Mosquitoes of Summer (6 page)

“You’ll never believe what I found,” she cried.

“Wood,” commented her sister.

“That too,” she agreed. “We’ll piece it together and see what it was before it got broken. Help me open my backpack.”

After Hannah secured her wood she pulled out the tissue and uncovered her find. In shocked silence, the three girls gaped at the knife.

“Oh … my… gosh!” Lucy gaped at the knife. “Our pirate must have used the knife to break the wood, and then dropped it in the sand. It must have gotten buried by accident and he couldn’t find it. What a clue! And look, there’s a name carved into the handle. I think it says W. M… n... I can’t make out the rest.”

The three heads huddled close together and with subdued excitement, they continued discussing the knife. However, they were completely unaware that someone was watching them. A stranger sat far back from the beach, partially hidden by the tall dune grasses. As the girls’ parents made their way back with Meg in tow, the stranger got up and headed into the woods behind the road that led into French River. Within seconds he was out of sight.

CHAPTER SEVEN

PLANS
AND
TRAPS

Back at the Buzzel house later that evening, Hannah carefully cleaned the knife with her archaeology brush (from a fossil kit she had bought in Ottawa’s Museum of Natural History). She then checked for fingerprints using a special black powder which she lightly sprinkled on the handle. No luck. The wooden handle looked like it was whittled by hand and was too rough to hold any prints. With a sigh, Hannah put her kit and the knife back in her bag.

“We’ll have to ask around and see if anyone lost a knife,” said Hannah. “But we can’t make it obvious. We don’t want anyone to know that we actually found something near the wreck. We might get into trouble for snooping around under there.”

“Yeah, that’ll be a piece of cake, Sherlock,” Emily quipped, artfully rolling her eyes. She was almost as good as Hannah but needed a bit more practice.

“I can also look through the phone book and see if there is a listing for W. M.,” added Lucy. “If that doesn’t work, then I’ll talk to Mr. Wayne again and see if he knows anyone by those initials in French River.”

“And I will keep Meg occupied so she doesn’t get in our way,” added Emily. Personally, she thought that was one of her more brilliant ideas. Emily and Meg had a special relationship. Emily chased Meg. Meg ran away. She simply loved Meg to bits and followed the poor dog everywhere. Hannah thought it was a wonder Emily actually stuck close to the wreck this afternoon, what with Meg practically begging to play Frisbee.

Normally Emily would have been chasing Meg up and down the beach, neither tiring of playing fetch. But she desperately ached to be a part of Hannah’s ‘big-girl world.’ Tagging along with her sister made Emily feel more important, even though she did not always understand, or even care about what was going on.

Before leaving Lucy’s house, the girls promised to meet up as soon as their parents allowed. They needed to plan their next move. On the drive back, Emily fell over onto Hannah’s lap, exhausted by the hectic day. She was fast asleep within minutes. Usually Hannah did not tolerate Emily sleeping on her (she tended to drool), but this evening she was deep in thought, trying to puzzle out the meaning of the knife. She leaned her head back on the seat and closed her eyes. Within minutes she too was asleep.

The next day dawned bright and hot. And noisy! Frustrated, Hannah slammed her blue Harry Potter pillow over her head, muffling the sounds that were coming from right above her.

“Squirrels!” she said disgustedly. Normally she thought they were cute furry brown things and she enjoyed listening to them chatter in the trees. But not today.
Today
they were hopping all over the vinyl tent covering of the camper.

Making an effort, Hannah squinted from under her pillow. She sat up instantly. She was staring face to face with one of these suckers. He was hanging off the screen window like a mini vampire, glaring at her. Hannah swore she saw tiny fangs sticking out from his upper lip! Beady little black eyes bored into her skull. On the smallish side, the mangy squirrel had a small scar over his left eye. He also had a stumpy tail.

“Crazy squirrel! Shoo.” Hitting the screen mesh, Hannah watched the diabolical little rodent drop like a stone off the tent. Plunk! “Bye-bye. Have a nice trip Squirrellee!” Smiling, she snuggled down into her sleeping bag and prepared to go back to sleep. Cracking open one eye, she glanced at the digital clock sitting beside the sink.

“Nine o’clock! Way too early,” she mumbled. With very little effort, she started drifting off again, dreaming of….

“WE’RE UNDER ATTACK!!!!!!!!!”

Flying out of bed, Hannah’s legs got tangled in the sleeping bag and she went down hard on the floor.

“What are you yelling about?” she shouted to Emily. “You made me fall out of bed.”

“THERE’S SOMETHING IN THE CAMPER,” cried Emily, not lowering the decibels. “It’s right under my bed, in one of the storage containers. Just shut up for a change and LISTEN!”

Eyes near bursting from their sockets and hair all twisted in ugly knots, Emily pointed to a spot near her feet. Standing as still as possible, Hannah strained to listen. Sure enough, she could hear furtive scratching noises. Then a thump. Scratching. Thump.

“Something’s hitting the lid,” whispered Hannah. “We need to get Dad. Fast!”

She sprinted out the door, leaving poor Emily alone with the evil monster. In record time she was back with her small army. Mom, Dad and the Bean (hanging precariously onto Hannah’s middle finger), found Emily huddled in the far corner of the camper, knees drawn to her chin and staring wildly ahead. A shaking finger pointed down.

“The noise is coming from there, where we keep our Trivial Pursuit game and drawing papers.”

Hannah watched her dad cautiously lift the cushions off the offending storage box. Slowly he opened the lid. Wow, thought Hannah. A garbage bag worth of shredded white paper filled the box to the brim. Chewed up cardboard game pieces added colour to the pile. Poking aside the mess of paper with a fly swatter, Dad carefully looked for the monster. Suddenly, a pair of black beady eyes poked up out of the mess. A small scar was over its left eye!

“CRAZY SQUIRREL!” shouted Emily, at which the squirrel promptly disappeared into its little mountain of paper. The last thing Hannah saw was a stumpy tail being quickly pulled back in. Banging shut the lid of the box, Dad went outside, looking underneath the camper.

After listening to her dad while he let off a few choice swear words, Hannah managed to make out the fact that the squirrel had chewed a nice big hole in the bottom of the camper, right where the storage box was located. Dad came storming back inside and asked the girls whether they had food stored away somewhere.

“Only our chocolate bars,” said Hannah. “And they weren’t in the box. Besides, with the lid closed, the squirrel is trapped in there. He can’t come into the tent.

“Where did you keep your chocolate?” asked Dad.

Turning to point to the counter opposite the storage box, Hannah found herself staring at the empty wrappers. Mr. Bean stared too.

“My Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup! Emily, you ate it!”

“Did not!
You
ate my Mars bar.”

“Did not!”

“WATCHA DOIN?!”

“Girls, enough!” yelled Mom. “You too, Mr. Bean!”

“Poop, Mr. Bean!”

After giving the bird a dirty look, Mom turned back to her daughters and told the girls to take a closer look at the chocolate bar wrappers. Sure enough Hannah could see tiny teeth marks etched into some melted chocolate.

“He scraped it clean! I can’t believe it.” Hannah turned to her dad. “But how did he get in? The windows were screened and the door was closed. It wasn’t through the box!”

Everyone started searching the camper, looking for an opening. Minutes passed.

“Oh no!” wailed Mom, pointing to the screen where Hannah had her bed. On the bottom of the screen was a big hole. Small mesh shavings littered the foot of the bed. More swearing from Dad.

“We have to trap him and then take him far away from here,” he said, rubbing his hands together with an evil glee as he planned his attack. “I’ll use the red cooler box as the trap. Hannah, get some peanuts from the Bean. It’ll be our bait.”

“Watcha doin?” Again from the Bean.

Dad set to work quickly. He tied some string to a cork, and then placed the cork between the hinged door of the cooler, propping it open. Inside the cooler he scattered a handful of peanuts. When he pulled the string, the lid came crashing closed. The cooler was then placed near the camper. Dad set up his camp chair about 8 feet away, holding the string in one hand while drinking his coffee in the other.

“Perfect! Now we wait.”

Ten minutes later Dad was carrying a noisy cooler to the car, trying to hold it steady as the enraged rodent banged around inside. Once he was back he told everyone that he let the squirrel off near the Darnley Greens golf course, a couple of kilometers from the house.

“Maybe now he’ll keep busy chasing balls instead of destroying our camper.”

The rest of the day passed pleasantly enough. The girls tidied up in the camper, making sure the remaining chocolate bars were back in the house. Dad sewed up the squirrel hole in the tent and then patched up the hole in the storage box using a piece of tin. “Let’s see the little tree rat try to get through that!”

In the meantime, Mom vacuumed the house which meant a bath for the Bean. Unlike other normal parrots, Mr. Bean hated water. However, for some reason the vacuum cleaner forced him to seek out water. But even this trick had its limits and the crazy bird would not take more than one bath per week, if they were lucky!

After lunch the girls changed into their bathing suits and decided to ride their bikes down to the beach at Twin Shores. Hannah’s mom and dad joined the girls a couple of hours later, bringing down boogie boards, sand toys, beach umbrellas, chairs and most importantly, food! A bag of ketchup chips, chocolate chip cookies, and sliced cucumbers (for Emily) were gobbled up in no time.

“Mom, did you bring anything to drink?”

“Oops!”

“Dad, do you have any money for slushies?”

“Oops!” again.

“Mommy, I’m shriveling up from thirst!” cried Emily.

“I guess we’ll have to walk around the beach and collect empty bottles,” Hannah sighed while searching through the cooler for plastic bags. “We can cash them in at the General Store and use the money to buy the slushies. With the two of us taking different sections of the camp site, we can cover a lot of ground. Let’s go.”

An hour later the girls came back with blue-red and orange slushies brimming in clear plastic containers. “That was hard work. We had to beg for more bags because we found so many bottles. I guess everyone likes to drink in this heat. We couldn’t carry the beer bottles though, so we left them.”

“It was heartbreaking!” sniffed Emily, having a hard time forgiving Hannah for forcing her to throw money away like that. “All those beer bottles would have made us rich! Hundreds of dollars!”

A perfect eye roll from Hannah.

After a quick supper of grilled cheese sandwiches the family gathered around the campfire in the backyard, roasting marshmallows and hotdogs until the evening turned too cool to remain outside. It had been a fun-filled day of squirrel hunting, swimming in the ocean, making sandcastles and eating junk food on the beach. There was no mention of the Arrowhead mystery, and it was refreshing to take a little break in between their detective work.

CHAPTER EIGHT

ASUSPECT

The following day Lucy called the girls and begged them to come over in the afternoon. The Smiths had been out on Wayne’s boat earlier in the morning and Lucy had just gotten back. Breathlessly, she told Hannah to come over quick! Something had happened while they were out!

Hannah’s mom dropped the girls off at the Buzzel House, promising to be back before supper. Meg came bounding out around the side of the house as soon as she saw the car. Out on the back porch, Lucy’s parents looked up, distracted by the sudden racket. They had been completely absorbed in what looked like a serious talk with a grey-haired man.

“Everyone, I would like you to meet Mr. Bill Malone,” said Roger as he introduced his guest. “We seemed to have had some excitement while no one was home. A break-in, as a matter of fact. I don’t think anything was taken, but they sure made a big mess, especially in Lucy’s room. For some reason whoever came in here was mighty interested in her things.”

Wide-eyed, the girls could not believe the news. This had never happened to the Smiths. They never even locked their door. Someone was looking for something and the girls were afraid of what that was. “Did the neighbours see anything?” Hannah asked.

Nodding her head, Lucy’s mom, Alice, turned to Mr. Malone. “Actually, Bill did. He was coming back from fishing in the harbour this afternoon when he heard a large crash coming from our house. As he hurried up the drive, he saw someone running out and disappearing into the field and –”

“Something didn’t feel right,” cut in Bill. “So I decided to take a look. By the time I made it up to the top of your drive the burglar was gone. That’s when I noticed that the backdoor window was broken. I didn’t call the police because I wasn’t sure that your parents would have liked that. So I decided to wait for them to get home. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a good look at the intruder, so I’m little help to the police.”

Bill directed his entire conversation towards the girls, keenly watching their reactions. He seemed unusually pleased by their uneasiness. Meg was barking again as two Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) approached Roger and Alice. As her parents moved off to make their report, Lucy turned to Bill, looking thoughtful. “Are you from around here? I don’t remember seeing you here before.”

As if expecting this line of questioning, Bill quickly replied, “I just rented the Davis place. It’s been for sale since April when I was last here, looking at houses to buy. I left the day before the storm hit that brought in the wreck. I usually never stay in one place for too long, but I have some interests here. So I decided to come back and give this place a try before I actually bought into the area.”