Applewhites at Wit's End Page 9

  It was a good thing, Jake thought, that E.D. had been sent out with a folding chair, a lantern, and her walkie-talkie to sit between the boys’ bunk and the girls’ to listen for possible disturbances so Hal and Cordelia could come to the staff meeting. She’d been freaking all afternoon about the destruction of her precious camp schedule, and the stress level was high enough in the room already. Winston, always upset by intense emotions, had gone from one person to another at first, wagging his tail, trying to comfort everybody. But he’d given up and gone to hide out in the hall. Jake knew how he felt.

  So far no one had done anything in this meeting except complain. It hadn’t occurred to the family, when they’d planned to have the campers do all the things that gave them joy, that the campers were likely to be as different from one another as the Applewhites. The camper priority lists had been something of a shock. Randolph’s theater workshop was the only one that all six wanted to take. Jake’s singing workshop was next, with five, and then Cordelia’s, with four. Even Lucille had lost her usual glow of rosy optimism. “I’d been so looking forward to sharing the joys of poetry with six children. Now there’s only one!”

  “At least you’ve got one,” Archie said. “Hal and I have to share Samantha Peterman.”

  “The good thing is, that means I only have half a person,” Hal pointed out, “or a person only half the time. The bad thing is, she wants to do murals! She says a piece of canvas is too small to hold her vision!”

  “It isn’t just that I only have one,” Lucille said. “It could be wonderful to have only a single budding poet to concentrate on. It could be an opportunity to help shape a whole life’s work. But this afternoon I shared with her some of the very best of contemporary American poetry—to show her how magnificent, how transcendent, a poem can be—and she was impervious. She listens. She nods. But what does she write? Verse!” Lucille shuddered as she said the word. “All her poems rhyme. They gallop. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-dum! Da-da-da-da-da-dum!”

  “It would appear,” Zedediah observed, “that she understands rhythm, at least.”

  Cordelia moaned. “Don’t mention that word! While Lucille was doing Poetry, I had Dance. Thanks to all the talk about passion, Q decided the workshop ought to be all about Step! He was like a freight train. He took over entirely. Step. All rhythm. No music. Think about that—dance with no music! All foot stomping and hand clapping.”

  “You have to admit, he’s really, really good at it,” Hal said.

  “Of course he’s good at it! He’s good at everything! He’d be good at any kind of dance—including the kind I want to teach! And then there’s David. David brought tap shoes today! I ask you—tap shoes? The two of them were absolutely competing with each other. My workshop has turned into some kind of a reality show. Q teaches the girls a Step routine, so then David insists on getting them to do shuffle, ball, change, which Q does as well as he does, by the way—better, really. I felt like I was caught in a war zone. I couldn’t get either of the boys to so much as try a grand jeté or a glissade, and they won’t lay a hand on the barre. David called it a crutch! Ginger and Cinnamon have both had ballet, but Cinnamon says she ‘prefers modern dance.’ What am I going to do? I’d planned that contemporary Swan Lake for the end-of-camp show. I’d already started on the choreography!”

  Sybil had been curled up in her easy chair chewing on a pencil. Now she spoke. “Cinnamon is the only camper who chose fiction. I talked to her about it at dinnertime, and she tells me Destiny wants her to write a children’s book. I have no idea how to write a children’s book. Plot I can teach. How to slip in clues I can teach. How to create an interesting ongoing character. But Cinnamon wants her main character to be a possum! A beautiful possum! She wants it to be a picture book so Destiny can do the drawings for it. The absolutely only thing I know about picture books is that they’re thirty-two pages long.”

  “Give Cinnamon some Petunia Granthams to read,” Zedediah said. “I should think plot, at least, would be pretty much the same from a Petunia Grantham mystery to a picture book. Except shorter. And without the murder.”

  Randolph had gotten up and was now pacing around the edge of the room like a tiger in a cage. “Nonessentials!” he said suddenly. “Niggling quibbles! Every one of you is capable of handling a talented kid—even a roomful of them. When you find out what they do best, you just let them do it. Push them a little to do it even more, even better.”

  Lucille snorted. “I’m a poet! I refuse to encourage Ginger to write verse.”

  Jake had been thinking about the poems Ginger had forced on him. The last few had reminded him a little of country and Western love songs. He raised a tentative hand. “What if you didn’t think of her stuff as poetry? What if you thought of it as song lyrics? Lyrics pretty much always rhyme.”

  “Song lyrics.” Lucille pondered this for a moment. “Not poetry at all.” She nodded. “Pure genius, Jake. Now all we need to do is find somebody she can work with to compose the music! Cordelia? You compose.”

  “No way,” Cordelia said. “I don’t do songs.”

  Jake thought about Cordelia’s music for her one-woman ballet, The Death of Ophelia. All discordant chords and no hint of melody. She had that right!

  “What did I tell you?” Randolph said. “Even Jake knows how to do this. Every one of these kids has talent. A good director with talented actors needs to give them their heads, let them experiment, trust them to find their way. The most he does is nudge them in a useful direction. Just be good directors. Figure out what they’re doing well and support it.”

  “That should be easy to do with Harley,” Lucille said, “if I can get him to take pictures of something besides corpses. He showed me some of his work—he has a fabulous eye for composition and design.”

  “Workshops aren’t problems,” Randolph said. “We need to focus on the problems!”

  “Like what?” Sybil asked.

  Randolph turned on Hal and Cordelia. “I looked into the boys’ and girls’ cottages this afternoon. It looks like tornadoes have been rampaging through there. Clothes, books, papers—mess—everywhere! We wouldn’t keep the goats in a mess like that.”

  Cordelia laughed. “If we did, Wolfie would gobble it all up!”

  “This isn’t funny. This whole place is a disaster. We’re only three days in, and already the bathrooms in the cottages are absolutely filthy. The grass is knee-deep—who knows what vermin could be multiplying in there? The green twin claims—”

  “Ginger, dear,” Sybil put in.

  “Whatever! She claims there’s a mouse living in their bedroom. And there are ants in the kitchen!”

  “I’ve asked the ants to leave,” Lucille said. “They’ve let me know they’re just passing through. They’ll be gone by the end of the week.”

  “Get some ant traps next time you’re in town!” Randolph told Archie.

  “Don’t you dare,” Lucille said.

  “Nothing at Wit’s End is the least bit worse than normal, Randolph,” Sybil said testily.

  “Normal isn’t good enough! This isn’t just where we live anymore; it’s a camp! A public facility!”

  “The kids don’t care,” Cordelia said. “Well, except Ginger doesn’t like mouse pee and poop in her dresser drawers.”

  “Well, I care!”

  “Good heavens, why?” Sybil asked.

  Zedediah spoke then. “Have E.D. put bathroom cleaning and grass mowing on the Community Service schedule tomorrow. That’s not so difficult. Find a live trap for the mouse. Now that I don’t have anyone to do workshops for, I’m going back to turning out furniture and making money, you’ll all be glad to know. Anybody else have anything worth talking about?”

  “I do,” Jake said. “I’m a little nervous about my singing workshop. I’ve got everybody except Harley—”

  “That seems very strange, don’t you think?” Lucille said. “The son of a pair of singers with a band so successful their concerts are all sold out six months in advanc
e—”

  “I think it’s just a cult following,” Hal put in.

  “The point is, his parents are professional singers, and he absolutely refuses to sing.”

  “Could be that’s the reason,” Zedediah said. He glanced meaningfully at Archie. “It can be a challenge, competing with a parent.”

  “Anyway,” Jake went on, “Q and David are both great singers, which would be good except that I don’t know how to help either one of them get any better. David keeps reminding me that he’s had a private, professional coach, and Q has his grandfather, who taught him enough to win all those talent shows. All I did when I taught Destiny to sing was to get him singing with me. I don’t have a clue what to do with these guys.”

  “If you want to learn to play chess,” Zedediah said, “the best way is to play with somebody better than you are.”

  “But isn’t a teacher supposed to be better than the people he’s teaching? I’m definitely not better!”

  Zedediah smoothed his mustache. “This isn’t a school. And even if it was, a good teacher is always learning. You’re doing a workshop. Think about that word. You’re all of you working together. Find out what each of them does best, and make sure everybody else learns from that. Make it a collaboration.”

  “Between David and Q?”

  Zedediah laughed. “So think of your job as using their competitive drive to spur them all on to better things. For them, and for you, too. Be as competitive as they are, at least in terms of getting better. Cordelia, same thing. Now, if no one else has anything substantial, I assume we can adjourn. I have a rocking chair order to start on tomorrow.”

  “Somebody make sure E.D. gets the message about what needs to go on Community Service!” Randolph said. “Hal and Cordelia, it’s your responsibility to keep those bunks neat and clean.”

  “That’s why we get the big bucks,” Hal said bitterly.

  “Very funny. Archie—ant traps! And mouse poison. First thing tomorrow!”

  Jake saw Archie jump as Lucille pinched his leg. There would be no ant traps or mouse poison, he knew.

  “Meeting adjourned!”

  Chapter Nineteen

  E.D. sat alone on the end of the dock, her bare feet in the water, listening to the frogs and katydids calling from all around her. The water felt good. So far she had refused to actually swim in the pond. The idea of living things under and around her that she couldn’t see—things that might have teeth or slime or jaws like a snapping turtle—was just too horrible. It was a muggy day as usual, but cloudy, so even though it was late morning, the sun wasn’t beating down on her. She kicked her feet, watching the circles the splashes made spread across the surface of the pond.

  In spite of the coming of chaos, everybody seemed to be surviving. If anything, Lucille was even happier than usual. With fewer workshops, she had expanded her morning meditation, and the kids actually seemed to be liking it. E.D. suspected some of them were using it to get a little extra sleep—nobody was really doing the lights-out-at-ten thing. But Samantha had told Cordelia that meditation was changing her life. “I used to stress about everything, and now I just breathe!” Yoga, too, had expanded—instead of the sun salutation, it had become a whole forty-minute session. Lucille had flung herself into research on song lyrics and had become practically obsessed about helping Harley to expand his photographic range. “Turns out what he likes about dead things is that they never move, so he can absolutely control the image he gets. We’re working on that issue.”

  Archie and Hal had both come up with projects for Samantha, Cordelia had decided that Step and tap might both be able to be worked into modern dance somehow, and though Jake wasn’t talking much about his singing workshop, he’d found a bunch of karaoke music, and Destiny’s repertoire had suddenly expanded. Now, whenever he wasn’t talking, he was singing. Sybil had decided to learn everything she could about children’s books. She’d come back from the library in town with shopping bags full of them and was reading her way through the lot.

  Everybody except E.D. herself was loving the theater workshop. She’d joined it as a way to be close to David—even without his aura, the magnet thing was still at work. Cordelia claimed it was hormones and perfectly normal.

  The trouble was, Randolph wouldn’t let anybody, not even the camp historian, hang out just to observe. E.D. had to do scenes like everybody else. It was easy enough to memorize the words, but she did not like having to actually get up onstage and say them. She was painfully aware of how bad she was compared with the other kids. For one thing, she could never figure out what to do with her hands!

  Her father knew Jake and the campers loved his workshop. He knew they were doing well, and he could see they were learning stuff all the time. So he should have been as happy as anybody. Instead, he seemed to be getting more and more uptight as the days went by, fussing about things he’d never so much as noticed before, like the time somebody forgot to put the lid on a trash can and a raccoon got into it and strewed trash all over the yard. He’d completely freaked about that—and even picked up some of the mess himself.

  And then there was the Fourth of July celebration, when they’d gathered all the campers down by the pond. All the kids were given sparklers, and Archie and Zedediah had set off bottle rockets. Randolph had come tearing down from the house shouting about fireworks being illegal in the state of North Carolina. This had never bothered him before. They’d had fireworks every year since they’d moved to Wit’s End, and—

  E.D. looked up. Something had moved in her peripheral vision. Something in the woods on the other side of the pond. Yes. There it was again. Something—someone—was moving among the trees. She reached for the walkie-talkie on her belt and realized she’d left it on the desk back in the office. No, no, no! If this was a camper sneaking away, she’d be in trouble. “Keep these with you at all times,” her father had told everyone the day he’d handed them out.

  She scrambled up, shoved her feet into her sneakers, and hurried back to shore. As she started around the cattails that lined the edge of the pond toward where she’d seen the movement, a man stepped out of the woods. Instinctively, she crouched down and peered between the reeds. The man was wearing a suit, a white shirt, and a tie, and was carrying a clipboard. He stood for a moment gazing across the pond, jotted something down on the clipboard, and then slipped back among the trees.

  He hadn’t seen her, apparently. Never once in the whole four years they’d lived here had a stranger turned up on their property, much less a stranger in a suit with a clipboard. Weird. Who would go wandering around the countryside dressed like that?

  Follow him, a voice in her head told her. Go tell somebody, another voice answered. If you go back to the office now, he’ll get away, the first voice said. You need to find out what he’s doing. E.D. stood up. The man was no longer visible. She hurried around the pond and ducked in among the trees. Once in the woods, it was hard to move quietly—hard for that matter, with the bushes and vines and fallen branches, to move at all. She stopped to tie her sneakers, and realized that the man was having the same trouble with the underbrush as she was and was making at least as much noise. If she moved slowly and carefully enough, she could follow him by ear without him hearing her.

  Five minutes later she realized she had moved too slowly and carefully. She couldn’t hear him anymore. And of course she couldn’t see him. Too many trees, too many vines and bushes. She’d lost him!

  Chapter Twenty

  A mosquito landed on Jake’s arm and he swatted it. He was sitting in his sanctuary atop a vine-shrouded boulder in the woods, having slipped away while Ginger was busy talking to Lucille. It was the only place in the whole of Wit’s End that he was safe from her. Nobody knew of this place where he always came when he felt the need to be alone. Not even Destiny had ever found him here. But somebody was very close right now, moving noisily through the woods in his direction. He parted a curtain of leaves and saw E.D., her back to him, peering anxiously this way and
that, apparently looking for something.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  She jumped and spun around. It took her a moment to see him. He should have kept quiet, he realized. She might have gone on past.

  “Shhh!” she said, and whispered, “Did you see him?”

  “See who?” Jake whispered back.

  “The man in the suit.”

  Jake shook his head. “Nobody came by here.”

  “Rats,” E.D. said in her regular voice. “I really did lose him. What are you doing up there?”

  Jake sighed. “It’s my secret hideaway. At least it was.”

  “Where’s Winston?”

  “I closed him in my room. I can’t bring him out here with me—you never know when he’s going to bark at something.”

  “If he’d been here with you, he would have scared the guy off.”

  “Yeah, and brought my stalker right to me. She knows that if she finds Winston, she’ll probably find me. And she has a free period now.”

  “Ginger?”

  “Of course Ginger. She’s like a burr. Or a leech.”

  “I think it’s cute.”

  “You wouldn’t think it was cute if you were the one she was stalking! Lucille’s been doing the songwriting workshop in Wisteria Cottage, so Ginger’s taken to leaving stuff for me on my bed! Flowers, cookies, songs—all of them dedicated to me—notes on lavender paper. She thinks it’s my favorite color because of my room.” Jake sighed, and then realized what E.D. had said. “A man in a suit? In the woods?”

  “Suit and tie! He was skulking around by the pond with a clipboard taking notes. It’s weird.”

  “Yeah. Seriously weird.” Jake remembered the black car he and Destiny had seen. “Like that car.”

  “What car?”

  “A plain black car. It started up the driveway one morning. First day of camp, I think it was. Destiny and I thought it was Archie, back from getting groceries in Traybridge, but when we went to see, the guy backed up and drove away. Fast.”