Across the table, Hatcher was frowning at me.
“Uh, yeah, mom, I’m sure it will be fun,” I chirped as brightly as I could. But knitting was her thing, not mine. On a scale of one to ten, my interest in learning how to rub two sticks together and make socks was about minus a zillion.
“The class meets in the evenings,” my mother continued. “I figured that would give you and Mackenzie plenty of time together during the day. And Ella says we’ll each have a finished pair of socks by the end of the week.”
“Awesome!” said Mackenzie, and I shot her a look.
My mother turned to her. “Why don’t you join us, sweetheart? My treat.”
My cousin’s fork paused halfway to her mouth. “Uh, that’s okay, Aunt Dinah. I’m happy just to hang out here with Lauren and Pippa.”
“Yay!” cried Pippa, bouncing in her seat.
“Nonsense,” my mother said. “I’ll call Ella right away. I’m sure there’s room for you in the class. It will be fun!”
Now I was the one with a smirk on my face.
“I wish I could take knitting lessons,” said Lauren enviously, looking up from her book. Breakfast was the only time my bookworm sister was allowed to read at the table. Another Nancy Drew, I noticed: The Secret of the Old Clock.
“You’re taking dance right now, sweetie,” my mother told her. “We can do a knitting class together another time.”
“Open my prethent next!” Pippa demanded, plucking a package wrapped in bright pink paper from the pile and handing it to me.
“Wow, thanks!” I told her when I opened it. She’d given me a photo of herself in a homemade frame made of Popsicle sticks covered in purple glitter.
“Belinda helped me,” Pippa explained. “You can put it on your drether, and that way you won’t ever forget me.”
Hatcher kicked me under the table. I studiously avoided looking at him.
“No chance of that, Pipster,” I said solemnly.
Lauren gave me a bookmark with an owl on it—she must have overheard me admiring it at the bookshop—and my brothers had pooled their resources on a gift certificate to the sporting goods store in West Hartfield.
“For those new swim goggles you’ve been wanting,” said Danny.
I beamed at my family. “Thanks, everybody!”
“Wait, there’s one more,” said Mackenzie, and passed me a small box she’d been hiding on her lap.
“Owl earrings!” I cried happily. I don’t wear much jewelry—it’s too much of a pain taking it on and off all the time, what with swim practice and everything—but these were really pretty. The flat, round disks were made of sterling silver, and each one had a great horned owl etched onto it, tufted ears and all.
“Nice,” said my mother as I put them on and showed them off. “Your cousin knows you well.”
“Maybe they’ll bring you luck in finally spotting one,” Mackenzie added.
“I hope so.” Adding an owl to my life list—the list all birders keep of the different species they spot—was something I’d been trying to do practically forever.
My father placed another platter of sourdough waffles on the table, and my brothers and I dove for them. I managed to snag two.
“Truly!” scolded my mother. “Leave some for the rest of us.”
“How come you aren’t yelling at Hatcher and Danny? They’ve had, like, four each already!”
Across the table from me, Hatcher held up five fingers and grinned.
My mother sighed. “I swear, it’s like feeding a pack of wolves.” She spiked a fork into one of my waffles and whisked it onto Mackenzie’s plate.
“Hey!” I protested.
“You have a guest,” she said.
“It’s just Mackenzie!”
“Truly, you know better than to sass your mother,” my father chided.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, not feeling sorry at all. This was my birthday breakfast, and I’d been a good sport—well, sort of—about postponing it. What was wrong with making the most of it now that it was finally here?
“What was that?” my father replied, cupping his hand behind his ear.
“Sorry, sir,” I corrected myself. Lieutenant Colonel Jericho T. Lovejoy was a stickler for protocol.
I slathered my waffle with butter, then drenched it with syrup.
Hatcher pretended to look shocked. “Have a little waffle with your syrup, why don’t you?”
My mother took the pitcher away from me and passed it to Mackenzie. “This is real maple syrup from Freeman Farm.”
“The place where you guys helped out at yesterday?” my cousin asked, perking up. She glanced over at me. “The one where—”
“Yeah,” I said, giving her the stink eye. I could feel my face growing pink.
On the way home from helping the Freemans out yesterday, I’d texted Mackenzie about Scooter’s ambush. She was at the airport in Chicago waiting for her connecting flight to Boston, and had called me back immediately demanding the gruesome details.
“Can’t talk now. I’m in the car. I’ll tell you more when you get here,” I’d whispered, and hung up.
“Tell who what?” asked Hatcher, who had ears like a bat.
“Nothing.”
I hadn’t had a chance to tell Mackenzie more last night, though, because her flight ended up being delayed. She didn’t arrive until nearly midnight, and thanks to daily doubles—the Spring Break camp I’d signed up for that had me at swim practice both morning and afternoon—I hadn’t been allowed to go pick her up at Logan Airport.
“Are you kidding me?” I’d blurted when my father told me the news.
“I am not,” he’d replied. “You made a commitment, and Lovejoys always honor their commitments. Coach Maynard is expecting you at the pool at oh-six hundred, and we won’t get back until the wee hours.”
Most of the time I didn’t think swim practice was stupid. Swimming was one of my favorite things in the entire world, and usually there was no place I’d rather be than in the pool. But when it’s your birthday, and your cousin who’s your best friend and whom you haven’t seen since Christmas is coming to visit, trust me, you’d think it was stupid too. My father’s decision was a supreme act of parental unfairness, and I told him so. Then I asked—begged—him to make an exception for once.
“Sorry, Truly,” said Mr. Military. “No means no.”
“But Dad, it’s my birthday.”
“You girls will have all week to visit,” he’d said stubbornly.
I’d tried to stay awake anyway until Mackenzie arrived, but between running around all day at Freeman Farm and the whole drama of my close encounter with Scooter Sanchez, my eyes slammed shut the minute my head hit the pillow.
When I woke up, it was morning, and Mackenzie was snoring lightly a few feet away. My grandparents’ house was huge, and there were actually two extra bedrooms for guests, but we’d wanted to be together so I’d set up the air mattress for her in my room instead.
I’d pulled on my swimsuit and sweats, then tapped her on the shoulder. “Hey.”
One of Mackenzie’s eyelids had fluttered open. “Huh?”
“I’m going to swim practice.”
“S’nice,” she’d murmured, then rolled over and went back to sleep.
And now here we were at the breakfast table, and she was about to spill the beans about my first kiss. But she took the hint, thank goodness.
“—the one where you spent your birthday?” she finished smoothly.
“Truly was a good sport,” my father said, patting my shoulder.
“She sure was,” said Mackenzie, grinning broadly. I gave her the stink eye again.
“Happy day-after-your-actual-birthday, fellow namesake,” said my aunt, breezing in through the back door just then. She leaned down to kiss my cheek. The two of us are both named after the first Truly Lovejoy, and one of the best things about moving to Pumpkin Falls had been getting to know Aunt True better. She’d always been the family free spirit, a world trave
ler who rarely stayed anywhere very long, but ever since Black Monday she’d given up her “wandering ways,” as Gramps and Lola put it, and moved here to Pumpkin Falls to help run the bookshop with my father. She was totally in his court.
“Nothing’s more important than family,” she’d said simply, when I asked her about it once.
Leaning down again, my aunt took my empty plate away and replaced it with two brightly wrapped packages.
Across the table, Pippa started bouncing in her seat again. “Open them! Open them!”
I did. Inside the bigger of the two was the bird feeder I’d wanted. I looked up at my aunt, mystified. “How did you—”
“A little bird told me,” she quipped, and everyone groaned. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist. It was your mother.”
“Did you think we didn’t notice all the hints?” said my mother, and suddenly I felt ashamed of the way I’d reacted to her present.
“Thanks, Aunt True—and thank you for the knitting lessons too, Mom,” I said, jumping up to hug them both.
The second package was from Gramps and Lola. It was a book, of course. When your grandparents own a bookstore, you pretty much know what to expect every time Christmas and birthdays roll around.
“Owls of North America,” Mackenzie read the title aloud over my shoulder in her Texas twang. “Sounds like a real page-turner.”
I grinned. “Shut up.”
Mackenzie loved to tease me about being a birder, but I didn’t really mind. She said it was an obsession, and she was probably right. I couldn’t help it, though—birds fascinated me, especially owls. The fact that I hadn’t yet spotted one wasn’t for lack of trying. The last time there was a full moon, I’d dragged my father out into the woods to look for owls. We’d had fun, but unfortunately that’s all we’d had, and I returned home without anything to add to my life list.
My father checked his watch. “Boys, you’d better hit the road if you don’t want to be late to wrestling practice.” As Hatcher and Danny got up from the table, he turned to me. “Truly, you and Mackenzie may be excused as well.”
“Why don’t you show Mackenzie around the house, and then take her downtown,” my mother suggested. She crossed the kitchen and kissed my father. “Thanks for breakfast, handsome. I’ll be at my desk if anyone needs me.”
My mother’s “desk” these days was the dining room table. She’d pretty much taken it over since going back to college.
“Be sure and come see me at the bookstore,” Aunt True told my cousin and me.
“We will,” I assured her.
My father looked over at my little sisters. “And you two young ladies have KP this morning,” he said, which was military shorthand for “Kitchen Patrol.”
“But it’s Truly’s turn to do the dishes!” Lauren protested.
“The birthday girl doesn’t do dishes,” I reminded her.
Pippa frowned. “No fair! Yethterday wath your birthday, not today!”
Leaving them to argue their case to Dad, I escaped to the front hall. Mackenzie was right behind me. She grabbed my arm the second we were out of earshot. “Now, tell me about the kiss!”
CHAPTER 4
“Please,” I groaned. “I just ate.”
“That bad, huh?” Her blue eyes sparkled with anticipation. “I want all the gory details! Scooter’s the one you had to dance with at that cotillion thing, right?”
Of course she had to bring that up. “That cotillion thing” was the mandatory dance class at Daniel Webster School that I’d been forced to enroll in right after we moved to Pumpkin Falls. It was part of this stupid town tradition that had its grand finale at the annual Winter Festival, when the whole school participated in an exhibition dance. I’d gotten stuck with Scooter for my partner. In the end, it wasn’t all that horrible, especially after the two of us won the “most improved” award, which came with a cash prize of $25 each. And of course there’d been that dance with Calhoun. . . . Still, dancing would never top the list of things that I was good at, or that I liked to do. Especially not with Scooter Sanchez.
“So c’mon, Truly, what happened?” Mackenzie begged.
I made a face, then gave her a play-by-play account of Scooter’s surprise ambush behind the Freeman’s barn. I left out the part where Calhoun saw us, though. If Mackenzie suspected that I maybe, even a teeny tiny bit, might like Calhoun, she’d pounce on it like an owl on a field mouse. I’d never hear the end of it.
“So that’s it?” she said when I finished. “Scooter just walked away?”
“Uh-huh.”
“He didn’t try and talk to you later, or call you?”
I shook my head.
“Weird! Well, we have all week to get to the bottom of it.”
“Or not,” I said. Analyzing Scooter Sanchez’s romantic intentions was not my idea of a fun way to spend Spring Break. “How about we drop the whole subject instead, and I give you a tour?”
She sighed. “Fine.”
We started in the living room.
“Mom told me to be sure and take lots of pictures,” my cousin told me, pulling out her cell phone and snapping one of the baby grand. “Nice piano. Are you taking lessons again?”
“Maybe this summer. I haven’t had time yet, between swim team and everything else that’s happened.”
“Everything else” meaning uprooting from Texas and moving across the country, starting over at a new school, stupid cotillion, stupid math tutoring, helping out at the bookstore, solving two mysteries, and falling into a frozen river. It had been a busy winter.
“Are those the ancestors you told me about?” asked Mackenzie, pointing to the oil portraits that flanked the piano.
“Yep. That one’s Nathaniel Daniel Lovejoy, and the other is his wife, Prudence.”
“Nathaniel’s the one who founded Lovejoy College, right?” said Mackenzie, taking another picture. “The one with the big stone pumpkin on his grave?”
I nodded. I’d sent her a picture of it that day of the field trip to the cemetery. Mackenzie loved all the oddball stuff here in Pumpkin Falls.
“Yeah, and he named a mountain and a lake after himself while he was at it,” I added. “It’s kind of embarrassing.”
“At least he used his last name,” my cousin pointed out. “It could have been worse.” She struck a pose and summoned her fake radio announcer voice. “And now, a word from Nathaniel Daniel Lovejoy, founder of Nathaniel Daniel College.”
We both burst out laughing. My ancestor’s parents must have been total morons to pick a pair of rhyming names like that. Didn’t it occur to them how much the poor kid would get teased at school? Even Pippa called him “Nathaniel Daniel looks like a spaniel.”
Mackenzie stared up at the painting. “You weren’t kidding when you said he has a big nose.”
The “Lovejoy proboscis,” as Gramps had dubbed it, was a topic of great concern at the moment for my brother Hatcher. Gramps inherited Nathaniel Daniel’s nose, and so did Dad, and now Hatcher was convinced that he was starting to follow in their footsteps. At least once a week he asked me if I thought his nose had gotten bigger. I said yes, of course, just to torture him, but to be honest I didn’t think it looked any different.
“This is such a cool house,” Mackenzie said, gazing around.
I nodded. Coming here for our annual visits used to be the high point of the year for me. When you grow up in a military family, you move a lot, and this was the one place I could count on never to change.
My cousin gave an envious sigh as we started upstairs. “You’re so lucky you get to live here.”
“Except for the fact that it’s in Pumpkin Falls, not Austin.”
“What’s so bad about Pumpkin Falls?”
I shrugged. “It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just—not Austin.”
I still really missed Texas.
I skipped the squeaky stair, but I’d forgotten to warn Mackenzie about it, and it let out a screech as she stepped on it. “That’s the original Truly,?
?? I told her, pointing to the portrait hanging above it.
“J. T.!” my mother called from the dining room before I could continue.
My dad emerged from the kitchen, frowning. “What?”
“Could you maybe find time this week to fix that stair, darlin’?” my mother asked, poking her head out into the hall. “I hate to keep nagging you, but it’s driving me crazy. I’m trying to work in here, and every time anyone goes upstairs or down, all I hear is squeak squeak squeak.”
My mother was working on a research project for her American History for Educators class at Lovejoy College. Professor Rusty was the instructor. Professor Rusty’s real name was Erastus Peckinpaugh, and he was my Aunt True’s boyfriend. At least we suspected he was her boyfriend. Nobody was really quite sure. Ever since the Valentine’s Day dance, when my friends and I delivered his long-lost love letters to Aunt True, Professor Rusty had been spending a lot of time hanging around the bookstore with a hopeful expression on his face, and my aunt had been acting a little odd.
My father flapped his good hand. “Put it on the honey-do list, and I’ll get to it soon, I promise,” he told her. “I’m late for a meeting at the bookstore.”
“It’s been on the list for weeks,” my mother grumbled as he disappeared back into the kitchen.
“What’s a ‘honeydew’ list?” asked Mackenzie.
“Oh, you know, ‘Honey do this, honey do that.’ ” My mother smiled. “I’m guessing Teddy has one too.”
Teddy was my uncle Teddy, Mackenzie’s father. He was one of my mother’s six Texas brothers.
Mackenzie smiled back. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure he does too.”
My mother went back to her research, and I turned to the portrait again. “So, as I was saying, that’s the original Truly Lovejoy.”
“The one you and your Aunt True are named after?”
I nodded.
“She’s pretty.”
“You think?”
“She kind of looks like you.”