Summer of Lost and Found
Page 13
I peeked one eye open. Lila had stopped again, listening. Slowly, she raised the hand holding the book. She fumbled to stuff it into the tote bag slung across her shoulder, her gaze never breaking from the bush in which I was hidden. She grabbed hold of Sir Walter’s collar and paused again. Did she see me? Could she hear me, struggling not to hyperventilate? Was part of my shorts showing through the brush, or was the metal detector glinting in the midday sun?
It felt like years passed in those moments until Sir Walter started whining at Lila and she grudgingly let go of his collar. And then he dashed—or as close to dashed as a slightly overweight old dog can do—across the yard, on a beeline to me.
Frantically, I tried to slither farther into the bushes. I couldn’t squirm away faster than Sir Walter could speed-lumber, and soon enough his wet nose was pushed up into my muddy, scratched hand. “Not now, good sir!” I hissed. “You’re blowing my cover!” He panted happily at me. I’m sure if I could’ve seen his butt, which was still outside of the bushes, I’d have seen his tail wagging with joy.
I heard Lila running across the yard. In seconds, I would be caught. And then, a miracle in the form of a squeaky frog toy. My elbow found it, actually, pressing down hard enough that the resulting squeak made both me and Sir Walter startle. Lightning fast, I snatched the frog and gave it a more powerful squeeze before chucking it out of the bushes. It arced across the yard, and Sir Walter speed-lumbered after it. From within the bushes, I saw him almost knock Lila over like a bowling pin.
“Your froggy!” Lila exclaimed. “You finally found it, good sir!” Sir Walter proudly ran circles around Lila, squeaking frog clamped in his grin. The trespasser in the bushes was forgotten, for now. I watched through the brambles as Lila petted him. After what felt like an eternity, she stood up, taking the toy from Sir Walter’s mouth. She tossed it to the front door, and after one final glance in my direction, headed after dog and toy. She was even caterwauling again. Now I could totally understand why her audition had gone so poorly.
I didn’t shift, not even to swat at the flies and mosquitoes having a party on my bare arms and legs. I let the trickle of blood from a scratch drip down my thigh. I held my breath, waiting for Lila to disappear inside the house. By some miracle, maybe just maybe, I was going to be able to escape her.
Finally, Lila reached her green front door, pulled a key from her pocket, and slipped inside with Sir Walter. The screen bounced back open from the impact of her slamming shut the heavy inside door, and then everything in the yard was still again.
I wanted to collapse onto the dirt below me as all the adrenaline flooded out of my body. I knew, though, that if I did Lila might come bustling out of her house the minute I eventually picked myself up to leave. I had a small window of opportunity now—those minutes when you first get home, when you’re preoccupied with checking the mail or pouring a glass of water from the pitcher in the fridge. That’s not the time when you stand at the window and watch your yard for trespassers and thieves. (Or stand in the hallway and watch through the peephole, for city dwellers like me.) So I clutched the metal detector with one hand and pushed up from my crouch with the other. My legs burned from squatting for so long, and I got the world’s worst head rush. That plus the heat was almost enough to make me pass out. As soon as the edges of my vision stopped twinkling, I scrambled through the scratchy bushes and ran along their perimeter to the road. I never glanced back, not wanting to slow myself down and being afraid that the act of looking would somehow make Lila catch me.
At the cottage, I hid the detector under my bed and recovered by making lunch. Mom had totally relaxed her grocery-shopping rules for this trip, possibly in another attempt to avoid conflict, and so our cupboards had stuff like marshmallow fluff and sugar cereal. As I chewed my fluff-and-puffs sandwich, I checked my phone to see if Dad had left another message, but it only showed a missed call. I sat and watched the cat clock on the kitchen wall tick-tock in time with the moving tail while I tried to work up the nerve to call him back. I hadn’t talked to Dad in so long, and my current feelings toward him had been colored by worry and hurt. I didn’t know whether I wanted to—or could be—happy and excited if I finally reached him. Maybe I’d still be mad and confused. What had he quoted in his last message? “The approaching tide will shortly fill the reasonable shores that now lie foul and muddy.” Maybe I didn’t want to clear things up. Finally, I dialed his number and waited. The phone rang four times before I was sent to voice mail.
I shoved my phone across the table and put my head down on the surface for a few minutes. Ambrose understands how this feels, I thought. If nothing else this summer, I’d found someone who made me feel a little less alone. I wasn’t the only kid whose father had wandered off. Whether temporarily or permanently—who knew.
As murky as the situation with my parents was, at least it felt like the truth about the colony had a chance of becoming clearer. The stakes felt really high now—with us leaving soon, and more construction signs popping up along the road to the Grandmother Vine. I decided to do a little last-minute research on how to check the shoreline for clues. Leaving my bike at home, I hurried down the quiet Manteo streets toward the bookstore. A sleepy Sir Walter wasn’t waiting on the porch as I walked up the steps, but I knew that already: Lila had made her visit for the day, while I’d pilfered her metal detector. I shook off the wave of guilt I felt, reminding myself that I was borrowing it, and breezed inside the store.
“Can I help you, sweetheart?” Renée asked, pausing her dusting work behind the counter.
“Yes, actually. I’m looking for books on how to search for stuff underwater.”
“Stuff like what? Shells?”
“No, artifacts.”
That didn’t seem to faze Renée. “Oh, you mean from shipwrecks?”
I tipped my head back and forth in a sorta motion. “More like stuff people lost—or left behind.”
“The explorers. Or pirates?” Renée’s eyes lit up when she mentioned pirates. I realized right then that there were an awful lot of pirate knickknacks behind the counter: a ship in a bottle; a clock with Blackbeard’s face as the face; an impressively realistic stuffed parrot wearing a mini hat. I guess pirates were Renée’s thing, like cows were Mrs. Kim’s. Her apartment is full of cow stuff, right down to her Holstein welcome mat.
“Like the colonists. Is there a how-to book for finding artifacts in sand or shallow water? Or a manual?” I pressed my lips together as I thought hard. “Maybe a book on maritime archaeology.”
“Believe it or not, a good person to ask is right behind you,” Renée said.
I expected to see Lila’s dad, or maybe a dive captain, when I turned. Or even the potbellied metal-detector guy Mom and I had seen on our beach day. They would all be “good people” to ask. I did not expect to see Lila Midgett, tanned arms crossed against her chest, glowering at me.
“Hi, Nell,” she spat. “Let’s take this outside and I can fill you in.” She linked my arm with hers, then steered me out the door. I looked helplessly back at Renée, begging with my eyes: No! Hand-sell me a book or something! Don’t let Lila drag me out of the store. I should’ve planted my feet on the area rug in front of the counter and refused to move. But I didn’t want to make a scene, and it was embarrassing to show Renée that in the short time I’d been in Manteo I’d managed to turn a frenemy into my first-ever enemy. Renée, oblivious to my plight, smiled and waved at us, going back to dusting off her pirate tchotchkes.
Outside, Lila didn’t let go of my arm. “You’re still poking around in this stuff! Unbelievable. No, inconceivable!”
The shock of seeing her wore off. “Lila, you’re not the boss of me.” I wrenched my arm free and took a few steps back. “So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going back into the store to read. It’s a free country.” I pulled open the screen door and pressed the handle of the heavy wooden one.
“It won’t be so free if I tell my dad that you were trying to steal an artifact.”
“I bet I could tell him about our metal detector, though.”
Picturing it hiding under my bed at the cottage, I felt like I was going to be sick. Had she seen me running through the yard with it? I imagined Lila standing at the window of her house, watching as I raced away, and I cringed. Try to play it cool, Nell. Reading all the mystery books that Dad has lying around the apartment has taught me that the bad guys are often caught when they accidentally implicate themselves during questioning. No matter what, I couldn’t admit I’d taken it. “What metal detector?”
“Don’t play dumb. You know exactly what I’m talking about.” Lila leaned forward, like the prosecutors always do during the dramatic courtroom scene. Lila was good. I bet she read those kinds of books too. “You found an even better way to spite me—steal my stuff to do your totally amateur investigation, right?”
“I honestly don’t know what you’re referring to.” I smoothed a piece of hair off my forehead. “You lost your metal detector or something? That’s what this is all about?” My head throbbed. I could almost hear a telltale blip-blip-blipping from beneath my bed, all the way at the store.
Lila stamped her foot. “It’s missing from our garage. I went out to get something an hour ago, and it was gone. I saw footprints, too. And when I was coming home, I heard a phone ring—from over near the bushes. Right before Sir Walter went nutso in them.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “You were out there hiding.”
The most genius idea ever hit me. “What did the phone sound like?” I asked innocently.
“A bunch of horns tooting.” She added, “It was really annoying.”
“Call me.” I pulled out my phone. “Call my number right now and see what happens when my phone rings.”
Lila watched me carefully as she pulled her scratched-up flip phone out of her bag. “Don’t touch anything on yours.”
“I won’t.” I even set my phone on the arm of the rocking chair and raised my hands like people do when the police ask them to drop their weapons.
I told Lila my number, and she dialed it. A few seconds later, my phone rang. The noise it made was ducks quacking loudly. They woke up Sir Walter, who had been snoozing on the steps. Confused, he barked and stared up at Lila. When he saw me, he got that doggy grin on his face again and shuffled over to flop down on my feet.
“That’s not exactly fanfare, is it?” I crossed my fingers on my right hand and my left toes, too, hoping that she wouldn’t think of the ability to assign different ringtones for different people. Didn’t her parents and even Renée strongly suggest that Lila doesn’t have a ton of friends? If I only called a couple of people regularly, I wouldn’t bother to assign different rings.
“I guess . . . it wasn’t your phone.” She gazed slightly beyond me, like she was concentrating very hard on how to match up these puzzle pieces: me giving off a guilty vibe, her metal detector mysteriously disappearing, but her only (and largely circumstantial) clue failing to tie me to the crime. Even Sir Walter’s enthusiastic trip to the bushes could be explained by his long-lost froggy. Lila looked back at me and blinked. “Although I’m not convinced it wasn’t you.”
I shrugged, trying not to let my relief show. If she couldn’t pin the theft on me, then she couldn’t use it to prevent Ambrose and me from going searching tomorrow.
“You better be careful, though. I’m still watching you.”
“Isn’t that taking away from your precious time to hunt ghosts and find the colony?” I pointed out. “You’re just mad that I might solve the mystery first.”
Lila made an exasperated noise and angrily untied Sir Walter’s leash from the railing. “You’re absolutely right, for once. I don’t have time for you. Construction for the Elizabethan Links is going to start in a matter of weeks and who knows how that will upset the paranormal hot spots on this island.” She tugged Sir Walter up from the ground, then stomped away.
I watched her turn the corner, feeling an uncomfortable mix of frustration and guilt. I wanted to go back inside the bookstore, but I didn’t want to risk another run-in with Lila if she came back. Instead, I shuffled home.
• • •
We turned on the news after dinner, to hear the weather report. “Some pretty gnarly weather heading into the weekend,” the meteorologist said. Mom laughed at his surfer lingo. “ ‘Gnarly’? Didn’t that go out with Gidget?” I had no idea what she was talking about, so I just shook my head no. The weatherman went on about how a front from the west was going to meet with the tropical system or something, and push high winds and rain toward the Outer Banks.
“This weekend won’t be a good time for a trip over to Nags Head to hike on those dunes. It’s too bad,” Mom said. “They’re incredibly tall, like mountains of white sand—but not safe when there’s a chance of lightning. Have I told you about dune vegetation?”
“Hmm,” I said, trying to concentrate on what the weather guy was saying. I might’ve missed part, but I definitely heard him say that the bad weather would intensify Friday night. That was good. If Ambrose and I were off the water by midafternoon, which we would need to be, anyway, based on what time my mom usually came home, then we should be fine.
I stayed up late, working on an epic e-mail to my dad with everything I’d learned so far. I hinted that tomorrow I might have even more juicy stuff for him to write about. Am I getting my hopes up too much? I wondered what two kids with barely any equipment could possibly find. Then again, we had already found the flask, using just my big toe.
When I finally clicked off the light at midnight, I tossed and turned. Partly, it was the good kind of nerves. I don’t know what made me more excited: possibly finding the long-buried secrets of the lost colony, or spending a day out on the water with Ambrose. Wait until I told Jade about that. I hadn’t heard from her since she sent me a picture of her and Sofia hugging in their zookeeper gear, and she hadn’t replied to my last text, which bugged me.
But truthfully, I had been having a hard time sleeping ever since the night the flask went missing. Even though I was positive that Lila took it during dinner, I couldn’t forget that uncanny feeling of being watched in my dark room, the sense that someone or something was in the small, quiet space with me. I had debated buying a night-light at the Festival Park’s souvenir shop, in case I ever got that sensation again, but ultimately that felt too childish. I still kept the flashlight in bed with me, curling my arm around it as I slept.
Once I finally fell asleep, I had more weird dreams. I was on the water with Ambrose, in a big old-fashioned boat, kind of like the Elizabeth II at the Festival Park. We ran across the wet deck, trying to find someone in between getting splashed by big, salty waves. Finally, I rounded a corner and saw the person we’d been looking for: Ambrose’s dad. He was wearing reenactor clothes, like Ambrose and his mom—that’s how I knew it was him. I pulled on his shoulder to make him turn and face us. But when he did, it wasn’t Ambrose’s father anymore. It was my dad. Feeling confused and relieved at the same time, I woke up.
The clock on my bedside table read 3:17 a.m. I rolled over and put my pillow over my head to block out the moonlight coming in through my curtains. I counted back from one hundred to fall asleep, like I used to do when I was little. It took at least three rounds before I conked out. The last thing I remembered thinking before I succumbed was that everything would be okay if we found something this summer. But in my half-asleep state, I mixed up “something” with “someone.”
CHAPTER TEN
My mom came into my room at seven thirty a.m. to give me a quick kiss good-bye. I had set my phone to wake me up at the crack of dawn, and I’d very quietly gotten dressed and packed a bag while listening to Mom moving around the kitchen and prep
aring to leave. When I heard her padding down the hall to my room, I jumped back into bed and pulled the comforter up to my neck so she wouldn’t see that I’d been awake. She’d know that I was up to something if she saw me up so early.
“You’re on your own until dinnertime. I’m touring a winery on the mainland—they’re showing me the scuppernong fermentation process. It’s going to take a few hours, and then I need to finish my field notes at the vine.” She smoothed my hair back from my forehead. “Are you feeling okay? You’re awfully bundled up in here. It’s warm out, you know. I hope you’re not coming down with something.”
It was already toasty in my room. I let one of my bare arms slide out from under my covers. “I’m fine. I just felt like snuggling in this morning.”
Mom glanced out the window. There was one patch of blue in the sky, the rest overtaken by thick clouds the color of milky tea. “It is a gloomy, stay-in-bed day. But if you venture out, remember—you need to give me a call if you’re leaving the cottage.”
I nodded. “Have fun with the tour.”
She stopped in the doorway. The way she stood reminded me of how Sir Walter’s ears pricked up at Fort Raleigh, when he was barking at some unseen thing in the woods. My mom could sense that something was up. “Sure you don’t want to come with me? The fermentation process is pretty interesting. You see, the sugar in the scuppernong grapes—”
“Mom,” I interrupted. “No offense, but grapes and vines are your things, not mine. I’ll be fine hanging out here today. Reading in the garden.”
She smiled at me, and I felt a twinge of guilt for lying. Telling her that I planned to spend the day reading was a flat-out lie, not even a little white one. “If you say so. Bye, sprout.”