In war there really are no winners, only losers. That was a quote I remembered seeing posted somewhere in the museum. Or something close. It’s possible I got it a little mixed up because I also remember that the words were attributed to Neville Longbottom, and I know that can’t be right.
It may be true in war, but in the battle for the secret jelly-bean formula, on the hallowed grounds of the Greenburg Museum of Modern Warfare, the good guys definitely won.
It honestly didn’t take much to get the curator on our side; he believed our story from the start. The Greenburg County Sheriff’s Department, however, was a little harder to convince. It helped that we had Mr. Oglesby’s support, though he seemed a little miffed at us for using museum artifacts in self-defense and thanked Cass for not cutting anyone’s limbs off, because it probably would have driven up the cost of insurance. He blamed himself for not relocking the door after letting us in, and blamed the other two men for the rest.
It really helped that those other two men, whose names apparently were not Broomstache and Freckles, both had criminal records and were wanted in connection with a string of robberies in Pennsylvania. Authorities had been hunting them for months. We Kwirks, on the other hand, had one unpaid parking ticket between us, for which my mother apologized profusely.
There was no evidence that the two intruders were connected to Garvadill in any way, and neither would admit to anything without first talking to a lawyer, but the detective in charge said she would investigate my father’s claim that this was not a random armed robbery but a case of corporate espionage.
“No doubt in my mind. They were hired thugs. Those jerks will stoop to anything to get my secrets,” Dad said.
“And by ‘jerks’ you mean the other candy company,” the detective, who was blessed with the name Alicia Strong, confirmed.
“They are not a candy company. I work for a candy company,” Dad insisted. “They are an artificial flavor manufacturer. And I’m telling you, they have to be the ones behind this.” Unfortunately, there were no security cameras in the Museum of Modern Warfare save the one in the gift shop, so the detective had only our family’s word to go on.
“We will look into it,” Detective Strong said. She had short, black, no-nonsense hair and a matching no-nonsense expression, and she stood over six feet tall. I know I wouldn’t have tried to argue with her, but Dad was too angry not to. “It’s just . . . it’s a little hard to swallow, Mr. Kwirk. You said you were in the museum—after hours—on some kind of scavenger hunt? And these two guys must have been following you around our little town where you don’t even live?”
Honestly, we didn’t know how they found us or how long they’d been stalking us. Since the park at least. Maybe long before that. Just biding their time, waiting to ambush us when there were no witnesses around. They hadn’t counted on Cass having to take an emergency potty break and sneaking up on them, saber in hand. They hadn’t counted on my mother being armed and dangerous.
They didn’t know what the Kwirks were capable of.
“It wasn’t a scavenger hunt, exactly. It’s hard to explain,” Dad said. “The point is, we didn’t know who these guys were until they attacked us and demanded my formula.”
“For the fried-chicken-flavored jelly beans that I’m not supposed to tell anyone about?” The detective seemed to be struggling to keep a straight face.
“They really do taste exactly like fried chicken,” I said.
“It’s uncanny,” Lyra added.
“Uh-huh,” Detective Strong said. You could tell she was ready to go home. Or at least to get away from us. “Sooo I think I’ve got everything I need for the time being, but I’m going to want you all to stick around town, if you don’t mind, just for another day. I’m sure I’ll have more questions. Could be a lot more questions. But for now, how about you and Mrs. Kwirk take your kids back to your aunt’s house, and I’ll take these two wanted felons down to the station. I’ll give you a call if I need anything else.”
“But you promise you’ll look into it?” Dad prodded. “You wrote it down. Garvadill. That’s G-A-R-V-A—”
“Yes. I got it, Mr. Kwirk. Corporate espionage and chicken-flavored beans.”
“Jelly beans.”
“Right,” Detective Strong said. “’Cause what the world needs is some chicken-flavored candy.” She made a few more notes in her notebook, probably doodles of my father in a straitjacket being led away to the funny farm. Then she headed toward the squad car where Jamie Trendall and Gavin Blane, aka Freckles and Broomstache, were conscious, cuffed, and complaining that they had done nothing wrong and that they were the ones who had been assaulted. I could see where it might look that way, judging by their bruises, bloody lips, and swollen eyes. I had scratches all over me, but that was the magic tree’s fault; Freckles’s knife hadn’t even left a mark.
Detective Strong looked back over her shoulder. “And one more thing, Mr. Kwirk.”
“Yes?”
“Just want to say that I’m sorry for your loss. I knew Frank. We all did. He was a good man.”
Dad nodded. He’d heard that same thing a hundred times since we’d been here.
I wondered if he was finally starting to believe it.
The ride back to Aunt Gertie’s was quiet, but a different kind of quiet than before. The kind of quiet that every now and then gets interrupted by a snort or a sigh, but not an unhappy one. More like the sigh you give when you’ve finished off the last bite of peanut butter pie and you’re sort of sorry to see the empty plate, but your belly’s too full anyway and you’ve still got the taste of peanut butter on your tongue to remind you of just how great it was.
Any other time, if one of us had broken the silence with a laugh or a knowing grunt, somebody else would have asked, “What?” demanding to be in on it. But this time we were all in on it already. So when Lyra giggled or Dad whistled or Mom said, “Huh,” softly, to herself and shook her head, I didn’t have to ask. I didn’t even try to guess exactly what was going through each of their heads. I just let the evening’s cool slip through the crack in the window, teasing my hair, and laughed quietly to myself as I thought about mountains of ice cream and Garbage Pail Kids and girls in flower dresses.
And Papa Kwirk. Stuffed in a shell and hidden away in a museum. Waiting for us to solve the puzzle and come find him. Though now that we had, I still felt like I was missing something.
Then again, maybe there was no one right answer. Maybe Papa Kwirk’s last wish was like a scatter of stars in the sky, a collection of moments and memories that you traced your own pattern over, making your own story from the connected dots.
“Vile fiend,” Lyra whispered in front of me, stretching so she could rest her head on Cass’s arm. “Good one.”
I looked up at the sky—just dark enough that you could start to see the stars if you looked hard, starting to wink at you, as if they’ve just whispered a secret—and thought about the grandmother I never knew and how she didn’t have to wait for Papa Kwirk any longer. He’d come home at last.
When we pulled up to the house, Aunt Gertie was waiting for us, sitting on the front porch in the dark, in different color yoga pants with a shawl draped over her shoulders and a phone in hand. “I heard what happened!” she yelled as we spilled from the car like clumsy circus clowns. “Got a call from a Detective Strong just a few minutes ago. She told me everything. Are you okay?”
“We’re fine, Aunt Gertie,” Mom said, putting her arm around Cass as we all trudged up to the house. My legs were like Slinkys. I could still probably pick bits of sticks and leaves out of my hair. My ribs hurt from where Freckles had squeezed me. But Mom was right. I was fine. Maybe even a little better than fine.
Aunt Gertie wasn’t convinced. “She said two hooligans tried to rob you?”
That was one way to put it. It was probably what Detective Strong would write in the report, at least. I was ready to launch into a full retelling, but Lyra cut me off, running up to the porch with more energy than I could muster. “It was wild, Aunt Gertie. These two guys accosted us and took Rion hostage, and one of them was armed with a knife, and the other had a baseball bat, and they were demanding Dad give up his formula, right, but then I distracted them with my verbal prowess, and Cass showed up with a sword, and Mom blasted them with pepper spray and Rion . . . well, I’m not really sure what Rion did . . .”
“Thanks, Ly,” I muttered, but she just ignored me and kept going.
“And then Dad knocked one of them unconscious with Papa Kwirk’s old shell and then the police came. It was intense.”
Lyra probably could have kept going, but at the mention of Papa Kwirk, Aunt Gertie raised a finger to shush her and looked at Dad, now leaning against the porch rail.
“You found him, then?” she asked.
“We found him,” he said with a nod.
Aunt Gertie smiled her own peculiar smile. I’d seen that same smile before: right after the service, the first time Dad had tried to say goodbye to Papa Kwirk. I didn’t trust it.
“In that case, there’s something else you need to see,” Aunt Gertie said, already sounding guilty. But before any of us could even get inside, she made Dad promise not to be mad—probably the most frequently broken promise in history. He did anyway, and she opened the door.
It was time, she said, to read the will.
When I was younger, like seven or eight, I didn’t know what the word “testament” meant. I didn’t even know it was a word. I wasn’t like Lyra. I thought the thing everybody read out loud when you died was called a Last Will and Test of Men. And with a name like that, I sort of imagined it was a list of trials you had to go through in order to inherit the dead person’s leftovers. If you could pass the Test of Men, you got your late rich uncle’s house on the beach and his collection of pink porcelain pelicans, or whatever strange thing your family was bound to leave behind. To make matters worse, I also had been told that there was both a “new” and an “old” Test of Men, which just confused me further.
Eventually I figured it out. Sometimes it takes me a while.
Papa Kwirk’s last will and testament was only two pages long, single-spaced, which struck me as odd. Aunt Gertie had been keeping it on top of the fridge, of all places, at the bottom of a bowl of three-year-old Halloween candy. It had been right there, right next to us, all along. She blew off a dust bunny and handed the document to Dad.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Read it. But remember . . . you promised.”
He wasn’t angry yet, but he did look confused. “It’s so short,” he said, echoing my thoughts. After all, this was the will that not only outlined the kind of memorial service Papa Kwirk wanted (the infamous funneral), but everything that came after: from the frowning clown to the Museum of Modern Warfare. The empty casket. The clues. The quest. The whole crazy day. It was all in there somewhere. We’d done it all for him.
That’s what Aunt Gertie had told us, anyway. And she was the executor of the will.
We all stood behind Dad—who sat across from Gertie at the table, like two foreign leaders negotiating a treaty—and waited for him to read through it. It didn’t take long. When he finished, he flipped back and forth between the two pages, shaking his head.
“This is it? This is his will?” Dad slapped the pages with the back of his hand. “All this says is that he grants you power of attorney as executor, and that his body should be cremated and his family should ‘dispose of his ashes in a manner that brings them peace and understanding.’”
Aunt Gertie leaned back in her chair, clutching a cup of coffee in both hands. “Yes. Well. I might have read into that last part a little bit,” she admitted.
Dad’s jaw dropped. Cass’s eyeballs bulged. Lyra’s face folded into a look of confusion.
In a manner that brings them peace and understanding. It took a hot minute to fully process what Aunt Gertie was saying, what all of this meant, but like I said, I get there eventually.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh.”
Aunt Gertie winked at me.
What it meant was that all of it, from the bottom of the bottle to the top of the mountain, everything we had been through that day—it hadn’t been Papa Kwirk’s idea at all. It hadn’t been written into his will. He hadn’t sent us on some harebrained scavenger hunt around town to find him.
Aunt Gertie had. She had masterminded the whole thing.
“Wait . . . so you did this?” Mom asked.
Aunt Gertie wrapped her blue shawl tighter around her shoulders. “Well, if we are being completely honest, I had some help from Jimmy’s friends and acquaintances. And I wouldn’t say it was all my idea, either. He did say that it would be funny if singing clowns were the bearers of bad news. And he absolutely insisted he didn’t want people crying and carrying on at his funeral. He wanted it to be a celebration of his life, with singing and dancing and everyone having a good time. And tacos, he was adamant about the tacos. The rest, I suppose, was up for interpretation.”
“Up for interpretation?” Mom repeated. “Gertrude, stashing Frank’s remains in a museum is not an interpretation. Making his family traipse all the way across the city looking for them is not an interpretation. I mean, come on. A marching band? At a funeral? Who does that?”
“Actually,” Lyra chirped, “the jazz funerals in New Orleans are famous for their marching processionals.”
“Funneral, dear,” Aunt Gertie reminded her, casually taking a sip of coffee.
“We almost died!” Mom snapped.
It sounded like an exaggeration, except it really wasn’t, though the almost dying part wasn’t really Aunt Gertie’s fault; Broomstache and Freckles weren’t part of her plan. Though I guess I could have broken my neck falling out of the tree.
“I’m sorry,” Aunt Gertie said. “It was never my intention to hurt you.”
“And what was your intention, exactly?” Dad asked, leaning across the table, his temper still somehow in check, though I noticed his hands were trembling again, just as they had been when he’d held Papa Kwirk’s shell in the museum. “If it wasn’t set out like that in Frank’s will, then why do it?”
Aunt Gertie sighed as she reached across the table and put hers on top of his. And for the first time I realized just how old her hands looked. The knobble-boned fingers and creased skin. Liver spots marching straight up her arms. She had found some time in the day to get her nails done, though; they shone a pearly pink.
“I didn’t do it for him,” she said. “And I didn’t do it for you either. Not just for you, anyway. I did it for me.”
Dad tried to pull his hands back, but Aunt Gertie clamped down on them, wrapping those bony fingers around his wrists. Like my sister, she was a lot stronger than she looked. Maybe it was a Kwirk thing. “Jimmy had a plan for what his life was going to be. He had it all mapped out, all the dots connected. But all of it—his whole entire world—it all revolved around Shelley. It absolutely shattered him, losing her. For a time, I think, he just didn’t see the point in trying. And, unfortunately, you were the one who paid for it.”
I looked at Dad and saw, in that moment, the little boy who had lost his mom. Who woke up and got himself fed and out the door to catch the school bus. Who spent his Saturday mornings alone in the living room watching cartoons while his father slept. Who grew up the rest of the way with what seemed like only half a parent, as if the death of Grandma Shelley had split Papa Kwirk in two.
“It took him a long time to crawl out of that hole, Fletcher,” Aunt Gertie continued. “And when he finally did, you were gone.”
“I wasn’t that far away,” Dad said.
“Not in miles, maybe,” Aunt Gertie replied, arching a sculpted eyebrow at him. “For twenty years I watched you two circle around each other, holding it all in. He was too stubborn or too scared to say he was sorry. And you were too proud and too hurt to forgive him. And I get it, Fletcher. I do. There’s no excuse for the kind of father he was.” She shook her head but kept her eyes fixed on Dad’s. “But I’m not getting any younger, and I’m not about to keel over being the only one who knew how much your father loved you. And how it broke his heart that you two grew so far apart. I needed you to at least try and see him the way I see him. The way the people in this town that you never wanted to come back to see him. For the man he wanted to be. That way, maybe . . . just maybe . . . you’d forgive him. And yourself.”
Aunt Gertie took a deep breath, and the room suddenly got hear-your-heartbeat quiet. Dad’s hands were still locked up in hers. The rest of us still huddled behind him.
“So then why didn’t you just tell me these things?” Dad said, finally breaking the silence. “Wouldn’t it have been easier?”
“Sure it would have.” Aunt Gertie smirked. “But we Kwirks never believed in doing anything the easy way.”
I watched Dad’s face, waiting for him to finally break one of his promises. Waited for him to start yelling, to storm out of the room and stomp up the stairs, or to pick up Papa Kwirk’s too-short will and tear it in half right in front of Aunt Gertie’s face. That’s probably what I would have done.
Instead he grunted. He shook his head and grunted again.
And then, like a train building steam, chugging out of the station, the grunts turned to chuckles, and the chuckles exploded into startling uncontrollable laughter so loud it filled the whole kitchen. Both Cass and Lyra looked at him like he was possessed, and Mom put her hands on his shaking shoulders, but Dad just kept going, squeezing Aunt Gertie’s hands now, tears trickling from the corners of his eyes.
Then it spread. First to Aunt Gertie, then over to Cass, who couldn’t help herself and caught the giggle bug whenever it struck anyone around her. Cass laughing made Lyra laugh, which got Mom going. All five of them now, doubled over in the kitchen, squealing and howling like lunatics.
And I tried to resist, because it seemed wrong to be laughing at a time like this, but I couldn’tt. They sucked me in. I wasn’t even entirely sure what we were laughing about. Maybe just the ridiculousness of it all—because it was ridiculous—but it was also perfect in its own way. A perfectly ridiculous Kwirky day. Tears coursed down Dad’s cheeks. Aunt Gertie was moaning, leaning back in her chair, clutching her stomach. I laughed so hard my nose ran. Lyra was cross-legged on the kitchen tiles, rocking back and forth.
Finally, after a minute Dad stopped and took a deep breath. The giggles slowly petered out, though Lyra was still on the floor. We all wiped our wet cheeks on our sleeves, save for Aunt Gertie, who used her scarf. A final guffaw from Cass threatened to send us off again, but our insides hurt too much.
“I have so many things I want to ask you,” Dad said to Aunt Gertie, his face ruddy and shiny with smeared tears. “But there’s this one thing that’s really nagging me. There was only a small bag of ashes in the museum. I know that’s not all of it. So where’s the rest? And please, just tell me this time. No more ghosts. No more clues. Where is my father?”
Aunt Gertie got this look on her face, somehow horrified and amused at once. She pointed behind us into the dining room.
At the vacuum cleaner resting in the corner.