CHAPTER 11
“Let’s go down to the beach, see if we can spot any fish,” Kit suggested the minute they hit the front door to the beach house on the run.
“Okay, but let’s grab towels to put under us so we don’t get all sandy,” Baylee proposed.
“Who cares if we get sandy? This is a vacation. I can get dirty if I want and not have to take a bath,” Kit countered. “And I’m gonna do what I want. It took a lot to get Alana to let me come and I’m not spending it scrubbing my skin off in a stupid bathtub. I’m getting outside and I’m staying outside.”
“You have to take a bath, otherwise you’ll stink. Who wants to smell bad?” Baylee pointed out.
“I’ll wash off when I go swimming. You just wait and see. I intend to stay in the water all day tomorrow,” Kit emphasized. “That is, when I’m not looking for shells or rocks or fossils.”
To Quinn, exploring the Island looking for shells and rocks and fossils sounded a lot better than getting in the water. Since Quinn didn’t know how to swim it was the only downside to coming on the trip.
As the newest member of their trio, she listened while the other two did what they usually did. They bickered good-naturedly like best friends, like they were comfortable with each other because they’d already been together for years.
Quinn didn’t want to admit it, but she was a tad jealous of their closeness.
“Hey, don’t worry about it. I’ll take a bath—eventually—if you don’t rat me out beforehand.”
Insulted, Baylee declared, “You know darn well I’m not going to rat you out.”
“Good. Besides your dad won’t stand over me with a hairbrush and whack me every time I don’t scrub the right way. But it doesn’t mean I’m taking one until your dad makes me.”
Baylee nodded, knowing full well how awful Alana treated Kit. “But you better hope he doesn’t pull out a bottle, otherwise we’ll all get it for sure ’cause Tanya didn’t make the trip this time. She isn’t here to intervene and help us like usual.”
Even though she was revved up, Kit took the time to lay her hand over Baylee’s. “We’ll be on our best behavior. We won’t make him mad.” She didn’t want Baylee to start worrying about it.
“I’m just glad he let me come,” Quinn admitted.
“Tanya put in a good word for both of you,” Baylee confessed. “She sort of made him bring all of us.”
“Remind me to hug her when we get back then. Hey, time’s wasting. Hurry up, will you? I told you I wanted to go see if the treasure box we buried at the campground last summer is still there.”
“Oh, good idea. I forgot about that,” Baylee said. “Let’s pack sandwiches and juice boxes and eat them on the trail. They’ll tide us over to dinner.”
“Now we’re talking. Come on, Quinn.” Kit dragged her along the long hallway into a sunny kitchen. “We need to remember to bring shovels so we can dig up the treasure box.”
Kit ran into a laundry room as if she knew exactly where to look and came back with two garden spades. She sat them down by the back door and took off her backpack.
While Baylee started digging around in the pantry for peanut butter, Kit poked her head down into one of several sacks of groceries sitting out on the counter.
“Boy, you are so lucky, Baylee. Tanya thinks of everything. Look at all this food she had delivered already. Come on Quinn, don’t just stand there. Find the fresh loaf of bread and anything else that looks good enough to take with us.”
Kit emptied her backpack to make room for some of the supplies, including the garden trowels for digging. Quinn dutifully dug into the bags and began pulling out various items. When she got to the Oreos, Kit swooped in and jerked them out of her hand. “Good find,” she yelled as she crammed them down into her own pack.
When Quinn pulled out a bag of M & M’s, Kit did a little happy dance. “I’ll carry these, too. See what else you can find in those sacks to snack on.”
After throwing together peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and stuffing them into plastic baggies, Baylee stood at the counter going through an assortment of apples.
When Kit saw what she was doing, she grabbed Quinn’s arm, yanking her through the back door and headed down to the water’s edge all the while yelling at Baylee. “Leave the stupid fruit. We have a bag of M & M’s so there’s no more room in my pack for apples anyway.”
Baylee shook her head. “But Tanya says we should eat fruit at least once a day.”
“How many times do I have to tell you that’s regular days? That’s for when we’re back at home. This is spring break, where you throw out all the rules and do what you want.” Looking for an ally, she turned to Quinn. “Right?”
“Sounds good to me.”
Baylee harrumphed out in frustration, took off after her friends, stuffing three apples down into her own backpack for good measure.
“Look at how clear that water is,” Kit stressed to Quinn. “Where else can you see so many bright orange fish swimming around in the ocean? Those are called garibaldi damselfish. The baby ones have blue spots. Wait until you get in the water, go snorkeling, get up on a board for the first time. We should go swimming,” she announced after finally managing to take a breath.
For someone who didn’t say a whole lot in class, Quinn thought Kit sure made up for it outside of school. When she wasn’t around adults the girl became a chatty Cathy that refused to shut up.
“I told you before I came that I don’t like the water,” Quinn reminded her.
“We’ll fix that,” Kit gushed as she traipsed off in the direction of the campground. “Now let’s go dig up our treasure.”
She took off leaving Baylee to explain to the newcomer about their cache.
“It’s an old metal box my dad used for fishing lures before he got a new one. It’s full of stuff we found all over the campgrounds, stuff no one else wanted.”
“Like what?” Quinn asked.
“Like a bracelet made out of plastic beads and a mood ring and one gold earring. We find a lot of jewelry. ’Course it’s usually junk stuff. And last summer we found a couple of shark teeth and some fossils. Then there are all the cool shells we pick up.”
From up ahead, Kit concluded, “Sure it’s junk, but it’s ours. We found it and no one knows about it but us. That makes it special. It used to belong to just me and Baylee, but we’ll share our treasure with you, Quinn.”
“Why?” Quinn wanted to know. No one had ever shared anything with her before. There had to be a catch.
“Because we’re pals now,” Kit revealed while she ran back toward Quinn and slung an arm companionably around her shorter friend’s shoulder. She left it there while they hiked into the hillside away from the beach, pointing out each time she recognized a familiar shrub or flower along the way like a helpful tour guide.
Quinn didn’t have the heart to tell her she got half the native shrubs wrong. Quinn might not have spent any real time in the wilds before today, certainly not enough to know the Island the way Kit and Baylee did, but she had asked Mrs. O’Malley all about Catalina. The teacher had picked out three books for Quinn to read before making the trip.
Kit didn’t seem to have any idea what manzanita looked like. And it was all over the place. But just when she had decided to set her straight, Kit changed subjects entirely and started talking about an old shipwreck off Ballast Point.
By the time they passed a ranger station, tromped the length of the camping area before coming to a small clearing, they were all sweaty and the only one who still seemed excited about the trek was Kit.
But as if recognizing the glade, both Kit and Baylee dropped to their knees while Kit pulled out the trowels from her backpack.
The two began digging in the dirt near a grove of fern and lupine.
Woots and shouts went up the minute the spades connected with metal. After that, uncovering the infamous battered green tin box became a mission. Lifting it out of the hole, Kit unlatched the metal lock and flipp
ed open the lid.
Like Indiana Jones showing off his loot, Kit proudly displayed a plethora of shells, a mismatched assortment of rhinestone jewelry, fossils that resembled seaweed imprints, and an array of oddly-shaped small pieces of driftwood they’d found washed up on the beach.
“It’s still here. Now we just have to find a better place to bury it.” With that, Quinn watched as they took off to scout the immediate campsites.
Quinn didn’t understand why they had needed to dig up the box, let alone re-bury it, but she trudged after them anyway until Kit spotted an ancient ironwood tree about twenty feet in height laden down with new white blossoms and long, scalloped tooth-like leaves shooting out abundant with spring growth.
Kit took out her trowel again and dropped to her knees. At its narrow base, she began to brush away twigs along with the reddish cinnamon bark collected there so she could get her shovel in the dirt.
The three of them watched as a family of red squirrels scattered up the trunk of the tree in retreat. Kit took their flight in stride and announced, “See, this is a better spot. Come summer, we’ll remember it here because by the time we make it back the babies will be a lot bigger. I bet they make their home in this tree year round. When we come back this summer, all we have to do is look for that same family of squirrels and this tree.”
Baylee shook her head. “They won’t still be at the same tree, Kit.”
“Sure they will. Where else they gonna go?” Kit reasoned.
Instead of arguing the point, Baylee grumbled, “You sure get bossy when you get away from Alana.”
“Shhh, do me a favor, for the next week, don’t mention her name. I don’t want to think about that woman again until we go back Sunday night. Okay?”
Leaving Sunday night? Quinn didn’t want to spend her precious time thinking about going back to Ella or Ross. Not now when they’d only just arrived. From what little she knew about Kit’s mother, the woman sounded too much like Ella, mean-spirited with a foul mouth.
Not as willing as Kit to get dirty, Baylee gingerly sat down on the ground. Then as if she’d just thought of something, she handed her trusty trowel off to Quinn. “Here, you can use mine to help Kit with the hole. I’ll use that flat stick over there.”
Feeling for the first time like she’d truly been included and given some way to contribute in sharing the treasure box, Quinn got into the spirit of the moment and did her part to dig.
But when she caught sight of a fat reddish, brown bird, she stopped long enough to point it out. “Look at that, a partridge! See it searching for twigs to eat.”
“As in partridge and a pear tree?” Kit questioned, turning to study the squatty fowl as it pecked the ground for roots and whatever bark it could find.
“Yep. They’re also known as grouse.”
“It looks like a chicken,” Baylee noted.
“It’s in the chicken family,” Quinn stated. “But it’s an omnivore.”
Kit rolled her eyes and hoped Baylee didn’t ask what that was. It seemed as though everyone knew a lot more about stuff than she did. But this wasn’t school and she wasn’t in the mood to listen to a lecture about some stupid bird. She dug harder in the dirt.
After working the hole bigger, Kit adjusted the box down inside and the three of them got busy covering it back up again.
As soon as she was satisfied with the work, Kit stood up and announced, “Your dad should be back with the food by now. Anyone else hungry besides me?”
“You just ate a sandwich on the way here,” Baylee declared. But realizing Kit didn’t get all that much to eat at home because Alana usually kept her on a strict diet so she wouldn’t get fat, she sighed. “Okay, fine, let’s head back then.”
“I could eat,” Quinn offered amicably. With so much food around, she never seemed to get her fill, either.
Huffing out a breath, Baylee grumbled to Kit, “I thought you wanted to go swimming.”
“Later,” Kit muttered as she led the way, long legs striding back down the hill and out of the grove of trees and back to the house. “Maybe your dad ordered us a pizza.”
But when they got back they learned Mr. Scott had brought them giant, juicy hamburgers and skinny French fries instead from a little take-out joint in downtown Avalon.
The man had also managed to remain stone-cold sober during the meal and had even carried on a conversation about what they’d done and seen in the few hours since they’d arrived.
After stuffing their faces, the three girls recovered from chowing down on the big supper by going back outside. The three of them got comfortable near the water, stretching out on the beach towels Baylee had insisted they bring.
Staring up at the night sky, gazing up at the sky full of stars overhead, the three girls were grubby and sweaty from the shortcut they’d taken earlier down the side of a hill on their way back, where they had come upon a herd of bison, live, honest-to-goodness buffalo.
Okay, so maybe the creatures had smelled really bad and the smell had almost made Baylee throw up, but they were still real animals, not just lame pictures in a book. To Quinn, who cared about how badly they smelled?
“You should be glad you’re Native American, proud of it, you know. That’s a heritage not everyone can brag about. And with all that black hair, you’re really cool looking. You look kinda like Cher,” Kit told her as she patted her stomach and stared out over the calm waters of Avalon Bay.
“Yeah, it’s kind of boring to have stupid ol’ blonde hair all the time. I wish mine was black and straight like yours,” Baylee admitted. “Tanya says I should be grateful for having curls, but I hate them. They make me look dorky. I want straight hair like you and Kit.”
Quinn blinked in astonishment. No one had ever thought she was particularly attractive, certainly not cool-looking. In fact, most places where Ella had dragged her, people had often stared at both of them like they were little more than trailer trash. Now, she not only had these two for friends, they thought her Native American heritage made her look like a celebrity.
While the boom box played a dreamy Michael Bolton tune in the background, Baylee confessed, “I love his voice.”
“I love his hair.” Kit admitted. “He’s so good-looking.”
“You want to marry him,” Baylee accused.
“Sure, like he’d ever want to marry a kid.”
“I’m never getting married,” Quinn announced. “Adults are stupid for ever going all ape over each other anyway and for ever getting married in the first place.”
“Yeah, I’m never doing that either. Ever,” Baylee tossed in. She thought about her no-good mother who had up and left her so she could run off to be with her lover. The adults didn’t think she listened to them, but that’s what her dad kept crying about every time he got drunk, which was almost all of the time. “Adults are mean every time they open their mouths anyway.”
When the song changed from Bolton to Bonnie Raitt’s guitar riff for “Love’s Sneakin’ Up On You,” Quinn confessed, “I’m going to play guitar like that when I grow up. She plays better than those stupid, male rock stars. She’s talented and I bet nobody tells her what to do, either.”
“Sure they do,” Baylee declared. “She’s got managers and producers, even a director for her videos and all sorts of other people in the background telling her what to do every single day.”
That assessment made Quinn think of her father, who was supposed to be some stupid famous singer in a band. But since she had yet to lay eyes on the guy, she doubted the whole story was even true. More than likely, Ella had made the whole thing up. But then if that were the case how had she and Ella come to be living with his record producer in the biggest house she’d ever seen?
She sighed; sometimes she didn’t know what to think about Ella’s story. “But that’s just part of having a successful singing career. I’m going to have a career when I grow up and no one is telling me what to do or bossing me around.”
That sounded pretty good to Ki
t, too. “Do you think we’ll ever grow up and be like the boss of ourselves where no adult can…?” She’d almost said hurt us, but at the last minute changed it to, “…tell us what to do?”
“Sure. We could live together in our own house, not ever get married to anybody, and do whatever we wanted. Be independent women.”
“Well, we’d have to get jobs. I’m going to be an actress and my dad will direct me in the movies. Quinn’s going to sing and play guitar. What’re you going to do, Kit?”
Kit thought long and hard to come up with something Alana didn’t allow her to do. Because the list was really long it took her some time to come up with an answer. But sports seemed to upset Alana the most, so she went with that. “I’m going to play volleyball.”
“You can’t play volleyball for a living,” Baylee stated flatly.
“Sure you can,” Quinn reasoned. “Kit could be the best damned volleyball player in the history of volleyball.”
Kit beamed at her. “That’s right, I’ll be legendary” She flexed her biceps. “I’m good at spiking the ball. People will talk about me all over the world wherever I go.”
But Baylee didn’t think Alana would be too happy about that career choice. “You could paint. I know you love that.” It sounded better than volleyball to Baylee. Little worrywart she was, she thought on it for a bit and then cautioned, “If you play volleyball you’ll be outside a lot. You could get skin cancer spending all that time in the sun.”
“Geez, Baylee, you’re just full of goodwill and cheer tonight.”
“It’s true. Tonya read about it in a magazine. Getting too much sun without wearing sunscreen causes something called mel-a-mo-ma. If you get too much, you could die.”
“It’s pronounced melanoma,” Quinn corrected, risking the fact that these two might make fun of her for being so nerdy. Ella had always made fun of the fact that she liked to read, especially when the subject material was about something as adult as cancer. Plus, that very week, she’d watched a segment on the morning show on TV about that very topic.
“Well, whatever it’s called, it’s seriously bad news. We should always put on sunscreen when we go outside, even if it’s just for a little while. We’ll start tomorrow when we go surfing and swimming.”
Ending Evil (The Evil Secrets Trilogy Book 3) Page 14
