“Piper? Piper, can you hear me?”
“Yeah, the connection is better. What were you saying when—?”
“Listen to me! Yesterday a very bad dude released some crazy airborne version of the rabies virus into the air. It happened in the Cascade Mountains area. A summer camp was attacked by infected animals, not far from the Mountain Loop Highway. The animals went crazy, biting everyone they came across. I don’t know how you even got into that area; the military set up roadblocks, and—”
“My dad took a dirt road off the Mountain Loop Highway,” she told him. “It wasn’t marked. He almost missed it. Are we going to get in trouble? Will they lock us up for trespassing?”
“That’s not important!” Tad was almost yelling now. “If you see an animal acting weird, whatever you do, don’t let it near you!”
Piper scanned her surroundings for signs of wildlife and saw none. “Tad, you’re freaking me out. What’s going on?”
“You should get out of there right now. It only takes one little bite…” Tad trailed off, holding something back.
“What happens when the animals bite, Tad?”
“Piper, more than a hundred kids were killed at that camp. The animals are sick. One bite and you’ll be dead before you hit the ground.”
Piper went numb. It dawned on her that she hadn’t seen a single mammal since they’d arrived. Not even a squirrel or chipmunk. Nothing. She’d felt like something was amiss, but couldn’t put her finger on it. Then she remembered they’d spied an unusual amount of roadkill the last few miles before the turnoff: a couple of deer, a raccoon, and a dog. The smell of skunk—clearly more than one—had brought tears to their eyes, and they’d been forced to roll up the windows. None of the carcasses looked particularly mangled or bloody or had tire marks on them. Now that she thought about it, none of the animals had looked injured at all. Just dead. She thought of her parents and Creeper, so far from the safety of the RV.
“Tad…” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper. “I think we may have driven right into the middle of it.”
“Piper, you have to get your family inside the RV. Then get out of there. Head to Seattle and don’t stop until you get there. If any animals survived the”—crackle crackle—“you might not be able to”—crackle crackle…
The signal failed and Tad was gone again. Piper started to redial his number, but something—a faint breeze, a smell in the air, or maybe her secret bargain with the universe—told her to check on Grace. She looked down at the bassinet. Her blood ran cold.
Piper dropped the phone. It clattered against a vent pipe, tumbled over the side of the RV, and shattered against the portable barbecue grill with a loud clacking sound. The noise drew the attention of the furry creature peering hungrily into Grace’s bassinet. It aimed its beady black eyes at the phone dangling by its wire guts from the grill’s lid handle. Nostrils flaring, it raised its muzzle to the roof of the RV. Piper saw the foam dripping from its mouth. She recognized the animal. A wolverine, the largest member of the weasel family, and a vicious predator. Although wolverines weighed less than forty pounds, one could still take down a weak caribou. She’d never seen one in person before, but it fit the description. It had a head shaped like a bear’s. Its elongated body was covered in fur. The fur was black and white, a reverse in the stripe pattern of a skunk. This one was clearly sick, just like Tad said. One bite. One bite and then death. The creature’s foamy jaws were inches away from her sleeping sister.
Piper leaped to the ladder and slid down the side rails, ignoring the rungs entirely. She landed hard, twisting her ankle, but she couldn’t let that slow her down. She needed a plan. Her dad’s hunting rifle was the first thing that came to mind, but it was locked in a case in the cargo bay. She’d never get it out in time. What else?
Piper looked on the ground for anything she could use as a weapon and saw the water hose attached to the RV. Her dad had spent the morning washing Rolling Thunder from bumper to bumper. If the water pressure was strong enough, maybe she could blast the wolverine away from her sister.
Piper turned the spigot on, and water flowed from a holding tank in the RV’s belly, through the hose, and out the nozzle, pooling on the ground. She picked up the sprayer. The wolverine threatened Piper with a noise that sounded like a cross between a lion’s roar and the grunting of a pig.
“That’s right!” she yelled at it. Piper spotted the long grill fork and grabbed that too. “Stay focused on me!”
But the animal would not be distracted. It turned its attention back to the baby. Globs of saliva dripped from its mouth into the bassinet.
Screaming and brandishing her two makeshift weapons, Piper charged at the wolverine. The hose uncoiled like a striking snake behind her.
A full year had passed since the horrific rabies outbreak in Washington. For the most part, the world had moved on. It was early August, two months deep into summer, a time when the kids of Jesup, Georgia, were running around outside with their tongues hanging out, like crazy dogs that had slipped their leashes. They spent their days sugar-powered by Kool-Aid and ice cream, and they wore bathing suits as uniforms. Fun in the Southern sun was all anyone could think about. Except for Tad. He couldn’t get his mind off Piper. It didn’t help that he was now lost in a sea of boys clamoring for her attention. She’d always been pretty, but seemingly overnight she’d blossomed into the kind of girl who turned guys into silent-film comedians, tripping over their own feet, slap fighting one another over who would get to retrieve the book she’d dropped in the school hallway. She’d turned into what his dad would have called “a stunner.”
It wasn’t just her looks that had changed. Her personality had changed too. She wasn’t a tomboy anymore, and she’d stopped hanging out with “geeks” like Tad. She was part of the pageant crowd now, a group of girls who entered—and usually won—every pageant in eastern Georgia. The Beauty Queens. Piper was the most beautiful of them all. In fact, she seemed even more radiant since he’d last seen her, before the start of summer. That was two months ago. Two months, one day, seventeen hours, and some change. When Tad found out she’d been invited to cut the ribbon at the opening of the new Jesup Nature Center, he started a countdown, using a red marker to X out days on the calendar over his desk. Today was Red Circle Day.
Tad watched from the crowd as Piper, dressed in a lovely pink sundress and a white sash printed with glittery gold letters that read JUNIOR MISS JESUP, used a pair of oversize novelty scissors to cut the ceremonial red ribbon hanging across the entrance door of the shiny nature center. He lost sight of Piper as Mayor Stodge escorted her into the building and the throng funneled in behind them. Tad loitered outside a bit for no particular reason he could think of before heading up the steps.
Tad knew the layout of the building because the curator, Mrs. Ham, had given him a preview tour when he accompanied his mother in July to deliver some family heirlooms for a special exhibit. Tad headed there now to consult with a dead man.
He entered a room labeled THE FLORA OF GEORGIA and nosed around. Mrs. Ham had done a bang-up job of displaying his family’s donated items. Most of them—including a botanist’s satchel, a microscope, and a rusty pair of pruning shears—were resting on satin pillows. Placards framed on metal stands told visitors what each item was and how it might have been used in the field. An oil painting of their original owner hung on the wall behind them, bathed in the apricot glow of the track lighting above.
Tad stepped in front of the portrait, glanced around to make sure he was alone, and then, in a familiar tone, he spoke to the man in the painting. “Hey…um…how’s it hanging, sir? Hope you’re comfy here. It’s a lot roomier than our basement. Definitely an upgrade. So…I need to ask for some advice, if that’s okay. It’s about a girl.…”
Tad nearly jumped out of his sneakers when a ghostly vibrato voice replied, “Speeeeaaaak, my son.” He whirled to find his friend Grafton Connor standing behind him, grinning and fully satisfied with the outcome of h
is prank.
“I’m sorry, buddy.” Grafton chuckled. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your heart-to-heart chat with Lord Boringdude. But if you need some advice on your love life, you should talk to the photo of Dian Fossey over in the primate exhibit. She was an expert on monkey mating rituals.”
“Har, har,” Tad replied. “What are you doing here, anyway? Didn’t you just get your driver’s license? I figured you’d be out making the roads unsafe for humankind.”
“I was. And then I drove here to check out the Birds of the Southern States exhibit. It’s kinda lame, though—too many songbirds, not enough raptors. But observing a dodo bird talking to a wall made the trip worthwhile.”
At six foot two, Grafton was big enough to be a varsity attraction at Jesup Middle School, and there were certainly unfair expectations of him to play sports, but Grafton was a science geek, like Tad, and had zero interest in athletics. He was a birder, the type of guy who’d rather spend his time in a tall field than on a ball field. “You want to tell me why you were soliciting dating advice from a painting? Who is that guy, anyway?”
“Dr. Brisbane Cole. He was a famous botanist back when America was fairly new. He was only fifteen when he joined the Lewis and Clark Expedition as a page. He was even pals with Thomas Jefferson. He’s kinda my hero.”
“Cole…Cole…” Grafton stroked his chin. “That name sounds familiar.”
“Picked up on that, Sherlock?” Tad snorted. “Brisbane Cole is my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.”
“That’s…um…great. But I’m a little offended. I thought I was your hero. Oh well. I guess that explains your weird fascination with plants. Genetics. I can sorta see the resemblance between you two. Same goofy grin. He’s a much better dresser, though. Maybe if you worked on your wardrobe a little, you wouldn’t need help in the dating department.”
The man in the painting was in his early thirties, attired to fit a bygone era and portrayed as possessing a noble mien. He was wearing a double-breasted tailcoat with a high collar made of velvet, and under the coat a white waistcoat, and under that a white shirt. His neck was hiddden by a cravat—a scarf-like precursor to the necktie. Cole’s waist looked pinched (girdles weren’t just for women back in his day). This gave him a waspy, cartoonish torso. His hairline had receded, but tufts of golden locks jutted forward from his temples to frame his bare forehead like a laurel wreath. Cole had a gaunt but handsome face, made even more pleasant by his crooked, toothy smile, the kind you rarely see in nineteenth-century portraits of self-important muckety-mucks. Cole was cradling a golden cylindrical canister in his hands.
Grafton peered into a glass case to inspect a two-hundred-year-old flower press. “How’d the museum get all this junk?”
“It’s not junk, goober. It’s here on loan. When I was a baby, my mom inherited Cole’s estate. There wasn’t much left to it by then. His brownstone in Manhattan was foreclosed on by the bank when my great-grandfather couldn’t afford to pay the city’s high property taxes. You ask me, we got all the good stuff: His botany equipment, the painting, some of his field journals. I’ve read them all. My ancestor was like the Indiana Jones of plant hunters, traveling all over the world to collect specimens. My mom thought it would be a nice gesture to donate his stuff to the museum so other people could appreciate it. I’m not thrilled about parting with his stuff, but at least she let me keep his final journal.”
“So what’s the deal?” Grafton asked. “He your romance coach or something?”
Tad shifted in his shoes, embarrassed. “I was just talking out loud. It’s not like I expected him to answer or anything.” The fact was, Tad wished he could go back in time and ask his ancestor how to fix things with Piper. If there was one thing he and his long-dead relative had in common—besides a deep interest in botany, of course—it was their unwavering devotion to one woman. Grafton was his buddy, but Tad didn’t feel as though Dr. Cole’s tragic love life was any of his business.
“So…I’m assuming you’re still hung up on you-know-who?” said Grafton. “Because if so, it’s like I’ve told you a hundred times, you need to let her go. For your own sanity.”
“Let who go?” Tad asked innocently.
“You know who I’m talking about, dude. Miss Peanut Festival 2014. Piper Canfield. Is that why you came here? Are you hoping to take her aside and have a little chat? Seriously, dude. I have to watch you like a sharp-shinned hawk. Someone has to keep you from making the biggest mistake of your life.”
“Look, not that it’s your business,” Tad said, “but Piper and I have history.”
“So? I have history with her too. And Math and Chemistry. Jesup Middle is a small school. What’s your point?”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” said Tad. “I meant we share a past.”
Grafton raised one eyebrow. “But not a present, right?”
Tad didn’t offer a reply.
“Thought not. Look, I get that you have a thing for the girl. She’s hot. Heck, you can’t throw a paper plane in Jesup without hitting some dude who has a crush on Piper Canfield. But there’s a reason why guys steer clear of her and the rest of the Snooty Queens. They’re heartbreakers, every one.”
Piper’s clique referred to themselves as the Beauty Queens, on account of their combined twenty-six pageant wins, but most of Tad’s guy friends called them the Snooty Queens behind their backs. It wasn’t a particularly clever play on words, but it was accurate. In Tad’s opinion, the Snooty Queens were as shallow as a plate of water. He’d never given them much thought until Piper joined their ranks, ending their lifelong friendship in the process. It’s not wise to approach someone who’s surrounded by angry pit bulls.
“Look, you need to be careful,” Grafton warned. “Even if Piper doesn’t drag your heart through the mud—and she probably will—those other harpies won’t be so gentle with your reputation. Before you get within ten feet of their pack, they’ll brand you as the creepy stalker guy and your social life will be a wrap. Did you know they’ve actually started handing out restraining orders? Check this out.” Grafton reached into his book bag and retrieved a six-by-two-inch piece of pink laminated cardboard. Printed on one side were the words YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO COME WITHIN 100 FEET OF THIS PERSON EVER AGAIN. Tad turned it over and saw that the back was covered in glitter and shiny star stickers.
He was amused. “What did you do to earn that?”
“I was behind Patty Myers and Olivia Price in line at Dairy Queen last week, and I asked them if they were having a good summer,” Grafton said. “Patty handed me this. It’s laminated, bro. Laminated! That’s serious business.”
“Why’d you bother keeping it?” Tad asked.
“I don’t know how it works. Maybe if I collect five, I’ll win a free soda or something.”
“They’re ridiculous,” said Tad. “Look, I appreciate your concern, but I still have to talk to Piper. It’s important.”
Grafton gave Tad a pitying look. “I figured. But what kind of buddy would I be if I didn’t at least try to talk you out of committing social suicide?”
“Your concern has been entered into the record.”
Grafton shrugged, then picked up a twined bundle of corncob husks from one of the exhibit tables. “What’s this? Some kind of camping pillow?”
“That’s what Cole used to…uh…wipe. Toilet paper wasn’t produced in America until the eighteen fifties.”
Grafton dropped it like a hot potato. “Ew! Gross, dude!”
“It’s not used, dummy! That would be unsanitary. How did you think Native Americans cleaned themselves back then?”
“I don’t know! I just figured they grabbed a passing squirrel, something soft and fluffy! You could have warned me!”
“Nobody told you to pick it up,” Tad reminded him. “This is a museum. Look, don’t touch.”
Piper Canfield and the rest of the mayor’s entourage entered the room with much commotion. Piper’s eyes met Tad’s,
then she quickly looked away. The exchange felt like frostbite. Grafton put a comforting arm around Tad’s shoulders and said, “That’s good advice, dude. Look, but don’t touch. You should leave her alone.”
After Grafton left, Tad waited for more than an hour for Piper to break away from Mayor Stodge and the others. He paced back and forth between the Spiders of the Carolina Coast exhibit and the restrooms. If there was one thing he knew about girls, it was that they went to the restroom a zillion times a day. Needing a distraction from his anxious thoughts, Tad picked up a pair of headphones and listened to an audio commentary about the black widow spider. Apparently, the females bite the heads off the males when they get sick of having them around. He tried not to forge implications.
When Piper finally made her way to the restroom, she was so focused on adjusting her sash that she didn’t see Tad until she was right next to him.
“Hey, Piper!” he said, mustering a chipper voice. “Can we talk for a sec?”
“Oh…hey, Tad. Um…” She looked extremely uncomfortable. Not good.
“It’ll only take a second.”
Piper fished into the little purse that hung by a thin gold chain crisscrossed over her sash. Tad feared she’d spring a homemade restraining order on him, but instead she took out her cell phone and checked the time.
“Okay,” she said, “I have a couple minutes. What do you want?”
Tad got straight to the point. “I have something for you. Can you come by the house later to pick it up?”
“Oh. I don’t know, Tad.…I’m supposed to meet my friends. We’re working on pageant stuff—the talent portion. We have to practice.”
Piper’s cagey response wasn’t the reaction Tad was hoping for. He knew that if he gave up now, this would become the site of his final defeat. His Alamo. His Waterloo. His Death Star. He had to be persistent. “It won’t take long, I promise. You don’t even have to come inside the house. Your gift is in the backyard. In the greenhouse.”
The Murk Page 2