Applewhites at Wit's End Read online

  “Inside, Winston,” E.D. said, holding the screen door open.

  The frantic dog turned, nearly tripping over his ears, and scuttled safely into the house, where he continued to bark menacingly.

  The horn went still. For a moment nothing happened. The car windows were so dark it was impossible to tell who might be inside.

  Aunt Lucille appeared at the door now, her cascades of blond curls coming loose from the flowered scarf she had wrapped around her head, her hands covered with flour. She pushed Winston out of the way with one foot and came out onto the porch, brushing the flour from her hands, just as the back window of the Mercedes went slowly down and two identical faces peered out. “This had better be Eureka!” one of the faces said. “We’ve been driving in circles for an hour!”

  Chapter Six

  The driver’s side door of the Mercedes opened. “Of course it’s Eureka!” a gruff voice bellowed. “Didn’t you see the sign?”

  A man wearing a chauffeur’s cap above a New York Yankees T-shirt, tattered blue jeans, and sandals got out of the car, stretching his legs and groaning. Ignoring Lucille, Jake, and E.D., he came around and opened the back door so the identical bodies that went with the identical faces could get out.

  Cinnamon and Ginger Boniface. The twins from New Jersey. The twins were eleven years old, Jake knew, but in person they didn’t look it. As thin and small as they were, they could have passed for third graders. Both had short, curly, carrot-orange hair and pale skin sprinkled with freckles. They wore matching shorts and beaded tank tops—one green, one blue—matching sequined flip-flops, and long, sparkly earrings. Their finger-and toenails were painted the color of their clothes. They stood in the gravel drive now, frowning identical frowns.

  Lucille was hurrying down the steps to greet them, still brushing flour from her hands. “Welcome, welcome, welcome, girls!” she said as she went. “Welcome to Eureka! I’m Lucille Applewhite.” She held out her hand to the nearest twin, but the girl kept hers at her side.

  “The poet!” the other twin said, her frown vanishing. “I’m a poet, too.”

  “Of course you are,” Lucille said. “You won an award!” She used her still-outstretched hand to point first to E.D. and then to Jake. “This is E.D. Applewhite and that’s Jake Semple.”

  In spite of his fresh Mohawk, the twins barely glanced at Jake. He could feel his jaw clenching. He’d expected, at least, to be noticed.

  The man nodded at the green twin, “Ginger,” and then at the blue, “Cinnamon.”

  “Well, girls, you’re a little early, I’m afraid,” Lucille said. “The other campers won’t be here till—”

  “Between two and five P.M., like the schedule says,” E.D. said with a familiar edge to her voice. She had sent the opening-day schedule electronically, Jake knew, as well as including it in the precamp packet she had sent to every family by snail mail.

  “We’re really, really glad to have you, though!” Lucille put in quickly. She turned to the man, who had popped the trunk and was hurriedly dragging out blue and green suitcases and duffel bags.

  “Are you—are you Mr. Boniface?”

  “Nope. Name’s Bruno. Theodore Boniface’s driver.”

  “I see. We were under the impression you’d be doing the whole trip today. We weren’t expecting the girls to get here till around five.”

  “Somethin’ came up, and Mr. Boniface needs me back tonight. We came as far as a hotel in Raleigh last night.”

  “Motel,” the blue twin said. “That didn’t even have a pool!”

  “I should’a been on the road an hour ago. Stupid GPS didn’t work for—”

  “I’m so sorry you got lost,” Lucille interrupted. “We sent directions—didn’t we, E.D.?”

  “You should have received them with the schedule,” E.D. said to the man.

  He hefted a blue-and-green plaid steamer trunk from the car and dumped it on the drive with the other luggage. “I hope somebody can get this stuff where it belongs. I gotta be starting back right now.”

  The twin in blue squinted up into the sun. “Is it always this hot here? Where’s the pool? There’s supposed to be a pool!”

  “A pond, actually,” Lucille said. “It’s quite lovely. Entirely natural.”

  “There’s a tour of the grounds scheduled for after the other campers arrive,” E.D. told her.

  “Does that dog bite?” the green twin asked. Winston’s barking had subsided, replaced by the occasional whuff to show he was still keeping an eye on things. “I’m not staying if he bites.”

  Jake shook his head. “He’s just nervous.”

  Jake had intended to lock Winston in Wisteria Cottage while the campers were arriving. The dog was frightened of new people till he got to know them. There was no way Jake could have known he should do it this early.

  Lucille was holding on to her welcoming smile, but Jake could tell it was taking an effort. “Jake,” she said, “why don’t you take those duffel bags down to Dogwood Cottage for the girls.”

  Jake went down the porch steps as the driver pulled a pair of tennis rackets from the trunk. “Might as well take those back with you,” Jake said. “No tennis court here.”

  “No tennis court!” the blue twin wailed.

  Bruno put the rackets back and closed the trunk. “Nice to meet you,” he said to Lucille. “Good luck!” He got back into the car. “See you in August,” he called to the girls. He slammed the door and started the car.

  “See you,” the green twin said.

  “Whatever,” said the other.

  As Jake went to pick up a duffel bag, the Mercedes roared away, spitting gravel. He could understand the man’s hurry to get away from the twins even if he didn’t have to be back in New Jersey that night.

  “No tennis court!” the blue twin said again. “What kind of a camp is this anyway?”

  Jake had already thrown the first duffel bag over his shoulder, picked up the other one, and started down the path that led to the cottages.

  Chapter Seven

  E.D. heard Aunt Lucille take a deep, calming breath. “You go on back to the kitchen,” E.D. told her. “I’ll help these two settle in. Get your suitcases, girls. I’ll take you to your bunk.” Mercedes and a driver or not, there was no reason these two couldn’t get their own bags to their bunk.

  The screen closed behind Aunt Lucille. The twins had made no move toward their suitcases. The green twin was staring up into the trees next to the house, an abstracted look on her face. With disapproving eyes, the blue twin, hands on her hips, scanned the house, then the yard, and finally what could be seen of the barn above the bushes. E.D. went down the stairs and found herself seeing Wit’s End suddenly—really seeing it—as the campers would.

  Some shingles were missing from the porch roof, and the main house badly needed a paint job. It was a stark contrast with the bright new sign Archie had made proclaiming it to be the Lodge. They couldn’t have afforded to paint the house; but why had no one thought, when the sign was hung, to clean the heavy, gray tangles of spiderwebs from around the eaves or to scrub the green algae or mold or whatever it was creeping up the siding from the ground?

  The scraggly combination of grass and various North Carolina weeds that constituted the front lawn had grown tall enough to be putting out seeds and a few raggedy flowers. And the barn, in spite of all the work that had been done last year to turn it into a theater, still looked shabby from the outside. There, too, the sign over the double doors, with its gold leaf lettering—WIT’S END PLAYHOUSE—made the dull, flaking, barn red paint look even worse by comparison.

  E.D. started down the gravel path toward the cottages. “The girls’ cottage is called Dogwood,” she said, acutely aware of how much less picturesque it was than its name. All of the cottages at Wit’s End, built in the 1940s when it had been turned from a failing farm into a motor lodge, had been white originally but over the years had weathered to a silvery gray. Their roofs were thick with moss. The southern mixed-deci
duous forest—sweet gums, beeches, hickory, and oak trees, with a few tall pines—might seem to be closing in on them. Her mother liked to say the cottages blended perfectly into their surroundings. Someone else might say their surroundings were gobbling them up.

  E.D. spoke as cheerfully as she could, considering how angry she was that the girls had arrived so early. It wasn’t their fault, she reminded herself. “Just grab your suitcases and come along. I’ll take you there.”

  “What about our trunk?” the blue twin asked. Her voice, E.D. thought, was an irritating whine.

  “Jake’ll be back to get it any minute.” She continued down the path, assuming the girls would come after her. Behind her she heard a loud, theatrical sigh. Then there was the sound of scraping gravel, followed by a series of bumps and thumps and curses. She turned back. The wheels on the two suitcases had dug trenches in the path and were now jammed against little piles of gravel. The twins were standing there, looking helpless.

  “They won’t go any farther,” the green twin said.

  “Well then,” E.D. said, determinedly hanging on to cheerfulness, “I guess you’ll just have to pick them up!” She turned back toward Dogwood Cottage.

  Green twin Ginger, blue twin Cinnamon, she repeated in her head as she walked. She would take them to their cottage, but that was absolutely all she would do with them. She wasn’t their counselor; Cordelia was. She would leave them at Dogwood and go find Cordelia. It wasn’t her fault they had come nearly four hours early. What kind of parents spent a fortune to send their kids to camp and then totally ignored that camp’s very clear instructions about when to get them there? For that matter, what kind of parents sent two eleven-year-olds halfway across the country accompanied only by a surly chauffeur? Green twin Ginger, blue twin Cinnamon.

  Behind her the twins were complaining to each other now about the heat and humidity and how heavy their suitcases were. “Where do you suppose Maria packed our swimming suits?” one of them asked the other. “I gotta get in the water.”

  E.D. wondered who Maria might be. A maid, maybe. Maid. Chauffeur. Mercedes. These were not kids who would take well to roughing it. When the cottage came into sight, Jake was nowhere to be seen. He had left the duffel bags on the porch and disappeared. Just like him to go off and leave everything to her.

  E.D. went up onto the slightly sagging porch, stepped over the duffel bags, and held the screen door open for the twins. They bounced their suitcases up the stairs and around the duffel bags, and dragged them inside.

  Cinnamon immediately left hers in the middle of the living room and began inspecting the walls, lifting pictures to peer behind them and feeling behind bookcases. “Where’s the thermostat? Somebody needs to turn up the air-conditioning. It’s an oven in here!”

  “No thermostat. No air-conditioning.” E.D. pointed to the open windows. “The bunks are cooled by outside air.”

  “Cooled? Cooled? You have got to be kidding! People could die of heat like this.”

  E.D. knew this wasn’t true. She had lived at Wit’s End without air-conditioning for four whole summers. “It’ll be better at night.” This wasn’t entirely true, either, of course.

  “That’s it! I’m out of here.” A phone seemed to have materialized in Cinnamon’s hand. She was biting her lip and pressing on the screen. “Dad will just have to send Bruno back for us.”

  Would that mean refunding the twins’ deposit? E.D. wondered.

  Ginger had gone off down the hall to explore the bedrooms. “Hey, the back bedroom isn’t too bad,” she called. “It’s all shaded by trees.” There was a brief pause. “And there’s a breath of a breeze. Oh! Listen! Did you hear that? Shaded by trees—breath of a breeze. It’s the start of a poem!”

  “You two can have that room if you want,” E.D. told Cinnamon.

  Cinnamon swore and peered at her phone. “What’s the matter? I’m not getting a ring.”

  “You probably don’t get service here,” E.D. said. “There’s only one tower.”

  “Look at this,” Cinnamon said, holding her phone out to no one in particular. “No bars! Not one single bar! I’ve never seen that before.”

  “That’s because you live in New Jersey,” E.D. said. “This is North Carolina. The country. If your phone doesn’t match our one tower, you don’t have service. Period. Anyway, we sent you the list of rules. Rule three: no cell phones.”

  “Mother said that had to mean no cell phones during sessions. You know, like no cell phones in class at school. You can’t expect us not to have a phone! What if there’s an emergency?”

  “Our cells work here. Plus, there are land lines. This is the country, not a desert island. Count yourself lucky—since your phone doesn’t work, we won’t have to confiscate it!”

  “Cinn, come on back here,” Ginger called from the bedroom. “There’s a real, live hummingbird out there by some big orange flower. Come look!”

  Cinnamon swore again and put her phone in the pocket of her shorts. “First chance I get, I’m calling Dad. We’re going home.” She raised her voice then. “Did you hear that, Ginger? We’re going home!” But she went down the hall.

  “The bathroom’s on the right,” E.D. called after her. “I’ll go get your counselor.”

  Chapter Eight

  Jake had dropped the duffel bags at the girls’ cottage and was on his way to the woodshop to help Archie and Zedediah with the floating dock, kicking gravel as he walked. His grandfather had told him, the day he’d dropped Jake off at Wit’s End to join the Creative Academy, “Those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind.” His grandfather had been making some sort of point about the behavior that had gotten Jake in trouble, but now Jake had a niggling suspicion that starting a camp was sowing the wind, and the Boniface twins were the first signs of the approaching whirlwind.

  Before the day was out there would be four more kids besides the twins. He waved a hand in front of his eyes to shoo away a cluster of gnats. That’s pretty much what he’d done with people all his life, he thought. He’d shooed them away—turned them off, scared them. He hadn’t really known how to do anything else. There were some guys back at school in Rhode Island who he used to hang out with, guys who were as intimidating as he was. Kids and teachers all pretty much did their best to avoid them, which was what they wanted. The thing was, he hadn’t really known those guys. They were all too busy showing how tough and cool they were to find out what any of them were like behind the image.

  Now that he had the new haircut that was supposed to make him stand out from the other campers, he wondered if that was really what he wanted. Part of what he’d loved about being in the shows Randolph had cast him in was hanging out with other kids who liked what they were doing as much as he did. Like Jeannie Ng, who had played Liesl and given him his first stage kiss—his first kiss of any kind, though he hadn’t admitted that to anybody. There’d been her brother, too, and most of the guys from Oliver! They’d all become his friends. The first friends he’d ever had.

  They had understood what he felt when he was on the stage. They had the same kind of focus, the same determination to be the very best they could be. Jake had never before in his life really worked at anything. But as much work as a show took, it didn’t really feel like work. He’d been hoping camp would be like that. Now he wasn’t so sure.

  Destiny had wakened him at five thirty this morning, flinging himself onto Jake’s bed and startling Winston, who left claw marks on Jake’s bare arm as he scrambled out of Destiny’s way. “Get up, get up, get up, Jake!” Destiny had hollered, prying open one of Jake’s determinedly closed eyes. “It’s Eureka! day! Finally! This is gonna be the bestest summer in my whole life!”

  Jake wished he could be as sure of that as Destiny.

  As he approached the door to the woodshop, Jake could hear raised voices from inside. Archie and Zedediah must still be arguing about how best to moor the dock they were working on to the land. Like the diving platform, it would be mounted on oil drums. It
was designed to float so that it could accommodate itself to the water level, which changed according to how much rain they got. They’d had days and days of rain in the late spring, so the pond was unusually high. But as the summer went on, the pond would shrink.

  Jake went in and found the two of them standing in their own halves of the woodshop’s working space with the long, narrow, nearly completed dock between them. Each side was a reflection of father’s and son’s very different ways of working. On Zedediah’s side the hand-tools were neatly hung on Peg-Boards, the worktable was precisely organized, with screws, nails, nuts, and bolts all in labeled containers. The wood that was destined to become the rocking chairs and gliders that made up most of his catalog was stacked neatly against the wall covered with a tarp. In the corner was a cabinet that held cans of stain, varnish, polyurethane, paint, and the solvents needed to work with them, organized by both type and size.

  Archie’s side was a chaos of paint cans and tools, mostly strewn on the floor, some dumped without apparent order into buckets and boxes among miscellaneous piles of oddly shaped chunks of wood and tree stumps or limbs in assorted sizes that were the raw materials from which he created his Furniture of the Absurd.

  They stopped arguing when Jake came through the doorway. “What do you think, Jake?” Zedediah said. “Tie the dock to a couple of trees like Archie says, or sink posts a little ways back from the water and fasten it to those?”

  “Whichever is easier and faster,” Jake said. “Two campers are here already. E.D.’s having a fit.”

  “Ha!” Archie said. “Trees it is then.”

  “All right, trees,” Zedediah conceded.

  “It’s awfully big,” Jake said. “Will it fit through the door?”

  Archie sighed. “You weren’t even here for the Incident of the Buffet!”

  Jake had heard the story, of course. Several times. When the buffet, which Archie had fashioned from the massive trunk of a fallen oak tree, was completed, it had turned out to be too long and tall and wide to get out of the shop. After a major argument about whether the buffet or the front wall of Pinewood Cottage would have to be dismantled, Archie had ended up cutting the buffet in two and turning each half into a credenza.