The next morning, Duke stood in the kitchen doorway in an old pair of sweatpants, his face unshaven and drawn.
“I’ve got some bad news,” he said.
Amelia was swirling maple syrup on her stack of blueberry pancakes. She froze, watching the syrup sink into a pool in the middle.
“Sit down,” Diane said. “I’ve made too many pancakes—”
“I’m not hungry,” Duke said. “But thanks all the same.”
“It’s Winston, isn’t it?” Amelia’s words tumbled out in a rush. “He’s getting way worse. He needs that drug—”
“He died.”
Diane put down her fork. “Oh no.”
“Sometime last night, I think. Or maybe early this morning. When I went in to check on him, he was gone.”
“He can’t be dead,” Amelia said. “We were trying so hard.” The back of her eyelids ached. She closed her eyes tightly, but tears squeezed through, dripping onto her pancakes.
“I am so sorry,” Diane said. “If you could have got that drug, would it have saved him?”
“I don’t know. It was a long shot. Winston was very sick. I think his kidneys failed him at the end.”
“It’s not fair.” Amelia pushed away her plate of pancakes. She would choke if she swallowed one bite.
“Winston was suffering,” Duke said quietly. “And now he’s not. And Amelia, I want you to pick a place to bury him.”
Fresh tears flooded Amelia’s cheeks. She felt her mom’s arms wrap around her shoulders.
When she could trust herself to talk, she said, “In Marguerite’s garden.”
“It’s called Moondance,” Marguerite said. “It’s one of my favorite roses. Smell one, Amelia.”
Amelia put her nose almost inside one of the frothy, creamy-white flowers. It had a wonderful spicy smell. “Can we bury him here?” she said to Duke. “Right beside this rose bush?”
“It’s a perfect spot,” Duke agreed.
Marguerite gave Duke a shovel. Diane, Gabriella and Marguerite watched while Duke dug a deep hole. Amelia couldn’t bear to look. She knelt beside the cardboard box on the grass. Winston was inside, wrapped in a soft green towel.
Duke had asked Amelia if she wanted to see Winston, and she had cried harder and said no. Now she changed her mind. She pulled back the corner of the towel. “He looks peaceful,” she breathed.
Duke put down the shovel. “Ready?”
Amelia carefully folded the towel back around the tortoise. “Ready.”
“It’s time for me to steal Amelia,” Duke said.
“Just make sure you bring her back before midnight,” Diane said, “or the bus will turn into a pumpkin.”
“We’re walking,” Duke said.
Diane gave Amelia a hug. “Have fun, Cinderella.”
“Where are we going?” Amelia said when they got outside.
“It’s a surprise,” Duke said.
“Does Mom know?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why can’t—”
“Shush.”
They walked for twenty minutes, through neighborhoods Amelia had never been in before. She loved walking in the dark. Duke carried a flashlight, but he kept it turned off, because there was enough light from the streetlights. She also liked that they didn’t talk. She wanted to think about Winston.
Then Duke turned onto the street in front of an elementary school. He flicked on the flashlight. “We’re going around the back.”
They walked across a playground, past the dark shapes of a climbing jungle and teeter-totters and onto a grassy playing field. Amelia stumbled on the bumpy ground, and Duke shone the flashlight in front of their feet.
“Okay,” he said when they got to the far edge of the field. “There’s a little hilly place where we can sit.”
In the beam from the flashlight, Amelia could see smooth black water just below them, with tall reeds growing in the middle. She sat on the ground beside Duke and pulled her knees up to her chin. Duke turned the flashlight off.
“How did you find this place?” she whispered. She somehow felt she should whisper. She still wasn’t sure why they were there, but it had the feeling of a great adventure.
“I thought I’d found a shortcut home from the gas station,” Duke whispered back. “Turned out I was wrong. But I found this pond. Right in the middle of the city. There’s a little creek that runs into it. Neat, huh? Now let’s be quiet and listen.”
Somewhere a dog barked, and she could hear the distant sound of traffic. Amelia concentrated.
And then she heard it. A hoarse, gravelly sound that made her jump.
“What is it?” she said.
“A frog,” Duke said. “He was here last time too.”
Duke was very still beside her. Amelia made herself keep still too. The frog kept up a steady croaking, and she thought it was the coolest sound she had ever heard. The cars and the barking dog disappeared, and she felt like they were a million miles away, in the middle of a jungle or a swamp. She could tell that the frog was close, maybe right in front of them.
“Why is it croaking?” she said in a low voice.
“Looking for a mate or telling other male frogs to stay away. Or maybe he’s telling us it’s going to rain. Some tropical frogs do that.”
“Like a weather forecast,” Amelia said. She loved the croaking sound. Part of her wished she could see the frog, but it was more mysterious this way.
Then there was silence, with just the faint whisper of a breeze through leaves, and she shivered.
“Cold?” Duke said.
“No.”
“Me neither. Was that the first time you’ve heard a wild frog?”
“Yeah.”
“Nice.”
Amelia thought of the fire-bellied toads and Nate the tomato frog and felt sad. “I wish Nate and the toads could be wild,” she said. “And Mary and Kilo and Apollo and Oliver. Oh, and Pinecone too. And Bill and the snakes. Everybody.”
“I wish they could too. But they probably came from pet stores and wouldn’t know how to survive. We could never just set them free. Look what happened to Winston.”
“I know they couldn’t live here. Only in the rainforest or desert or wherever they came from.”
They were quiet for a moment.
Then Duke said, “One of these days I’m going to go to the Galapagos Islands.”
“Where’s that?”
“In South America, near Ecuador. You can take boat tours there. It’s kind of a wildlife paradise. There are iguanas, lizards, geckos and a tortoise called the Galapagos tortoise that can get to be 150 years old. And tons of birds. All living wild. I’d love to see it.”
“I’m going to go there too,” Amelia said.
“Well,” Duke said, getting to his feet and stretching, “I think that old frog is done for tonight.”
Amelia stood up too. “The money in the pickle jar. It was all for nothing, wasn’t it?”
“What?” Duke said. “No way! We’ve got all the other animals to look after. They depend on us. And because of you, everyone in the neighborhood wants to help.”
He grinned. “Mick was actually excited about cleaning up ferret poop yesterday. You can’t give up on me now, Amelia.”
“I won’t.”