Finding Grace (7 page)

Chapter Eighteen

I can't keep standing in the doorway like a ninny. I have to go in or go out.

I take a deep breath and step inside. I scuttle over to a shelf stacked with boxes of cereal and pretend to be looking at them. I feel like a spy in a secret agent movie. My heart is pounding so loudly that it's a miracle the girl and the storekeeper can't hear it.

“I'll have three jawbreakers,” the girl says.

Ohmigosh. She's thinking about jawbreakers too. This is exactly what I mean about the bond between twins.

My legs wobble. The storekeeper glances at me and I give him a confident smile and pick up a box of Shredded Wheat.

Cripes. What do I do now?

A plan. I need a plan. I've spent a lot of time imagining finding Grace, but I've never imagined what to do next.

Then the girl says, “See you later.” She turns around.

Her face is covered with freckles.

And when she walks past me, I can see that we aren't the same height at all. She's shorter than me. She looks about eight years old.

The bell jingles and she's gone.

The storekeeper is staring hard at me now. He has bushy gray eyebrows that meet in the middle. “Fifteen cents,” he says.

I blink and try to focus. “What?”

“Cereal. Fifteen cents.”

He probably thinks I don't have any money. He probably thinks I'm one of those kids that hang around in stores and swipe stuff.

To prove him wrong, I pay for the cereal. Then I march out of the store.

I
despise
Shredded Wheat.

• • • • •

By the time I get back to the hotel, the box of cereal is so soggy it's starting to fall apart. I dump it in a garbage bin outside the hotel. What a waste of fifteen cents!

The man in the gray uniform is still there, standing under the awning. He looks at me, but he doesn't make any move to open the door. So much for feeling like a queen. I guess a half-drowned kid doesn't rate.

I drip my way across the lobby. I'm not in the mood to read any more. It must be the shock of almost finding Grace. I feel as limp as a wrung-out dishrag. When I get to our room, I don't turn on the light because I'm afraid of waking Mom. I sit on the edge of the bed and eat a smushed cheese sandwich in the dark.

Then I put on my pajamas and crawl under the blankets. I stick my cold feet over to Mom's side of the bed. In two seconds, I am fast asleep.

Chapter Nineteen

“Where are you going?” I whisper.

Mom has opened the curtains a crack and the room is filled with pale gray light. She's dressed and she's fumbling in her purse.

“Out,” Mom says. “For a walk.”

I blink the sleep out of my eyes. “What time is it?”

“Four-thirty.”

“I'm coming too.”

I slip out of my pajamas and pull on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. I lace up my running shoes.

We slip out of the hotel like thieves in the night. The lights are dim and there's no one around, not even the doorman. Outside, the sun isn't up yet, but the sky is pearly and a pale robin's egg blue. The lake is as smooth and calm as a sheet of glass.

Mom gazes all around. She takes a deep breath. “It's nice here.”

“Really nice,” I agree. I shiver a little. I should have brought a jacket.

“The mountains, the forest, the lake…this would be a nice place to grow up.”

Mom's voice trembles. She's thinking about Grace. I squeeze her hand. “Come on,” I say. “I'll show you the village.”

We stroll along the path. Somewhere, some birds are singing like crazy. There's no one around. I love being out here with just my mom. It feels like we are the only people in the whole wide world who are awake. I tell that to Mom and she smiles and says that in China right now people are probably having dinner.

I'm thinking about that when voices drift across to us. I spot two men at the end of the red dock, loading boxes into a boat. Mom and I sit on a bench and watch them. One of the men waves and I wave back. Then the men climb into the boat and putt away, sending silver ripples across the water.

We sit on the bench for a long time, staring out at the lake and not talking. Then we start walking again. We go all the way to the gravel beach. A crow is hopping near the edge of the lake, holding a piece of bread in his beak. He flaps away when we get near. Mom sits on a log and I walk over to the pile of boards where those boys were playing yesterday. Some of the boards are nailed across two logs. It looks like they're building a raft. Nifty.

I look for flat rocks and try to skip them on the smooth water. My best is three skips. Then Mom and I cross over to the other side of the street and start walking back to the hotel.

All the businesses are closed up except for the Top Notch Café. The door is open and the smell of baking bread wafts out. “Smell that,” Mom says, and she pokes her head in the door.

“We're not open yet,” a voice calls out.

“Not even for a cup of coffee?” Mom says wistfully.

“Oh heck, you look cold. Come on in.”

The woman speaking to us is behind a counter, sorting cutlery into piles. Mom and I sit at a table.

The woman brings over a steaming cup of coffee for Mom and a hot chocolate for me. She's a big heavy woman with the name
Daphne
stitched above her chest. “Fred could do you a fry up,” she says. “Bacon, eggs, hash browns, and tomatoes.”

“Heaven.” Mom smiles.

When the food is ready, Daphne sets the heaped up plates in front of us and plops down in a chair at the next table. “Time to take a load off my feet. You're up with the birds, aren't you? You must be staying in one of them motor courts; or are you just passing through? Not that there's anywhere to pass through to, us being at the end of the road and all.”

She pauses to take a breath.

“We're staying at the hotel,” I say proudly.

Daphne raises her eyebrows. “Didn't take you for hotel guests. No offence, like. My niece Martha works at the hotel, a chambermaid you know, and she says they pay good and that it's ever so nice a place to work. You wouldn't believe what guests leave behind, not that she gets to keep anything, it all goes straight to the lost and found, an' she says the job is better than dishing up here at the Top Notch, which she did last summer. She's a hard worker an' all, was here from six in the morning 'til the supper gang left because she's saving her money to go to university.”

She takes another breath and looks expectant, as if we're supposed to say something. Mom winks at me and murmurs, “University. That's impressive.”

“First in the family. Gonna be a veter'narian.” Daphne sticks out her hand. “I'm Daphne.”

“Flora,” Mom says. “And this is my daughter, Hope.”

Daphne eyes my plate. “You're cleaning that up fast. Want some more hash browns?”

I control the urge to burp. “No, thank you.”

“This is very kind of you to open early for us,” Mom says.

Daphne shrugs. “Makes no never-you-mind to me. I'm here anyway. And it's nice to have someone to talk to. The hubby,” Daphne jerks her head towards the kitchen, “he's baking that bread you smell and he don't say nothing 'til after lunch and then he don't say more than ten words. He don't start really talking 'til ten o'clock at night, and then I'm worn out and you can't shut him up.”

Daphne heaves to her feet. “Time to make the coleslaw. I'll get you some more coffee and hot chocolate. You set here as long as you want. Two mites like you don't take up any space.”

Mom sips her coffee slowly like she's not in a hurry to go anywhere. At seven, Daphne turns the sign around in the door so it says
Open
. The café fills up quickly, mostly with men in work clothes and muddy boots.

“Loggers,” Daphne says as she scurries past with plates of food. “They know they can get a decent meal here.”

And I mean
scurries
. For such a large woman, Daphne can move fast.

Mom watches her for a few minutes and then the next thing I know, she's up on her feet, getting the coffee pot from the counter and pouring coffee for the loggers.

My mouth drops open.

The loggers like Mom and she kind of flirts back with them, but I know it doesn't mean anything.

When the last one is gone and there's a lull, Mom pays our bill and Daphne says, “You can come anytime, Flora. You're good for business.”

When we get out to the sidewalk, the sun is shining and the lake sparkles like it is made out of tiny diamonds.

Mom says, “That was fun. I haven't waitressed for years.”

She sounds so happy. If only it would last.

Chapter Twenty

We end up having all our meals at the Top Notch Café. Mom says The Copper Room in the hotel is too expensive, but I think she likes hanging out with Daphne.

Granny would have said that Daphne could talk the hind end off a donkey. When the café is quiet, Daphne sits with us and chats. Over breakfast waffles, lunchtime bowls of homemade vegetable soup, and suppers of shepherd's pie, we hear all about the comings and goings of the village.

We hear about the post office lady who likes sherry, and shy Mrs. Wilkins who left her husband for an encyclopedia salesman, and Grandma Bell, who isn't really anyone's grandmother and who is losing her marbles, and Daphne's hubby Fred, who was born with one ear.

This is the best story of all and I'm dying to see Fred, but he stays hidden in the kitchen, banging pots and pans and sometimes hollering at Daphne.

When it's busy, Mom gets up and helps with the coffee or clears dirty dishes from the tables.

Daphne says she hates charging us, what with Mom being such a help, but Mom says we won't eat for free, so we get complimentary desserts: chocolate sundaes, apple pie à la mode (which is French and means with ice cream), and pineapple upside-down cake.

In between meals at the Top Notch, Mom shuts the curtains and lies down on the big bed in our room or sits on a bench across from the hotel, gazing at the lake. I borrow one of the bicycles from the hotel and ride around and around the village, hunting for Grace.

By the third day, I've about given up.

The bike is a pain in the you-know-where. One of the tires keeps going flat and I have to go to the gas station every few hours to get it pumped up. And the chain falls off unless I pedal really fast.

And there is no sign of Grace.

I make a loop, up along the main road beside the lake as far as the beach and then back on some of the little side roads, which are quiet and away from the lake and the tourists. I do this twenty times in a row.

The whole time, I'm thinking I might have made a big mistake about Grace. Maybe she and her great-aunt don't live in Harrison Hot Springs at all. Maybe they just come here every year on her birthday and have her picture taken.

There's one way we could find out. We could ask Daphne. You can bet she knows everyone in this village.

I suggest this over cheeseburgers at the Top Notch. Daphne is in the back talking to Fred and can't hear me, but I whisper anyway.

Mom says no. She doesn't want Grace to find out that people have been asking about her. She says it might scare her. She says there's a good chance Grace doesn't even know she's adopted.

That brings us to the big question. “If we find her, are we going to tell her who we are?” I ask Mom.

Mom doesn't answer me for a long time. “I don't know,” she says finally.

• • • • •

When I'm not riding around on the bike looking for Grace, I swim in the outdoor pool or read my Nancy Drew books in the lounge. We came on Sunday, and by Thursday I've read both my books over again and I'm desperate for something new.

That's why I screech the bike to a halt, spraying gravel, when I spot a sign in the window of a brown building on one of the back roads. I've been pedaling pretty fast so the chain won't fall off, which is probably why I didn't notice it before. It says
Fraser Valley Regional Library
.

A bigger sign on the front of the building says
Harrison Hot Springs Municipal Hall
, which I think means that this is where the people who look after all the village's business work.

I lean my bike against a fence and go inside. There's a room with some tables and chairs, and a rack full of different colored pamphlets. A typewriter is clacking away through an open doorway. There's another door, closed, with a card tacked to it that says:

LIBRARY

Hrs. Mon-Thurs. 11:00 to 3:00

It's two o'clock on Thursday. I almost decided not to make that last loop on my bike because it's hot today, a gazillion degrees, and I don't want to miss the complimentary tea at the hotel. For once, luck is with me. If I hadn't gone around one more time and found the library today, I would have had to wait until next week.

I've never been to this kind of library before and I'm not sure if you're supposed to knock, but in the end I just walk in.

The library is all in one room. There are some metal shelves crammed with books and a table with magazines and newspapers on it. A man is sitting at a desk. He smiles at me and says his name is Mr. Trout and is there anything he can help me with.

Of course I know that you're supposed to have a card to borrow books and that librarians are strict about that and can be very mean if you forget your card. But Mr. Trout looks nice and not mean at all.

I take a deep breath. “I'm staying at the hotel and I was wondering if I'd be allowed to borrow a book, just one, because I'm desperate and I promise to bring it back on Monday because I am a very, very fast reader.”

Mr. Trout's eyes twinkle and I'm right, he is nice. He says, “You look like an honest person. I don't see why not. A weekend can be an eternity without anything to read. How about two books?”

He shows me where all the kids' books are at the back of the room. I always like to read the first three pages of a book before I decide to take it. Since I'm only picking two, I don't want to make a mistake, so it takes me awhile. A few people come in and out, but mostly it's just Mr. Trout and me.

I've narrowed it down to a mystery about a lost gold mine and
Old Yeller
, which I've read but want to read again. Mr. Trout is doing end-of-the-day kinds of stuff like tidying up the newspapers and magazines and rinsing his coffee mug at a sink beside the window. “I'm going to pop out to the post office,” he says. “I'll just be a jiffy. You can hold the fort. We'll write down the titles of your books when I get back.”

All librarians should be exactly like Mr. Trout. You can tell he really likes and trusts kids. I've never been in charge of a library before! Even if it's only for a few minutes.

I spot a chart on the wall covered with glittery gold stars and I walk over to have a closer look. At the top, it says
Harrison Summer Reading Club. Blast off to Reading!
There's a rocket on one side and a list of names. Beside each name are stars. A boy called David has the most, his row marches almost right across the chart.

I count his stars. Fifteen. I figure you get a star for every book you read. I could beat David hands down. I look over the other names. Cynthia's second. She has twelve stars. Most of the kids have five or six or seven stars.

There's only one kid with no stars. My heart stops
Bam!
when I read the name. Grace.