“When I turned thirteen,” Grandpa carried on, “my savvy opened a crack in the earth so deep, I fell in and conked my noodle on the earth’s very core. I was nearly a grown man before I found my way back up from the depths and the darkness. And the headache I got lasted years.”
“You should’ve been wearing a helmet,” Fe said, nodding gravely. She was too young to know that Grandpa Bomba had a dozen different tall tales about his savvy birthday. No one knew which were true and which were super-sized servings of deep-fried baloney.
Mom sighed again. Autry wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “Don’t worry, Dinah. Gypsy and Samson are staying too.
“You’ll see,” Autry went on. “A few weeks with us and Ledge will get his feet under him.”
“Yes, because we can all see how well that plan worked for Rocket.” Mom served her words with a hefty side of sarcasm.
Autry looked toward the garden, where Rocket was picking pieces of the barn out of the lettuce beds. No longer glowing blue, Rocket had gotten up before dawn with Autry, Dad, and anyone else who’d been able to stay to lend a hand. He’d repaired the downed cables and re-juiced the generator, while the others assessed the damage and tried to clean up what they could of my mess. Nobody let me help.
My uncle rubbed his jaw thoughtfully as he considered his oldest nephew. “Rocket’s got one last thing to learn about scumbling,” he said. “And he’s got to figure it out himself. I’m confident he’ll find his way off this ranch someday.”
The thought of someday hadn’t made me feel any better.
Yet, as I sat at the picnic table with the other kids the next day, I realized that there was a bright side to my forced stay at the Flying Cattleheart. I’d tossed and turned the night of the barn disaster wondering how I’d ever make amends. If I went straight home, Autry might never know how sorry I was about the ruined barn. And I still needed to get Grandma’s peanut butter jar back from Sarah Jane. Now, at least, I might have a chance to try to fix some of the things I’d broken.
“Hey, Ledge! What if your parents never come back for you?” Mesquite jabbed my elbow again, clipping the wing of my positive attitude.
Marisol forged her features into a mask of concern. “If your parents leave you here for good, you’ll have to live with Rocket permanently. I hope the two of you can get along. If not . . . zzzzttt!” She playacted giving her sister an electric shock, then laughed as Mesquite collapsed against the picnic table with her eyes crossed and her tongue sticking out.
“You’ll be toast, Ledger.” Overflowing with mock melodrama, Marisol sniffed, then dabbed her eyes with a paper napkin.
I spewed muffin crumbs as a wave of panic hit me. If I ever managed to get home again, I didn’t want to show up on the steps of Theodore Roosevelt Middle School roasted, charred, or extra-crispy. The feeling of ants swarming beneath my skin returned and both of my knees hammered up and down beneath the table.
I knew I shouldn’t listen to the twins, but that didn’t stop unwanted savvy energy from building as I watched their skit depicting my demise, every crackerjack retort dying on my tongue.
I looked from the house to the conservatory to the windmill to the trucks in the drive. With a flash forward, I saw everything in ruins. My savvy may not have made me supersonic fast, but it did give me plenty of steam to vent. And, until I learned to scumble, there was only way I could think to do it.
“I’m going for a run.”
Chapter 10
SEEING ME TAKE OFF, BITSY LEAPED down from her place on the porch, hobble-bobbling next to me like she intended to come along.
“Go back!” I said, shooing her away. “You’re not fast enough, girl. Go back to Grandpa!”
When I reached the ranch’s entrance sign by the highway, I stopped to catch my breath, struggling to adjust to the thinner, dryer Wyoming air after sprinting up and over the south ridge full throttle. The sign over my head was a towering ten-gauge steel construction with the name of the ranch and the hand-cut figure of a butterfly with upside-down, heart-shaped spots: the Montezuma’s Cattleheart—the butterfly Autry had been following in Mexico when he met the twins’ mom.
The heavy sign shivered over my head. Moving away from it, I turned east, following the road, telling myself I’d turn around before I reached Sundance.
I settled into a lung-pushing, blood-pulsing rhythm. The soles of my sneakers slapped the pavement. My arms pumped at my sides. Not wanting to cause an RV wreck or blow apart another bike, I stepped off the road whenever someone passed me.
I tried to forget about the twins’ playacting. To forget what they’d said about my parents leaving me at the ranch for good. I didn’t know how long I could live with Rocket and survive. The last two nights, I’d been forced to hit the hay up at his small, rammed-earth house at the top of the east ridge. With its thick, cement-like walls, sparse furnishings, and lack of electronic equipment or gadgets, everyone agreed it was the safest place for me.
Rocket and I had barely spoken as he set up a place for me to sleep after I wrecked the barn.
“Got what ya need?” he’d asked, tossing me a sleeping bag.
“Y—oof!” I answered, getting the breath knocked out of me as I caught it.
“Toothbrush?”
I nodded.
“Need a pillow?”
I paused before nodding again, not wanting to seem too demanding.
Rocket’s final question came with a baleful look:
“Do you snore?”
All I could do was shrug and repeat over and over inside my head: Don’t snore, Ledge . . . Don’t snore . . .
As Rocket disappeared to grab a pillow, I glanced carefully around the room. He’d taped maps and pictures of motorcycles to every wall and stacked travel magazines and books about adventure on every surface. There were photographs too, pictures of family, and people I didn’t recognize. Rocket may not have left the ranch in years, but he obviously dreamed about it.
Shaking out the sleeping bag, I accidentally knocked down a bunch of his photos. I’d rushed to pick them up and stick them back on the wall. But one kept slipping down—a photo of a much younger Rocket holding hands with some girl. The girl was tall, with blond hair, long bangs, and a pink gum bubble the size of a grapefruit hiding half her face.
If I hadn’t been afraid Rocket would light me up like an X-ray skeleton, I might’ve asked for tape to re-hang the picture. But I’d been pretty sure it would’ve been safer to ask an angry grizzly bear to dance.
Autry might not have stopped me from running from the Flying Cattleheart, but I soon realized he hadn’t let me go alone. A tight group of cobalt dragonflies zipped beside me like a squadron of Blue Angels. Executing coordinated loops and rolls, the insects jetted so close, I could feel the vibration of their wings against my skin.
Halfway between my uncle’s ranch and town, I stopped. On the south side of the road, a salvage yard sprawled beyond a low hill, nearly hidden by a stand of dark pines. The sign for Neary’s Auto Salvage Acres was overshadowed by a foreclosure notice, just like the ones I’d seen in town. It seemed as though the people in these parts were having trouble making the payments on their loans. But I knew times were tough all over.
Looking between the trees at the sea of crumpled cars and trucks, I wondered if a junkyard would be the best spot in the world for me . . . or the worst. Was I looking at my life to come? I shook my head, and picked up my pace.
Sweat-soaked and parched, I reached the town of Sundance twenty minutes after I left the ranch. Ignoring the inner voice hollering at me to turn around, I made one last push past the heavy equipment yard of a building whose sign read: CAD Co.—Cabot Acquisitions & Demolitions. The name on the sign made me think of Sarah Jane. In a town the size of Sundance, there couldn’t be too many Cabots.
When I reached the Welcome to Sundance sign, I stopped, my mind still full of Sarah Jane Cabot. Cars moved along I-90 in the distance, and a low mountain rose up above the rolling hills. Autry’s dragonf
lies landed near my feet, taking up resting positions along the white line on the pavement, tiny aircraft queued up on a four-inch-wide runway.
Pacing beneath the sign, I pulled the Sundance Scuttlebutt notebook from my pocket. Unable to sleep, I’d glanced at some of Sarah Jane’s crazy notes the night before. The girl had a way with words, that was solid. In the dead of night, I believed every one of them, until the light of morning came and common sense returned. It was hard to stay convinced for long that Sundance was being overrun by Axehandle Hounds—small dogs that ate the handles off unattended axes—or that there was a race of tiny people who lived in the stacks at Crook County Public Library, coming out at night to shelve books for the librarians.
I slapped the notebook against my palm, still pacing beneath the Welcome to Sundance sign. She’d written her name and address on the paperboard cover. The longer I paced, the looser the bolts holding the sign to its post became, until the sign lurched, swinging like a pendulum from a single remaining bolt. I stopped and stared again at Sarah Jane’s address, realizing that I might be able to use the notebook as leverage. Maybe Sarah Jane would want her notebook back badly enough to make a trade. I knew if I could just get Grandma Dollop’s jar, I’d feel a whole lot better. It would be easier to learn to scumble my savvy if I didn’t have that shanghaied jar lingering cruelly on my conscience.
Fifteen minutes later, I found myself on the front porch of the Cabot residence, after getting directions from someone on the street. It had taken a while. The town was as quiet as it had been two days before, and the few people I ran into hadn’t been eager to tell me how to find the Cabots.
The house was a hulking Victorian structure that sat alone above the town, surrounded by dozens of stumps and one tall birch tree. It looked like a maniac logger had hit the place overnight and been chased away by Axehandle Hounds before he could cut down the last tree. The remaining paper-white birch bent over the house, its branches hugging the place like pale arms. A spiked, wrought iron fence encircled the entire property.
Cautiously, I moved through the gate, climbed the stairs to the porch, and reached for the door knocker, hoping that nothing would fall apart.
Sweat dripped from my hair, stinging my eyes. Autry’s dragonflies pestered me. When the Cabots’ housekeeper opened the door, I took a step back. Standing in the doorway, the frizzy-haired, bug-eyed woman clutched the handle of a carpet sweeper in one hand, and a glossy, rolled-up supermarket tabloid in the other, a headline about UFOs barely visible between her fingers. Whether it was the rolled-up paper that motivated them, or something else, Autry’s dragonflies gave up their bullyragging and struck off in a blue streak.
Without blinking, the housekeeper raised her eyebrows a fraction of an inch, indicating quite clearly, and with the smallest possible effort, that I should speak quickly or get my little dogies yippee-ti-yi-yo gone.
“Um, did Sarah Jane get back okay the other night?” I asked, my words tripping over themselves, as if Mom were standing over my shoulder telling me to be quick. “I mean, is Sarah Jane here? Can I see her?” I held my breath, watching out of the corner of my eye as the screws that held the doorknocker in place began to work their way loose.
A full ten seconds passed while the housekeeper stared at me blankly. My request to see Sarah Jane appeared to have left her baffled.
“Are you a . . . friend . . . of Miss Cabot’s?” she asked, and the way she said the word friend made me guess I was the first kid to come round knocking in quite some time. Maybe Sarah Jane had been telling the truth when she’d told me she had no friends.
“Sure. Yeah. Okay,” I answered, rubbing the faint bruise that shaded my chin like a smudge of newsprint, a souvenir from my last encounter with the intrepid Sarah Jane and her friendly, friendly fist. I held up Sarah Jane’s notebook. “See? I’ve got her notebook right here. Trust me, SJ and I go way back.” All the way back to Saturday.
The housekeeper stepped back, nodding me into the house with the point of her chin. “I’m cleaning,” she said gruffly, rattling the carpet sweeper in my face. “You can wait in Mr. Cabot’s study while I call Miss Cabot down. Mr. Cabot’s not here and I always save his room for last.” She turned a sharp eye on me, rimpling her nose like she smelled something bad. Then added, “If you value your skin, don’t touch anything. Or Mr. Cabot might make you part of his collection.”
“His collection?”
The woman didn’t elaborate. She didn’t have to. Cabot’s study spoke volumes for itself—and I didn’t think I liked what it had to say.
Chapter 11
LOOKING UP, I GAZED INTO THE glassy, staring eyes of a zoo’s worth of stuffed and mounted trophies: antelope, elk, deer—even a jackalope or two. Opposite me, a one-eyed buffalo jutted into the room like it had been stopped dead in its tracks while breaking through the wall. Stepping into the dimly lit study, I knew I never wanted to be part of Noble Cabot’s collection. Not if I wanted to keep my head.
But Cabot had other things in his trove: a coin shot through the middle by Annie Oakley and a set of dried gourds that resembled the founding fathers all sat together on one shelf, and a clock made out of the jaw-bone of a crocodile hung on the wall, tick-tick-ticking.
The housekeeper pushed past me to open a curtain, allowing a rectangle of sunshine to light the wings of Cabot’s assortment of butterflies. There were dozens of them. I even thought I saw a Montezuma’s Cattleheart—black with red, upside-down heart-shaped spots. But instead of flying around the place the way the butterflies did at my uncle’s ranch, here every one was pinned down dead, stuck in place between thin layers of glass and mounted on the wall with the rest of Cabot’s treasures.
If I wasn’t careful, I knew I could end up under glass myself. I was certain Mr. Cabot would consider an unusual kid like me a unique addition to his collection . . . a real conversation piece . . . or maybe just a brand-new tool over at the CAD Co. acquisitions and demolitions place. With a good Ledger Kale around, who needed a backhoe or a wrecker?
No wonder Sarah Jane had wanted Grandma Dollop’s jar! She’d probably swiped it for her dad. I looked around Cabot’s study for the peanut butter jar, but found no sign of it. I tapped my finger against the pocket that held Sarah Jane’s notebook. With her passion for peculiar stories, Sarah Jane was clearly following in her father’s footsteps. It made me wonder what her mom was like. Mrs. Cabot looked normal enough in the portrait hanging behind Cabot’s desk. Tall, thin, and graceful, Mrs. Cabot reminded me of the one tree that still stood outside the house.
A fly buzzed in the window, breaking the stillness that choked the room. The housekeeper dispatched the bug with three swift smacks of her alien-invasion tabloid—Ka-thwap! Ka-thwap! Ka-thwap!—busting the silence into smaller and smaller fragments. Then she pointed the tabloid my way, making it clear that I would share the fly’s fate if I stepped out of line.
As soon as the woman left to call up the stairs to Sarah Jane, I moved to check out the rest of the room. Backing into a rack of rusted barbed-wire snippets, I let out a yelp and leaped forward, colliding with a display of rocks and minerals, and knocking over a trash can filled with wadded-up paper. Righting the trash can, I grabbed the scattered scraps. It was only when I was stuffing them all back into the trash that I realized they had been copies of The Sundance Scuttlebutt.
Sarah Jane’s father must not have been a fan.
Trash picked up, I did my best to straighten Cabot’s rock collection, admiring a cluster of pyrite—fool’s gold—as heavy as a can of baked beans. I remembered seeing a ton of the stuff at Willie’s Five & Dime, so I knew it couldn’t be worth too much, even if it did look a lot like gold.
I carried the rock with me as I continued to poke around, trying to ignore the image of my own head, and the heads of everyone in my family, mounted on the walls with all the wildlife. Disregarding the housekeeper’s orders, I touched everything. The frizzy-haired woman was not my mother. Just because she said something, that didn’t mean I ha
d to do it. Here, I had a choice.
Juggling the pyrite from hand to hand, I stopped to investigate a pair of antique wrist shackles hanging from a hook near the one-eyed buffalo, trying not to think about the sheriff who’d come asking questions at the ranch.
“Hands in the air!” I jumped as I felt something jab me in the back. Sarah Jane’s watermelon-scented lips were by my ear—so close, I could feel her warm breath on my cheek. The girl was as silent and sneaky as a bushwhacking, story-slinging ninja.
“Those cuffs once held the Sundance Kid, you know.” She giggled. “Maybe you’re his reincarnation. That would make a really great headline!”
As soon as she dropped her finger from my back, I turned, whacking my head against the buffalo’s shaggy chin. Two of the heavy-duty bolts that held the trophy to the wall came loose and the buffalo head lurched sideways as if cocking its head to get a better look at us. At the same time, the hands fell off the crocodile clock, even as it kept on ticking.
Sarah Jane shook her braids. “You are the King of Damage, you do know that, don’t you? What are you doing here, Cowboy? Did you come for another right hook in the kisser?” She bent toward me again, cracking her knuckles with a teasing smile. Then she stopped and wrinkled her nose the same way the housekeeper had done when she’d let me in.
“Wow! You smell worse than that bison once did, Cowboy. What did you do, run here?”
“Um, yeah actually. I did,” I answered, trying not to flinch as the buffalo took another lurch down the wall. “And the name’s Ledge, remember?”
“Yeah, yeah. Ledge—got it.” Sarah Jane eyed the buffalo, then looked back at me. “I see you’re getting acquainted with all my father’s favorites.”
“Favorites?”