Finding Fortune (6 page)

I bent closer. “She was so beautiful.” The girl in the picture had a cloud of dark wavy hair and china-doll skin, but you could still tell it was Hildy, even without the wrinkles and lipstick and the lopsided wig. She had the same mischief in her smile, the same stubborn tilt to her chin.

“Look how happy they all are,” I said as I stared at the faces in the crowd. “I'm glad Hildy's making a museum. Otherwise how would people know this stuff ever happened?”

Hugh took the picture and set it back in its stand on a card table. “You want to see her crown?” he asked. “It's made out of buttons.” He picked up a pink velvet bag from the corner of the table, but before he could get the drawstring untied, we heard Hildy's raspy voice. It sounded like she was coming down the hall, talking to somebody on her cell phone.

“Say that again,” I heard her squawk. “We got a bad connection. I can't quite hear you.” My heart jumped. What if she was talking to Mom? Had Nora given up and spilled the beans already?

Hugh held a finger to his lips and pulled me down to a crouch. Then he motioned for me to stay low and follow him through another obstacle course of cardboard boxes and wooden crates. When we finally stood up straight, we were in a dark storage room off the gym.

“What's going on?” I whispered. “Why are we hiding?”

“I don't want Hildy to see us,” Hugh said softly. “She doesn't like me exploring the museum when she's not there.” Before I could wonder more about who Hildy had been talking to or whether she was looking for me, Hugh grabbed my hand. The next thing I knew, we were stepping out into the blinding sunlight and a flower garden that bordered the side of the school.

On the other side of the garden there were two women in sun hats bent over a row of white flowers. They straightened in surprise when they spotted us. When one of them pushed back the brim of her hat, I realized who they were—the sisters from the second floor. I could tell they expected us to stop and say hello, but Hugh was already scurrying along a dirt path that led back to the front of the school. I gave the sisters a little half wave and trotted after him.

Hugh didn't slow down until he had rounded the corner of the building and slipped behind a gnarled lilac bush. “Jeez,” I huffed once I had scooted into the space beside him. “What's going on? I feel like I'm in a video game dodging old ladies.”

Hugh leaned his back against the brick wall of the school to catch his breath. “That was Sister Loud and Sister Soft,” he panted, and readjusted the pencil behind his ear. “They're always trying to get me to help pull weeds in their soap garden. If we had stopped, I'd never get to finish showing you around.”

I leaned against the wall beside him. The bricks felt warm on my back. “You really call them that?” I smiled. “Sister Loud and Sister Soft?”

“Not to their faces. Just with Mine. We can't tell them apart unless they're talking … or yelling.” Hugh peeked out from the branches of the lilac to check whether the coast was clear. When he turned back to me, his expression was somber. “Are you afraid of heights?” he asked.

“Um. What kind of heights?”

Hugh pointed past the fading purple blooms over my head. I took a careful step out from under the bush and squinted into the sunlight. He was pointing at the tower.

 

SEVEN

TO GET TO THE TOWER,
we had to go back inside, make our way to the third floor, open a narrow door hidden in a crook of the hall, and climb up twelve more steep steps. At the top, Hugh shoved open a trapdoor. I clambered through after him and stood up slowly, reaching for the railing to steady myself. When I looked out, my stomach flipped over and my breath caught in my throat. You could see forever—past the cornfields, past the roofs of Fortune poking up through the trees, all the way to the Mississippi River. Dad likes to call it the Mighty Mississippi, but the river didn't look so mighty from up in the tower. It looked more like a flat brown snake sliding across the countryside.

I could tell Hugh had been up in the tower before. He didn't even bother to grab the railing as he stepped around the trapdoor and looked down on the backyard of the school. “Whoa,” he said. “Garrett got a lot more shells this morning.”

I edged over to see what he was talking about. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again, trying to make sense of the strange scene below. There was an old baseball diamond out back, and surrounding it were mountains and mountains of salt-and-pepper-colored shells. At the edge of the ring, a huge man with a scruffy blond beard stood in the back of a green pickup truck shoveling more shells on top of another pile. So that was Garrett, Hildy's handyman who wrote on the blackboards. Hugh had pointed out the door to his room on the third floor when we were on our way up to the tower.

“What the heck is he doing?” I asked.

“Making a labyrinth.”

“A labyrinth?”

“It's kind of like a maze,” Hugh explained. “Garrett used to fix up old castles and churches in England, where they had a lot of that kind of stuff. He says he's always wanted to make a labyrinth. And he thinks it'll help get more people to come see the museum.”

“Wow,” was all I could say. I had been in corn mazes before, and Nora and I had gotten lost in a giant boxwood maze when we went on vacation to Colonial Williamsburg. But I'd never heard of anything like that being made out of shells. Then again, I'd never heard of a button museum until about an hour ago.

While we were watching Garrett, I began noticing all the graffiti in the tower. It wasn't like the graffiti I had seen scribbled in bathroom stalls and under the bleachers at school. It was the antique kind—hundreds of names and sayings carved on the floor and the railing. There were so many, it seemed like every kid who had ever gone to school in Fortune must have owned a pocketknife and climbed up to leave a mark in the tower.
FCS is the Best!
…
Peggy Anne and Emma Jean—Friends 4Ever … Fortune Hunters-B.Ball Champs of '69
.

Hugh called me over to see a carving on the handrail.

“If they got married,” he said, barely able to contain himself, “her name would be Mrs. Hazel Nutt.” He started laughing so hard, showing those funny front teeth of his, that I got the giggles too and couldn't stop until Hugh knelt down and pointed to where Hildy had carved her name on the floor near the trapdoor when she was a kid.

“How do you know that's her?” I asked.

“Because she asks me to get her mail out of the mailbox by the road sometimes, and I've seen that name on her letters. Hilda Larson Baxter.”

“So she must have been picked to be the button queen right after she finished high school.” I kept staring at the date on the floor, trying to add up the numbers in my head. “If Hildy was eighteen when she graduated,” I said, “that means she's got to be … more than eighty years old.”

“Whoa,” Hugh said.

We were still on our knees talking about how peppy Hildy was for being so ancient when we heard a huge commotion below—a roaring engine and hissing brakes and some sort of weird high-pitched braying sound. Hugh scrambled to his feet. “Mayor Joy's back!” he cried.

I followed him to the front railing just in time to see a man hop down from the cab of a tractor-trailer truck in the parking lot. “Hey there, buddy,” the truck driver called out. I couldn't tell who he was talking to. Then a donkey emerged from the high grass near the old playground, wheezing out a stream of hee-haws as he clopped across the gravel.

“That's Wayne,” Hugh said.

“Which one?”

Hugh laughed. “The donkey. He hates it when the Mayor goes away on long hauls. Garrett takes good care of him, but Wayne likes Mayor Joy a lot better.”

I sized up the man below. He was old too—not as old as Hildy, but his bald head shone like polished mahogany next to his snow-white sideburns. “Is that another one of your nicknames? Mayor Joy?”

Hugh shook his head. “No, he's really the mayor. And his last name is really Joy.”

“What's he the mayor of?”

“Fortune.”

“Fortune? But Fortune's not even a town anymore, is it? It only has twelve people.”

Hugh shrugged. “Beats me. All I know is that's what people call him, and Hildy says he's been the mayor forever.”

The Mayor's kindly voice drifted up to us as he stood rubbing Wayne between his oversize ears, carrying on like they were long-lost friends. I lifted my hand to wave.

“Don't!” Hugh said under his breath. He grabbed my arm, tugging me back from the railing.

“How come?”

“I don't want Mine to find out we were up here. She thinks it's too dangerous. And she says I'm allergic to wasps.”

I stopped breathing for a second. “Wasps? What wasps?”

Hugh nodded up at the rafters. Two wasps were circling lazily over our heads. I felt my stomach go watery. I could see a giant wasp nest lodged between the roof supports of the tower. “Hugh,” I gasped. “Why didn't you tell me you aren't allowed up here? Or in the museum? Your mom's going to think I'm the worst babysitter ever.”

Hugh flinched like I had pinched him.
“Babysitter?”
he said. Then he spun away, sending his pencil flying. He marched for the trapdoor and lowered himself through.

“Wait, Hugh,” I called as I floundered after him. It wasn't easy to wrestle the hatch closed and pick my way down the steep steps. I thought Hugh would be gone when I finally stumbled out to the third floor, but he was sitting at the top of the main staircase with his elbows on his knees and his chin propped in his hands. I plopped down next to him and held out his pencil. “Sorry if I hurt your feelings,” I said. “I didn't mean that I think you're a baby or anything.”

Hugh tucked his pencil behind his ear again and scowled down at his Cubs slippers. “I thought we were hanging out because you wanted to be friends,” he said, “not because you thought you were supposed to be my
babysitter
.” He spit out the word like it was a bad taste on his tongue.

“I
do
want to be friends,” I said. “It's just that I don't want to break any rules while I'm here … I'm in enough trouble as it is.”

Hugh finally looked up at me. “'Cause you ran away from home, right?”

I blinked at him in surprise. Then I remembered. Spymaster Hugh had heard everything that had happened in the foyer when I first arrived. “Yeah,” I admitted softly.

“Mine and I sort of ran away from home too.”

“Really? How come?”

“Mine said Chicago wasn't good for us anymore and we needed a fresh start.”

The forlorn note in Hugh's voice tugged at my heart. No wonder he was so desperate for friends. It had to be lonely being the only kid wandering around this old school. Plus I hadn't seen a single TV or computer since I arrived. “If you want, I could ride my bike over and visit you sometimes,” I offered. “Once I go home. I don't live very far away.”

Hugh gave me a skeptical look. “Yeah, that's what Cal said too—that he'd come and visit, but he never did.”

“Who's Cal?”

“He was Mine's boyfriend. He's been my favorite so far. He used to take me to see the Cubs, and he taught me how to play video games and say cuss words in Spanish. All sorts of stuff. But Mine thought he was a bad influence so they broke up.”

“Sorry,” I said. “That stinks.”

“So what should we do now?” Hugh asked. “When do you think your mom'll be here?”

I shifted on the steps uneasily. “Oh, I don't know. This afternoon sometime.” I glanced at my watch. I only had a few more hours to come up with an explanation, some way to convince Hildy that it would be okay for me to stay longer.

I pushed myself to my feet and meandered a little farther down the hall, peering into classrooms. Each one had a chalkboard with the word
no
written across the middle. When I stopped in the doorway of what looked like an old chemistry lab, Hugh appeared at my side and pushed his way past me. “Look,” he said, opening a cabinet under one of the tall lab tables. The shelves inside were filled with beakers and bottles containing the remnants of mysterious-looking powders and liquids. “I'm going to borrow Hildy's rubber gloves sometime and Mine's sunglasses so I can mix these together and see what happens.”