CHRIS HAD A BEDROOM ON THE GROUND FLOOR with a concrete garden bench right under his window, as he had the bedroom that looked into his mother’s garden. So it wasn’t at all hard to climb in his window, although if a parent caught someone there would be scolding about messing up the air conditioning and then pointed questions about what was wrong with using the front door like a civilized person. And anyway, Carrie wasn’t the sort of person to climb in windows in the first place, so Chris was really very confused.
“Um,” he said as Carrie stomped across his bed while he was in it. “Hello, cousin?”
“Sorry,” Carrie said, “I didn’t think you’d be in bed yet.”
“I was checking Facebook on my phone,” Chris admitted, “so I wasn’t exactly asleep, but—why did you climb in my window?”
“I know, and I’m sorry about that,” Carrie said, which didn’t answer the question. “But I don’t want my mom and dad to know that you know what I’m going to do tomorrow so I need to warn you about it—”
“Carrie!” Chris had seen her like this only once before, when she’d told a teacher the exact truth in just such a way that the boy who’d been picking on the whole second grade class got suspended. “What did you do?”
Carrie opened her mouth, apparently to angrily demand to know why Chris thought she’d done anything, then seemed to realize the exact circumstances and deflated a bit.
“I lost my necklace,” she said.
“That . . . sucks?” Chris tried, because he wasn’t sure where this was going.
“At the Archive today,” Carrie explained. “And it was the one Aunt Elsie left me—”
“You lost that!?”
“Not by accident!” Carrie hissed. “It was the only one I was wearing and we needed to get back in that office!”
Chris blinked. “You left your locket in the office today?” he asked. Carrie nodded.
“In a desk drawer,” she said. “I’m going to call Professor Griffin tomorrow and see if he’ll let us come back and look for it. I’m hoping it’ll give us an excuse to move the desk and the file cabinets, and I might be able to convince McRae that I really don’t want help finding it on account of it being so personal and me being so embarrassed.”
“I don’t know if that will stop him,” Chris said. “He’s kinda creepy. You don’t think he knows something about what happened to Aunt Elsie, do you?”
“Oh, probably!” Carrie said. “He sure seems interested in us, and Aunt Elsie, and her office—”
“Which is going to be his office soon,” Chris pointed out.
“I know,” Carrie said glumly, and they sat side by side in the dark, wondering if they’d bitten off more than they could chew.
“Well, today is a Thursday,” Chris said finally. “And the Archive is closed for the next three days because the person who used to come in on the weekends is gone, so we have the weekend to plan.”
“And Monday is a grace period,” Carrie added. “Because McRae has to go up to his old office on Monday and get the last of his things.” When Chris looked confused she rolled her eyes and added, “He told me allll about it while he was helping me carry a box out to the car. I have no clue what he wants but it is totally not Aunt Elsie’s job.”
“Great,” Chris sighed. “So we still haven’t found the box or even the floorboard, you had to lose your locket, and we have no idea what the deal is with McRae.”
“An excellent summary,” Carrie said, turning reluctantly to the window. “Not that we—actually—”
“What?”
“Oooooooohhhh!” Carrie breathed. A delighted smile broke across her face.
“Carrie, what?” Chris asked. That smile of delighted plotting never, ever boded well.
“I might possibly be able to do something about McRae,” Carrie said sweetly, and scrambled out the window, through the backyard, and over the fence, leaving behind her a very puzzled and alarmed cousin.
Carrie did not pop out of the woodwork the next morning, despite the vaguely panicked impression Chris woke up with as a result of a series of dreams about cars exploding and Carrie dressed as a mobster telling him that “McRae’s been taken care of.” It took him some time to remember that she was working at the school until noon and did not own anything with pinstripes. Chris spent the morning eating cornflakes and watching a television special on Bigfoot, turned the television off violently when a car restoration show came on, and then gave up and did all his chores except the mail, which he was in the middle of sorting when Carrie finally did call him.
“Chris,” she said, “how do you feel about terrible action movies?”
“Weren’t we going to . . . ?” Chris trailed off significantly as his mom wandered past, looking surprised that he’d already done a load of laundry. He wasn’t sure if they had been planning to do something, but he was sure that an action movie wasn’t going to help them deal with Dr. McRae.
Unless it was an action movie about mobsters and Carrie really was planning to sink the man into the harbor wearing concrete overshoes and needed to watch a movie for research, but Chris didn’t think his subconscious was that accurate.
“This will help,” Carrie said. “I’m ninety-five-point-nine percent sure.”
“Um,” Chris said, wondering at the point nine. “Sure. Are you coming by or should I meet you there?”
“No!” Carrie said. “Chris, we’re coming to get you in, like, half an hour. Do not still have your pajamas on!”
Then she hung up, leaving Chris to slowly realize that she’d said “we” instead of “I” and that he was, in fact, still in his pajamas.
There were two people in the car when Carrie swung by to pick him up. One of them of course was Carrie, looking cheerful and wearing yellow and demonstrating that Mrs. Hadler still had not eaten her. Chris was always slightly afraid that she would, and had probably read The Librarian from the Black Lagoon at an impressionable age, because Mrs. Hadler wasn’t even a librarian.
The other person in the car was a girl the same age as Chris and Carrie, with her long dark hair caught up in a ponytail and a pair of strangely familiar sunglasses snagged in her collar. Her eyes were a bright and vivid blue and she was very nearly the prettiest person Chris had ever seen. She was also weirdly familiar, as though he’d seen her in passing a long time ago and never caught her name, and Chris found himself staring, trying to remember where he had seen her, trying to force her name onto the tip of his tongue. She’d been, not sad, but grave . . . wait. She was the girl from the funeral! His pulse suddenly racing from the shock of seeing a mystery up close and personal, Chris realized that he was frozen halfway into the backseat, staring. He gave himself a stern shake and scrambled into the back.
“Hey,” he said, giving Carrie a desperately questioning look and scrabbling around for the seatbelt.
“Heya,” Carrie chirped, bright and sing-song. “Maddison, this is my cousin Chris.”
“Hi,” the newly introduced Maddison said, offering Chris her hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“Chris,” Carrie said, “this is Maddison, she’s new in town and she’s been working in the office with me. Her dad’s the new archivist at Edgewater.”
The world didn’t exactly stutter to a halt, but Chris felt as though his stomach switched dimensions for a second.
“Oh,” he said, uncomfortably aware that his voice started out an octave higher than normal and then took a swan dive. “Dr. McRae?”
“He’s my dad,” Maddison agreed wryly, with a self-deprecating sweep of her hands. “Maddison McRae, at your service. I’m shamelessly exploiting your cousin’s good nature.”
“It’s apparently hard to make friends in a new area when school is closed for the summer,” Carrie said. “I mean, unless you want to become best buddies with Mrs. Hadler—”
“I like her,” Maddison said, chewing on the strap on her sunglasses. “She’s fierce.”
“And terrifying,” Chris added, still trying to deal with the dizzy heat haze that was swimming in his vision whenever he looked at Maddison. She was just so incredibly pretty. And funny, even though he’d only known her for a few minutes. And—oh no . . .
Carrie, blissfully unaware of her cousin’s sudden revelation that he had a crush on the daughter of the villain of the piece, added to his mortification by saying, “Well, if you’re Chris, Mrs. Hadler’s the devil walking among us. He tried to pass off a fake absence note in third grade and she caught him.”
“Carrie,” Chris protested, because it had been years and nobody in the family would let him live that down. Also now Maddison was looking at him.
It wasn’t as though Chris had never had a crush on someone before; he’d pined for Lindsey Ipcress from first grade all the way through eighth, when her family suddenly moved to Wisconsin over winter break. And he’d actually asked Nancy Brewer to the spring formal last year. It was just that something in his head bounced up on springs when he saw Maddison, and he felt that he wanted nothing more than to talk to her forever but also that he’d melt into a puddle if she looked at him too long.
“Oh my gosh, what happened?” Maddison asked, turning all the way around in her seat to stare at him. Chris tried furiously to be cool and not melt, because it felt like he had a giant neon “I Have a Crush on You” sign flashing over his head. “Did she turn into her secret dragon form and eat you?”
“She . . . called my parents, and I got detention, and then she graded my technique and execution,” Chris said, forcing himself to meet Maddison’s eyes and not blush too much. Maybe he should be thankful they were talking about something embarrassing, it gave him an excuse to turn red.
“Also,” Carrie said, “she told him he had a great future ahead of him as a counterfeiter. Chris always leaves that part out to garner more sympathy.”
“Good for you,” Maddison said. “Counterfeiting’s a useful skill, not that I would know or anything.”
“Heh,” Chris managed. “Me neither. One try, and then I was scared straight!” Then he realized that he had just insulted her compliment, unless she’d meant it ironically, which he couldn’t tell, and—oh this was a disaster.
“Ah-hem,” Carrie added, making both Chris and Maddison jump, and realize that she was already leaning against the side of the car. Which she had parked in the parking lot of the movie theater at some point while Chris was shooting himself in the foot. “We’re here, by the way,” Carrie said, unfairly amused. Then she opened the door for Maddison while Chris was still fumbling with his seatbelt.
The movie, presumably picked by Carrie because it was conveniently playing just after she and Maddison got off work—she appeared to want to make friends—was called Space Nazis at Roswell. Almost the only good thing about the movie was the convenient timing. It was a movie about Nazis fighting aliens in the 1950s in New Mexico and there were a dozen confusing plot holes and a strangely violent subplot involving llamas. And all but one of the main characters died in the third act, preceding the unexpected reveal that the nuclear launch codes had in fact been stolen by Sasquatch.
Chris was particularly confused because there had been no mention of a Sasquatch in the movie until the last act, although Maddison had innocently parked herself in the seat beside him and asked if he wanted some of her popcorn and his sudden crush had made concentration so difficult he could well have missed it.
“Actually,” Maddison said when he brought the subject up over pizza in Carrie’s living room—the unexpected Sasquatch, not the unexpected crush—because Carrie invited Maddison over for takeout and Chris was suffering for conversation topics, “when they find the footage of Fritz sneaking into the bunker it’s shot like the Patterson tape.”
“The what?”
“Most famous film footage of Bigfoot,” Maddison said, gesturing with a slice. Seeing Carrie’s quizzical look she shrugged and added, “It’s cryptozoology and folklore, I think it’s fun. You can find it weird if you want.”
“Believe me, we’re both a lot weirder,” Chris said, googling the Patterson tape. “Wow, this is shaky—oh, I see what you mean.”
“It looks like a person in a gorilla suit,” Carrie said, peering over his shoulder.
“Many people agree with you,” Maddison said gravely through a mouthful of pizza.
“Anyway, Bigfoot? Aliens?” Carrie asked.
“You caught that,” Maddison said.
“I guessed,” Carrie admitted. “Nobody mutters about ‘grays don’t do that’ and ‘that is not the hollow earth theory’ unless they know a little something about aliens.”
“Yeah,” Maddison sighed, poking her pizza to avoid looking at them. “It’s just a hobby. I’m the kid of a history professor and an art gallery manager. Developing an interest in the otherworldly was self-defense. It keeps people from trying to talk to me at regional history conferences.” Chris manfully suppressed an irritated look at the mention of Maddison’s father but apparently wasn’t fast enough, because Maddison saw him and blew out another sigh.
“See, there’s my dad, making things complicated again.”
“It really wasn’t—” Chris started.
“It’s not your dad,” Carrie said. “It’s that he took our aunt’s job so suddenly . . . ”
“I know,” Maddison said. “I don’t know why he did, either. I mean, they’d asked him if he would think of coming in and consulting occasionally on this lost mission in a national park project—he teaches American history but his specialty was early Spanish colonization of the Americas—and he said no like three times, but then they gave him first priority when the whole post was open and he took it.”
“Was the pay better?” Chris asked.
“I think it’s the same,” Maddison said. “He bounced around a bit when I was little so he didn’t have tenure, and it wasn’t a locked-in position or anything, but Mom runs an art gallery and we aren’t desperate for money. Dad just came home one evening and said ‘we’re moving.’ It’s been weird.”
“Tell me about it,” Chris said.
“Oh,” Maddison said. “I’m so sorry, that was rude, me complaining about having to move.”
“It really isn’t your fault,” Carrie said. “It was an accident, and you’ve been more than kind, and the strange things our parents do shouldn’t reflect on us.”
“I hope so,” Maddison said. “Dad’s been acting squirrely. And he insisted we go to your aunt’s funeral, did you notice?”
“I thought I recognized you,” Chris admitted.
“Our moving truck hadn’t even made it to the house yet,” Maddison said. “Mom and I had to stop at a department store just to get something black to wear, but Dad insisted that we go. He claims it was only respectful, but I just think it was tasteless, and I know it made Mom furious. Plus, when the moving truck did get to the house we were at the funeral, and all the basement boxes ended up in the attic.” She paused. “Did your aunt, I don’t know . . . know any Kevin McRaes?”
“Not that I know of,” Chris said. “The name isn’t at all familiar.”
“Did your dad know any Elsie Kingsolvers?” Chris asked.
“No,” Maddison said. “I think I’d remember a name like Kingsolver. I just wondered—I mean, if they had known each other and then had a falling out—it might explain something?”
“As far as I know there’s nothing,” Chris said. Carrie was spinning the ring on her finger to avoid looking at either Maddison or Chris, but for what reason Chris didn’t know.
“It’s a mystery,” she said finally, looking up and breaking the slowly gathering tension as she did so. “So! Maddison—how do you like the neighborhood?”
It was a transparent attempt to change the subject but Maddison seized it.
“Well, the first and only local event I’ve been to was a funeral,” she said, but she was smiling a little. “There don’t seem to be many kids my own age around, and my Dad is going around muttering about sixteenth-century charters.”
“That’s more or less to be expected,” Carrie said, getting up and gathering the now-empty pizza box and the discarded paper plates. “Almost everyone we know is either on vacation or away at camp right now, in order to avoid the tourists.”
“Or helping their cousin work a lobster boat in Maine,” Chris grumbled, and Carrie whacked him on the head with the pizza box.
“Who’s lobstering?” Maddison asked.
“Chris’s best friend Jacob,” Carrie said. “And my friend Sadie. We’ve both been left for a lobster, or in my case a chance to get loads of practice piloting a boat. It’s just me and Chris until the last week of July.”
“Can I join you?” Maddison asked. “Otherwise I’ll spend the whole summer reading books about local ghosts and trying to research the Bermuda Triangle. And looking forward to the weekly Bigfoot documentaries on TV.”
Chris gave Carrie a meaningful look, because she was perpetually leaving Bigfoot documentaries on in the background, but Carrie just ignored him.
“Sure,” she said. “Although I should warn you we were basically going to watch a show about finding ghosts and argue about it all day Sunday.”
Chris and Carrie had a very strange relationship with television shows about “experts” hunting mythological creatures or doing overly scripted archeology, and they both knew it. It was a product of their fathers’ joint aversion. Robby and Brian Kingsolver were both violently opposed to that sort of show, but not, as far as their kids could determine, for moral or artistic reasons. They simply refused to watch anything on any channel that was about finding Bigfoot or Atlantis, and when asked for a reason, complained about believability.
Chris actually thought the shows were interesting, Carrie seemed to find them amusing on a comic level, and neither of their mothers cared. Except Aunt Helen, who had to avoid any television with rapidly flashing lights because she got migraines.
What Aunt Elsie had thought of the Great Kingsolver Television Debacle nobody knew, because she didn’t have a television. Why Robby and Brian Kingsolver had such an aversion had never been clear; most of the family treated it as an amusing quirk and neither Chris’s uncle nor his dad were interested in explaining, preferring instead to watch six hours of cat shows or accidently catch the fruit salad on fire rather than watch one episode of Treasure Hunters. Chris’s dad had difficulties cooking.
Maddison left not long after agreeing that ghosts were better than loneliness, because her mom was on her way home from work and could pick her up. Chris waited until the car had pulled all the way out of the drive to collapse to the couch, dizzy with suppressed feeling.
“She’d been helping me sort student records since last Monday.” Carrie’s eyes were dancing with amusement.
“But you didn’t—”
“I knew she was familiar but I couldn’t place her until I met her dad the other day.”
“So you—”
“Invited her to the movies with us, yes.”
“And I—”
“Have the world’s biggest crush!” Carrie gasped, and burst out laughing. Chris scowled at her. Carrie continued to laugh, a little hysterically, and finally sat down on the couch hiccupping with giggles.
Chris gave her his most plaintive and woeful expression and she finally subsided, more or less.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s been a long week and . . . your face!”
“She’s just . . . ” Chris tried, and then couldn’t think of an appropriate adjective and gave up. “And her dad may be out to kill and eat all of us . . . ”
“Leaving aside the question of just what you’ve been watching on television,” Carrie said, “I don’t think Maddison knows any more than we do.”
“I think we may know a lot more than she does,” Chris said. “I mean I think I do—you don’t think that she—”
“No, I don’t think she knows anything at all about this mess,” Carrie said. “Otherwise I don’t think she’d have asked us if our aunt knew her dad.” She stopped. “Do you think?”
“It doesn’t seem likely,” Chris said. “She never even mentioned him to us, and none of our parents recognized his name when the professor mentioned it.”
“Then why go to the funeral?”
“To scope out the lay of the land?”
“Now there’s a scary thought.”
Chris began digging his shoes out from under the couch. “I like her, though,” he said to the cushions, not trusting himself with face-to-face at the moment. Carrie smacked him lightly on the arm anyway, but all she said was, “Yeah, I liked her too. That’s why I offered to pick her up on my way to work tomorrow.”
“You’re trying to kill me,” Chris groaned.