Applewhites at Wit's End Read online

  APPLEWHITES

  AT WIT’S END

  STEPHANIE S. TOLAN

  Dedication

  To all the Yunasa campers,

  past, present, and future—

  thanks for your inspiration!

  P.S. Any resemblance to persons

  living or dead is purely coincidental!

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Hal’s Map of Wit’s End

  Family Tree

  The Cast of Applewhites at Wit’s End

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Stephanie S. Tolan

  Credits

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Hal’s Map of Wit’s End

  Family Tree

  The Cast of

  Applewhites at Wit’s End

  Permanent Residents of Wit’s End

  HUMAN

  E.D. (Edith) Applewhite—

  age thirteen, well organized and reliable (the only noncreative member of the family), third child of Randolph and Sybil

  Randolph Applewhite—

  professional theater director, husband of Sybil and father of the four Applewhite children

  Jake Semple—

  age fourteen, the bad kid from the city, the only non-Applewhite student at the family’s home school, the Creative Academy

  Sybil Jameson—

  author of the Petunia Grantham mystery novels, wife of Randolph and mother of the Applewhite children

  Destiny Applewhite—

  age five, highly creative, extremely talkative, youngest Applewhite child

  Zedediah Applewhite—

  patriarch of the Applewhite family, maker of fine furniture, father of Randolph and Archie, grandfather of the children

  Archie Applewhite—

  creator of Furniture of the Absurd, husband of Lucille and uncle of the children

  Lucille Applewhite—

  poet, wife of Archie, aunt of the children, sometime mystic and photographer

  Cordelia Applewhite—

  age seventeen, dancer-choreographer, eldest Applewhite child

  Hal Applewhite—

  age sixteen, sculptor, painter, seriously introverted second Applewhite child

  OTHERS

  Winston—

  highly sensitive and slightly overweight basset hound

  Paulie—

  Zedediah’s adopted parrot, known for his impressive vocabulary of curse words

  Wolfbane (Wolfie)—

  exceedingly bad-tempered male member of Lucille’s pair of rescue goats

  Witch Hazel (Hazel)—

  gentle and unassuming female goat

  EUREKA! CAMPERS

  Ginger Boniface—

  age eleven, the green twin, poet

  Cinnamon Boniface—

  age eleven, the blue twin

  Harley Schobert—

  age twelve, son of indie rock stars, photographer

  David Giacomo—

  age fourteen, “angel” and Renaissance man

  Quincy (Q) Brown—

  age thirteen, dancer, singer, swimmer, talent show winner

  Samantha Peterman—

  age twelve, passionate reader, visual artist

  ASSORTED MINOR CHARACTERS

  Bruno—

  the Boniface chauffeur

  Mrs. Montrose—

  telephone voice, bane of Randolph’s existence

  Marlie Michaels—

  Harley’s considerably tattooed mother, lead singer of Dragon’s Blood

  Mrs. Giacomo—

  David’s elegant mother

  Mystery Driver of Plain Black Sedan

  Daryl Gaffney—

  telephone voice, assistant at the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources

  Chapter One

  It was a dark and stormy night when Randolph Applewhite arrived home from New York to announce the end of the world. The whole family plus Jake Semple, the extra student at their home school, the Creative Academy, were gathered at the time around the fireplace in the living room of the main house at Wit’s End, while a wind howled and snow swirled against the windows.

  Like everyone else, E.D. had at first taken her father’s announcement to be hyperbole—one of her vocabulary words for that week, which meant “deliberate and obvious exaggeration for effect.” A famous theater director, Randolph Applewhite had a habit of making exactly this announcement whenever something—almost anything—went wrong with a project of his and he felt the need for sympathy. So often had they heard it, in fact, that E.D.’s mother, the even more famous Sybil Jameson, author of the bestselling Petunia Grantham mystery novels, actually said, “That’s nice, dear,” as she struggled to pick up a stitch she had dropped in the scarf she was attempting to knit.

  It wasn’t until well into his explanation that she put down her needles and began paying attention. “What do you mean gone?”

  “Just what I said! Gone! Embezzled!”

  “How much of it?”

  “All of it! To the last penny. The Applewhite family is destitute. We shall have to sell Wit’s End and move to a hovel somewhere.”

  “What’s a hovel?” asked E.D.’s five-year-old brother, Destiny, who was cheerfully and industriously drawing a bright spring-green pig on a large pad of newsprint.

  When the whole story had at last been told—not until long after Destiny had been sent to bed and everyone else had finished a couple of mugs of hot cocoa enhanced with comforting marshmallows or alcohol, depending on their ages—it was clear that while the end of the Applewhites’ world had not yet arrived, it was looming on the horizon like smoke from a wildfire and heading their way.

  E.D. had never really understood—nor felt the need to—the financial structure that formed the foundation of her family’s creative compound. She only knew that the whole, extended Applewhite family had left New York when Destiny was a year old and moved to rural North Carolina, where they had bought an abandoned motor lodge called the Bide-A-Wee. They had renamed it Wit’s End and had lived here since, the adults following their particular creative passions and the children, except for E.D.’s own absolutely noncreative self, discovering theirs. All of the adults were famous. Her grandfather and her uncle Archie both designed and created furniture—Zedediah Applewhite’s handcrafted wood furniture and Archie’s “Furniture of the Absurd,” which wasn’t really so much furniture as sculpture and which was regularly exhibited in galleries a
round the country. Her aunt Lucille was a poet.

  What E.D. learned that stormy winter night was that they had come to Wit’s End not just so the family could live together, but so that they could pool their resources in order to continue their work. The vast majority of these resources came from the worldwide sales of the Petunia Grantham mysteries; some came from Zedediah’s beautiful, expensive, and entirely practical furniture; and some came from Randolph’s work directing plays. Nothing else anyone did brought in much money. All of their resources had been gathered together in a family trust. The manager who had handled that trust, and therefore the future of the entire Applewhite enterprise, had turned out to be a crook.

  “He’ll go to jail,” Randolph said after his second cup of bourbon-laced cocoa. “There’s that, at least!”

  “And what good will that do us?” Archie asked.

  “I, for one, will feel better,” Randolph answered. “It will cheer the dark nights in our hovel.”

  Zedediah, ever practical, pointed out that the Petunia Grantham mysteries would no doubt continue to sell as they always had, to which Sybil responded that she had only that morning killed Petunia Grantham off. The current novel, which was due to be finished within the week, would be the last in the series. “I killed her because I simply can’t write another one. It would destroy my very soul.”

  “Your soul is tougher than that!” Randolph responded. “You can simply resurrect her in the next! They do it all the time in soap operas.”

  “My books are not soap operas!”

  Only Aunt Lucille had taken the news of their sudden poverty in stride. She breathed a series of long, calming breaths, smiled, and announced that they would get along in some unforeseen way, just as they always had. All they needed to do was trust their creative energies, and they would surely come up with a way to solve the problem. “One step at a time,” she said. “Out of the darkness, into the light.”

  “How long do we have?” Sybil asked then.

  “If we gather up everything we have in the bank accounts, plus whatever you’re owed when you turn in the current novel, plus the fees for the two directing gigs I have contracts for—assuming that Zedediah’s furniture continues to sell the way it has—we can probably keep the mortgage paid through June. Maybe July. But after that …”

  “We’ll think of something,” Lucille said. “Remember Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind.’ ‘O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’”

  As it turned out, the winter was unusually harsh and unusually long, or at least it felt that way. By the time the Wit’s End daffodils began blooming in March, the family had become obsessed with saving money in every way possible. The children’s allowances had been not just cut, but actually discontinued. E.D.’s older brother, Hal, unable now to order sculpture supplies online for UPS delivery, had taken to going through the trash to find materials for his projects. “If it gets much worse,” he complained, “I’ll have to go back to painting! At least I have plenty of tubes of paint.”

  E.D.’s sister, Cordelia, had given up drinking her seaweed-and-protein health drinks. “I can’t even afford the gas to get to the store, let alone the cost of the supplements! How am I going to maintain the energy to keep up my dancing?”

  Winston, their food-loving basset hound, was now living on kibble instead of canned dog food, and liver treats had become a thing of the past. Zedediah’s parrot, Paulie, could no longer count on fresh peanuts, and meat had become an occasional indulgence instead of the centerpiece of most dinners for the humans in the family. Pot roast, everybody’s favorite dinner, had not been seen since the end of the world was announced. E.D. thought she had seen Uncle Archie at the goat pen from time to time, staring longingly at Wolfbane and Witch Hazel, Lucille’s rescue goats.

  E.D. herself had begun using the back sides of papers from the recycling box to write her research papers for school. And Zedediah had sped up production of his furniture, appearing in the kitchen late for dinner, still wearing his sawdust-covered work apron, and going right back to the woodshop afterward. So busy was he that Paulie had begun picking his feathers out from loneliness and perches had to be established for him throughout Wit’s End. The last person to leave a room was supposed to take Paulie along so that he wouldn’t be left by himself.

  It was an evening in early March when Randolph, having just been paid by the theater in Raleigh where he’d directed a production of the musical Oliver! with Jake, his newly discovered star, playing the role of the Artful Dodger, called a family meeting. He waved his check in the air. “This will cover another mortgage payment,” he said. The Applewhites couldn’t always be counted upon to celebrate one another’s successes, but this time they broke into spontaneous cheers and applause. “Even better, I have a plan to save Wit’s End!”

  The cheers and applause died away. No one entirely trusted Randolph’s ideas. “What is it?” E.D.’s mother asked suspiciously. She had steadfastly refused—citing the arrival of her Petunia Grantham royalty check as her fair contribution to the family bank account—to resurrect Petunia or begin another book, as she felt the need to rest her brain. “Your plans have been known to require considerable effort from the rest of us.”

  “All for one and one for all,” Randolph said. “Just listen to me, everyone. You’re going to love it!” He turned to Jake, who was sitting on the floor rubbing Winston’s ears. “I owe a part of this idea to Jake. I was sitting in the theater, listening to him sing ‘Consider Yourself at Home,’ when it came to me. The next line of the song invites Oliver Twist into the family, just as we’ve invited Jake into ours. So there I was, looking at this stage full of singing and dancing kids—Fagin’s pickpockets—and it occurred to me that we could create just such a family.”

  “A family of pickpockets?” Archie said. “I hardly think that’s the best way to solve our problem!”

  “A family of creative kids! We invited Jake to join the Creative Academy. Why couldn’t we take in a whole lot more? Not all year round—just in the summer. We’ll start a camp for creative kids. I’ve even got a name for it. Eureka!” Randolph looked expectantly around the room. “Well? What do you think? People pay big money to send their kids to summer camp. Just regular summer camp. Think what they’d pay to have their kids spend eight weeks with a family of professional artists. Famous professional artists!”

  “Kids? Living here with us?” Hal said, his face going pale. “How many?”

  “I’m thinking just twelve this first year, a pilot group.”

  “And what would we do with these twelve kids?” Archie asked.

  “Teach them. Encourage them. Share with them our love of art, our own individual creative passions. Set them on the path to becoming creative, productive adults! Eureka! would not only bring in big bucks, it would be a humanitarian endeavor—helping to groom the next generation of American artists. It will be a whole family project. There will be something for everyone to do.”

  “Me, too?” asked Destiny.

  “Of course you, too. You can be the camp mascot!”

  E.D. doubted that Destiny knew what a mascot was, but the title was enough to satisfy him.

  Randolph turned to his wife. “Now that Petunia Grantham’s dead, you’re going to need something to do! You can’t rest your brain forever!”

  “Twelve children? Twelve other people’s children?”

  “Yes. Think of it. Twelve delightful children into whose meager little lives we will bring the joys of art. We do art—and children—uncommonly well. Just look at our own four, and Jake, too, of course! Who would have thought when Jake first came to us that we could turn him into a musical-theater star in a matter of weeks? We could do that sort of thing with twelve more!”

  E.D. suspected that Jake wasn’t willing to give the Applewhite family all the credit for his newly discovered talent, but she could see that he was listening carefully as Randolph laid out the details of the camp. Each of them would share with the campers what they l
iked to do best, Randolph told them—their own creative passion—including Jake. As the only one besides Destiny able to sing at all, he could be the singing coach.

  “And what would I share with them?” E.D. asked.

  “A play needs a stage manager, a camp needs a—a—an executive assistant, the person who handles the schedule and the details and makes sure everything runs smoothly. You do that wonderfully well, E.D—you know you do!”

  No one but Destiny had yet accepted the idea. So Randolph went on, refusing to be daunted by their stony faces. “For heaven’s sake, people. We’re talking only eight weeks here! Practically no time at all. If we charge twelve families what I expect to charge them, we could save Wit’s End, bring meat back to the family table, and restart allowances. Would you really rather sell out, leave here, and move to a hovel in Hoboken?”

  Chapter Two

  When Jake had first come to live at Wit’s End, he had been determined to get away as soon as possible. Having been kicked out of the entire public school system of the state of Rhode Island, then out of Traybridge Middle School after he was sent to North Carolina to live with his grandfather, he had expected to get himself kicked out of the Applewhites’ Creative Academy in a matter of days. The first problem with that had been that the Applewhites weren’t the least bit bothered by his multiple piercings, his scarlet spiked hair, his black clothes, or his cursing—all the things that established his identity as the bad kid from the city. The second problem was that he really had no place else to go. His parents were both serving time in minimum-security prisons for having attempted to sell their home-grown marijuana to an off-duty sheriff’s deputy, and there were no foster families back home in Providence willing to take him in. E.D. had almost gleefully pointed out that his only alternative was Juvie. So he’d been forced to stay.