Back in the main room, AmberLea is still flipping through piano music. Toby’s poking around inside the piano. He looks up. “Nothing. No secret compartment behind the secret compartment either. I looked in the gramophone too.” There’s a wind-up gramophone beside me. I lean on it to hide my trembling. The gun clunks against it. I flinch. I don’t know why I don’t want them to know about the gun, but I don’t. Somehow it makes things worse. As if he can read my mind, Toby says, “And there was no Walther PPK.”
“What?” I scuttle to the compartment to peek in, hoping the Colt .45 doesn’t make my sweater sag too much. Toby’s right: no PPK, which means I’m not the only McLean grandson on the loose with an automatic weapon. Good luck at those airports, guys. Right now, I’ve got more pressing issues.
Toby says gently, “Couldn’t help noticing those, uh, weird golf balls though. There’s one short of an even dozen.”
I swallow hard. I can’t look at anyone. I figure we’re all thinking about how Zoltan Blum was killed. Now for sure I don’t want them to know about the gun I just found. “Yeah,” I say at last. “I think they’re Cuban. My grandpa ran an import/export business. You should have seen the wooden Frisbees from Australia.”
There’s an awkward silence. AmberLea breaks it by tossing another music book aside. “Zilch. Didn’t your grandpa like any music but Broadway shows?”
“Well, Christmas carols. And old dance-band stuff he played on the gramophone here.” I move back to the gramophone to show a rack of ancient 78 rpm records. It’s such a relief to talk about something else that I can’t stop. “His rule was no electronics. We’d wind up the gramophone at drinks before dinner, or he’d play piano for singalongs. Jer brought his guitar sometimes, but Grandpa wasn’t into that so much.” I close the gramophone cabinet. “Once, Deb—my mom—snuck a portable radio in when she was a kid, and Grandpa found it and said the only place she could listen to it was in the outhouse. ‘Elvis belongs in the outhouse,’ he’d say. All rock was Elvis to Grandpa. Me and my cousins used to sneak iPods up, and if he caught us he’d say the same thing to us.” I stop. I’m drifting into thoughts I don’t want. I didn’t always like coming to the cottage. It was a place for the physical guys like Bunny and DJ and Adam. I was always afraid I’d get thrown in the lake, or get a lap full of water at dinner. That’s another story too.
“You still use an outhouse?” AmberLea interrupts my thoughts. Her chin has done its disappearing act.
“No, no. Just for backup. The bathroom’s down the hall.”
AmberLea jumps up.
“Except the water’s not on,” I say.
She stops. “Well, what did you guys do? It’s kinda urgent, you know?”
I get it. “We brought water with us and poured it down the toilet.”
“Great. Where’s the water?”
“We didn’t bring any today.”
“So what are my options? Quickly.”
“Um, well, I guess go in the snow or use the outhouse. DJ used the outhouse. He said it was like being back on Kilimanjaro.”
“Super.” AmberLea sighs. “Where is it?”
“Out back.” She hustles to the kitchen door. I flick on the outside light. The biffy stands by some leafless bushes, a half moon cut in the top part of the door. You can still see DJ’s size 13 footprints leading to and from it.
“Oh man, Spencer.” AmberLea sighs again. “You’re gonna owe me big-time.” She grabs the flashlight from Toby.
“There probably won’t be spiders this time of year,” he says.
“And it won’t smell bad,” I add.
“Double super.” AmberLea gives us a fake smile and a bit of sign language involving one finger. She opens the door. “Well, at least come outside so you’ll hear me if I scream. And there’d better be T.P. in there.”
Toby and I follow her outside. Strangely, it feels slightly warmer out there than it does in the cottage. AmberLea mashes her way through the snow and wrestles the door open. The flashlight plays on the inside of the biffy.
“What’s all over the walls?” asks Toby.
“Old cartoons and covers from the New Yorker,” I say. “I think I have them memorized. My grandpa had a subscription.” The door bangs shut behind AmberLea. “And a picture Deb—my mom did when she was little, like five or six.”
“Your grandpa hung it in the biffy?”
“That’s what it was for. It’s of flowers. My mom said it would make the place smell better.”
“You have an interesting family,” says Toby.
“You don’t know the half of it.”
A moment later the door bangs open and AmberLea high-steps back through the snow. “There’s a kid’s drawing on the door in there,” she says. “Of flowers.”
“Yeah, I was just telling Toby that my mom did that.”
“Ever notice it’s on music manuscript paper? Maybe we should look on the other side.”
Deb’s crayon drawing of a vase of flowers is stuck to the outhouse door with rusting thumbtacks. It takes some work to pry them out. It’s a regular-sized sheet of paper, but almost as heavy as cardboard and yellowed with age and outhouse life in general. Deb may have skipped two grades in primary school, but I bet she failed Art. She couldn’t even color inside her own lines. I’ve been looking at this all my life, every time we played hide-and-seek at the cottage or needed a last-minute pee before hitting the highway, and it’s only now, with the flashlight trained on it, that I notice the sets of five lines stretching across the paper.
I flip the page over. On the other side, music, complicated-looking music, has been written into the lines. The green ink has faded, but the penmanship is sure and sharp. Below the music, what I guess are lyrics have been printed in more of that Russian-style writing. In the corner is a bold lightning bolt of a Z.
“Bingo,” breathes AmberLea.