Applewhites at Wit's End

by Stephanie S. Tolan

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Two can play at this game, Jake thought as he led the still-blustering Thomas Timmons, or whatever his name really was, on as roundabout a route as he could manage past the far side of the Lodge toward the boys’ and girls’ cottages. He began explaining Eureka! as if he really believed the man was an inspector from the state.

  “This used to be a motor lodge,” he told him, “so the campers stay in self-contained cottages. Each one houses three campers and a counselor and has a full kitchen and a full bath. Even though the cottages aren’t air-conditioned, we like to think Eureka! provides exceptionally luxurious accommodations.”

  “The department doesn’t care about luxury,” the man said, scratching the back of his neck with one hand. His frown got even more ferocious. “What we care about is the health and well-being of the campers. What we care about is sanitation. Sanitation and safety!”

  Jake hoped this guy’s intimidating attitude was all an act. If the plan they’d figured out—the plan he hoped E.D. was getting organized right now—was going to work, the man pretty much had to be a good guy at heart.

  When they’d gathered to figure out what to do, David had suggested replacing distraction and delay with “capture and torture.”

  Q had accused him of watching too much television, but Cinnamon pointed out that the capture part was right. “We need to catch him instead of chasing him off. But how?”

  Destiny had started jumping up and down. “I know how, I know how! We can dig a Heffalump trap. Like Pooh and Piglet. We can dig a pit where he’ll fall in and he won’t be able to get out.”

  Everyone had laughed at this at first. But it was Destiny’s Heffalump trap that finally led them to their plan. Of course, they had thought the man would sneak into Wit’s End the way he had before. They hadn’t expected him to make a frontal assault. But now that he had, they would just have to make the best of it. Creativity and flexibility, Jake thought. Like Zedediah said. Jake figured his job was to stall for time and give the man a false sense of confidence. Thomas Timmons needed to believe they were buying his act.

  The two of them had arrived at the boys’ cottage now, and Jake led the man onto the porch. “You’ll be interested in the Community Service aspect of the Eureka! program. We’ve involved every person at the camp, staff and campers alike, in making sure that everything is kept clean and in order.” With that he opened the door so that the man could go inside. It’s a good thing this isn’t real! Jake thought. Nothing about what greeted them as they entered was clean and in order.

  Because Hal needed a room of his own, Harley had been sleeping on a foldout couch in the living room. Not only was the couch-bed not made, but the tangle of bedclothes was strewn with pages of music, some of it printed, some handwritten, and Archie’s guitar lay on top of it all. The guitar case was open on the kitchen table, and empty soda bottles and glasses littered the counter. The mess was clearly not Harley’s alone. There were clothes, dirty socks, smelly sneakers, and wet towels strewn on the floor, along with a pair of men’s ballet slippers and one tap shoe. A flowerpot filled with sand supported a dead branch festooned with tangles of equally dead honeysuckle where someone had been practicing weaving Elf Nets.

  Thomas Timmons whipped out his pen and began making marks on the sheets of paper clipped to his board, clicking his tongue and shaking his head. Jake bit his lip to keep from laughing and led the way down the hall to Hal’s room, and David and Q’s, both of which made the living room look neat by comparison. He had decided to save the bathroom for last.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  When E.D., Winston, and Destiny approached the parking area in the shadow of the barn, the barefoot campers and Cordelia were in a semicircle around Lucille doing tree pose. Lucille, Cordelia, and Samantha were each standing perfectly balanced on one leg, the other foot flat against the inside of the knee and their hands entwined above their heads, gazing raptly skyward. Nobody else had managed to look up. Most of them were teetering on one leg and waving their arms and hands in the air to try to maintain balance.

  “Aunt Lucille, Aunt Lucille!” E.D. shouted. It was as if the sound knocked them all over. Even Lucille tipped sideways and stepped out of the pose. “There’s a state inspector demanding to see the kitchen!”

  “What? An inspector? Now? Good heavens, not the kitchen!”

  “Jake took him off to the bunks first, but Mom needs help!”

  “Cordelia!” Lucille said, pushing her feet into her flip-flops and snatching up her water bottle. “Can you finish the yoga session? Just do one sun salutation, I think.” She was off even before Cordelia could answer, running toward the Lodge.

  “This is it,” E.D. told the others when she was sure her aunt was out of earshot. “He drove right up to the Lodge and identified himself as the state inspector. Has a fake ID and everything. Mom’s freaking, Dad’s furious. They have no idea, of course, that he isn’t what he says he is. Jake’s stalling him—letting him do his inspector act at the bunks. We have time to get ready, but we have to hurry. Have you got your camera, Harley?”

  Harley grabbed it and held it up.

  “Good. Destiny? Do you remember what you’re supposed to do?”

  “I’m the honeypot!” Destiny said. “For the bottom of the pit. ’Cept I gotta yell and yell.”

  “Where’s your life jacket?”

  “We left it by the dock,” Ginger said, “so it would be there when we needed it.”

  “I’ll go get Wolfie,” Cinnamon said.

  “Be sure to keep him out of sight—and leave him on his rope till we see if we need him. Destiny could be enough.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. We don’t want to chase the guy away again.”

  E.D. checked her watch. “I don’t know how long it’ll take for him to inspect the cottages… .”

  “If Dogwood’s as bad as ours, it’ll take a while,” Q said.

  “It’s pretty bad,” Cordelia said. “I’ll run over and lead him through it—pretend I’m afraid of what he’s going to report. This is going to be fun.”

  “There are still mouse turds in our room,” Ginger said. “Act as if you’re trying to hide them so he’ll be sure to notice.”

  As Cordelia started away, E.D. called to her. “Tell Jake to beep my walkie-talkie when you’re done at the cottages. You can say you’ll take the guy to the pond before he goes back to inspect the kitchen. I’ll meet you all on your way there.”

  “Ten-four!”

  “Everybody remember what you’re supposed to do?” E.D. asked.

  “Gee, no, we’re all idiots,” David said.

  That, E.D. thought, was enough. Hormones or no hormones, she was finished with David! What had she ever seen in him? “Let’s go!”

  “I gots to get my swimming suit!” Destiny said.

  “No time for that. You can go in your pajamas,” E.D. told him.

  “Head ’em up, move ’em out,” Q shouted.

  “All for one and one for all,” Harley called as they started toward the pond.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Once Cordelia arrived it got harder and harder for Jake to keep a straight face. She came tearing up the path and stood in front of the door of Dogwood Cottage with her arms folded across her chest. “You can’t come in here,” she told the man. “We’re not ready.”

  “That is the point of an unannounced inspection,” the man said. His voice, Jake thought, had softened suddenly. Cordelia, in her yoga outfit, her hair curling damply around her face, was looking particularly gorgeous. “We need to see conditions as they really are, not as they’ve been fixed up to impress us.”

  Cordelia, with a great show of reluctance, moved aside and let him open the door.

  Jake hadn’t been inside the girls’ cottage since the first night of camp. Except that here it was Cordelia who slept on the foldout couch, the scene inside was much more like the boys’ cottage than he would have guessed. If anything, it was worse, mostly because the girls
seemed to have a lot more clothes. Blue and green shirts and shorts, sneakers and sandals, jeans and T-shirts and bathing suits were draped on furniture and lay in piles on the floor, along with a surprising number of Cordelia’s skirts and blouses. In the midst of the clothes were Samantha’s books—piled, strewn, and stacked everywhere.

  “Normally, it’s much neater than this,” Cordelia said, blushing slightly as she slipped some underwear under a blouse.

  Thomas Timmons nodded. He seemed to be paying as much attention to Cordelia as to the mess he was inspecting. Alternating between jotting notes on the pages of his clipboard and using his pen to scratch his neck, he muttered “dreadful,” “appalling,” and “disgusting” under his breath. As he started down the hall, Cordelia whispered to Jake E.D.’s message about letting her know when they were finished here.

  In the twins’ room, Cordelia kept putting herself between Thomas Timmons and what he was trying to inspect as if she wanted to keep him from seeing something. Finally, he actually put out a hand and moved her, surprisingly gently, out of the way.

  “Vermin!” he said triumphantly, pointing at the scattering of mouse droppings all along the baseboards and the small pile in the corner. “This cabin is infested with mice!”

  “We’re planning to get a cat!” Cordelia said, and Jake had to clamp a hand over his mouth and leave the room entirely.

  When the man had taken more notes in the bathroom, which wasn’t so much dirty, Jake thought, as incredibly cluttered with tubes and bottles and jars and various zippered bags, combs, and brushes covering every square inch of horizontal surface, they went out onto the porch and Jake pressed the key on his walkie-talkie that would let E.D. know they were coming. Cordelia asked what else the man needed to inspect.

  “Everything, of course!” he said. “Except, perhaps the woods. I don’t need to go hiking all over the whole sixteen acres.”

  “Shall we take you to see the goat pen?” she asked innocently.

  “I think not,” he said quickly. He made a show of flipping through the forms on his clipboard. “There is nothing in here about goat facilities.”

  “Okay, then,” Cordelia said, starting down the path toward the pond. “We might as well take you to the pond. It’s where we swim. Quite nice. Lovely clear water.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” the man said, following closely behind her.

  “After that we’ll take you back to the Lodge so you can inspect the kitchen,” Jake said, trailing along after them. “The campers should be gathering in the dining tent very soon for breakfast. This is a creativity camp. Tell him about our workshops, Cordelia. And the end-of-camp show we’re planning.”

  “End-of-camp show? I hope you haven’t spent a lot of energy on that!” the man said. “It’s highly likely, given what I’ve seen so far, that the department will decide to close this camp down.”

  Cordelia yelped. “Close it down? Why? When? How?”

  As the man talked, citing violation after violation, Cordelia led him on toward the pond until E.D. came hurtling up the path and crashed into them. She was out of breath, her face red and terrified.

  “Oh, thank God. Come quick!” she yelled. “Destiny’s fallen into the pond, and something’s got him! I think it’s a snapping turtle! The biggest one I’ve ever seen.” She looked up at Thomas Timmons, clearly distraught. “Oh, please, please come and help us save my little brother! Snapping turtles can bite through a grown man’s leg. What’ll it do to a five-year-old? I tried to reach him, but I couldn’t! Maybe you can! But hurry! Oh, please! Hurry, hurry, hurry!”

  She turned around and tore off down the path. The man ran after her, and Jake and Cordelia closed in behind. No doubt about it, Jake thought, E.D. was really good at improvisation! He almost believed her himself.

  As they got closer to the pond, they could hear Destiny shrieking at the top of his lungs. “Oww! Owwwww! It gots my foot. It hurts! Help, help, help! Somebody help! Oooowwww!”

  Winston was standing belly-deep in the pond, barking.

  Ginger and Samantha were running back and forth along the edge of the pond screaming about the monster that had hold of Destiny. “It’s huge!”

  “Even with his life jacket, it could pull him under!”

  “He’ll drown!”

  “Or maybe bleed to death!”

  “Oh, help, help, help!”

  Out just a little way beyond the end of the dock, Destiny was splashing frantically and continuing to yell.

  E.D. ran out to the end of the dock, crouched down, and reached toward Destiny. “You need to get closer,” she shouted to him.

  “I can’t! Oooowwww! He gots me. I can’t!”

  Thomas Timmons threw down his clipboard, ran onto the dock, and moved E.D. out of his way. Then he knelt and stretched one arm toward Destiny, who went on screaming and splashing, still well out of reach. E.D. scuttled back off the dock as David and Q came running from the woods with the dock ropes they’d untied from the trees. Jake snatched away the ramp that led onto the dock while Cordelia, E.D., and the other two girls began shoving it out into the water. Harley came from the woods with his camera and started clicking one picture after another.

  At the front of the dock Thomas Timmons, still focused entirely on the screaming and splashing in front of him, had taken off his suit jacket and was waving it at Destiny. “Here, here! Try to grab on to my jacket. If you can get it, I can pull you over.”

  As the dock floated steadily toward him, Destiny, still yelling and splashing, managed to paddle steadily backward. The others had stopped pushing now, but Jake and Cordelia, up to their knees in muck, gave one last tremendous shove. Thomas Timmons, having finally reached Destiny’s hand, dropped his suit jacket on the dock behind him and pulled Destiny around to the ladder as the dock floated completely away from the shore.

  Destiny stopped yelling and climbed the ladder as the man got to his feet. “Thanks, oh thanks! The monster thingie letted me go!” he said. Then he pointed back toward the edge of the pond. “But we can’t get back to the land anymore.”

  It wasn’t until then that Thomas Timmons discovered he’d been caught in a Heffalump trap.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Getting the man out of the Heffalump trap turned out to be considerably more difficult than getting him into it. As the dock floated away, it had dragged the ropes into the water, where they’d sunk immediately muck-ward, so there was no way to pull it back in. Destiny, not the least bit bothered by muck, jumped off the dock and paddled his way back till he could stand up and slog his way to solid ground, where a dripping Winston met him, wagging with relief, and shook pond water all over him.

  “My idea worked! Did you see how good it worked?” Destiny burbled to E.D. as he unbuckled his muddy life jacket. “I was a very good honeypot. Don’t you think I was a good honeypot?”

  The man called out that he had no intention of ruining his suit by swimming to shore. So Cordelia hurried off to find Archie and Zedediah, who brought down a coil of rope. Jake swam one end of it out to the dock, and the others pulled it back in.

  The impostor, still pretending to be an agent of the state, announced as he stepped off the dock onto theshore that the state could shut them down immediately on the basis of the pond alone. But when he noticed Harley taking pictures, he went suddenly silent and allowed himself to be escorted back to the dining tent, glancing over his shoulder every few steps at Winston, who was trotting along behind him, alternately growling and whuffling all the way. Sybil, Lucille, and Randolph met the procession, and Paulie, who’d been moved out of the kitchen and into the tent, greeted them all with his usual cascade of curses and then demanded a peanut.

  It wasn’t until Lucille and Sybil had seated him at a picnic table and Harley announced he was going to the office to upload the photographs he’d taken of the “rescue” at the pond that Thomas Timmons broke down and admitted that he was neither Thomas Timmons nor an agent of the state.

  Randolph threaten
ed to call the police on the spot.

  “No one’s had breakfast yet,” Sybil protested. “It’s never good to make important decisions on an empty stomach!”

  “There’s no decision to be made!” Randolph said. “This person has perpetrated a fraud! I guarantee you there’s a law about impersonating a government employee and terrorizing innocent citizens! He is a criminal, and it’s our duty to turn him over to the authorities!”

  “He’s not going anywhere, Randolph,” Zedediah said. “Breakfast first, authorities later. I for one would like to hear the young man’s story before we send him off to jail.”

  Lucille smiled beatifically. “Think of it this way, Randolph. Terror can be an excellent motivator. Just go inside and look at the kitchen. It’s absolutely sparkling. I don’t think the refrigerator has ever been so clean!”

  “And now we know why,” Sybil added. “Cleaning a refrigerator is an appalling job!”

  So it was decided that everyone who needed to would shower and change and gather back in the dining tent for breakfast, while Lucille and Harley printed out the pictures Harley had taken—pictures, Randolph reminded the impostor, that would serve as evidence of fraud in a court of law.

  When breakfast was over, the interrogation of the prisoner began.

  “My name is Jonathon Sandler,” he said, surrendering his fake ID badge. “I live in Traybridge. I’m an actor.”

  “An actor?” Randolph scoffed. “There’s no work for an actor in Traybridge!”

  “You’re telling me! That’s why I went to New York right out of college. I tried my luck there for three years and only managed to get two roles in all that time—both of them off-off-Broadway. No money. I survived as a bookkeeping temp.”

  Zedediah, who had been sitting next to Destiny watching him draw possums on a sketch pad, looked up. “Were you any good at it?”

  “I got a couple of pretty good reviews—”