Kepler’s Dream
Page 1
JULIET BELL
G. P. PuTnam’S SONS
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Juliet Bell. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.
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Published simultaneously in Canada. Printed in the United States of America.
Design by Annie Ericsson. Text set in Kepler Std.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bell, Juliet. Kepler’s Dream / Juliet Bell. p. cm.
Summary: While her mother undergoes radical cancer treatment, eleven-year-old Ella stays with her father’s mother in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she learns about grammar and family history, and helps investigate the theft of an extremely rare book from her grandmother’s library.
[1. Books and reading—Fiction. 2. Grandmothers—Fiction. 3. Swindlers and swindling—Fiction. 4. Family life—New Mexico—Fiction. 5. Cancer—Fiction. 6. Kepler, Johannes, 1571–1630. Somnium—Fiction. 7. Albuquerque (N.M.)—Fiction. 8. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.B82432Kep 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2011024136
ISBN: 978-1-101-57207-8
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
for Samuel and Romilly
and for Henry
1. Star Light, Star Bright
2. Sunny Skies
3. The Good Grammar Correctional Facility
4. The Librerery
5. The Circle C
6. Midnight Party
7. The Aguilar and Mackenzie Agency
8. Abercrombie and Snitch
9. Casa de Estrellas
10. Big River
11. The Plan
12. Dream of the Moon
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
ONE
IT WaS THe mIDDLe OF THe nIGHT, anD THaT’S nOT a TIme when you want to be hearing strange noises. I don’t care how brave you are. No one wants to be restless and almost-asleep, then rustled awake by a thudding overhead and the feeling that someone is trying to get into the room.
There was a tapping at the door. A whisper I could hardly hear.
“Ella!”
Someone was calling my name.
I sat up in the darkness. It was always so dark at my grandmother’s. I don’t know what they do to the nights in Albuquerque, but whatever it is, it makes their midnight air thick and slippery like oil, and impossible to see through.
I listened.
I heard the scratching sound again, and then Lou started to growl. My dog Lou may have been softhearted, but he was as spooked by that house as I was, and if some ghost or monster really tried to get me, he’d want to protect me. The problem was, the rumble in his throat made it hard to hear what was going on. It seemed like an intruder was working away at the outside door to the bathroom. My bathroom had two doors, one into the room where I slept and one that connected to one of the murky areas behind the house, a scratchy tangle of brambly wilderness and rusty fencing and, for all I knew, buried treasure. I’d never been able to use that door to get outside. It was one of the features of my grandmother’s house that seemed part of some mysterious, earlier time, when people were running around—actual children maybe. Not just ghosts.
“Ella!” I heard again. Lou gave a short woofle-bark, but I shushed him, saying it was OK. A breeze of relief cooled my nervous sweat: I recognized that voice.
“Rosie?” I whispered back.
“Yeah. Can you open the door? I’m freezing out here!”
That was the other thing about Albuquerque nights, even in the summer. They were cold. It was the end of June, but I always slept under about ten ancient, musty blankets, and even then, my nose, like a dog’s, sometimes got cool and clammy.
“Just a minute.” I kept whispering, because I really didn’t want to wake up the GM (the name I had secretly given my grandmother Violet Von Stern). She had made it clear in some lecture or other—maybe the time she told me I must never go into her room without asking; or the time she said, with her trademark sarcasm, how delightful it would be if people could sound less like a herd of elephants stampeding through the hallways—well, anyway, it was clear that if I ever woke my grandmother up by mistake, I would regret it. I’d always been confused about the difference between corporal and capital punishment, but I was pretty sure the GM believed in both.
“Can you open the door?”
I could hear the shiver in Rosie’s voice. I felt sorry for her, even though we weren’t friends. I wasn’t sure why. She seemed to think I was a wimp, especially since my embarrassing fall at the Circle C—which was too bad, because on the soccer field I’m not a wimp at all, I score goals and have “grit,” according to Coach, but how could Rosie know that? We had met a few times by then, but it hadn’t worked out. Just because you’re both eleven doesn’t mean you’re going to get along. Friendship isn’t a math equation. We might both have been stranded there that summer—me staying with my grandmother because of my mom’s cancer treatment, and Rosie with her dad, who worked for the GM—but she and I didn’t hang out.
Except, apparently, in the middle of the night.
Still, even if she hated me, I didn’t want the kid to die of hypothermia. Besides, what was she doing outside my room? What made her wander away from her and Miguel’s cabin at that icy midnight hour?
I was planning to ask her once I got the idiot door open, but the problem was, I couldn’t. It had been frozen shut by years of neglect. There was no give in it whatsoever.
“I can’t do it,” I whispered to the voice behind the door. “I can’t move the doorknob at all. It’s stuck.”
“I’m reall
y c-cold.” Rosie sounded miserable, and Lou whimpered in sympathy. I wondered if she thought I wasn’t really trying.
“Let me think for a minute here.” But it was the middle of the night; I wasn’t at my sharpest. I felt like Winnie the Pooh, tapping his head all stuffed with fluff. In real life I was pretty smart, my report cards were fine if you consider that important, but under pressure, some of that intelligence just leaks out like air from a balloon. Besides, thinking hadn’t done much for me that summer so far. I had tried to think about my mom getting better, but she was still super-sick; I had visualized my dad coming out to rescue me from his mother’s house, but he was off leading fishing trips and not planning to show up anytime soon; and I spent a lot of time imagining the end of July, when I could finally see Mom again, but it didn’t seem to make the time pass any quicker. I was still stuck in New Mexico with a grouchy old lady, a hundred peacocks, and a girl who thought I was too pathetic to open a bathroom door.
“I’ll come outside.” What else could I do? I wasn’t just going to say, Sorry, Rosie, you figure it out, I’m going back to bed. “Wait there, OK? I’ll come and get you.”
“OK.” Rosie’s voice sounded small and faint. This wasn’t like her. I hadn’t heard her talk much, but when I had, her voice was strong and confident. Something must really have rattled her. Maybe she wouldn’t find me quite so useless if I saved her from death by frostbite.
But getting out of the house meant making my way in the darkness through all the rooms that were between me and the big chunky front door that clanged open or shut like the gates of a castle. The GM’s home was an old adobe (I called it the House of Mud, but under my breath so she couldn’t hear me) laid out in a rectangular shape around a small central courtyard where the birds and bugs hung out. The house itself was made up of dim, spooky chambers filled with junk or antiques, depending on how you looked at it. The bedroom I stayed in was at the back. Getting to the front door meant going through the long room with the armor and bottles and the tiger rug she called Tigger; the sickly yellow Haitian Room, currently occupied by Christopher Abercrombie, Our Honored Pest, I mean Guest; along the winding, cluttered corridor; and then by the bedroom of my grandmother herself, where she made potions or did voodoo or maybe just slept in her bed. Whatever she got up to in the middle of the night.
And I would have to do this whole journey in the pitch dark without waking up either the GM or her yappy dog Hildy, or for that matter Our Guest. Then go outside, clamber over old, falling-apart hen coops, past the Librerery with her thousand valuable books, through thornbushes, and around to the back, near my bedroom, to find Rosie.
Piece of cake! Or it would have been, if I had been half god or wizard or something. Unfortunately, I was a regular, mortal eleven-year-old, with ordinary powers.
Still, I made it. Maybe my dead grandfather’s spirit was helping me along. I closed Lou in my room, telling him I’d be back soon, and then I got all the way through the house to the front door, tiptoeing as delicately as I could. I managed not to wake anyone up, as far as I knew.
Outside, the night air soaked me like a cold shower. I could hear stirrings and rustlings all around. It was probably just the birds, but in that light it seemed like there were snakes in the grass, and burglars on the roof, and creatures hiding in the Library waiting to reach out and grab me. The one good thing was that there were a zillion stars overhead. It was hard to believe anything too terrible could happen with all those constellations looking on.
“Star light, star bright,” I said in a low breath, “first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight.”
I wished my mom would get better.
That was my regular, all-the-time wish. Please let the transplant work. Don’t let her die. I prayed, thought, wished—everything. My mom had just had the stem cell transplant that morning. It was too soon to know whether it would save her life.
When I finally found Rosie, she was sitting huddled on a rusty old cooler-type thing on the back step near my bathroom door. She looked different, and it took me a minute to figure out why: usually she wore her hair pulled back, but now it was loose and tangly, like mine used to be when it was long. I had cut my hair short when Mom got sick, out of solidarity since she lost hers, and now it was in that awkward growing-out phase. One of the only good things so far about not being home in Santa Rosa that summer was that I could have all my bad-hair days miles away from the people I knew.
“Hi,” I said, rubbing my arms in a useless effort to get warm.
“Hi.” Rosie seemed shy all of a sudden.
“It’s really cold out here.”
“Yeah.”
“So—” I said awkwardly. Well, someone had to start a conversation. We couldn’t just sit there swapping small talk all night. “What’s the matter? Why are you up?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Oh.” And why are you telling me? Do I knock on your cabin door every time I can’t sleep?
“I don’t know where my dad is,” she added in a small voice.
“What do you mean?”
“I woke up and went in to talk to him, and he’s gone.”
“Gone?” I asked stupidly. The cold was attacking my brain cells. “You mean—you mean, he’s just gone?” You would never know, at that moment, that I actually scored pretty high on comprehension tests at school.
“He was out earlier tonight, but he came back before I went to bed,” Rosie explained. “And he didn’t say anything about going out again. Usually he would tell me.”
“Do you want to try to find him?”
Rosie looked at me like I was a moron. “Where?” she asked. “How?”
“I don’t know.” I looked up at the stars, like maybe the Big Dipper would tell me. If I had been Edward Mackenzie instead of Ella, it might have. My grandfather Edward, I had learned that summer, knew everything there was to know about the stars. He was an astronomer. I never met him. He died when my dad was a kid. Some kind of accident.
But being me and not Edward, I couldn’t read anything up there. The stars blinked in the quiet and kept their secrets to themselves. “I’m super-cold,” I mentioned.
“Come on. Let’s go back to my dad’s cabin.” That seemed brilliant to me, so we wouldn’t have to worry about waking up the GM. Plus I’d been curious to see Miguel’s place. Unlike his daughter, Miguel had been friendly to me ever since the day two weeks before when he picked up Lou and me from the airport. He was one of the only bright spots in the whole setup. Still, I thought he might want to keep his home private.
“Are you sure your dad wouldn’t mind?”
Rosie shrugged. “He’s not here to mind. So tough luck for him.” That was more the attitude I had heard from her before: no nonsense.
It was a short walk along a path Rosie knew well, past the feed shed and other strange storage areas. If the peacocks were bothered by us walking around in the night, they didn’t make a racket about it. That was a relief.
The cabin was cozy after the stark cold of outside. A foldout couch that I guessed was Rosie’s bed was made up with blankets and a pillow. In the corner I saw a shadowed cooking area, the kind of snug kitchen you get in an RV or on a boat. The place wasn’t big—then again it wasn’t filled with armor and tiger rugs, either. I liked it.
“Which is his room?” I asked, and Rosie took me to her dad’s neat quarters. It had a small chest of drawers and an empty chair, a single, tidy bed, and a crucifix on the wall. I remembered talking once with this girl in my class, Jordan, whose parents were divorced—like mine were, like Rosie’s were getting ready to be—about seeing where your dad lived. “Dad Pads,” Jordan called them, and said they were usually messy and had lousy food. My dad’s apartment in Spokane had been, the one time I’d seen it, a Dad Pad just like Jordan described. Ketchup, mayonnaise and beer in the fridge, clothes and gear every which way over the chairs. Miguel’s place was different. It felt like a real home someone lived in, instea
d of some junky motel room that had gotten out of hand.
“See?” Rosie said in the emptiness. “He’s not here.”
I nodded. The only person in Miguel’s room was Jesus on the cross, and he wasn’t talking.
“The fire went out a while ago,” she said, going back to the main room. “That’s why it’s so cold.”
“Well, let’s start a new one.” I’d watched Miguel do it a hundred times in my grandmother’s kitchen, so figured I could give it a try. I wanted to prove to Rosie I wasn’t a complete good-for-nothing. I took a couple of big logs from the tin bucket, then Rosie scattered kindling over, then I added crumpled-up newspapers as a final topping. It was like making a sundae. Rosie found the matches and lit the edge of one of the papers, and away it went. Like a house on fire. Rosie high-fived me, her first real sign of friendliness, and then we sat on the floor, our backs against the couch, trying to get warm.
We got hypnotized, staring at the green, blue and orange flames moving around each other like in a dream. In a sort of trance I noticed two other doors in the farthest corner of the cabin. One was the bathroom, I guessed, but what was the other one?
I was about to ask her, when suddenly we both heard a loud, strange bang. Then another.
I thought it was fireworks at first. It wasn’t the Fourth of July yet, but almost, and there are always those people who can’t wait till the Fourth to get things exploding.
“That,” said Rosie in a choked whisper, “sounds like a gun.”
A gun?
But she was right. It hadn’t been a rat-a-tat-tat, like fireworks: it had been two muffled cracks, like—well, like gunfire.
Rosie covered her mouth and pointed at a high shelf in the cabin. There was nothing there, so I didn’t get what she was pointing at.
“My dad’s rifle—it’s usually up there. It’s gone.”
Now I was freezing again, and there was nothing the fire could do to keep me warm. We both strained to listen, but there was dead silence.
And then there was an incredibly loud wail that tore up the air.