by Sharon Short
There was a silence as Chip looked, and I mentally blessed him for not questioning me, just doing as I’d asked. “It’s Asian ginseng,” Chip said.
I pressed my eyes shut. Damn Cletus and his half-researched approach to things. “Listen, she’s been drinking a lot of that, I know. And that could be raising her blood pressure, which could be why she’s having heart problems. Get her to the doctor now. Get her blood pressure taken. And take the tea and her blood pressure medicine with her and tell the doctor she’s been drinking this tea.”
Chip promised he would. I pressed the button to end the call, then stared at Winnie’s cell phone in the palm of my hand. Call Owen? Maybe she was right. It was tempting. But all she knew was that we’d been testy with each other while Slinky was keeling over—not what all he’d confessed to me at Suzy Fu’s Chinese Buffet. I wasn’t ready yet to talk to him. I wasn’t sure when—or if—I ever would be.
I went up the steps and left the cell phone in the driver’s seat. Then I got in Sally’s truck—which started nicely—and headed out to the woods where Trudy and her buddies had started their “utopia”—another result of Cletus’s half-researched interests.
14
By the time I got to the state forest and was getting out of Sally’s truck, I could smell the rain in the air. By the time I was walking through the woods—mentally cursing myself that I hadn’t thought to switch to tennis shoes from flip-flops while I was back at my apartment—it was drizzling, the sweetly scented rain turning the late June mugginess to something more like a musky, wet warmth, an enjoyable scent and feeling for about three minutes. Then, suddenly, the skies opened up and the rain came down with a fury. By the time I got to the little clearing where Trudy and her buddies held camp, I was soaked.
The tents were gone from the clearing. I wondered if the kids had been caught at their Utopian games and sent home or to juvenile hall or wherever the park rangers would send them if they were found out. Then I blinked hard in the rain and saw one lone tent, on the far end of the illegal campsite. I started toward it, not with any notion that I’d go in and get dry (even I am not that much of an optimist) but thinking maybe I’d get a clue about why the kids left.
Even better, I hoped I’d find something in the tent that would give me a clue as to Trudy’s intentions . . . like where she was planning to hitchhike.
All right, I really am an optimist. Even when soaking wet.
I opened up the flaps. And there he was—Charlemagne. By himself. Blissfully asleep.
Given the heavy thrum-drumming of the rain on the tent (a sound that always makes me want to pee, which is why I quit Ranger Girls when I was twelve, because there were too many rules about how to go in the middle of the night, and who wants to worry about the buddy system when there’s an urgent need to pee and it’s raining?), I was surprised that he was asleep.
But fast asleep he was. I had to kick him twice in the calves to wake him up.
Finally, he stared up at me with bleary eyes.
“Huh? Who’s it?” He sat up, rubbed his eyes with his fists, just like a little two-year-old, and despite the odor in the tent (soggy seventeen-year-old boys who haven’t bathed in a while do not smell nice), I felt a surge of pity for him.
“It’s me, Josie Toadfern,” I said. “Remember me?”
Charlemagne sat up, crossing his legs Indian style. My neck and back were getting sore from leaning over, so I sat down next to him, too. This was a four-person tent, but there wasn’t much leftover room. The back of the tent was stuffed with clothes and a backpack and cooking pots and goodness knows what else. Charlemagne sat on an old Army-issue sleeping bag that even in these conditions managed to give off its own unique mustiness. I breathed shallowly and tried to distract myself from my rising gorge by thinking of all the tricks I knew to get wet, musty smells out of cloth.
“What’re you doing here?” Charlemagne asked, sounding a wee bit annoyed. Not that I could blame him. Until I showed up, he was probably having a nice dream—unless, of course, some version of Mrs. Oglevee haunted him.
“I’m looking for Trudy,” I said. “Or at least, someone who knows where to find her.”
”Well, that’s sure not me,” Charlemagne said. He tried to sound angry, but his efforts didn’t fully mask the hurt in his voice. Plus, his eyes gave him away.
“You do know her daddy died yesterday at the pie-eating contest.”
“Yeah, sure. Word travels fast around here.” He shrugged.
Okay. No love lost between Trudy’s father and her beau.
I tried again. “Trudy is not at home. I was just at the Breitenstrater place and no one seemed to know where she was—or care.”
Charlemagne gave me a half-sneer, half-smile. It didn’t make him look nearly so tough as I knew he hoped it did. “So what’s new? No one there ever paid any attention to her, anyway. She told me a bunch of times she might as well have been dead, like her brother, only no one would have mourned her like they did him.”
“Her Uncle Cletus cared about her,” I said. “And about you. But now he’s disappeared also.” Charlemagne, startled, stared up at me. Finally, a reaction of something besides de-fensiveness. “Oh, man, Cletus is missing?”
“Well, no one’s seen him since before the pie-eating contest, anyway. Look, we don’t even know if Trudy knows that her dad is dead. I’d think she’d want to know that.”
Charlemagne rolled his eyes. “She’ll hear about it eventually. Death of someone important like Mr. Breitenstrater will make the news. Then she can come home and stake her claim—the next Breitenstrater to use power to mess with people’s lives. ‘Course, she’s already good at that.”
He hugged his knees to his chin and started chewing on a thumbnail.
“Charlemagne, I don’t know what happened between you and Trudy. But I can tell you this. It’s not like Alan Breiten-strater’s death is going to make news anywhere but around here, so unless she’s in the area, she won’t know about it.” I hesitated before making the next statement I had in mind. I hate being manipulative. But then the rain came down harder, and mud squished up against my butt. Oh, what the hell. “Unless the truth about what I think really happened comes out.”
Charlemagne stopped chewing his nail and gulped. “I thought he just had a heart attack?”
I lifted my eyebrows. “I think he was murdered.”
Charlemagne suddenly looked scared. “You think he was murdered?”
“I think there’s a possibility. And with Trudy out there, not knowing, maybe vulnerable . . .” It was my turn to shrug. Lord, I was ashamed of myself—especially because I knew Mrs. Oglevee would be proud.
He moaned. “Oh, man. And after the fight we had . . .”
“Why don’t you tell me what happened?”
Charlemagne shook his head. “I’m not really sure. I’ve been spending nights out here most of the summer—anything to get away from my old man, you know? But Trudy always went home at night, then got a ride out with one of the other kids or her Uncle Cletus, except the morning of the pie-eating contest.”
“Cletus knew about this?”
“Sure. Trudy really started our Utopia, but it was all based on stuff her Uncle Cletus had taught her. He was real proud of her. He even paid for all of the food we needed, stuff like that.”
I forced myself not to roll my eyes. Great. A corporate-funded Utopia.
“Cletus even came out every now and then, hung out around the campfire with us. A few times Todd Raptor came out, too. He didn’t seem into the Utopian stuff, though. Just seemed amused by the whole thing. I think he was trying to buddy up to Uncle Cletus. Cletus—he told us to just call him that—would tell us stories about Utopias and how he believed that a Utopia could really work because we were still young and pure enough . . .”
My attention wandered as I tried to sort out the image of Todd and Cletus out here together. Todd had been the one to direct me to this place the first time, so finally I knew how he’d learned about
it. But it was hard to imagine Todd and Cletus out here palling around together. Maybe Todd wanted to be in Cletus’s good graces—in case Cletus would try to talk Alan out of the sale. Todd might not realize just how deeply the hate between Alan and Cletus went, might not know that Cletus actually hating the idea of the sale would help seal Alan’s desire to go through with it. . . but, no, I realized. Todd was too sharp for that. He had to have some other reason for going out here.
Probably something secretive. But then, why was he so quick and eager to tell me about this place, this setup, when Cletus hadn’t breathed a word?
Circles. I was going in circles with the information I was gathering. I tuned back in to Charlemagne. He’d branched off on reciting more of Cletus’s utopia stories.
“Uh, Charlemagne, excuse me for interrupting, but you were going to tell me about the morning of the contest?”
“Oh, yeah. Well, Trudy hitchhiked most of the way out here that morning,” he said. I shuddered, remembering her note that she was hitchhiking around. “We were all surprised to see her because we knew she was expected to make a command performance at the pie-eating contest. But she came here instead. She was really unhappy about something, but she wouldn’t say what.”
Charlemagne looked sad at the memory. “Trudy just told us that all of what we were doing was phony—that everything her Uncle Cletus had said was phony—and that he was a phony and that our whole Utopia was phony, based on phony ideas.”
For a moment I wondered if Winnie had dropped by the Breitenstrater mansion in her bookmobile and left a copy of Catcher in the Rye with Trudy.
“Then she said that Paradise was phony, too,” Charlemagne said. “Based on phony ideas. And that she couldn’t live here any more, but that we should go home, because it wasn’t our fault that Paradise was phony. It was the Breitenstraters’ fault. And that she’d learned that from her Uncle Cletus.”
“Paradise is phony? And it’s the Breitenstraters’ fault? What did she mean by that—specifically?”
Charlemagne shook his head. “I don’t know. Trudy wouldn’t say more than that. Everyone just started packing up, because without Trudy’s uncle’s funding, no one really wanted to hang out here anymore—” Well, I thought, of course not. What good is Utopia if you have to pay for your own potato chips and chocolate chip cookies and soda? “—and she wouldn’t talk to me,” Charlemagne went on, “other than to say, ‘it’s over,’ and I knew she meant more than our Utopia. I knew she meant us. Even though she knew I have nowhere else to go. And that I love her.”
Tears welled in his eyes, and he rubbed his eyes as if he were just tired—but I knew better, and I felt sorry for him. Maybe his and Trudy’s had just been puppy love, destined to fade away no matter what. But he was still hurting. Just as Mrs. Beavy was hurting and Geri was hurting . . . and I was hurting . . .
“I know this is hard,” I said. “But do you have any idea at all where she went off to?”
Charlemagne shook his head again. “I overheard her say to one of the girls that she had found a nice home for Slinky.” I gulped. Lord, maybe it was selfish of me at that moment, but I surely didn’t want to be responsible for Slinky for the rest of my life.
“Then she asked for a ride up to Masonville, to the Greyhound bus station,” Charlemagne was saying.
Well, thank God, I thought. She was just trying to throw me off her trail after all with the hitchhiking-around comment in her note.
“But no mention of where she was going from there.”
Charlemagne shook his head. “And at the time, I didn’t care.”
I gave him another little pat. “But now you do.”
He shrugged, tried to arrange his face into another tough-guy scowl. “I don’t care. I’m fine here. I can be a one-man Utopia.”
I sighed. “How will you survive, Charlemagne? Without Cletus’s funding—”
“That’s just what gets me,” Charlemagne said. “We were just starting to get self-sufficient.”
“You were? How?” Unless they’d discovered a hamburger bush and a French-fry tree and a milkshake pond, I just couldn’t imagine it. None of these kids had struck me as the wild berries-and-nuts kind, not for more than play.
Charlemagne glanced around as if he were suddenly afraid spies might be listening outside the tent. Given the remote locale—and the endless rain—I didn’t think so. “Josie,” he whispered, “this forest is full of a wild herb called ginseng that’s really valuable!”
I stared at Charlemagne, horrified at what I was hearing. Oh no, I thought. Please don’t tell me—
But Charlemagne went on. “I’m surprised you don’t know about it,” he said. “Because we were working for Otis Toad-fern. Aren’t you kin?”
“He’s my uncle,” I moaned.
“How about that,” he said. “No wonder you and Trudy got along so great. You both have nutty uncles! Anyway, he was having us gather it for him. He paid us pretty well, too.” Charlemagne reached in his pocket, and pulled out a tattered twenty dollar bill. Poor kid. He had no idea that when a twenty was for really living on—not just spending money—it didn’t go very far.
“How did my uncle know to find you here?” I already suspected the answer had to have something to do with Cletus.
Charlemagne paused, frowned. “You know, I don’t know. I never thought to ask.” Then he brightened, patted his pocket into which he had again stuffed his twenty. “But anyway, Mr. Otis Toadfern told us there was plenty more where those came from, long as we kept gathering ginseng! And now I’ll be a one-man monopoly.”
I looked at this one-man-monopoly-utopian who was really just one very confused kid. “Charlemagne,” I said slowly, “listen to me. My uncle is, at the moment, in the Paradise jail for gathering ginseng. It is illegal. It is considered poaching—and a serious offense. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
At first, I didn’t think so. Charlemagne stared at me, wide-eyed, uncomprehending. Then suddenly, he slumped forward. “Oh, God. I’m doomed.”
“No you’re not,” I said. “Listen. I need to go by the Breit-enstrater Pie Company to return some tablecloths. Doesn’t your dad work second shift?”
Charlemagne just kept crying.
“I have a hunch that he’d be glad to talk to you. And work things out. What do you say, Charlemagne?”
For a few more minutes, Charlemagne sobbed into his folded arms. Then he looked up, and snuffled once more, before giving me a wavering smile. “Just call me Chucky.”
15
Chucky (I was glad to go back to calling him that) did the work of folding down his tent and stuffing his clothes into his backpack. He carried out the tent and a few cooking utensils and his sleeping bag, and I carried out the backpack. By the time we were packing everything out, the rainstorm had stopped. Early evening light sluiced through breaks in the clouds.
Lord, I’d spent too long out here. Sally was going to be mad I’d been gone so long with her truck.
The rain had left the air cooler, which was a relief, but we were soaked through, a miserable feeling once the rain stops. And the rain seemed to worsen the smell of the tent and backpack, to set its odors to fermenting.
So I have to admit, I was grateful for Sally’s pickup truck, even while being unhappy that my own car was broken down, because we could put the tent and the backpack and sleeping bag and gear in the truck bed. Driving all the way back to Paradise with that fermenting smell would have been awful.
As it was, in the backseat floor I found a couple of towels that were stiff with God only knows what, which I unkinked enough to spread over the front seats, so Chucky and I could ride without soaking Sally’s upholstery. I was careful not to get anything on the bag of clean Breitenstrater tablecloths, still in the backseat.
And I cracked the windows and breathed through my mouth and hoped I wouldn’t dehydrate as a result of all this mouth breathing. Chucky fell asleep right off, snoring softly.
Poor kid. He was bone weary—not jus
t from lack of sleep, I was sure—but also from all the mental wear and tear of losing his status as a baseball player, pulling away from his dad, trying to believe in the impossible, and losing his girlfriend.
I had to shake him three times to wake him up once we got to my laundromat, which was closed by the time we got back into town. I was itching to go in and see what state Sally and Larry, Barry, and Harry had left it, but first things first.
Chucky and I set about the business of getting cleaned up: muddy shoes left out on the stair landing. Fluffy clean towels, soap, shampoo, and a new disposable razor for Chuck to use in the bathroom of my extra for-rent apartment. I put a small laundry basket outside the door of the extra apartment and told Chucky to leave his filthy clothes there, and that I’d wash his clothes from the backpack and leave them folded outside the door. He started to protest that I didn’t have to do all this, but I arched my left eyebrow at him, and he had the good sense to look like a grateful little boy.
Then I went to my apartment, took a quick warm shower (I’d have preferred a hot, long one—but the water heater for the apartments can only handle so much simultaneous use, and I figured Chuck had earned a long, hot shower), and then changed out of my own sopping clothes into dry ones.
I checked my answering machine for any messages. The only one was from Sally—she and the triplets had gotten a ride home with Bubbles, who was going to watch the boys while Sally worked on the theatre, and would I be so kind (this word was sarcastically spoken) as to return her truck, bringing it to the theatre?
No messages from Owen.
I went down to my laundromat. The gnaw of disappointment over not hearing from Owen was offset a little, by a self-portrait of Harry, with a washer in the background, signed with a flourish in blue marker by the artist himself. Harry had left it on my desk in the back room. The kid had possibilities.
My laundromat was in good shape, too, which made me extra glad I’d been thoughtful about using the stiff towels to protect Sally’s upholstery.