Applewhites at Wit's End

by Stephanie S. Tolan

  “Why didn’t you tell anybody?”

  “What’s to tell?”

  “Was he wearing a suit and tie?”

  “I didn’t get a look at the driver. I barely saw the car before it took off.”

  E.D. shook her head. “I don’t like it. Something’s going on, and I want to know what. A guy in a suit skulking around with a clipboard, a car that takes off the moment somebody sees it, and the strange way Dad’s been acting.”

  “What do you mean strange?”

  “Like how he reacted to the way Q cut the grass.”

  Jake laughed. “That was pretty funny. Q after Q after Q all over the place. Kind of like crop circles!”

  “Yeah, but that’s exactly the kind of stunt Dad should have admired. The kind of thing he might have done himself when he was a kid. Instead, he hollered and fussed and made Q cut all the rest so it would look like a plain, ordinary lawn. When did Dad ever care about a lawn? And another thing: he’s started going out to the mailbox to collect the mail—getting up way before noon to do it.”

  That, Jake thought, was strange. “Maybe he’s expecting a check and wants to be sure nobody else gets it.” He stretched and climbed down off his boulder. “Don’t tell anybody about my hiding place, okay?”

  E.D. looked around her. “Tell anybody? I couldn’t find it again if I tried.”

  “We should go back. It’s nearly lunchtime.” Jake watched E.D. start back the way she’d come. “Wrong way,” he said. He grinned. Could be, he thought, he’d found a crack in E.D.’s organized perfection.

  “Right!” she said. “Of course.”

  Jake led the way back toward the Lodge. Apparently he hadn’t lost his sanctuary.

  That night Jake sat in the dark barn wondering where E.D. was. She’d never missed a theater workshop before. Maybe she’d finally decided David wasn’t worth the humiliation of getting up onstage and going through a scene like some kind of robot. Jake thought it was strange that somebody who could come up with a completely bogus story in two seconds on the phone—like she’d done with Mrs. Montrose when she told her the camp was full—could be so incredibly stiff and awkward onstage speaking memorized lines. It was good that she didn’t know the kinds of things David said about her behind her back. If he ever said them to her, Jake intended to deck him.

  The stage lights and the houselights had been turned off in the barn. Outside, the sun had fallen below the tree line, but it would still be light for a while yet. Inside, it was hard to make out where Randolph Applewhite was sitting, a slightly darker shadow among the shadows of the rows of empty theater seats.

  Randolph’s voice came now from the darkness in front of them. “Tonight we’re going to play a theater game called Harbor. Half of you will be on one side of the stage and half on the other. I’ve placed chairs in a line stage left and chairs in a line stage right. Those chairs are docks, and the stage is the harbor. You’ll be boats heading from a dock on one side of the harbor to a dock on the other side. The object is to get safely to your new dock without sinking anyone else or getting sunk.”

  “How will we keep from crashing into each other?” Harley asked.

  “That’s the whole point of the game. Each of you will decide what sort of boat you are and what sort of noise that boat would make. As you cross the harbor, you’ll make your sound so that the other boats will know where you are, and at the same time you have to listen for everybody else.”

  “Who wins?” David asked.

  “Trust him to ask,” Q whispered to Jake.

  “Nobody wins,” Randolph said. “This is theater, not sports. Either you all win or you all lose. The successful working of a harbor requires that boats move around without running into one another. The whole point is to get safely to an empty dock on the other side of the harbor. If there’s a collision the game starts over again. But—listen up; this is important!—no matter how often you have to start over, there is to be no talking. No talking during a round, no talking in between. No sounds except the boats. Understood?”

  “Understood,” they all answered.

  “Okay then. Everybody up. No more talking as of now.”

  Jake scrambled to his feet as everybody else was doing, cracking elbows with Q in the process.

  Randolph’s voice came from the theater seats. It had grown even darker now so that it was no longer possible to see him at all. “Pick a side, find a chair, and sit down. Be thinking about the kind of boat you want to be and what sound it would make. When I say Go, the game will begin.”

  Jake began moving like a sleepwalker, his hands in front of him, aware of the sounds of movement around him: of chairs scraping on the stage floor, of grunts and yelps as people bumped into one another. Someone brushed past his hands, but he managed not to run into anyone, and he found a chair by knocking into it. He sat.

  “Go!” came the command. Jake stayed sitting for a moment as the others rose around him, beginning to make their boat sounds, before he decided to be a sailboat, making a whispery, blowing sound between his lips meant to be the sound of his hull slipping smoothly through the water. He rose and began moving slowly, straining to see the movement of the others he could feel and hear around him. He was surprised how unsettling it was not to be able to rely on his eyes. And how hard it was to make sense of all the boat noises. Next to him was a puttering engine sound, ahead of him on the other side of the stage a loud foghorn sound of a very large ship. That would be Q. “Splish, splish, splish” came from his left—a rowboat maybe? “Vroooooommm! Vroooooommm!” ahead and to the right. David. And then, inevitably, Jake thought, the sound of people colliding. Groans rose from all sides of the stage.

  “End of round one,” Randolph called.

  “Don’t be so loud,” someone said. “I can’t hear anybody else.”

  “Not my fault—”

  “No talking! Take your places again.” A pale light glowed from the seats as Randolph switched on a flashlight briefly. “Not great. That was only forty-five seconds. You’ve been used to working as individuals. But plays are not just assemblies of individuals. This game is designed to create an ensemble. I assume you all know what that means. Theater is a collaborative art. You need to rely on yourselves, of course, but also on one another. When we begin again, remember to listen to the others and assert yourself at the same time. Listen. Share the space. Cooperate. And remember the goal.”

  The second round lasted very little longer than the first. Jake had been sunk by Vroooooommm!, who had been too loud and moving too fast to hear the sound Jake was making or even the Putt, putt, putt Jake had been trying to avoid. David had been making so much noise, he must have been expecting everyone just to get out of his way.

  In the third round everyone was temporarily blinded by a sudden flash of light. “Everybody freeze!” Randolph shouted. He wouldn’t have needed to tell them, Jake thought. They were all dead in the water. Randolph came to the stage with his flashlight and took Harley’s camera from him.

  “I needed to see where I was!” Harley said. “I was afraid I’d fall off the stage.”

  “So change docks with somebody at the back. Who’s willing to come to the front?” In the light of the flashlight, Harley and Samantha changed places, and they began again.

  Not being able to talk through what had happened in each round, everyone had to figure out for themselves how to do it better. “Can we change what boats we are?” Jake risked asking when he’d been hit again and everyone was stopped. His whispery sound was apparently too hard to hear among all the other boats.

  “Do you get to change roles halfway through a play?” Randolph asked.

  It took an unbelievable fourteen rounds before they finally found their way to the docks on the opposite sides of the stage without any collisions. Everybody cheered, and Randolph turned the lights back on, which blinded them all over again.

  “Remember this!” Randolph said. “Ensemble! And just for the heck of it, see if you can get back to your bunks now wi
thout your flashlights.”

  “Will we be doing scenes again tomorrow?” David asked.

  “Tomorrow we work with improvisation.”

  As the campers headed out of the barn, the spotlights that illuminated the barn’s parking area were turned out. Jake was always surprised at how dark night in the country was. The light in the windows of the Lodge did little more than show the direction they needed to go. One by one the boat sounds started up around him, though it wasn’t really hard to see each other. David’s Vroooooommm! and Q’s foghorn were in front of Jake, the two boys crashing into each other as they went. Both boats, Jake thought, should be at the bottom of the harbor by now. A moment later Ginger splish, splished into him.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  E.D. hurried down the dark hallway, her spiral notebook clutched to her chest, and stood for a moment at the closed door of her parents’ bedroom. Before Eureka! started they had always left the door open, but her mother insisted on keeping all the bedroom doors closed now in case any campers happened to go upstairs. She didn’t want the campers to know that nobody (except E.D. of course) ever made their bed in the Applewhite household. E.D. took a deep breath. With the door closed like this, going into her parents’ room felt like spying. You are spying, she reminded herself. That’s the whole point. She wanted to find out what was going on with her father. In the Petunia Grantham mysteries, Petunia was always finding critical information by digging through people’s trash. There had been nothing useful anywhere else. This was E.D.’s last resort.

  She opened the door and slipped inside, shutting it quickly behind her. Her father was in the barn doing the theater workshop. It was the counselors’ night off (Cordelia had insisted they get one a week), so she had dragged Hal to town to see a movie. Everybody else was over at Zedediah’s watching television. E.D. turned on the overhead light.

  There was one wastebasket in her parents’ room, and it was nearly full. Perfect. Her father’s hysteria about housekeeping had apparently not carried over to his own bedroom. She upended the contents onto the rug. There were plenty of crumpled tissues, a sock with a hole in the toe, some catalogs that should have been put in the recycle box, and several crumpled envelopes and balled-up sheets of white paper. Petunia Grantham strikes again! she thought. Gingerly, she fished these out of the pile.

  None of the envelopes had been mailed. There were no stamps, no return addresses, not even the address of Wit’s End. On each envelope was the name Randolph Applewhite, spelled out in letters that had been cut from magazines or newspapers and pasted in place, like ransom notes from a kidnapper. It gave the envelopes a threatening air.

  She smoothed out one and slipped it into her spiral notebook. The others she put back with the rest of the trash. Then she picked up one of the balled-up sheets of paper and carefully straightened it out. It had been printed on what looked like an ink-jet printer. There was not much on it, but what there was sent a shiver up her spine.

  15A NCAC 18A.1004 PERMITS

  No person shall operate a summer camp within the State of North Carolina who does not possess a valid permit from the Department.

  It had to have been copied from an official document. Department of what? She thought back to the months of preparation for Eureka!, trying to remember whether anyone had ever mentioned having to have a permit or having to deal with the state.

  Hurriedly, she opened another crumpled sheet.

  15A NCAC 18A.1001 DEFINITIONS

  “Summer Camp” includes those camp establishments which provide food or lodging accommodations for groups of children or adults engaged in organized recreational or educational programs.

  She wondered how many children constituted a group.

  “Department” shall mean the Secretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources or his authorized representative. “Sanitarian” shall mean a person authorized to represent the Department on the local or state level in making inspections pursuant to state laws and regulations.

  State laws and regulations. What kinds of laws and regulations? She pulled open another wad of paper.

  15A NCAC 18A.1005 PUBLIC DISPLAY OF GRADE CARD

  Inspections of summer camps shall be made in accordance with this Section at least once during each season’s operation. Upon completion of an inspection, the sanitarian shall remove the existing grade card, issue a grade card, and post the new grade card in a conspicuous place where it may be readily observed by the public upon entering the facility.

  There was no official grade card posted where it could be observed by the public—or anywhere else. She spread the last page out on top of the others.

  15A NCAC 18A.1008 GRADING

  The sanitation grading of all summer camps shall be based on a system of scoring wherein all summer camps receiving a score of at least 90 percent shall be awarded Grade A; all summer camps receiving a score of at least 80 percent and less than 90 percent shall be awarded Grade B; all summer camps receiving a score of at least 70 percent and less than 80 percent shall be awarded Grade C; and no summer camp receiving a score of less than 70 percent, or Grade C, shall operate.

  Official language was stupidly repetitious and obvious, E.D. thought. Were they writing for five-year-olds? But then she looked again at the last part. Without a grade of at least C, no summer camp shall operate. Did that mean the state could shut them down?

  Were these messages warnings or threats? Threats. Why else the cut-and-pasted letters on the envelope? And why was her father keeping these messages a secret? He was engaging in a classic cover-up, E.D. thought with a sinking feeling in her stomach. She had once done a research paper on political cover-ups. She knew where they led. Nowhere good.

  She also knew it was illegal to put anything other than actual mail into somebody’s mailbox. So whoever was doing it must be waiting till after the mail had been delivered. Who could it be?

  E.D. flashed, suddenly, on the first morning of camp. The phone call from Mrs. Montrose about the rejection of Priscilla. “Tell your father he hasn’t heard the last of this.” These messages were exactly the sort of thing Mrs. Montrose would do. But was she just threatening, or had she actually turned them in to the state?

  The man in the suit. The plain black car Jake had seen. Mrs. Montrose must have turned them in. They were being watched by “the department”!

  E.D. folded the smoothed-out pages and put them in her spiral notebook. She gathered up the rest of the trash and put it back in the wastebasket. She knew something nobody else except her father knew. Something he didn’t want the rest of the family to know. The question was, What should she do about it?

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Staff meetings had gotten very short and less full of complaint. Except for Randolph. He was on a rampage now about food storage, going on and on about whether eggs and milk were being kept at sufficiently low temperatures to prevent spoilage. And whether the lunch buffet allowed tuna or chicken or egg salad to be at room temperature long enough to risk salmonella or botulism.

  “Has any one of us ever gotten salmonella or botulism?” Lucille asked when Randolph took a breath. She didn’t need to wait for an answer. “Well, there you are. We are actually feeding the campers considerably better and more carefully than we have ever fed the family!”

  “Give us a peanut!” Paulie screamed from his perch, then burst into hysterical laughter.

  It really was uncanny, Jake thought, how often Paulie managed to connect with what was being said.

  “Let’s get on with it,” Zedediah said. “Anybody have anything important to report?”

  Hal nodded. “Samantha’s planning to do her mural on the side of the barn! The barn needs painting anyway. She wants to do all nature images—with maybe a few elves or fairies.”

  “And we have our first interworkshop cross-fertilization,” Lucille said. “Harley’s started taking pictures of things that aren’t dead: leaves, flowers, the pond. As long as they don’t move. He’s taking pictures to give
Samantha some ideas. He’ll make a photomontage, and she’ll paint a version of it on the side of the barn. She wants it to be like a gigantic patchwork quilt, end-to-end and ground-to-roof.”

  Randolph began muttering about the danger of allowing a camper on a ladder.

  “We’re putting up a scaffold,” Archie said.

  “I have news as well!” Sybil said. She looked around the room, beaming with satisfaction. “I have begun a new book.”

  “Raising Petunia Grantham from the dead, are you?” Archie asked.

  “Not quite. I’ve begun writing a children’s book. The heroine is Petunia Possum.”

  “Isn’t that the name of Cinnamon’s picture book?” Randolph asked. “Do you mean you’re plagiarizing a camper?”

  “It isn’t plagiarism. It’s cross-fertilization. I thought about what Zedediah said about working together. So Cinnamon and I have created a character. She’s putting the character into a picture book with illustrations by Destiny; I’m putting her into a mystery book for older children. Cinnamon’s been hanging around the goat pen to get to know Wolfie. He’s going to be her villain.”

  “Isn’t it beneath you to write a children’s book?” Randolph said.

  “I’ve been doing research. The main difference between literature for children and literature for adults is the age—or in this case the species—of the protagonist. With a bit of luck—you know perfectly well I’ve always had uncommonly good luck—children’s books can make a fortune. Consider Harry Potter. An absolute fortune!”

  At that moment Hal’s walkie-talkie chirped. “Mayday, Mayday,” E.D.’s voice called. “Q and David are throwing each others’ clothes out the window of the cottage.”

  Hal went pale. “I can’t,” he said. “I can barely deal with them when they aren’t fighting.”

  “I’ll go,” Zedediah said, holding his hand out for Hal’s walkie-talkie. “On my way,” he said into it. He turned back at the door. “Meeting’s over anyway, right?”

  Randolph nodded abstractedly. “A fortune,” he muttered as everyone else in the room stood up to leave. “An absolute fortune… .”