Scumble

by Ingrid Law

  Moving away from me, Sarah Jane idly brushed her fingers over other things in the room, stopping in front of a murky glass case next to her father’s desk. She sighed as she stared through the glass.

  Squinting, I moved closer.

  “What’s in there?” I asked.

  “Look for yourself.”

  “What the—whoa!” The sight of a two-headed rattle-snake caught me by surprise. I stepped back, dropping the heavy pyrite cluster on my toe, then hopped quickly to the other side of the room, trying not to react as a rocking chair in the corner fell off both its rockers. It had been stupid of me to come here. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I needed to get Grandma Dollop’s jar and go before I revealed how completely I belonged in Cabot’s exhibit.

  Sarah Jane looked from me to the chair and rolled her eyes to heaven, repeating, “King of Damage,” under her breath.

  “Relax, Ledge. It’s not alive,” she explained, sounding like a bored tour guide as she dissed me, the clumsy tourist. “I don’t think it’s even real. Even so, it’s my father’s favoritest favorite.”

  As I did what I could to right the rocker, Sarah Jane bent to retrieve the glinting chunk of pyrite.

  “Maybe if I were this shiny, I could get some attention too,” she murmured. “I can’t even get Daddy to read my newspapers—no matter how wild I make the stories.”

  I looked away, unsure what to say. The soft tick of the crocodile jaw clock filled the room—the only sound until Sarah Jane sighed a second time and returned the fool’s gold to its proper place.

  “So, what’s up, Ledge? Why are you here?” She turned back to me.

  “I . . . er, have your notebook. I thought you might want to make a trade.”

  “A trade?”

  “You took something that doesn’t belong to you on Saturday,” I answered. “I came to get it back.”

  Sarah Jane pulled a face, but before she could reply, a man’s voice made us both turn.

  “What, precisely, did my daughter take, young man? And who in Sam Hill’s kitchen are you?”

  Chapter 12

  SARAH JANE’S FATHER STOOD IN THE doorway, a silver-tipped cane in one hand, a heavy red-and-white foreclosure sign gripped in the other. Mr. Cabot’s yellow hard hat, with its CAD Co. logo, was paired with a dark western-cut suit. His scowl looked unbreakable as he blocked the only exit from the room.

  A cranky Cabot is bad for Sundance, the sheriff had said to Uncle Autry. A cranky Cabot is bad for us all. A creep of crimson, as red as the foreclosure sign, colored Mr. Cabot’s face as his stare drilled through me. He didn’t look once at Sarah Jane. I guessed finding a strange boy talking to his daughter in the middle of his private room didn’t make the man too happy. In fact, judging by the way the red in his cheeks was morphing into a deep and dangerous-looking purple, I guessed that I had, in one fell swoop, just made Noble Cabot cranky.

  He dropped the sign with a heavy thud, letting it lean against the doorjamb.

  “Sarah Jane, go to your room,” he ordered. “I’ve told you before that you don’t belong in here.” Mr. Cabot’s words were aimed at his daughter, but his eyes never left me once. Sarah Jane flushed.

  “But, Daddy—!”

  “Sarah Jane, do as I say!” Even without a remarkable talent backing him up, Mr. Cabot’s voice had the same kind of power over Sarah Jane as Mom’s had over me. Before her father could tell her again, Sarah Jane fled past him in a blur, knocking over the sign and stomping up the stairs. She slammed a door above us, rattling the entire house as powerfully as my savvy might’ve done. Mr. Cabot didn’t even blink. He continued to stare at me.

  “Er . . . I was just leaving.” Jar or no jar, it was time for me to go. Tripping over the foreclosure sign, I tried to slip past Mr. Cabot. But he raised his cane—swish—to stop me.

  “Not so fast, young man.”

  A telltale tingling itch crawled into my palms. I had to get out soon. Supersonic soon. I clenched my fists and focused on a spot on the floor between me and Mr. Cabot.

  Above us, Sarah Jane opened and closed her bedroom door again—SLAM!—and again—SLAM! SLAM! SLAM! Reminding everyone that, just because she was upstairs in her room, she hadn’t disappeared.

  “You! What is your name?” Mr. Cabot demanded. “Who do you belong to?”

  I bit my tongue. Filled with freaked-out savvy fuel, my hands began to shake and my skull buzzed like a big, round beehive on my shoulders. After what happened to my uncle’s barn, I knew I could huff and puff and blow the Cabots’ house down at any second. I knew it with terrible, horrible, nauseating certainty.

  I was three crocodile clock ticks away from breaking family rules, ready to spill my guts and yell, “If I don’t leave now, I’m going to destroy your house!” when the doorbell rang and saved me from Mr. Cabot—saving Mr. Cabot’s house from me at the same time.

  I drew a deep breath and listened as the housekeeper opened the front door. A moment later, she was standing behind Sarah Jane’s dad, her brow creased at the sight of the buffalo head tilting precariously from the opposite wall.

  “What is it, Hedda?” Mr. Cabot demanded without turning.

  “Mr. O’Connell’s at the door, sir,” Hedda said, eyeing me with distaste. “He says he’s looking for his nephew.”

  The dragonflies, I thought. Autry’s squadron of insects had taken off as soon as I’d reached the Cabot house. While the bugs had seemed like a nuisance before, now I was grateful to them for getting my uncle here so fast.

  “O’Connell?” Mr. Cabot spat, turning on the housekeeper as if she’d picked up a dirty word off the floor and jammed it in his ear. “O’Connell?” Mr. Cabot left the room without another glance my way, smacking his cane against the fancy molding of the door frame with a CRACK! as he headed for the front door like a bolt of lightning with a hitch in its jag. I followed quickly, ignoring the way every spindle in the stair rail jogged up and down in its setting, making the sound of a giant millipede running a marathon in wooden shoes as I passed by.

  Uncle Autry stood on the other side of the screen door. Beyond him, half a dozen gumball-sized spiders worked busily between the porch’s ornate columns. The presence of the spiders was the only sign that my uncle wasn’t as relaxed as he appeared. Autry’s features were calm and composed. His posture easy. Yet all six spiders looked like they’d sucked down seven pots of super-sweetened coffee. Beneath the eaves, chaotic, disorderly webs were going up faster than shake-and-bake subdivisions, each one big enough to nab an entire thirteen-year-old boy.

  I shot past Cabot as he reached the entryway. Flying out the screen door, I pushed past Autry too, not even daring to pause. I felt just like I had at school when I’d had to rush out of art class after looking too long at a weird painting of melting clocks. Only, on that day—a month before my birthday—Josh and Ryan had been there to drag me to the nurse’s office, even while Big Mouth Brody announced to everyone that I’d barfed after getting freaked out by a painting. Though, now I wondered if it hadn’t been some sort of savvy premonition.

  Ducking under the drooping webs draping Cabot’s porch, I leaped the stairs and cleared the perimeter of the pointed iron fence, hustling past my uncle’s white pickup. All without wrecking a single thing more.

  I leaned against a row of mailboxes across the street, not realizing my error until too late, when I toppled them all—seven in one blow. I fell with them, making a raucous racket.

  The din brought Sarah Jane to her window. She opened the circular pane set into the small tower at the very top of the old house and leaned out, shaking her head.

  Hobbled and kicking, I picked myself up, trying to be cool even though my left foot was trapped inside one of the curved aluminum mailboxes. I may have gotten free of Cabot’s side-show study, but I still looked like a clown in a three-ring circus. All I needed was a banana peel, an exploding cigar, and a human cannon launcher. Then my life would be complete.

  Chapter 13

  THE MOMENT HE STEPPED AROUND THE
side of his truck, Autry found me stuck up to my knee in the Cabots’ reinforced mailbox. My uncle stopped and stared, scrubbing his face with one hand. I guessed he might’ve been rethinking my potential for any future savvy finesse.

  “If that’s the worst damage done here today”—Autry nodded toward the mailboxes—“I think we can count ourselves lucky. Do you think you can make it back to the ranch in the truck?” Autry’s voice was rigid, but a corner of his mouth had begun to twitch.

  I looked down and shook my leg again. A stifled snort erupted from my uncle. It took a moment before I realized that Autry was doing his darndest not to bust a gut and guffaw out loud.

  “Can you can make it a few miles without, you know—” He waved a hand toward the scattered rubble around me, still trying not to howl with laughter. “Without recycling my truck?” Autry did what he could to compose himself as I stared at him without a lick of humor. One look back at the Cabot house did the trick, sobering him fast. I hadn’t made out the words that passed between him and Mr. Cabot, but I’d heard enough of the tone to know there’d been an argument.

  “Any idea how I might go about doing that?” I asked, sitting down on the pavement to pry the mailbox from my leg. If I was going to learn to control my new anti-talent in time to get back home before school and the father-son half marathon in the fall, I was going to require some concrete advice. I was willing to give anything a try. If my uncle told me sit on my hands, cross my eyes, and sing “Yankee Doodle” with a peanut shell up my nose, I would’ve given it a shot. But Autry’s reply was even less helpful than a nostril full of salted nuts.

  “You’ll put it together, Ledge. At some point you’ll figure out what you need to learn from this savvy of yours and then everything will get a little easier. I promise.” Holding out a hand, he hooked his thumb around mine and pulled me up from the ground. Then he kicked the rest of the mailboxes out of the street before climbing into the truck.

  I followed my uncle, crossing fingers and toes, hoping that God or luck or sheer force of will might keep the automobile intact.

  Turning the key in the ignition, Autry spared one last look at the hulking Cabot house and the collection of stumps surrounding it, letting his gaze linger on the highest branches of the tall white birch. Sarah Jane was still at her window, pencil in hand, scribbling rapid notes. Then she leaned forward, long braids dangling over the windowsill, and called out:

  “Hey, Ledge! I’m signing you up for a free issue of The Sundance Scuttlebutt! But the next edition might take a while. It’s going to be a super-duper humdinger!”

  Free issue. I snuffed out a breath. Meeting Sarah Jane had already cost me plenty. Money, candy, comics, Grandma’s jar, and my entire future should’ve been enough to foot the bill for a lifetime subscription if I’d wanted one—which I didn’t.

  Autry shook his head, giving me a look of warning. “I don’t know what drove you to run all the way to town today, Ledge,” he said. “But it’s best you stay away from Sarah Jane from here on out, got it? Noble doesn’t want you, me, or anyone else like—” He stopped before finishing his sentence, roughly jamming the truck into gear before turning it around, tires kicking gravel—ping, clang, ping—against Mr. Cabot’s prison-like fence. “Well, he just doesn’t want anyone around his daughter, that’s all.”

  “What about Mrs. Cabot?” I asked, remembering the portrait above Mr. Cabot’s desk. “Doesn’t she want SJ to have any friends?”

  “Is that why you ran all the way to Sundance?” My uncle sounded surprised. “To make friends with Sarah Jane?” Suddenly, his expression changed. His eyebrows shot up and his mouth formed a silent oh.

  “I think I understand now,” he said. “The sheriff said something about both of you being at Willie’s Saturday when things . . . er . . . fell apart?” Autry coughed once meaningfully, glancing sidelong at me as he drove us out of town. “Did all that five-and-dime damage happen when you met Sarah Jane?” He flashed me a quick grin. “You know, Ledge, I used to get nervous around the ladies too. Sarah Jane is a pretty gir—”

  “Aaagh! No! It’s not like that.” I cut my uncle off before I had to find the nearest mine shaft and dive in headfirst. Heat rose up my neck, flooding my face, and the Welcome to Sundance sign spun like a pinwheel on its remaining bolt as we passed it.

  “Y-you’ve got it all wrong,” I spluttered. My stomach flip-flopped like a fish caught in the jaws of a bear. I didn’t want to talk about what happened at the five-and-dime. I didn’t want my uncle thinking I was sweet on Sarah Jane either. But when the unbidden memory of kissing Sarah Jane popped into my head like a horror-movie monster trying to eat my brain, the connection between my gray matter and my vocal cords was temporarily severed. The dashboard panels inside the truck began to rattle. And when a radio knob flew off and hit me in the nose, Autry was at least kind enough to flinch instead of laugh.

  Embarrassment, anger, pain, fear, frustration—I had my very own trigger-happy Wild Bunch gang of emotions. Pinching my nose where the knob had hit it, I took a deep breath through my mouth and let it out slow, determined to pull myself together.

  “I found Sarah Jane’s notebook,” I explained slowly, trying to keep my voice steady as I spoke the partial truth. I pulled the small notebook from the pocket of my cargo shorts and held it up. “It has her address in it. See?” I showed my uncle the cover, then flipped through some of the pages.

  “I just thought I’d return it to her . . . and make sure the sheriff found her Saturday night.”

  Autry raised an eyebrow. Stopping to let a rafter of wild turkeys cross the road, he took Sarah Jane’s notebook from me to read what she’d written above a wacky sketch of a horse wearing shorts, suspenders, and a jaunty feathered hat.

  “How in the world is Hal Gunderson training his mare to yodel in time for the county fair?” Autry murmured. We were quiet for several minutes as he appeared to consider the idea of Mr. Gunderson’s horse performing a whinnying yodel-eedle-idle in front of a fairground crowd. Shaking himself as the last gobbler cleared the highway, Autry laughed abruptly, like he’d just thought of the answer to a riddle that had been bugging him for months.

  “Maybe Sarah Jane takes after her mom after all,” he said as he handed the notebook back to me.

  “Takes after her dad, you mean,” I corrected him, sticking the notebook full of bunk back into my pocket. “Have you seen her dad’s collection?”

  Autry’s face fell into a scowl, his foot heavy on the gas pedal as we passed the foreclosure sign in front of Neary’s Auto Salvage Acres.

  “I’ve been watching Cabot’s ‘collection’ get bigger every day,” he muttered.

  Then, in a louder voice: “Well, Ledge, I’m sure Summer Cabot looked down from above, glad to know that you were watching out for her daughter. But since Noble Cabot’s the one we all have to worry about—”

  “Down from above?” I echoed. “Sarah Jane’s mom is dead?”

  Keeping his eyes on the road, my uncle shifted in his seat. His answer came slow and his words were measured: “Summer’s been in the earth for some time,” he said. “She got sick when Sarah Jane was just knee-high, and . . . well . . .” He trailed off. It was only then that I remembered that Autry’s own wife was buried in the town cemetery too.

  “. . . And people don’t always get better,” I finished for him, feeling like a bonehead for bringing up the subject. “Sorry,” I added as an afterthought. Autry dipped his head to the side, but said nothing more. I wondered if he was thinking of Summer Cabot’s passing or his own wife’s. From what I could tell from my brief run-in with Noble Cabot, it was the only thing he and my uncle had in common.

  “Look, I don’t have many rules for the summer, Ledge,” he said at last. “But this is one: Stay away from the Cabots. I’m sure Sarah Jane can find herself a new notebook. Promise me you’ll steer clear of her after today.”

  “I promise I’ll never put a shoe inside the Cabots’ house again.” I raised my hand and vowed. It
wasn’t the exact promise Autry had been looking for, but seeing the remaining radio knob begin to spin, he let the subject drop.

  Chapter 14

  I SPENT THE NEXT FEW DAYS ignoring Fedora and the nut-mix of cousins I was stuck with for the summer. I woke at dawn every morning, just like Rocket. While my cousin did his best to move quietly around his small house, I did my best to stay on his good side by pretending to be asleep until he was gone.

  When I wasn’t running, restlessness chewed on me the way Bitsy chewed on rawhide. Not wanting to risk my uncle’s phone or computer, I didn’t talk to my parents when they called or ask to e-mail my friends. Josh, Ryan, and Brody were probably too busy riding bikes and water coasters to even notice I was gone.

  Alone, I moped around the ranch, pitching pinecones into the river or climbing the birch trees in the glade. I constructed stone towers and knocked them over. I even built a fort. But when a squirrel leaped onto my lean-to of fallen branches, the whole thing fell in on my head. Rounding out its imitation of me, the shaken squirrel took off running.

  Wanting to avoid another disaster of my own, I kept my distance from the main house, Rocket’s potting shed, and the orchard of bee boxes in the meadow. Once, I got too close to the conservatory and Marisol levitated me six inches off the ground, while Mesquite propelled me in the opposite direction.

  Even as I did everything I could to avoid the Bug House, Gypsy was drawn to it like it was built for her. She spent hours watching the butterflies inside, or picking flowers in the meadows around it. With her thirteenth birthday still a few months off, I could only guess what sort of savvy Gypsy might get. I pictured my cousin blowing out her birthday candles and sprouting pixie wings, shrinking down to the size of Thumbelina to spend the rest of her life living on a toadstool surrounded by dandelions and daisies, farting glitter and singing kumbaya.

  Autry lit the evenings with enormous, crackling campfires, staving off the rapid cool down of the Wyoming summer nights, while keeping me away from the main house at the same time. By our third night at the ranch, Fedora was in full fire-safety mode: