“Sold,” said Eddie.
“Goodbye!” said Peter. “Have a nice supper.”
“We will,” said Caroline.
The girls watched them go. “Those boys are so transparent you can see right through them,” said Eddie. “That’s the most far-out story they’ve come up with yet.”
“How do you know it’s not true?” asked Caroline. “It really did look like termite wood to me.”
“Sure,” said Eddie. “But it’s not off the Corby house.”
“How do you know?” asked Beth.
Eddie went down the steps and searched around in the bushes until she found the stick of wood Jake had thrown away.
“What color is this?” she asked her sisters, pointing to the peeling paint along one edge.
“Green,” said Beth and Caroline together.
“And what color is the trim on the Corbys’ windows?” Eddie went on. Then she answered for them: “Yellow.”
Twelve
Alone on an Island
“Well, that’s that!” said Jake as the boys walked home. “They’ll never rent the house now.”
“I sure wouldn’t want termites in my bed,” said Peter. “It’s nice of you to paint the Corbys’ house for them, Jake.”
“Uh…yeah. Sure,” said Jake.
It did seem as though termites would put the Corbys’ house at the bottom of the Malloys’ list, Wally thought. Surely, if they stayed in Buckman, they would look at other houses for rent before they chose one with termites.
He turned his attention to the last project for school—where would he choose to be plane-wrecked? He thought Caroline Malloy had chosen Australia, but she could always change her mind, especially if she found out he had chosen the North Pole. So what should he choose? Africa?
He imagined himself in a jungle. He imagined himself sitting under a banana tree. He imagined looking up and seeing Caroline swinging toward him on a vine. Nope. Not Africa.
The Sahara Desert, maybe? He imagined himself crawling up a sand dune looking for water. He imagined himself reaching the top and coming face-to-face with Caroline, crawling up the other side. Scratch the desert.
He could not imagine Caroline at the North Pole, however, so he decided to stick with that.
When he got to school the next morning, some people were checking maps at the front of the room. Some were looking through books at the back of the room. Others were going to and from the library.
Wally went to the library and spread out a map of the Arctic. It was very white. It was very empty. No roads, no cities, no lakes, no rivers. He closed his eyes and waved one finger around and around above the map, then let it drop.
There. Right there was where his two-engine plane would crash, about two inches from the spot marked NORTH POLE.
Wally decided he would use his hatchet to dig out blocks of ice and build himself an igloo. Unlike the boy in Hatchet, however, he would find a box of matches in the airplane. He could not see himself trying to start a fire without matches at the North Pole. And maybe he’d have a ham sandwich and a blanket, too.
First step: Get out of the plane in case it was going to explode.
“Hey, Wally!” a boy said. “I’m going to be shipwrecked off the coast of New Zealand. Want to be shipwrecked with me?”
“No!” Wally said emphatically. Too close to Australia.
“Well, don’t get your britches in an uproar,” the friend said. “I was just asking!"
The more Wally thought about Caroline, however, the more afraid he was that on the last day of school, she would announce that she had been plane-wrecked in the same place he had. Then everyone would say, “Oh, Wal-ly! How’s Car-oline?” the whole rest of the summer. Or worse:
“Caroline and Wal-ly,
Sitting in a tree,
K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”
It seemed that every time Wally unfolded a map, Caroline Malloy walked by his chair. Every time he got a book off the shelf, Caroline saw what it was. She was probably only pretending she was going to Australia, he thought. Whatever place he chose, he had to keep secret.
An island. That was the only place Wally could escape her, he was sure. He got a magnifying glass from the librarian, held it over a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean, and chose Banaba, one of the smallest islands he could find. It was so small, in fact, that Wally couldn’t find out anything about it at all, and that suited him just fine.
Rainfall in the Pacific Islands varied from a few inches to many feet per year. Some islands were merely mounds of sand on a reef. Some were volcanic lava. Some had mountains and some had thick jungles. Wally decided his island could be anything he wanted it to be. But whenever he unfolded a map of the Pacific Ocean, he hid it beneath a map of the Arctic, just to fool Caroline. He absolutely would not go all summer with friends teasing him about being in an igloo with her, which was exactly what they would do if both he and Caroline chose the North Pole.
“Hey, Wally!” they would say. “Was it cold enough for you, or did Car-oline keep you warm?”
After school that day, the boys stayed behind a few minutes to help the music teacher load some instruments into her van. By the time they finished, the Malloy girls had already left, so the Hatfords walked home alone.
“Hey, Josh,” Wally asked. “If you were stranded on an island in the Pacific, what kind of clothes would you wear? I have to know for my report.”
“None,” said Josh.
“None?”
“It would be hot! You’d be alone! Why would you want to wear clothes?” asked Josh.
Wally definitely did not want Caroline Malloy anywhere near his island.
As they got closer to home, they saw their neighbor weeding her lawn at the house next door to theirs.
“Hi, Mrs. Corby!” Peter called. “Jake’s going to paint your house for you.”
“Peter!” Jake snapped. “Shut up.”
Mrs. Corby turned around and straightened up, bunches of dandelions dangling from both hands. “What?” she said. “Paint my house?”
Peter looked confused. “Well…I think he…”
“Shut up!” Jake muttered again through clenched teeth.
“I didn’t tell her about the termites!” Peter said to his brothers.
“Termites? What termites?” Mrs. Corby said worriedly.
Josh clapped one hand over Peter’s mouth, and Jake said, “We’re just making up a story, that’s all. Since you’re moving away, we’re making everything happen in your house.”
Mrs. Corby looked doubtful. “Well, don’t give me termites, not even in a story!” she said.
The phone rang when the boys walked inside, and Peter answered it. “Jake and Josh are mad at me!” he complained, ready to tell his mother everything. The twins clutched their foreheads. But then Peter stopped talking. “It’s not?” he said. And then, to his brothers, “It’s Beth.”
The boys looked at each other. “What does she want?” Wally whispered.
“What do you want?” Peter said into the telephone. There was a long pause. “Uh-huh…,” said Peter. He listened some more. “Yes,” he said. “Yeah, I saw her…. Uh-huh…. Uh-huh…. Uh-huh….”
Wally and Jake and Josh all tried to get the phone away from Peter, but he had a tight grip on it and pressed himself against the wall. Finally he said, “Okay, goodbye,” and hung up.
“What did she want?” the boys cried together.
“Why didn’t you give me the phone?” demanded Jake.
“I can talk on the phone same as you!” said Peter.
“But what did Beth want?” asked Wally.
“She said, ‘How are you, Peter?’ “
“Besides that!” said Jake.
“She wanted to know if I knew whether or not Mrs. Corby was home, and I said yes.”
“Why did Beth want to know that?” asked Josh.
“She said that she and Eddie and Caroline wanted to see the inside of her house themselves so they could choose their own bedrooms be
fore they moved in,” Peter told them.
“What?” Jake and Josh and Wally all yelled together.
“They didn’t buy the termite story!” moaned Jake. “Darn it! Peter, when are they coming?”
Peter shrugged. “Soon, I guess.”
Jake continued staring at Peter as though he were looking straight through him. Then he grabbed the Yellow Pages, leafed through them quickly, and dialed a number.
Wally knew when Jake lowered his voice that he was trying to sound grown-up. “Hello,” Jake said. “I wondered if you had a truck in the College Avenue area. You do free inspections, don’t you?”
Wally covered his eyes.
“Yes,” Jake went on. “I’d like you to take a look at our house and the house next door.” And he gave the address. “Sure….Okay, that’s fine….Yes, that’s terrific!” And he hung up.
“Jake, what are you doing?” said Josh.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” said Jake. “The Malloys don’t believe me about the termites.”
“So what?” said Wally. “We don’t believe you either!"
“So they’ll move in!” said Jake. “They’ll spy on us and make our lives miserable. All I want is for a termite company truck to be parked outside when the girls come over. That’s all I ask.”
This was a bad idea, Wally knew. This was a terrible idea!
“Well, if you think I’m going to answer the door and lie about termites in Mrs. Corby’s house, you’re nuts!” he said, knowing the way Jake always tried to pass the dirty work on to him.
“Nobody has to lie. I didn’t lie either, did I? I just said I wanted an inspection of our house and the house next door. It’s free. I could even have done the Corbys a favor if the inspector finds something.”
“What are we going to say when a truck gets here, Jake?” asked Josh. “Where do we think there are termites?”
“We don’t have to say anything because we’re not going to be here,” Jake explained. “When we see the truck pull up, we’re going to slip out the back door and hide in the toolshed till it’s gone. The driver will walk around inspecting the outside of the house and then go over to Mrs. Corby’s, and that’s all the girls have to see. Then they’ll believe there are termites, and they’ll tell their folks. The driver will drive away, and that’s all there is to it. The end.”
The end, my foot! Wally thought. Mrs. Corby would find out they’d fibbed, and the termite truck driver would chase them to the ends of the earth. And as if that weren’t enough, Wally just knew that Caroline was going to follow him to his island in the Pacific.
Thirteen
A Bad Idea
“We’ll shake them up,” said Eddie. “Jake thinks he can fool us with that old stick of termite wood. All we’re going to do is knock on Mrs. Corby’s door and tell her we want to see the bedrooms—that Mom was over there yesterday to look at the house, and we just wondered what our bedrooms would be like.”
“Gosh, Eddie, I don’t know …,” said Beth.
“What harm could it do? I’m not telling her we are renting her house. We’re just taking a look, and we want the guys to watch us go in. Can’t you just see Jake’s face! We’ll tell him later that we have our rooms all picked out.”
Caroline giggled. “Maybe we should bring Dad’s binoculars and look into the Hatfords’ upstairs windows while we’re over there.”
“Yeah! Bring those too!” said Eddie, and the girls laughed out loud.
A note from their mother on the table said she was shopping.
The girls ate some cheese crackers and drank some orange juice. Then Eddie said, “Let’s go. We’d better get back before Mom comes home.”
“You do the talking,” Beth told her as they walked down the hill toward the bridge. “I don’t want to lie.”
“Who’s lying? All I’m telling Mrs. Corby is we’d like to see the bedrooms. We would!"
Caroline was simply happy to go along. She was putting so much work into her Australian project that she was glad to get away. She had even made a watercolor painting of what an Australian hillside would look like with HELP spelled out in rocks, her little shelter made out of a raincoat off to one side.
She didn’t know why Wally was being so secretive about his choice. Every time she looked his way, he had some other book tucked inside a book on the Arctic, and all the while he was really planning to be shipwrecked on a Pacific island. Why did she care where he was shipwrecked? Did he think she was going to follow him there? Just for that, maybe she should !
The girls were halfway across the footbridge when Caroline said, “Look at that! What is it?”
Her sisters looked. On the other side of the river, halfway between the Hatfords’ house and the Corbys’ next door, sat a white truck with a huge fiberglass insect on top. The big insect had a tapered body, wings, and terrible eyes and pincher jaws. termite x, it said on the side of the truck.
“What’s the X for?” asked Caroline.
“Death,” said Eddie. “It means death to termites.”
“Then it’s true?” said Beth. “The house next door really is full of termites? I’m sorry for the Corbys, but I’m glad for us, because I know Mother wouldn’t rent their place now.”
“Yeah, but how do we pretend we’re still interested in those bedrooms if they’ve got termites?” said Caroline.
“Look. We told Peter we were coming over to look at the house next door. So we’re going to look at the house next door!” said Eddie. “We just know he’ll tell his brothers.”
They passed the Hatfords’ house and went up the walk to the Corbys’. Eddie rang the bell. A few moments later a gray-haired woman in a blue sundress answered. “Hello?” she said.
“Hi. We’re Mrs. Malloy’s daughters, and I think she looked at your house yesterday,” Eddie said.
“Oh, yes, she did!” Mrs. Corby’s face brightened. “Have you decided to rent it after all?”
“Well, not exactly,” said Eddie. “But we just wanted to see the bedrooms, in case we move in here.”
“Certainly!” Mrs. Corby said, holding the door open. “Please come in.”
And when the girls were inside she said, “The bedrooms used to belong to my children, you know. But they’re all grown up and married.” She started up the stairs, the girls following. “I’ve got bad knees, so this house is a little too much for me anymore. My husband and I are planning to move closer to our daughter in Elkins.”
She held on to the banister as she climbed and stopped to catch her breath when they reached the top. Everything looked dark and old, and there was a certain mystery to the house. Caroline thought of all sorts of things she might explore if she lived here—cup-boards to open, an attic to investigate.
“There are two bedrooms on this side of the hall and two on the other,” Mrs. Corby said. “The bathroom’s at the end.”
Sure enough, two of the rooms looked directly toward the Hatfords’. As they peeked out the windows, the girls saw the Termite X driver in his white jumpsuit walking around the Hatfords’ house, looking it over. The boys were nowhere in sight. Caroline even used the binoculars when Mrs. Corby wasn’t watching, but she still couldn’t see them.
“Well,” Eddie said. “Thank you so much. You must really love this house.”
“Oh, I do, and I’ll hate to leave it,” Mrs. Corby said, going back downstairs beside them. She told them to be sure to look at the flower beds as they left. “And please tell your mother I know she’ll love the house as much as we do,” she added.
As the girls opened the front door, they almost bumped into the Termite X driver coming up the steps.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said to Mrs. Corby, “but would you happen to be the person who called about termites in your house?”
“Termites!” Mrs. Corby said. “What is all this about termites?”
“I don’t know, ma’am. My dispatcher told me to check out this house and the one next door, but no one’s home over there.”
/>
“Well, I want you to know there are no termites in this house!” Mrs. Corby said. “And I don’t appreciate your implying that there are.”
“I’m only telling you what the dispatcher told me, ma’am,” the driver said. “Sorry to have bothered you.” And he went back to his truck and drove away.
“What do you suppose that was all about?” Eddie asked her sisters as they went down the sidewalk. “You don’t suppose the Corbys really do have termites, do you?”
“And where do you think the guys went?” said Beth. “We wanted them to see us go in.”
They walked back across the bridge, then up the bank and on up the grassy hill to their house. Mrs. Malloy was standing on the back porch, hands on her hips, waiting for them.
“Uh-oh,” said Caroline.
“Just what have you girls done?” their mother said, and she sounded angry.
“Wh—what do you mean?” asked Eddie.
“I called Mrs. Corby this morning and told her that we’d decided against renting her house, and now you girls go over there to look at her bedrooms! What got into you? She has her hopes up again and thinks I’ve changed my mind. She just called and said you had only looked at two of the bedrooms and missed the most charming one of all.”
Caroline could hear Eddie swallow as they started timidly up the back steps.
“I didn’t know what to say!” Mrs. Malloy went on. “She was so disappointed when I told her there must be some mistake, but we had definitely decided we didn’t want to live so close to the river.”
“Well, I…,” Eddie began. “We might…We didn’t know if you were going to take it or not, and in case you did, we wanted to see what our bedrooms would be like.”
“I wish you would ask me before you do something like this!” Mrs. Malloy went on, following the girls inside.
“I’m sorry,” Eddie said meekly.
“Well, you should be!” said her mother. The phone rang just then, and Mrs. Malloy picked it up. “Hello?” she said. She stood for a moment without saying anything, her eyes wide with astonishment. Then she slowly put the phone back down.