I pick up the phone and dial. “Hi, Aunt Renn, this is Penelope.”
“Hi, Melon. What a nice surprise,” she says. Aunt Renn is my mum’s sister. She lives far away and has always called me Melon since I can remember. It has something to do with cantaloupes and my name being Penelope, but it never made any sense to me. That’s my aunt Renn for you.
“Are Nanny and Pop-Pop home?”
“You just missed them,” she says. “They piled into their van and headed west to some flea market. You can call them on their mobile. Do you have the number?”
I tell her that I do, and then I say, “I’m doing a school project about our family history. Do you know anything?”
“Not much,” she says. “What kind of stuff do you want to know?”
“Something good enough that I could put on an arm coat,” I say. “Like, was anybody in our family famous?”
“I came in second place in a spelling bee in fifth grade,” she says. “Embarrassment. That was the word I missed.
E-M-B-A-R-A-S-S-M-E-N-T. I think that’s it. I can never remember if it has two r’s or two s’s.”
“Hmmm,” I say and then nothing else.
“But your uncle Clay would know more about that than I do,” she says. “About our family, I mean. He never was a very good speller.”
“Uncle Clay?” I say, after punching in his number. “It’s Penelope. Can you tell me something about our family that’s not boring or about spelling?”
Uncle Clay says he’s been studying about our family’s genie-ology. Which sounds really good until he tells me that genie-ology doesn’t have anything to do with magic genies. So, I hang up.
“Penelope, sweetness. How are you?” she says. “Pop and I are at a flea market outside Austin. We’re about to buy a lamp.”
“Do you know anything really good about our family?”
Nanny says, “I beg your pardon? What isn’t good about our family? Answer me that.” Then she says something else about a lamp shade and a new plug.
“Huh?”
“Oh, Penelope. We’re talking lamps here. Can I ring you later?”
“Wait, before you go,” I say. “Do you know if Grandpa Felix still lives in Simmons?”
“Felix?” says Nanny. “Lost track of that one years ago. Why do you ask?”
I tell her “no good reason” and then hang up.
Lizzie’s got half of my Hook hat covered in marshmallows.
“Your family is very dull,” she says.
Maybe they are, but having a dull sort of family is the kind of thing you can’t do anything about and don’t really want to hear from somebody else. “What’s so great about your family?” I say.
Lizzie shrugs and then, like she gets asked this very question all the time, she says, “My mum and dad are both scientists and worked in Africa on finding cures for diseases. My dad still does that, except not in Africa any more, but my mum stopped working after I was born so she could concentrate on me. My grandpa on my mum’s side was an astronaut and got to go into outer space. My grandma is a reporter and got to meet the president, but I don’t remember which one. My other grandpa, the one with the spider legs, flies airplanes.”
Well then. Nobody likes a big shot.
“I’m just saying,” she says. “But don’t feel bad. I’d swap with you.” She squints her eyes, shakes her finger, and says, “Because there are no adventures allowed,” in a creaky, high-pitched voice that sounds a good bit like her mummy’s. Even looks like her, too.
“Sure,” I say, even though I wouldn’t swap families with Lizzie no matter what. Not even if they got a TV and her mummy started letting her do stuff and stopped putting ice cubes in milk.
“What about your dad’s family?” says Lizzie. “I mean, they might be not as dull.”
“My dad didn’t have any brothers or sisters,” I tell her.
“A LONELY ONLY like me?”
“Yep.”
“What about his mum?” she asks.
“Dead,” I say. “So, there’s just his dad, Grandpa Felix. Now that he’s not dead any more.”
Lizzie chews on a marshmallow. “The one with the nose?”
I nod.
“Do you think he’d be any better than the rest of your family?” She pauses. “And by the way, I wasn’t looking at your nose just now. And even if I was looking at your nose, which I was not, it’s not because it’s big. I thought there was something on it.”
“Fine.” I pull the picture of Grandpa Felix from my pocket.
“Where did you get that?” Lizzie asks.
“From the photo album.” I touch my finger to Grandpa Felix’s nose in the picture and can just about see him wink at me.
“Did you have a hook with this costume?” asks Lizzie.
“What?”
“Captain Hook has a hook for a hand, you know,” she says. “That’s why they call him Captain Hook.”
“In there somewhere.” I point to the bottom of my wardrobe without taking my eyeballs off Grandpa.
“Like a treasure hunt.” She starts throwing things out of my wardrobe. Shirts fly by my head – pink ones, the kind I don’t like and never wear because pink makes me feel like a raw sausage hot dog and at the same time like a baby pig with a temperature. One shirt hits me in the face.
“Watch it,” I say, pulling the shirt off my head.
“Found it!” Lizzie holds up the hook made out of tin foil wrapped around a coat hanger. “If only we could find some real buried treasure.”
Now, I’m telling no lies when I say that I see Grandpa Felix just about give me another wink right then and there. So I say to Lizzie, “Maybe we can.”
Lizzie’s eyes get so big, her cheeks might fall in, and she says, “I smell an adventure.” I grab my magnifying glass and we head for the computer.
“What are you doing, dorkus?” says Terrible. We run into him as he comes out of the kitchen.
I shrug at him and try to slip past, but he blocks me.
“Hey, we learned about noses in biology class today,” he says.
He leans in close and my nose twitches at his bad smell. I switch to breathing through my mouth and look for other alien signs like scales and pointy teeth, but I don’t see any.
“Noses never stop growing,” he says, waiting for my reaction.
But I don’t say anything and try to keep my face blank.
“Ears, too. Haven’t you ever noticed how old people have giant noses and ears?”
Lizzie’s eyes get big and she says, “I have noticed that! I’m just saying.”
“See?” he says. “Even when the rest of them stop growing, their noses just keeping on getting bigger and bigger and bigger and …”
I hold the magnifying glass up to my eye and peer at him until his nose is the size of a baked potato. He rolls his eyes, mutters weirdo under his breath, and then lets me by. Aliens are not to be trusted (NUMBER 2)
At our computer, I do a search for Felix Crumb. Apparently, there are a lot of Felix Crumbs out there. Too many. But none that actually live near me. Still, it makes me wonder how many Penelope Crumbs there are. But when I ask Lizzie, she clucks her tongue like a pigeon and says, “Do you want to find your grandpa or not?” I tell her fine and that when she clucks her tongue I want to throw breadcrumbs at her.
Lizzie looks at the screen over my shoulder and says, “Maybe you should hire a private detective. They find people all the time.”
“I am a detective,” I tell her. “And I’ve only just started finding people.” I search for F. Crumb, instead of Felix, in Maryland, which is the state where I live.
Lizzie points at the computer. “It says there is one F. Crumb in Simmons and two F. Crumbs in Montville. They’re not that far from here.”
“Mum said Grandpa Felix used to live in Simmons,” I say. “That’s got to be him!” I print out the telephone numbers and addresses and fold the paper in half. “We used to go to Simmons a lot when Nanny and Pop-Pop lived there. Before they got their camper van and went exploring.” I stuff the paper under my shirt in case there is an alien inspection before I can get back to my toolbox.
“What are you going to do with those?” she asks.
“Lizzie Maple, we’re going on a treasure hunt. Only this treasure is the not-buried kind.”