Applewhites at Wit's End Page 13

  When Lucille had rung the chimes to bring them back to sitting position, she announced that she had something to tell them and she wanted all of them, including Destiny, to just listen. They did.

  “The state can make an unannounced inspection,” Lucille said, wrapping up the story. “E.D. saw a man by the pond taking notes, but there’s much more to a state inspection than that. So we’re pretty sure he’ll be back.”

  “If we fail the inspection, will they shut down the camp?” Q asked.

  “Shut it down?” Destiny burst into tears. “No, no, no! I’m not finished the Petunia Possum drawings. And Cimmamon doesn’t got all the words done, either.”

  “Archie and Hal just got the scaffolding up for my mural!” Samantha said, pointing to the side of the barn where a platform was rigged with ropes and pulleys. “I haven’t even started it!”

  “Harley’s doing music for my lyrics!” Ginger said. “I want to have one of our songs in the end-of-camp show! If they shut us down, there won’t be a show!”

  “There has to be a show!” David said. “My mom’s hiring a videographer to make a DVD. It’s supposed to be my professional audition piece!”

  “And Cordelia and I have been working on a way to combine Step with ballet,” Q said. “We’re going to revolutionize the world of dance!”

  “Take it easy, everybody,” Lucille said. “Breathe! We may be on the state’s radar screen, but nothing has really happened yet. Tell them about distraction and delay, Harley.”

  When Harley had explained that they couldn’t fail an inspection that hadn’t been completed, E.D. told them that what they needed to do was think of ways to keep the inspector from getting it done. “He was probably just taking preliminary notes. An inspection includes collecting a water sample from the pond for testing, and I’m sure he hasn’t done that yet. We need to keep it that way.”

  “So what do we do if he shows up at the pond to get some water?” Cinnamon asked. “Shoot him and sink his body in the muck?”

  “Now there’s an idea!” David said.

  “That’s what would happen in a Petunia Grantham mystery!” Cinnamon pointed out.

  “This is not a Petunia Grantham mystery,” Lucille said.

  “Maybe we could keep him from getting to the pond in the first place,” Q said. “How about we string trip wires across the trails and through the woods?”

  “Oh sure, trip wires!” David said. “That’ll stop an agent of the state.”

  E.D. sighed. She was beginning to wish her hormones would go back to wherever they came from. She suspected that Botticelli must have had nicer models for his angels.

  “We could weave Elf Nets across the trails,” Samantha said.

  “Elf Nets?” David scoffed. “What the heck are Elf Nets?”

  “Nets made out of vines and strung between trees. Like the sculpture I made in Archie’s workshop.”

  “She used honeysuckle and wisteria vines,” E.D. said, “but if we wore gloves—and shirts with long sleeves—while we worked, we could use barbed wire vine and maybe even poison ivy, too. Nobody would dare try to get through a net like that. We could block every single trail in from the road. Maybe it wouldn’t stop him completely, but it would sure slow him down.”

  “What if he comes through the meadow instead of the woods?” Ginger said.

  “We could let Wolfie out of the goat pen,” Destiny put in. “That would scare him away. Wolfie scares everybody.”

  “If he’s sneaking around, how will we even know when he comes back?” Q asked. “He could show up anytime and anyplace. We need some kind of watch system.”

  “Winston! Winston!” Destiny said. “He always barks at strangers.” Hearing his name, the dog looked up and thumped his tail. “See? Winston wants to be a watch system.”

  Jake nodded. “He could do it, but he’d have to see or hear or smell the guy. I guess he and I could take a walk around Wit’s End a couple of times a day.”

  “Me, too! Me, too! I wants to go along!”

  “We could all take turns,” Q said. “We could walk the perimeter every hour or two. The dog could use the exercise.”

  “We could put ‘walk the dog’ on the Community Service list,” David said. “That would be a heck of a lot better than cleaning bathrooms!”

  Aside from vetoing murder, Aunt Lucille let the kids go on spinning out methods for distraction and delay without comment. She was listening in a way that E.D. recognized. The Applewhites believed in individual initiative and independence. She had a feeling the adults were going to let the kids do whatever they could think of short of murder and mayhem. She remembered a term from a program she had seen on television: plausible deniability. This way, if things went wrong somehow, the adults could all say they hadn’t known about any of it. It was just a bunch of kids goofing around behind their backs. What the kids needed to do was make sure things didn’t go wrong.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  “Jake, Jake!” Harley’s voice came over the walkie-talkie. “Code red! Winston’s barking his head off.”

  This was it, Jake thought, his stomach starting to knot. It was July 11, four days since they’d started planning, and the man in the suit hadn’t been spotted once. They’d developed Plans A through F to distract and delay the inspector no matter where or when he showed up, and the adults were letting them use the walkie-talkies to keep in touch. All the kids—including Hal and Cordelia—had spent their mornings, wearing gardening gloves and sweating in long-sleeved shirts and jeans, building Elf Nets across the woods trails. They’d finished the last one just this morning. The rest of the time, except for the perimeter dog walks, camp had gone on as usual, E.D. coming up with daily schedules that managed to fit the workshops into the afternoons, with theater, as usual, taking up the evenings. Nobody expected an inspector to come after dinner.

  Jake had been hoping the inspector wouldn’t come back. The truth was, he’d had enough run-ins with state government to last the rest of his life. Rhode Island had banned him from public school and put him in foster care. He wasn’t looking forward to trouble with North Carolina. At least this time, he reminded himself, it wasn’t Jake Semple alone against a whole state. He figured he was pretty much an innocent bystander.

  “Did you hear me, Jake? Code red!”

  “Roger,” Jake said. “Where are you?”

  “Meadow. Not far from the goat pen.”

  “Ten-four. Meadow’s Plan C. Can you see him?”

  “Guy in a suit. Heading in from the road.”

  “Has he seen you?”

  “Don’t know. He can’t miss the barking!”

  “Okay. Stay out of sight if you can. But don’t lose him. I’ll get the others on it.”

  Jake wished there were enough walkie-talkies for everybody to have one, but Randolph had vetoed buying more. In the afternoons the campers tended to be scattered all over camp. He’d been printing out song lyrics in the office when Harley called in. Now he looked at the Wit’s End map on the wall and checked the afternoon schedule. This was the first after-lunch session of the day, which meant Ginger was in Wisteria Cottage with Lucille.

  Samantha was at work on the scaffolding at the barn. Harley had finished his photomontage. Samantha had laid out the patchwork pattern on the barn wall and should be painting her mural now. Cordelia, Q, and David were in the dance studio, probably arguing, as usual, over the best way to create a fusion of Step, tap, and ballet. And Cinnamon—perfect!—Cinnamon was at the goat pen already, where she was supposedly trying to tame Wolfie so the Petunia Possum picture book could have a happy ending. The inspector’s route and timing couldn’t be better for Plan C. He thumbed the walkie-talkie to transmit. “Cinnamon! Did you hear? He’s somewhere near you.”

  There was a brief crackle of static. Then “Roger that. I’ve spotted the target. Ten-four. Waiting for him to get closer.”

  The only person Jake couldn’t locate on the schedule was E.D. But she had a walkie-talkie with her. He hope
d she had it turned on. “E.D. Where are you?”

  “Dance studio.”

  The dance studio. David was there. Was she still hung up on that jerk? “Mobilizing Plan C. Blue already in place. Step One about to begin.”

  “I heard. Cordelia, David, and Q on their way. I’m heading for Wisteria to change Green Twin to Blue and deploy. Cinnamon!”

  “Yep?”

  “Got your scarf with you?”

  “Yep.”

  Destiny was going to be terribly disappointed to have missed this, Jake thought. He’d wanted to be part of what he called “destruction and delay.” He’d been carrying an empty single-portion cereal box around with him, calling it his “walkie-talker.” But Sybil had taken him with her to the library in town to get more kids’ books for her market research. “I’m a nil-ustrator,” he’d told Jake importantly as he climbed into the car after lunch with a backpack to fill with picture books. “I gots to do research too.”

  Jake hurried out of the office and ran toward the goat pen. Step One for Plan C was the release of Wolfie, and he didn’t want to miss it. After that, of course, though everybody had a job to do, they had to be flexible and creative. Once Wolfie was loose, there was no way to predict how things would unfold.

  As he got closer, he could hear barking and shouting. He arrived at the goat pen out of breath and sweating. Cinnamon was standing by the open gate. Hazel was next to her, nibbling contemplatively at the hem of Cinnamon’s shorts. All the action was in the meadow. Harley was shouting at Winston, who was chasing Wolfie, who was chasing a man in a dark suit, who was dodging around among the waist-high weeds and grass and thistles, flapping a clipboard behind him and hollering for someone to “Call him off, call him off!”

  “Run for the woods!” Harley shouted at the man now. “It’s your only hope!”

  Dodging and weaving, the man began angling toward the trees on the other side of the meadow, Wolfie closing on him fast. The man caught sight of the beginning of a trail and headed for it, putting on a final burst of speed, apparently thinking, from Harley’s warning, that Wolfie would stop once he got in under the trees. Wolfie, of course, would not stop. But the man would, Jake knew. Not more than ten yards into the woods an Elf Net was strung securely across the trail.

  Sure enough, there was a scream just about the time Wolfie headed in among the trees and then another—louder and more bloodcurdling—as Wolfie apparently caught up to the inspector, who was surely caught in, or at least stopped by, the Elf Net. It occurred to Jake that injuring a representative of the government was probably not a good idea. But he need not have worried. Cinnamon put two fingers in her mouth and whistled a whistle that could have been heard in the next county. A moment later Wolfie appeared at the edge of the meadow, a narrow strip of dark fabric caught on his twisted horn.

  “Stay where you are, mister!” Harley shouted toward the woods, “while we catch the goat. Don’t come out till we say it’s okay!” It wasn’t an instruction the man was likely to ignore. Cinnamon, with Hazel at her heels, hurried across the meadow to meet Wolfie.

  Jake could hardly believe his eyes as he watched Wolfie fall in next to Hazel and the two goats trot docilely after Cinnamon straight back into the pen. Too bad Lucille wasn’t here to see, he thought. Cinnamon, the goat-whisperer, slipped into the shed and returned with a coffee can full of feed, which she poured on the ground. As the goats began to eat, she went out of the pen and closed the gate. By that time Ginger had arrived, dressed now in blue, a matching scarf securely covering her Mohawk haircut. Cinnamon whipped an identical scarf out of her pocket and tied it on over her red curls. The two girls now looked exactly alike. Destiny could probably tell them apart, Jake thought, but nobody else could.

  He pushed the transmitter button on his walkie-talkie. “Samantha. Blue and Blue deployed.”

  “Roger. I’ll be ready if he comes this way.”

  What happened next would depend on the twins. Cinnamon would go down the trail and ask the inspector where he wanted to go. Then she’d offer to take him on a shortcut through the woods. After that she and Ginger would take turns disappearing and popping up in unexpected places. When he’d seen Cinnamon disappear behind a tangle of bushes and vines in one direction, Ginger was to pop up in the opposite direction and ask why he was going that way. By the time he got out of the woods, they figured he’d be doubting his sanity. Depending on the route they were able to pick out, which was something they hadn’t been able to plan, they might lead him to the barn, where Samantha could accidentally spill a can of paint down on him from the scaffolding, or back to the meadow, where Q and David would be ready to open the gate and turn Wolfie loose again.

  When they’d planned it originally, they weren’t sure how David and Q would get Wolfie back once he was free, but now it was clear they’d only need Cinnamon to come and whistle for him. How did she do that? Jake wondered.

  There wasn’t anything more for Jake to do now except wait either to see the man emerge into the meadow again or to hear from Samantha that she’d dumped paint on his head. Distraction and delay. So far, so good. If he were the guy stuck in the Elf Net, Jake thought, he wouldn’t be any too eager to come back to Wit’s End—ever.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  E.D. missed the whole of Plan C. When she’d arrived at Wisteria Cottage, Ginger and Lucille had been poring over a book of folk songs, comparing verses and choruses and talking about the uses of repetition in songwriting. “Code red!” she shouted as she went in. “The inspector’s back—in the meadow! Plan C has started already. You need to change clothes, Ginger, and get out there as fast as you can.”

  “It’s okay, go!” Lucille said. Ginger turned and ran for Dogwood Cottage. “Plan C?”

  “Plausible deniability,” E.D. said. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Nobody will get hurt, right?”

  “That’ll pretty much depend on Wolfie,” E.D. said as she headed for the door. She wanted to get back in time to see the action.

  “Wait!” Lucille said. “I want you to look at something.”

  “But I have to go—”

  “Do you play a central role in Plan C?”

  “No—but—”

  “Okay, then. This’ll only take a minute.” Lucille pulled E.D. over to Archie’s laptop on the kitchen table. She didn’t let go of her arm as she brought a photograph up on the screen. “I’m thinking of starting a blog about all this. Something wonderful is happening. I’ve already written three poems. It’s not just Harley’s camera. Look here!”

  That was how E.D. missed what happened in the meadow. Lucille insisted on showing her all the evidence that orbs couldn’t be accounted for by the camera flash lighting up dust particles or moisture in the air. Lucille and Harley had been conducting experiments. They’d stirred up dust in the storage rooms of the barn and taken pictures. Those photos had some orblike blobs, but they all were fuzzy and indistinct. None of them had the interior mandala patterns, and none of them had blue fringes. They’d run the shower in Wisteria’s bathroom until the room was full of mist, and none of the photos they’d taken had orbs in them at all. There were even two photos with colored orbs that had been taken outside without a flash. Incontrovertible evidence, Lucille called these photographs.

  “But the best thing of all,” she announced with triumph, “is that you can call them! At least I can. Harley refused to try.”

  “Well, thanks for showing me these,” E.D. said. “But I really should get back—”

  “Just a few more! Look here.”

  E.D. sighed. “I don’t see any orbs.”

  Lucille nodded. “Exactly! There weren’t any. So I closed my eyes, went into a meditative state, and asked them to show up and let us take their picture. And they came! I’m afraid Harley’s a little freaked by it all. He’s considering giving up photography altogether.”

  By the time E.D. finally managed to get away, she found Jake and the campers at the goat pen, congratulating themselves on
their success and complaining about the things that hadn’t worked the way they’d expected.

  It turned out that Ginger and Cinnamon had gotten themselves just as lost in the woods as the inspector until Ginger finally stumbled onto the road by accident. As soon as the man had seen pavement, he took off running, or at least limping very fast, to find his car. “I think Wolfie must have hurt the man’s leg a little when he tore his pants,” Ginger said.

  “So we didn’t get to sic Wolfie on him again,” David said. “Too bad! I don’t think he even drew blood the first time.”

  “And Samantha didn’t get to dump her paint,” Jake added.

  “I’m just as glad,” Samantha said. “I’d finally managed to get the colors right, and I didn’t want to waste the paint. Besides, I got four whole patches of the barn quilt finished. You all need to come see it!”

  “Archie’s gone to the pond. He’s giving us an extra optional swim,” Q said. “Cordelia went to get Hal and change into her suit.” The others agreed they were more than ready for a swim.

  E.D. had still not convinced herself that the pond was okay for swimming, so while the others went to change into their suits, she headed back to the air-conditioned office. She’d been thinking about Aunt Lucille and Harley looking for evidence about orbs, and realized there was still no evidence that the messages that had continued to appear in the mailbox were real. She’d never actually gotten around to checking. If the whole thing was really Mrs. Montrose trying to get revenge on her father, it could be that the woman had exaggerated the danger. Maybe the state couldn’t actually shut them down at all. The thing to do was go online and check out the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources. Before they harassed a state inspector again, it would be a good idea to know for sure how much was riding on his report.