I hopped on my bike, happy to be leaving the fort. The canopy of trees offered welcome shade, but I shivered in the gloom. This was not how I expected today to go: Ambrose abandoning me, Lila catching me and then blackmailing me. Is it blackmail if you were doing something wrong? In any case, it was enough to make me want to close my eyes, click my heels, and find myself back on a New York City subway, heading home to my apartment and my real friend Jade. And hopefully my dad, too.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Something wrong, Nell?” Mom eyed me slyly from the side, one hand on the wheel and the other reaching for her iced coffee in the cup holder. “You’re awfully quiet.” I frowned and sank deeper into my uncomfortable seat. Jeeps might be cool, but they aren’t especially comfy. Every bump on the road felt like it would leave a bruise. “And perhaps a smidge sullen,” she added.
“It’s nothing.” I pulled my sunglasses out of my bag and popped them on my face. Despite a sympathetic phone call with Jade, a full night’s sleep, a delicious breakfast (Mom made cinnamon rolls—something about this cottage was making her more domestic than she has ever been before, cooking and baking and even buying a cross-stitch kit at a shop on Budleigh Street), and the beautiful sunshiny weather, I was in a foul mood.
“Ah, the sunglasses treatment. So you really don’t want to talk about it.”
My instinct was to roll my eyes, but halfway through I realized Mom couldn’t see that behind the oversize frames.
“Have you talked to Dad lately?” she asked, her voice a little softer.
I pulled off the sunglasses. “No. What’s going on? Have you? Where is he now?”
Mom sighed. “I didn’t say that to upset you, but I’m guessing the barrage of questions means you already are. Yes, I did talk to him.” She took another sip of her coffee and cleared her throat. “Briefly. He said he tried to call you.”
That was true. I’d missed a call while I was at Fort Raleigh—although I never felt my phone buzz in my bag. Once I had gotten back to the cottage, I’d seen that I had a new voice mail. Hi, Nelly. Thanks for keeping me up-to-date on your and your mom’s goings-on. Here’s my quote for you: “The approaching tide will shortly fill the reasonable shores that now lie foul and muddy.” From The Tempest, again. That one has a lot to unpack, but basically: Think about a tide of reason washing away what makes the shore muddy—or hard to understand. You’re thinking a lot about mysteries these days, big ones and small ones, and trying to solve them. Anyway, well, um . . . I’m sorry I’m not there with you right now. London’s great, and I can’t wait to tell you all about it. We’ll talk soon, and I promise I’ll help unmuddy the shores. Love you lots. Dad. He always says “Dad” at the end of a message, too—like I’m not going to recognize my own father’s voice or phone number. Although maybe right now that fear is a little more valid than it used to be.
I’d almost deleted the voice mail as soon as I listened to it because I was angry. I wanted an answer to the simplest of questions: Why? Why did he abandon ship the week before Mom and I left? Why did he leave the country without first telling his kid? If he was so sorry, why didn’t he just get on a plane and come join us? It was his fault, after all, that I was on a “muddy shore” in the first place. I felt angry with Mom, too, for being so vague, and trying to seem unworried. This was something to freak out about!
“Nell?” I jolted back to the present. Mom was no longer eyeing me from the side but turning her whole head to look at me, then snapping it back to watch her driving. With a lot of tourists on the road, that was not the best idea. “Sprout, are you upset?” It wasn’t a question, the way she phrased it.
“I guess so,” I said. “Not just about Dad or whatever.” Ambrose, my untrustworthy pseudo-friend. “I think I’m kind of homesick.” It wasn’t an untrue statement. When I’d talked to Jade the night before, I could hear Sofia giggling in the background the whole time. Hearing about their sleepovers put a pit in my stomach. I felt kind of like my life was a snow globe that someone had shaken up really, really hard. Only it wasn’t raining glitter flakes on me, that’s for sure.
Mom reached over to ruffle my hair. “The good news, along those lines, is that we only need another week or so here. I’m almost done with field research, and Luke Midgett can help me if I realize I forgot something after we head back.”
A little less than two weeks ago, I would’ve wanted to be on the next flight out of Norfolk. Heck, I’d even have been willing to travel home on one of those rickety First Flight airplanes from Kitty Hawk. But now . . . I needed to know what had happened on Roanoke. The mystery had even wound its way into my subconscious. The night before, I’d dreamt that I wandered into the lost colony’s village on my way home from the fudge-and-ice-cream shop. The sad-faced colonists begged me to stay. “Don’t give up on us,” a woman pleaded. I can’t remember her face, but she seemed familiar somehow. I woke with a start, worried for all those lost people. I wanted them to be found. But without Ambrose, would I even keep searching the island?
“Nell?”
There was another reason why I was hesitant about going home, as much as I missed it. “Is Dad planning on being there when we get back?”
Mom was silent for long enough for me to know that she was weighing out some part of her answer. “I don’t know, sprout. Maybe. We’ll see.” We’ll see. Historically, that has been Mom-speak for no, or I don’t really want to get into this complicated thing right now, so I will be super vague in my answer.
We rode in silence the rest of the way to the vine. Mom turned on the radio to cover up my pouting and her frustration. Thank goodness for car radios. Whoever designed them must’ve understood a lot about family dynamics.
Once we got to the Grandmother Vine, I helped my mom collect samples for testing. She and Lila’s dad had found some evidence that people had cared for the vine in the past. The only thing was, nobody on the island had been crashing around the woods to prune or fertilize it for the past couple of decades. The fact that it was thriving now, after a few bad drought years and a hurricane, too, was a mystery. (Considering all the deer poop scattered around the forest floor, I wondered if scat might be the secret to the vine’s success.) As Mom took notes and prepared clippings, I carefully labeled her soil samples and also helped transcribe an interview she’d done with Lila’s dad. He said that the colonists used fruit from the scuppernongs to make fermented beverages. With a sigh, I thought of the flask Ambrose and I had found, and lost.
Mom wouldn’t stop pestering me about it, so I finally tried one of the enormous grapes—after dumping half the contents of my water bottle over it to make sure it wasn’t dirty. The fruit was sweeter than I’d expected, but very pulpy. I savored it, imagining people four hundred years ago eating from the same plant.
After lunch, Mom didn’t have any more tasks for me, so I tightened my hiking sandals, slapped on some bug spray, and headed into the woods. There wasn’t a path, so I clomped through the underbrush without a plan. Even my hiking sandals weren’t exactly great for the conditions—I stepped in a wet, marshy patch of mud at one point and it splattered all over my toes. I had to be careful of the sticks and twigs along the ground to make sure I didn’t stab my feet through the sandals’ loose netting. It was also hard to tread softly, which I was trying to do. I wanted to be stealthy so I could see one of the deer again, maybe that same buck. Or the ghostly white doe Lila mentioned people seeing. But with all the crashing and crackling noises I made, there was little chance of me surprising anything in the forest, no matter how deep I got. At least I’ll scare away any alligators, I thought.
I didn’t want to wander so far that I got lost and worried Mom, so I pulled out my phone to use its compass. It was fun to walk around the woods alone. Even deep in the Ramble of Central Park, you always come across other people. Not that I’m ever allowed to wander in there by myself. The freedom to explore the Roanoke woods was thrilling. The quiet was like nothing I’d ever experienced in the city. It wasn’t silent; the hum
of nature meant there were as many sounds as I was used to hearing on Columbus Avenue. Just different. The wind moving branches, insects chirping, distant and surprisingly near birdcalls. If I closed my eyes and listened to it all at once, it was like a symphony.
The longer I listened to my surroundings, the more I started to hear things. Things that almost sounded like low voices, whispers, words. The air moving through the trees, probably. I got that watched feeling again, like when the deer was near me. But it was stronger, so much so that the beginnings of a nervous tickle formed in my throat. I peeked one eye open, and then the other. I looked around me slowly. Nothing. But the hairs on my arms were standing up, and I felt tense. Surrounding me were old-growth trees, tall and strong. I was dwarfed by them, a tiny thing alone in the big woods.
Or was I alone?
I glanced at my phone’s screen. The compass, which had been pointing due north, was spinning. Not quite wildly, but in fast and steady circles despite my holding the phone absolutely still. “What the,” I murmured. It had to be some kind of glitch. I closed out of the compass app, then reopened it. Same thing, spinning round and round and round. My phone didn’t have any bars, either, and the clock had been displaying 12:43 p.m. for way longer than a minute. One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi. I counted all the way to sixty Mississippis, but the numbers didn’t budge.
The battery must’ve died. Or my phone got a virus or something. But the whole no-longer-having-a-compass thing was a big problem, because I wasn’t sure which way I’d walked in the woods. Give me the NYC subway system and I could make my way anywhere. But tracking my way out of the forest using broken twigs and smushed leaves and lacelike patterns of afternoon sunshine through the trees as clues? Forget it. I wiped the sweat from my face and ran in my best guess of the direction I’d come. Did I walk past that gnarled tree before? Maybe?
The only sound I heard was my heart thumping, at a pace slightly below mild panic, and my ragged breathing as I stepped over rocks and tree roots. I tried not to think of the episodes of that survival show Dad and I used to watch all the time, the one about people who got trapped unexpectedly in nature and beat the odds to survive. He said it was good fodder for his writing because the episodes were always so tense. I could almost hear the narrator telling the audience my situation: Nell was just going to take a walk in the peaceful woods. But when her compass stops working, she finds herself hopelessly lost, with no way to get home. Nell struggles to survive, eating grubs and drinking rainwater collected on slimy leaves. But will she—
“Hey-ho, Nell! Is that you?”
Startled, I spun around. Ambrose dashed through the trees toward me. Whether he was coming from the road or somewhere deeper in the woods, I had no idea. After all, I was completely and utterly lost. Part of me was relieved to see him—I wasn’t alone, and judging by the lightning speed with which he ran through the forest, he probably knew his way out of here. Nobody would narrate a TV show about my demise. Plus, this meant I couldn’t have gotten that far from civilization, if another person was around. Running into someone I knew in the woods showed me that, strangely enough, this place wasn’t that different from Central Park, after all.
Still, the other part of me continued to be livid about Fort Raleigh, the ring, and Lila. So what if Ambrose saved me by finding me here? I didn’t want his stupid help. I’d rather get eaten alive by mosquitoes than accept a favor from Ambrose, my traitor.
I ignored him and kept crashing along in the same direction, faster than before. Mud streaked up past my ankles, I almost impaled a toe on a twig, and perhaps mosquitoes are attracted to fuming girls because I swear there were more buzzing around my ears than ever before in my life. And my cabin at summer camp had holes in all the screens.
“Where in the world are you headed? Stay—you’re going straight into the bog.” The bog—that explained the uptick in the bloodsuckers. I kept moving, clenching my fists as I pumped my arms to power myself along. I’ve had it with people leaving me behind. I don’t need another person in my life who walks away when it gets tough or whatever.
“Nell!” Ambrose’s voice was closer, and almost pleading. “Tell me what you are running from!”
I whirled around. Ambrose was close behind me, his hand hovering above my sweaty shoulder. My messenger bag spun on a trajectory out past my hip and almost smacked him, but he dodged at the last second. His face fell from happy to crushed as he studied mine.
“You really don’t know why I might not want to talk to you right now?”
“Aye—no, but why wouldn’t you want help navigating yourself out of these woods? You’re awfully far from the road, and not heading in any sort of direction in which you might care to go.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m taking a walk. The whole point is to be out in nature and wandering. Alone. Anyway—let me enlighten you as to why I’m mad.” I thrust out my hand and started counting the reasons off on my fingers. “One: You totally abandoned me at Fort Raleigh yesterday! You convinced me to try to steal an artifact for you—and yeah, it was an artifact. Not something belonging to your family that’s there by mistake, and I’m not sure why I was dumb enough to believe you in the first place.” I paused for a breath, but when he started to open his mouth to explain himself I launched into my rant again. “Then, while I was in the midst of actually trying to take it for you, you ran off! Leaving me to get caught by Lila, my nemesis and the daughter of the guy in charge of the museum. Do you know how much trouble I could’ve gotten into?” I realized that I’d stopped counting at some point, so I dropped my hand to my hip.
Ambrose opened his mouth to speak again, but I shushed him. “I think you did know how much trouble. If you hadn’t, then you probably wouldn’t have bailed on me. You got to avoid Lila’s wrath, but I didn’t.” I paused, staring at the ground and my muddy feet. Letting out my emotions, even those angry ones, felt excellent. It was like I had released a steam valve of all the bad feelings that had been building up in me for the past day. Now that the worst of my anger had subsided, I peeked at Ambrose’s face. His lower lip and chin were quivering ever so slightly, like he might be trying not to cry. His wide eyes brimmed with disappointment. In himself, maybe? My stomach dropped, with the first, tiniest hint of empathy.
“It’s not a fun feeling, to think that someone—a friend—let you down like that,” I said quietly. I kicked at a rock with my mud-caked right foot. “I was enjoying exploring with you, learning about this place, uncovering its secrets. I still want to know what happened here—I need to know it. Maybe now all that is a lost cause.”
“Oh, Nell. Never give up.” Ambrose’s voice cracked with those words. “What you think is lost may still be found. But I truly didn’t mean to hurt you. Nor see you accused of being a cutpurse. I only thought—that it would be better if they saw you, and not me.”
“Cutpurse”? What does that even mean? Is that some weird British slang? “Do you want a shovel? Because it seems like you’re trying to dig yourself even deeper.” I crossed my arms over my chest. That is actually a comeback my mom used on my dad once. It seemed pretty effective.
“Huh? I’m not digging. . . .” Now he gave me a weird look. “It was too late by the time I heard Lila entering the room. That girl knows you, not me, and so I thought she’d be more understanding if you were alone. You left with such alacrity that I didn’t have a chance of finding you afterward.”
“Alacrity”? Either he meant anger or speed, because I’d stormed away from Fort Raleigh like someone chasing a crosstown bus that skipped their stop. I studied Ambrose’s face to see if he was telling the truth. “You were hiding somewhere outside, waiting for me?” Knowing that made me feel an ounce better. I’d imagined Ambrose traipsing down the road and leaving me there, dangling like a fish on one of Lila’s mom’s hooks. (Actually, she said she uses a trawler, which has big nets.)
He nodded. “But I didn’t follow when you left. She would have seen me. Believe me: I feel terrible about what happened. It is�
�—he paused dramatically—“my bad.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “I guess I believe you.”
“Will you allow me to escort you back to civilization, then? You were lost, right?”
“In my defense, I was using my compass. But once I got into the woods it stopped working. My whole phone did. I have no idea what’s wrong with it.” I pulled it out again and turned it on.
“I’m not missing much after all, not having one of those,” Ambrose said, laughing.
The compass wasn’t acting crazy anymore, but now I didn’t have any bars. “I think it’s coming back to life.” I waved the screen at him, realizing it was the perfect time to snap a picture of Ambrose on the sly. Now that I wasn’t so mad, I could see that he looked awfully cute today. Jade kept bugging me for a photo, ASAP. She’d also said that she and Sofia hadn’t had any luck meeting boys in their tennis lessons, which was a relief.
When Ambrose glanced up at a tree, I held out my phone and snapped. But he moved at the last second, and one of my fingertips was in the way of the lens. The photo was too blurry to be good. Maybe I’d have to work up the nerve to ask if we could take a picture together.
We walked through the woods, which felt peaceful and lovely, like when I’d started walking, and not ominous and creepy like when I’d figured out I was lost. Ambrose could step quietly, while I moved like a herd of wildebeests on the run. “Do you come here a lot? You know how to walk without carving a path of destruction through the forest.”
Ambrose shrugged. “I’m light on my feet, I suppose. Always have been. I do spend a lot of time in the woods.”
“Don’t you ever hang out in town? The bookstore is fun, and the food is delicious. You know, fudge and ice cream and stuff. I suppose you get enough of the tourists, though, at the Festival Park.”
Ambrose nodded. “I don’t mind the visitors. I like to see people—who are happy to have traveled here.”
Summer of Lost and Found Page 11
