Effie Starr Zook Has One More Question

by Martha Freeman

  “How soon?” Effie asked.

  “Soon,” said her uncle.

  Aunt Clare was standing on the front porch as the truck came up the driveway. She ran out and met them by the garage. Boris was there too, wagging his tail and dancing in happy, welcoming circles.

  “Effie, I’m so sorry, but it’s all going to be okay—you’ll see—,” Aunt Clare began at the same time Boris jumped up and put his big dirty paws on Effie’s shoulders, causing her to stagger and step back. Boris was a smelly, grimy outdoor dog whose bed was in the barn. He had no manners. But at least he was honest.

  “The only truthful one around is Boris!” Effie snapped. “What is the matter with you? My mom might be dead, and you keep saying it’ll be all right. Well, dead is not all right!”

  “She’s not dead,” said Aunt Clare.

  “Is there news?” Uncle Ted asked.

  “No, uh . . . that is, no,” said Aunt Clare.

  Effie snorted. Her aunt didn’t know anything. None of them knew anything. “So how do we get news?” Effie asked.

  “I’ve got my iPad right here.” Aunt Clare held it up. “I’m just waiting for your dad to Skype. Come on inside. We will get some tea or juice or something.”

  Effie didn’t want tea or juice. Effie didn’t want anything except for time to pass so her dad would call. Not knowing was awful. But if the news was bad news, the worst possible news, news you couldn’t take back or make better, then knowing would be worse.

  Wouldn’t it?

  Since she couldn’t sit still, Effie paced—from the kitchen to the dining room through the front hall to the parlor to the sunroom around the back stairs and into the kitchen again. Her aunt and uncle stayed put at the kitchen table. She knew she was driving them crazy, and she didn’t care.

  She tried to think logically, as if logic would provide the tape and string to hold her together. My mother is a good pilot. Sunspot carried a life raft. The United States Navy has good sailors and good ships. She was wearing a helmet. There are sharks in the ocean. How fast did the plane descend? Why hasn’t my dad called yet? My mother is a good pilot. She was wearing a helmet.

  If Effie could stick to logic, she wouldn’t think about living in a big house in Brooklyn with only her father, and she wouldn’t think about happy times with her mom, either—looking at the Manhattan skyline together, looking at old photo albums, her mom reading to her before bed, the night her mom came back from a long trip and woke Effie up to look at the sunrise and eat ice cream for breakfast.

  Effie’s mom was not reliable. She did not volunteer at school. She did not remember the rule about no peanuts. She forgot to send birthday party invitations. But she loved Effie. Effie had never doubted it.

  And she had promised she would come back.

  Effie’s thoughts were zigzagging on unproductive paths when her phone chirped. It was in her pocket. Familiar as the ringtone was, Effie couldn’t place the cricket sound for several moments. Then she remembered: Jasmine.

  “Hello?”

  “Effie, hello—is your mom okay? Alice just heard on the news!” Alice was Jasmine’s family’s nanny.

  “It’s on the news?” Effie hadn’t thought of that.

  “Alice says so. Not the first story or anything. How are you? How is your mom?”

  “I don’t know,” Effie said.

  “You don’t know how you are, or you don’t know how your mom is?”

  Jasmine’s questions could make a person crazy, but right now Effie liked the reminder that some stuff in the world remained normal. “Both,” she said. “Dad’s supposed to call.”

  “Oh, golly, I feel bad for you,” said Jasmine. “If my mom were dead, I—”

  “She’s not dead!” said Effie.

  “Not dead,” said Jasmine quickly. “But if she’s dead—”

  “Jasmine!”

  “Sorry, okay, sorry,” said Jasmine. “Nothing this bad has ever happened to me—”

  “It still hasn’t. It’s happening to me,” said Effie.

  “I know,” Jasmine said, “and it’s awful, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. What am I supposed to say?”

  Effie’s pacing had brought her back to the parlor, where she realized her knees were weak. She dropped down onto the old, uncomfortable settee. “I don’t know either,” she said.

  “Will you call me when you find out more?” Jasmine asked.

  “No,” said Effie.

  “But you are my best friend!” Jasmine whined.

  “I know,” said Effie. “I might call. It depends.”

  “On if she’s dead?” Jasmine said.

  “On how I feel about stuff,” Effie said, “on whether I want to talk, on whether I want to talk to you.”

  “Are you still my best friend?” Jasmine asked.

  “Yes,” Effie said, “but that’s not what I’m thinking about right now.”

  “You’re thinking about your mom,” said Jasmine.

  “Yes,” said Effie. “Good-bye, Jasmine.”

  She hung up and went into the kitchen, where her aunt and uncle were sitting at the kitchen table. “We should turn on the news,” Effie said.

  “Is that a good idea?” Uncle Ted asked. “The media isn’t always reliable.”

  “Can we please turn on the news?” Effie repeated. Her aunt reached for the remote at the same time that the Skype tone on the iPad rang.

  CHAPTER

  22

  Effie’s father was standing outdoors in the open, with a line of palm trees and the clear sky behind him. It was eight a.m. in Hawaii. On the screen, her father’s face was at a funny angle, and he looked tired, but Effie focused on one thing. When her father was upset, a furrow dug itself between his eyebrows. There was no furrow now. That was how Effie knew what he was going to say before he spoke, and relief surged through her.

  “Mom’s all right, isn’t she?”

  Her father nodded, choked up, and at last managed three words: “Yes. She’s okay.”

  Everybody cried. Then Effie hugged her aunt and uncle and apologized for being rude, horrid, and ungrateful. They said that was okay. She wished more than anything that she was hugging her dad and her mom, too. It was a while before anyone could speak, and as soon as they could, the Skype connection broke. A long half hour of interrupted explanation passed before Effie understood what had happened.

  It was the solar batteries, her father said. They had stopped giving consistent power to the propellers, and because of that the plane lost altitude. There were no airfields nearby, no islands, no place to land. Effie’s mom had been forced to ditch in the Pacific.

  “In the end, the propellers completely shut down, but Molly kept the plane under control,” her father said. “It skimmed along the whitecaps, then finally settled down onto the surface.”

  “How do you know all this?” Aunt Clare asked.

  “I monitored her descent by satellite. Then, once she was safely in the life raft, I talked to her on the emergency radio.”

  “So now,” said Uncle Ted, “I suppose you’ll be in Hawaii for a while, overseeing the investigation. You’ll want to know exactly what went wrong.”

  “Actually . . . , no,” said Effie’s father. “We won’t be staying long. The navy will bring Molly to port with all deliberate speed. We’ll fly back as soon as we can secure transportation.”

  Effie couldn’t wait to see her parents, to touch them and be certain for herself that they were okay. But a tiny part of her was disappointed, too. She wanted to uncover the family secret. She had thought she had all summer to do it, but now she’d be going back to Brooklyn. Once she was home, would she ever find out the truth?

  “I don’t understand,” Aunt Clare was saying. “Aren’t you going to take the plane apart? Dissect those batteries?”

  “We do want to investigate,” said Effie’s dad, “for the sake of science and engineering and the future of aviation. But right now further study isn’t, uh . . . practical. The plane seems to hav
e survived the water landing pretty well. But once Molly was safely in the life raft, it sank. Right now, as far as we know, it’s under fifteen thousand feet of ocean.”

  “Oh dear,” said Aunt Clare.

  “But you’ll raise her?” said Uncle Ted.

  “Not anytime soon,” said Effie’s father. “There are, uh . . . certain financial exigencies.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Effie.

  “Oh dear,” said Aunt Clare, and Effie noticed that she and her uncle had turned pale.

  What was the matter with them, anyway? Effie was sad for her parents too, but all of them had known the trip was risky. And it wasn’t Aunt Clare and Uncle Ted’s airplane at the bottom of the ocean.

  “Leaving all that aside for now,” said Effie’s dad, “I think you’d better prepare for an influx of media on your end.”

  “Oh dear,” said Aunt Clare.

  “Yes, well, it can’t be helped,” said Effie’s father. “What if you recruited a family spokesman?”

  At this suggestion, Aunt Clare perked up. “I know just the person,” she said.

  “You do?” Uncle Ted looked at her.

  Aunt Clare nodded firmly and reached for her phone. “I do, and she will love taking her rightful place smack-dab in the middle of the action.”

  CHAPTER

  23

  The family is, of course, disappointed by the abrupt end to the pioneering mission and the loss of the experimental aircraft. We are heartened, however, by the outpouring of support from friends around the world. Most important, we are relieved beyond measure that brave Molly Zook—scion of Penn Creek’s most prominent family—is safely aboard a US Navy destroyer bound for the Hawaiian Islands.”

  As Aunt Clare had anticipated, Mrs. McMinty had been more than happy to step up and represent the family before the media. In her eagerness to answer Aunt Clare’s call, she had broken every speed limit in the county. Now, having read aloud the statement hastily written by Aunt Clare and Uncle Ted, she stood on the front porch, magisterially regarding the TV trucks and reporters spread out before her.

  Her lipstick, applied more carefully than usual, was pink to match her T-shirt. In deference to the seriousness of the occasion, she wore baggy capri pants in place of her usual baggy shorts.

  Hunkered down in the parlor with the blinds drawn, Aunt Clare, Uncle Ted, and Effie could hear everything said outside.

  “Any questions?” Mrs. McMinty asked, and Aunt Clare squealed: “No-o-o-o! She is supposed to say, ‘Thank you for respecting the family’s privacy, and good afternoon.’ ”

  “I don’t get it,” Effie said. “She doesn’t know anything else. How is she going to answer questions?”

  “Not knowing anything won’t stop her,” said Uncle Ted, and he was right.

  Mrs. McMinty was in her element. The reporters went bananas trying to get her attention, and one by one she called on them.

  When the guy from WNEP wanted to know how Effie had taken the news about her mother, Mrs. McMinty told a long story about how she herself had taken the news of her late husband’s first heart attack.

  A lady from WPGH asked if the loss of the plane would set back solar aviation, and she told an even longer story about the time her neighbor’s rooster flew the coop.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” yelled reporter Tapper Sprocket of the Harrisburg Patriot-News.

  “I think,” Mrs. McMinty sniffed, “that the message is clear to anyone glancingly familiar with American history.”

  The questions continued, as did the chatty, irrelevant answers. Finally, Uncle Ted peered out from between the slats of the window blinds. “Some of them are starting to pack up,” he reported.

  “She wore them down!” said Aunt Clare with satisfaction.

  “That woman,” said Uncle Ted, “is a genius.”

  • • •

  Only after Effie had turned out her light that night did she think of Sadie’s and realize she should have asked Mrs. McMinty if she knew what was going on. There had been plenty of time for that, too. After the widow’s triumphant performance as family spokesperson, she had come into the parlor to enjoy hors d’oeuvres and admiration. But Effie hadn’t said a word about the bookstore or Mr. Odbody either. The abrupt conclusion to Sunspot I’s mission had wiped them clean out of her head.

  Effie’s next thought made her sit up in bed. What about Chop Suey?

  She pulled her phone over and saw that it was almost ten o’clock. Her uncle was probably asleep, tired out after an emotion-packed day. Also, he and her aunt had to drive all the way to Johnstown for an appointment the next morning. Effie had asked if she could go too, but they had told her it would be every kind of grown-up boring.

  Chop Suey has food and water, Effie reminded herself. If Uncle Ted can’t take me, I’ll think of a way to bring him home myself.

  • • •

  Effie slept well that night in spite of the thoughts doing battle in her head.

  Elsewhere, other people were not so successful.

  Moriah, for example, tossed and turned. As soon as she had heard about Effie’s mom, she felt terrible she’d gotten angry at her friend. The truth was Moriah sometimes questioned her pa’s wisdom too. For that matter, so did her mom.

  You had to be loyal to family, though. That was Precept 12, besides being plain old natural. When someone outside the family, someone like Effie, questioned Pa’s wisdom, what could she do but defend him?

  Still, pitching a fit hadn’t been necessary. She wished she had talked to Effie about it. Now that her parents’ trip was over, they would come for their daughter, and she would go home. Moriah wondered if she would ever see Effie again.

  Seven time zones away, aboard the USS Higgins, Effie’s mother was supposed to be resting. But resting was not really the word for what she was doing. The word for it was crying.

  Alone in the destroyer’s sick bay, Molly Zook cried for all kinds of reasons. She was heartbroken she had lost Sunspot I. She was upset that she had almost died. She was grateful that she had not died. She missed her daughter.

  And there was one more reason too.

  Molly Zook was anxious. When Sunspot I sank, it took with it the best hope for saving the Zook family fortune. All of them had counted on the airplane’s success creating a demand for its patented solar technology. They would sell it and be rich again. But now Sunspot I was at the bottom of the Pacific and, as of tomorrow, the family would more than likely be broke.

  Molly didn’t think she would enjoy being poor. If she had to get a job, what would she do? She had a pilot’s license. If she learned to fly helicopters, she could ferry her friends around. A lot of them had beach houses with guest rooms. Maybe they’d let her stay over sometimes.

  Molly blinked to clear the tears and then rolled over. Before her eyes was a map of the world that someone had affixed to the bulkhead. Molly propped herself up on an elbow and found Pennsylvania. Penn Creek was too small to be marked, but she knew where it was. Her daughter was there.

  The state capital, Harrisburg, was eighty miles southeast, and marked by a star. There in the offices of the Patriot-News, reporter Tapper Sprocket was at that moment tapping at the keyboard on her desk.

  Molly had never heard of Tapper Sprocket, but the young reporter knew all about Molly. In fact, she had been investigating the Zook family for two years, ever since a challenge to Gustavus Zook’s will was filed in the Cambria County Court of Common Pleas.

  Tapper couldn’t finish that story until the judge made her decision, and—like most of the parties to the case—she would be on hand in the courtroom in the Cambria County seat, Johnstown, the next morning.

  Now, though, the untimely end to Molly Zook’s round-the-world flight meant she had to rush something into print right away.

  “We need a bulletin for the Web in half an hour,” the state editor told her. “And the rest by eleven for the morning edition. We can’t beat the TV, but you got the depth, right? You’ve been
reporting this story long enough.”

  “Depth I got,” said Tapper, and for the first time all day she smiled. She was thinking of the strange, blind creatures that lived in the depths of the Pacific Ocean. How surprised they must have been when Sunspot I drifted gently down to join them.

  CHAPTER

  24

  By the time Effie came downstairs the next morning, Aunt Clare and Uncle Ted had left for their appointment in Johnstown. It wasn’t that far, they told her, but the rural roads were narrow and winding. It would take a big chunk of the day to get there and back.

  Facing hours by herself with nothing to do, Effie went outside and greeted Alfred (who ignored her) and Boris (who went crazy with joy). She could hear a tractor out back. With Uncle Ted away, one of the hired guys was getting a field ready for planting.

  It seemed like a lifetime ago that Effie had tried and failed to go to the diner for breakfast. The owners must be back from vacation by now. She would eat a Greek omelet and rye toast. She would figure out how in the world she could rescue Chop Suey without anyone to drive her. She would find out the meaning of the sign that said THE ALPHA AND OMEGA OF PENN CREEK.

  The bike ride to town had become routine. She barely noticed the trees, mailboxes, driveways, and houses whizzing by. A big truck passed and she didn’t flinch. Soon she had crossed the bridge and sailed down Main Street to arrive at her destination.

  Inside the diner, the blast of AC gave Effie goose bumps. When she looked around, she saw she was in a comfortable, bright place with wood paneling and orange tabletops. The waitress behind the counter was wearing a checkered uniform. Effie had been to plenty of diners in New York; the waitresses never wore uniforms.

  “Table for one?” the waitress asked. She was wiry and energetic-looking with straight brown hair. “Or would you rather sit at the counter?”

  “Counter, please.” Effie liked sitting high up on a stool.

  “Take a seat.” The waitress’s name tag said TERRY. “Can I get you some coffee?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Effie looked at the menu, then looked up. There was no TV. Only two tables had customers. She wished she had brought a book. She was almost done with the fourth volume of The Exiles. With Sadie’s out of business, where would she get something new to read? She saw a newspaper at the other end of the counter. She pulled it toward her and was astonished to see her mother was on the front page.