“Interesting,” says Jack Philpotts again, with a tone that suggests this might be another good thing to put in one of his murder mysteries. “We heard about the teacher situation.”
Mom stiffens.
I already don’t like the famous author, but I am undecided about this Mariella. What’s up with those shoes? I lean enough to look at them again. They’re black high-tops on four-inch wedges. I don’t even get how she walks in them. I look at Ben, and he’s looking at them too.
“Kinky,” he says.
“Mmm-hmm,” I say, but I’m not sure if he means kinky-good or kinky-weird. I know I mean kinky-weird. This girl is wildly different from Zoe. By now, Zoe would have been at my table, finding out my life history. Maybe Mariella doesn’t care. Maybe she’s too good for us.
“Let’s get you to number nine.” Mom switches to her mayor voice. “You’ll be right next to us. We’re at number ten. Best spot on the beach. Always plowed out first.” She motions to me to come over to her, then turns to the Philpotts. “This is my daughter, Quinnie. And this is Ben Denby.”
I don’t move a muscle. Ben twitches.
Jack Philpotts gives us a little rubber-band smile.
Mariella says, “Hey,” and jerks her bangs.
17
Out in the parking lot, Ben says to Mariella, “So. You can hang out with us if you want.”
He jiggles his leg like he’s got a calf cramp.
“We’re not exactly hanging out,” I say. I want to pinch him, but I reach into my pocket for my rock. It’s not there! What did I do with it? Maybe I left it on my desk. “I mean, we’re going to be searching for Ms. Stillford.”
Inside Gusty’s, Jack Philpotts is listening to Mom and watching her point toward the post office. When she doubles her point like she means Rook River is farther north, he nods.
“I guess. Sure,” Mariella says.
So, now I’m stuck with this situation, which I might not mind if Ben wasn’t acting so interested in this odd girl. Mom has given us directions to go up and down Mile Stretch Road and scour it for clues. From the convent at number one all the way to the Abbotts’ at twenty-eight. How much walking Mariella Philpotts will be able to do in those shoes, I can’t guess.
“Okay,” I say, taking charge. “Ready? We’re headed toward the convent.”
No one moves.
“Ready?” I say again.
“Yep,” Mariella says.
I can see Ben sizing himself up against her to see if he’s taller.
“Ben?” I ask.
“Uh huh.” He gives up the height assessment. “Let’s go.”
“Soooo, we are walking north.” I point toward Circle Lane. “Look for personal stuff: Ms. Stillford’s scarf, a tote bag that says Beatrix Potter Botanicals, a scrap of paper with writing on it—you know, anything that might be a clue to where she is.”
Ben adds, “A shoe, a pool of blood, signs of a struggle, a circular burn pattern in the grass from the rocket thrusters of the alien spacecraft.” He looks at Mariella like he’s checking to see if she thinks he’s funny. I want to scream.
Above us, a few gulls cry for the French fries they expect when anyone comes out of Gusty’s. When we don’t toss fries their way, the gulls screech at us and take off.
“What’s your name?” Ben says. “Maryellen?”
“Mariella.” The girl stops and stares him straight in the face. “But I prefer Ella. Like Ella Marvell in her Trouble period.”
“Huh?” says Ben. He squirms out of her stare.
Okay, so she’s not shy.
“You don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, do you?” she says and keeps walking.
“Don’t think so,” he says.
Ella Marvell. I search my mental music database. Blues? I’m pretty sure it’s not hip-hop or Ben would have nodded some respect.
“Ben likes hip-hop,” I volunteer.
“Ella Marvell was the uncontested queen of 1960s rhythm and blues,” Mariella says without looking at us.
I kind of doubt that, but I vow to check it out later. I can hear Ms. Stillford saying to her, “Tell me, Mariella. Do you have any support for that statement?” I don’t know what Mariella’s—or Ella’s—schooling has been like up until now, but I bet she’ll have to work harder with Ms. Stillford . . . and watch the exaggeration. Or as Ms. Stillford always says to me, “Hew out hyperbole, Quinnie.”
I scoop up a handful of sand and broken shells, shift them around in my hand like there might be a clue in the sifting, then pitch them aside and continue on.
Ella walks next to me, if you can call what she does in her crazy-high shoes walking, and Ben follows behind us. I make a metal note to write Zoe about this strange girl from New York.
A few steps later, Ella takes a dive. Not a flat-on-her-face, looking-stupid dive. No. It’s more like a fainting swan fall—right back into Ben, whose hands magically catch her under the arms and bounce her back to her feet. Almost like a choreographed move. Ella dips. Ben catches and lifts. She resumes walking. And in that split second, some teeny-weeny little moment happens between them. Some indescribable thing that I know will niggle at me for a long time. Of course, they both pretend not to notice.
We continue walking. Me and them. But their moment nicks away a cubic millimeter of my heart.
Not only that, physical contact with Ella opens up a spigot in Ben. He starts telling her about how we are pretty sure Ms. Stillford’s been kidnapped—because of love—by either Owen Loney or his uncle John. And about Ms. Stillford’s house and the things being moved and the dresses. He’s gushing like Spouting Rock. He even tells Ella about how his uncle made this big pot of wild rice soup and packed up most of it.
But Ben kind of gets me going too. Soon we’re laying out our case, clue by clue. I tell Ella about the timing of Owen Loney taking his boat out the other morning and about John Denby’s pickup being all cleaned up with the topper on it. We end on Ms. Stillford’s turning down Owen Loney for dates all the time and leaving John Denby at the altar.
Ella listens and nods her head as we make our way down the road. She looks at the back of each beach house as we pass it.
“Are all these houses empty?” she asks. I can tell she’s judging Maiden Rock, and I feel embarrassed.
“Most of them are closed up for the winter, except for the weekenders. There’s Zoe’s, where you live, and our house next door. There’s the house at the preserve where Ben and his uncle live, the lobster pound where Owen Loney lives, the convent where the two sisters live. And Ms. Stillford’s.” I choke a bit on that last one.
“Now I get why my dad wanted to come here,” Ella says.
“Why’s that?” I ask.
“He writes gory crime novels, and this place is desolate.”
“Where’s your mom?” Ben asks.
“She lives in LA. She writes rom-coms for the movies. Why do you live with your uncle?”
“My parents are dead.”
“Oh, yeah. For all I see my mom, she could be too.”
I cringe and check Ben’s reaction. I’m sure he’d rather have his parents living in LA instead of the Rook River Cemetery. But he shrugs and almost smiles.
Wonderful. So now they have that in common—dead or kind-of-dead mothers. And from what I could tell in Gusty’s, her Dad is even less warm and fuzzy than Ben’s uncle. Yet another reason for them to become best friends.
“Writing crime novels sounds cool,” I say. I don’t exactly mean it, but I’m trying to change the subject. I imagine Agatha Christie . . . but then I think of Ms. Stillford again, and my mind switches to CSI.
“So, maybe she’s tied up in one of these houses,” Ella says and points down the line.
I am considering this actually really brilliant possibility when a cry goes up from the searchers in the reeds along the edge of the Pool.
I hold my breath as a woman in a blue RESCUE coat leans over and picks up something. She waves at the others. It’s small. I can’t make
it out. They gather like a fist, studying it. I imagine bad things. Ms. Stillford’s watch? Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Wha—?
The searchers break apart and resume their walking. False alarm.
Ella looks at the Pool and says, “That’s a pitiful lake.”
The Pool isn’t at its best at low tide. It’s so shallow, you could wade into it, but you wouldn’t want to, due to sharp shells, stranded marine life, and waterlogged trash.
“It’s not a lake,” I say. “It’s a tide pool.” But even though she doesn’t know squat about tide pools, she may be right about Ms. Stillford being held in one of the houses.
“You know,” I say to Ben, “she really could be in one of the summer houses.”
I know Mom said she was going to check all the houses, but I decide, since we’re here already, we should do it—look all around them.
“Yeah,” Ben says. “He could have knocked on her door and thrown a bag over her head and put her in his pickup and tied her up in the cellar of any one of these.”
“Or an upstairs bedroom,” I add. I want her to be someplace nicer if she has to be tied up somewhere at all. Then, because the wheels are spinning in my head, I say, “Maybe I can get Mom to give us the keys to the houses.”
Ben is hopping around in place. “Yeah, and the Abbotts’, ’cause they border the marsh in the nature center. My uncle would probably hide her someplace closer to our house.”
“Where he could walk to at night and not need the car or truck to take her wild rice soup,” I practically shout.
“And,” Ben says, “and, that is why he wants to search the marsh by himself. Because she’s in a house near there.”
“I sure hope it’s not an Abbott,” I say.
“What’s an Abbott?” Ella tries to keep up with the conversation.
“They’re the four abandoned houses at the other end of Mile Stretch Road.”
Ben jogs ahead of me and Ella, opening mailboxes and sticking his nose in each one.
“Don’t mess with the mail,” I yell.
“There isn’t any mail,” he yells back.
Of course there isn’t.
A plastic bag blows across our path. Ella grabs it and turns it inside out then lets it go. “What’s down there?” She points down the drive of #1 Mile Stretch Road.
“The convent,” I say as I keep my eye on Ben.
“Like with nuns?” She almost laughs as she says it.
“Mmm-hmm. Our Lady of the Tides Catholic Convent. Only two nuns left.”
“Two?”
“Just two.”
“That’s weird.”
“They’re . . . a little weird.”
Ella kicks over a piece of driftwood near the convent mailbox. A million tiny bugs swarm in the wood’s crevices. Meanwhile, Ben has his head in the convent trash bins, rummaging like a gigantic raccoon.
At first I want to stop him but then I remember that they find evidence in the trash on CSI all the time. Instead, I hurry toward him.
“Oh, man. Look at this!” Ben pulls an empty, waxy-white, fifty-pound bag out of the trash. Across the front, it says Mexican Bat Guano. He thrusts it at Ella like he’s won it for her at the carnival at Old Orchard Beach.
“Ick, I don’t want that.” She wrinkles her nose and backs up.
“You know what this is, don’t you?” Ben says.
“An empty old stinky bag.”
“It’s bat poop. Bat guano. My uncle uses it for fertilizer.” Ben is clearly proud of his very specific gardening knowledge.
I look in the trash bins. “My mom’s going to flip.”
“Why?” Ella says. “Is bat guano illegal?”
“Paper mixed with glass and garbage.” I pick a few things out of the trash bin, then throw them back. “They’re supposed to separate. Mom’s told them a hundred times.”
“There’s some cool stuff in here.” Ben starts pulling things up from deep within the bins—a broken screwdriver, a cracked rubber hose. “This is gross,” he says, but he keeps doing it. Crumpled potato chip bags, cupcake wrappers, at least twenty empty cat food cans.
Ella leans over the pile. “They have cats?”
“Oh, yeah.” I try to count them from memory and stop at fifteen.
Ella looks closer. “Are they . . . fat?”
“The cats?” I ask.
“The nuns.” She looks at me like I am being purposely stupid, which I am.
Ella picks up a Suzie Q cupcake wrapper as if it’s contaminated. “They don’t exactly eat healthy.”
“Sister Rosie is kind of a . . . chunk,” Ben says. He shrugs his shoulders like he should get credit for not saying fat.
I’m about to give him a Ms. Stillford–style “watch yourself” look when we hear the convent van engine rev up. I immediately feel weird about going through the nuns’ trash. It’s embarrassing to see what they eat.
“Throw it all back in the bin, now,” I yell.
A second later, the van barrels around the curve of the driveway, moving in our direction at a fierce pace. We jump back as it screeches to a halt in front of us.
The front windows power down simultaneously and two black-and-white nun heads appear. Sister Rosie is driving, as usual. I think about her promise to Mom and wonder if she only intends to keep it when she thinks Mom’s watching. Her sweet, round face with its twinkly eyes makes me believe she really wants to comply but she just loves to drive fast.
The passenger, Sister Ethel, wears her typical somber look. Her face is wrinkled like an apple-head doll with two cloves for eyes.
Sister Rosie leans out excitedly and says, “Hello, dears. I know. I know. I know. Separate. We must start separating.”
“We’re on a search party,” I say, “looking for clues about Ms. Stillford.”
“Oh, yes. We heard. How worrisome.” Sister Rosie makes a sad face. “Let’s hope she’s just taken a little vacation.”
“Who is your friend, Quinnie?” asks Sister Ethel.
“This is Mar—Ella Philpotts. She and her dad are living in number nine while the Buttermans are in Scotland.” Ella steps forward like the nuns are a curiosity. “This is Sister Rosie,” I say and point to the driver. “And this is Sister Ethel.”
Then Ella surprises me again. “I thought nuns were supposed to have saint names.”
Sister Rosie doesn’t miss a beat. “Oh, but we do. Rosie is short for Saint Maria Giuseppe Rossello, and Ethel is short for Saint Ethelburga of Barking.”
Sister Ethel leans out the passenger window and extends her thin, wrinkled hand to Ella. “Welcome to Maiden Rock, Ella. Like Ella Marvell, I presume?”
I’m shocked by this, but not as much as Ella is. She leans forward and rests her hand lightly on the fender. “Yes, Sister. In her Trouble period, or maybe her One and Only period.”
While I’m wondering how Sister Ethel knows squat about the uncontested queen of 1960s rhythm and blues, something happens that I will never forget, ever, in my whole life. Sister Ethel breaks into song.
“Trouble hanging ’round me.”
If that wasn’t enough, Sister Rosie leans over and joins in.
“Knocking at my door.”
The next thing I know, Ella is singing with them. “I give up a little but, yeah, yeah . . . But you always want me more.”
Ben’s grimacing like he’s had bamboo shards shoved under his fingernails. Ella and the nuns continue to yowl. I have no clue whether this sounds anything like the real song.
Then Sister Ethel pats Ella’s hand and says, “Well, we’re off to Walmart for cat food.”
“Quinnie,” says Sister Rosie, “you must keep us posted on any news about Blythe. And tell your mother to let us know if there is anything we can do.”
The only thing I can think to say is, “You could separate,” but before I get it out, Sister Rosie guns the engine. I manage to yell, “Slow down, sisters,” as they leave a dust swirl behind them.
“Ethel Burger of Dogby?” Ella asks.
“Ethelburga of Barking,” I say.
“Whoa,” Ella says. “Maine is crazy.”
18
Ben, Ella, and I turn around and head south on Mile Stretch Road. You’d think we’d be jabbering about the sisters singing, but we’re not. We’re all in our own worlds. Ben’s attention span is usually as short as a match burn, but he keeps sneaking looks at Ella like he’s replaying the performance. I assume Ella is thinking about saint names since there’s a small smile at the corners of her mouth.
Me? I’m thinking about searching all the houses along the beach.
“Hey,” Ella says, “there are cars up there.” She points up the road toward our and Zoe’s houses.
“That’s Zoe’s house—your house. Don’t you know your own car?” I say.
“We didn’t have a car until this morning.” She shrugs. “It’s leased or something.”
“Don’t people own cars in New York?” Ben asks. Now he’s interested in NYC traffic.
“Mostly taxis,” she says. “There’s no place to park.”
“Come on,” I say, and I run around number two. I check the door, the windows. I go up on the porch on the beachside and look in. All the furniture is covered with sheets. Looks like it’s untouched. “She’s not here,” I yell.
Ben is ahead of me at number three. He’s stacking cinder blocks, climbing on them and looking in the windows. “This one is closed up tight,” he calls out.
Ella tackles number four. “This one has boarded-over windows.”
“Those are storm shutters,” I say.
“I can’t see a thing,” she calls.
“Check if the door’s locked,” I say.
All the houses up to Zoe’s house look undisturbed.
When we reach number nine, Ella’s dad is unpacking the car. He mumbles something to himself as he carries in a box.
“Don’t even ask,” she says. “He’s in the zone.”
I don’t ask.
“He’s writing a novel,” Ella continues.
“While he walks around?”
“Yep. He goes into the zone pretty much anywhere, and he just starts talking a story to himself.”
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