Eighteen
Ka-boom!
Wally had started up the stairs when the second scream came, this time from Caroline. He couldn't imagine what the girls could be screaming about, unless someone had been found murdered on the floor.
The next voice he heard was Mrs. Malloy's. “Girls, now stop!”
Wally reached the doorway first, his family close at his heels. The girls and their mother were staring at the ceiling, so Wally looked up too. There were dozens and dozens of ladybugs. The ceiling looked like it had measles.
“Now what?” said Mr. Hatford.
“Oh, no!” said Wally's mother. “I've seen a few in the last couple of days, but this is an invasion!”
“What else?” said Jake, grinning at Josh. “Ladybugs, girls. Get it?”
A ladybug dropped from the ceiling and landed on Caroline's arm. She screamed again, and when another landed on the back of her neck, she shrieked and jumped up and down.
Jake and Josh started to laugh, but Wally was fascinated by the ladybugs.
“The weather must have done it,” said Mr. Hatford. “But how they're coming in, I don't know. Through the attic, maybe.”
“Get the flyswatter,” said Mrs. Hatford.
“Never mind the swatter,” said her husband. “Get the vacuum cleaner.”
With the Hatford boys and the Malloy girls watching from below, Mr. Hatford climbed up on a step stool, and holding the wand of the vacuum in one hand, he ran it over the ceiling.
Zing, zing, zing went the vacuum as one ladybug after another—sometimes three or four at a time—was sucked into the machine.
“I'm so sorry all this is happening while we're here,” Mrs. Malloy said. “As though you needed one more thing!”
“The ladybugs would have come whether you were here or not, Jean,” Mrs. Hatford said. “But they can really be a pain.”
“Tell you what, Peter,” his father said. “I'll give you a nickel for every dozen ladybugs you can catch. Take them out in the woods and let them go—whatever. But keep them away from the house.”
Peter immediately started cupping his hands over the ones he found on the wall.
Caroline was sobbing. “I don't want to sleep in here, Mother,” she wailed. “They'll get in my hair and crawl in my pajamas.”
Wally laughed out loud. He couldn't help it.
“Never mind her,” Mrs. Malloy said quickly. “Caroline, we are lucky to have a roof over our heads, the fix we're in. Ladybugs aren't going to hurt you one bit.” But Caroline went on weeping, and the vacuum went on sucking up bugs, and Peter kept trying to catch some and put them in a jar. Wally thought this was one of the best evenings he'd ever seen.
Mr. Malloy called from Ohio later, and after Mrs. Malloy had talked with him, she told the others that the electricity still had not come on in their house, but that the power company expected to have power restored to everyone in two more days.
“They are trying to restore electricity to nursing homes and hospitals first,” she explained. “Houses, I guess, will be last on the list.”
“We're glad to be able to do this for you, Jean. Stop worrying,” Mrs. Hatford told her.
The heat wave broke the next day in West Virginia. Temperatures dropped from the hundreds to the eighties, and Wally knew that if he tried to fry an egg on the sidewalk now, it would sit there undisturbed all day.
Everyone felt better now that the air was more bearable, and Wally was determined to be as kind as he could to the girls for the last days they were there. When he went to breakfast, however, and saw Caroline with her hair plastered to her head like an onion skin, he stared, impolite or not.
“She tied a scarf around her head all night,” Beth explained, trying not to laugh. But Wally and Jake and Josh and even Peter giggled in spite of themselves.
With the thought that the Malloys would be leaving soon, everybody seemed more relaxed. Beth made a double batch of chocolate chip cookies for Peter and his brothers. Mrs. Malloy drove to a market for sweet corn, and Caroline and Eddie picked tomatoes and green beans for dinner from Mrs. Hatford's garden.
Everyone seemed to be in a good mood at dinner. Mr. Hatford had finished his rounds early, Mrs. Hatford had been pleased to find dinner cooking when she came home from the hardware store, Peter had been busy collecting more ladybugs, and Jake and Eddie had sat down and played cards without any bickering.
“Now, this is what a summer evening should feel like!” Mr. Hatford said, reaching for another ear of corn, and at that exact moment there was a huge Ka-boom that shook the house.
Wally almost leaped out of his skin. Peter dropped his fork, and several voices at once cried, “What was that ?”
Because Tom Hatford was a part-time sheriff's deputy, he had a two-way radio, and immediately he leaped to his feet and rushed to turn it on. He stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, listening to the static and the excited voices and confusion coming from the speaker.
“Ray? … Ray?” Mr. Hatford kept saying. “What have we got? What exploded?”
And finally an answer: “I don't know, Tom. Larry says he sees smoke coming from east of town, and we've got a car on the way…. Wait a minute! It's the coal mine, Larry says. Son of a gun, we got a call coming in saying there's been an explosion at the old coal mine!”
Wally stared at his brothers, then at the girls.
“Why would anyone have done that?” Mrs. Hatford said. “Why, nobody's used that mine for years!”
“Who would do it—that's what we want to know,” said Mr. Hatford, grabbing his keys and rushing for the door.
The peach cobbler that Mrs. Malloy had made for dinner sat untouched on the kitchen counter.
“Well, it's not the end of the world,” Mrs. Hatford said, puzzled. “As far as the sheriff and the police can tell, no one was hurt. Come and eat your dessert and we'll know more about the mine when Tom comes back.”
“I'm not very hungry,” said Wally, getting up from the table.
“Me neither,” said Eddie. “Maybe I'll have some later.”
Caroline and Beth and Jake and Josh left the kitchen too, and only Peter stayed in his chair, heaping on the ice cream and spooning the warm peaches and cream and crust into his mouth.
“Now what, Ellen?” said Mrs. Malloy. “You'd think they were the ones who blew up the mine.”
Out on the porch, Wally said, “The shopping list!”
“Right!” said Jake. “We've got to show it to Dad! Where is it?”
“I don't know!” said Wally. He thrust his hand into his right pocket. Nothing there. He stuck both hands into both pockets and searched around with his fingers. Nothing.
“What were you wearing the day you found it?” asked Jake. “ Think, Wally!”
“My other pants,” Wally said. “I was wearing shorts, I guess. They were in the hamper, and Mom's washing clothes tomorrow!” Wally made a beeline for the basement stairs, Caroline and her sisters following, Jake and Josh at their heels.
“What's going on?” asked Mrs. Hatford as they crossed the kitchen.
“Nothing,” said Wally.
They thundered down the basement stairs and over to the heaping baskets of dirty clothes by the washing machine. The boys tore through the clothes, sending shirts and towels flying this way and that, until finally Wally held up the wrinkled shorts he'd been wearing for the past week. He dug in the pockets. Success! He held up the worn slip of paper triumphantly and read, “ Eggs, Rope, Tomato sauce, Flashlight, Dynamite.' ”
“First-class evidence!” said Jake.
“Not quite,” said Eddie.
“Why not?” asked Josh.
Eddie pointed. There on the stand next to the washing machine were a bottle of bleach, a bag of clothespins, and a large blue container of detergent. The red and yellow label said, DYNAMITE! FOR ALL YOUR WASHDAY NEEDS.
It was about nine-thirty when Tom Hatford came back, his clothes dusty.
“Well,” he said. “All we
can tell is that some person—or persons—set a charge at the entrance to the old mine and sealed it up. What we won't know until we get a crew out there tomorrow to haul some rock away is whether there was anybody in there.”
Wally hadn't even thought of that.
“You mean, it might be murder?” he asked.
“All I'm saying is that somebody had a reason to close up the entrance to that tunnel. And we won't know the reason till we find out who did it. We're checking with every explosives place around here to see who they've sold to in the last week or month. We asked the residents out near the mine if they'd noticed anything out of the ordinary. People go back there from time to time to fish the river or climb the rocks. They dump some old tires, maybe, or a broken stove.” He stopped suddenly, facing the row of kids sitting on the sofa.
“You know,” he said, “you guys don't look so good. A little green around the gills, if you ask me. Do you know anything that might give us a clue?”
Peter came out of the kitchen holding his second bowl of peach cobbler, licking the back of the spoon. Jake gave him a warning look, and Peter said softly, “I won't tell!”
Wally's heart sank.
“Tell what, Peter?” asked his father.
“What I'm not supposed to,” said Peter.
Nineteen
Tippy
“Well, whatever you're not supposed to tell me is exactly what I want to hear, so let's hear it,” Mr. Hatford said firmly.
Peter stared down at his bowl.
“Who was up there? Somebody we know?” his father asked.
“A man,” Peter said, his lips scarcely moving.
“Who?”
“I don't know. A man in a truck.”
“When did you see him?”
“A couple days ago.”
Caroline closed her eyes momentarily. They were all going to prison; she was sure of it. They had all been up to a place they weren't supposed to be. She imagined herself in jail wearing a black and white striped suit. Or maybe it was orange.
“What was the man doing?” Mr. Hatford asked Peter.
“Chasing.”
The two mothers were in the doorway now, and Mr. Hatford remained standing, hands on his hips, facing the row of six kids squeezed together on the couch.
“Who was the man chasing, Peter?” asked his mother.
“I can't tell,” said Peter. “I promised.”
“If you don't tell, Peter, the wrong person may be blamed for that explosion. If you want to help the police do their work, you'd better tell me,” said his father. “In fact, if you want to eat at the table for the next week, you'd better tell me now! Who was he chasing?”
Peter looked helplessly at Jake, then back down at his peach cobbler. “Us,” he said in a tiny voice. “Well, not all of us, exactly. He was chasing Eddie and Jake.”
“Why?”
“Because … because they climbed through the fence.”
There were two or three seconds of silence, and then came another explosion, this time right there in the room as Mr. Hatford's voice filled every centimeter of space.
“Don't you two know better than to do that?” he bellowed. “You're the oldest of the bunch and you go set an example like that?” He turned on Jake. “How many times have I told you boys never, ever to go near that mine? Are you numskulls?”
And now Mrs. Malloy's voice was loud. “Eddie, what were you doing up there? How could you do something so dangerous?”
“We … we just wanted to see what was in the tunnel. We weren't going to go down a shaft or anything,” Eddie said meekly.
“It was a dare,” Jake explained uncomfortably. “I dared Eddie to do it and she dared me.”
“That's the stupidest reason I can think of!” Mr. Hatford continued yelling. “Dumb, dumb, dumb! I thought you two were smarter than that.”
“I'm sorry,” mumbled Jake, staring down at his hands.
“So who was this man?” asked his father.
“I don't know,” Jake answered. “All of a sudden, there he was, going all crazy, and we tore out of there.”
“He didn't have on a uniform or anything,” said Eddie. “I don't think he was a guard.”
“We just went tearing down the hill as fast as we could with him yelling at us never to come back,” said Jake.
“Do you realize what a dangerous thing you kids have done?” Mr. Hatford boomed. “If he was the one who set off that charge, do you realize he might have been going to set the explosives off that very day you were up there?” He stared at them some more and shook his head in disgust. “You kids sit right there and don't move while I call the sheriff. I'm going to let him question you.”
The adults were talking in the kitchen. The seven kids sat in the living room, Peter looking most miserable of all.
“Man oh man, are we in for it!” said Josh. “I've never seen Dad so mad.”
“I have!” said Peter brightly, wanting to redeem himself. “Remember the time Jake called the termite inspector to go to the house next door and—”
“Shut up,” said Jake.
The more Caroline thought about it, the more relieved she was that her own father wasn't there. With both of the dads yelling, it would have been like thunder in the house.
There was the sound of a car pulling into the driveway, then footsteps and voices on the porch. Mrs. Hatford answered the door, and both the sheriff and the chief of police walked in. Mr. Hatford pointed out Jake and Eddie. The sheriff sat down.
Caroline listened while Jake had to explain all over again how he and Eddie had sort of dared each other to go into the old coal mine—how they hadn't intended to go down a shaft; they'd just wanted to peek, to say that they'd gone in. And the way he told it, it sounded as though he and Eddie were longtime friends.
“Your dad says a man at the mine chased you,” the police chief said. “Where did he come from?”
“We don't know!” said Jake. “He seemed to pop up out of nowhere.”
“Was he in the tunnel or outside it?”
“Outside,” said Caroline. “I think he was in the bushes.”
“As soon as we heard him shouting, we ran,” said Eddie. “We'd only just stepped inside the entrance when we heard him.”
“How tall was he?” asked the sheriff. “Tall as I am?”
“Shorter, maybe,” said Jake.
“Taller!” said Wally. “I saw him chasing you and he looked like a giant to me!”
“He was not!” said Beth.
The sheriff rolled his eyes. “Okay, what did he look like? Did he have a beard? A mustache?”
“Yes,” said Caroline. “A beard. I think.”
“He didn't have a beard!” said Josh. “I'd remember if he had a beard.”
“He had a mustache, but he didn't have a beard,” said Beth.
“What color was his hair?” asked the chief of police.
“Gray,” said Josh.
“Yellow,” said Jake. “A yellowish color.”
“Brown,” said Caroline.
“We don't even know what color his hair was. He was wearing a cap,” said Wally.
“Can't you kids agree on anything?” asked the police chief.
“He was driving a truck!” said Peter. “We all saw that. An old rusty truck.”
“Yes!” said Caroline. “An old rusty brown truck.”
“Did anyone get the license number?” asked the sheriff.
The kids hung their heads.
“Was it a West Virginia license plate, at least? Can you tell us that?” asked the sheriff.
“I think so,” said Josh.
“But you're not sure. Did anyone actually see the license plate?”
Nobody had.
“And that was the last you saw of him and his truck?” asked the police chief.
“No, he was outside our house on the road,” said Caroline.
“Here?” cried Mrs. Hatford.
“Did you get a good look at him?” asked the sheriff.<
br />
Josh shook his head. “We were underwater,” he said. “I mean, when we saw him stop his truck, we ducked down under the water.”
“We didn't want him to know who we were,” said Caroline.
“Did he say anything to you?”
“No,” she said. “Just looked at us, then drove away. It was creepy.”
The sheriff was writing things down on a notepad, and for a while Caroline figured he had asked every question there was to ask. Surely by now he knew that she and her sisters and the Hatford boys had nothing to do with that explosion.
The sheriff closed his notebook. He put his pen back in his pocket. And then, just when Caroline thought the worst was over, he leaned forward, looked from one kid to the next until his eyes had traveled down the whole row, and said, “Who's Tippy?”
Twenty
E-mail to Georgia
Dear Bill (and Danny and Steve and Tony and Doug):
I don't know if your computer is hooked up. For all I know, you guys could already be on your way back here. But man oh man, have you ever missed some excitement!
First, you won't believe this, but the Malloys have been staying here for the past few days because there's a heat wave in Ohio and all their electricity is off. They'd already left your house when they found out, and all their furniture was gone, so Mom invited them to stay with us till the power came back on. They've been sleeping in Jake and Josh's bedroom, all four of them. Talk about weird!
And they threw our underwear in the closet! You know what would be even worse? If the heat wave hadn't broken here in West Virginia, our power went out, and we had to go to Ohio and stay in their house for a while. That would be so awful I don't even want to think about it.
Then a storm came up here and the heat wave broke and we were without power for a while. Then we had a ladybug invasion and Caroline freaked out. Dad's been paying Peter a nickel for every dozen he collects, and he's already got a jarful.
That's just for starters.
Then … Jake and Eddie dared each other to go to the old coal mine. They've really been bugging each other. It's like having a cat and a dog under the same roof, and we've all been getting a little sick of them. Anyway, they did go, and a man came charging out of nowhere, yelling at them to get out. Two days ago there was a big explosion at the entrance to the mine. Peter, of course, told Dad we'd been there, and Dad called the sheriff and the chief of police. They came over and asked us a lot of questions.
Who Won the War? Page 9
