Papa Kwirk had sold the house four years ago. The same one my father was driving us to in the wee hours of the morning with a shovel in the trunk.
We only heard about it after the fact. That’s how it was with Papa Kwirk. One surprise after another.
I had never been there, to the old house. When we’d come to visit, we’d stayed with Aunt Gertie, despite my mother’s suggestion that we could just get a tidy hotel room instead. We never stayed in the house where my father grew up because he didn’t want to. Too many memories. He never actually said that, not to me, anyway; that’s just what I figured out.
And yet, when he heard that Papa Kwirk had sold the old house, Dad was furious. It was one of the few times I’d heard him yell. I’d seen Dad angry at my grandfather before, but it was always a teeth-grinding, sulk-in-a-chair kind of mad. Quiet and contained. The day he found about the house was unforgettable.
It was also Thanksgiving.
Papa Kwirk and Aunt Gertie decided to make their annual visit early that year because they were taking a cruise together over Christmas to the Bahamas (another benefit of big-city lawyering). It was an odd Thanksgiving from the start. It was unusually cold, even for November, a feed-the-fireplace and run-the-heater kind of cold. Mom was making veggie lasagna instead of turkey because my then-twelve-year-old older sister had sworn off meat, which meant the rest of us had to suffer. There wasn’t even a fried-chicken-flavored jelly bean to be had.
It was almost as cold inside the house as out. Grandpa had only been there a few hours, but I could tell he was already getting on Dad’s nerves, the two of them room hopping so that they wouldn’t have to share the same space. When one was in the family room, the other would hang out in the kitchen. Front porch and backyard. They watched the parade on two different TVs. But we only have the one dining room. They sat at opposite ends of the table, but it was still too close.
It was while he was spooning up some mashed potatoes (to complement the Thanksgiving pasta, of course) that Papa Kwirk let it slip that he’d sold the family home.
“You did what?” A limp bit of lasagna hung from Dad’s fork, halfway to his mouth.
“Yep,” Papa Kwirk said, snapping his fingers. “Went just like that. Made a good chunk o’ change from it.”
“You sold the house?” Dad repeated in disbelief.
Papa Kwirk shrugged. “Sure did. Just felt like the time was right, you know? Turkey is delicious, by the way,” he said to my mother.
“I didn’t make any turkey,” Mom said, obviously taken off guard.
“I know,” Papa Kwirk said, giving my twelve-year-old vegetarian sister a wink.
Dad was not amused. “Are you kidding me? That’s my house!”
“Actually, this is your house,” Papa Kwirk said, indicating the cream-colored walls of our dining room. “And it’s a very nice house. You should be very proud. That house, on the other hand, was my house. It was in my name. I paid for it with my money. And now it belongs to the Burbages. Bursages?”
“Burgesses,” Aunt Gertie said.
“Bur-somethings,” Papa Kwirk concluded. The fact that he couldn’t even remember who he’d sold it to just seemed to make Dad even angrier.
“How could you do that?”
“Honestly, Fletcher,” Aunt Gertie interjected. “That house was too big for Jimmy all by himself. He found a nice condo in a little community only twenty minutes down the road from me. They mow the lawn for you and everything. It’s perfect.”
My father, the man who said “dagnabbit” or “holy Toledo” whenever he stubbed his toe, uttered a curse and started jabbing at his asparagus with his fork. He didn’t seem interested in eating it, just stabbing it repeatedly. “When did this happen?”
“About two months ago,” Papa Kwirk said.
“Two months! And you didn’t tell me?”
“Like I said,” Papa Kwirk replied calmly. “Not your house.”
“But it’s the house I grew up in! It’s the house Mom—” Dad stopped abruptly and pointed his mutilated, speared asparagus at Papa Kwirk.
“You don’t need to remind me about your mother,” Papa Kwirk said, setting down his glass of ginger ale and leveling my father with a stern look. “If I’d thought you wanted it, I would’ve asked. But you hightailed it out of there the first chance you got and hardly ever came back, so what does it matter? Or were you thinking about moving back to Greenburg to be closer to us?”
Dad and Papa Kwirk glared at each other across the table. You could hear the football game playing on the TV in the other room. The Lions were getting creamed.
“That’s enough,” Aunt Gertie huffed. “You boys need to stop. You’re going to ruin Thanksgiving.”
But it was too late.
I sat between them—my sulking father and my stone-eyed grandfather—and quietly ate my yucky vegetarian lasagna, wishing it was turkey, wishing Thanksgiving dinner was over already, part of me even wishing that Papa Kwirk had just skipped this year’s visit altogether.
And wondering, If Dad cared so much about that old house, how come I’d never even seen it?
Mom said she was going to hop into the kitchen real quick to check on dessert.
All three Kwirk kids decided to go help her.
I was finally going to see my father’s old house. My palms were sweaty, even though it was cool in the car. I sat in the back, mentally outlining all the potential problems with Dad’s plan. One being that the aforementioned “favorite spot” might not be there anymore. The current owners—the Bur-somethings—could have redecorated, maybe moved the rocks around. There might not be an X marking the spot. All we had to go on was Dad’s memory from childhood. And this was provided we even had the right answer to the riddle to begin with.
Add to this some other concerns, which I pointed out in as sensible a voice as I could manage.
Like “Isn’t this trespassing?”
And “Don’t you think it’s going to look a little suspicious, the four of us sneaking around in some stranger’s backyard, carrying a shovel?”
And “We are still out in the country. Don’t people out in the country usually have guard dogs? And shotguns?”
And “Have you ever seen the movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?” Though this was Illinois, not Texas. And the Bur-somethings probably weren’t power-tool-toting cannibal murderers. But how could you be sure?
My concerns about shotguns and chainsaw-wielding psychopaths were met with more mumbled assurances from Dad. “It’s all right. We’ll sneak through the woods and slip through the back gate under cover of darkness,” he said.
“Like a band of Zendali assassins!” Cass added, clearly feeding off Dad’s strange newfound enthusiasm.
Yeah. Or like a quartet of trespassing, hole-digging wackos, I thought.
Dad shut off the lights again when he turned down his old road and parked in the grass, far away from any of the streetlamps. You could see the shadowy outlines of houses behind the rows of trees.
“I used to spend hours in these woods as a kid. I know them like I know the chemical composition of isoamyl acetate,” Dad said.
“Oh, well in that case,” I muttered.
Dad took the shovel from the trunk and led us, single file, to the edge of the woods. The same kind of woods where the bodies of kids who have been missing always turn up six weeks later. The kind of woods that, in the afternoon, would probably appear tranquil and inviting, but in the early hours of morning looked like the setting for a scene from Slayaway Camp Seven.
I felt the need to casually mention this, but Dad marched right into them, shovel bouncing on his shoulder like he was one of the seven dwarfs headed to the mine. Heigh-ho. Heigh-ho. It’s off to dig up our grandfather’s dead body we go. “I told you. There’s really nothing to worry about,” he said. “Now, from here on out, try to use hand signals when possible and talk only when necessary.”
I wondered what the hand signal for “This is stupid” was. I settled for circling my finger around my ear. The cricket chirps that had seemingly followed us all the way from Aunt Gertie’s were loud enough to mask our footsteps, but I still watched every footfall, looking for roots that might trip me. Lyra walked behind me, pushing on me to hurry. I heard something skitter off to my right and wondered what kinds of animals hung out in these woods at night. Raccoons and opossums. Maybe a fox. Cougars? Were there cougars in Illinois? Whatever was out there, it probably had rabies.
“We’re almost there,” Dad whispered.
The trees thinned as we came to a line of gray picket fences, almost as tall as me. I remembered Aunt Gertie’s story—the one about Papa Kwirk and Grandma Shelley’s third date. How he barely made it back over that amusement-park fence before getting eaten alive by dogs. The crazy things we do for love. Except the fence we were facing had a gate. And the gate was hanging wide open.
Almost as if we’d been invited.
Dad walked through first and the rest of us followed, though we nearly crashed into each other when he stopped abruptly. An image of an ax-toting serial killer riding on the back of a giant, rabid Rottweiler popped into my head, but it was just Dad pausing to take in his old backyard for the first time in ages.
He drew a deep breath, as if he could inhale the whole of it, the scent of every flower, every tree, every stem of grass. Smell and memory are deeply connected—Dad explained it all to me once in tedious detail: how a particular aroma could trigger all kinds of intense emotions, even flashbacks. I wondered if they were good memories or bad ones racing through Dad’s brain. It was too dark for me to see his face, but I thought I heard him sniff. “It’s just the same as I remember,” he whispered.
While Dad took in the backyard with its soccer ball and plastic slide, I inspected the windows of the house, making note of the fact that all the lights in it were off. I prayed for them to stay that way.
“Dad?” Cass said, tugging on his arm. “Worms? Shovel? Favorite place?”
“Right,” Dad said, and pointed to the back corner of the yard. There was the butterfly garden, pretty much just how he’d described. The sycamore still stood guard over the blueberry bush, which was still a ways from bearing fruit. Everything else was just starting to bloom. I tried to imagine it in the daylight, and I could almost picture my grandma Shelley, the woman I’d never met, bent over this patch of flowers, pulling weeds. She wore the same dress as she did in the picture on Dad’s nightstand, the one of them sitting on the bench together. Her feet were bare and the bottoms were smudged with dirt. I don’t know why, but for some reason I imagined her as the kind of woman who liked to be barefoot outside. Just like me.
At the center of the little corner garden stood a round rock just big enough for a boy of ten to sit on, his net draped across his lap, waiting for a butterfly to alight. That was the rock Dad knelt beside now, setting down the shovel and rubbing his hand along the stone’s smooth surface. Maybe it was the same rock he’d been sitting on when she collapsed in the kitchen, so long ago.
“Give me hand with this, will you?” he whispered.
Cass and I bent down and dug in with our fingers, helping Dad roll the rock backward, revealing a patch of earth beneath. Even in the darkness I could see things crawling and squirming, taken by surprise by the sudden prickle of cool air. It gave me a shiver. I could see where this would be a nice spot for finding worms, though. I just hoped it was a nice spot for finding dead grandfathers too.
“This is so nefarious,” Lyra said softly.
“It’s not nefarious,” Dad insisted. “We aren’t doing anything bad. We’re just honoring a dead man’s wishes. Now hand me that shovel before somebody catches us.”
Dad jabbed forcefully into the earth, stomping down with his fancy dress shoes and pulling up a huge clod. “Dirt’s loose,” he said, forgetting his own rule about talking as little as possible. “Somebody else has been digging here recently.”
Dad attacked the ground. This same man who only hours ago had been shouting at us all to pack up so we could go home now grunted as he worked the shovel, wiping his sweat on his shirtsleeve, getting dirt all over his black trousers. Keeping the still-dark house at the corner of my eye, I watched him unearth one shovelful after another, working frantically. The hole he’d made was two feet deep at least—but all we’d found so far were the worms. Maybe Dad had gotten it wrong. Maybe Papa Kwirk had been thinking of something else, another spot, another favorite place. After all, it’s not as if the two of them ever agreed on much of anything before.
“Dad. I know you think you know what you’re doing—” I began, but as soon as I said it, there was a dull metallic clang as the blade struck something hard. Dad handed Cass the shovel, then dropped to his knees and starting digging with his hands.
In moments, those same hands appeared holding a metal tackle box. The kind you would use to hold fishing gear.
We’d found him. We’d found Papa Kwirk.
“I don’t believe it!” Cass said, much too loud for any Zendali assassin.
“Is that really Papa Kwirk?” Lyra wondered in a whisper. “It’s so small.”
Dad shushed them both again and pulled his phone from his pants pocket, activating the flashlight. He handed it to me and I cupped my hand around it, focusing the beam on the box, worried that the sudden light might attract the attention of cannibals and cougars alike. With dirt-crusted hands that he’d absentmindedly wiped on his white dress shirt, Dad unfastened the box’s latch. Be careful, I thought. This wasn’t the first box he’d opened on this trip. We’d figured our grandfather was in the last one too.
Dad slowly lifted the lid and peered inside.
Then he let out a gasp loud enough to wake the dead.
“Where’s Grandpa?” Lyra asked.
It’s the kind of question you ask when you are at the mall, or maybe at the beach, and you notice that a member of your family has disappeared.
It’s not normally asked while staring at a steel tackle box that you’ve just dug out of the ground in someone’s else’s backyard. I continued to shine the phone on Dad, who was still bent over, staring at the contents of his unearthed treasure and shaking his head.
These weren’t the remains of Francis T. Kwirk. And it wasn’t old fishing gear either, which would have made even more sense. Instead, the tackle box was filled with cards. Stacks and stacks of cards. Like trading cards, except they weren’t of baseball players or Star Wars characters or Pokemon.
They were all of kids. Like, gross kids. Cartoon drawings of children oozing pus, or leaking snot, or gushing blood, some with holes in their skin or extra eyeballs or excessively hairy armpits. The one on the very top showed a corpse rising from a grave. Dead Ted. They all had names like that. Stinky Stan and Barfin’ Barbara and Patty Putty. Whoever made these cards was a big fan of alliteration. And also demented.
Dad snorted and shook his head, like he couldn’t believe his eyes. I didn’t blame him.
“What are they?” Cass asked.
“They’re Garbage Pail Kids,” he answered. “My Garbage Pail Kids. My whole collection.” He wiped his grubby hands on his shirt again before picking up a handful of cards and shuffling through them. “I assumed they were long gone. Figured he just threw them out. Frank hated these cards,” Dad muttered.
I could see why: kids being beheaded and electrocuted, covered in spiders or boils or boogers or goo. Some were clever, though, like the picture of the kid in a karate uniform trying to chop a board and shattering his arm instead. His name was Bruised Lee.
I actually kind of liked them.
Dad riffled through cards, pushing them from one side of the tackle box to the other. “This can’t be it,” he said. He pushed the box into my hands, then bent down for the shovel again. “There has to be something else down there.” He drove the blade back into the dirt, sinking it as deep as it would go.
I handed Dad’s phone to Lyra and started sifting through the cards myself, skipping past Leaky Lindsay and Fryin’ Bryan, digging through the contents of the box as Dad speared the ground. Then I spotted it. Taped to the bottom. A photo, the old Polaroid kind that spit straight out of the camera back in the dark ages. It showed Papa Kwirk and Dad standing by a pond, fishing poles in hand. Dad looked like he couldn’t have been more than eight—younger than Lyra, at least. He was holding up a fish no bigger than my hand. On the white border at the bottom, somebody had written names, in all caps, just like on the other cards:
FISHIN’ FLETCHER AND FATHER FRANK
“Dad. Look.”
Dad left the shovel stuck in the dirt and leaned over my shoulder. Lyra angled the light so we could all see.
“Heavens to Murgatroyd,” Dad whispered. He carefully pried the picture free from the bottom of the box, working at the tape with his dirt-crusted fingernails. “I remember taking this picture,” he said. “I remember writing our names.”
It was a little weird, seeing my father so young. No glasses. No bow ties. No gray hairs. And Papa Kwirk too, without his leather jacket and bushy beard, looking so clean-cut and carefree. I’m not sure I would have recognized them.
“There’s something on the back,” Lyra piped up.
Dad flipped the photo over to reveal something written in the white space, though it was different handwriting from the names on the front.
“‘To find me you’ll have to conquer Mount Everest,’” Dad read aloud. His voice jumped a few decibels, well above a whisper now. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I put my finger to my lips, to let him know he was being too loud, but it was too late. The light in one of the windows in the second story of the house where my father grew up blinked on.
We all stood there, frozen, waiting for the light to shut back off. For whoever had stumbled out of bed to give up and go back to sleep. But it didn’t. Instead, the blinds started to raise.
“Hurry! Fill the hole!” Dad said, reaching for the shovel.
“No time!” Cass hissed. I slammed the lid of the tackle box closed and tucked it beneath my arm. Dad pulled the shovel free. “Go, go, go!” Cass gave me a push toward the gate, where Lyra was somehow already waiting, gesturing frantically for us to hurry, the light from Dad’s phone flashing like a beacon. From the now-open window, I could hear a woman’s voice shout down at us.
“Who’s out there? What are you doing? Get out of our yard!”
What do you think we’re trying to do, lady? I thought to myself.
“I’ve got a gun!” she added.
“See? Told you!” I said to Dad’s back as we bolted from the butterfly garden where he used to dig up worms, into the woods where he used to play, stealing back a memory that he’d thought he’d lost and a pail full of garbage-y kids.
A frantic run through the trees and a short getaway drive later, Dad pulled the Tank into the parking lot of a CVS so that we could all have a moment to calm ourselves. Beside me, Lyra was taking long, slow breaths like she did right before each of her turns at the statewide spelling bee. Cass was giggling uncontrollably, her head pressed to the window. I was pretty sure she’d lost it, if she’d even had it to begin with.
Not that I could blame her. My heart was hammering, my shirt was damp, and I had scratches along my arms from the branches I’d scraped against running for my life in the dark. The last time I’d been this keyed up was when I’d prank called Principal Williams to tell him he’d won an award for World’s Best Administrator . . . at Farting. Manny still owed me five dollars for that dare.
The good news was that we didn’t get shot. The bad news was that we hadn’t really gotten what we came for, either. Only a picture of Papa Kwirk—along with pictures of a hundred other kids, leaking various fluids out of their bodies. Grandpa’s clue hadn’t led us to his remains—just to another clue, which only confused me more. What kind of crazy cigar had he been smoking when he wrote out that will of his? Why couldn’t I be part of a family that buried their dead in coffins instead of a family that buried pictures of puking kids in tackle boxes?
And why was my father mumbling the word “Easter” to himself?
“What?” Cass asked, glancing at Dad, her lunatic giggling finally subsiding.
Dad twisted in his seat to face the three of us. His glasses were smudged with dirt, just like his shirt and his pants . . . pretty much all of him was coated. He had a peculiar look on his face. It reminded me of the look Manny got whenever he tried to do subtraction in his head.
“You know how your mom and I hide your Easter baskets every year?” he asked.
We all nodded. Some kids have nice Easter bunnies who leave their baskets on the stairs or by the door. Not the Kwirks. Our Easter bunny was a sadistic prankster who liked to torture us. We had to hunt for our baskets, sometimes for hours. They were never just behind the couch or in the closet, either. Once I found my basket in the trunk of the neighbors’ car. Considering they were only filled with candy that we could get for free whenever we wanted, the reward hardly seemed worth the effort. But then . . . there was something about the hunt itself that was exciting. The last couple of Easters I’d looked forward to the process of finding the basket more than eating the goodies inside.
“Well, I never told you this, but it’s kind of a family tradition,” Dad continued. “When I was little, your grandmother used to hide my basket too. But she would give me clues, written on these little scraps of paper, scattered all throughout the house.”
“You never give us clues,” Lyra complained.
“That’s because you’re smarter than I was,” Dad said. “And you have each other. But it was just me growing up, so Grandma Shelley would give me little riddles and rhymes that had me going from room to room, trying to find the next clue, and the next, until the last one led me to the dryer or the pantry where my basket would be.”
“Like a scavenger hunt,” Lyra said.
“Or a Dan Brown novel,” Cass said. Her English teachers probably adored her.
“Something like that,” Dad said. “But then, after your grandmother passed away, the clues stopped. That first Easter without her, my basket was just waiting for me on the kitchen table, and the year after that, there was no basket at all. We just sort of stopped celebrating, I guess.”
That was terrible. Suddenly I felt guilty for complaining that my basket only ever held leftover candy from the Kaslan factory. At least I always got a basket, even if sometimes it took an hour to find it.
“Because of that, I always assumed my mother made the clues. That it was all her idea, and that Frank really could care less,” Dad mused. “After all, she was the one who did everything with me.”
“Not everything,” I said, and held out the picture of Fishin’ Fletcher showing off his modest catch.
Dad took the photo and stared hard at it in the weak glow of parking-lot lights—not at the clue written on the back, but at the faces on the front. He and his father, huddled together, Dad looking straight into the camera, Papa Kwirk beaming down at his son.
Papa Kwirk hated those cards, but he held on to them. Dad hated to fish, but still he went.
The picture shook a little, but Dad’s jaw tightened. “We can’t go home. Not until we find him.”
“We’ll find him. We will,” Cass said, reaching over and putting her hand on Dad’s arm. “But first we should get back to Aunt Gertie’s before Mom wakes up.”
Dad nodded and handed the photo back to me before starting the car. Lyra looked at the back again. “Conquer Mount Everest,” she whispered.
That was the next step. The next clue in our hunt for Papa Kwirk. Though I was sure that didn’t mean actually climbing the real Mount Everest, it still hinted at something daunting. Maybe something even more dangerous than sneaking into a stranger’s backyard and putting a hole in their flower garden.
But Cass was right. We needed to get back to the house.
Because my mother could be just as daunting and dangerous if she wanted to be.