EITHER MADDISON WAS AVOIDING HER DAD OR HER dad was avoiding Maddison or they were both trying to avoid each other. Maddison was too irritated and worried to tell. But she kept walking into rooms only a step ahead of her dad, and leaving as soon as he walked into rooms, and her mother was starting to get the grim set to her mouth that said she was going to snap at one of them for being an idiot soon.
Maddison knew that spending the whole day dialing her friends’ phones at regular intervals and simmering with worry when they kept going to voicemail was several levels of rude, especially if you were staying at someone else’s house. She just couldn’t stop herself. She’d barley managed to stop herself from calling both sets of Kingsolver parents multiple times, and had settled instead for calling each house twice, once to find out that Chris and Carrie were both out with Professor Griffin and wouldn’t be back for at least a day, and then once a little later to ask Carrie’s mom and Chris’s mom if they would please tell Chris and Carrie to call her back as soon as possible.
Not that she expected them to call her. Maddison’s luck was generally horrible and she expected to spend the rest of the week glued to the phone wishing someone would call her, and getting nothing. She’d even tried calling Chris and Carrie with her cell phone from the attic, but although she got a full five bars if she stood on top of the old dresser, she still couldn’t get through to Chris or Carrie. The phone wasn’t even ringing before going to voicemail. Maddison was stuck feeling horribly guilty for having her phone out at the dinner table, feeling terrible for spending all her time on the Lyndons’ home phone in between playing cards with Mrs. Lyndon.
When Mrs. Lyndon won War and then three games of Go Fish, Maddison realized she wasn’t paying enough attention to what she was doing, and surrendered the deck of cards so Mrs. Lyndon could play Solitaire. Then her cell phone finally, actually rang.
It was an unknown number, but Maddison answered with shaking hands anyway.
“Hello?” Please, please, please don’t be a telemarketer.
“Hi! Maddison, right?” The voice was familiar, but it wasn’t the familiar voice Maddison had been hoping for.
“Father Michaels?” Maddison asked in surprise.
“Yes,” the priest agreed. “We met when you came by to ask me some questions about the old parish register.” They had actually met when Maddison, Chris, and Carrie had fallen into the cistern in the church basement while sneaking around where they weren’t supposed to and had unearthed a dead body, but Father Michaels had ended the day by giving them tea and telling them about the parish register and was surprisingly forgiving. Maddison had no idea why he might be calling her.
“Is there . . . something wrong with the parish register?” Maddison asked weakly.
“You’re the first person who picked up the phone,” Father Michaels explained, which didn’t really explain anything. “Maddison, this may seem completely out of line, but I’d prefer you be angry at me than in some sort of trouble. I had a man come to my door yesterday pretending to be a federal agent and asking questions about you and the parish registers.”
“What?” Maddison said. “Me?” Had they decided to go after her father already?
“Actually, you and both your friends,” Father Michaels explained. “He asked me a lot of strange questions about who had asked to see the parish registers in the past month. I called the FBI and they’re looking for this phony agent but I wanted to make sure that you knew what was going on and to be careful. I really didn’t like the looks of him.”
For a moment, Maddison couldn’t find her voice, and then when she did, the first thing she asked was, “Did you tell my dad?”
“His phone line is busy, that’s why I called you.”
“Of course it is,” Maddison said, and thanked the priest on autopilot so she could hang up and figure out where her dad was.
He was in the study, on the phone, and Maddison heard him before she saw him, and then decided to listen in because he was arguing with someone about stalking. Specifically, that he had not noticed anyone stalking him and so this was a new development.
“Yes, well, I can hardly do anything if I don’t know what the man looks like,” he was saying. Maddison cautiously pushed the door open. Her dad was pacing back and forth across the small room waving one hand and scowling. “What—no! Why would I have robbed a bank?”
Maddison started edging her way into the room, careful not to startle him. If her dad didn’t know she was there he might say more than he usually did around her.
“Helen, I know you have a lot to do, I’m just saying this is turning into a matter of life and death and if I don’t know what he looks like I can’t—” He looked up and right at Maddison. Maddison froze. A look of supreme horror danced across her dad’s face.
“Helen, I need to call you back,” he said, lowering the phone from his ear and ending the call even as the person on the other end started yelling furiously.
“A matter of life and death?” Maddison asked, coming into the room and shutting the door. She wasn’t seeing red, but she was having trouble focusing she was suddenly so angry. “When were you planning to tell me about this?”
“Maddison,” her dad started to say.
“Don’t ‘Maddison’ me!” On some faraway level Maddison knew that starting a fight right now was a bad idea. On the much more immediate level of right now she did not care. She had passed her tolerance level for this frustrating evasion about three weeks ago, and if her dad tried the “I’ll explain everything, just not right now” route she might explode.
“I’m telling you . . . ” Her dad was trying to stuff his phone in his pocket and failing. “This is not something you want to get involved in—”
“Yes, I can tell, you sulked around in corners spying on my friends rather than facing it!” Maddison snapped. “You ran away to Nebraska rather than facing it!”
“Because it almost destroyed me last time!” her dad yelled. “I can’t watch the same thing happen to you! I won’t let you get involved in this!”
“But, you can’t seem to comprehend the fact that I am already involved!” Maddison yelled right back, startling both her father and herself. The windows may have rattled a little bit. They were both shaking. The chicken that had been perched in the window box directly outside the study window was upset and clucking furiously.
And then the door positively slammed open, and Mr. Lyndon was framed in the doorway, expression somewhere between murderous and exasperated. Apparently he had heard them yelling, and apparently Mr. Lyndon had had enough.
“All right,” he declared, glaring at Maddison, her father, and the chicken that was now pecking inquisitively at the glass of the window. “Both of you, sit down, now.” He opened the window and said kindly to the chicken, “You shoo.” Then he gave it a gentle shove out of the flower box. The chicken tried to peck at his fingers and then fluttered away in a huff. “I mean it,” he said to Maddison and her dad, who looked at each other, and then at Mr. Lyndon, and then sat down on either end of the desk. Mr. Lyndon glared at the both of them and sighed.
“You know,” he said, “I’m retired.” He crossed his arms and looked up at the ceiling, as if just rolling his eyes heavenward was no longer enough. “Do you know what that means? It means I’m supposed to be done with taking witness statements forever. I’m supposed to be done with interviewing witnesses who are confused and upset, and I’m not supposed to be comparing multiple accounts of the night in question to see if there’s anything they can agree on. But then, that’s always been a particular problem with this case, hasn’t it?”
“Greg,” Maddison’s dad started to say.
“Go on. You were going to explain to me why the San Telmo is suddenly a major factor in this case, since not once in the whole investigation did anyone other than Wyzowski mention a sunken treasure ship.”
“It—it wasn’t—as far as I knew, it had nothing to do with Ryan disappearing,” Maddison’s dad stammered, and Mr. Lyndon put his head in his hands.
“No, I mean it,” Maddison’s dad said, hopping off the desk so he could gesture wildly. “Greg—look, we were all friends! Wyzowski and Ryan and Griffin and I were in the same dorm off and on, we had something like six classes together—and we spent part of our free time looking for clues to the San Telmo together. But the night Ryan disappeared he told me he was going to a concert. And there’d been—tension between the five of us for a couple of weeks, so he’d been tiptoeing around me. I didn’t see how Ryan’s disappearance could have anything to do with the San Telmo, so, no, I didn’t mention it.”
“Wyzowski did,” Mr. Lyndon said. “Wyzowski, in between telling me that there might have been alien involvement and insisting that he had never once in his entire life tried any kind of mood-altering substance, told me that Ryan Moore had been really excited because he had just found a new clue to the mystery of the lost treasure of the San Telmo. He said Ryan was going to meet you to go looking for it the night he disappeared.”
“What?”
“Wait,” Maddison said. “Who was the fifth person?” Her dad and Mr. Lyndon turned to stare at her, her dad opening his mouth uncertainly. Mr. Lyndon looked proud that she’d noticed. “You said you and Ryan and Wyzowski and Griffin, but that’s only four. Who else was there?”
“Kevin,” Mr. Lyndon said. He sounded irritated. “You’re going to have to tell her eventually. I’m honestly shocked that you’ve managed this far without needing to explain.”
“Explain what?” Maddison wailed.
Her dad sighed. “It wasn’t just me and Ryan and Griffin and Wyzowski,” he explained. “There was another person, one who never deserved any of this.”
“And?” Maddison asked impatiently.
“She didn’t share a dorm room with us, obviously,” her dad said. “They wouldn’t do co-ed dorms for another three years.”
“Who?” Maddison demanded. Her dad sat down heavily in Mr. Lyndon’s desk chair and grabbed a random pen so he didn’t have to look at anyone.
“Elsie Kingsolver,” he said.