I’ve never snuck out of the house before. I’ve never met a friend for a midnight rendezvous in the park, or had to smuggle a telepathic girl with a buzz cut out of my basement, or run away with a Reese’s Pieces–eating alien. But I think I could do it if I had to. The getting out seems like the easy part—there are windows to climb through and trees to shimmy down. It’s the getting back in that’s tricky. Because you don’t know what happened while you were away.
For instance, your mother might have woken up to find the other half of the guest bed at your great-aunt’s house empty. She might have walked through the cluttered rooms looking for your father, only to find two notes on the kitchen table—the first from your great-aunt, informing everyone that she left early for crack-of-dawn yoga at the Y, and the second from your father, saying that he was running out to get something, that he took the kids, but not to worry, he’d be back soon.
Of course, if your mother is anything like my mother, asking her not to worry is like asking the sun not to rise, which was what it was starting to do when we pulled into Aunt Gertie’s driveway and found Mom waiting for us on the porch wearing her nightgown and a face that Lyra was quick to find a word for.
“She looks consternated.”
“Ew,” I said. “That’s disgusting.”
“Not constipated, you dope, consternated. She looks worried.”
“Oh.” That I couldn’t argue with. Mom was glaring at us through the Tank’s windows. I thought I could hear her teeth grinding before I even got out of the car. We made a line, standing like captured soldiers facing the firing squad.
“I can explain,” Dad began. This seemed doubtful but certainly worth a try.
Mom just stood there, taking in our muddy shoes, Dad’s filthy dress shirt, the scratches down my arms, the leaves in Cass’s hair. We looked like we’d just barely escaped from the deepest jungles of the Amazon. “I’m listening,” she said. But her arched-eyebrow Medusa’s stare must have paralyzed Dad, because he suddenly went mute, so we all jumped to his defense, each of us talking over the others.
“So we figured out the first clue . . .”
“. . . came downstairs for a glass of milk . . .”
“. . . woke me up and I slapped him, but then . . .”
“. . . got in the car and drove . . .”
“. . . in his old backyard under this rock . . .”
“. . . through the woods by the pond, but the gate was unlocked . . .”
“. . . used to dig for worms . . .”
“. . . pretty sure they had rabies . . .”
“. . . with Aunt Gertie’s shovel . . .”
“. . . found this box, but it turns out it wasn’t Papa Kwirk . . .”
“. . . like these cards, with pus, and pimples, and guys with their heads chopped off and brains leaking out all over the place . . .”
“. . . this photo of Dad fishing with Grandpa . . .”
“. . . and a second clue—this one about Mount Everest . . .”
“. . . like a scavenger hunt . . . you know . . . on Easter . . . but with a dead body instead of candy . . .”
“. . . light came on, and some lady started saying something about having a gun . . .”
“. . . might or might not have been a serial killer . . .”
“. . . ran as fast as we could back to the car . . .”
“. . . and drove back here . . .”
“. . . and it was a stupid, stupid, stupid thing to do,” Dad finished for us, frowning. “I honestly don’t know what came over me. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Sorry if we worried you, Mom,” Cass seconded.
My mother took it all in, judge and jury, dressed in her floral nightie and flip-flops, listening to the accused desperately plead their case. We dropped our chins and stared at our filthy sneakers.
When she spoke, it was in that voice, that chilling robot-mom voice that’s somehow even worse than yelling at you because it’s dripping with parental disappointment, except her eyes were fixed on Dad this time. “You took the kids?”
“I know,” Dad blubbered. “It was dumb. I just thought—”
“You took the kids?” Mom repeated sternly. “Just the kids?”
Then it dawned on me. She wasn’t angry that we did what we did—okay, she probably was—but the thing that really stung was that we’d done it without her.
“I’m sorry, Moll, I just thought . . .”
“You thought I would have said no,” Mom finished for him. “That I would have told you it was a terrible idea. That I would have tried to talk you out of it.”
Dad nodded. Mom took a deep breath.
“You’re right,” she said. Then she reached out and took Dad’s hand. “But I still would have gone with you. That’s how it works, remember? We do it together. All of it.”
“In that case,” Dad said, smiling sheepishly, “how would you like to climb Mount Everest?”
I knew a few things about Mount Everest. I knew it was the tallest mountain in the world. I knew that it costs a gajillion dollars to climb and that more than three hundred people have died trying, which makes it one of the most expensive ways to kill yourself.
I also knew it was nowhere near Aunt Gertie’s house. Eight thousand miles to get over there, plus another dozen death-defying miles by foot to get up. No way Papa Kwirk was on top of the real Mount Everest. Which meant it was another riddle. A code that needed to be cracked.
But we were the Kwirks. A father with a PhD in chemistry. A mother who read books on astrophysics. One sister who could recite soliloquies from Hamlet and another who knew how to spell the word “soliloquy” when she was six.
And me. I’d seen the movie Everest three times. Once in IMAX. That practically made me an expert.
Naturally we started by looking for a Mount Everest equivalent nearby. Trouble was, there are no mountains in Illinois. The highest point in the entire state is really just a mound—Charles Mound—which doesn’t sound big or intimidating at all, and Greenburg itself is surrounded by soybean fields, the land flatter than a Coke that’s sat open for three days. The closest thing I’d seen to a mountain since I’d been here was the tower of brownies that still sat on Aunt Gertie’s kitchen table.
Which was where we all sat, trying to decipher Papa Kwirk’s second clue. Mom, Dad, and Cass were on their phones. Lyra and I had to make do looking over their shoulders, telling them which links to click on. I looked over Mom’s, because Cass had Delilah wrapped around her neck again. Apparently with Aunt Gertie off at yoga, the no-pythons-in-the-house rule didn’t apply.
There was an Illinois Mountain, but it was in New York. There was a Mount Saint Mary’s Catholic school, but Grandpa wasn’t Catholic. There was nobody with last name of Everest in the Greenburg phone directory. There was an Everitt and an Everset, but neither of them had ever heard of Frank Kwirk, and both asked us to never call them again.
After what seemed like hours of fruitless searching, we’d gotten no further than when we started. Dad leaned back in his chair and rubbed his temples. “It’s hopeless,” he said. “What was the man even thinking?”
Maybe that should be the family motto. The Kwirks: What Were They Thinking? I imagined a coat of arms with a big question mark in the middle and the words in Latin circling the outside. Cass could wear it to the next Ren Faire.
“Maybe he’s trying to tell us he was eaten by vultures,” Lyra suggested.
“Yeah. Because that makes sense,” I said.
“For your information, it does make sense,” she shot back. “Mount Everest is on the border of Nepal and Tibet, and Buddhists in Tibet believe that after your soul leaves, your body is just an empty vessel that needs to be returned to the earth. So they chop you into pieces and put you on top of a mountain and the vultures come and eat you. I read about it in National Geographic.”
“I don’t think your aunt fed your grandfather to vultures,” Mom said.
“Maybe she ate him herself, then.”
We all stared at my little sister this time.
“What? It’s called endocannibalism. It’s practiced by the Yanomami tribe of South America. Or is it Yamonami?” Lyra’s face scrunched, then relaxed. “The point is, when somebody dies, they mix the ash of the dead person up with mashed bananas and eat it. That way the soul of dead person is absorbed by the tribe and is protected from evil spirits.”
“You’re suggesting we search Aunt Gertie’s trash for banana peels?” Cass asked.
My eyes instinctively went to the white plastic garbage can sitting in the corner.
“I really don’t think your great-aunt ate your grandfather either,” Mom said. “It has to be some kind of metaphor. A challenge. Something like climbing Mount Everest. Let’s think. What’s the hardest thing Frank ever did?”
I tried to remember all the stories that Papa Kwirk used to tell us. Some were about his childhood, growing up poor here in Greenburg. Dumpster diving and sneaking sweets from other people’s lunch bags. Putting crawdads in Aunt Gertie’s hair for fun. His teenage years, smoking cigarettes and listening to records—back when they were cool the first time (the records, not the cigarettes)—and trying to stay out of trouble at school.
But most of his harrowing stories—or at least the ones I remembered—were about the war. The going and coming back. Stories about venomous snakes and booby traps and practical jokes his fellow soldiers would play on each other. His favorite story—the one I heard the most—was about the night his unit got pinned down in the boonies. They were taking fire, finding cover wherever they could, when an artillery shell landed right next to him, practically in his lap. Turned out it was a dud; otherwise there’d be no story to tell. It just proved how lucky he was. “That was as close as I ever came to fillin’ my britches,” Papa Kwirk said, which was always the point when Mom declared story time over and tried to change the subject.
I wasn’t sure what any of that could possibly have to do with Mount Everest.
Dad had an answer, though. And it had nothing to do with the war.
“It was me,” he said. He put down his phone and rubbed his eyes. “Frank once said that the hardest thing he’d ever done was raising me.”
“He actually said that?” I asked. Even if it was true, it wasn’t the kind of thing either of our parents would ever admit. I could picture Papa Kwirk saying it, though. Getting shot at in the middle of a booby-trapped, bug-infested jungle on the other side of the world is hard, Rion, but it’s nothing compared to raising a kid.
“I’m sure he didn’t mean it,” Mom added.
“No. I’m pretty sure he did. Though I can’t imagine how hard it could have been. I pretty much raised myself after Mom died.”
“But if you’re Mount Everest, then where’s Papa Kwirk?” Lyra asked.
We were stuck again. Mom and Cass went back to their phones. I grabbed the tackle box full of Garbage Pail Kids and sat on the floor, spreading them out. Maybe Brainy Janie or Drippy Dan could help us.
As I looked over the cards, I thought about how certain things run in families. How they get passed down. Like, I’m pretty sure Lyra inherited Dad’s analytical brain. And Cass obviously inherited Mom’s tendency to see every choice as a matter of life or death. And I’m pretty sure I inherited Papa Kwirk’s salty sense of humor.
But we all liked to collect things. I collected comics. Dad collected Garbage Pail Kids and wacky ties. Lyra collected words. Cass collected quotes from her favorite books and movies, printing them out and hanging them on her wall. Aunt Gertie collected everything, from toothbrushes to vacuum cleaners. We all hoard something, I guess. Which made me wonder . . . what did Papa Kwirk collect? Maybe the collecting gene skipped him somehow.
Maybe he was the kind of guy who didn’t hang on to anything for long.
Or maybe I just didn’t know enough about him yet.
“I give up. I’m calling Aunt Gertie,” Dad said finally.
“She’s not going to tell you anything,” Cass countered. But Dad ignored Cass’s warning and dialed anyway, putting it on speaker. It went straight to voice mail.
“This is Gertie Kwirk. Let’s be perfectly honest: I’m probably screening your call. But that should just make you feel even more special if I bother calling you back.”
At the beep, Dad hung up and started to text her instead. “Found . . . the . . . second . . . clue,” he said, narrating as he went. “Stuck . . . on . . . Mount . . . Ev . . . er . . . est. . . . Please . . . ad . . . vise.”
“It’s a waste of time,” Cass reiterated in a singsong voice. “She can’t tell you. This was part of Papa Kwirk’s last wishes. It’s all in his will, remember?”
“Then maybe we should try to find his will again,” I said. “While she’s not around to stop us.” Though in this junkyard of a house, I wouldn’t know where to start.
“That’s cheating too,” Lyra said.
“Do you have any better ideas?” I snapped.
Dad’s phone rang.
“Aunt Gertie?” Mom asked hopefully.
Dad shook his head. “Riya,” he said.
Riya Kumari was Dad’s lab assistant at Kaslan’s Candy Factory and, frankly, one of the best reasons to visit him at work, outside of the free jelly beans. She was smart and funny, and had worked with Dad on the mango chutney jelly bean, which proved to be an instant success. She also could touch her tongue to her nose, which I found impressive.
Dad went into the other room to take the call. Before he shut the door, I could hear his voice jump an octave. “What? When? Do we know who?”
“That doesn’t sound good,” Mom groaned.
“Trouble in Loompaland,” I said. Something had obviously happened at the factory. I wondered if this meant we were going to have to leave early after all. Give up on finding Mount Everest. Give up on Papa Kwirk. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the idea. Last night I had almost been ready to leave, but now that we’d started, it seemed wrong not to finish. We sat and waited for Dad to return. He was frowning when he came back into the room.
“Somebody hacked into the servers at Kaslan’s over the weekend. We just found out this morning.”
“Garvadill?” Mom asked.
Dad pointed to his nose, which I guess meant that yes, they were the most likely suspects. Either that or they stank. Probably both.
“Those jerks,” Cass said. “What did they steal?”
“Nothing vital,” Dad confirmed. “They managed to access our emails. Some sales reports. That’s about it.”
“No formulas?” Mom asked.
“Of course not,” Dad scoffed. “We don’t ever send those out over email. Whoever it was may know what we’re working on, but they have no idea how we’re doing it. That’s all in here.” Dad pointed to his head, and in that moment, I got a flash of what the inside of my dad’s brain looked like. A bunch of Snorks and Mutant Ninja Turtles and GI Joe guys all wearing polka-dotted bow ties and spouting complex chemical equations at each other. “Our tech guys are going through everything now. They’ll find out what was taken, hopefully trace it back to the source.”
“That’s gutsy,” Mom said. “Just breaking right into your system like that.”
“It’s flat-out piracy is what it is.”
Now I had an image of a bunch of scientists dressed in lab coats and eye patches, brandishing gummy swords and licorice whips, raiding Dad’s office, looking for treasure chests full of jelly beans. The whole thing seemed ridiculous to me, but Dad was fuming.
“I told you, Molly. Those guys will do just about anything to try and get ahead. But we’ll still beat ’em. The day Garvadill takes Kaslan’s Candy under is the day I eat my—”
He was interrupted by another sound from his phone: Optimus Prime telling his fellow Autobots to transform and roll out. It was his text notification. “Aunt Gertie,” he said.
“What’s it say?” we all asked at once.
“‘Maybe you need a break. Take the family out for a treat. There’s an old-fashioned ice-cream parlor off West Street called Mallory’s. It’s the best,’” Dad read aloud.
“That’s it?” Cass asked.
“Take a break? We’re just getting started,” Lyra complained.
Dad quickly started texting back his reply, talking his way through it, as usual. “Don’t . . . see . . . how . . . getting . . . ice cream . . . will . . . help . . . find . . . Frank. . . .”
I stood up and huddled with the rest of my family around Dad’s phone this time, waiting for Aunt Gertie’s response. Ten seconds later, Optimus Prime gave his orders again.
Mallory’s has a HUGE menu. So many flavors. It’s impossible NOT to find what you’re looking for.
The text was followed by a string of emojis. An ice-cream cone, followed by the poop emoji, followed by a winky face.
“Please tell me she thought that was chocolate soft serve,” Cass said.
But it was the winky face, not the swirly poo, that did it.
My parents looked at each other. Then Mom told us all to go upstairs and get changed.
I was going to have ice cream for breakfast.
By the time we were ready (Mom insisted we shower off the dirt from our earlier expedition), it was clear that it would be closer to lunch. We piled in the Tank, and Dad followed the GPS into the center of town. He’d never been to Mallory’s before. Apparently the building had housed a Mexican restaurant when he was growing up, but that was almost thirty years ago. It made sense that some places would disappear and others would rise to take their place.
And yet downtown Greenburg still looked a lot like it probably did thirty or even fifty years ago. Everything had an old-fashioned feel: green awnings and redbrick siding, bright blue mailboxes and old yellow fire hydrants. Wood placards listed store hours, and actual metal bells hung from doors to announce your arrival. There was even a phone booth. It didn’t work, of course—it was just for looking at, but it was kind of neat seeing one out in the wild, and I had half a mind to jump in and rip off my shirt, Clark Kent style. Except there wouldn’t be a Superman logo underneath, just my pale skin and the one annoying chest hair that seemed to have sprouted overnight.
Mallory’s Ice Cream Parlor and Restaurant was situated next to an old-timey barber shop—the kind with a red-and-white striped pole swirling out front. It reminded me of the Salty Shakers. We were still twenty minutes early—the place didn’t open until eleven—so Mom suggested walking around town a bit. Who knows, maybe we’d find a mountain along the way.
As we walked, Dad’s voice rose and fell as he pointed out the places from his childhood. He didn’t recall there ever being a coffee shop, but he did remember the antique furniture store on the corner and the place that sold soaps and candles next door to it. Cass asked if we could stop there. I knew if I objected I would just be outvoted, so I didn’t even bother.
Flicker’s Candle Shop smelled a little like Kaslan’s Candy Factory, sweet and spicy and fruity all at once. It hit you right as you opened the door. I followed along behind Dad while the girls went to check out the froofy bath salts and anything made with milk and honey. Naturally Dad stopped by the row of candles that smelled like food.
“Eighty percent of taste comes from olfaction,” he told me, his nose hovering over a candle that smelled just like fresh pineapple.
“Eighty percent of lectures come from know-it-all fathers,” I said under my breath. If it had been Manny, I would have said something like “If it smells so good, why don’t you eat it?” But that wasn’t much of a dare for my father. I was a little surprised he hadn’t licked the candle already.
“I used to come here all the time as a kid, you know,” he said.
Right. Because who needs a toy store or an arcade when you can come to the candle store and sniff wax all day? Such a nerd. My father took another long snort. “Ethyl butyrate. They put it in orange juice sometimes.” He handed the candle to me.
I took a little sniff. “It reminds me of the beach,” I said, mostly because I didn’t want to say what it really reminded me of, which was a certain orange-and-blue flower dress and the girl who wore it. Talking about girls to my father sounded even less fun than rubbing Aunt Gertie’s feet. I put the candle back and watched as Dad moved down the line, smelling each and every one and muttering a string of chemicals to himself. Anyone who didn’t know him would probably assume he was missing a few screws.
Lyra came over and shoved a bar of soap up my nose and demanded I smell it.
“Peppermint,” she said. “And it exfoliates. Mom said she’d buy it for me.”
What was it with my sisters shoving things in my face all the time? “Good for you,” I said, hoping “exfoliates” meant “to make disappear,” but I wasn’t going to hold my breath.
“You could borrow it if you wanted,” she added. “You’ve got a little pimple right there.” Lyra pointed at a new zit on my chin. I swatted her hand away and she pranced off.
By the time we left the store, both girls were carrying little bags from Flicker’s like they were souvenirs and Mom had a new lilac-scented candle stashed in the Bag of Holding. As we walked the rest of the way around the block, Dad continued to reminisce about growing up there. Just about every sentence out of his mouth started with “Used to.”
“That used to be a Radio Shack,” he said. “And I’m pretty sure that was a bank. And that used to be a music store. I bought all my tapes there.” I considered asking him what a tape was, but I knew it would just be faster if I looked it up on my own later. Or just forgot about it entirely.
He stopped on the corner. “There used to be a doughnut shop over there that your grandmother would take me to on Saturdays after my Little League games,” Dad said wistfully. “Didn’t matter how many times I struck out, she’d still buy me two chocolate cake doughnuts. We’d sit on that bench and feed the crumbs to the doves.”
Dad smiled as Mom tucked her arm through his elbow. It seemed strange to hear him talk like this. He always said how he couldn’t stand this town, how happy he had been to get away. Yet there was the street he used to ride his bike down. And there was the little community theater where he saw his first play (Cass was desperate to know which one, but he couldn’t recall). And here was the bench where he ate his chocolate doughnuts. I wondered if it was the same one as in the picture sitting on his nightstand at home, and felt a twinge of sadness. Grandma Shelley might have sat on that bench. We turned the last corner to see the wooden sign outside the ice-cream parlor had been flipped.
The bells on the door jingled as we walked in.
“Welcome to Mallory’s. Take any seat. I’ll be with you shortly,” called a man’s voice from the kitchen.
There were plenty to choose from. There were only three other people in the place. It looked like something out of an old movie. The floor was tiled blue and white, and the stools by the counter looked like they spun all the way around. A giant glass container held long paper straws. The walls were all decorated with metal-plate advertisements for sodas and sundaes, save for one wall toward the back, which was covered with photos, most of them in color but some in black and white. The whole place smelled like sugar and french fries, a winning combination.
We took a big booth in the corner and waited for our server, a young man with slicked-back hair. He looked like something out of the musical Grease; I know because my sister made us all watch it. I wondered if he always wore his hair that way or if it was required as part of the job.
“Hi there. I’m George and I’ll be taking care of you today. Have you been to Mallory’s before?”
Dad answered for all of us. “We’re from out of town.” It was the simplest explanation, I guess.
“Well then, welcome, first timers. Here are some menus,” George said, handing them over. “Food toward the front, sweet stuff toward the back. Our soup of the day is cheesy potato. Our flavor of the day is You Mocha Me Crazy. I’ll give you some time to look things over and be right back.”
I flipped to the food, forgetting, for a moment, why were even here. The picture of the double bacon cheeseburger was taunting me. Sitting next to me, Cass hadn’t even gotten to the food yet. She was still on the first page, the one detailing the restaurant’s history. “It says here that this place was first founded by the Mallory brothers in 1952 and stayed in business until 1967, when the elder Mallory died and the younger one sold the property to pay off debts. The building went through several other owners until it was bought by the Meeks family and turned back into an ice-cream parlor three years ago.”
The name caught my attention. Mom’s too.
“Did you say Meeks? Didn’t we meet them yesterday at the service?” she asked. “Wasn’t she the girl who said all those nice things about your grandfather?”
Her name was Tasha. She had beautiful black hair and a great smile and pink lip gloss with a touch of glitter. She also had on earrings shaped like dolphins. She was wearing white sandals and had painted her toenails to match her dress.
“Yeah, maybe,” I said with a shrug.
“Well, it says he here that the Meekses bought it with the express intention of restoring it to its former glory,” Cass continued. “The new owners even went back to the Mallory family and got some of their original recipes. Several of the menu items are the same as those served in the 1950s, and even some of the pictures on the wall date back to when the parlor was first opened.”
“That’s great,” Dad said, “But I really don’t see how . . .”
“Um . . . Dad . . .”
As expected, Lyra had skipped clear past the food and gone straight to the dessert. She turned her menu so we could all see it and pointed down at the bottom of the Sundaes and Shakes page. To six words in a fancy rolling script.
A lump lodged in my throat.
We’d found it.