Amelia Earhart: Lady Lindy (4 page)

“New York,” Felix explained. “We all went there, Maisie and me and Great-Uncle Thorne and—”

“And my bullheaded sister,” Great-Uncle Thorne interrupted. “For decades she carried a torch for that nincompoop Harry Houdini—”

“Your sister had a crush on Harry Houdini?” Rayne asked, interested again.

Great-Uncle Thorne banged his walking stick on the floor.

“Irrelevant!” he proclaimed. “All that you need to know is that Amy Pickworth can come back without her twin, just like I returned without that obdurate sister of mine.”

“Obdurate?” Rayne said, losing interest again.

“Oh! Look it up!” Great-Uncle Thorne said dismissively. “We have more to do here than improve your vocabulary.”

While Great-Uncle Thorne shouted, Rayne stepped forward, her palm facing outward as if she was ready at any moment to press that spot on the wall and go up those stairs.

“I'm coming upstairs with you,” Great-Uncle Thorne said quickly. “We'll survey the objects and find the one that will get you to the Congo.”

“But surely that object is gone,” Felix said. “Phinneas and Amy took it with them to get there in the first place.”

Great-Uncle Thorne shook his head. “They hadn't given the object to Dr. Livingstone when Amy disappeared,” he said.

“You're wrong!” Felix said, his head swimming with too much information.

“I'm certain of this.”

Maisie's face had that deep-in-thought look she got when she was thinking hard.

“Impossible,” she finally said. “Phinneas could not get back if they hadn't given the object and received a lesson.”

Great-Uncle Thorne's face twisted with anger.

“You are an idiot!” he said. “That's why you have
lame demon
!”

“I thought it was—”

Great-Uncle Thorne pressed the wall, hard. As soon as it opened to reveal the staircase, he marched forward to the stairs, his ebony walking stick tap-tapping as he moved.

At the foot of the stairs he paused to face them.

“We will find the object that Phinneas brought back from that fateful trip to the Congo. You will choose a secondary object to bring along. And if and when things become . . . complicated . . . you will say
lame demon
three times with your hand on that secondary object and continue your travels elsewhere.”

“Complicated?” Felix asked. “You mean cannibals catching us or—”

“I'm not sure I want to do this,” Hadley said.

“Exactly!” Felix agreed.

“I'm in,” Maisie said quietly.

“Maisie,” Felix pleaded, “let's discuss this calmly and rationally.”

“I'm in,” she said again, louder this time.

“Maisie,” Felix said, and even though he put on the look that usually softened her, this time she shook her head.

“I'm in, too,” Rayne said.

Felix didn't like how her fingernails all had half-peeled-off purple nail polish. He didn't like how she wasn't looking at him.

“What?” Rayne asked him. “Don't look at me so weird.”

Felix turned away, confused. All of a sudden, he missed Lily Goldberg. Lily Goldberg had not sent him one email or letter or anything since she'd moved away. At first, he'd missed her like crazy. Then she'd kind of faded into a happy blur. But standing here right now, seeing Rayne's messy fingernails and listening to Great-Uncle Thorne's big plans, the threat of the Congo getting closer every second, Felix wanted nothing more than to talk to Lily.

The others were following Great-Uncle Thorne up the stairs to The Treasure Chest and, for a crazy moment, Felix thought he might just walk away. They couldn't do this without him, could they?

Great-Uncle Thorne paused on the stairs and swiveled his head so that he faced Felix below.

“What are you waiting for?” he bellowed.

Maybe because Felix always did what he was supposed to do, or maybe because everyone else was standing there waiting for him, he scurried to meet them.

Great-Uncle Thorne unclasped the maroon velvet rope and swept his arm to indicate they should all enter The Treasure Chest.

Once everyone had stepped across the threshold, Great-Uncle Thorne strode into the room and began to scan the cupboards and shelves.

An object caught Felix's eye almost immediately. All of a sudden, he forgot about the Congo and Amy Pickworth. Instead, he remembered his aviation report.

At the end of the day, Miss Landers had made them write down the aviator they wanted to research and Felix chose Charles Lindbergh.

“Ah!” Miss Landers had said, flashing her dazzling smile at him. “Lucky Lindy!”

“Lucky Lindy?” Felix had said.

“That was his nickname,” Miss Landers explained.

Jim Duncan signed up for Baron von Richthofen, the World War I flying ace also known as the Red Baron. And Libby announced she would do her project on Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier. Even Felix, who had trouble getting excited about the aviation unit because he was so worried about Great-Uncle Thorne's mission, started to relax.
Lucky Lindy
, he thought, liking the way that sounded.

Now, right on the desk in front of him, surrounded by a seashell and a magnifying glass, was a compass. Not a regular compass, but the kind that fit into a dashboard of instruments on a plane.
Maybe it belonged to Lucky Lindy,
Felix thought. Hadn't Great-Uncle Thorne said to be more deliberate about the objects they chose? When Felix reached for it, a liver-spotted hand grabbed his wrist, hard.

“No one is touching anything until we find what we are looking for!” Great-Uncle Thorne boomed.

“Um,” Maisie said, “what
are
we looking for?”

“How would I know?” Great-Uncle Thorne said dismissively. “When my sister and I wanted to visit King Tutankhamen, we came in here and we searched for an Egyptian object. Therefore—”

“Um,” Maisie said, “but how did you manage to get to this King Toot . . . Toot and . . .”

Great-Uncle Thorne slapped his forehead.

“Have you never heard of King Tut, you imbecile?”

“Of course,” Maisie said haughtily. “I just never knew his full name.”

“I think what Maisie was trying to say,” Hadley offered, “is how did you know that an Egyptian amulet or
kartoush
or whatever would get you to King . . . Tut . . . and not to, say, Cleopatra?”

Great-Uncle Thorne blinked. Then blinked again.

“I suppose we made a mistake or two,” he admitted. He chuckled softly. “Why, there was the time we ended up on the
Mayflower
instead of the
Santa Maria
. Now that was interesting.”

He looked at their blank faces and
tsked
.

“The
Mayflower
brought the Pilgrims to Massachusetts,” he said, his voice thick with contempt. “The
Santa Maria
was one of Columbus's ships, along with the
Niña
and the
Pinta
.”

“Got it,” Rayne said, and she began to walk around the room, studying the objects that crowded every surface.

Maisie went to the other end of The Treasure Chest, scrutinizing an object carefully before deciding it wasn't the right one.

“I think,” she said slowly, “that we aren't looking for something African. We're looking for something Dr. Livingstone needed to survive there.”

“Like malaria pills?” Felix asked, only half jokingly.

Hadley held up a map, brown with age and crisscrossed with faded blue lines.

“He might have needed this,” she said.

Immediately, Great-Uncle Thorne took it from her. He held it close to his eyes to better examine it.

“The confounded continent has changed so much over time,” he said, more to himself than to the children.

Everyone gathered around him, craning their necks to try to get a view of the map.

Everyone except Felix. He stayed put, and as soon as he was certain no one had noticed him, he tucked the compass into the pocket of his hoodie.

“Borders and names back then . . .” He shook his head. “It's hard to make out some of the writing. . . .”

“Wait!” Maisie said, pointing to a particularly long line. “Right there. It says
Nile River
.”

“This might be the very thing . . . ,” Great-Uncle Thorne said.

With the compass safely in his pocket, Felix joined the others.

“I say we give it a try,” Hadley decided.

Great-Uncle Thorne studied the map, then studied the children's faces, then studied the map again.

Finally, with a nod, he looked back up.

Maisie reached for the map, but Great-Uncle Thorne stopped her.

“Remember, I told you to be more thoughtful when you do this,” he said firmly. “You know that you are looking for Dr. Livingstone. You know the Congo is a dangerous place.”

Felix swallowed hard.

“You know that if you say
lame demon
, you will get out of any predicament.”

Great-Uncle Thorne paused.

“You know you may only use that three times.”

He held up three fingers and waved them in front of the children.

They all nodded.

“And by all means,” Great-Uncle Thorne said in his big voice, “stay together!”

A chill swept over Felix and he shivered. Maisie took his hand and squeezed it.

When Great-Uncle Thorne held the map out to them, a look of nostalgia crossed over his face.

“How I wish I could go with you,” he said with a sigh.

Maisie took the map. First Hadley, then Rayne, then Felix put their hands on it, too.

They lifted up, up, up.

The smells of Christmas trees and hot chocolate and flowers in bloom filled the air.

A breeze blew across them.

Great-Uncle Thorne's upturned face grew smaller and smaller until he vanished altogether and they tumbled through time.

SILVERBACK!

W
hen Maisie looked up, all she saw was green. From somewhere way above her came a tiny pinprick of light. But otherwise, just green. She was looking up because she seemed to be tangled in something that prevented her from looking anywhere else. She wiggled and writhed, trying to free herself, but it seemed the more she moved, the more tangled she became.

Maisie squinted.

The green, she realized, was all leaves. A canopy of thick green leaves hung over her. Over everything, really. In fact, she realized as she struggled to free herself, she seemed to be caught up in foliage of some kind.

Maisie wiggled and writhed some more.

Not just leaves. Vines. She was caught up in vines so strong that she couldn't bend or break them.

“Felix?” she called.

From the distance, she heard a grunt.
Is Felix trapped, too?
Maisie wondered.

“I'm stuck!” she yelled. “In vines and stuff!”

Another grunt.

Maisie tried to stay perfectly still and think. She knew that Felix could be an extraordinary hypochondriac, always thinking he was hurt worse than he was or worrying over getting a terrible deadly disease. But it was possible, she thought, glancing around as best she could, that he had gotten hurt. Vines and foliage, after all, belonged in a jungle. Which was exactly where they had wanted to land—a jungle along the Congo River. Maisie swallowed hard. She had been excited to come to Africa and find Amy Pickworth and Dr. Livingstone. But now that she was here, alone, tangled up in vines, with her brother maybe seriously hurt, she didn't like the idea so much.

Plus, it was hot. A kind of hot she'd never felt before, almost as if the air was an electric blanket, laying on top of everything and generating heat. She started to sweat, and almost immediately she heard buzzing. And then flies circled her. And then they started to land on her and . . .

And? And what?
Maisie tried to figure out, wriggling even more to make the flies fly away.

But they didn't budge. In fact, it felt like they were biting her. No, not biting. Licking.

Gross!
Maisie thought.

The flies were licking her sweat.

“Yuck!” Maisie shouted, trying to swat at them.

Birds cawed.

The ground beneath her trembled slightly.

“Felix?” Maisie said, softly at first, then louder: “Felix!”

Nothing but that grunting.

The flies nibbled her sweaty neck.

Maisie squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated on just her right arm. If she could get her right arm free, then she might be able to get all of herself free.

She felt like she spent an hour or more trying without any luck to release her arm from the vine's clutches. The flies kept eating her sweat, and the heat felt hotter and every now and then she heard the sound of an animal she did not recognize. Maisie tried not to think about lions or snakes or hippos. She tried not to think about how Mr. Landon, her science teacher last year, had told them that the hippopotamus was one of the most dangerous animals in Africa.
They'll charge you,
Mr. Landon had said.
And you won't be able to outrun them
. Then it had seemed funny, sitting safely in P.S. 3 surrounded by other kids and the smell of books and paint and ink. The image of a hippo running fast had made Maisie laugh. But now, as the earth trembled again and an animal's calls echoed through the air, it didn't seem funny at all.

Frustrated, Maisie stopped being so careful and methodical and just tried to yank her arms free. The vines cut into her and held on tight.

Now she felt an unmistakable trickle of blood on both arms and what sounded like the footsteps of someone running. Or maybe slipping?

Then came a series of yelps and groans before Felix tumbled right past her, slipping and sliding down what Maisie saw was a steep embankment.

“Ugh!” she heard Felix say.

She could turn her head just enough to see him climbing slowly up toward her, using vines and branches and whatever else he could grab on to so that he wouldn't go falling back downward again.

“I . . . have . . . looked . . . every . . . where,” he panted as he finally reached her side.

His face was smudged with dirt and his glasses hung crookedly on his face.

“Just get me out of here,” Maisie said. “Please.”

Felix took a couple of deep breaths, then straightened his glasses and studied Maisie's predicament. He remembered how a few years back, their mother had gone through a knitting phase, bringing home skeins of yarns and needles and patterns. She would sit after dinner, frowning at the sweater or scarf she was trying to make, all of it turning out ugly and lumpy or full of holes. She always got her yarn tangled, and he and Maisie would help her straighten it out, pulling it through loops and back again, trying to follow its knotty, complicated path.

This is just like that,
he told himself.
Pretend you're untangling Mom's yarn.

Carefully, he lifted a vine and began to send it backward, away from Maisie. Then he did another. The work was slow and frustrating. Just when he thought he'd released one, he saw that it was looped through yet another.

Maisie moaned. “Can't you go faster?”

“I'm trying,” he said.

“It is so hot,” Maisie complained.

Felix nodded.

Sweat dripped off his forehead and onto his glasses. Flies kept landing on his face and hands. He didn't know when he'd last felt this miserable.

“Are these flies biting me?” he said, knocking them off his nose.

“I think they're eating our sweat,” Maisie said, disgusted.

“Do you think they're tsetse flies?” Felix asked, pausing in his work to stare at his sister.

“Maybe?” she said.

“Tsetse flies give you sleeping sickness,” Felix said in a trembly voice. “And sleeping sickness can kill you,” he added in an even more trembly one.

Still in the distance, but closer now, came more of those grunts.

Maisie's eyes widened.

“I thought
you
were making that noise,” she said softly.

Felix shook his head, a vine dangling in his shaky hand.

“Do you think it's a hippopotamus?” Maisie asked.

“Maybe?” Felix said.

“Remember what Mr. Landon said? That they're the most dangerous animals in Africa?”

“Uh-huh,” Felix said, trying to calm himself so he could get Maisie out. But his hands shook so much he had to quit and sit on them to make them stop.

Maisie wriggled a bit and her left arm came free.

She wriggled a bit more and her left leg came free, too.

“Pull,” she told Felix, offering up her arm and leg.

“You don't understand how steep the ground is,” he said. “If I stand up, I'll slide all the way down.”

“Pull,” she said, gritting her teeth.

Felix knew this was one of those times that he could not win. So he got to his knees, one leg already sliding out from beneath him. Quickly, he grabbed on to a vine. It slipped through his hand as he fell back even more.

Once again, he climbed back to Maisie, holding on to whatever he could find, his hands burning from the vine whipping through them.

When he reached Maisie again, he tried not to say
I told you so.

“See?” he said, which he knew meant the same thing.

“Plant yourself against that tree,” Maisie said, pointing with her chin. “And then pull.”

It took more crawling to get to the tree, and then a lot of slippery maneuvering before Felix had his back supported against the tree's trunk in such a way that he could lean forward and take Maisie's hand without sliding down the hill again.

But finally he did it.

He reached forward as far as he could, barely able to grasp Maisie's fingers. He held on tight. He pulled.

All of Maisie except her right foot sprang free.

“Aaarrgghh!” she said, collapsing in frustration.

Felix crawled back to his sister, and the two of them slowly unraveled the vine that still held on to Maisie's ankle.

“It's like Mom's knitting,” Maisie said with a weak smile. “Remember?”

“I was thinking the same thing!” Felix said.

Their shared memory gave them renewed energy and in a few more minutes they had managed to free Maisie's foot, too.

If they could have, they would have jumped for joy.

But any movement sent them sliding. So Maisie gave Felix a light high five, and then they sat still, gazing upward, trying to figure out how to make it to the top without falling all the way to the bottom.

“Um,” Felix said, his voice cracking.

“What?” Maisie said, her brows wrinkled the way they always did when she was thinking hard.

“Um,” Felix said again, blinking and pointing.

“What's the . . . ,” she began.

But then she saw exactly what was the matter.

Standing no more than twenty feet away, staring at them, was a family of big black gorillas.

“Don't move,” Maisie whispered.

As if I could,
Felix thought. He tried to remember everything he knew about gorillas. They lived in Africa, so he and Maisie had definitely landed in Africa. Something needled at him, something he was forgetting. But Felix ignored it. When five gorillas were standing this close, there was no need to worry over something forgotten.
Gorillas,
he reminded himself.
What do I know about gorillas?
They were endangered. But of course, not here in this place at this time.

The gorillas peeled bark off trees, examined it in their very humanlike hands, then ate it. One burped. One farted.

Despite herself, Maisie giggled.

Felix glared at her, like a warning.

She turned her attention back to the gorillas.

Each of their faces looked different, just like people's do. One gorilla had a thoughtful expression, another seemed happy. The third gorilla had the face of an old man, and the fourth seemed bored. The fifth . . . the fifth wore a cocky expression that reminded her of an older boy who had lived near them on Bethune Street. The boy's name was Ethan, and he used to ride his skateboard up and down the neighborhood like it was the easiest, coolest thing ever. He wore bright orange shoes made out of plastic. Once Maisie asked him about those shoes and he'd said, as if she was the dumbest person on the planet, “They're skateboarding shoes.”

The cocky gorilla stopped eating bark and turned his big, cocky face toward Maisie and Felix.

To Felix, it seemed like the gorilla tilted his head and stared right at them. Felix gulped. No matter how hard he tried, he could not remember anything else about gorillas. They lived in Africa. And they were endangered. That was it. He couldn't remember if they were dangerous, like hippopotamuses. He couldn't remember if they were carnivores. Nothing.

“He acts like that kid, Ethan,” Maisie said out of the side of her mouth.

“Ssshhh,” Felix hushed.

“The skateboarder,” Maisie added.

The gorilla took a few steps toward them, then stopped.

Stop talking!
Felix told his sister silently, hoping mental telepathy might work.

“Doesn't he?” Maisie said. “Not just his expression, either. His
face
looks like Ethan.”

Apparently, she had forgotten to be quiet altogether because she was talking in her regular tone of voice.

And the gorilla was walking toward them again.

The gorilla did not speed up or slow down. He just kept moving toward them with his big gorilla steps, his gorilla arms swaying as he moved, just like a cartoon gorilla.

The other gorillas kept eating bark and scratching themselves, and burping and passing gas. The old-looking one leaned against a tree, folded his arms across his hairy belly, and went to sleep. Immediately, he began to snore. Loudly.

And the gorilla that looked like Ethan the skateboarder kept moving toward Maisie and Felix, his head bent quizzically.

Felix, already sweating in the oppressive jungle heat, began to tremble.

Maisie, however, was not afraid. As the gorilla got closer and closer, excitement swelled in her. She had never seen a gorilla before, not even in the zoo. And now she was almost ready to touch one, although she figured that probably wasn't a very good idea.

“Don't make eye contact,” Felix whispered, his voice dry and cracked.

“Why not?” Maisie asked.

The gorilla stopped and looked at her, frowning.

Maisie grinned at him. His fur was coarse and black, but his stomach was pink and the hair on his back was tipped with silver.

Felix noticed these things, too. He noticed that the gorilla's face looked like a rubber gorilla mask and that his black eyes looked like a person's eyes peering out through a Halloween mask. Then he remembered one more gorilla fact: Silverback gorillas acted like teenagers. Big and playful and, Felix thought as he sized up this silverback gorilla, probably weighing seven or eight hundred pounds. He could crush them. Easily. He could knock them out or knock them down or just about anything.