Harry was roasting marshmallows over the campfire and Alison was helping the little kids with theirs while Mrs. Rupe reclined watching the small portable TV from the bedroom compartment. During a commercial, she smiled at me. “Don’t you like marshmallows, Lewis?”
“Uh, yeah, usually,” I said uneasily. Just looking at them after all that pizza and ice cream made me queasy. “Not tonight, though.”
She looked around. “Where did Milton disappear to?”
“I think he walked over to talk to those people in that mini motor home,” I said, gesturing.
She nodded. “Oh,” she said, and then, “Did you want something, sir?”
I glanced up, and there he was again. The guy I’d run into while I was chasing Billy.
He smiled. It looked like he had false teeth. “I dropped my car keys earlier today somewhere around here. I wondered if you’d found them.”
“No. I didn’t see any,” Mrs. Rupe said.
Everybody else shrugged or shook their heads. “Nope,” Harry said.
The false teeth vanished. “Well, thanks anyway,” he said, and went on across the grass.
“Didn’t he look kind of familiar?” Mrs. Rupe asked nobody in particular. “Who is he?”
Nobody answered.
“Lewis,” my sister said, “would you get me a wet washcloth? I don’t dare let go of Ariadne until I’ve cleaned off her hands. They’re pretty sticky.”
“I thought you were the baby-sitter,” I said, but I got up from the picnic table bench. I knew perfectly well one girl alone couldn’t keep up with both those kids.
“Bring me a can of pop on your way back,” Harry called, and I gave him a wave of acknowledgment. How he could still be eating and drinking was beyond me.
I went into the bathroom and got a washcloth, running water over it and then wringing it out. As I started to leave the rig, something clinked against my foot and I looked down.
Keys. About eight of them on a key ring with a Seattle Seahawks medallion on it.
I bent and picked them up. I hadn’t noticed how Mr. Rupe carried his keys, but I hadn’t seen anyone else have any, so I took them along, remembering at the last minute to get Harry a can of 7UP, and went back outside.
Harry took the pop without saying “thank you,” and Alison did thank me for the washcloth, which she promptly applied to a squirming Ariadne. I extended the keys toward Mrs. Rupe.
“I guess Mr. Rupe dropped these in the bathroom,” I said.
She glanced at them, still half-absorbed in her sitcom. “No, those aren’t Milton’s. He doesn’t have a key ring like that. Oh!” For a few seconds she actually looked at me. “That man was looking for keys. Maybe they’re his.”
“Inside our motor home?” I asked, incredulous.
“Oh, probably one of the children found them and took them inside. Why don’t you go see if you can find him and ask?”
I looked at Billy, who shook his head. “I didn’t find them. Can I have that thing? I like the Seahawks.”
“No, it belongs to the guy who lost the keys,” I said. I hesitated, then glanced at Harry. “You want to come?”
“Sure,” Harry said, drinking half his 7UP in one long gulp.
We didn’t see the passenger from the Crown Victoria, but the man I guessed to be the driver was sitting at the picnic table beside the car, reading the paper and drinking something out of a paper cup. He looked at us but didn’t speak until I held out the keys. “Are these the ones that were lost?”
He gave me a neutral glance, then accepted the keys. “Thanks,” he said and went back to reading his newspaper.
“You’re welcome,” I said. As we walked away I remarked to Harry, “Friendly fellow, wasn’t he? Listen, the other guy was right there by our coach during the fire. What if Billy and Ariadne didn’t find the keys. What if that guy dropped them inside himself?”
“What would a stranger be doing in our motor home?” Harry asked. “Nah, Billy probably did it. He just didn’t want to admit it.”
I didn’t see why he’d hesitate to tell the truth. Nobody ever punished or even scolded him no matter what he did. But I didn’t say anything.
The next day we got out of the campground without running over anything but a hose stretched across the road. Somebody yelled after us, but Mr. Rupe didn’t seem to hear him.
“Tomorrow we’ll be in Yellowstone,” he said as we drove along the highway. “It was the first national park, you know. And it’s still the most visited of them all. We’ll see all kinds of wild animals and geysers and those mud pot things.”
“What are geysers?” Billy asked, and Harry said, “Mud doesn’t sound interesting.”
“The geysers are hot water that spouts up out of the ground under pressure,” I said. “Dad looked it up online when we knew we were coming. They call the most famous one Old Faithful, because it goes off so often—twenty-one to twenty-three times a day. It squirts as much as one hundred thirty to one hundred eighty feet up in the air; seventy-five hundred gallons a day.”
Harry was scowling. “We came all this way to see tons of water and mud?”
“It’s boiling mud,” I said. “My dad told us about it. And I think some of it’s colored.”
“Big deal,” Harry said. “I’d rather see all the wild animals.”
“Are there tigers?” Billy asked eagerly.
“No tigers,” I told him. “Bears, maybe. And deer and elk and moose. And buffalo.”
“I want to pet a bear,” Ariadne piped up.
Alison shook her head. “These are wild animals, Ariadne. You can’t pet them. You can only take pictures of them.”
The little girl’s eyes were wide. “Will wild animals bite me?”
“Not if you stay back away from them,” Alison assured her.
“Can we feed them?” Billy asked.
“No. You aren’t allowed to feed them,” I said, glad Dad had looked up a little about it. “It would make them sick.”
Actually, the food we were eating was beginning to make me sort of sick. Alison and I had never had so much junk food in our lives, and we’d only been gone from home for a few days. I never thought I’d look forward to a salad or a serving of peas, and even broccoli sounded better than another potato chip.
“We’re going to stay in a campground outside of Yellowstone,” Mrs. Rupe told us. “It’s not far away, and it has better facilities than the park,” she said. “We’ll have a store and a laundry and a playground for the little kids and an indoor heated pool. Besides, the campgrounds inside the park were all full by the time I called.”
The campground turned out to be neat. We went to the swimming pool first thing. It was surprising how fast Billy and Ariadne were catching on to swimming. They weren’t especially graceful, but they could keep themselves afloat all right.
Harry was the kind of guy who liked to sneak up behind you and jerk you under. He even did it to Alison, who didn’t care for it much when she didn’t have a chance to get a good breath of air first. There were some other kids there, though, and they invited us to a water volleyball game with a big ball, and that distracted Harry from any more dunking.
The RV park was full, and after a while so many people came in the pool that we decided to get out. “Hey,” Harry said, “let’s go play video games. There’s an arcade right off the laundry room.”
I knew Harry had more spending money than I did, and I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to spend on video games, so I was glad when Alison came to call us to supper.
We walked back to our campsite, smelling everybody else’s hamburgers and hot dogs being grilled. People were sitting around their picnic tables or eating in their rigs with the doors open, so we could tell what most of them were having. I hadn’t eaten any junk all afternoon, so I was hungry. I hoped we weren’t having more chips, at least for tonight.
We were, though. With grilled cheese sandwiches. Mr. and Mrs. Rupe had been invited over to the Nabakowskis—in the mini motor home from the last campground—for steaks.
“You kids can toast your sandwiches all right, can’t you?” Mrs. Rupe asked cheerfully. Without waiting for a reply, the Rupes were out the door and gone.
I looked at the refrigerator. “Is there anything green in there?”
“A head of lettuce. There was a cucumber, but I think it got slimy already. Listen, I’ll fix hot sandwiches and make a salad if you’ll take Billy and Ariadne outside and watch them. I can’t do this and keep track of them, too. Make them sit at the picnic bench.”
So I tried. Harry could have helped, but he didn’t. He was talking to a girl in red shorts from the trailer two spaces down.
I sighed. “Sit right here,” I told the little kids, “while I bring out the paper plates and stuff, okay?”
When I came back, fifteen seconds later, Ariadne was gone. Billy was watching a column of ants cross the table to a spot of what might have been jam left by the last users.
“Where’s your sister?” I demanded.
Billy looked up vaguely. “I don’t know.”
I cursed under my breath. “I’ll have to go look for her. You stay put. On second thought, you’d better come with me so I can watch you.”
Reluctantly, Billy left the ants. “She went to see the bears, maybe.”
“She can’t see the bears. They’re in the park, and we aren’t there yet.”
There were people all over the place, cooking, eating, heading for the pool or back from it, crowding into the store. Ariadne had been wearing a red swimsuit, but half the kids out running around had red somethings on. We passed Harry, and I called, “Come help us look for your little sister.”
He waved, but the girl was smiling at him, and he didn’t come with us. “Nothing will happen to her with all these people around,” he said and kept on talking to the girl in red shorts.
I snorted. Did he really think all these strangers were going to look out for Ariadne?
We walked from one end of the camp to the other and didn’t see her. We met Alison, with an anxious look on her face, when we were almost back to our motor home.
“I can’t find her,” I said. “If she’s moving, she could be staying just ahead of us.”
Alison bit her lip. “And it’ll be our fault if anything happens to her. Why didn’t you get Harry to help look?”
I rolled my eyes. “Harry’s not much use in an emergency. You don’t think she could have gone back to the pool, do you?”
“I hope not. I’ll go check there, and you make another pass around the park. This time stop and ask people. Maybe she went in someone else’s trailer or something.”
Ten minutes later, at the far back of the campground, I stopped. Nobody had seen a little girl in a red swimsuit. I didn’t know where else to look, and I was getting pretty nervous.
“Ariadne, where are you?” I yelled in frustration.
To my great surprise, she answered. “I’m here,” she said.
I looked all around, but it wasn’t until she yelled again that I looked up.
And there was her little face, peering down at me from the top branches of the tallest cedar tree in the camp. About a mile over my head.
My stomach tightened in a knot. She had to be at least thirty feet off the ground.
My mouth went dry. “Come down,” I suggested, “and have supper.”
“Okay,” Ariadne said and disappeared. A moment later there was a flurry of movement in the branches, and I thought she’d fallen.
“Ariadne?” I asked.
Her voice sounded small. “I can’t get down, Lewis. I slid, and my hands hurt.”
My teeth came together with an audible click. “How did you get up there?”
“I climbed up to get away from the bears,” she said.
“There aren’t any bears here,” I protested, moving directly under the lower branches. I couldn’t even see her when I looked straight up.
“They would bite me,” she said, and then I caught a glimpse of red and a few needles drifting down through the branches as she slid down a bit more.
I had visions of her falling all the way and breaking her neck. And guess who’d be held responsible?
I evaluated the tree, swallowed, and called up to her. “Stay where you are, Ariadne. I’ll come and get you.”
I’d forgotten Billy. “No. You sit down, right there, and wait for me, okay?”
I didn’t know if he could be trusted or not, but I had to get Ariadne down.
The branches scratched my face and especially my ears as I climbed. It was a long way up, and the branches were getting a little small to hold my weight before I finally got within range of her. She looked scared, and reached out for me.
“If I try to carry you,” I told her, “I can’t hang on. I need both hands to get down, so I’ll stay just a step below you, to catch you if you slip, and you move down one branch at a time. Okay?”
“Okay,” Ariadne said. “See, Lewis, there’s the bear!”
I looked down where she was pointing. I might have laughed if I hadn’t been so high in the air, still having to get her safely down.
“That’s a dog, Ariadne. Not a bear.”
“No, I heard that lady call him ‘bear,’ ” she insisted.
“He’s just a big dog, and they probably named him Bear because he sort of looks like one. Get ready, now, and put one foot down, okay?”
And then I paused and leaned out a little to see better. Was that a familiar car in that last campsite way up on the side of the hill, almost hidden by a couple of trees?
It was light blue, but I couldn’t tell if it was the same car that carried the guy who claimed to have lost his keys near our coach. But now I could tell that this one was towing a small travel trailer.
Ariadne’s foot touched my shoulder, and I guided her foot onto a sturdy branch and dropped down one level myself. I hoped we both made it down all right.
It seemed to take forever, and Alison was standing there with Billy when I dropped to the ground, soaked in sweat. I handed Ariadne to her with relief.
“Let’s go eat,” I said, to cover the fact that my knees were wobbly.
“I think the first sandwiches are probably cold by now,” my sister said. “Whatever made her climb up there?”
“A bear,” Ariadne insisted, ignoring my explanation. “There! See?”
Even when we paused to talk to the lady who was walking the dog, Ariadne wouldn’t believe he was just named Bear, but was a dog, so I gave up.
I glanced over in the direction where I’d seen the blue car, but I couldn’t see it at all from the ground. By this time, though, I realized that we’d seen the same people and the same rigs in each of the campgrounds. A lot of them were heading for Yellowstone, too.
When we got back to the motor home, Harry was sitting at the picnic table, finishing the last of the sandwiches Alison had made. He hadn’t touched the salad.
Alison’s lips tightened, though I was glad we were going to get fresh, hot ones. “You might have helped,” she said.
Harry grinned. “With all those sandwiches going to waste? Didn’t Ma pack some Fig Newtons somewhere? I couldn’t find them.”
“They were in a box in one of the basement compartments,” I said. “That one, I think.”
“The keys are in the ignition,” Harry said, popping open a Coke and taking a slurp.
Meaning, I took it, that I should fetch the keys and find him the cookies. Alison wasn’t the only one gritting her teeth, but I did it.
As I turned the key in the compartment door, I heard a sound that I realized I’d heard earlier, sort of faint and far away. “Sounds like a cat around here somewhere,” I commented.
Before I could prop the door open, Billy exploded in my direction. “I want the kitty,” he cried.
And sure enough, we had a stowaway.
There he was, the big gray-striped cat Billy had been chasing at the other camp. He leaped past me and right into Billy’s arms.