Penny Dreadful (26 page)

“LUELLA!”

But Luella didn’t answer. Was it possible she’d really left Penny behind and gone swimming?

“LUUUUUEEEEELLA! HEEEEEELP!”

Penny yelled for a few more minutes, but Luella never yelled back. No beam of light found its way to her. Luella really
did
seem to have deserted her.

Standing on the box on her tiptoes, Penny tried to climb out of the hole. She could get her fingers up and over the lip of the hole, but her dusty hands could find nothing to grasp. They slipped in the dust, and she fell back onto the box. By now her fingernails were torn and packed with dirt. She was bleeding where the knife had scraped her. It hurt. Frustrated, Penny climbed back down into the hole and sat on the box, her face in her hands, to think. How would she ever get the treasure home now that she had found it?

But a person can only feel frustrated for so long. After a bit Penny got angry—at Luella.
Really
, she thought,
what’s the point of finding the treasure, and getting it home, and staying in Thrush Junction, if my best friend is someone who’d leave me in a dark tunnel alone? What kind of a friend is that?
She pictured the others off swimming and laughing and playing in the lake she still hadn’t even seen.

After a few minutes of this fury Penny’s flashlight died, and her anger made way for another emotion: fear.

In the suffocating darkness Penny heard a rustling on the floor near her feet, and she jumped up on the box with a shriek. She stood on the box, shaking a little. Now
it dawned on her that she was
really
stuck in a hole.
Stuck in a hole!
Who knew how long it would be before Luella realized she hadn’t come home? She could be stranded here overnight! Maybe even for days!

Penny’s stomach growled. Her throat felt parched. She looked around again, but everywhere was darkness. She touched the stone walls of the hole beside her, felt how solid they were, how hard. There was no way to dig herself out.

She climbed down from the box and gingerly rooted in the clutter for the rope. At last she found it, but even with the old rope in her hands, she was lost. A rope isn’t much good at the
bottom
of a hole.

So Penny did the only thing left to do. She cried. She perched on top of the box, put her head on her knees, and wept.

At first she cried because she was stuck in a hole and abandoned by her friends. But there in the dark, thoughts swarmed in her head, and she found herself thinking about her parents and their money and all the years she’d wasted being bored and sulky. When she hadn’t had any problems, she’d been miserable, and now that she knew
how
to be happy, she had real problems. Like being poor. And stuck in a hole.

Penny cried and cried, and even once she’d run out of
things to cry about, she kept crying because she was alone, and she could because there was nobody to hear her.

Only there
was
someone.

“Penny?” came a voice from down the tunnel, a gentle voice. The voice was accompanied by a beam of light. “Are you okay?” The voice got closer. The light too.

It was Jasper.

Penny looked up, and her wet face split open with a smile in the light. “You’re here! You came back! You didn’t leave me!” she said, rubbing her dirty face with the dirty back of a hand.

“Of course not,” said Jasper. “We never would. But Duncan and Luella can’t fit in here, so I came by myself.”

“I thought—I thought Luella said she was going swimming.”

“Oh, well,” laughed Jasper. “You can’t listen to
Luella
. She says a lot of things. She just ran back with the fishing line to get me and Duncan.”

Penny dried her eyes with her shirt, stood up on the box, and pointed excitedly at her feet. “Hey, I found something! It’s a heavy box. And it says
BB
on the side. I think it must be the treasure!”

“That’s great,” said Jasper with a grin. “Only it won’t do us much good down there. Come on!” She reached down a hand.

“Wait a minute,” said Penny, disappearing into the hole and reappearing with the rope in her hand. “I have an idea.”

In no time at all Penny had tied one end of the rope around a handle of the box. She passed the other end to Jasper, who managed to fix it to a sturdy stalagmite. Then Penny climbed out of the hole, holding on to the rope with one hand and Jasper’s fingers with the other. She felt like an explorer scaling a wall, climbing a mountain. It was fun.

After that the two girls, with lots of grunting and heaving, pulled the box from the hole. It was dead weight, and they almost didn’t manage it. Jasper wanted to give up and come back for it later, but Penny insisted. “No, we can do it! I know we can do it! It isn’t that big. We
have
to do it.” So together they grabbed on to the rope, and hand over hand, they tugged and strained and finally pulled the box up over the lip of the hole and into the tunnel.

Then each girl took a handle and, groaning, they carried the box back to the tunnel’s tight opening, where Luella and Duncan waited for them with cheers and shouts.

“Sorry I left you,” Penny said to Luella after she’d stepped out into the ring of flashlights and pulled the box through after her. “But I found the treasure, I think!
Look!” She pointed to the letters on the side of the box. “I told you I would. I
knew
I’d find it.”

Luella shook her head in bewilderment and said in an unusually serious tone, “I
can’t
believe it. I really can’t. Jeez.” She looked at Penny curiously, her head tilted slightly. “It’s almost like you
knew
, like you had some kind of premonition or something.”

Penny didn’t know how to respond to that. “I did. Kind of …” That was as much as she could figure out how to say.

Then, in a brighter voice, Luella cried, “What are we waiting for? Let’s see what we’ve got!”

As quickly as four kids can lug a heavy wooden box, the friends made their way back out of the cave, following their fishing line around each curve and turn, banging their calves on the treasure with every step and shouting excitedly about what they would do with all their gold.

“I want a boat!” said Duncan.

“Well, sure,” said Luella. “Who doesn’t? Boats for everyone!”

They carried their load out into the burning midday sunlight, where they all took turns beating on the box and tugging at the corners of the wooden planks. Duncan found a rusty bottle opener in the creek bed and tried to pry the box open with that, but it was no use.

At last Penny stood back, wiped a slick of sweat from her forehead, and said, “I think we just have to carry it home nailed shut like this. We’ll never get it open here.”

“Yeah,” said Luella. “What we need is a
sledgehammer.
”

“Maybe
first
we can try a crowbar?” suggested Jasper. “Or the back end of a hammer?”

“Anyway,” added Duncan, “if we have to carry it home, I’m sure glad it has handles.” He reached for one end of the box.

They heaved the box of treasure along the little creek and pushed it up the hill to the twisty road. They carried it home along the shoulder. Taking turns, and blistering their hands terribly, they lugged the box slowly, all the while aware of the mysterious clanking and clinking sounds coming from within. Finally they got it back to the Whippoorwillows.

Once the box was safely on the porch, Luella ran to fetch a crowbar from Down-Betty’s utility shed. She handed it to Penny, saying, “Here you go, treasure seeker. Show us what you found!”

Penny stared at Luella. Then she stared at the sky. “Thank you,” she said under her breath, to nobody in particular.

At last Penny turned to the box. She attacked it with a ferocity that shocked everyone. She pried and pulled
and splintered the wood with the crowbar. She clobbered the top of the box and split off chunks of wood. She probably took longer and made more noise than she needed to, but her friends just stepped back and let her go at it. Finally one of the side panels came loose from the box and fell off. Penny stopped, crowbar aloft, and stared at the gleam of something inside the box. When the sunlight caught the contents of the box, it shone!

Everyone held their breath. Everyone leaned over to see. Everyone waited as Penny reached out and pulled a second panel of wood loose.

Then everyone let out their breath in a disappointed gust as a dark, cloudy glass bottle rolled from the box and onto the floor of the porch with a thump.

“No!” cried Penny. “No, no,
no
!”

Nobody else spoke. They all just stared at the bottle.

Penny dropped the crowbar and said sadly, “It can’t be!” She fell to her knees to look inside the box. “It can’t!” She reached inside the box, slicing her arm on a jagged piece of wood as she felt for gold bars or coins or nuggets. Or anything! But no. No. Just more bottles. A box full of bottles. Horrible, dirty bottles.

Penny sat down on the warm wooden floor of the porch, beside the box, and stared at her bloody arm. She sucked on her scraped finger. Then she fell silent.

“Penny?” said Jasper. “Penny?”

Penny didn’t answer.

Duncan crouched down and picked up the bottle. He wiped it clean with his shirt and examined it.

Nobody spoke.

“It said BB,” said Penny at last, in a flat voice. “It said
BB
. BB is Briscoe Blackrabbit. How could it
not
be his treasure?”

“Because,” said Duncan gently and cautiously, “
BB
also stands for Bastable Bourbon. See?” He held out the bottle.

Penny looked at the bottle in his hand, gleaming in the sunlight. “But I was supposed to find it,” she said. “I was going to fix everything.”

“What everything?” asked Jasper kindly. “What needs fixing?”

“Yeah,” said Duncan, “what’s going on?”

Penny heaved a sigh. She said nothing at first, but her face looked strained, almost as if she were in pain and trying not to cry.

“Penny? Are you all right?” asked Luella in a careful voice.

Penny shook her head, her lips drawn and her eyes shut. She crossed her arms over her knees and rocked.

Luella sat down next to Penny, and then hugged her. “Really, Penny. You can tell us. What’s going on?”

“No, I
can’t
tell you,” said Penny, opening her eyes. “It’s too awful.”

“Sure you can,” said Duncan, setting down the bottle and sitting on Penny’s other side. “You can tell us anything. That’s what friends
do
. They tell each other things.”

Jasper sat down too, so that the four friends were sitting in a small circle beside the disappointing box.

“Spill it,” said Luella. “No secrets here.”

Penny looked at the three friendly, interested faces. It had not occurred to her to think of this as a
secret
. In books secrets were fun and mysterious. This didn’t feel fun
or
mysterious. It just felt sad and real.

She took a deep breath and said, “I guess you’ll find out soon anyway, so I might as well tell you now.… It’s the house, the Whippoorwillows.”

“What
about
the house?” asked Luella. “What on earth does finding the treasure have to do with the house?”

“Give her a chance to explain, Lu,” said Jasper. “Go on, Penny. Take your time.”

“Thanks,” said Penny with a sigh. “It’s hard because I don’t even really understand just what’s happened, but I guess my aunt Betty didn’t have enough money when she died, and she didn’t really
own
the house entirely.
The bank owns part of it because she was supposed to pay them some money. So now, since we inherited the house, we also inherited the money … 
problems.
” She whispered the word
problems
as she looked at Luella. “But we don’t
have
any money. We used to have a lot, sort of, but we don’t anymore. We’re … 
poor.
”

“Oh,” said Duncan. “Oh.”

“Well, join the club,” said Jasper. “Nearly everyone is poor in Thrush Junction, if you want to call
that
poor. My mom talks all the time about how she can’t afford to fix the truck.”

“Yeah. Or if you want to see
really
poor, we can walk over to the freight yards in South Junction and watch the hobos cook their dinner,” added Luella. “
That’s
poor.”

“We aren’t hobos,” said Penny sadly. “But we’re going to lose the house.”

“Oh,” said Duncan again.

“Oh,” chorused Jasper and Luella.

“Yeah,
oh,
” said Penny, looking up and around at her friends. “See, it’s awful. I thought we wouldn’t if I could find the treasure. I thought I could find the treasure.…” She sucked her finger. “No, it was more than that. I
knew
I would find the treasure. Inside myself, somehow, I could just
feel
that the gold was waiting for me. There in the caves. It was like magic or something. I wished, and there
were signs. Like in a book.” She looked up at her friends.

Luella, Jasper, and Duncan stared back at her, but nobody said anything.

Penny’s nose had begun to drip, and she wiped it with the back of her hand without even thinking twice about it. “I just—I just love Thrush Junction so much, but now we’ll have to go back to The City, where my parents can get jobs, and they’ll be all busy and sad again, and I’ll be so lonely and miss you guys all so much!” She wiped her nose again and sniffed.

“Oh, Penny. I’m sorry,” said Jasper.

Luella dug her chin into her knee and said nothing.

“What will happen to
us,
” asked Duncan, “if the bank takes the house?”

Luella looked up at Penny and raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, what
will
happen to us?”

Penny took a deep breath. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s good.”

“Hmm,” said Duncan worriedly.

“I know,” said Penny. “I know. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay, Penny,” said Jasper.

“Yeah, it’s not
your
fault,” added Duncan.

Luella stood up and brushed off the seat of her shorts. For once she had nothing to say.

T
HE
E
ND OF THE
B
EGINNING