Applewhites at Wit's End (5 page)

Chapter Nine

E
.D. found Cordelia and Hal in Sweet Gum Cottage, which was now the visual arts studio. Surrounded by tubes of paint, they were painting elegant wooden signs for the boys' and girls' cottages with the names of the campers who would be staying in them. It was an idea they'd thought up when everybody had still been expecting a dozen campers; and though it hardly seemed necessary now that there were only three names on each sign, they had refused to give it up. Cordelia's was covered with flowers and vines. Hal had chosen a fantasy theme of wizards and dragons and goblins. Just like them, E.D. thought, to take hours to create something only moderately useful that could have been printed out in seconds.

Paulie greeted her from his perch in the corner with a scream and a string of curses. “Hi, Paulie,” she said automatically.

Hal looked up from his work. “I'm not sure I can go through with this after all. Whenever I think of staying in a cottage with three other people, I feel like I'm going to throw up.”

“Quit complaining,” Cordelia said. “At least you're going to have your own room, which is more than I get!”

“How long do we have till they start getting here?”

“No time at all,” E.D. said. “The first two are here already. They're down in Dogwood Cottage now, complaining about the heat.”

Hal's face went so white that the acne on his cheeks was more noticeable than usual. He rubbed at the sparse goatee that had taken him all spring to grow. “Now? Campers are here now? We're not ready. I'm not ready!”

“
You
don't have to be,” E.D. told him. “They're Cordelia's, not yours. The Boniface twins. A really scruffy chauffeur brought them in a Mercedes! Cinnamon says they're going home, though. Between the lack of air-conditioning and the cell tower not being the right one, she is
not
a happy camper! Do you suppose we have to refund their deposit if they go home? Dad'll have a heart attack.”

“Of course they're not going home,” Cordelia said. “They're my first two campers! I'm so excited! Cinnamon and Ginger, right? Age eleven. The poet and—and—I forget what the other one does. I'll get right over there.” She put down her paintbrush. “Could you finish painting these last two—”

E.D. just looked at her.

Cordelia picked the brush up again. “Sorry, I wasn't thinking. Would it be okay, you think, if I just take the time to paint in these lilies? It'll only take a minute.”

“It isn't as if they have anywhere to go,” E.D. said. “Or even any way to call home and demand their chauffeur back since their phones don't work here.”

Hal put his brush down suddenly and rushed off to the bathroom. After a moment E.D. and Cordelia could hear him retching. “You think he's going to be okay?” E.D. asked.

“Of course. He only has three boys to deal with. How bad could it be?”

“It's Hal! I couldn't believe he agreed to this counselor thing in the first place.”

Cordelia finished the last lily with a flourish of her brush and shrugged. “Dad had him the moment he promised to pay us! Hal was halfway through building a computerized moving sculpture when the world ended, remember? All the parts he needs to finish it cost a fortune. If he hadn't agreed to be a counselor, he'd have had to abandon the whole project.”

“What are you going to do with the twins from now till the other campers come?”

Cordelia put her paintbrush into a jar of turpentine and stood up. “Don't know. I'm sure that when I meet them something will come to me. I got a zillion ideas off the internet. Like Uncle Archie says, ‘Google is your friend!'” She picked up some papers from the end of the table. “These are the maps of Wit's End I made for the campers when you rejected Hal's version—”

“I didn't reject it; I gave it half the wall in the office.”

“Maybe I'll give one to each of the twins and challenge them to a scavenger hunt.”

“Ginger is green, Cinnamon blue,” E.D. said.

“What?”

“You'll see.”

“Okay.” Cordelia took off her paint smock and tossed it on the end of the workbench, smoothed her long, wavy auburn hair, and tugged at the flowered skirt she had chosen to wear with her staff shirt. “Do I look all right?”

E.D. nodded.
All right?
Cordelia was flat-out gorgeous. She tended to dress like Aunt Lucille, in bright colors and flowing fabrics; but even in cutoffs and a raggedy T-shirt, she would look better than E.D. on her best day.

“Here I go. Wish me luck.”

As the screen door slammed behind Cordelia, Hal came out of the bathroom wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Paulie, preening his newly grown-in feathers, swore at him gently. “It's no good,” Hal said. “I can't do this. I'll be in my room. Tell Dad I'm sorry to let the family down, but I just can't do this.”

“Dad's at the airport. He'll be back in a couple of hours. The Applewhite future depends on
Eureka!
You know perfectly well you can't quit.”

Hal uttered a couple of parrot words and headed back to the bathroom.

Chapter Ten

W
hen Zedediah left, Jake and Archie went back to work on the dock. After they'd nailed the last of the top boards in place, Archie dug through a pile of scrap wood in the back corner of his side of the shop and came up with an old, paint-splattered, four-rung wooden ladder. “There weren't any more swimming pool ladders on Craigslist, so I figured we could use this.”

“It won't look as classy as the other ladder.”

Archie sighed. “I know—but it'll do the job.” When the dock was finished, Archie stood back to look at it. “Hardly a work of art!”

“Destiny's orange and green blotches add a nice touch,” Jake said.

“It's possible that absurdity can go too far. I must remind myself that this, like the diving platform, is merely practical. Let's get a dolly under the thing and move it outside.”

While they were maneuvering it through the doorway, Zedediah drove up in Archie's pickup with an enormous coil of rope in the back.

“We'll take it from here,” Zedediah told Jake. “You'd better go find out what's still on E.D.'s to-do list. With her schedule screwed up like this, she's probably beside herself.”

Jake headed back to the Lodge. One thing that wouldn't be on E.D.'s list was getting Winston stashed in Wisteria Cottage before anybody else arrived. Nobody understood Winston's sensitivity the way Jake did—or even noticed it particularly. But in a world as intense as the Applewhites', the dog needed his own personal safe haven. As far as Winston was concerned, that haven was Jake's bedroom—in fact, Jake's bed.

The moment Jake slipped inside the front door, Winston came running, snuffling and whining with pleasure, and leaped on him, covering his knees with saliva. “Down, boy!” Jake said, shoving the dog firmly to the floor. Winston rolled over to let Jake rub his tummy. The smell of warm chocolate wafted in from the kitchen. Lucille was making her famous triple-chocolate brownies as a treat for the first night of camp.

“Let's go,” he said, “and get you stowed.” But outside, instead of heading for Wisteria Cottage, Winston trotted purposefully off toward the meadow, his tail waving cheerily. Jake didn't whistle him back. If the dog wanted a walk, why not let him have one before he got cooped up in his safe haven?

Winston leaped at a butterfly—the only prey he ever went after—prey he never came anywhere near catching. It was funny to watch the big, ungainly basset hound leap up in the air after a butterfly that could float effortlessly out of his reach. For some reason, Winston never got discouraged.
Butterfly, leap. Butterfly, leap.

Across the meadow, Winston took the woods trail in under the trees. Jake followed, watching his footing to keep from tripping over wisteria vines or the things E.D. called barbed wire vine. Lucille said they were greenbrier, but E.D. insisted that nothing as vicious as that should have such a pretty name. No matter how often the vines were cut back from the trail, they grew across it again. In spite of that, the trail was passable—cutting cross-country through the woods was nearly impossible. Between wisteria, barbed wire vine, and poison ivy, the North Carolina woods could be treacherous, but at least they were quiet and shady. Jake began to hum “Consider Yourself at Home,” his favorite song from
Oliver!
. His heart lifted immediately.
This,
Jake thought,
is what Zedediah means when he talks about joy
. In no time he had switched from humming to singing, his voice filling the green shade of the woods.

When he finished the song, he thought he heard voices from the general direction of the pond. He stopped and listened. Girls' voices. The fur rose along Winston's back, and he began making the whuffling sound he made when he was deciding whether to bark. It couldn't be E.D. or Cordelia. Winston never whuffled at anyone he knew. It had to be the twins.

“No worries,” he told the dog. “We don't have to go anywhere near the pond.” He had taken only a few more steps along the trail when there was a bloodcurdling shriek. It was followed by another, and another. Soon there were two voices shrieking. Whatever was going on, it sounded serious.

Jake tore through the woods toward the pond, leaping over vines and fallen limbs, shoving branches out of his way as he went, his skin getting scraped by the thorns of the barbed wire vine. Winston lumbered behind him, barking frantically. When Jake emerged from under the trees, he saw one of the twins, completely covered with black muck, standing hip deep in the pond. Her carroty curls had vanished under the muck, as had her freckles. The only part of her that wasn't black was her mouth, stretched wide in yet another scream. The other twin, in a blue swimsuit, was dancing along the edge of the pond, staying well back from the edge, her bare feet, too, black with muck.

“Come back!” the blue twin yelled. “Right this minute! Come back here!”

“I can't! I can't! It's got me. I can't move! You gotta come pull me out!” The muck-covered twin held a dripping hand out to her sister. “
Quick, quick! It's sucking me down! I'm gonna drown!”

“I can't come out there. It'll get me too. We'll both drown!”

Jake sighed. The girls had begun to cry now, growing more hysterical by the minute. He pulled off his sneakers and socks, ran to the pond, and splashed into the water, sinking deeper into the mud with every step he took. It was all he could do to keep his balance as he pulled one foot after another out of the mire.

Good thing she's so small,
he thought. She was still gasping through her sobs that she was drowning when he reached her, pulled her free, and threw her, dripping slime, over his shoulder. Slight as she was, the extra weight forced him even farther into the mud. Still, he managed to slog his way back to shore without falling in himself. No way this girl had been in any danger of being pulled under.

“You saved me, you saved me,” she was saying as he set her down on the grass.

Jake wrinkled his nose. The feel of the muck didn't particularly bother him underfoot, but the smell was disgusting: all mold and rot and dead things. Dead fishy things. He was almost as black with it now as the girl.

The other twin had started screaming again. She was sitting among the cattails at the edge of the pond, trying to fend Winston off as he slathered her face with his tongue. Jake didn't need to have seen it to know what had happened. Winston couldn't stand to see anyone cry, stranger or not. He always did his best to offer comfort, which consisted of licking them reassuringly. And thoroughly. He must have jumped on her and knocked her backward.

Jake went over, grabbed Winston's collar, and pulled him away.

“That's it!” the girl said, struggling to her feet and trying to wipe Winston's saliva off her face with one hand and the mud off her bottom with the other. “Get me to a phone,” she demanded. “Right now! My sister and I are going home.”

Jake picked up a towel that was crumpled on the grass. He supposed the girls had been intending to swim out to the diving platform that floated invitingly in the center of the pond. Kids who were used to swimming pools clearly didn't understand about ponds. He took the towel over to the other girl, who was trying unsuccessfully to clean her face with her muddy hands.

“How'd you fall down?” he asked as she began toweling her face and hair.

She looked up at him, her eyes wide. “I didn't
fall.
It was the pond! It's like something out of Stephen King. I just started walking out into it, and it pulled me in, knocked me over, and started to suck me down. I was lucky to get up again.” She dropped the towel and threw her arms around him. “Thank you, thank you. You saved my life!”

It was then that Cordelia arrived. “I see you've met Jake.” Jake disentangled himself from the mud-covered twin. “What are you two doing here? You're supposed to be on a scavenger hunt over by the barn!”

“It's too hot for a scavenger hunt,” the muddy twin said.

“Besides,” the other one added, “I never compete with Ginger. There's no point. She always wins. We saw the pond on the map you gave us and decided to swim instead.”

This, Jake thought, was why they'd all been warned never to let the campers out of their sight.

“Our father is going to sue you for everything you've got!” the green twin said. “How come you didn't warn us about this death pond?”

Cordelia smiled a bright and entirely unconvincing smile. “How come you didn't notice the sign in your bunk that says, No Swimming Without a Lifeguard Present?”

“Get me to a phone,” said the blue twin. “Now! We're going home!”

“If you say so,” Cordelia said, “but you have to come to the office to use the phone, and you're not setting foot in the office till you've had a shower. Besides, you're going to need some lunch. We hadn't expected to have campers here till dinnertime, but I make a mean peanut butter sandwich.”

From the look on the girls' faces, Jake figured peanut butter sandwiches were not a staple of their diet. “Let's go, Winston,” he said, picking up his socks and shoving his muddy feet into his sneakers.

The sound of Archie's pickup heralded the arrival of the floating dock as Cordelia shepherded the muddy twins back toward their bunk.