Chapter 20

The building was vacant, everyone apparently drawn to the mock battles outside. He paused, wondering which way Lester and his dad had gone.

Loud voices drew him toward the chapel.

He peered around the corner into the brightly lit room. The walls were plastered white, with skylights and windows letting in enough daylight to illuminate every corner, even under the gloomy clouds. There were no places to hide. But there was no sign of his father or the box thief. Suddenly, though, he could hear them.

“Pete, you’re out of time,” Lester said.

“Look, I explained it to you,” his dad replied. “The delays couldn’t be helped. We’re still a go for tonight. And it’s looking good.”

Fred surveyed the room. Where were the voices coming from? He turned around and went back into the hallway. There was no sign of the pair, nor could he hear them. He returned to the chapel, and the voices were clear as a bell. Where were they?

“Why don’t you give me the details on what you have so far?” Lester said. “I need this. If you don’t deliver…”

The threat hung in the air.

“Patience. We’re a go for the boat tonight. It’ll take us right to it.”

“We’ll never get a chance like this again!” Lester said, his voice louder.

“Take it easy, Lester,” Fred’s dad said. “You’ll get what’s coming to you.”

“I’d better.”

The door to the confessional cracked open, and the curtain on the other side also moved.

Overcome with an instinct to hide, Fred retreated from the room and ducked into a nearby stairwell. Pressed against the wall, he held his breath. Footsteps echoed off the stone and faded away. His heartbeat throbbed in his ears. Fred waited another full minute, and then poked his head into the tunnel. The coast was clear.

Sighing with relief at escaping detection, he couldn’t resist one more look to see where they were headed. He exited the bastion and stood on the wooden bridge over the weed-filled former moat. The men had separated, Lester the box thief turning toward the campsites on the hill, and his dad veering toward the museum and the ruins down the hill to the right of town.

His eyes instinctively followed Lester as he trudged through the various sites and entered the same empty tent Fred had searched earlier. Lester must have kept the box with him.

It seemed from the conversation with his dad that whatever Lester was up to, he couldn’t have opened the box. That made sense, didn’t it? He’d have been talking about it if he had, wouldn’t he? Not about some boat. So, Fred still had time. While his brain was busily formulating a plan, he walked slowly, returning to the crowds and noise of the bastion courtyard.

* * *

“So, what’s the plan?” Grace asked. They were strolling back down the hill toward town.

Fred hadn’t gotten far with the actual planning part of the plan, so he really had nothing to offer. “I’m thinking.”

“Uh-huh,” Grace said. “Translation: not a sweet clue.”

Fred scowled. Grace was annoying sometimes. Make that a lot of the time. “Well, why don’t you come up with something?”

“I would, Freddo, no problem, but you haven’t told us what the heck is going on around here!”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re not blind,” Grace said. “We saw your dad with that Lester creep.”

“And we saw you follow them,” Mai added softly, “without us.”

He felt a flush stain his face. “Yeah, about that—”

“If he’s working with your dad, then why don’t you ask your dad about your box?” Jeeter suggested. “He’d be the logical choice, right?”

Fred frowned at Jeeter.

“Hey, I’m just saying,” Jeeter said.

Fred didn’t answer, staring instead at the harbour. They were back on the quay. The tall ships were visiting as part of the encampment, half a dozen of them anchored in the harbour. Would his dad have been talking about one of those boats? There were no others in the harbour, so it would have to be one of them. He just had to find out which one.

“Freddy,” a soft voice said.

He whipped around. “Mom?”

She was as white and pasty as uncooked dough. Tendrils of her hair had escaped her bonnet and clung limply to her damp forehead. She grasped his sleeve. Her hand was shaking.

“I think I overdid it,” she said shakily. “I need to lie down for a minute.”

He thought of the heaping pile he’d left in his tent. “C’mon, I’ll take you. Mai, I’m going to put her in yours, okay?”

Mai’s brown eyes, full of concern, met his. “Of course.” She gently took his mom’s other arm and they guided her the short distance to their site.

Grace pulled back the tent flap. “Um, excuse my mess,” she said, grabbing clothes off the floor on her side of the tent and tossing them to the corner.

Mai helped his mom to her sleeping bag, neatly arranged on the floor. His mom sighed and closed her eyes, draping her arm across her forehead. “Don’t let me sleep more than fifteen minutes,” she said, her voice already thick and sluggish. Within seconds, her breathing was slow and deep.

Grace went back outside, leaving Fred and Mai inside with his sleeping mother. Fred flopped down onto Grace’s crumpled sleeping bag. He felt winded, like he’d just run a race.

Mai’s hair brushed against his face as she sat down beside him. She wrapped her arms around her bent legs and rested her chin on her knees. They watched his mom as she slept.

“Why didn’t you tell me about your mom?”

Fred could hear the hurt in Mai’s voice. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m your best friend. I could have helped.”

Fred sighed. “I know.”

“So why didn’t you?”

He searched for the words. His thoughts from the past two months were all crammed together in his head, like a pile of dirty laundry stuffed in a hamper. He struggled to pull them apart. Into something that made sense.

“It was so weird,” he said. That was lame. Not really what he meant, either. “I mean, it came out of nowhere. It was suppertime. Mom was sitting in the lawnchair wrapped in a blanket. I was barbecuing hamburgers and she says, ‘The cancer is back,’ as if she was asking me to pass the ketchup.” He heard his voice, raspy and uneven.

Mai reached out and squeezed his hand.

“She said she had felt something was wrong for a while, that it might be back, but she’d been afraid to get tested. She was catching every cold, everything that was going around all winter. Her immune system was toast. I was out spelunking in sinkholes without a care in the world and Mom had cancer.”

“That’s not your fault. You didn’t know.”

Blood rushed to his head. Fred sucked in a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “Then I kept thinking, you know, how we saved Grace’s dad and everything. I felt like…I felt like all the ‘save the parents’ luck had been used up, you know? I mean, what were the odds both of them would be okay? Grace’s dad and my mom? I couldn’t face you guys. I couldn’t face Grace’s happy ending day after day. Not while I was looking after Mom.”

“It’s okay.”

Tears leaked from his eyes and his throat burned. “Mom didn’t have any benefits from the bakery. No sick days. No insurance. And Dad was self-employed. She was so sick from the pneumonia, she could hardly get out of bed. It was like that for weeks. I was doing everything—cooking, laundry, all of it. Then the dive shop closed a couple of weeks ago out of the blue. Dad’s contract he’d been working on was cancelled.”

Mai sniffed and brushed her free hand across her face, squeezing his hand tighter. Fred turned to look at her and saw her cheeks were wet, too.

Thunder crashed overhead. Rain erupted and pelted the tent, a ceaseless drum roll. His mother didn’t stir.

“You know, at first Mom said she wasn’t going to get any treatment. That she couldn’t go through it again. Said she wasn’t strong enough. She was talking about just enjoying our time together, however long that was.” His breath caught on the sob that burst from him. “I hadn’t asked her about it. But I knew it must have been bad…the last time.”

“Oh, Fred,” Mai whispered.

“She kept these journals. In a box in her closet. One afternoon when she was sleeping on the couch, I searched through them and found it. The one from the last time she had cancer. It was all in there. How she’d thrown up all the time and been so sick she could barely lift her head. The pain. How much she cried. And she wrote lots of times that it wasn’t worth living. That if she survived, she’d never do it again.”

“Your poor mom.”

“It was awful! How could I ask her to go through that again? But she felt bad about her decision, I know she did. Couldn’t look at me without tears in her eyes. She got really depressed. She hardly ate and she slept all the time. I think that’s partly why she had pneumonia for so long. But then a couple of weeks ago, something changed. She seemed to come around.”

He stared out at the rain. “It’s weird, like when things were the worst, when Dad’s business went under, she came out of this fog she was in. And last week she finally said yes. They’re going to start treatments right away. I think…I think she wants to fight, because…because maybe she thinks Dad can’t look after me.”

Mai gasped, her hand covering her mouth. “You really think that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t that. It could be it took her awhile to get ready for it in her mind, you know? Like getting ready for battle or something. I guess it doesn’t matter why, just that she’s going to do it. Fight. But that’s why I’ve got to get my box back, Mai,” he said. Conviction surged through him like a fever. “Mom will be able to go to one of those places like the Mayo Clinic or something. Get the best, you know? And she won’t have to worry about working, or money. It’ll fix everything.”