“Whoa now! Re-verse! You gotta fill me in.”
So I did. And when I finished the part about Ben yelling at his brothers, he says, “No way that's going to work with Karl or Taylor. Ben's got no credibility with either of them after the way he used to tear that house up. I'd go over to Karl's after school, and Ben and this crazy friend of his, Fang, would just be going off.”
“Fang?”
“Well, that's what everyone called him. He was Ben's best friend. Anyway, then Dr. Briggs discovered they were growing pot behind the cabaña—and that they were selling it.”
“Holy smokes!”
“Exactly. After that everything changed. Dr. Briggs made Ben volunteer at the rehab center in the hospital, and I guess now he wants to be a doctor.” He hesitated, then said, “I probably shouldn't be telling you all this, so don't pipeline it, okay?”
“Of course not.”
“So what happened after the police showed up?”
“I don't really know because I wasn't there, but Casey says Karl's going to have a police record.”
“Taylor's friend Casey?”
“Yeah.”
He's quiet a minute, then says, “Maybe I should call Karl. God, what a mess.”
So I let him go, but before he hangs up I say, “Brandon?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
“I don't know what I did, but sure.” Then he says, “Hey, don't you have a pig to find? You better get hunting—daylight's about gone.”
I get off the phone and let out a big sigh. And when Marissa says, “I think you said more to him in the last five minutes than you have in your entire life,” I laugh and say, “You're right.”
And as we're heading out to resume our search for Penny, it hits me that I'm happy. Really happy. And it's not because I've just talked to Brandon. It's much bigger than that. I'm happy because I feel grounded again. Like I can trust myself.
I wave through the window at Lucinda and call, “Don't worry! We'll find her!” and off we go to find Penny the Pig.
TWENTY-ONE
Dot and Holly had already scoured the back end of the property. No Penny. We filled each other in on what we'd seen and found, then set off to check the last section of property together. And as we're walking along, I'm worried that Marissa's going to start blabbing about how I'd called Brandon, but she doesn't. She just walks beside me, smiling at me from time to time, and I know—my secret's safe with her.
And I'm relieved because it's just too complicated to try to explain. Especially when you're supposed to be looking for a big black pig in the great outdoors—which is almost pitch-black itself.
Holly says, “You know, this is not looking good. We've checked everywhere but the ravine, and I'm not about to go down there in the dark.”
Dot says, “Me either. And if we're going to keep searching, I've got to go call my mom and tell her we'll be late for dinner.”
Well, really, there was no place else to look. We were standing about ten yards from the cabin fireplace, and even though we could see that Penny wasn't anywhere around the ruins, something was still pulling me in that direction.
Marissa says, “Sammy, I really don't want to go over there. It's too creepy!”
“That's okay. You stay here. I just want to take a quick look down the ravine. Maybe she was snorting around and fell in. She went down there before when she found the gas can, you know.”
I run over and take a look around, but even with the moon glowing brighter by the minute, I don't see a thing. And as I'm heading back, I can't help but feel that Marissa's right. The fireplace, all scarred and charred, feels creepy. Like something risen from the dead.
I circle the ruins and call out, “No Penny there,” but then I hear a snort. I freeze and look around me, calling, “Penny? Penny, was that you?”
Snort, snort!
There's no doubt about it, there's a pig in the vicinity. Trouble is, the snorting sounds a long way away, and I sure don't see her.
I call again, “Penny?!”
Snort, squeal, snort!
Holly runs up, crying, “I heard that! Penny? Penny, here, girl!”
By now we're all looking. Behind trees and rocks and weeds, but we're not seeing anything. Finally, Holly says, “Let's just stand together and listen. Then, when she snorts, we'll figure out which direction to go.”
So we huddle up about ten feet away from the ruins, and Holly calls, “Penny! Here, girl!”
Squeal, snort! Snort!
Dot points toward a tree and says, “It's coming from over there!” but the rest of us say, “No…it's coming from over there,” and point straight to the flattened cabin. Dot laughs and says, “Oh, yeah. I really see a pig over there.”
We were pointing at ashes and air, but we take two steps in our direction anyway. Dot takes two steps in hers, and then Holly calls again, “Penny? Penny, where are you?”
Nothing.
“Penny? Where'd you go?”
Nothing.
“Penny!”
SNORT!
Dot zooms over to us. And we move forward, but now we're at the edge of the ruins, and really, there's nothing there! Marissa says, “Oh my god, this is just too creepy.”
SNORT! Oink, oink, OINK!
Holly says, “It's like she's right here!”
Marissa shivers and starts backing away. “I'm out of here!”
“Marissa! Ghosts don't oink.” I pull her back. “There's an explanation, we just have to find it.”
Then Holly says, “Look!” so we all scurry over to the edge of the ruins where she is, and there, through large splinters of wood, is a hole. A deep black hole. Holly squats and calls down into it, “Penny?”
SNORT!
Holly smiles at us. “We found her! No one's planning to have her for dinner. She just fell down a hole.”
I'm happy about finding Penny, but I just can't help asking, “What's that hole doing there? How deep is it?”
We look down it, but we can't tell much—it's totally black. I dig up a pebble, call, “Watch out, Penny!” and let it fall, clink, to the bottom.
Marissa says, “That didn't sound like dirt. It sounded like metal,” and Dot adds, “But that's not a little hole. It's not a well, but it does sound pretty deep.”
I tried another one, and this time it landed with a little thump.
Holly shakes her head. “That one sounded like it hit dirt.”
I get up and say, “Well, we can't tell anything until we get some light down there. I'm going to run back to the house to see if Lucinda's got a flashlight or something.”
So I jet off, but when I get to the porch, I can see Lucinda through the window, and she's not alone. Kevin's back. And I want to run up and bang on the door, but I just can't. Kevin's sitting on the edge of a kitchen chair, slumped over, with his face in his hands. And from the way his back is bobbing up and down I can tell— he's crying.
His cowboy hat is sitting on the table next to the blueprints, and Lucinda is standing beside him with her hand on his shoulder, talking to him. She's not yelling, or scolding, she's just talking.
I couldn't interrupt. Even to tell Lucinda that we'd found her pig. So I'm looking around, wondering if maybe there's a flashlight or lantern or something in the toolshed or Kevin's truck, when I remember—Hudson's bike.
I wheel it over to the hole and right away they all groan. I explain about Kevin and Lucinda, and then get busy cranking the pedals. Holly winds up with rear-wheel duty, and Dot stabilizes the front while Marissa looks down the hole. When we get a steady beam of light going, Marissa calls, “I see her! It doesn't look like she can get up…and God, there's a bunch of stuff down there.”
I keep cranking and call, “What kind of stuff? How deep is it?”
“I don't know. Bags and pails…a scale…”
I quit cranking. “A scale? Let me see that.”
So Marissa and I switch. And sure enough there's all kinds of stuff down there. Penny's lying a
t the base of a rickety old ladder leaning against the wall and not far from her are bags and buckets, a fan and a space heater, and then some things that look like they belong in a kitchen— big glass measuring cups, a roll of plastic wrap, a hotplate, a couple of wooden spoons, and a pair of cleaning gloves. And coming right out of the dirt, hanging clear down to the floor, is an extension cord. And at the end of the cord is a power strip, where about six cords could go.
Marissa says, “I can't keep this up much longer, Sammy.”
“Just one more minute…I need more light to the left. Can you move a little?” Holly scoots to the right, and that's when I see a bare light bulb with a cord looped around a pipe, which has been hammered into the dirt wall. I look over my shoulder and say, “You can stop now.”
Holly lets the back wheel drop. “What is down there?” Marissa says, “It just looks like an old root cellar with a bunch of junk in it.”
I try to find an edge to the board that's been shattered by Penny, but I'm getting covered with soot, and then I get stabbed with a splinter. I cry, “Owwww,” yank the spear of wood out of my hand, and say, “Forget this, I'll just go down the way Penny did.”
“Go down?” Marissa turns me toward her. “You can't go down there!”
“Why not? There's a ladder…it's not that deep…” I give her a little smile and say, “I'll be baaaack!”
I ease my way through the hole, catching the last couple of ladder rungs on the way down. And the first thing that hits me when I land is the smell. It's putrid. Like dirty feet and mildewed sheets, only more chemically than that. I say, “Hi, Penny. Everything's going to be fine,” and scoot my feet along the ground so I don't accidentally step on her.
Dot calls, “Are you all right?” and Holly adds, “Sammy, you're not going to be able to lift her—you want me to come down and help?”
I call back, “Give me a minute and I think we'll be able to see what's going on down here.”
“How are you going to do that?”
I grope around until I touch the left wall, then find the pipe with the light bulb and follow the cord to its end. Once I've got the plug in my hand, I crawl on the ground, groping along until I find the power strip. I put the two together, and suddenly I'm blinded by light.
I look up, and there's Holly's face with the biggest bug eyes I've ever seen on her. She gasps, “Wow!”
The room isn't big. It's about six feet wide and four feet long. Max. And there are thick planks, like the ones the cabin had been made of, reinforcing the walls and ceiling. It's like being in a miniature mineshaft.
I go over to Penny and say, “Hi, girl,” and check her out. She has a nasty gouge along her belly, and another by her shoulder, but it's her right front leg that's stopping her from getting up. Every time I try to touch it, she squeals and pulls away.
Holly asks, “Is it broken?”
“Looks like it.”
“You want me to come down and help you lift her up?”
“It's going to take a lot more than the four of us to get her out of here.”
By now Marissa and Dot are looking down the shaft, and Dot says, “What is all that stuff doing down there? It looks like Mr. Pence's room!”
It did look like the school's science lab. There was a Bunsen burner, several glass beakers with motorized mixers mounted in them, a jug of denatured alcohol, a bottle of iodine, a box of Hefty bags, and a nearly empty sack of rock salt. But then there was weird stuff, too. Like empty boxes of Sudafed and a graveyard of drain-cleaner bottles.
“I have no idea.”
Holly says, “Sammy, you've got to get out of there.”
Now I had the creeps, too, but I wasn't ready to leave just yet. Then Holly points over in a corner. “Sammy, look! Behind that sack…no, over by the bucket…is that…” I pull back the sack and say, “…a gas can. Yes, it is.” “Sammy, you've got to get out of there. Now!”
“But I don't get this! Why would the gas can be hidden down here? Maybe it's a different can. Maybe it's…”
All three of them yell, “Sammy! Get out!”
So I'm heading for the ladder when I notice an old scrap of paper sack with something scribbled on it. I pick it up, and what's on it is a list of instructions—so many cups of this mixed with so many ounces of that, stir and heat, cook and cool—it looks like a recipe that's been handed down from generation to generation, only this is not a recipe for biscuits.
No, across the top in faded lead is written METH.
Now the whole time I'd been down there, I wasn't really scared. I mean, sure, I knew being eight feet under in a makeshift cave wasn't safe, but I wasn't that worried about it. I was more thinking, What is this place? But the minute I figured out what it was, I panicked. I had to get out. Get out now.
I charged for the ladder, but my foot caught on the power cord, and as I'm stumbling to the ground, the room goes black.
Holly's voice comes down the shaft. “Sammy! Are you all right?”
I call, “Yeah,” because I'm not hurt, but I'm not all right. Not at all. I scramble toward the moonlight coming through the hole, and as I hurry up the ladder, I feel bad leaving Penny there, but what else could I do?
And the minute Holly grabs my arm to help me out, does she say, God, I'm glad you're out, or, Why are you shaking so bad? No. She steps back and says, “Oh man! You stink!”
Now, being down there, I'd almost gotten used to the stench. And I tried, but I couldn't really smell it on myself. And as Marissa and Dot take whiffs of me, then crinkle their faces and pull back, I hand Holly the recipe and say, “Like really bad B.O.?”
Even by moonlight, she can read the word METH on the paper. Even by moonlight, I can see the color drain from her face. She chokes out, “Oh my god!”
I'm still shaking. “Exactly.”
Marissa says, “What? What are you guys talking about?” but before we can answer, Dot whispers, “Shh! Shh! Listen!”
Sure enough there's the purr of a motor. And it's not along the street or in the Huntleys' driveway. We can't see it, but there's no doubt about it.
Someone's coming.
TWENTY-TWO
We grabbed Hudson's bike and tumbled down into the ravine. And as we're squirming around, getting flat on our stomachs so we can see up over the edge, Dot whispers, “What was that paper about? Why are we hiding? Why are you and Holly so freaked out?”
I whisper back, “That's a drug lab down there.” I hold up the paper. “This is a recipe for methamphetamine.”
She says, “What?! But who…,” and Holly and I say at the same time, “Dallas!”
Dot says, “Oh, you've got to be kidding!”
“There he is, right now!”
Dallas doesn't have his headlight on. He just putts up, rolls his motorcycle beside an oak, and parks. Then he takes a flashlight out of one of his saddlebags and turns it on, but the beam is muted. Like it's on a dimmer. He sort of sneaks over to the rubble, but as soon as he sees the hole in the plywood, he switches off the light and hurries back to his bike.
He stands behind the oak tree for the longest time, waiting and watching. And while he's waiting and watching, we're barely breathing, trying to shrink into the hillside.
Finally, he decides to risk it. He tiptoes over to the shaft, then slides the plywood aside, just like that. He takes one last look around, switches on his flashlight, and then stays there for a minute, crouched over the hole.
Penny lets out a great big SNORT!, and after he tries to quiet her with “Shh! Shh!” he mutters something about stupid nosy pigs and disappears into the ground.
The minute he's out of sight, Marissa whispers, “What are we going to do?” and Dot says, “You think he's mixing up metha…whatever that stuff is…right now?”
“No,” I say, “I think he's getting his supplies out, so he can mix it up someplace else.”
Holly says, “That sneaky lowlife! He's so sorry for Lucinda. Right! He doesn't care squat about the cabin, he just wants the cover!??
?
Marissa shakes her head. “I don't understand…did he burn it down?”
I whisper, “No.”
“Then what's the gas can doing down there?”
“Oh, he put it there, all right, because he didn't want anyone to find out who did.”
All three of them look at me and say, “What?” and Dot adds, “What kind of sense does that make?”
I could barely keep up with how fast the pieces were clicking together. “Let's put it this way—I don't think the Murdocks burned down the house. Or Kevin or that real-estate rattlesnake or the developers or the Snout, for that matter. I think the person who burned down the cabin knows Dallas, and he knows Dallas is a dealer.”
“Who?” They look at me like a family of owls.
“Ben.”
Dot says, “Briggs?”
“That's right.”
Marissa says, “Oh, Sammy. That is so out there!”
“Maybe. And maybe not. Look, Ben used to be addicted to meth. He owns a truck that he bought from Dallas. There's transmission fluid over there in the tree tunnel where we found the cap. We know Ben's truck leaks tranny fluid and…”
“But you said—”
“I know, I know, that it's like oil—all cars drip it. But there are just too many connections here.”
Marissa says, “I don't know. They seem to be pretty weak connections to me.”
“But hang on. Have you noticed that necklace Dallas wears? You know what's hanging from the middle of it?”
Holly nods. “It's a tusk or a tooth.”
“Right. A fang. Brandon told me that Ben used to have this really wild best friend that everybody called Fang.”
Dot says, “Brandon? When did you talk to him?”
“I'll tell you about it later. What matters now is the connection. Add to that the fact that all of the Briggs brothers have used meth and that Dallas has probably had some sort of run-in with the law before…”
Dot says, “Where do you get that?”
“The first time Holly and I met Dallas he said something about being grateful to her for giving him a chance when no one else would…like he had a record or something. Anyway, if you put all those things together, the connection starts getting a little stronger.”