by Lynne Jonell
Taft set down his fork, took a last drink from the thermos, and lifted his sleeve to wipe his mouth.
“Here,” said Christina, handing him a napkin. “Don’t use your sleeve, it looks like you were raised in an orphanage.”
Taft gave the napkin a startled glance, and took it slowly.
“And don’t lick your plate, either,” Christina added.
Taft frowned.
“Listen,” Christina said, “I’m just telling you. It’s good manners.”
Taft wiped his mouth in silence and put the napkin down. “They didn’t teach us manners at the orphanage,” he said slowly. “There’s probably a lot they didn’t teach us.”
Christina hadn’t meant to embarrass him. “You’re smart, though,” she said.
Taft ducked his chin. “I wish I was smarter. I hate not knowing stuff.” He ran his hands through his hair in frustration. “I wish we could figure out what Lenny is doing with the zoom. And I wish I knew why the kids never come back.”
Christina nodded. “And how come they don’t run out of kids at the orphanage, if they keep sending more and more of them up to the ridge?”
“I can tell you that,” said Taft. “It’s because we keep getting new kids from the big city.”
“Seriously?” Christina frowned. “But how can kids keep disappearing without somebody wondering what’s going on?”
“Good question. But have you noticed that practically everybody in Dorf thinks Lenny Loompski is wonderful? Maybe they just don’t want to ask any embarrassing questions.”
Christina shook her head. “I never meet anybody from Dorf, unless they come to the house. And I hardly knew there was a Lenny Loompski before yesterday.”
Taft looked pleased to know something that Christina didn’t. “Well, we collected trash all over Dorf—trash, and recycling, and lately we’re even going to garage sales to buy up any little plastic toys they have—”
“Like the ones Danny was scrubbing?” Christina interrupted. “Are they for you guys to play with?”
Taft looked at her in disbelief. “Are you kidding? We just sort them and clean them and put them in boxes. Then somebody loads them in the truck’s cab, and a bunch of kids climb in the hopper, and that’s the last we see of the toys. Or the kids.”
Christina was silent, digesting this.
“Anyway, everywhere we collect trash, people talk to the driver and say how great Lenny Loompski is, and how he’s the nicest Loompski of them all, and how lucky the town is to have such a generous benefactor.”
“Generous?”
Taft nodded. “He makes us pick up people’s garbage—and he doesn’t charge them for it. And he gives to the policemen’s fund, and he buys extra equipment for the firefighters, and he donates hundreds of books to the library. Not the orphanage library,” he added bitterly.
“Didn’t you ever tell anyone what Lenny was really like?”
Taft snorted. “Ever try to tell grown-ups something they don’t want to hear?”
Christina laughed.
“And besides, anybody who talks to one of the townspeople gets put on the next truck to the mountain, whether they can sing or not.” Taft fiddled with his fork and put it down again with a clatter. “But that’s not important now. We’ve got to make a plan to rescue Danny.”
“Well, we need to find him first. And we should figure out where you can take him afterward, too.” Christina glanced quickly at Taft. She had talked him out of staying in the tunnel and brought him to the attic. But it would be terribly hard to hide Danny in the attic—he might not understand the need to stay quiet. “I wonder if Gus and Jake would need some help?”
Taft tapped his fingers against his knee. “When we go looking for Danny tomorrow, we should find out what they’re doing with the zoom, too. Your father must know a lot about it—they’re working with it in the lab, aren’t they?”
Christina nodded. “They’ve known about it for years and years.” She reached into her pocket for the test tube and shook out her mother’s ring. “See? This has got a zoomstone. It was my mom’s before I was even born.”
Taft turned the golden circle in the lamplight. The pink and green streaks stood out beautifully against the polished gray stone. “Can you make the streaks melt again?”
“Maybe.” Christina rubbed the stone with her finger. “I don’t want to ruin the ring, though. I’m not even supposed to have it.”
Taft handed her the ring. “I wonder if you can control it, though. What if you just turned it to gel and then stopped? If it didn’t liquefy all the way, it wouldn’t hurt anything, right?”
“Well . . .”
“Come on. It would be a scientific experiment.”
Christina was tempted. She probably could do it. She would try to put a little fear in her voice, but not as much as when she had lost her grip in the tree. And of course she would have to do it softly.
“Crieee-eee!” she sang in a thin thread of sound, G-sharp, falling to F, as she thought about what would happen if she were caught sneaking food. That added some fear, but no actual terror, and she watched with pride as the streaks brightened, trembled, started to liquefy—and then gelled and hardened once more. Perfect.
“Let me try.” Taft reached out. “What was that first note again?”
Christina sang a high G-sharp, very quietly and exactly on pitch.
Taft held the ring close to his mouth. “Crieee-eee!”
Christina shook her head. Taft’s cry sounded lonely and fearful enough, but the pitch was off. “That’s not—” she began, and then stopped, aghast. The stone was smoking.
As they watched in horror, it emitted a sharp POP! Christina flinched as tiny fragments hit her cheek.
The smoke cleared away, leaving a smell like burnt orange peels. Where the stone had been was now only an empty hollow, a charred oblong in the gold circle.
“I sang the exact same notes you did!” Taft sounded near tears.
Christina couldn’t take her eyes from the ruined ring. “No. You were flat.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Yes, you were,” said Christina with the calmness of despair. “You were a quarter-step below the tone. I could hear it.”
“I didn’t mean to,” said Taft. He ducked his chin inside his collar and looked at her worriedly. “I must have gotten close enough to the right frequency so the vibrations started to work, but not quite in the right way.”
Thought had vibrations—that’s what her father had said Leo Loompski believed. And if you could focus your thoughts exactly right, you could . . . what?
Christina cupped the ring between her two palms. The empty blackened setting stared up at her, and an edge of uncharred gold winked in the lamplight.
Well, all the focused thoughts in the world weren’t going to fix exploded jewelry, no matter what Leo Loompski believed. Christina slid the ring into her sweatshirt pocket. She could get mad at Taft, but what good would that do?
Taft hunched his shoulders. “Your dad told Lenny Loompski that zoom was unstable. This must be what he meant.”
Christina nodded. No kidding.
“With the exact right pitch, though,” Taft went on, “it would be safe.”
“It’s not that safe. The drops explode when they hit the ground, remember?”
“Yes, but if you were careful not to let the drops actually hit anything? What if you just let the liquid slide gently into a jar, or something?”
Christina considered this. “It’d be okay as long as you didn’t drop the jar, I bet.”
Taft gave a short laugh. “A whole jarful would probably be like a small bomb.”
Christina caught her breath at the thought. A small bomb might explode with orange light. A small bomb would make a muffled boom, could even shake her house . . .
“I bet that’s what happened on the ridge last night,” she began, and then saw by Taft’s stricken look that he had realized it, too.
“I’m going to sleep now,” said Taft
, his voice strained. “I’m leaving first thing in the morning. I’m getting Danny off that ridge, no matter what.”
Christina sat gloomily on her bed. She pulled the green scrapbook off the shelf and opened it. Just seeing her mother’s handwriting made her feel better somehow. She turned the pages until she came to her seventh year.
That was the year she had started music lessons with Mrs. Lisowsky. She had learned to read notes and play some simple tunes on the piano and count the beat. Christina took out her markers and drew a piano, and a girl with blond braids sitting on the bench playing, and a tiny woman who looked a little like a redheaded bird off to one side.
She held the book at arm’s length to admire her drawing. A piece of paper slipped out from the back, where it had been left loose, and Christina picked it up off the floor. It was a sheet of music, written out in blue ink, and the handwriting was her mother’s.
The title at the top said simply “Lullaby,” and the line below said “To be sung to ‘Largo,’ from the New World Symphony, by Antonin Dvořák.” Christina read it through, following the notes on the staff with her finger.
Her mother had written it for her; that much was clear, for it began, Little one, child of mine. Christina hummed the tune, and then, in a whisper, she sang it all the way through.
She held the paper for a moment, smiling down at her mother’s words. Then she tucked the lullaby back in the scrapbook, and with it the message from the test tube, carefully flattened. Last, she looked at her mother’s ring once more.
She would keep it safe. Someday maybe it could be fixed, and in the meantime, perhaps her father wouldn’t think to look for it.
She opened the big wooden box that held her mother’s jewelry, and the three tiers popped up. Christina couldn’t bear to put the ruined ring in one of the velvet-lined compartments—she would see it every time she lifted the lid. So she put it in the bottom of the box, along with the loose necklaces and fingernail clippers and various odds and ends. She tucked it way in the back, under a pile of old keys—house keys and car keys and small luggage keys and one big brass key.
Christina turned the brass key over on her palm. It was strangely heavy in her hand and edged with green where it had tarnished. It looked like the kind of key that could open the door of a cathedral or perhaps a castle—
Or maybe a large square door with an old-fashioned lock.
She sat perfectly still, feeling a sudden clutch of excitement high in her stomach. Tomorrow they were going to go rescue Danny—but tonight, right this minute, she could try the key. The tunnel was lighted, and even if it wasn’t, she had a flashlight.
TAFT came with her, of course. “It might be a good place for Danny and me,” he said. “It could be like an air-raid shelter, or something.”
Christina passed by her mother’s old rocking chair on her way out of the attic and trailed her fingers over the carved wooden back. Secretly, she hoped that the door led to Leo Loompski’s private laboratory. Her mother had been working with Leo, her father had said, and clearly her mother had a key . . .
Taft closed the service door behind them. “Hey, if it is an air-raid shelter, maybe it will be stocked with food!”
Christina shone her flashlight down the long stair from her roof to the tunnel. She had grabbed some emergency supplies on her way out—the jackknife from her mother’s jewelry box, a pack of Life Savers—but a few pieces of candy weren’t going to last long, the way Taft ate. She doubted that the underground room was stocked with food, but it would certainly solve one problem if it were. It was hard enough to feed one boy—she could only imagine trying to feed Danny, too.
They stood in front of the wide wooden door. A string of lightbulbs, some burnt out, stretched along the back wall of the tunnel on either side like a row of broken teeth. Christina pulled the tarnished key from her pocket and fumbled at the shadowed lock. The key slid in with a scraping sound.
“Hurry up, can’t you?” Taft was hopping with impatience.
“Stand out of my light,” said Christina, struggling to turn the key in the stiff lock. The resistance gave way suddenly, and there was a distinct, metallic snick.
She pushed the door all the way open and shone her flashlight inside. The narrow beam played along rough stone walls, quite unlike the smooth, manmade tunnel behind them. Christina stepped inside and ran her hand over the rock. Yes, someone had wired it for electricity—there was a light switch, in a metal box—but when she flipped it, nothing happened.
“It’s not a room at all—it’s a cave!” said Taft.
Christina hesitated. The cave was vast and dark, and the rock hung overhead in great, wicked lumps that looked as if they might fall at any moment. And there might be bats. Her hand wavered slightly, and the shaft of light danced along the stone, throwing huge, trembling shadows.
“Can I have that for a minute?” Taft took the flashlight and moved forward.
Christina glanced back through the door. Behind her, the familiar corridor with its regularly spaced lightbulbs looked safe and beckoning.
“Hey! Are you coming or not?” Taft called. He stopped, half turned, yellow light illuminating the underside of his chin. “This cave goes a lot farther in!”
The cave went on and on. It twisted here and there, as if it were a river, and every so often, smaller rivulets went off in side passages. But as they continued on, the main tunnel also began to be littered with interesting bits of clutter. It looked as if someone had used it for storage.
Taft, intent on exploring to the end, kept forging ahead, sweeping the flashlight from side to side. Christina followed closely, trying not to look up at the curving walls and heavy ceiling of stone. But in spite of the frightened feeling she got whenever she thought about how many tons of rock were suspended above them, a part of her still wanted, like Taft, to go on and see what was at the end. Maybe there would be something there that her mother had left long ago.
Taft stopped suddenly. Christina pulled up short just in time to avoid running into him. “Why did you stop?” she began, and then she saw.
The cave had widened into a vast room, and all around them were more of the leftover objects: bulky forms half covered with sheets, high metal benches with test tubes and microscopes stacked on them, and everywhere piles of paper, old and brittle, with curling, broken edges.
“My turn for the flashlight,” said Christina, and she shone it behind canisters and jars, under benches and on drawings of inventions inked in thin blue lines on large sheets of paper. “Hey—this was Leo Loompski’s old laboratory!”
Taft lifted one of the drawings and held it to the light. “That guy was nuts,” he said. “Look at this. A rocket-powered baby carriage. Some baby was going for a ride.”
“Dad talked about that one, remember?” Christina shone the beam on another piece of paper. “Look at this. ‘Zoom Skates.’ And this.” She pointed at a drawing of a large catapult with what looked to be a child with a backpack sitting in the basket.
“Kidapult,” read Taft. “Avoid the crowded school bus. Fling yourself to school and float down for a soft landing every time!”
Christina laughed. “It’s like he remembered what he wanted when he was a kid and then he invented it.” She studied the careful printing in the lower right-hand corner that read Leo Loompski. “I can see why my dad got impatient with him, though. This isn’t exactly important scientific research.”
“Maybe old Leo got tired of serious science all the time,” Taft said. “I mean, look at this stuff—it’s crazy, but it’s cool. A hovercraft merry-go-round. A little plane . . .”
Christina walked ahead. Where were her mother’s drawings? Where had her mother done her experiments?
The dust, suddenly thicker than ever, swirled at her feet, sandy particles with a soft, ashy feel. Christina coughed. She put up an arm to cover her mouth, and the flashlight’s beam swung wide, illuminating not cavernous space but solid rock. The cave had ended. A pile of rubble filled it from floor to
ceiling.
“Wow, a cave-in!” Taft darted forward. “Look, the ceiling came right down on top of everything, equipment and all—”
Christina suppressed a shudder. Her arm sank down.
“Oh,” said Taft, from the darkness ahead.
There was a long silence. Far in the distance, there was a faint murmuring gurgle that might have been water passing over rock.
Taft stepped back through the ashy dust and took the flashlight from Christina’s hand. He played its dimming beam over every foot of the rock slide, then handed it back, gently.
“There’s no way through,” he said.
Christina did not answer. She did not want to talk about what might lie on the other side of the cave-in.
Taft seemed to understand, for he turned and began to poke around the sheet-draped equipment, lifting corners to see what was underneath. “I wonder if Leo Loompski ever built any of those inventions he drew, or if they’re all just on paper?”
Christina shone the flashlight on Taft. “Let’s go back now.”
“Okay,” said Taft. He let go of a sheet corner that hung above a curve of burnished metal and sneezed as the dust flew up. “Anyway, this is a bunch of old equipment. Nothing too interes—”
The sheet slipped to the floor.
Christina took in a sudden breath. Before her, gleaming in the tea-colored beam of light, was a silvery, smooth, perfect little craft.
It rested on small rubber wheels. Its body was like a polished metal watermelon, extra-large. It had two red-leather seats, one in front of the other, and a windscreen, and tail fins, and two beautifully curved wings. It was the plane in Leo Loompski’s drawing, and it was just their size.
“Wow,” breathed Taft. “Do you suppose it can really fly?”
There were no real controls. There was a speaker phone sort of thing—a funnel on a tube—and a cap that unscrewed and seemed to lead to a fuel tank, but no throttle, no rudder pedals, no joystick.
“And no airspeed indicator,” mourned Taft. “It’s not really meant to fly. It’s only a model.”
