Finding Fortune

by Delia Ray

  I might not have believed him if I hadn’t heard her bumping around behind the red velvet curtains, getting ready for her son’s visit. The stage actually seemed like a pretty smart choice for a bedroom, considering how close it was to the kitchen. I glanced around. Nothing in the kitchen matched anymore. There was a gold fridge and an avocado-green stove, and long rows of cupboards painted the color of canaries. And the kitchen felt lots homier than a cafeteria, with its smell of coffee and molasses and the trail of mixing bowls and muffin tins that Mine had left spread across the metal counters.

  Hugh gnawed a tiny chunk off the top of his muffin. “Tastes like birdseed,” he said. Then his face spread into a grin, wide enough for me to see his big front teeth. “That must be why you like it. Because you’re a wren. Did you know wrens are famous for their loud and complex songs?”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said through my bite of muffin. “But that’s probably exactly how my sister would describe me. Loud and complex.” I took another swig of milk. “Is that what you were looking up in that bird book? Wrens?”

  Hugh nodded. “I like to keep notes on people.”

  “So how come you didn’t tell Hildy and your mom that we had already met last night? Was it because you didn’t want them to know I caught you spying on me?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hugh said, but I could see a flush of red creeping up his pale neck.

  When I raised one eyebrow at him, he turned away, rushing to change the subject. “I wish I could have Lucky Charms instead of this yucky muffin.” He pointed to some cereal boxes that sat on top of the refrigerator.

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Mine only lets me eat sugar cereal on my birthday. They’ll probably be stale by then.” He was quiet for a second, studying my expression. “I’m eight. But I bet you thought I was only seven, right?”

  I shrugged. He was definitely smaller than the average eight-year-old, but he seemed wiser somehow with his silvery gray eyes and that pencil perched behind his ear. “I wasn’t sure how old you were … just like you didn’t know whether I was fourteen or not.” I broke into a sly smile. “Come on, admit it. You were spying last night.”

  Hugh thumped his muffin down on his plate. “All right, all right, I was spying.” He sighed. “I’m usually really good at it.”

  “So it sounds like this is something you do a lot—this spying thing.”

  “Yeah, but you’re the first person who’s caught me since we moved here,” Hugh boasted. “Hildy’s never caught me. And Mine, she knows that I wander off sometimes, but she doesn’t know exactly what I’m up to.”

  “What are you up to?” I asked.

  Hugh’s face grew solemn. “There’s a lot of strange stuff going on around this place. I’m trying to figure it out.”

  “Really? You mean like those weird things under the sink in my room?”

  Hugh sat up straight. “So you saw the skull?” he asked gleefully. “Were you scared?”

  “Petrified,” I said. “Until Hildy came in this morning and explained about her teacher and the art lessons.”

  “Yeah. Mr. Bonnycastle. He sounds cool. I told Hildy she should put the skull in her museum, but she says it doesn’t really fit with her theme.”

  “Museum? What museum?”

  “It’s in the gym. It’s sort of hard to explain.” Hugh hopped up from the table. “But I can show you if you want.”

  “Sure,” I said. Then I glanced around the messy kitchen. “Right after we do these dishes.”

  Once we had finished, Hugh led me back through the foyer to the opposite end of the school. But even when I stood in the doorway of what used to be the gym, staring out at the so-called museum, I still didn’t understand. All I could see was a ton of junk spread from one basketball hoop to the other. I gawked up at the narrow balcony that ran around the sides of the sprawling room. In the old days people probably lined up along the railings to look down and watch games, but now even the balcony was jammed with junk.

  “What is all this stuff?” I whispered.

  “It’s going to be a pearl-button museum,” Hugh said. He had already started down one of the cramped pathways that led through the piles, and I followed slowly along, examining the clutter on either side—rusted machinery with cranks and foot pedals, washtubs full of different kinds of shells, clamming rakes, and sawhorses stacked with old metal signs that said “American Maid Button Manufacturers” and “Style Right Buttons—Jewel of the Mississippi.”

  “Gosh, my dad would love it here,” I said.

  Hugh seemed surprised. “He would? Mine’s worried. She says people go to museums to see dinosaurs or mummies or planetariums or IMAX movies. Like they’ve got in Chicago.” He stopped next to a burlap bag full of discs that looked like miniature checkers. “She doesn’t think people really care about buttons.”

  I scooped up a handful of the discs. They were white on one side and brown on the other. “Those are button blanks,” Hugh said. He sounded like a tour guide. “That’s what buttons used to look like before they polished off the outside part and drilled in the holes.”

  So these were the missing pieces—the circles that had been punched out of all those shells in the alleyways of Fortune and the little pile of shells in the cabinet upstairs. I rubbed my finger over the white side of one of the blanks in my palm. It was smooth and let off a little gleam of light like a pearl, which probably explained how the buttons got their name.

  “You can keep one if you want,” Hugh offered. “Hildy won’t mind. She says she’s going to give a button blank to every single person who visits her museum.” He rooted in the side pocket of his cargo shorts. “Here’s mine.” He opened his fist to show me the one he’d been carrying. “It’s my lucky charm.”

  “Way better than cereal,” I joked. “Never goes stale.”

  Hugh smiled crookedly. “Hey, that’s a good one. I gotta write that down.” He reached for the pencil behind his ear and pulled a fresh index card out of his pocket. As Hugh wandered ahead scribbling, I hung back and sifted through a few more handfuls of button blanks, searching for one that struck my eye. I’d never had a good luck charm before and suddenly it seemed like something I desperately needed.

  After I had chosen my favorite blank and tucked it in my pocket, it took me a while to find Hugh in the maze of cardboard boxes. “Ahoy!” he yelled when I came around a stack of storage bins. I laughed in amazement. He was standing inside a boat—a big one—that looked like it had run aground on the only island of empty space in the gym.

  “This is the best part of the whole museum,” Hugh declared. “It’s a clamming boat. It used to be Hildy’s dad’s.” The wooden boat sat about three feet off the ground on a makeshift platform. It was long and flat-bottomed and smelled like it had a fresh coat of paint—emerald green with bright white trim.

  “Isn’t it great?” Hugh asked me. “I just wish we could name it something different.”

  “Why, what’s it called?”

  Hugh didn’t answer. He rolled his eyes, jerking his thumb toward the back of the boat. I walked around to read the name that was painted across the stern in white capital letters. “What’s wrong with Little Miss?” I asked. “I think it’s cute. It’s short for Mississippi, right?”

  “That’s the problem. A boat shouldn’t sound cute. Why couldn’t Hildy’s dad have called it something like Sea Witch? Or Discovery. That’s what Lewis and Clark named theirs. Those guys never would have gone exploring in a boat called Little Miss.”

  He had a point. The name sounded too sweet, especially considering the scary contraption full of long hooks that ran along the length of one side. “That’s the clamming rig,” Hugh told me, slipping into his tour guide routine again. He explained how the clammers used to drag all those hooks along the bottom of the river and the dopey mussels and clams got fooled into thinking the hooks were something tasty or an enemy floating by, so they chomped their two halves down on them. “And whammo,”
Hugh said, smacking his hands together. “After that, they got their insides boiled out and their outsides cut into buttons.”

  “Yuck.” I grimaced.

  Hugh swung his legs over the side of the boat and hopped from the platform to the floor. “Come on,” he said. “I have to show you one more thing.” I scrambled after him as he ducked under another set of sawhorses. I flinched when we popped up next to a pair of spooky mannequins with yellow hair like straw. They were wearing matching vests decorated in a gleaming assortment of buttons, but I couldn’t stop to take a closer look. Hugh had already disappeared again. I squeezed past another row of old-fashioned machines, wrinkling my nose at the smell of engine grease. Hugh was on the other side holding a photograph in a silver frame.

  “Guess who?” he said, handing me the picture. I stared at the pretty girl who waved from the black-and-white photograph. She wore a puffy white dress and a tall crown, and she sat on a throne tucked inside a giant fake clamshell. It looked like she was riding on a fancy float like the ones in the Macy’s parade that Nora and I watched on TV every Thanksgiving.

  “Is that—?”

  “It’s Hildy!” Hugh pointed to the words engraved on the bottom of the frame. Queen of the Fortune Button Festival—June 1950. “She says she was the last queen ever because the river ran out of shells and they stopped having the festival.”

  I bent closer. “She was so beautiful.” The girl in the picture had a cloud of dark wavy hair and china-doll skin, but you could still tell it was Hildy, even without the wrinkles and lipstick and the lopsided wig. She had the same mischief in her smile, the same stubborn tilt to her chin.

  “Look how happy they all are,” I said as I stared at the faces in the crowd. “I’m glad Hildy’s making a museum. Otherwise how would people know this stuff ever happened?”

  Hugh took the picture and set it back in its stand on a card table. “You want to see her crown?” he asked. “It’s made out of buttons.” He picked up a pink velvet bag from the corner of the table, but before he could get the drawstring untied, we heard Hildy’s raspy voice. It sounded like she was coming down the hall, talking to somebody on her cell phone.

  “Say that again,” I heard her squawk. “We got a bad connection. I can’t quite hear you.” My heart jumped. What if she was talking to Mom? Had Nora given up and spilled the beans already?

  Hugh held a finger to his lips and pulled me down to a crouch. Then he motioned for me to stay low and follow him through another obstacle course of cardboard boxes and wooden crates. When we finally stood up straight, we were in a dark storage room off the gym.

  “What’s going on?” I whispered. “Why are we hiding?”

  “I don’t want Hildy to see us,” Hugh said softly. “She doesn’t like me exploring the museum when she’s not there.” Before I could wonder more about who Hildy had been talking to or whether she was looking for me, Hugh grabbed my hand. The next thing I knew, we were stepping out into the blinding sunlight and a flower garden that bordered the side of the school.

  On the other side of the garden there were two women in sun hats bent over a row of white flowers. They straightened in surprise when they spotted us. When one of them pushed back the brim of her hat, I realized who they were—the sisters from the second floor. I could tell they expected us to stop and say hello, but Hugh was already scurrying along a dirt path that led back to the front of the school. I gave the sisters a little half wave and trotted after him.

  Hugh didn’t slow down until he had rounded the corner of the building and slipped behind a gnarled lilac bush. “Jeez,” I huffed once I had scooted into the space beside him. “What’s going on? I feel like I’m in a video game dodging old ladies.”

  Hugh leaned his back against the brick wall of the school to catch his breath. “That was Sister Loud and Sister Soft,” he panted, and readjusted the pencil behind his ear. “They’re always trying to get me to help pull weeds in their soap garden. If we had stopped, I’d never get to finish showing you around.”

  I leaned against the wall beside him. The bricks felt warm on my back. “You really call them that?” I smiled. “Sister Loud and Sister Soft?”

  “Not to their faces. Just with Mine. We can’t tell them apart unless they’re talking … or yelling.” Hugh peeked out from the branches of the lilac to check whether the coast was clear. When he turned back to me, his expression was somber. “Are you afraid of heights?” he asked.

  “Um. What kind of heights?”

  Hugh pointed past the fading purple blooms over my head. I took a careful step out from under the bush and squinted into the sunlight. He was pointing at the tower.

  SEVEN

  TO GET TO THE TOWER, we had to go back inside, make our way to the third floor, open a narrow door hidden in a crook of the hall, and climb up twelve more steep steps. At the top, Hugh shoved open a trapdoor. I clambered through after him and stood up slowly, reaching for the railing to steady myself. When I looked out, my stomach flipped over and my breath caught in my throat. You could see forever—past the cornfields, past the roofs of Fortune poking up through the trees, all the way to the Mississippi River. Dad likes to call it the Mighty Mississippi, but the river didn’t look so mighty from up in the tower. It looked more like a flat brown snake sliding across the countryside.

  I could tell Hugh had been up in the tower before. He didn’t even bother to grab the railing as he stepped around the trapdoor and looked down on the backyard of the school. “Whoa,” he said. “Garrett got a lot more shells this morning.”

  I edged over to see what he was talking about. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again, trying to make sense of the strange scene below. There was an old baseball diamond out back, and surrounding it were mountains and mountains of salt-and-pepper-colored shells. At the edge of the ring, a huge man with a scruffy blond beard stood in the back of a green pickup truck shoveling more shells on top of another pile. So that was Garrett, Hildy’s handyman who wrote on the blackboards. Hugh had pointed out the door to his room on the third floor when we were on our way up to the tower.

  “What the heck is he doing?” I asked.

  “Making a labyrinth.”

  “A labyrinth?”

  “It’s kind of like a maze,” Hugh explained. “Garrett used to fix up old castles and churches in England, where they had a lot of that kind of stuff. He says he’s always wanted to make a labyrinth. And he thinks it’ll help get more people to come see the museum.”

  “Wow,” was all I could say. I had been in corn mazes before, and Nora and I had gotten lost in a giant boxwood maze when we went on vacation to Colonial Williamsburg. But I’d never heard of anything like that being made out of shells. Then again, I’d never heard of a button museum until about an hour ago.

  While we were watching Garrett, I began noticing all the graffiti in the tower. It wasn’t like the graffiti I had seen scribbled in bathroom stalls and under the bleachers at school. It was the antique kind—hundreds of names and sayings carved on the floor and the railing. There were so many, it seemed like every kid who had ever gone to school in Fortune must have owned a pocketknife and climbed up to leave a mark in the tower. FCS is the Best!… Peggy Anne and Emma Jean—Friends 4Ever … Fortune Hunters-B.Ball Champs of ’69.

  Hugh called me over to see a carving on the handrail.

  “If they got married,” he said, barely able to contain himself, “her name would be Mrs. Hazel Nutt.” He started laughing so hard, showing those funny front teeth of his, that I got the giggles too and couldn’t stop until Hugh knelt down and pointed to where Hildy had carved her name on the floor near the trapdoor when she was a kid.

  “How do you know that’s her?” I asked.

  “Because she asks me to get her mail out of the mailbox by the road sometimes, and I’ve seen that name on her letters. Hilda Larson Baxter.”

  “So she must have been picked to be the button queen right after she finished high school.” I kept staring at the date on the
floor, trying to add up the numbers in my head. “If Hildy was eighteen when she graduated,” I said, “that means she’s got to be … more than eighty years old.”

  “Whoa,” Hugh said.

  We were still on our knees talking about how peppy Hildy was for being so ancient when we heard a huge commotion below—a roaring engine and hissing brakes and some sort of weird high-pitched braying sound. Hugh scrambled to his feet. “Mayor Joy’s back!” he cried.

  I followed him to the front railing just in time to see a man hop down from the cab of a tractor-trailer truck in the parking lot. “Hey there, buddy,” the truck driver called out. I couldn’t tell who he was talking to. Then a donkey emerged from the high grass near the old playground, wheezing out a stream of hee-haws as he clopped across the gravel.

  “That’s Wayne,” Hugh said.

  “Which one?”

  Hugh laughed. “The donkey. He hates it when the Mayor goes away on long hauls. Garrett takes good care of him, but Wayne likes Mayor Joy a lot better.”

  I sized up the man below. He was old too—not as old as Hildy, but his bald head shone like polished mahogany next to his snow-white sideburns. “Is that another one of your nicknames? Mayor Joy?”

  Hugh shook his head. “No, he’s really the mayor. And his last name is really Joy.”

  “What’s he the mayor of?”

  “Fortune.”

  “Fortune? But Fortune’s not even a town anymore, is it? It only has twelve people.”

  Hugh shrugged. “Beats me. All I know is that’s what people call him, and Hildy says he’s been the mayor forever.”

  The Mayor’s kindly voice drifted up to us as he stood rubbing Wayne between his oversize ears, carrying on like they were long-lost friends. I lifted my hand to wave.

  “Don’t!” Hugh said under his breath. He grabbed my arm, tugging me back from the railing.

  “How come?”