Scumble (26 page)

“I'm sorry, Ledge! It's monstrous! Totally catastrophic!”

“It was just an alarm clock, SJ—”

“No! You don't understand!” SJ pushed away from me, leaving a damp stain of tears on my shoulder. “Daddy had security cameras in his office!” Her voice dropped quieter and quieter as she spoke. “He saw us there, Ledge. He saw
you
there! He knows we were the ones who broke in. He knows everything! And he is
mad . . .
” Her last word came out a whisper.

There wasn't enough thin Wyoming air in the room. I couldn't breathe. My fingertips were tingling. My lips felt numb.

Somehow I managed to say: “How mad, SJ?”

Her eyes rolled wildly and she shook her head. “Try exploding-sun, comets-hitting-earth, end-of-life-as-we-know-it mad! He's gone, Ledge. He's taken all his workmen and all his wreckers. He's gone to your uncle's ranch—he's going to tear everything down!”

“But . . . he can't do that! At least, not yet, right? Autry still has time. He's in Cheyenne. He's getting the money to—” I stopped. Looking at SJ's face, I could see none of these things meant anything. Mr. Cabot was on a rampage.

I turned from the room, ready to fly to the ranch as fast as my feet would carry me. But Sarah Jane grabbed my shirt.

“Ledge! There's no way to stop him. It's too—it's too . . .” SJ sniffed and stammered, unable to finish. What had she been about to say? That it was too late? Too dangerous? It didn't matter.

“You don't understand!” I said, pulling away. “There's no one there, SJ. No one who can
do
anything.” Not even the twins would be there to protect their home from Cabot, not if they'd struck out far, hunting for Eva Mae's tall-tale treasure in the outer edges of the Flying Cattleheart. Sure, invisible Samson might be able to tie Noble Cabot's shoelaces together, or try to scare the workman with his shadow. But what good would those things do against bulldozers?

“I have to go,” I said, knowing the fate of the ranch would be left to a three-legged dog if I didn't. Beneath my skin, the ants were seething. I wanted to take Noble Cabot's entire house down then and there. I could do to Sarah Jane's dad what he was about to do to my uncle. What he'd already done to the T-shirt shop in town. What he was planning to do to the five-and-dime, and the salvage yard too.

And I didn't need a bulldozer or a wrecking ball to do it.

“Ledge, no.” Sarah Jane whispered my name like she knew what I was thinking, her voice pulling me back from the brink, back from a dangerous ledge I hadn't even seen myself nearing. I knew I could make the choice to be like Mr. Cabot. Or I could choose another way.

The Ledger Kale way.

“I have to go,” I said again.

“He's my dad, Ledge.”

“So?”

“
So
—I'm coming with you!” Sarah Jane wiped her eyes and shoved her feet into her shoes. I stood in my socks, itching to go as I waited for SJ to lace up her green Converse low-tops—the same ones that had tangled with my running shoes on my very first day in Sundance. The day all this started.

“Fine,” I said. “But if you can't keep up, you'll have to
catch
up.” Turning, I shot through the bedroom door, then stopped—or would have, if my sock-feet hadn't sent me sliding right into Hedda the Horrible, who stood at the top of the stairs. Hedda held her broom in one hand and her rolled-up tabloid in the other, and she glared at me as if I were a bug she'd like to flatten.

A headline spiraling round her paper caught my eye, one worthy of
The Sundance Scuttlebutt
:

Apparently, Hedda was looking for a new job . . . on another planet.

I couldn't push past her—I didn't want to knock the woman down the stairs—and I didn't have time to talk my way around her either. Backing up, I slipped on one of SJ's pencils. With a sudden inspiration, I bent to pick it up.

I shoved the pencil at Sarah Jane, then fished one of the loose notebook papers from my pocket and pushed that at her as well.

“What do you want me to do? Take notes?”

I grabbed SJ's arm and pulled her close, whispering in her ear exactly what I wanted her to write. She looked at me like she thought I'd cracked my last marble, but didn't waste time asking questions. Sarah Jane wrote quickly, pressing the paper against my back. Then she handed me what she'd written, watching as I moved toward Hedda, holding out the piece of paper. Careful not to look at it myself.

“Have you read today's headline?”

Hedda's brow furrowed as she glanced at the words:

Eyes round, Hedda dropped her newspaper and broom. Her hands flew to her heart and fluttered there nervously. Then she lit down the stairs, collected her purse, and left through the front door.

“Where is she
going
?” SJ asked, bewildered.

“She's either leaving town, or looking for the landing site,” I answered with a shrug. Sarah Jane stood up taller, eyes dancing.

“That's the power of the press!”

“No, that's the power of Sarah Jane Cabot,” I replied. But I didn't have time to explain more. Not right now.

I pulled Sarah Jane down the stairs and out the door, nodding to the tall birch tree beside the house as I crammed my feet back in my sneakers. For what it was worth, I'd kept my promise to Uncle Autry: I hadn't put one shoe inside the Cabot house.

S
PEEDING FROM THE CABOT HOUSE, I wasn't supersonic, but I was close. I'd never run so fast in my entire life. If I'd been running against Ryan, I would've beat him easy. But there was more at stake now than a half marathon, a time to beat, or a trophy. This race had to count—
really
count—and I was glad I'd trained so hard for it. If only Dad could see me now!

Sarah Jane matched me stride for stride, as if she and I had been running in sync together all summer rather than constantly tripping each other up. We passed the
Welcome to Sundance
sign still swinging from one bolt in the wind. With a
snap!
and a backward glance, I repaired the sign—no problem. If only I could snap my fingers and do the same for Willie's, the salvage yard, and the Flying Cattleheart. But I knew there were some things I couldn't fix—and I was reminded of it again when we reached the ranch's towering steel gate.

The gravel road cresting the ridge was brutally gouged and furrowed. A parade of heavy equipment had left thick tire treads in the red soil, flattening the tall grass and wildflowers, squashing grasshoppers, butterflies, and tiger beetles in its path. Warm wind mixed diesel fumes with the smell of crushed sage, creating a pungent mix that made my stomach churn.

Suddenly, the ground rumbled, quaking hard enough to make me and SJ stagger and clasp hands as we tried to keep our balance.

“Ledge! Is it an earthquake?” SJ was breathless. I couldn't answer—I didn't know. On the other side of the ridge, thick billows of dirt and dust rose up in grubby clouds. The tremor only lasted seconds, but it shook me to my core.

I'm here too late, I thought. The demolition's started.

Up and over the ridge we went, panting as we reached the slope on the other side. Sarah Jane clutched a stitch in her side but didn't ask to stop. Dust hung thick over the basin of the ranch. I couldn't see what was happening below until we drew closer. Then details of the scene came into sharp focus.

At first even I had trouble reconciling what I saw with what I remembered the ranch to be. For Sarah Jane, the disconnect between the old landscape and this new one was even harder to fathom.

“Ledge! When did your uncle get the
moat
?”

I was having trouble with that one too. Between the time I'd left the Flying Cattleheart and now, the path of the river had altered. Now, instead of burbling around the far side of the Bug House, the cascading waters rushed rapidly through a deep gully that wound around the O'Connells' log house. The “moat” trenched through Rocket's garden, then doubled back to snake in front of the conservatory, resuming its course on the far side of Cam Beacham's lucky-glove cottonwood.

The last person to move the banks of that river—the
only
person—was Grandpa Bomba. But these days Grandpa Bomba couldn't move his own
chair
. Still, there was no other explanation. Somehow, Grandpa must have found the strength . . . or borrowed a lion's share.

The resounding bark of a dog yanked my attention away from the wayward waterway. Following the sound west, I saw Mr. Cabot climbing down out of his truck on the other side of the current, silhouetted against a settling haze of dust. Leaning on his cane, his shape was unmistakable, and his yellow CAD Co. hard hat glinted in the sun like a hazard beacon.

Mr. Cabot moved to stand in front of the Bug House, quickly joined by a company of slack-jawed workmen and a sloth of heavy equipment as every engine went quiet, one after the next. Mr. Cabot appeared to be waiting for a barrier to be removed, or some high-noon face-off to end.

“Daddy! Stop!” SJ cried as she and I changed course, leaving the gravel road and cutting across the field toward the conservatory—toward Mr. Cabot, two bulldozers, three trucks, an excavator, and a backhoe. There was a spot where Grandpa had made the banks of the gully too narrow, the water flowing mostly underground. It was a small breach in the defenses, but one that had allowed the wreckers, and now us, to cross over.

Hearing his daughter's cry, Cabot turned. I could see Bitsy, all three feet planted like a not-so-misfit guard dog in front of the glass-roofed barn. Hackles raised. Teeth bared. The dog that I'd seen licking crayfish and teaming up with tarantulas looked ready to chomp the seat right out of Noble Cabot's pants.

But Bitsy wasn't alone in her fight. Two other figures had inserted themselves between Cabot and the conservatory, standing their ground against seemingly impossible odds. Just behind Bitsy, Grandpa Bomba stood in Cabot's way, looking stronger than I'd ever seen him. His old muscles were as withered and wrinkled as ever, but he no longer looked like a man knock-knock-knocking on the door of heaven.

The third figure was Samson—flesh and bone and fully visible.

Half kneeling next to Grandpa Bomba, Samson's whip-thin frame was tense as he held fast to Bitsy, the late-afternoon wind lashing his long hair into his eyes. Samson looked just as he had in my earlier there-and-gone visions, only now there was no trace of transparency on him. He'd shown up completely—stepped up completely—making Grandpa and Bitsy stronger.

Down on one knee, Samson held Bitsy back with one hand as she barked and lunged at Cabot and his men, showing them what kind of dog she could be, stalwart as ever, even if she was down one leg. With his other hand, Samson held fast to Grandpa's arm in a way that made me wonder if it was Samson supporting Grandpa Bomba, or the other way around. My cousin's face was gaunt and focused. Giving his strength to Grandpa was taking everything out of him—not just his invisibility. The bugs inside the conservatory had a rag-tag team of unlikely champions.

The Goliath beetles, stick insects, and butterflies had no way of knowing that their safely controlled and protected environment was about to come crashing down, sending them out into a world they weren't prepared for, or one that might not be prepared for them.

I knew exactly how that felt. I also knew what it meant to have people standing up for me.

“Daddy, stop!” Sarah Jane cried again, grabbing her father's hand as she reached him, still struggling to catch her breath.

“Sarah Jane! You shouldn't be here!” Cabot's face twisted as he pulled his hand free. He looked at me and his face turned purple. I thought his head might be about to explode. Then shouts rose from behind us, and the girls appeared at the top of the north ridge. The twins must have spotted the cloud of dust and felt the earth rumble too. Now Marisol and Mesquite were headed toward the Bug House as well, their backpacks bumping heavily behind them. Fedora ran out ahead—her own Kale-family speed genes kicking in. Despite everything, I smiled. Wait until Dad saw that! Fe's feet were a Road Runner blur!

“Daddy, this is crazy!” Sarah Jane clung to her father. “There are amazing things here. Wonderful things. What you're doing will make the worst, most wrong sort of headline!”

Cabot dropped his chin to his chest, his shoulders heaving. I stood back, waiting to see what he'd do. Close by, Grandpa and Samson watched and waited too. Bitsy stopped barking. Cabot's workmen shuffled their feet and tipped their hard hats back. All eyes were on Noble Cabot.