Project Sweet Life (15 page)

But despite the fact that we went back over all the ground we’d examined and then went even deeper than before—ninety feet at least—we saw nothing that
might be used to store money.

Before we knew it, our tanks were out of air.

We sat in the shallow water of that pathetic little beach for a long time. The wake from passing boats lapped at our armpits and jogged our empty tanks. It was no longer the cool temperature that kept me slumped on my little rocky shelf of a seat. It was that I knew exactly what leaving meant: We were one step closer to the end of our friendship.

Curtis and Victor didn’t move either. They knew what I knew.

But we couldn’t stay in that water forever. As the sun sank lower in the sky, we all stood and slowly slopped our way to shore.

I stopped suddenly, water dripping down my body. “Wait,” I said.

Victor turned. “What?”

“The last fortune cookie,” I said, just above a whisper.

“What about it?” Curtis said.

“What was it?” I said, looking at Victor. “What was your fortune?”

He thought for a second. “Something about a place to sit when you’re tired.”

“
A seat for the weary is always welcome
,” Curtis recited. He stared at me. “Dave? What is it? What are you thinking?”

I turned back to the water. “It’s crazy. I know it is! I mean, what are the odds? But I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t check.”

“What?” Curtis said. “Check
what
?”

“
A seat for the weary is always welcome!
” I said. “That rock I was sitting on—it was flat, almost like a seat.”

I fumbled in the water, looking for the shelf-like rock.

“Help me!” I said. “Help me get this to the surface!”

I saw right away that it wasn’t a rock. It was a rectangular box covered with barnacles and mussels.

“It’s not porcelain,” Curtis said.

“That was our mistake!” I said. “Assuming it was porcelain!”

We carried it to the beach.

“It’s heavy,” Curtis said. He didn’t say it, but I knew we were all thinking the same thing:
like it’s filled with gold
!

I grabbed a rock and started scraping at the surface.

“Metal,” Curtis said. “It’s made of metal!”

“Not just metal,” Victor said excitedly. “Pewter. Which doesn’t rust!”

We kept scraping at the box until we could make out its general shape.

“Saint Barnaclees!” Victor said. “It’s a tea caddy!”

“What?” I said.

“Something the Chinese stored tea in. They used to be bigger than they are now, because the Chinese drank a lot of tea. And it would be airtight, to keep the tea fresh.”

At that moment, I scraped away enough of the barnacles on the top to see the engraving there. It was a flower.

No, not just a flower.

A chrysanthemum!
Lei-Lei’s favorite flower!

“Open it,” Curtis said. “Open it!”

I turned to Victor. “You do it,” I said. “This was your idea.”

So he did. He had to pry it with his weight-belt buckle.

We all held our breath.

Finally, he forced the lid open.

We all leaned forward so fast, our heads almost clunked together.

It was dark inside the container. Dark and wet.

Victor reached inside the caddy. His forehead furrowed. Then he probed deeper still, fumbling around with his hand.

“Well?” Curtis said. “
Well?
”

Victor lifted his hand out of the container and opened his palm.

Thick brown sludge dripped down from his fingers. It splattered against the water. For a second, I thought I saw little numbers—vague ones and twos and fives and zeros—floating on the surface of the water, like the sheen of gasoline we’d seen earlier. They looked like ink that had been lifted off paper. And almost immediately, they dissolved away.

“What’s that?” Curtis said, meaning the sludge.

“All there is inside,” Victor said.

“Wait,” Curtis said. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying,” Victor said, “that I think I was wrong about Lei-Lei’s money not being in bank notes. And at some point over the last century, the container leaked.”

“Project Sweet Life?” I said. “
Ha!
That’s a laugh! It sure hasn’t made our life very sweet.”

It was Tuesday afternoon in the third week of August, the week after we’d learned that if we had found Lei-Lei’s money, it had long since turned to Cream of Wheat. The heat wave still hadn’t let up, and we could barely stand being in the bomb shelter, even with the door propped open.

“And summer’s almost over!” I went on. “Even if we get seven thousand dollars tomorrow, that only gives us one week off before school. Some sweet life!
We’ve worked our butts off all summer long—and for nothing!”

Part of me was mad at Curtis. After all, Project Sweet Life had been his idea in the first place. But I couldn’t stay angry. We’d all signed on knowing the risks. It wasn’t Curtis’s fault that we’d failed. Who knew it would end up being so hard to make a simple seven thousand dollars?

“We didn’t fail,” Victor said, as if reading my mind. “We found Lei-Lei’s money, and we guessed almost the right number of jelly beans. We even caught the bank robber. We’ve just had a run of bad luck.”

“But we didn’t get the money,” Curtis said. “Who cares if we were right about those things? We didn’t get the money! So yeah, we did fail. Now we’re going to pay the price.”

I thought,
Wow, even Curtis has given up!

“It matters,” Victor said. “If it hadn’t been for Lani and Haleigh, we would’ve won that ten thousand dollars. If it hadn’t been for Mrs. Shelby, we would’ve caught the bank robbers.”

Curtis just snorted in disgust. I’d never seen him so down.

“Wait,” Victor said suddenly.

“What?” I said.

“The guy who broke into Mrs. Shelby’s at the same time we did? He was one of the bank robbers, too, wasn’t he?”

“Eddy?” I said. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Well, what if we caught
him
? Wouldn’t we get another hundred-thousand-dollar reward?”

I shrugged. “Maybe. What difference does it make? We don’t know where he is.”

Victor’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe we do.”

Curtis looked up.

“Remember when we were staking out Mrs. Shelby’s house?” Victor said. “And remember how Eddy was also staking out her house at exactly the same time by pretending to be a plumber? Well, I just remembered something about his plumber’s van. It had a Zone One parking sticker on his back bumper.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I remember that, too.”

“So to find Eddy, all we need to do is find his van. And if he had a Zone One parking sticker, we know where he parks.”

“Is that enough to go on?” I said.

“Absolutely!” Curtis said suddenly. “It’s just a
zone
. How big can a zone be? Piece-o-cake!”

Project Sweet Life was back in business. Meanwhile, the conclusion-jumping Curtis I knew was back too. All was right in the world.

That night after dinner, my mom presented my dad and me with one of her famous Tootsie Roll pies.

“What’s this?” my dad said.

“It’s a reward,” she said. “For Dave.”

“Me?” I said. “What’d I do?”

My mom smiled. “Well, mostly it’s for what you didn’t do. You’ve worked all summer long, and you haven’t complained once, not since that first night when your dad said you had to get a job.”

“That’s true,” my dad said, nodding. “Thatta boy.”

Great
, I thought.
For dessert tonight, we’ll be offering a fine selection of guilt
.

“And you haven’t left your wet towels lying in the bathroom,” my mom went on, “and you never once ran late and had to ask us for a ride to the pool.”

Okay, okay!
I thought. This made me feel guilty
and
stupid. Here I’d been thinking that the one thing we did succeed at this summer was outwitting our parents, but I hadn’t even done
that
well. I’d just been lucky that my parents were so trusting.

“It wasn’t any big deal,” I said quietly.

“It was!” my mom said. “And I know exactly how you’re going to want to spend some of that money you’ve been earning this summer.”

“You do?” I said.

She nodded. “Back-to-school shopping!”

I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was,
Wait. First, you unfairly force me to get a summer job a whole year before I’m supposed to. And now, despite the fact that you’ve paid for my back-to-school shopping every year until now, you
also
want me to spend the money I supposedly made on that job on back-to-school clothes? How is
that
fair?

“I’m taking you to the mall this Saturday,” my mom said. “I’ll even spring for lunch!”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” I said.

“But I
want
to,” my mom said.

“No, really,” I said. “I’ll do my back-to-school shopping Labor Day weekend.”

“Dave, that’s crazy. The mall will be mobbed.”

“But Mom—”

My dad glanced over at me, eyes suddenly narrowing. I think his “surveyor’s sense” was tingling something fierce.

So I had no choice but to nod at my mom and say, “Okay. Saturday it is.”

But that’s when I realized something pathetic: Despite what I’d said to Curtis and Victor, Project Sweet Life had stopped being about “the sweet life” a long time ago; now it was just about not getting caught. Every day meant another in a long string of lies. We could barely even go outside without worrying about being spotted by some random family member. But we couldn’t stop now; we couldn’t back out because the punishment would be unbearable.

This Saturday it would all come to an end, anyway. My mom would learn I had no money—unless we could somehow find Eddy and implicate him in the Capitol American bank robberies. Catching him was our very last chance. But even if we did catch him I still wouldn’t have enough money to go shopping with my mom. It
had taken Mrs. Shelby
weeks
to get the actual check.

Who knows? Maybe if we caught the bank robber, Capitol American would give me a loan.

We learned online that parking Zone 1 was, naturally enough, downtown. So the next day, Wednesday, we rode our bikes back there.

We saw right away that most of the street parking in the city center proper was one-hour-only, whether or not you had a parking sticker. It was just on the streets to the north and east of downtown, which were mostly apartment and condo buildings, that the Zone 1 parking stickers were valid.

“Now what?” I asked. “We just wander around Zone One until we see a white plumber’s van?”

“I bet the plumber part was just one of those magnets you buy online to disguise a car,” Curtis said. “I bet it peeled right off, so now it’s just a plain white van.”

“So that’ll be even harder to find,” I said.

“We could go back to the Paper Lantern and get some more fortunes,” Curtis said. “I bet they’d tell us where to go!”

“Something tells me that won’t work again,” I said. “Why don’t we let that be our backup plan?”

We zigzagged from one end of Zone 1, which butted up against Zone 2, to the other end, which ran into Zone 3.

It was hotter than ever outside—surface-of-the-planet-Venus hot. The sun glared down at us like a disapproving principal, giving me a headache. The heat rose up at us from the streets in great, suffocating waves. If you cooked an egg on the pavement, it would have fried as hard as an Egg McMuffin in a matter of seconds.

But we didn’t see any white vans, plumber sticker or not.

“Maybe Eddy has a day job,” I said, collapsing in the shade of a tree. It was only three in the afternoon, but staggering around in the Saharan heat had taken a lot out of us.

“He doesn’t have a day job!” Curtis said. “He’s a
thief
. Not having to work is the whole
point
.”

“He still might have been out,” Victor said.

So we went back the way we had come.

This time, we did find a white van, parked on one of
the side streets (and too close to a fire hydrant). It must have been parked there in just the last hour or so, because we’d passed this way before and hadn’t seen it. Problem is, it didn’t have a Zone 1 parking sticker.

“That’s not it,” I said. “Unless Eddy removed his sticker. But he’s still parking in Zone One, so why in the world would he do that?”

A few blocks later, we spotted another white van. This one we might not have seen before, because it was parked in an alley between two buildings. We walked closer and saw that it had a Zone 1 parking sticker.

“Now what?” I said.

“Now we wait,” Victor said.

We settled down in the meager shade of a spindly, dehydrated rhododendron and waited.

“We do have one advantage,” Curtis said. “Eddy doesn’t know we exist. He left the coffee shop before the waitress realized what we were up to—and given that he’s guilty of the same crime she is, something tells me he’s never visited her in jail. So I’m sure he thinks it was Mrs. Shelby, not us, who busted their operation. And I’m sure he has no idea we were in her house the day he broke in.”

“Yeah,” Victor said. “But there aren’t that many teenagers downtown, remember?”

“What’s your point?” I said.

“My point,” Victor said, “is that we should still make sure Eddy doesn’t see us.”

We waited under that rhododendron for hours. We couldn’t afford bottled water, so we took turns ducking into a nearby office building to use the drinking fountain. But none of us got restless. In fact, we were weirdly animated, excited that finding Eddy had proved to be so easy.

Then, finally, a skinny man in a paint-speckled jumpsuit emerged from the rear of a nearby building. He carried a spattered tarp and a couple of cans of paint. He walked right to the white van, put the supplies in the back, and climbed up into the driver’s seat.

It wasn’t Eddy.

Had this person borrowed the van from Eddy? No, you could tell from the way he knew exactly where to find the seat belt that this was
his
van. Maybe Eddy had borrowed it from him? Either way, finding that van hadn’t brought us any closer to Eddy himself.

It was now after five o’clock. We’d been out in the sun most of the day.

“It doesn’t matter,” Curtis said calmly, patiently. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”

At this point, we had no choice.

The next day, Thursday, we did the same thing all over again. We did see another white van, and waited a couple of hours to see the owner, but it wasn’t Eddy.

Before we knew it, five o’clock had rolled around again. I was blistered and sweaty and headachy and even more sunburned and definitely ready to go home.

“We can’t go home,” Curtis said.

“Why not?” I said.

“Because that’s what we did yesterday. Maybe Eddy is on a schedule of some sort. Maybe he doesn’t get home until after five.”

“I thought you said he didn’t
have
a job,” I said.

“Maybe it’s not a job,” Curtis said. “Maybe he’s on a schedule for some other reason. He worked at the diner as a front for a robbery, didn’t he? Anyway, we need to keep looking.”

“You couldn’t have thought of this earlier?” I said.
“Like this morning, before we didn’t pack sandwiches or anything else to eat?”

“Suck it up,” Curtis said. “It’s for a cause bigger than your stomach.”

Even I knew that Curtis was right, so we called our parents and told them we had to work late, and kept looking for Eddy, late into the sandwich-less night.

We still didn’t find him.

The next day, Friday, we came back, sandwiches in tow. We weren’t weirdly animated anymore; after three days of heatstroke, starvation, and aimless wandering, we were all in foul moods. I think we also knew that our one last chance at success with Project Sweet Life was quickly slipping away. I’d told Curtis and Victor about the back-to-school shopping my mother had planned for the following morning, and I think the consequences of our failure were finally seeming real. I was almost ready to suggest we go back to the fortune cookie idea.

We’d started out in the early afternoon. By late afternoon, we’d seen three Eddy-less white vans. But by seven thirty that evening, we still hadn’t seen Eddy.

And that’s when we ran into him.

Not his van—the man himself.

We were walking down the street. Suddenly a man flew out of the apartment building on our left. He was in a big hurry, pushing right through us. He offered no apology before running off down the street.

“That was Eddy!” I whispered. “We know where he lives!”

“Don’t whisper,” Curtis said. “Whispering calls attention to itself. People instinctively hear the hushed tones.”

I glared at him. “You’re just making stuff up again, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. But at least now he had the decency to look guilty about it.

I changed the topic back to the one at hand. “Now we know where Eddy lives—let’s go to the police!”

Victor shook his head. “We don’t
know
Eddy lives in this building—maybe he was just visiting a friend. And even if he does live here, so what? We can’t call the police and say, ‘We think this guy’s a bank robber.’ No, we need evidence.”

“Evidence?” I said.

“Something that ties Eddy to the bank robberies,” Curtis said. “Victor’s right. That’s how we’re going to get that reward.”

“But that would mean getting
inside
his apartment,” I whispered, forgetting what Curtis had said about hushed tones. “How are we going to do that?”

No one answered me. We looked over at the apartment building. It was made of brick with small, blocky balconies stacked above the entrance, one for each of the five floors. A pattern of Ionic columns embellished the roofline. It had probably been a grand structure in its day, but that had been a long time ago. Now the bricks were dingy, and the paint on the wooden windowsills and balconies was cracked and peeling.