I looked around for clowns, hidden cameras, but there was nothing. Just an empty casket. And a note from my late grandfather telling us where to dig.
This was the grand finale. The moment where the magician, locked in chains and submerged in a tank of ice-cold water, has surely been under too long . . . and then the black cloth drops to the floor to reveal the empty chamber, the picked locks and coiled chains in a pile at the bottom, the magician gone, and the audience left flabbergasted.
“Seriously?” I shouted, my voice carrying through the amphitheater. “This freakin’ family can’t even die normally!”
My sisters both gave me dirty looks. I didn’t really mean to shout it. It just kind of slipped out. It was the kind of thing that should have gotten me in trouble, except my parents were too focused on Aunt Gertie, waiting for an explanation. “Why is Frank’s casket empty?” my mother wanted to know.
“Well, for one, it’s not really his casket,” she said. “We’re just borrowing it.”
Even my aunt’s explanation required explanation.
“Borrowing it? From who?” Dad asked.
“From whom,” Lyra corrected. I kicked the back of my little sister’s shoe. Now was not the time for Lyra Kwirk, Grammar Police. Now might, in fact, be the time for the real police. There was a body missing, after all. But not missing, exactly. Just not where it was expected to be.
“It belongs to the Danfields,” Aunt Gertie told us, referring to the casket. “Friends of a friend. Their great-grandmother passed away last week, but the service isn’t until tomorrow, so I borrowed it to use as a kind of centerpiece. I thought the stage would look too empty without it.” Cass nodded as if this somehow made sense to her. It was a matter of stagecraft, apparently.
“Oh my god,” Mom said, sounding horrified. “I think I met the Danfields. They were standing right here. I shook their hands.”
“Yes, well, you probably should have thanked them for lending us this casket,” Aunt Gertie said, “Except, of course, you didn’t know.”
“Know? How could we have known? You didn’t tell us!” Dad shouted.
“I didn’t tell you because it’s supposed to be a surprise. So . . . surprise!” Aunt Gertie opened her eyes wide as they would go and shook her hands. Just like Chuckles McLaughsalot, only less funny, if that was even possible.
“What is going on?” Dad blurted. “How did . . . why did . . . what kind of . . .”
Aunt Gertie put a finger to Dad’s lips as if he was a three-year-old at the library who needed to be hushed. “I think we should probably wait and have the rest of this conversation back at the house,” she said calmly. “I only have the space rented till four, and it looks like it’s time to pack up.”
She pointed to the parking lot, where a hearse from Reynolds’s Funeral Services had pulled up. It was strange, seeing a hearse parked where the food trucks had been only moments before. Then I had to remind myself that the food trucks were the ones out of place. Everything was getting mixed up in my head. I watched as two large men got out of the hearse and started toward us.
It appeared the Danfields wanted their casket back.
The drive back to Aunt Gertie’s was quiet as a cemetery.
Cemetery. Noun. That place you go to bury a dead body. That is, if you had a dead body. And a casket to bury it in. But we had neither. Not anymore.
What we had was a slip of paper with one sentence scrawled on it and an aunt who refused to say anything more until she was “back at home and finally out of these heels and pantyhose.” The only break in the silence was the sound of the turn signal, like a mechanical heartbeat, and my father softly humming the theme to DuckTales. It was the show he and Grandma Shelley would watch together every day after school, he told me once. It was their favorite.
When we finally got back to the house, Aunt Gertie didn’t get out of her pantyhose. She had barely managed to slip off the heels before my parents cornered her in the kitchen.
“How could you do this?” Dad fumed. “Is this some kind of sick joke?”
“My job as the executor of your father’s will is to carry out his last wishes,” Aunt Gertie said evenly, refusing to match my father’s pitch. “And this is what he wanted.” She pointed at the slip of paper in Dad’s hand, the one he hadn’t let go of since he’d found it. “He wants you to go and find him, Fletcher.”
“I shouldn’t have to find him! He’s dead!” Dad shouted. “He should have been in that casket. A casket. His own casket,” Dad corrected, remembering ours had been a loaner. “For god’s sake, Gertrude, my mother’s buried in a graveyard less than ten miles from here. Why couldn’t we have just put him next to her? He was a war veteran. He probably could have gotten a free military funeral somewhere. Instead you’re telling me he wanted this?”
“That’s what’s in his will,” Aunt Gertie said.
“Then let me see his will,” Dad demanded.
“I can’t do that either. The will states that you’re not allowed to see the will until you’ve found your father.”
I shook my head, dizzy from my aunt’s convoluted logic. The funneral was one thing, but this was a whole new level of bizarre. In death, my grandfather had out-Kwirked us all.
Dad threw up his hands. “This is insane. Somebody please tell her this is insane?”
I was more than willing to back Dad up on this one, but Cass beat me to it. “Wait, so you’re saying Grandpa’s body is hidden somewhere?” she asked. “And we have to go dig it up like some kind of buried treasure?”
“That’s one way to think about it,” Aunt Gertie said.
Lyra’s eyes got googly. “That’s actually kinda cool.”
“There’s nothing cool about it,” Dad snapped. “It’s demented.”
“It’s totally demented,” I agreed. And also a little cool, I thought. In a demented sort of way.
“Can you even do that?” Mom asked. “Hide a dead body somewhere? Aren’t there laws against that sort of thing?”
“Well, it’s not his whole body,” Aunt Gertie clarified.
My mother let out a startled-mouse squeak. Dad’s jaw dropped.
“Wait a minute, you mean you cut Papa Kwirk into pieces and buried them somewhere?” Lyra exclaimed. “That’s so macabre.”
“Oh, heavens no!” Aunt Gertie said, staring at my little sister, appalled. “I had him cremated.”
I didn’t know what “ma-cob” meant, but I knew what it meant to be cremated. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. It meant we actually needed an urn instead of a casket. Though apparently we didn’t have either. Unless the Danfields had an urn they could lend us too.
“It was also part of his last wishes,” Aunt Gertie added. “Outlined in his will.”
“The will that you’re not allowed to show us,” Dad muttered. “Well, we’ll see about that.”
Like a spinning top, Dad started whirling wildly around the kitchen, opening drawers and then banging them closed, throwing opening cabinets, rifling through papers. “It’s around here somewhere. I know it.”
“You’ll never find it,” Aunt Gertie said. “Not until you find him. That’s the deal.”
“What deal? There is no deal. This isn’t a game, Gertie. This is my father we’re talking about. You’re telling me Frank’s ashes are buried somewhere and we are supposed to go and dig them up?”
“Kind of defeats the purpose,” Cass said.
“Totally superfluous,” I said. Lyra gave me a thumbs-up.
Aunt Gertie stood on the opposite side of the room from the rest of us, watching my father spin around aimlessly, her expression unreadable, a poker face that Papa Kwirk would have appreciated.
My mother tried to reason with her. “Gertrude, I know you’re only trying to do what you think is best and to honor Frank’s wishes. And I think the service today, while unconventional—”
Dad snorted. Apparently not the word he would have used.
“While unconventional,” Mom repeated, “was still very touching and in keeping with Frank’s spirit. But really, don’t you think it would be best for everyone if you just told us where he is so we can make arrangements to scatter his ashes somewhere appropriate?”
“Well, it would certainly make it easier,” Aunt Gertie admitted. “But Jimmy never believed in doing things the easy way. And this was important to him. I know it was. I know it’s what he wanted.”
“But he’s gone,” Dad snapped. “So it really doesn’t matter what he wants.”
Aunt Gertie returned Dad’s chilly stare with one of her own. “I agree with exactly half of that,” she said.
Dad ran his fingers through his hair, pacing back and forth through the kitchen like a tiger at the zoo. “You’re being unreasonable.”
Aunt Gertie shrugged.
“Why can’t you just tell us where he is?” Cass asked.
“I’m not permitted,” Aunt Gertie replied. “I’m not allowed to help you. That’s part of the deal. You have to find him on your own. Like I said, it’s all—”
“In the will,” Mom finished for her.
“This is unbelievable,” Dad muttered. “Absolutely unbelievable. You’re almost as bad as he was.”
“We all have our own way of saying goodbye, Fletcher. This is his. Take it or leave it.” I pictured a young Gertrude Kwirk at the negotiating table in some high-rise New York office, staring down a row of men in dark suits, delivering her final offer, knowing they would buckle and she would get her way. But this was different. She’d been pushing Dad all day with one surprise after another, and she’d finally pushed too hard.
“Then I leave it,” he said.
“Fletcher . . .” Mom reached for Dad’s hand, but he pulled back, just out of reach.
“No. Not this time. It’s always something with that man, Molly. You know that. He never knew when to quit. But I do. I’m done. Tomorrow morning, we are going home.” He faced my aunt. “You know where his remains are, Gertie. You can get them and do whatever you want with them. Toss them in the garbage, for all I care.” He looked at the rest of us, standing in a line. “Make sure you’re packed up tonight. I don’t want to stay here another day.”
I swallowed hard and nodded alongside my sisters, all of us stricken silent by Dad’s sudden outburst.
Aunt Gertie shrugged. “Do what you want, Fletcher Kwirk. But if you run away this time, I think you’ll regret it.”
If Dad heard her, he didn’t respond. He was already on his way upstairs to pack.
Wherever Papa Kwirk was, it might very well be his final resting place.
There was no dinner that night. My stomach was still loaded, and no one else seemed interested in eating. Mom and Dad had shut themselves in the guest bedroom for hours, talking in loud whispers, but not quite loud enough to hear unless you pressed your ear to the bottom of the door, which started to hurt after a minute. Not to mention the risk of being caught if one of them opened it suddenly, so I stopped eavesdropping after a while.
Besides, it didn’t take a super sleuth to figure out what they were talking about. It’s not every day you open your dead father’s casket to discover his body’s missing, with only a riddle telling you where to find it.
Aunt Gertie was on the phone in the kitchen, taking calls from people who weren’t able to attend the memorial but wanted to offer their condolences. “Oh. It’s all right, Martha. Yes, it was quite a large turnout. You should have heard the band. No. Not the Shakers. They were good. But the marching band really whipped the crowd into a frenzy.” When she saw me on the stairs, she waved and pointed to the table at a plate of brownies she’d set out: leftovers from ’Wiches on Wheels, according to the little paper sleeves they were wrapped in. I shook my head and went looking for my sisters.
It’s not something I make a habit of. In fact, most of the time when Lyra or Cass enters the room, I find some excuse to go into another one. But at this moment, the last thing I wanted to be was alone.
I found them both in the backyard. Lyra was spinning around in the tall grass catching fireflies—of which there seemed to be a blue million, so many that you could put out your hand and have one land right on it. There were some advantages to living out in the country. The woods all around. The chorus of the frogs. That smell—crisp and subtly sweet like a ripe apple. And the sky. You could see the stars better from Aunt Gertie’s backyard than you ever could from ours. You could easily spot yourself in them, if you knew where to look.
“Hi, Ri.”
Cass was sitting on the porch with her phone in her hand and Delilah coiled around her neck. I found it strange that she could take the snake outside and it never tried to get away. Maybe my sister’s skinny shoulders were more comfortable than they looked. I sat down next to her, but not too close; even though she’d had that python for two years now and I’d never seen it eat anything but dead mice, I wasn’t taking any chances. Delilah flicked her tongue at me. I stuck mine out at her.
“I think Dad and Mom are fighting,” I said.
“Mom and Dad don’t fight,” Cass said back. She finished her text and set her phone in her lap so she could look at me. “They debate.”
“I think Mom and Dad are debating, then.”
“Whether or not to stay and hunt for Grandpa’s ashes?”
“I guess,” I said. “I really couldn’t hear very well. Aunt Gertie has thick doors.”
“Wait, you were spying on them? Good thing they didn’t catch you. Dad’s ticked enough as it is.”
It was true. I’d never seen Dad so angry. I’d seen him frustrated or irritated—usually with himself, or something to do with work—but hardly ever mad. I’d never heard him slam a door or stomp up the stairs. He wasn’t one of those fathers who shout themselves hoarse. Not until this weekend. Not until he’d found out his father had died.
“He’s right, though. It’s totally nuts, Grandpa wanting us to find his ashes,” I said.
“I don’t know,” Cass said. “I actually think it’s kind of epic. Like some ancient Greek tragedy. Or something out of Scooby Doo. ‘The Mystery of the Missing Body.’” Scooby Doo was one of the theme songs Dad would sing to us sometimes. He would even make the Scooby sounds. “Heroow, Wraggy!”
“Too bad we don’t have a big blue-and-green van to drive around,” I said.
“Or a dog.”
“A talking dog,” I corrected. All we had was a python and a missing ferret. “Did you see the look on Dad’s face when the marching band showed up?”
“Or how about when those old guys came onstage to sing? I swear I didn’t know about half the stuff I heard today. Did you know Papa Kwirk was part of the volunteer fire department? Or that he saved that guy’s life?”
She meant Mr. Meeks. The one with the scars and the daughter with the Hawaiian Punch dress and big brown eyes. “I never heard that story before,” I admitted.
“That’s because Dad never talked about him,” Cass said. “At least not with me. Did he with you?”
I shook my head.
“I don’t think that’s normal. Do you?”
I almost asked what she knew about normal—a girl who sometimes spoke in rhyming couplets and had a crush on an imaginary elf. Instead I got to thinking about Papa Kwirk and how strange the whole day was. Not just because of the empty casket and the Hummus Hut, but because of the feeling I’d started to get. A sense of disappointment. It was sort of what Cass was saying. All the stuff she didn’t know. Like my own grandfather was a stranger to me. After listening to everyone else talk about him, the people he’d spent every day with, the people he’d shared most of his life with . . . it felt like he belonged to them. And not to us.
But we were still his family. Just because we only saw him once a year, that didn’t change the fact that he was our Papa Kwirk. Imagine if we had been called onstage instead of Tasha Meeks. Instead of the Salty Shakers. What would we have said? What would Dad have said?
What would I have said?
I looked at Cass, who was staring up at the stars, chin in her hands. “What do you remember most about him?”
“About Papa Kwirk?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Like, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?” I wasn’t sure she would even want to answer. My sister and I weren’t the share-your-feelings-with-each-other sort, so my question probably took her a little by surprise. Like a lot of things today, I guess.
“I’m not sure,” Cass said, mulling it over, the snake still happily curled around her neck. “I do remember this one time—you were still pretty young, and Ly was just a baby. It was Christmas, of course. And he and I were just watching TV in the living room. Papa Kwirk had the remote and was just flipping channels and I kept begging him to put on SpongeBob, but he wouldn’t do it. And then, finally, he found The Wizard of Oz.”
Ugh. I hated that movie. The ending was terrible. I mean, water? Really? That’s how you kill a witch? Drop a house on her, sure; that will kill just about anybody. But water? You’re telling me it never rains in Oz? Where the heck do all the flowers come from? And then to find out it was all just a dream? Lame.
Cass loved it, though—watched it every time it came on.
“It was the scene were Dorothy meets the Scarecrow,” she continued. “The Scarecrow started singing, and Papa Kwirk started singing right alongside him. Then he jumped out of his chair and pulled me off the couch and we started dancing together.” Cass smiled as she conjured up the memory. “He flung me around the living room, twirled me and flipped me upside down, going on and on about not having a brain. And I remember laughing and screaming so loud that Dad rushed in to see who was being murdered, only to find me giggling at Papa Kwirk, who was doubled over on the couch, trying to catch his breath.”
I could totally picture it, my sister dancing with my grandfather. I could picture the look on my father’s face as well.
“What about you?” Cass asked. “What’s your best memory?”
I didn’t even have to think about it: the first time I got to ride in Jack Nicholson. Stuffed down in the sidecar with my bike helmet on and a pair of Dad’s lab goggles strapped to my head. We only went around the block—that was all Dad would allow—and no faster than thirty miles an hour, though I think Papa Kwirk clocked over fifty once we were out of Dad’s eyeshot.
I’m sure I looked like a total dork with my hands thrust in the air as we whipped around each corner, but I didn’t care. And even though I was probably perfectly safe, riding through our empty neighborhood streets, it still felt dangerous. Like we were just barely in control and could crash any moment.
“Riding on the motorcycle,” I said. “Do you think we will get it? Jack Nicholson, I mean? Do you think Papa Kwirk left it to Dad?”
“Are you kidding?” Cass said. “No way would Mom or Dad let us have a motorcycle. Have you met them?”
Point taken. But somebody had to get it. You had to do something with everything that was left behind.
Lyra finally grew tired of her firefly catching and came and sat next to us, shoving herself in between us so that I had to scoot over. “It’s too easy. What’s the point if they’re just going to land right on your hand?”
I thought about what Aunt Gertie had said to Dad right before he stormed upstairs. Jimmy never believed in doing things the easy way.
Of course, in some ways, neither did Dad. He never skipped a step. Never cheated or used a hack. Even when he helped with homework—and he always wanted to help with homework—he’d ask you to explain your answers rather than just tell you if you were right or not. It’s right, he’d say. But what makes it right? That’s why I tried to get my homework done before he came home, or just lied and told him I didn’t have any. It went faster that way.
“They aren’t even flies, you know,” Ly added.
“What?” I asked, regretting it instantly. Asking Lyra to explain something was almost as bad as asking Dad.
“Fireflies. They aren’t really flies. They’re beetles. From the order Coleoptera. If you look at them closely, they look more like ladybugs. That’s why ‘lightning bugs’ is a better name for them, because at least they are bugs. And they light up. But then they should be called lightening bugs, not lightning bugs.”
Leave it to my nerdy little sister to care about the difference.
“That’s funny,” Cass said. “‘When I was little, I actually thought they made lightning in their bellies. Little storms of it. Like something out of Harry Potter. But then Dad explained that there’s no lightning inside them, that’s it’s all just a chemical reaction, and I was bummed.”
“According to Dad, everything’s a chemical reaction,” I said. “But that would be cool. If they, like, actually zapped lightning out of their butts.” I pictured a swarm of them descending on a city, electrocuting the fleeing masses in their bid to take over the world. “You would think with a name like that, they would at least sting or something. They seem so fragile.” That was why I didn’t like catching them myself; I was always afraid of accidentally smooshing them.
Lyra sighed. “That’s how it goes, I guess. Some things you think are magical, but then you find out they’re just ordinary after all.”
“Welcome to the real world,” Cass said.
“Yeah. Get used to it,” I added.
We got quiet after that. I just sat there on the back porch with my sisters and watched the perfectly ordinary lightning bugs blink on and off like flickering stars. At one point, I noticed Lyra shivering and scooted closer to her until our arms touched.
That night I managed to borrow Aunt Gertie’s phone long enough to call Manny. Everyone else was shut in their room, probably packing their bags per Dad’s instructions. I would have to do that too—my clothes were strewn across the floor, to make me feel more at home and to help Aunt Gertie in her mission to leave no square foot of carpet exposed—but packing would only take five minutes, and I had a lot to tell my best friend.
“Okay. You’re really not going to believe this.”
“Is it better than the death clown?” Manny asked. He sounded like maybe I’d woken him up. I wondered if it was an hour later there, then realized it was technically a school night.
“Ever heard of the group the Salty Shakers?”
“Are they like the Red Hot Chili Peppers?”
“Yeah. Pretty much the exact opposite of that,” I said.
I proceeded to tell him all about Papa Kwirk’s funneral. The Shakers. The marching band. The food trucks. And, of course, the empty casket. The only thing I neglected to mention was Tasha, only because I knew he would have too many questions. Like what did she look like, and what did you say to her, and was she like hot hot, and speaking of hot, how is your sister? I finished by reciting the clue my grandfather had left behind and explained that his ashes were buried somewhere for us to find.
“Okay. That’s a little strange.”
“A little?” I pressed. I really didn’t think he was taking this seriously enough.
“Yeah, I mean, who buries their ashes? Don’t most people scatter them in the ocean or off a cliff or something?”
“You’re thinking of The Big Lebowski,” I told him, remembering one of the eight gazillion not-entirely-age-appropriate movies he and I had watched together in his basement. His parents had Netflix and cable and had, thankfully, never figured out how to work the parental safeguards. “I think most people keep them in a vase on the mantel in the living room.”
“Right, because that’s not creepy either,” Manny said. “‘Hey, everyone, say hi to Grandpa. That’s him in the big metal pot on the coffee table. Try not to spill him.’”
All right. So maybe it was kind of odd keeping your dead relatives’ charred remains sitting out as decoration, but it certainly wasn’t any stranger than burying them like a chest of gold somewhere and forcing your family to go find them.
“It’s called an urn,” I said. “And honestly, I don’t think it’s going to matter. Dad’s fed up. We’re coming home tomorrow morning. Wherever Grandpa is, I think maybe he’s just going to have to stay there.” As soon as I said it, I felt a pang of guilt. This was his last wish, after all. And even if he wouldn’t know the difference, it still felt like we were letting him down. Not that I had a choice in the matter. This was Dad’s call.
Manny was still caught up on Papa Kwirk’s empty casket and the clue he left behind. “Oh, man, when I die, I’m totally gonna make my kids do all kinds of crazy crap to come find me. Then when they do, I’m gonna have ’em toss my ashes in a volcano.”
“Why a volcano?”
“I can’t even believe you have to ask that question,” Manny said.
Fair enough. Still, I seriously doubted Papa Kwirk’s clue would lead us to a volcano. There were no volcanos in Greenburg. But that just made me wonder where they might be. After all, he’d passed away only four days ago. That wasn’t a lot of time for Aunt Gertie to carry out the requests in his will, which meant he was most likely somewhere here in town. The same town where they both grew up. The same town where my own dad was born and raised.
“Hey. You okay?”
I realized I’d been sitting there with the phone pressed to my sweaty ear, not saying anything. “I guess I just don’t get why, you know? Why make us go and find him?”
“Maybe he left behind some unfinished business,” Manny suggested. “You know how in the movies, ghosts hang around sometimes because they’ve got some secret to spill? ‘I see dead people’ and all that? Maybe there’s something you gotta do before his spirit can move on to the afterlife.”
Great. Just what this family needs—the ghost of our crazy grandfather haunting us.
“Or maybe your grandfather was some kind of super spy, and he’s about to lead you to evidence that proves the president is secretly an alien overlord,” Manny suggested. “You gotta admit: it would explain some things.”
I could maybe picture Papa Kwirk as a super spy, except super spies don’t sing tenor in barbershop quartets. More likely Dad was right, and this was just Papa Kwirk getting the last word somehow, one final punchline so he could laugh at us from beyond the grave. So to speak.
“Whatever it is, I don’t think I could leave without at least trying to find out,” Manny added.
If you run away this time, I think you’ll regret it.
“You’re starting to sound like my great-aunt,” I said. But there had to be a reason. Every riddle has an answer, and somewhere out there, Papa Kwirk was waiting for us to solve his.
Us. Not Larry or Pastor Mike or the mailman or even Tasha Meeks. Everything leading up to the moment Dad opened that casket seemed like it was meant for everyone else, but this . . . this was Kwirk family business. Immediate family. This last wish, Papa Kwirk had saved for us to fulfill.
And we were headed home instead.
“Forget the volcano,” Manny said, interrupting my train of thought. “They’re mostly full of ash anyway, so you’d just be all mixed in with the rest. No, I want my kids to blast my ashes into outer space. They do that now, you know.”
“Yeah, I don’t think we’re going to find Papa Kwirk’s ashes in outer space,” I told Manny.
As it stood, we weren’t going to find them at all.