Gretchen pushed me forward. “This one.”
“Maybe Zinny should stay,” Louanne said. “What I’ve got to say concerns her.”
I thought about bolting for the door and making a quick escape, or falling down in a fit and thrashing around and maybe even going unconscious. Everyone hovered there, curious about why Louanne Boone wanted me to stay.
“Go on,” Mom said, “go find something to do. Zinny—you stay here.”
Reluctantly, they shuffled out of the room—all, that is, except May, who decided to wash the dishes.
“May, you too. Go on.”
“I’ll just do up these dishes first,” she said.
“Go on—”
“Okay, okay, okay! If you don’t want any help, that’s perfectly fine with me!” May said, stomping off.
Mrs. Boone fiddled with her key ring, clearing her throat several times. “You got new curtains,” she said.
“Three years ago,” Mom said.
“And I like the way you’re doing your hair.”
“Thank you, Louanne. Yours looks nice, too.” (It didn’t, though. Mom was just being polite.) “Now, is there some reason you wanted Zinny to be here?”
Mrs. Boone wouldn’t look at me, so I was real worried. She said, “I hope I’m wrong about this. I hate to do this.”
“What, Louanne? What is it? Does it concern Zinny?” Mom glanced from Mrs. Boone to me. “Zinny, have you any idea—?”
“Nope,” I said, which wasn’t exactly the up-and-down truth, because I knew it had something to do with Jake. Maybe Mrs. Boone knew about the puppy and thought it was my fault.
“Louanne—? Tell us what’s bothering you,” Mom said.
“Okay then, I will, but I don’t like to do it. You know I don’t usually do things like this. You know that usually I let things roll right off me. I don’t complain. I don’t meddle around in other people’s business. But this is different.”
Just spit it out! I wanted to say. Tell me the awful horrible thing I’ve done and hang me from the oak tree. Get it over with!
“My Jake mentions Zinny all the time—”
I believe I turned purple when she said this.
“That’s nice—isn’t it?” Mom said. “Does he ever mention May?”
Ah, I thought. Even Mom suspected he’d be more interested in May. Nobody would love me. I was mortified that she was announcing it like this.
Louanne twisted our tablecloth in her hands. “Well, yes, he does. Maybe I’ve got them confused. I thought Zinny was the older one. Maybe you oughta call May back in here.”
Mom summoned May, who must have been inches away from the door, because she reappeared instantly. “Yes?” she said brightly.
Louanne pressed her lips tightly together and gave the tablecloth a few more twists. Then she sat there, rigid as a fence post. Silent. The second hand on our clock flicked its way mercilessly toward the next second, and the next, and the next. I was beginning to think maybe she’d had a heart attack.
When she finally spoke again, I flinched.
“I was cleaning out my dresser drawers today. In the top drawer, under my stockings, I keep a little box with my valuables in it. I don’t have too many valuables, just a few things my grandmother gave me. And pretty regularly, I take out this box and look at those things. It makes me feel good. I like to touch them.”
A flicker of recognition flipped around the edges of my brain.
“And today when I looked in that box, I knew right away that one was missing—my grandmother’s diamond-and-ruby engagement ring. I asked my husband if he’d seen it. No, he hadn’t. I would’ve asked Jake, but he’s been gone all morning, and he’s not at Mrs. Flint’s. I have a hunch he took my ring and gave it to May or Zinny. There, I’ve said it.”
I thought she should have waited to ask Jake about it, but I guess she wasn’t thinking straight. I guess she got frantic.
May burst into tears, and I was out of my chair and at the door. I felt trapped, cornered.
“Zinny?” Mom said. “Where—”
I was off and running.
CHAPTER 20
BEADY EYES
The sun was directly overhead, beating down as I ran up the trail. My heart was thudding and my feet were pounding, thunk, thunk, thunk on each stone. The birds must have thought it was too hot to fly, because they clustered in the treetops, chattering.
When I lifted the stone which marked the spot where I’d buried the ring, a pale brown salamander raised its head and fixed its gaze on me. I must have looked like a big sweaty giant hovering overhead. This might sound strange, but it seemed as if that salamander was trying to tell me something. Before I could figure out what, the salamander darted under a patch of pine needles.
The ring was gone.
I didn’t know what to think. I dug farther down and pawed at the pine needles all around the spot. I searched the surrounding trees and bushes, but found nothing, and on my way back down the hill, I kept seeing those little beady salamander eyes staring at me.
I burst through the kitchen door, ready to confess all. Mrs. Boone was gone, but Mom was standing at the sink.
“Zinny? You look a wreck. There, there. I don’t blame you for rushing out. That was a horrid thing Louanne did. Imagine her suspecting her own son of stealing. I told her that Jake wouldn’t do such a thing, and even if he did—if he did—neither you nor May would have accepted it, and you would have told us about it. Don’t you worry. Everything will be okay.”
I was dumbfounded. My head was saying Confess! Confess! but my pitiful heart was so grateful for her comfort that I couldn’t speak. It was selfish of me, I knew it, but at the time, I wanted to believe that everything would be okay, as simply as that.
That night as I was brushing my teeth, I heard the music again. I walked outside and glanced into Uncle Nate’s room. On his mirror he had taped the picture of himself—the “proof.” Round and round the room he spun, doing the boogie-woogie.
There was something about that music and seeing Uncle Nate looking so determined as he spun around that made me determined. I was going to find that ring and that medallion, and figure out exactly what was going on.
CHAPTER 21
WANTED
At last, school was out, and I could concentrate on my trail. There’d been no sign of Jake since Mrs. Boone had visited, and May and Gretchen whispered endlessly at night.
“You notice Jake hasn’t been around?” Gretchen said.
“Shh,” May said. “Is Zinny asleep?”
I slowed my breathing and kept still.
“She’s out cold,” Gretchen said. “What about Jake?”
“I think he finally wised up. Can you keep a secret?”
“Of course I can.”
“I think he was just bringing Zinny things to make me jealous,” May said. “And you know that thing about the ring—? Here’s what I think. I think Jake did take that ring—”
“No!” Gretchen said.
The ring, the ring. It had been on my mind night and day. Maybe I only thought I’d buried it in that hole. Maybe I’d dropped it somewhere.
May whispered to Gretchen, “Wait—I think he took it and he was going to give it to me, but then he—oh, I don’t know. Maybe he chickened out. Maybe he lost it. But I definitely think he—promise not to tell?”
“Promise.”
“I definitely think he likes me.” May giggled. “You know what he did yesterday? I was at Mrs. Flint’s store, and Jake was there, and he—well, it was so obvious—”
“What was?”
“You know, that he likes me,” May said. “He smiled at me.”
“He does smile a lot,” Gretchen said.
“This was different. I could just tell.”
I buried my head under my pillow, cursing Jake.
One evening, when Dad and Ben were watching a baseball game on television, I overheard Ben say, “Dad, how come Zinny’s never home anymore? How come she’s always on the trail?”<
br />
“I guess she likes to be out on her own sometimes,” Dad said.
“Not sometimes, all the time!”
“She’ll get tired of it, sooner or later.”
“But she’s not nearly done. She’s got miles and miles to go,” Ben whined.
“She’ll get tired of it, you watch. She won’t finish it.”
My own father, a traitor, I thought.
The trouble was, I was starting to panic. By my estimate, I’d cleared only four miles of the trail; there were sixteen more to go. I had to finish it in the summer—I had to, but I was beginning to think it was an impossible task.
It now took me more than an hour to get up there, and once I cleared farther, it would take longer and longer just to get to where I’d left off. I was doomed. Then I had an idea, and I put it to Mom and Dad one evening.
“Zinny, you must be out of your mind,” my father said.
“A horse!” my mother said. “You might as well be asking for an airplane. We don’t have that kind of money.”
“But,” I pleaded, “then I could ride up the trail, and it wouldn’t take me nearly so long, and—”
“Zinny,” Dad said, “don’t you think this trail thing is getting out of hand?”
“Trail thing? It’s not a trail thing. It’s my trail. Aunt Jessie would have let me have a horse.”
That was the wrong thing to say. My mother burst into tears, and my father gave me a scathing look. “No horse,” he said.
I was desperate, and so I did a desperate thing. I put up a notice in Mrs. Flint’s store:
WANTED: CHEAP HORSE. NEED DESPERATELY.
PLEASE PHONE Z. TAYLOR.
I didn’t have any money for a horse, not even a cheap horse. The reason I put that sign up was because I hoped Jake would see it. I hoped he would bring me a horse, and I didn’t care if he had to steal it.
CHAPTER 22
THE FENCE
Nothing was going right. It was as if the world were in cahoots with my father, who thought I wouldn’t finish the trail.
The very day I’d put the sign up at Mrs. Flint’s, I was clearing the trail and, after a few hours’ work, noticed a brighter patch ahead. The tunnel of woods known as Maiden’s Walk was coming to an end. Weary of being closed in among the dark trees, I stopped clearing and walked ahead through the dead branches and rotting leaves to see what I could look forward to in the days ahead.
As I came through the last bank of trees, I sucked in my breath. Stretching before me was a clearing, about two hundred feet across: a meadow of tall grass and wildflowers, and beyond, the forest continued. This meadow might have been a sweet sight, but it wasn’t, for surrounding it was a sturdy barbed-wire fence.
A fence? On my trail? I surveyed the meadow. No sign of any animals: no cows or horses or goats. It didn’t even occur to me to continue the trail around the meadow. I was sure the trail had originally continued straight on, and for some reason, it was important to stay on that track. I headed back, planning my strategy.
At home, Dad handed me a piece of paper. “Zinny, what’s the meaning of this?” It was the sign I’d put up at Mrs. Flint’s, advertising for a horse. “Where do you expect to get the money to pay for this ‘cheap’ horse?”
“I could earn it,” I said.
“How?”
“Doing jobs for people.”
“When?”
“Whenever—”
“So you’ll give up working on the trail in order to do these jobs?”
I stuffed the paper in my pocket. “No,” I said. “No, I will not. Forget the stupid horse, then. I’ll just wear out my stupid legs.”
All I could think of was that I hoped Jake had seen the sign before Dad removed it.
The next day, I rummaged through the toolshed, looking for a pair of wire cutters. It was a mess in there, with scythes, hoes, hatchets, and pitchforks tilting helter-skelter among cobwebbed planks. Strewn across the wooden bench were plastic tubs of nails, screws, nuts, and bolts; screwdrivers and pliers and hammers; empty oil cans and coffee cans; and tangled loops of twine. I rummaged through this hodgepodge, burrowing under piles of metal, sending several spiders and a stunned mouse scurrying.
Seeing the coffee cans reminded me of the one I’d put the snake in. I shook a few of the cans, to see if any tools were stuffed inside. One can rattled and clanked. Inside were dozens of coins, or at least I thought they were coins, but when I dumped them out, I saw that they weren’t real coins, but tokens. Large ones, small ones, silvery, brassy. Some were plain, and some had designs or lettering. There was a cow on one, a bird on another. One said Lucky and another said Free.
They reminded me of the medallion I’d found, but there were none exactly like the medallion. In the midst of sifting through them, I got that wretched chilling feeling again, a dark, foreboding sense of something terrible happening all around me. I stuffed the tokens back into the can, and shoved it back where I’d found it.
As I headed back up the trail, Uncle Nate’s voice scared the living daylights out of me. I felt as if I’d been caught—but at what? I’d only taken the wire cutters. I’d bring them back.
“Hey!” he called. “Don’t like you being on that trail!”
“Why not?”
“Don’t think you should be up there alone. Don’t know what you’ll run into. No place for a girl.”
That was the wrong thing for him to say. “You mean it would be okay for a boy to be up there, but not me?”
He chewed on his lip. “Snakes up there—”
“Haven’t seen any—lately. Anything else up there I might run into?” And then, I don’t know what made me say this, but I added, “Anybody’s sweetheart?”
“Shoot!” he said, but he blushed and pushed the toe of his boot into the dirt. “Your Aunt Jessie wouldn’t like you going up there, that’s all.”
I had a strange reaction to this. I almost said, So what? which would have been a horrible thing to say, and which surely I didn’t mean, did I? And then I almost said, Yes, she would like it, because it was beautiful up there, and she loved trees and flowers. I suddenly felt very small and alone, as if no one understood what I was doing or why it was important to me, and I was not able to explain it to them because I didn’t know why it was so important to me.
Unable to answer him, I turned away and started up the hill. Behind me, Uncle Nate called, “Tootle-ee-ah-dah!” and instantly—without thinking—I answered, “Make the company jump!”
Then I stopped dead in my tracks, realizing what he’d said. Uncle Nate had never said Tootle-ee-ah-dah! to anyone but Aunt Jessie. And as I continued up the trail, I kept thinking about my automatic answer, Make the company jump! I’d said it with the same hopeful, happy burst Aunt Jessie had always said it. What did that mean, Make the company jump!? I wasn’t sure. The way Aunt Jessie said it made it sound as if the words meant Go to it! or Live! Live it up!
And I wondered why—when Aunt Jessie had climbed into her drawer—why I hadn’t leaned down and said, Make the company jump! Make the company jump! Maybe if I’d said that, she would’ve climbed out of that drawer and started dancing.
CHAPTER 23
DON’T BLAME ME
It’s not easy to cut through barbed wire, even if you have a pair of heavy-duty wire cutters. Eventually, though, after twisting, pulling, kicking, and scolding, I managed to cut through four lengths of double-stranded wire and pull each length back to the posts. This was a terrible thing to do, to ruin a fence. I am a farm girl, and I know how long it takes to repair a fence. But that day, I was like a bull with his tail on fire. That fence was in my way and it had to go.
When I started scraping away at the ground, however, I couldn’t find any stones—stones that should have continued the trail—beneath the grass. The stones stopped abruptly this side of the fence, and continued on the other side of the meadow, beyond that fence. Maybe someone had cleared this area of trees in order to make the meadow, and in doing so, they must have cl
eared the stones as well.
I wasn’t sure what to do. I could just clear the grass, and this part of the trail would be simply dirt, but then the grass and weeds would quickly return and cover the trail. I could find some stones and lay them myself, but I needed large slate slabs, and the only place I knew I could find these was back at the creek. I’d be lucky if I could find enough. Then I tried to picture myself trekking over four miles back to the creek, and lugging stones, a few at a time, four miles back. It didn’t seem very practical, and it would take me ages.
I walked the length of the fence as it ran down the hill to the right, to see if there was a farmhouse near, but another meadow stretched far below. No sign of a house or barn.
When I turned back, a dark pile off to one side caught my eye. Dozens of cast-off slate slabs were heaped haphazardly. I’d still have to lug them back to where I’d cut the barbed wire, but I could probably do it in a day or two.
Clearing the tall grass, though, proved to be harder than I’d imagined. I was going to have to go back and fetch a scythe.
Ben was kneeling in the midst of his squirt garden, scolding newly sprouted weeds. My own garden was looking sad and neglected. The tomato plants, which I’d not staked well, leaned mournfully toward the ground, heavy with green tomatoes. Weeds tangled wilder than witches’ hair. The zinnias around the border looked pitiful, cluttered with dead blooms and wilting from the bright sun.
Ben said, “Your garden’s a mess, Zinny. You oughta do something about it.”
“I will,” I said.
“Jake’s been here. It wasn’t me who got things wrong, Zinny. It was Sam.”
“Got what things wrong?”
“You’ll see.”
In the kitchen, Bonnie took one look at me and blurted, “Guess who’s been here and guess what happened?”
Sam, who was standing at the counter slopping leftovers into a huge pot for his daily soup concoction, said, “Don’t blame me, Zinny.”