The Danger Box Page 5

  We were both so still that when my stomach made a gurgle-wurgle-urgle, it sounded deafening. I crossed my arms in the middle of it, but it kept going. There’s no stopping a stomach when it gets like that.

  Lorrol’s chair squeaked, and then she laughed. First I thought she was blowing her nose. The sound was closer to a sucked-in goose honk than a giggle.

  “Sa-sa-sorry,” she said. I realized she might be lucky, but she had a stutter. That somehow made me braver.

  “That’s okay,” I said, wanting to laugh, too. If my grandpa had been there, he would’ve been asking how many piglets I’d swallowed whole.

  I tried to change the subject. “Did you ever think of a palindrome like it was a horseshoe?” Why did I say that?

  “Huh?” Lorrol said.

  “I mean, good luck — two sides the same — that stuff,” I said. I wasn’t sure where to look, so I kept looking at the screen in front of me.

  “What’s up with those g-g-glasses?”

  Whoa. She certainly didn’t believe in hiding any questions.

  “I have Pathological Myopia,” I said, feeling a bit proud that I had some long words to say, too. I was kind of glad she’d asked. “I’m legally blind,” I added.

  “Ohhh,” Lorrol said. “That’s tough.”

  “I’m used to it,” I said.

  “Well, I like your glasses,” she said. “I think they make you look really brainy. Are you?”

  Whoa again. “I dunno,” I said stupidly.

  “Sha-sha-SHOOT!” Lorrol shouted, jumping to her feet. “I forgot again!” And off she went, her flip-flops doing their whap routine on the stairs.

  Firecracker Girl was a lucky palindrome with a stutter. But why was I thinking about luck these days? And why had the mean dent left by Buckeye’s truck in the garden looked like a horseshoe?

  I reached for my Daily List Book after Lorrol left, but didn’t know what to write; if I crossed off her name, would that be unlucky?

  * * *

  The Gas Gazette: Issue Six

  A FREE NEWSPAPER ABOUT A MYSTERIOUS SOUL

  ~My father wanted me to become a doctor, like him. I tried, but I couldn’t stand seeing people in pain. In those days, if you had to have your arm cut off, they just did it. Doctors heard lots of screaming.

  ~I agreed to go to school in order to become a minister. At least I’d be able to take long walks in the country while I thought about sermons.

  ~Instead of doing all of my minister homework, I spent time talking with a naturalist at the university. I helped him collect the living specimens he was studying. I was great at capturing toads.

  ~Once I spotted a rare insect-eating plant in a wet, marshy area. I tried to use a long pole to vault expertly over a bad spot. I wanted to get there before some other students, and didn’t do it right. I flew up in the air and was soon stuck on the top of the pole.

  ~Everyone laughed as I slid down, into the mud and muck. I got the plant.

  ~I had plenty of worried, insecure, embarrassing moments in my life. But I kept gathering and sorting.

  ~Determination counts.

  Who am I?

  NEXT ISSUE TO COME.

  FREE!

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, I thought about Lorrol more than I did about Buckeye or chores. What was she doing in the library two afternoons in a row, and on the computers? Most local kids went to a day camp or helped their parents during the summer.

  Summer is the busiest time for our family, and that’s true for most people in Three Oaks. Folks are either growing things, making them, or selling them. Sometimes all three.

  Each year, Gumps fertilizes and turns over the soil in the garden, Gam plants and prunes, and I water every morning and evening. I can’t see where the water from the hose lands, but I know just how hard to make the spray, where to point it, and how long to hold it. I also do a ton of weeding.

  I’ve found some awesome bugs when I’m down on my hands and knees, and because I’m so close I can witness a bunch of drama. Like people, some insects seem to want attention and some don’t. Some are fearless and dress loud, and some are timid. Secretive. Some eat leaves in a tidy way, and some eat here and there, leaving a mess.

  If I find a bug that is hurting one of our plants, I lure it carefully onto a leaf and leave it out in the grass. Behind the toolshed. I figure it’ll be weeks before it gets back to where I found it, and maybe it’ll get distracted meanwhile. Or go exploring. I only keep the dead ones.

  Our vegetables are a big part of what we eat, and the garden fills up most of the backyard. I keep lists of what we’ve planted each spring, when each kind of plant comes up, when we harvest, and how much we get. This year we put in lettuce, parsley, basil, spinach, cabbage, cucumbers, summer squash, zucchini, eggplant, peppers, peas, beets, four kinds of tomatoes, three kinds of beans, and two kinds of pumpkins. Gam freezes a lot of veggies right away, and makes pickles and soups and casseroles and breads out of others. I help her with that by washing and chopping so that we don’t mix in bugs or dirt. When we get a particularly good crop, Gumps shouts proudly that God Loves Dilly Beans — spicy, pickled green beans, his favorite snack — and Gam shushes him.

  While I helped my grandma tie up the climbing beans that day, I wondered if Lorrol liked dilly beans. And I wondered why she was always alone.

  HERE’S MY USUAL summer routine: In the mornings I ~help Gam with laundry or the garden or cooking, and in the afternoons I either ~go to the store to help Gumps and keep him company, or ~go to the library.

  We hardly ever visit Lake Michigan, which is about twenty minutes away by car. That’s because we’re doing all these jobs. Plus, we aren’t sand fleas, as my grandpa says. None of us learned how to swim or lie on the beach.

  Michigan orchards turn out a lot of fruit, and Gam makes pies and jams from blueberries, strawberries, plums, cherries, peaches, pears, and apples. She’s famous in town for her secret pie recipes. I know them all because I help her measure the ingredients, but I’ll never tell. (Here’s a hint: Think more about lemons and real maple syrup than about sugar from a bag.)

  Summer folks love her cooking, so she sells as many pies and other things as she can make. Sometimes she swaps her apple tarts or plum-cranberry crumble for venison steaks in the fall, since Gumps doesn’t go shooting anymore. She trades jars of jam for fresh eggs. She once swapped eight loaves of her pumpkin-walnut bread for a Christmas ham from the meat market.

  Everybody local knows just about everybody else in Three Oaks, so trading food is easy because they also know who does a good job on what. Lots of people here grow their own backyard vegetables even if they have a regular-paying job, and some also set up a table and sell the surplus at a farmers’ market on Elm Street — Saturdays from late spring to early fall. Mostly they sell to folks with houses close to Lake Michigan, people who drive inland to visit our one-street town and buy fresh food. My grandparents decided not to have a stand after I got big enough to help; that’s because city people asked more about why I was looking so close at everything than they did about our veggies. Everyone seemed to have Eye Stories and some weren’t too great to hear. My grandma kept saying, “Let’s talk about tomatoes instead,” but it didn’t always work.

  So we garden, cook, bake, and run the store. From July 1 to Labor Day, it’s open seven days a week, just so Gumps won’t miss any business. He doesn’t like writing, so I keep a lot of lists for him. He finds things at yard and estate sales, and brings them back to sell. Sometimes it’s a hodgepodge of stuff that needs to be sorted; I help him decide on what’s junk and what’s not. Most city folks don’t know that he’s happy to bargain. That’s kind of a secret.

  As Gumps says with a shrug when someone pays a whopping price for something he would have sold for less, “Don’t ask, can’t tell!” We never stick on dishonest prices; just a Visitor Price if we think someone out there will buy.

  I wondered if Lorrol would think Chamberlain Antiques and Whatnots was cool, or as biz
arre as my name. I imagined her saying, “You’re so lucky!” as I handed her a horseshoe from our collection. I knew my grandpa wouldn’t mind; old horseshoes are cheaper than a Sunday newspaper in our town.

  Then I told myself not to be silly. She probably hated all old things. Anyone who made that much noise in a quiet place like our library was probably only interested in city stores where everything was new and life was loud.

  But talk about loud! She was probably still laughing about the kid with superthick glasses and a squealing belly. Those gurgles could’ve won first place at a county fair.

  If she was going to be at the library and on the computers this summer, we’d be alone again. A lot. I’d have to get braver. She clearly wasn’t going to turn into a different kind of bug, like the hiding, shy kind. Like me.

  Then I had an interesting thought. Unlike insects, people could decide to behave differently.

  This time, I’d be the questions-starter.

  JUNE WAS BLOWING closer to July, and for a couple of days I was too busy to get back to the library. It was a windy, dry summer all over the Midwest, and when wind gusts across flat land, it doesn’t like to stop. Not easily.

  Wind equals extra work.

  Stakes in the garden fell over, and it seemed like the crops were super-thirsty. Watering was tricky, because the spray blew where it wasn’t supposed to go. A quilt flew clear off the clothesline one afternoon and squashed our new pea plants. We had to stand them back up and make little fences for them to lean on.

  After lunch on the third day, I was clearing the plates when Gumps went out the kitchen door. The garage door slammed and then he clumped back in carrying a box I’d never seen before. Buckeye’s box — it had to be. He clattered it down in the kitchen.

  “Ash! Get that dirty thing off my table,” Gam said.

  We all looked at it. She was right, it did look like it’d been traveling. The box was old, dark, and beat-up. It sure was sealed shut — first with tape, then clear plastic.

  “Just want to open this and see if there’s any diamonds inside.” Grandpa Ash winked at me. “Or the Mona Lisa.”

  “Or Abe Lincoln’s underpants!” I chimed in.

  “Think we should?” Gam asked. “Is it ours to open?”

  My grandpa shrugged. “Buckeye gave it to us. Been here for days now. Aren’t you curious?”

  My grandma’s eyebrows went up and she turned away, like she did when she was interested but didn’t want to let on.

  “Come on, let’s just look!” I said.

  “Here, let’s you and me take it back out to the garage,” Gumps said. He picked up the box.

  “Just open it on the floor,” Gam said. You could tell she wanted to see, too.

  “Nah, that’s okay,” my grandpa said, and flashed me a quick grin. “Doesn’t belong in the kitchen, anyway. You’re right, dear.”

  Gam had gotten out the big shears. “Ash Chamberlain, you would tease a woman to death!” she said, and reached for the box.

  “Not so fast,” Gumps said. “Thought you weren’t interested.”

  “You boys are impossible,” Gam said, smiling now. “I give up; open the silly thing on the table.”

  We did. We don’t get that many surprise packages in our lives, so we were all a bit excited. Nothing like a small town for getting people curious.

  GUMPS SNIPPED AND pulled and soon all that plastic and tape was underfoot. The top opened easily, and I leaned in close. I saw an old blanket, a raspberry color, with worn places and broken threads.

  “Silk,” Gam said, running a finger along it. “Looks like a lap blanket, you know — something people used to have on the arm of a chair.”

  Gumps was already lifting it out.

  “Careful, Ash, there may be something fragile in there,” Gam warned.

  “Ooh,” he said, peeking into a fold. “I knew it! We’re rich!”

  Gam and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes.

  Out came a small, square shape folded neatly in a pillowcase. Gumps unwrapped it and held up a worn notebook.

  “Book,” was all he said, sounding disappointed.

  He handed it to me. I opened it slowly and turned a few pages. The writing was messy and the cursive was hard to read. Lots of it had been crossed off or scribbled on.

  “Huh,” I said. There was a paper label on the cover. “Ga-la-pa-gos,” I read, sounding out the syllables. “Ota-something. Lima. What’s a galapago? Some kind of fruit?”

  Meanwhile, Gumps had carefully shaken out the blanket. There was nothing else in the box.

  “Well,” Gam said, “guess we don’t have to worry about jewels. Probably a good thing. I don’t know, Zoomy. Didn’t you say ‘lima,’ too? Like the bean? Maybe it’s a crop list, from some other part of the world. Should be fun to look at.”

  “Can I hold on to the notebook for later?” I asked.

  “Why not?” Gumps said. “Box is worth something — they don’t make those anymore. I’ll take it in to the store.”

  “Take the blanket, too,” Grandma Al said. “Maybe an antique-fabric person will see it. Looks too fragile to use.”

  “Zoomy, you coming with me this afternoon?” my grandpa asked.

  I was still looking at the notebook. I kind of liked that no one had put his or her name on it. Maybe that meant it was like my Daily List Book — someone’s private place for writing things down.

  “Sure. Can I stop at the library first?” I put the notebook on the kitchen counter, near my pile of notebooks. “You can leave me, and I’ll follow.” I’d memorized the exact number of steps between the library and our store, and was allowed to walk that distance by myself.

  I wanted to see if Lorrol was around.

  I CIRCLED THE computers on the second floor before sitting down at my usual desk. No Lorrol. No anyone.

  I was surprised at how disappointed I was. I’d gotten myself all ready not to sound dumb, to ask her a bunch of questions before she could ask me any more. Plus, I was curious: Why was she always in such a hurry?

  People worked all the time in Three Oaks, but they didn’t usually hurry, especially in flip-flops.

  Well, there was one good thing about being up there on my own: I could do more Buckeye investigating.

  I typed Flint, Michigan, newspapers in the Search Box. Up popped the Flint Journal. This was a daily paper, which must mean lots of news. Whoa. I didn’t know anything about Flint, only that it was one of the auto manufacturing places that had a lot of unemployed people now. Every kid in Michigan knew about the auto plants closing.

  I sucked in air and blew it out hard, just like Grandpa Ash did that day in the kitchen. Then I typed in crimes, Buckeye Chamberlain.

  And there it was:

  Flint Resident Suspect in Auto Theft

  A red Ford pickup was stolen from outside Lonny’s Steak House on Wednesday evening. The suspect is Buckeye Chamberlain, age 31, of Flint, formerly of Three Oaks. Mr. Chamberlain is an unemployed General Motors line worker who was laid off two months ago. The truck owner is an antiques dealer who requested anonymity.

  The owner had entered the restaurant after parking the truck behind the building. He said he then saw local news of interest on the TV, and decided to eat at the bar. Mr. Chamberlain was the only other customer. A regular at the bar, Mr. Chamberlain was reportedly drinking heavily, and left the premises first. He had just informed the vehicle owner that he’d recently lost his apartment and even his car, but he would survive: He wasn’t a “quitter.” The bartender was able to identify him for the police.

  When the owner left minutes later, the truck was gone. Mr. Chamberlain was not seen anywhere in the vicinity.

  Anyone who has information on either the truck or Buckeye Chamberlain is requested to phone the Michigan State Police hotline.

  A thousand jumping jacks would be an understatement for what my brain was doing.

  I stared at the screen, my thoughts bouncing up and down. So Buckeye’s truck was probably the st
olen one. And what about the box? It must be valuable in some way. Otherwise, why would an antiques dealer —

  Just then, a heavy hand clapped me on the shoulder.

  I KNEW WITHOUT even turning my head that it wasn’t Gumps. His hand always felt kind. This hand felt hard.

  And then I smelled that old bandage smell, like something damp and unclean.

  My heart leaped up into my ears. It was beating so fast I could hardly hear.

  “Hi, runt,” Buckeye said. “Good timing. All on your lonesome, huh?”

  I swallowed hard. I wanted to turn off the computer screen, but instead I was suddenly tapping my chin. Uh - tap! Oh - tap! Uh - tap! Oh - tap! Maybe if I didn’t move, Buckeye would go away, like an angry wasp. Gam had taught me never to let a wasp know you’re afraid.

  The closest help was probably down that long flight of marble stairs. As if he read my mind, Buckeye snarled, “No one’s up here, and no one downstairs can hear us, kid.” He grabbed a chair and sat down right next to me.

  I put on my glasses — I’d taken them off for close reading. Now I could see Buckeye’s grimy hand and a pair of pants that looked as if they needed to go through the wash five or ten times. And there was his knee, poking through a hole.

  He was leaning forward, reading the article. I studied the dirt under his fingernails and the way his hand trembled. His knuckles were dry and cracked. He sat back and snorted.

  “Well, whadda you know? I’m famous. Busy doing a little background check, huh? Trying to get me in trouble?”

  I managed to shake my head right away, but I was still tapping. I wanted to tell him about the policeman’s visit, but no voice came out.

  “Planning on turning me in, huh?”

  I tried desperately to shake my head no, but by then I hardly knew what was doing what.

  Buckeye snorted. “You are a weirdo, aren’t you? Well, no worries — I’m not about to be caught.” He was talking in my ear, and his breath smelled nasty, like old sauerkraut. “And if you tell anyone you saw me, you’re as good as gone. Hey, you’re just an accident with an invisible name — easy to clean up an accident. And if you want my parents to stay sssaaaafe,” he hissed, “you’ll keep this little visit to yourself.”