Applewhites at Wit's End

by Stephanie S. Tolan

  Jake sat on a log at the fire circle where E.D. had brought him when she’d materialized out of the darkness as he and Winston left the staff meeting. Lightning bugs were blinking on and off around them. She was sitting next to him, the messages she had found in her father’s wastebasket spread on the ground in the light from her flashlight. “I’m going to watch the mailbox and see who’s leaving these things. But it may be too late. Remember how upset Mrs. Montrose was when we rejected Priscilla? I’m pretty sure she’s behind this. Bet you anything she’s already reported us to the state.”

  Jake nodded. “It’s just the kind of thing that woman would do.” Winston whuffed at a firefly. “You think the state could shut Eureka! down?”

  “Looks like it! And if we get shut down, the families won’t have to pay for the rest of camp. We’ll lose Wit’s End! I keep thinking about that hovel in New Jersey.”

  “Your mother says she’s about to make a fortune writing a children’s book, and Zedediah’s working—”

  “It’s a lot more than the money now, though. Everybody’s gotten committed to Eureka! If the state shuts the camp down it will be a failure. A massive—public—failure! Do you have any idea what it would be like for the whole family to fail at something? All at once? Bad enough if one single person gets a negative review. You should have been here the time the Petunia Grantham mysteries were called ‘literary potato chips’ in the New York Times! Or when some stuffy art critic said Uncle Archie’s Furniture of the Absurd was not only absurd but ‘ill-conceived and badly executed.’ Notice that I can quote these things! Ask any one of them if they’ve ever had bad press, and they’ll be able to repeat word for word every negative thing anybody ever said about them! Applewhites do not handle failure well. To have Eureka! shut down would be—would be—I’m not sure we’d ever recover.”

  Jake sighed. “I get it.”

  “The point is, What are we going to do?”

  Jake shrugged. “What can we do? And how come your father’s keeping all this a secret?”

  “That’s easy. Eureka! was his idea. If it fails, he’ll get all the blame. Uncle Archie and Grandpa will take him apart for not going to the state in the first place. At least it explains why he’s been so obsessed about stuff like mice and garbage. I was beginning to fear for his sanity.”

  “Does he know about the guy in the suit?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You should tell him. Maybe he could just call the department of whatever it is and ask what he needs to do to make everything legal.”

  “This is Randolph Applewhite we’re talking about. The director. Directors think they rule the world. My father doesn’t knuckle under. Rules are made to be broken. That’s practically a family slogan.”

  Somewhere in the woods an owl hooted—twice, then twice more. “In that case we need to take it to the whole family,” Jake said. “We did a theater game about the power of ensemble—where everybody wins or everybody loses. If it works for these kids, it’ll work for anybody. All for one and one for all!”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  It was 9:43 A.M. and E.D was crouched in the bushes between the house and the road, watching the mailbox. Almost always the mail was in their box by ten, and it wasn’t there yet. A seriously annoying sharp twig was sticking her in the back of the neck, and occasionally one of the big, black ants that were charging purposefully around among the leaves would get sidetracked and end up crawling up her arm or—worse—down her shirt. So far none of them had bitten her at least.

  She had peeked in on her father before she came outside. He’d been asleep, tangled in the sheet as if he’d been fighting to free himself from some dream monster. An alarm clock, an item seldom used in the Applewhite family by anybody except E.D., had been standing on his bedside table, close to his head. That was how he’d been getting up in time to be at the mailbox by about ten thirty—the crack of dawn in his world. She had crept in and turned off the alarm.

  As she was brushing away another ant, she heard an approaching vehicle. She peered between the leaves. It was the mail truck, coming fast down the empty road and angling toward their mailbox. It pulled to a stop with a screech of brakes, its hazard lights blinking. An arm reached out and opened the box. The arm withdrew into the truck, then reappeared with a batch of mail, flung it into the very back of the mailbox, and slammed the door shut. With a squeal of tires on hot pavement, the truck headed on down the road.

  E.D. waited. Nothing. Nothing. She watched the heat waves wrinkling the air above the empty road. An ant began crawling up her bare leg. She stomped her foot to dislodge it. A yellow jacket buzzed past her head. A crow called from the field across the road. If this was what it was like to be a detective on stakeout, Petunia Grantham could have it! Jake had a workshop this morning or she’d have taken him up on his offer to do the stakeout. She was glad it was all happening after Jake instead of before, she thought. It meant she had an ally. Now, instead of driving her crazy, his combination of creativity and good sense was a comfort.

  Finally, she heard the sound of a distant car coming from the direction the mail truck had gone. It was a black car. A plain black compact car.

  The car veered out of its lane and across the road, heading toward the mailbox directly into what would have been oncoming traffic, if there had been any, which, of course, there was not. As the car slowed, the window went down. A bare, hairy arm reached out, slipped an envelope into the mailbox, and disappeared again. The window went up as the car lurched forward, veered back into its own lane, and sped away.

  E.D. waited another long minute and then hurried to the mailbox. The envelope looked just like the others—RANDOLPH APPLEWHITE was spelled out in pasted-on letters. She ripped it open and pulled out the page inside.

  15A NCAC 18A.1012 RECREATIONAL WATERS

  A natural or artificial body of water may be approved by the Department for recreational purposes based upon the results of inspections, bacteriological examinations of the water, and sanitary surveys.

  She stuffed the page and envelope into her pocket and headed for the dance studio, where Jake would be preparing for his singing workshop.

  When she got there, Winston, who had been asleep on an old beach towel in the corner, came wagging over to greet her. She reached down to rub his ears. Jake was setting out the folding chairs for his workshop. “Another message came,” she told him.

  “Did you see who brought it?”

  “Only his arm. But it was the car you saw the first day of camp. Plain and black.” She gave him the sheet of paper and waited while he read it.

  “May be approved? So they could refuse to approve the pond for swimming.” Jake shook his head. “Do you suppose that guy took some water for testing?”

  “He’d have had to step in the muck to get close enough to collect a sample.”

  “He could’ve gone out on the dock to get it.”

  “I was on the dock when he showed up at the pond. He came from the woods on the other side. All he did was look at it for a while and take some notes. We should tell everybody tonight at the staff meeting.”

  Jake shook his head. “If we tell them all at once, they’ll gang up on your father.”

  Jake was right, of course.

  “And once they gang up, he’ll naturally have to fight back. Hard to get an ensemble going after that.”

  “So what do we do instead?”

  “Tell them one at a time. Ask everybody just to think about it for a while and not to talk to anybody else. In that harbor game everybody had to keep quiet. It keeps people from arguing, and that makes them have to think.”

  “I saw Aunt Lucille and Harley over by the woodshop as I was coming here,” E.D. said. “I think it would be good to tell her first.”

  “Okay. And I could tell Archie after my workshop. We’ll just tell them not to talk about it yet.”

  When E.D. got to the woodshop, Lucille and Harley were outside taking pictures of what looked like a huge tangle
of honeysuckle and wisteria vines stretched between two upright branches maybe four feet tall that were set into buckets of sand. The sweet smell of the honeysuckle blossoms filled the air. They didn’t notice E.D. at first.

  “Don’t focus too long or too hard,” Lucille was telling Harley. “Just keep clicking and changing your angle the tiniest bit each time. You never know what angle of light or what perspective will make the difference between a snapshot and a work of photographic art. The more images you get, the better your chances.”

  “But I want to know ahead of time exactly what I’m getting,” Harley said. “I want to control how it turns out… .”

  “I know. But you need to leave room for the magic,” Lucille said. “Craft is about control. Art requires magic.”

  “Excuse me,” E.D. said, “but can I talk to you for a minute, Aunt Lucille? In private?”

  Harley clicked his camera shutter, moved a little, and clicked again.

  “Sure,” Lucille said. “What do you think of Samantha’s sculpture? It’s her first project for Archie’s workshop. She calls it an Elf Net.”

  E.D. seldom understood Uncle Archie’s work, but the Elf Net was pretty. And interesting. She could almost imagine elves making it—to catch birds maybe, or unwary people tramping around in their world. “But won’t the honeysuckle blossoms die?”

  “That’s why Samantha wants me to take pictures of it now,” Harley said. “She thinks that way it can be two different pieces of art. One when the net’s alive and one when it’s just a skeleton.”

  “That ought to be right up your alley,” E.D. said.

  “The live one won’t last,” Lucille said, “but the pictures will. There will still be a three-dimensional sculpture after the vines die, but Harley’s work captures and keeps images of the original.”

  “Dead things don’t seem quite so dead,” Harley said, “when you’ve still got pictures of them.”

  “You keep working here,” Lucille told Harley. “Go on changing perspectives. I’ll just talk to E.D. for a minute or two.” E.D. and Lucille moved around to the other side of the woodshop. “What’s up?” Lucille asked.

  E.D. explained about the messages in the mailbox.

  “Just like Randolph to keep it a secret,” Lucille said. “Archie’ll never let him hear the last of this.”

  “That’s why Jake thinks it would be better for everybody just to think about it for a while before we get together—maybe there doesn’t have to be a fight. Dad doesn’t even know all of it.” E.D. told Lucille about the man in the suit.

  “You think he’s a state inspector?” Lucille asked.

  “What else? If we don’t pass inspection, they’ll close us down.”

  “There must be something we can do.”

  Harley’s voice startled both of them. “Distract and delay.”

  E.D. and Lucille turned. He had come around the woodshop and heard at least the last part of the conversation.

  “What do you mean?” Lucille asked him.

  “It’s the state you’re talking about, right?” Harley asked. “That means bureaucracy and red tape. Nothing ever works fast. If the guy’s an inspector, he has to finish the inspection and make his report before anybody can do anything. And it’s never just one person who can make a decision. One guy has to call another, and that guy has to get somebody else to sign something. It can take just about forever.”

  “How do you know this?” Lucille asked.

  Harley shrugged. “My parents deal with bureaucrats all the time when they’re setting up their concerts. Permits for this, permits for that. They say the best way to handle any problem you have with a bureaucracy is distraction and delay.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  “Are we going to do some solo work today, O Great Emperor of Singing?” David said as he came into the dance studio. “I don’t see how all this ‘sing-along’ stuff is worth my time. It’s not like I’m planning to join a chorus.”

  Jake turned from the table where the music system was set up. Q had come in behind David and was heading for a chair. “Q? You have any thoughts about that?”

  “Sure! One, harmony. Can’t learn harmony by singing alone all the time. Two, you ever been in a musical?”

  David sniffed. “Sure. We did Guys and Dolls at school last year.”

  “Then you’ve already sung with a chorus! Musicals are ensembles just like the rest of theater. You can’t just be like those dudes on television, showing off their style all the time.”

  David turned a chair around and straddled it. “Nothing wrong with the ‘dudes on television’! My vocal coach says—”

  Jake broke in. “We can do solos today if everybody wants to.”

  Samantha had come in and taken a seat. “I do a terrific ‘Over the Rainbow.’ Do we have the music for it?”

  Cinnamon stuck her head in the door. “Anybody know where Destiny is? He usually meets me at the dining tent, but he wasn’t there.”

  “Last I saw him was breakfast,” Q said.

  “He was with your sister after yoga,” David said.

  “She’s not here either!” Jake realized he ought to have noticed this a whole lot sooner. Ginger was always the first person to show up for his workshop. Most of the time she brought him a present of some kind. Or a snack for Winston.

  Jake picked up his walkie-talkie. “Anybody know where Destiny is? Or Ginger?”

  After a moment Cordelia responded. “Not in Dogwood Cottage.”

  “Not in the art studio,” Hal answered.

  “They’re not by the woodshop, either,” E.D. reported.

  “Better send a search party,” Archie said through a crackle of static.

  Jake had just begun to consider whether he should go ahead with the workshop and let the rest of the staff look for Ginger and Destiny when he heard Destiny’s voice in the distance. He was singing a song he’d learned at the last workshop when they were doing the music from West Side Story. After a moment Ginger’s voice joined in, both of them singing at the top of their lungs about how pretty they felt as they came steadily closer.

  “Ta-dah!” Ginger said as she came bursting in through the door. In one hand she carried her canvas bag. In the other she held Lucille’s hair clippers, which she waved triumphantly in the air. Both sides of her head were shaved, a little patchily, all the way to the scalp. Down the center of her skull ran a raggedy-looking strip of carroty frizz.

  Destiny followed her in and Jake groaned. Now, for sure, he thought, Sybil was going to kill him. All that was left of Destiny’s thick white-blond hair was a narrow stripe of buzz cut. “My Mohawk gotted a little short,” he said. “Ginger’s hand slipped. But she says it’s okay cuz it’ll grow right back.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The good thing about Destiny and Ginger having new and grotesquely bad haircuts, E.D. thought, was that it distracted her family from the power of the government of North Carolina to swoop in and destroy their lives. Everybody knew about it now, but as far as she knew, nobody had started in on her father yet.

  She had come into the camp office thinking of going online to see if she could check whether the warning messages were official state regulations or counterfeits. It had come to her suddenly that Mrs. Montrose might have invented the whole thing just to freak out the man who had traumatized her daughter. There might be no such department and no such rules. But Harley was already at the computer when she came in, uploading the photographs from his camera. Even now they were flashing on the screen for a split second, one after another.

  She would figure out tomorrow’s schedule instead and get online later. She settled at the desk and spread copies of the previous day’s schedules out so that she could see who had done which Community Service chores. She could just imagine the cry that would go up if she accidentally assigned anyone to bathroom cleaning two days in a row. It was bad enough when Q noticed that David had not yet had to clean bathrooms a single time. Nobody had bought her protest that it had been
an oversight. She would give David the job tomorrow and prove that she hadn’t been playing favorites.

  “No!” Harley said now from the computer. “No!”

  “What?” she asked.

  “There’s something wrong with this computer.”

  “It’s old!” she said. She was used to the machine’s sudden fits and sulks. She got up and went over to see if there was anything she could do. “Is the cursor being slow again?”

  The photo on the screen was one Harley must have taken in the theater workshop she’d missed. The campers were scattered around the stage in various awkward poses.

  “Look! Just look! Right above their heads.”

  E.D. looked more closely. In the air above the campers’ heads she could see four perfectly circular splotches of different sizes and slightly different colors. Like pale balls of colored light. “What are those?” she asked.

  “I don’t know what they are. I’ve never seen anything like them. There must be something wrong with the computer.”

  She touched one on the screen. Nothing.

  “They aren’t on the monitor,” Harley said, “they’re in the picture!”

  “Maybe they’re waterdrops. Could some water have gotten into your camera somehow? Or onto the lens?”

  “No way.”

  “What happens if you zoom in on them?”

  Harley zoomed in on the largest splotch. There was a kind of pattern in the middle of it, like one of Aunt Lucille’s meditation mandalas. It had a bluish fringe around the edge that reminded E.D. of the way children draw points around the sun to show that it’s shining. Whatever this was, it was a part of the photo, all right. The more he zoomed in, the fuzzier and more pixilated it got, but there was no way to tell what it was. He zoomed in on the others, one at a time. The two smaller ones were just plain white and hazy, with no patterns in the middle; both of the larger ones—a pinkish one and one with a tinge of gold—had the mandalas and the bluish fringe. They were quite pretty really.