Drizzle (5 page)

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Authors: Kathleen Van Cleve

BOOK: Drizzle
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Harry’s two biggest leaves scrape my leg. I scooch away from him, but end up touching another plant on the other side.
“Okaaay,” Basford says.
“We should get that to Beatrice. She’ll be excited you did so much,” I say, pointing to his bags. I only have about half as much.
“Let’s go!” I say, way too cheerfully.
Harry brushes the underside of a leaf on my ankle. It’s pretty obvious. Basford stares at him.
“It’s nothing,” I say, a fake smile frozen on my lips. “The wind.”
“Right.” His eyes dart back and forth between Harry and me, confused. There is no wind. I bite my bottom lip and Basford gives up trying to figure it out. As he lifts his bag over his shoulder, I glance back and stick out my tongue at Harry. He has to understand that I can’t just go around telling people my best friend is a chocolate rhubarb plant.
“Come on,” I tell Basford. “Beatrice will be making my favorite.”
“Rhubarb something?”
“No.” I grin. “Fried chicken!”
I heave my own bag over my shoulder as Basford steps in front of me, walking down the row of plants toward the road. I glance backward to see what Harry’s doing. One of his stalks is sticking straight out, perpendicular to the ground, as if he’s watching me. But I don’t think he’s too mad. If he were, his leaves would be rustling, and they’re not. I wink. Harry bends his middle leaf into a smile.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 22
 
The Turret
 
Today is Friday, which is always, always,
always
my favorite day of the week. These are the days I get Aunt Edith all to myself. She doesn’t do one shred of rhubarb business. Instead, it’s all me. Sometimes we see a silly movie. Other times, she teaches me about micro-financing and introduces me to people who have dedicated their lives to helping others. Patricia and Freddy stopped going years ago. I suppose I could ask Basford to join us, but he’s watching Freddy’s soccer game, and besides, I’m selfish about Aunt Edith. I like when I have her all to myself.
Finally, Aunt Edith’s Mercedes rolls very slowly down the circular driveway in front of our castle. Aunt Edith’s “driver”—or assistant, or secretary, or butler, whatever you want to call him—likes to make grand entrances. His name is Girard and he’s tall with a blocky nose and narrow shoulders that make him look like a long plank of wood, with arms and legs stuck out to the side. He’s really smart, supposedly, and works with Aunt Edith so that one day she’ll reward him with a high-powered job. That’s what she does with all her assistants. If I were her, I’d be looking for someone to hire Girard away right this second. He’s unbelievably annoying. He always talks about his time at Cambridge and Wharton, and says things like “Alas, sometimes I think I’d be better on a small pebble in the middle of the ocean, so drawn am I to both sides of the Atlantic.” Then he smiles, as if anyone understands what he’s saying.
Girard rolls down his window and smiles broadly. He has yellow teeth.
“Polly Peabody. My pleasure. As always.” He scurries out of the front seat and walks slowly to the back passenger door. “Your aunt.”
He swings open the black door and Aunt Edith steps out, all glorious-looking. “Hello, Polly.”
“Where are we going?” I blurt out. Aunt Edith looks at me disapprovingly. “I mean, it’s so good to see you. Sorry.”
“It’s good to see you too, sweetheart,” she says. She walks over to me, pulling a tangled piece of hair out from my barrette. “Today I have a surprise for you.”
Our last surprise was when Aunt Edith brought me to a science center so I could meet an astronaut who had walked on the moon. Just thinking about it makes me grin.
“Today,” Aunt Edith tells me. “Today we’re staying here.”
Here?
I scan the fields, chewing on my bottom lip. “At the farm?”
“The castle,” she says. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to show you.”
She walks ahead of me to the side door of the castle, the one her father built so that we wouldn’t have to use the portcullis. (That’s the enormous wooden door in the front of most castles that needs to be lifted up high by chains.) Sometimes I forget that Aunt Edith grew up in this very castle too. I still think of her as a city person. Even when she came back home after Grandmom died, she never became a farm person again. She told me once that she thinks it was a mistake that Grandmom never left, that she didn’t explore the world more. But Grandmom always told me that books and poems were all she needed to explore, and that she was quite happy to be on Rupert’s Rhubarb Farm for her entire life, “tilling the earth and seeing what magic came forth.”
Now Aunt Edith lives about ten minutes away, in a house she bought the very day she returned, four years ago. It’s white and rectangular with a flat roof. Inside, the walls are made of concrete that is painted bright white to match the exterior. I’ve only been there once and I have to admit, I didn’t really like it. You couldn’t tramp dirt inside, since all the furniture and rugs were white too, and she didn’t have any good snacks except for carrot sticks. Honestly, I don’t know how she can stand to live there after living here.
“This way,” Aunt Edith orders as we walk across the living room to the stairs in the northwest corner. We climb the circular stone steps, on the side of the castle where Patricia and I sleep. There are two rooms down our hall that are never used, so my first thought is that we’re going to go inside them.
But Aunt Edith passes those doorways too.
“One more flight, Polly,” she says.
The third floor. No one goes to the third floor. Not even Beatrice.
“But I thought—it’s locked . . .”
“Of course it is,” she says. Aunt Edith fishes inside her black shirt and pulls out a thick golden necklace. Instead of a charm or pendant at the end of it, there’s a long bronze skeleton key.
She pushes the entryway door to this floor open. Then she glides into the hall, stopping in front of a wooden door with a keyhole outlined in gold. She inserts the skeleton key into the lock and sweeps inside, as if she always walks into pitch-black rooms. I, on the other hand, freeze.
“Polly?” Aunt Edith calls back for me. I can’t believe she wants me to go in there when it’s so dark. I take a baby step toward the doorway.
“What about the light?” I ask weakly just as something big and black leaps out at me. “AGH!” I yell, and I leap back into the hall.
A single ray of light glints through the circular window, spotlighting the creature. It’s a cricket. A huge cricket. A cricket the size of a squirrel.
“Are you okay?” Aunt Edith uses her calm, stern voice.
“Cuh-cuh-cricket,” I stammer.
“They don’t bite,” she informs me.
“I can’t see anything—”
“Oh, Polly, are you afraid of the dark too?” Aunt Edith sighs.
I stop where I am and think about this. “Yes,” I admit.
I hear the clopping of her footsteps heading toward the doorway, but before they reach me, they turn in a different direction. She grunts, just barely, and there’s a loud clatter as something falls to the ground. The blast of light startles me.
Aunt Edith is standing by a large picture window, a heap of drapes by her feet. She’s yanked the entire curtain rod down.
“Well, come in,” she says as she pries the frame upward, allowing light and air to spill in.
The first thing I see when I walk over the threshold is the ivy: pretty, green five-pointed-leaf ivy, crawling over all the walls and bookshelves that line this circular wall. It covers the floors in coils and stretches up the window edges and even seems to wrap around the pointed witch’s hat of a roof.
I’m about to join Aunt Edith across the room when a strand of ivy literally
lifts up off the ground
and stares at me in the face.
The blood rushes to my head as I stare at it, hovering in the air in front of my eyes.
“Uh, Aunt Edith?”
“The ivy won’t hurt you, dear.”
I smile at the leaves, thinking that this must be how Eve felt when she was in the Garden of Eden looking at the serpent. The ivy wavers, and then curls back down at my feet.
“Enid’s library,” Aunt Edith announces.
I don’t know much about Enid, except that she was Grandmom’s mom, Rupert’s wife, and that her father, my great-great-grandfather, was an Italian prince. The story is that when he came to the U.S., he bought our property because it reminded him of his home in Italy. Then he built a castle (also to remind himself of his home) and became a rhubarb farmer. He’s the one who started the tradition of giving all the girls in his family an emerald ring. I look sadly down to my finger: I still can’t believe I lost my ring in the lake. It’s probably gone forever, something Patricia never lets me forget. She flashes her ring in front of my face every chance she gets.
Aunt Edith’s face is lit up, her eyes bright. “When I was a little girl, Enid used to bring me up here and show me all her books. Now I can bring you.” She steps over to one of the shelves, her long fingers tracing the spines of the books.
“Why is it locked up?”
“I locked it,” Aunt Edith tells me. “Only someone who can appreciate the power of words should be allowed in here.” She pauses in front of a book, shaking her head in amazement. “Here, look at this.”
She gives me an old book with a worn blue cover. It’s called
The Railway Children
by someone named E. Nesbit.
“I spent hours reading her books,” Aunt Edith says, looking at the book over my shoulder. “I’m jealous, Polly.”
“Jealous?” I turn to face her.
“To be able to read these books for the first time? What better cause for jealousy? You have hours of joy ahead of you.” She turns, curling her lips in, thinking. “But at least I have the honor of bringing these treasures to you. That’s something.”
She goes back to searching through the shelves. There must be thousands of books in here, lining every shelf, hidden behind the ivy and the dust. I could read a new one every day for the next ten years.
I close the Nesbit book and take a step toward Aunt Edith. At the same exact second,
another
cricket jumps out at me. This one’s slightly smaller, more like a chipmunk size. I leap out of the way, banging my knee against a shelf.
“Polly,” Aunt Edith says in her clipped voice, not turning around. “They’re only bugs.”
I can’t see where the cricket went, but I do see the clutter in the room: small, round, black-edged tables, with tiny colored squares circling around the edge. Dust specks glint in the sunlight that is now pouring through the rectangular window. Across the room, there are two more windows, hidden by heavy, dark red drapes.
“What are you looking for?” I ask Aunt Edith.
Before she can answer, a blue dragonfly swoops in through the window and flies around my head. It looks like the one that put on the show for Basford. My eyes dart from the dragonfly back to the ivy, which has lifted itself off of the ground and begun to move.
I can’t believe what I’m seeing. The ivy stops exactly where the dragonfly flutters, like a bus pulling into a station stop, and the dragonfly
perches
on one of the ivy’s leaves. And
then
the squirrel-sized Monster cricket leaps out of nowhere to rest on another leaf. The ivy weaves its way through the air, carrying the bugs across the room, until it reaches one of the dusty tiled tables. It parks at the table, allowing its passengers to jump off. The Monster cricket leaps to an old notebook on top of a stack of books, and the dragonfly zooms over to me, skidding to a stop right in front of my nose. He hovers there, sparkling, wings moving so fast that they create a blue blur. For a second, I just stare at him. Then, without even realizing what I’m doing, I nod.
And I swear the dragonfly nods back.
“I’ll find it, I’m sure of it,” murmurs Aunt Edith, over in the corner.
I nod again at the dragonfly.
Slowly, the dragonfly nods back at me.
This cannot be happening.
“Can you speak?” I mouth the words, so Aunt Edith doesn’t hear.
The dragonfly zooms closer and I think I actually lock eyes—my two, with his seven thousand and three—for a second. He starts to fly through the air, in deliberate movements. Straight up, then down-but-to-the-right, then straight up again. He hovers there, looking at me. Then he starts making a circle. A big circle.
It can’t be.
“No?” I mouth. Did this dragonfly actually just spell the word NO in the air?
The dragonfly bobs up and down.
“You can’t speak but you
can spell
?” I’m whispering now, but Aunt Edith still doesn’t pay me any attention.
When the dragonfly nods again, I reach out and grab on to the back of an old black iron chair. My knees are shaking and I think my heart may permanently stop. I want to tell Aunt Edith that I need to get out of this room, but before I do, the Monster cricket slowly lifts one of his skinny legs up off of the mantel and holds it up to his mouth.

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