Penny Dreadful (21 page)

“There’s a lake?”

Willa chuckled. “Well, the river has to feed into something.”

“There’s a
river?
” said Penny. She’d thought she and Luella had explored everything there was to explore the day they’d collected branches and vines to build their fort beneath the willows. They hadn’t even scratched the surface!

“Of course there is! It cuts through the mountains. Blackrabbit River, where the miners all used to pan for gold.”

Penny stared at the woman dumbly, thinking vaguely that Blackrabbit was also the name of Luella’s treasure.

“You haven’t seen
any
of this?” asked Willa. “All you have to do is walk back along the garden path, through the trees. What has Luella been doing with you?”

Penny shrugged. “Just playing. We built a fort one day.”

Willa shook her head. “We have to show you around. The lake is wonderful. There’s a dock for swimming, and a big rope swing and a zip line. Twent and I like to go there and try to catch frogs.”

“What do you do with them once you’ve caught them?” asked Penny.

“Oh, we never catch any. Between Twent’s costumes
and the fact that I’m as big as a house and as slow as a slug, the frogs are pretty safe, but it’s fun to
try
. You can also
try
to catch a fish.”

Willa slid the note into an envelope and said, “Give this to your parents. I’ll be thrilled to meet the whole family at the picnic!”

Penny took the envelope and—stepping over the small sleeping lion in the middle of the floor—headed home.

I
N
D
OWN
-B
ETTY’S
G
ARDEN

W
hen Penny got home, Luella was still nowhere to be seen, so she went straight upstairs to set Willa’s note on the kitchen table. Then she went to look for her father. She found him snoring on his bed, asleep beside a stack of dusty books.

“Hey, Daddy,” she said, sitting down beside him. “Are you awake?”

“Huh? Guh? Wha?” Dirk asked, propping himself up on his elbows, his eyes slitted. “No.”

“I have a problem,” Penny said.

“Hmmm,” Dirk said sleepily, lying back down. “Can it wait a little while?” His nose began to whistle.

“I don’t think so,” said Penny.

Dirk was sound asleep again and didn’t hear her at all. Penny sat for a minute and watched her father snore, mulling. When she couldn’t stand thinking any longer,
she tapped Dirk on the forehead until his eyes fluttered open once more. He didn’t look pleased.

“Daddy,” Penny said. “I
really
like it here. I don’t want to leave.”

Dirk eyed his daughter grouchily. “That’s funny,” he said after a minute, “because I was
just
wishing you would do
just
that. Leave. For maybe, oh, I don’t know—forty-five minutes?”

Penny sighed as Dirk pulled a pillow over his head. She lay down on the coverlet beside him on the other side of the stack of books, stared at a spidery crack in the ceiling, and thought to herself that Dirk was not taking things seriously enough. Perhaps growing up rich had addled his brain where money was concerned. He seemed to think that money would fall from the trees or fly in the window. Or that he would stumble into a river of money when he happened to need some.

Penny felt her eyes getting itchy, like they might be wanting to cry. She frowned at the spidery crack.
I have inner resources and I will not cry
, she thought.
Instead, I will do something
.

But what? What could she possibly do?

Penny thought back over all that had happened, about everything that had changed in their lives. She remembered The City. She remembered the day her father
had come home wild-eyed. She remembered the drifts and piles of laundry. Then she remembered the well in the yard, and her wishes. She remembered the moment when the doorbell rang. She remembered signing for the telegram. Penny sat up. Too bad they had left the well behind them.

Still
, she thought,
I can wish. There’s nothing stopping me from wishing
.

What could it hurt? Penny crossed her fingers and squeezed her eyes shut. She held her breath and made a little wish. “I wish I could fix things,” she said faintly. “I wish I knew how. I wish I had
any
idea what to do to help.”

Down in the yard someone suddenly began singing a song Penny had never heard before. “
Come on and hear … Come on and hear … Alexander’s ragtime band.
” It didn’t sound like anyone she knew. It sounded like a record or a movie star.

Penny opened her eyes, uncrossed her fingers, stood up, and peered out the window, but she couldn’t see anyone out there. The singing stopped as quickly as it had started, and Penny sat back down on the bed, disappointed.

Penny sighed. It would be nice if her father could finish his novel and sell it for lots of money so they could all stop worrying. But she didn’t think that was likely
since Dirk didn’t seem to be writing
anything
. Idly, Penny looked down at the stack of books beside her on the bed. She ran her finger along the spines as she pondered and listened to her father snore.

Most of them were cookbooks called things like
All You Knead Is Love
and
Foods from Field and Farm
, which didn’t interest Penny much. Then she noticed that the book at the bottom of the stack was called
The Money River: A Brief History of Gold Panning and Stream Mining in Eastern Tennessee
. Penny paused.

A money river? That was a funny coincidence! Or was it? Penny pulled out the book and sat up to examine it more closely.

The cover was old and dusty, with yellowed pages and funny photographs from long ago. It wasn’t the kind of book Penny ordinarily read, more the sort of thing Luella liked, but she began to thumb through it. At first she was distracted by the old pictures of saloon keepers and miners in squashed hats with dirty faces, but as she flipped through the pages, she came to something more interesting.

In a chapter called “Thrush Junction’s Magic Mountains,” Penny read about how the hills around Thrush Junction had been the site of the very first gold rush in America. In particular, she learned that a man named Briscoe Blackrabbit had struck gold in the mountains.
He had hoarded it for himself until bandits found him and made off with his treasure. The local sheriff had caught the thieves two miles outside of town, but Blackrabbit’s gold had never been recovered. The last sentence of the chapter read, “And so it was that tiny Thrush Junction kept its gold, and its secrets.…”

Penny cocked her head to one side and closed the book slowly. But just as she was setting it back on the stack, she noticed a tiny piece of paper sticking out. She tugged on the paper and pulled out a note! The white paper was much newer than the book, and the handwriting was fancy and old-fashioned:

A door will only open for one who turns the knob
.

   Penny stared at the note in her hand. Surely this was just some silly quote her aunt Betty had written down. Surely that was
all
it could be. And yet…

Outside in the willows the song began again. “
Come on and hear … Come on and hear …
” The voice was lilting and brassy and strong. Who
was
that?

Suddenly Penny had chills. She fingered the old note in her hands and listened to the song.

Then she tapped her father on the nose, giving him one last chance.

“Dad,” she said. “
Dad!
I don’t want to go back to The City. I don’t want to go back to being Penelope. We need to
do
something.”

“Huh?” Dirk said, rousing himself again. “Wha? You want something to
do
? I’ll tell you what you can do.” He spoke thickly, through a haze of sleep. “Take the big colander and pick some raspberries for me.” He rolled back over into the pillow. “I meant to get them earlier, but I got tired, and …” He yawned again. “And now I’m a little m—” Dirk began to snore.

“That wasn’t what I meant by
do,
” said Penny softly, but her father didn’t hear her.

So Penny quietly climbed down from the bed, clutching the note, and walked to her room. She wasn’t bored anymore, or worried. Now she was thinking—hard. Carefully, she placed the note in her desk drawer. Then, in the kitchen, she found the colander in the sink. She took it and headed outside and down the stairs—thinking, thinking, thinking all the while.

When she got down to the porch, she found Luella was home at last, eating a grape Popsicle on the porch swing. Luella didn’t offer to share, but she patted the swing beside her and asked, “Where have
you
been all day?”

Penny didn’t sit down. “Nowhere,” she said. “Right here. I just came down late because my dad made me
clean my room. I looked for you. But then I went for a walk and met Twent and Willa. And
then
I was reading this old book I found.”

“That’s cool,” said Luella. “No big deal. Twent’s funny. Willa’s nice. Jenny’s nice too.”

Penny nodded. “Where were
you
?” she asked. “I looked for you.”

“Oh, my mom made me go to the dentist,” said Luella. “But then she took me out for lunch to celebrate no cavities.” She grinned wide, making a funny face. “I had a club sandwich and a banana split.”

“Yum,” said Penny, but she felt distracted.

Luella reached for the colander. “What’re you supposed to do with
this
?” she asked, putting the colander on her head and raising her eyebrows at Penny.

Penny didn’t laugh. She just said thoughtfully, “I’m supposed to pick raspberries.”

“I’ll show you where they are,” said Luella. She finished her Popsicle, pocketed the stick, took off the colander hat, and stood up from the swing. “At the back end of the garden, along the path, near the apple orchard beside the woods.”

“Thanks,” said Penny, not really listening.

“Sure,” said Luella. Then she added, “Hey, Penny?”

Penny looked up.

“Are you okay?” asked Luella. “You look a little weird or something. Serious.”

Penny stared at her friend. She didn’t know exactly how to answer that question. She considered telling Luella about the carved box and the unwritten novel, the empty house in The City and the diseased llamas and the Donskys and the doorknob note and the money river—and this big new crazy idea she was having. But there was too much to tell and she wasn’t ready. “I’m okay,” she said, looking evenly at her friend. “It’s just stuff with my mom and dad.”

“Oh, well, parents!” laughed Luella. “Who needs
them
?”

“Yeah,” said Penny. “Who needs them.…” Then she said, “Hey, Luella, you know that treasure you were talking about the other day?”

Luella nodded.

“Do you think you could find it?” Penny tried hard to keep her voice light and fun, but her tongue felt tight and tense in her throat. “Really?”

Luella thought about this. “Well, I don’t
know
where it is. But I’ve been looking a long time, so I know a lot of places it
isn’t
. One of these days I’ll find it, I bet. Sure. Why?”

“No—no reason,” said Penny. “I was just thinking … 
something.…” Then she reached for her colander. “I guess I should go get those berries now.”

“Yeah,” said Luella. “Last one there’s a rotten egg!” She dashed down the stairs and to the garden, leaving Penny no choice but to follow.

This was actually a very good thing, because Penny had been stewing a while now, and it felt good to run. Penny chased Luella down the stairs and through the waving willows, around the house, along the path, and into the garden. Luella stopped when she came upon Down-Betty in a loose sundress and her wide-brimmed floppy hat, surrounded as usual by growing things.

Under her breath Down-Betty was singing, “
That’s just the bestest band what am, honey lamb … Come on along … come on along …
” Her voice was surprisingly strong. It didn’t sound old at all. She sang as she pulled handfuls of mint from the garden, but she looked up when she saw the girls. “Either of you girls want some mint?” she asked. “It’s just about taken over the garden. Militant stuff, mint.”

The girls shook their heads.

Down-Betty looked disappointed. “I didn’t guess so,” she said. “But no harm in asking. You kids today are spoiled, you know that? Why, when I was a girl, I’d have been delighted at a nice bunch of mint. I’d have been
tickled to death at such a gift. I’d have pressed it in a book or made some fresh mint tea with it.”

Luella snorted. “Why, that’s not true at all, Down-Betty, and you know it! When you were our age, you weren’t thinking about mint at all. You weren’t wasting time making tea or pressing plants!”

Down-Betty laughed. “True, true, Luella. But an old lady is
supposed
to say things like that. Old ladies are supposed to whine about how they walked to school in the snow, uphill both ways, and about how they ate on a raw potato for a week, and gathered wood for the fire. It’s just what old ladies do. If there’s an instruction manual to becoming old, that’s one of the very first rules, right after keeping a bowl of dusty hard candy on your coffee table.”