow-raising dog, the startled birds.

  “Sorry. That came out wrong. I mean…we are not going to solve this by watching from a distance. It’s no longer about the case; this is about us. Kerri, it won’t help to send anyone ahead. You won’t fix this unless you personally see it through.”

  All eyes now fell on Kerri, and she noticed. She felt her pockets, longing for a cigarette to hold on to, then hugged her waist and peeked through the boards under her boots at the gently dancing waters below.

  Tim yawned, not at all intending to put pressure on anyone.

  “Okay, right. Fuck it,” she capitulated. “Let’s do it.”

  —

  Kerri had brought along her binoculars. They were the same ones she used to carry as a child for bird spotting, but they were good binoculars that she’d treated with care, and they befitted a grown-up. Same went for her magnifying glass and her compass, both artifacts of beautiful craftsmanship that she had owned since childhood and still suited long-fingered hands. Andy was sure there was a company in England, possibly founded by a society of African explorers in the Victorian era, a bunch of Colonel Mustards with pith helmets and friendly mutton chops, who manufactured this high-tier field equipment especially for kids, aware that young explorers like Kerri must not be patronized with cheap plastic toys, but be offered the best durable tools to encourage their vocation, because those curious children shall be the great discoverers of tomorrow.

  Andy, in charge of both oars after having found it too difficult to synchronize with Nate, checked her own freebie Coca-Cola watch and made a mental note to replace it as soon as she could afford it.

  The boat’s path had hardly sundered the lake’s surface. Sunshine drew sparkling racing stripes across it. Kerri put down the binoculars, her hair bathed in tangerine solar wind. Her right hand comforted Tim at her feet, who was not as fond of the lake now that he wasn’t a leap from the surface anymore.

  “At least the weather’s good,” she granted.

  Nate, backlit and squatting on the bow, dipped a finger into the water.

  “Maybe it’s not the best time to bring it up, but we didn’t have very bad weather last time.” He allowed a beat for reactions. “I know what the Telegraph said. I’m just saying what I remember. The weather did not knock us over.”

  Andy glanced over the bulwark. Nothing could be made out below the surface. “Second-deepest lake after O’Higgins in southern Chile,” she recited.

  “Actually, the deep end must be over there,” Kerri said, pointing west, where the lake seemed to expand vastly beyond a cape. “After all, mine tunnels connect the isle and the mainland.”

  Andy reckoned the cruise would still take them five minutes. She took a deep breath and went all out to make it four.

  “So, what’s the story of the house?” she requested in the meantime.

  “You know it as well as I do,” Kerri said.

  “Humor me. A fresh briefing before we land.”

  Kerri sighed, and her hair shushed and hushed, listening to the very important story to come.

  “The house was built by Damian Deboën, a prospector who came to Blyton Hills during the Gold Rush in the eighteen forties. He had a lucky strike, made a fortune, built the mines, pretty much refounded the town, which was but a small parish at the time. The Deboëns lived here for a century, until a fire destroyed part of the mansion in nineteen forty-nine.”

  “Oh, come on,” Nate protested. “You’re skipping all the juicy bits.”

  “Like the bit about him being a pirate?” Andy recalled.

  “That one might be true,” Kerri conceded. “There are records of a Captain Deboën who escaped the gallows in Florida and sailed for the Pacific.”

  “Also the part about him being a sorcerer who lived for a hundred and fifty years,” Nate pointed out.

  “A sorcerer?” Andy checked both.

  “At least, he learned a handful of voodoo tricks while sailing the Caribbean.”

  “Funny how only your books mention that part, Nate,” Kerri mocked him.

  “Rumors in town said his house used to be filled with mysterious artifacts and potions.”

  “Guy was a mining engineer and the townspeople had not seen a chemistry set in their lives.”
>
  “Lived on his secluded island, seldom showed up in town, never went to church.”

  “Right, because you never fail to come out of your den for Sunday service.”

  “Lived alone, never married or wooed anyone.”

  “Nate, stop giving me arguments so easy to fling back at you; I might hurt you.”

  “And he didn’t age one bit while he lived here.”

  “Which didn’t add up to a hundred and fifty years.”

  Andy listened carefully under the path of flying arguments between both of them—the keen fantasy addict and the scientific skeptic. “Aren’t there any records?” she asked.

  “No,” Nate answered, in a Glad you asked pitch. “But let’s do the math: he came in the eighteen forties, as you said, looking about, what? Forty years old? Remember he’d been scallywaggin’ previous to that. Anyway, let’s say he was thirty. So, he digs the mines…Let me remark that you actually need a lot of gold to build a gold mine. This guy wasn’t your average fortune hunter who came west with an empty sack and a shovel; he must have carried along some booty from his sailing days. In my opinion, this gold mine thing was a money-laundering op. Anyway, business booms, the town prospers, and suddenly people start noticing old Deboën has hardly aged since he arrived. This is just a funny anecdote in the first decade, an oddity after two decades, fucking astounding after five. And that’s when the guy, at the age of eighty by our account, but looking not one day older than forty, moves back east, saying he has business to attend, and leaves everything in the hands of a trusted employee named Allen. Nothing is heard of Damian Deboën for years, then sometime in the nineteen twenties a young man arrives in town claiming to be Daniel Deboën, son of Damian, who recently died in Massachusetts.”

  “So he lives to a hundred, being generous,” Kerri said.

  “After begetting a child at eighty,” Nate countered. “And if you believe it was his child. Because according to the old people in town, Daniel happened to be the spitting image of Damian, only younger.”

  “So they haven’t seen Damian in twenty years, they hardly caught a glimpse of him while he lived here, but they all remember him perfectly.”