Quicksand Pond

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  A vehicle blasted into the yard, swerved roughly on the barren lawn, braked to a stop. Someone got out and walked up the porch steps. The screen door opened with a whine and jittered shut. Jessie peered up over the dock. Mitch’s pickup. He was home.

  Her legs were shaking too hard to walk, much less run. She thought she might swim. She leaned over the skiff’s side to look at the water and made a discovery. The raft was under the dock, nestled in shadow between the posts. Its new wooden platform floated high, just clearing the dock’s underside. The poling stick was laid neatly across it.

  Terri had hidden it there, Jessie knew without a doubt. She’d stowed it away for safekeeping, the same way she’d stowed the kittens under the porch. Whatever she knew about the thefts in the Cuttings’ garage, whether or not she was involved with the fire there, Terri was afraid she’d be accused. She was getting ready to be taken.

  The front door whined. Jessie lay down flat in the skiff, listening.

  Mitch was an impatient man. She heard it in the rapid tattoo his boots made on the porch, in the irritated way he let the screen door slap shut behind him, in his dry, repetitive cough. She smelled the cigarettes he smoked as he came and went, heard him swear and kick at something that made him stumble. (One of the kittens?) He was lugging things out of the house, loading them into the truck bed. What was he doing?

  Jessie raised her head just far enough to see him stagger through the door carrying a rolled-up rug over his shoulder. He teetered down the porch steps, threw the roll into the truck, and went back into the house. A minute later he reappeared with a cardboard box, set it in the truck, and returned for another. And another. A piece of newspaper escaped and blew across the lawn. He went after it, brought it back, and stuffed it into a box.

  He carried out the Chinese dragon vase, then a table and some chairs. The bronze table lamp was heavier than he expected. He tripped on the steps and nearly dropped it on its stained-glass shade. When he got to the back of the truck, he shoved it between the boxes with a loud exclamation.

  He went back for more, but Jessie lowered her head. She didn’t need to look anymore. She wondered if he’d keep the pretty china that Terri had liked so much. Keep it for her, for his daughter. Or would he not bother now because she was gone and might not be back soon. He didn’t look like a person who was thinking about that. He looked angry.

  The wind was coming up the way it often did in the late afternoon near the ocean. Waves began to knock against the skiff’s hull. They slammed against it harder and harder, rocked the boat side to side, until Jessie felt as if the pond would soon pour in on top of her. As the waves mounted, Jessie took from her back pocket, where she’d kept it all this time, the note she’d written Terri with her cell phone number. (“Call me in Pittsburgh. We can stay in touch! Jessie.”) She slipped it onto the raft under the dock, sticking it down between the planks as best she could so it wouldn’t blow away. Then she lay back in the skiff and gripped the sides with both hands.

  There was nothing to do but hang on and hope that Mitch would leave soon, that he’d finish loading his truck with the stolen goods and drive away to whatever place he planned to hide them next.

  * * *

  Jessie was soaking wet by the time Mitch’s pickup pulled out, so cold and stiff she could hardly walk. She left the kittens behind. She hoped Terri would come home in time to save them. It was all she could do to move her feet and keep moving them along the shoreline path. She still hadn’t warmed up when she reached the Kettels’ end of the pond.

  From a distance she saw the cottage, but the car wasn’t there. The sailors hadn’t yet returned from the harbor, and Jessie was glad. She needed time to recover, to put on dry clothes, quiet her mind, and get ready to join her family. She was ready to be with them again. After everything that had happened, she needed to come back. She hoped that tonight they could just be the Kettels again, on vacation together, eating dinner in the kitchen, teasing her father, laughing at one of Jonathan’s hilarious remarks, recounting their adventures—except Jessie knew she would keep what she’d just seen at the Carrs’ house a secret. To tell would only suck them back into the dark swamp at the end of the pond.

  She was nearly at the house when a shadow moved past the screen door. A rustle came from inside. She thought it was a bird at first, something with wings fluttering through the rooms. But a moment later came a crash, and then the sound of someone running through the house. The back door slammed.

  Jessie circled around back in time to see a lean figure rounding the house in the other direction, toward the driveway. By the time she got back there, the figure was pelting at top speed up the dirt road. She watched as it left the driveway and sprinted straight up the overgrown field. She watched the figure hit the main road, veer off, and run out of sight, never once looking back.

  She went into the house to see what was missing.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Silent Lamb?” Julia exclaimed in astonishment. “It couldn’t have been him.”

  “It was him,” Jessie said.

  “You’re saying Aaron Bostwick was the one who stole Dad’s laptop?”

  Jessie’s family stood around her, dripping with seawater. They’d just arrived from the harbor.

  “I’m saying he brought it back. There it is on the table, right where it used to be. He wouldn’t have brought it back for anyone else, would he?”

  “But that’s impossible. He’s a complete straight arrow. Aaron Bostwick wouldn’t steal a thumbtack. He’d be too scared.”

  “Maybe he’s not as lambish as you think. He was pretty mad at you down at the beach, if you remember.”

  “When was this?” their mother asked.

  Jessie filled her in while Julia stalked around the living room, saying, “I can’t believe this!”

  “What on earth did you do to make him so angry?” Marilyn Kettel asked her daughter.

  “Nothing!” Julia exclaimed. “He gave me a few rides to the beach, and then he kept hanging around like I owed him something.”

  “She gave him the big brush-off,” Jessie said. “He was furious. Remember how he said you’d be sorry?”

  “Well.” Their mother smothered a smile. “You must’ve hurt his feelings, Julia. It’s a sensitive time in life for boys his age. This isn’t the same boy as . . . what was his name who’s going to Princeton?”

  “Ripley Schute,” Jessie said. “No, Ripley’s the guy Julia moved on to afterwards. He’s much cooler. His dad is rich and he has a vintage Thunderbird.”

  “You’re insufferable,” Julia hissed at her. “I haven’t even seen Rip lately.”

  “Right, after he tried to tear your clothes off.”

  “He did not! That is so not true!” Julia yelled at the same time that her mother was murmuring, “My goodness. Such goings-on.”

  By now it was nearly six o’clock, and Jonathan’s lips had turned blue from standing around in wet clothes. All the sailors were shivering. The wind had come up strongly toward the end of the afternoon, causing their sailboat to heel over in the bay.

  “And Dad let go of the rope, and we went around in a circle for about an hour trying to catch it,” Jonathan said accusingly.

  “A slight exaggeration.” Richard Kettel grasped his son’s hand and began to take him upstairs. “And what is the rope I let go of called, Jonathan? You should remember that, at least.”

  “The big sheet,” Jonathan said.

  “The mainsheet,” his father corrected him.

  “Give him a bath. It’ll warm him up,” their mother advised. “I’ll put on some dry clothes and get a start on dinner. Lobsters tonight! Aren’t we the lucky ones. Have we got enough butter?”

  “I think so,” their father called from the top of the stairs.

  The Kettels disbanded to different corners of the house to dry off and warm up and prepare for the evening. Julia gave Jessie a particularly nasty look as she went up to change.

  “Traitor,” she said.

&
nbsp; “Why? It was true.”

  “It wasn’t! Do you care at all about other people’s feelings?”

  “I care. A lot more than you think.”

  There was something else Jessie wanted to say, something that was burning her tongue to come out, but she held fire. She went into the kitchen to wait for her mother to come down so they could make dinner together, a rare treat. Not until much later, as the whole family was sitting at the kitchen table wrestling with their bright-red boiled lobsters, did Jessie bring up what was on her mind.

  “So, Dad, when are you going to report the theft?” she asked.

  “What theft?” he said with a full mouth.

  “Of your laptop. Aren’t you going to tell the police that Aaron Bostwick broke in and stole it?”

  Everyone looked at her in surprise. “Why?” her father said.

  “Because he did. He robbed us.”

  “Well, he was mad at Julia.”

  “Does that excuse him?”

  “He brought it back,” Jonathan said.

  “Does that make it okay that he came in our house at night and took something? Not a thumbtack, either.” She looked at Julia. “He stole a three-hundred-dollar computer.”

  Julia rolled her eyes. “Come on! Aaron Bostwick is hardly a criminal. He was stealing for a completely different reason. It wouldn’t be fair to get him in trouble with the police.”

  “It wouldn’t be fair to who?” Jessie asked.

  “Wait. Wait. I see where you’re going.” Her father reached across the table and put his hand on her arm. “You’re talking about Terri Carr. And you’re right. We shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions about her. But that was different. Everything pointed to her.”

  “If Terri had stolen the laptop, she wouldn’t have brought it back. That’s the difference,” Julia said.

  “And sweetie,” her mother said, “Terri wasn’t arrested for stealing our computer. She’s charged with arson with malicious intent, which is a felony. She has a history of trouble with the law. She’s just a whole other level beyond Julia’s little . . . what do you call him?”

  “The Silent Lamb,” Jonathan informed her. “He looks more like a sheep to me.”

  “I don’t see that,” Jessie said stubbornly. “I don’t see how Terri is different. What I see is a lot of people thinking she’s different, expecting her to do something bad, looking for a way to prove they’re right. You know what? I’m going to report Aaron Bostwick to the police. I’m going to call the police right now and say I found him in our house trying to steal something else. Who knows, maybe he was. Maybe he decided the laptop wasn’t enough.”

  “What?” they all shouted. “Are you crazy? Are you nuts?”

  Jessie got up from the table, as if she really meant to do such a thing. Julia and Jonathan pulled her back down. They held her in her chair long enough for her mother to come around the table and put her arms around her and hug her. She rocked Jessie back and forth, laughing a little.

  “Okay, you’ve made your point,” her mother said fondly. “Our in-house moral compass. We’ll be more careful in the future about who we accuse. Is that enough? Can we get back to our lobsters now?”

  Jessie pulled away and didn’t answer. She looked around at her family and saw how they didn’t have a clue what she meant about Aaron. The injury to Terri was lost on them. They had judged her guilty and were ready to move on.

  “Well, what shall we do tomorrow?” her father was already saying, reaching for the coleslaw.

  “Go to the beach!” Jonathan shouted.

  “Go shopping,” Julia said.

  “A game of tennis?” their mother suggested.

  In the end it rained and they all went to the movies.

  * * *

  The house was half packed for departure when word came about Terri Carr.

  Two full days of preparation were always necessary to dislodge the Kettels once they’d settled into a place. That summer, due to the length of their vacation, there had been more settling than usual. Clothing, shoes, towels, and magazines had migrated into unimaginable corners and parts of the yard. Paperbacks, hats, sunscreen, dark glasses, and insulated water flasks had escaped under couches and beds. The Monopoly game and a number of puzzles had detonated into crannies upstairs and down, along with Julia’s endless bottles of nail polish, which turned up everywhere, often capless, fallen over or glued to the floor.

  “I have never seen so much junk!” their father exclaimed. “How did this family manage to accumulate such a mass of possessions in such a short time? We didn’t arrive with all this, did we?”

  Their mother had had the foresight to purchase a box of large black plastic trash bags. “Throw away whatever you won’t absolutely need in Pittsburgh, or you won’t fit in the car,” she advised her children. “That pile of flip-flops, for instance. We’ll never wear them in the city.”

  “But they’re brand new. You just bought them!” her husband protested.

  The phone rang. Richard Kettel answered. After a brief conversation he replaced the receiver slowly in its old-fashioned cradle.

  “That was the police. Terri ran away from the correctional center last night.”

  “Oh no,” Julia said, looking at Jessie.

  “They’re asking us to keep a watch out for her. She might try to come back here. Well, not here here. She might try to get back home.”

  “How did she get away?” Julia asked.

  “I don’t know. She was supposed to have a hearing before a judge this morning. She bolted.”

  Their mother, coming in from the kitchen, shook her head.

  “So sad,” she said. “One of those terrible situations. Where’s Jonathan?”

  Jessie looked around. “Somewhere outside, I guess. He was playing with his magnifying glass.”

  “Would you go find him, Julia?”

  “Why me? I was just—”

  “Please find him. Now!” Marilyn Kettel ordered. “I don’t want him outside by himself if that girl comes around here.”

  “Mom!” Jessie said. “It’s just Terri. She loves Jonathan. She’s the one who’s been giving him all his best bugs.”

  “She’ll never make it back here on her own anyway,” their father added, broom in hand. “The correctional center is miles away. What would she do, hitchhike?”

  “She might,” their mother said. “I wouldn’t put it past her.”

  Julia went outside. They heard her calling, “Spider boy! Where are you? Time to come back to the nest.”

  Jonathan answered at once. “Over here! Look what I found. A red ant!”

  Richard Kettel chuckled. “See? Nothing to worry about. Come on, back to work. Jessie, will you start packing Jonathan’s clothes into his duffel? He can wear the clothes he’s in now tomorrow in the car. We’ll have to leave at the crack of dawn to drop your mother at the airport.”

  “Oh, heavens, don’t worry about me. I can call a cab.”

  “Sweetie, we are not made of money! It would cost an arm and a leg to get a cab all the way down here.”

  A wild flame of hope had leaped up in Jessie when she heard that Terri had escaped. Irrational and illogical as it was, she hoped they wouldn’t catch her. She saw her on the highway with her thumb out, accosting the flow of traffic with a defiant eye. She saw her jogging along back roads, making friends with stray cats, her pockets stuffed with sandwiches and candy bars. She saw her throwing away those horrible green pajamas, putting on her dirty cutoffs, polishing her name charm between two fingers. She saw her living free, the way she’d wanted to on the raft.

  The raft.

  She saw her out there on it.

  All the rest of that afternoon Jessie kept an eye on the pond. She folded Jonathan’s shirts and shorts and put them in his bag. She took her own clothes from the shelves in the closet and divided them into neat piles on her bed, ready to pack. In the kitchen she helped her mother empty out the refrigerator and sponge it clean. If there was a squawk outside, o
r a flutter or a splash, her heart jumped and she ran to look. A dark spot appeared on the water far down the pond as she was taking in beach towels off the line. She stood and stared, afraid to let it out of her sight. But after a few minutes the spot rose into the air, spread wings, and flew away.

  After dinner that evening Jessie went for a walk by herself. She said she wanted to say good-bye to the pond.

  “I’m just going down to my old raft landing,” she told her mother. “Call if you need me. I’ll be close by.”

  She didn’t stay close by. As the sun dipped low on the horizon, casting fiery streaks of pink and fuchsia in all directions, she set out along the path around the shore. She half expected to find Terri back at her camp, cooking hot dogs over a fire, the raft bobbing along the bank.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” Terri would say. “I got your note. Now we’ll always be in touch. Isn’t it great out here?”

  “Beautiful,” Jessie would say.

  “See, it’s not so bad as you thought it would be,” Terri would tell her. “We could live out here if we had to.”

  But the camp was deserted and obviously unvisited in recent days. Jessie sat down on the stone table. She listened to the pond. Sometimes, amidst the croaks and flutters, came a watery sound, as if someone was out there just beyond her rim of vision, poling warily through the water. She’d catch her breath and think the raft was about to appear. But then the sound would fade. The reeds would rattle and . . . nothing.

  Evening was well under way but the sky was still light when a rush of wings came from above. She looked up to see masses of birds churning through the air. They flew in fantastic formations, wheeling and swerving, swelling out into clouds and thinning down into straight lines, hundreds of birds moving together in perfect synchrony. As she watched, Julia came quietly beside her and sat down.