Cecily handed the bandana back, and I tied it around my neck with a tight knot. I fell into step with Lindsey, who immediately noticed something was bothering me.
“You’re taking deep breaths again.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” I let out my breath and tried to forget the note.
We followed Cecily on a path that took us past the lake and up into the hills. She pointed out Aunt Winnie’s house, a tiny log cabin almost hidden among the pine trees. I remembered she was the one with the pigs who ate our table scraps, and I searched for the pen, but it must have been on the other side.
While we walked, Jayden and Freddy told us about their morning classes. Jayden learned how to use telekinetics to wash dishes, and Freddy practiced reading hidden writing.
“Buckeye is the teacher,” he said. “He’s from England, but he’s nuts about American authors like Mark Twain. We took turns reading out of a Twain biography while he held the book closed. Did you know Twain himself had ESP? He foretold his brother’s death, and he never got over it. Some people believe he was dabbling in time travel because of stuff he wrote.”
“Did he ever really travel in time?” Lindsey asked.
“That’s just fiction,” Ellen said.
“Is it?” Her quiet stare made Ellen blink. “It could be the next great invention,” she added. “Like space travel.”
Ellen didn’t have an answer for that.
The day grew warmer, and Cecily made us stop for a water break. I wasn’t sure if my canteen held as much as modern water bottles so I only took a few sips.
At our second break, she gave us some thick brushes she had brought. “We’re almost there, and you’ll use these when you get close to an artifact,” she explained.
“What are we looking for?” Freddy asked.
Cecily hesitated. “This dig site holds some strange objects. In the last twenty years we’ve unearthed antiquities that never should have been there.” She stopped abruptly.
“Like what?” I asked, but she bit down on her lip and changed the subject.
“You can drink the rest of your water now because we have a cistern at the dig site,” she said.
The water gave us a spurt of energy for the last stretch up the hill, but when we arrived, everything was a mess. The cistern lay on its side, and a big gash showed where the water had leaked out. Someone had knocked out the boundary stakes, and the strings dividing the plot into sections were limp and twisted.
“No water,” groaned Ivan. “What will we do in this heat?”
Cecily frowned. “First we’ll fix what someone tried to destroy.” She peered up at the sun. “But we may have to go back early.”
She assigned us partners so we could stand on either side of the square and tighten the strings. As I knelt in the dirt, I spotted a scrap of paper. It was blank except for a curly signature that appeared to be Hepzibah.
I showed it to the others, but Cecily took it away and put it in her pocket. “I need to show this to Mr. Parker,” she said.
I glanced at Lindsey—we were thinking the same thing—there was a mystery here that campers weren’t supposed to know.
Cecily darted around the edges of the dig site, checking everyone’s work. When she was satisfied the site was in order, she took out a diagram showing a grid marked with numbers. “We’re digging in grids nine and ten today,” she explained. “Everyone choose a spot and shovel the dirt into these screens.”
“I don’t see why we have to dig here,” Ellen said. “It’s obvious there’s something over there.”
I looked where she pointed, but the ground appeared the same as our assigned patch.
Cecily gave her a hand shovel. “Let’s see if you’re right. You dig there first.”
Stepping primly over the strings, Ellen swept her hand over the earth. Then she used the shovel to scoop out a hole about six inches deep.
“Not so fast,” Cecily called, but before she could give further directions Ellen tossed aside the shovel and whipped out her brush.
“It’s a huge bone,” she announced. “Like from a dinosaur.”
Despite Cecily’s protests, we ran across the grid. The bone was yellow and crusted with dirt. I rested my hand on its rough surface, and my mind tingled with the amazing possibility of holding something from thousands of years ago.
Garrett, who was usually quiet, pushed his way to the front. “Let me feel it.” The moment his fingers touched the bone, he shuddered. “This is an Apatosaurus bone. This dinosaur used to be called the brontosaurus. The bones are found in desert regions, so how’d it get here?”
“How’d you know that?” Ellen demanded. “I discovered it—I should have known it.”
Cecily took the bone. “Eugene is going to bust a gasket missing this. You two have learned your gifts! Ellen, we call it dowsing when you can find buried objects. And Garrett, you’re an empath. You know about things from touching them. Have either of you ever done this before?”
Ellen and Garrett stared at each other, their faces blank.
“Hmm, perhaps the air of Camp Hawthorne is working on both of you.”
My head prickled in the heat. I wanted to touch the dinosaur bone again, but it turned blurry and seemed to be fading farther away. With this double vision, I couldn’t claim the air of Camp Hawthorne was doing me any good. I sat down.
“You all right?” Lindsey’s voice reached me faintly.
My mouth was dry, and when I looked at my hands they seemed to be doubling into twenty fingers. “I’m not sure…”
Cecily’s face loomed over me. “Stella has heat stroke.”
“I think I can find water,” Ellen said, and then the light turned black.
Next thing I remember, a plastic bottle was being forced between my lips. “Quick, before it runs out.”
The cool water splashed into my mouth, and I managed to swallow. Another gulp and then another, and then Cecily’s face swam in front of me. “Any better?”
I tried to tell her I was fine, but my voice came out in a croak.
She peered at me. “The best we can do is get you down to Aunt Winnie’s cabin. She’ll be able to help.”
Her image wavered, and everything went dark again.
Chapter Fourteen
I woke up in a dim room with bunches of dried flowers and leaves hanging over my head—the smell reminded me of the lavender Grandma put in her drawers. “Grandma?” I asked.
“No honey. It’s Aunt Winnie here. You’re staying with me till you feel better.”
I followed the voice and saw a small woman in a wheelchair. Her skin was dark, but her hair was almost pure white. Her cheeks were so wrinkled she could have been the mother of my grandmother.
“My name’s Stella,” I said.
“Nice to meet you.” Aunt Winnie wheeled herself closer and replaced the washcloth on my forehead with a new one. “You’re wearing one of the old-time bandanas.”
I felt my neck. The bandana was still there, but it was twisted to the side. “This was my mother’s.”
“Ah.” Her eyes gleamed in the soft light.
“Both my parents were here—Franny and Dan. Did you ever meet them?”
Aunt Winnie lifted my wrist in her cool fingers. “Your pulse seems better.” She peered into my face. “What happened up there?”
“We were at the dig, and Ellen found…”
“No, honey, when you got sick.”
“The sun was hot, and everything went fuzzy and double.”
“You see clearly now?”
I focused on the room—the quilt at the foot of the bed and the vases of wildflowers on the window sill, then nodded.
“Good,” she said. “Now listen to me. If that double vision comes back, you close your eyes tight and concentrate on what you’re really seeing.”
Her words confused me, but there was something about the way she said them that made me think I needed to pay attention.
Someone knocked at the door, and Cecily’s
head appeared around it. “Is Stella ready to go back?”
Aunt Winnie patted my arm. “She’s ready.” She lowered her head and whispered to me, “Come visit, and I’ll tell you what I can about your parents.”
Her words drove away the last of my dizzy feeling, and I jumped up to follow Cecily. “I’ll be back,” I promised.
The rest of our group was waiting outside, muddy and jubilant. “Stella, look at all the stuff we found,” Lindsey said.
Garrett waved the dinosaur bone, Jayden held up a handful of pottery pieces, Lindsey a clay pipe, and Freddy a tin box. Ellen stood off to the side, covered in dirt, but smiling.
“You should’ve seen Ellen,” Lindsey continued. “When you fainted, she walked right up the hill and told us to dig, and we found a spring of water.”
I should have been happy for Ellen, but something inside me shriveled. Everyone was finding their gifts. What if I didn’t have one?
Lindsey linked her arm in mine as we walked back to camp. “You can get Ellen to help you find clues about your parents. Maybe they dropped something that’s been buried in the sands of time.”
I imagined the kids from my photograph dropping a soda can and a mound of dirt drifting over it, and I giggled. Lindsey always made me feel better.
Eugene took us to the evening program at the Whittier House. He shook his head over all the objects we’d found. “Twenty points for the Thornes,” he crowed. “And you’ll be in my dowsing class tomorrow,” he said to Ellen.
Since Karen and I missed the dig, Ellen told us in detail how she’d seen each of the shards of pottery and the clay pipe in the ground. By the time she got to the bits of gravel mixed with the tin box, I was sick of the whole adventure.
I let my mind wander to Aunt Winnie and her invitation to visit again. I hugged to myself the thought that she might tell me something more about my parents.
The Whits lived off the right-turning path from the Junction Stone in a tidy white house with green shutters. It looked as old as ours, but more cheerful. Neatly-trimmed bushes lined the front of the house, and two baskets of marigolds bloomed on either side of the front steps.
Cecily led us to the parlor, a long room stretching from the front of the house to the back. With all the campers gathered, it was pretty snug, but we found a breezy spot near the back window. The host for the event was Thaisa, the girl’s CIT at Whittier House. She was also the empathics teacher, as Cecily explained, which meant she could tell a story about any object she held.
Thaisa opened the evening by showing us a book that once belonged to John Greenleaf Whittier. She sat in a black rocking chair and swayed back and forth as she recited part of a poem called Snowbound. As she spoke in a low voice, I pictured the scene: a family gathered around the fire, a snow storm raging outside, and the strange guest. When she reached this part her voice swelled louder:
Another guest that winter night
Flashed back from lustrous eyes the light.
Unmarked by time, and yet not young,
The honeyed music of her tongue
“The poem’s about real people,” Cecily whispered. “The guest had gifts like us.”
Though it was the middle of summer, I shivered. Thaisa ended the recitation with lines that repeated in my head long after:
“Sit with me by the homestead hearth,
And stretch the hands of memory forth.”
After the reading, we divided into groups for tours of the house conducted by the Whits. We were in Thaisa’s group, and she told us how Whittier was a Quaker who spoke out against slavery. “He was also sympathetic to those wrongly accused of witchcraft,” she said. Her voice was so deep and mysterious that new goose bumps raised on my arms. “A Salem woman named Temperance Card was unjustly hanged, and Whittier wrote the inscription for her memorial, built two hundred years later.”
Upstairs, Thaisa showed us a hole the author put in the door of his study so his pet bird could fly in and out. I thought I’d like a hole like that in my own room back home. Of course, I’d have to convince Grandma to let me have a bird, first.
Thaisa had a way of staring, as though she was looking straight through you. She stopped our group at the door before we left. “The Thornes are always welcome here,” she said. “Nathaniel Hawthorne did a good turn for Whittier once.”
“What does she mean?” Jayden muttered to Karen.
“There’s a story called ‘P’s Correspondence’— Read it, and you’ll understand.”
Thaisa turned to Garrett. “I’ll see you at the class for empathics tomorrow.”
Freddy gave Garrett a soft punch. “Congratulations— you’ll love the classes.”
The magical feeling from the evening seemed to leak right out of me. Everyone else would be going to classes tomorrow, except me.
Chapter Fifteen
I woke up early the next day and made my way to the dining hall before anyone else was awake. A lot of things had happened, and I needed to think. I was surprised to find Jayden already there.
He was just pulling down a book from the shelf above the fireplace and grinned sheepishly when he saw me. “I just needed some time to read. I’m not used to being around people all the time.”
Jayden was a different person at camp—more like the kid who used to pedal around the neighborhood with me, not the one who clammed up this past year. I hadn’t realized how much I missed his friendship. I grabbed two slices of bread from the counter. “I know what you mean,” I said. “Tell Cecily I’m going to skip breakfast this morning.”
I followed the path to Aunt Winnie’s place and ate the bread as I walked. The sun slanted through the trees, lighting up the specks of dust that floated in the air.
Aunt Winnie’s cabin stood in the middle of a cluster of pine trees where the hill dipped into a hollow. She was in the yard, sitting in her wheelchair with a shallow bucket balanced on her knees. She made clucking noises as she sprinkled corn on the ground for the chickens, and they squawked and bobbed their heads to gulp the grains.
“Aren’t chickens the most comical things?” Aunt Winnie said, as if we’d already been chatting for hours.
“Can I feed them?” I asked.
She passed me the bucket, and the chickens followed me around, pecking at my shoe when I let up for a moment. They were so interesting I almost forgot my reason for coming, but not for long. “Aunt Winnie, did you ever meet my parents?”
She tilted her head and studied me. “I did. Your mother made me this cord for my glasses. I was old even then, you know.” She took off her glasses so I could touch the cord. “They call this stuff gimp.”
The cord was made from the same plastic as my key chain, but the pattern was different—looser and more flexible. “Can you tell me more about them?”
Aunt Winnie looked out at the tree tops, as though she stored her memories up there. “Your mother arrived first, as I remember. She found her gift the first day—a gift for making intricate things with her fingers. She used to help me thread my needles, twenty at a time so I’d have one whenever I needed it.”
Aunt Winnie’s words flowed over me like a wind, setting everything right in my mind. I knew I’d never forget a single thing she said.
“Your father started coming the next year, and he was a handful.” Aunt Winnie laughed, only it came out more like wheezing. “One day I woke up to find baby bonnets on all the piglets. He was in the telekinesis class with your mother, but he had another gift, too.”
“Were they friends right away?”
“More like enemies. She thought he was a show-off. But by their fifth year they were counselors-in-training together, and something happened that made them friends.”
“What was it?”
“It’s a secret, honey,” said Aunt Winnie, making her voice quiet. “But if you need to know, I promise I’ll tell you by and by. For now it’s safer this way.”
Safer?
“Does my grandmother know?”
Aunt Winnie’s face wr
inkled. “No more questions for today.”
Breakfast was just ending when I returned to the dining hall. Jayden jerked his head toward the door as he headed out to wash dishes, and I followed him. He got the dishes started in washing motion and leaned back against the brick wall. “I found that story Thaisa told us about,” he said.
My mind was full of my meeting with Aunt Winnie. “Thaisa?” I muttered.
“Remember ‘P’s Correspondence?’”
I flushed. “Yes—Hawthorne’s favor.”
“The way Hawthorne tells it, there was a man who knew the alternate history of world events, and everyone thought he was crazy. He mentions Whittier, but he only says he died young, which actually never happened.”
“What does it mean?”
“If we told people what we know, they would say we were crazy, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “What if Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that story because it was a real alternate history? What if that’s what Thaisa meant when she said Hawthorne did Whittier a good turn—he saved him from his alternate history?”
“Why don’t you ask Thaisa?” I asked.
“For some reason they aren’t telling us everything. Don’t you think it’s strange that we dug up a dinosaur bone yesterday that should have been in a desert? And why was Cecily so secretive about the scrap of paper you found? There’s a mystery at the dig site—what if there’s an alternate history going on there?”
I had a million objections to Jayden’s theory, but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if there might be some truth to it. “We’ll have to keep our eyes and ears open if we want to find out more.”
“Let’s meet back here if we learn anything,” he said.
When we were little, Jayden and I fixed a meeting place where all our adventures began. “It’ll be like the tire swing at your house,” I said.
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