The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [32]
“What now? Everything’s stupid to you.”
“On the computer. It’s Jed’s cat! Oh yeah, that reminds me, Ma said to stop giving him milk. It’ll make him sick.”
“What are you talking about? I didn’t give the cat anything.”
“That’s what I said. Must be Grum, then. She doesn’t want Stupid to get osteoporosis.”
“Well, I doubt that was Jed’s cat you saw here, anyway,” Barbie said.
By now the screen saver had moved on to other pictures. “Wait until it comes back around and you’ll see,” I said.
She crossed her arms and jiggled her foot nervously as she waited through photos of places around Kokadjo, B.O. and A.O. Meanwhile, I sat down—Celery didn’t seem to mind that—and pawed through some things on Odum’s desk, papers and books with big words I didn’t get. I rifled through the closest science book.
“Shish, what’s an isotope?”
“No clue. Look, Seb, waiting for the cat is taking too long. Can we go now?”
“What about turbulence? Or chirality?”
“That would be the sound your head will make when Boots Odum catches us in here. Will you hurry up?”
I spun the big globe on the desk. It had pins pricked into it here and there around the world. One was exactly where Kokadjo would be if Kokadjo were big enough to be on a globe. There were pins in every continent and ocean. Why had Boots Odum marked those places?
I jumped up to study the maps on the walls. One had a picture I’d seen in school of the continental divides showing all the tectonic plates. That map had a pin stuck in the Atlantic. And in very faint colored pencil lines, someone had drawn a swirling pattern with shading to make it look three-dimensional. Beginning at the pin and going underneath the ocean. All the way back to a pin marking Kokadjo. Around the edges of the map were newspaper clippings about natural disasters all over the world—earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis.
“Oh . . . my . . . Godzilla,” I said. “Look at this, Barbie. Does this mean what I think it means? ORC’s mining is causing all this damage!”
Barbie took a quick look and shook her head really fast. “No way,” she said. “Impossible. Boots Odum is just . . . just an artist. A really good artist. This must be his plan for a painting.”
The sketch was beautiful, just like all of the artwork Miss Beverly had shown us in the house. But what if it was more than that? What if whatever ORC was mining did have some powerful connection to other places in the world? It could be like when you pull a loose thread on the front of a sweater, and you wind up with a hole in the back. And somehow the cookie dough in my guts had put me in the middle.
Okay, now I was good and scared. “Hold the door, Barbie, I’m gonna make a run for it.”
“About time!”
We’d have been out of there in a flash if a dog in the next yard hadn’t picked that moment to start barking its head off. Was it barking at us, or was someone coming? I held my breath to listen.
Footsteps crunched on the gravel walkway leading to the barn.
10
“Hide! Someone’s coming!” I said, looking frantically around the room. The closest escape was the bathroom with the painting that liked me. Not a good idea.
“In here!” Barbie slid open the folding closet doors at the far end of the workshop, and we burrowed into the hanging coats as the barn door creaked open.
“Stanley? Stanley?” Thank goodness, it was Miss Beverly. I pictured her twisting her sorry neck around, searching for him. “Good afternoon, dear,” she said toward the bathroom door. Her voice sounded stretched out, worried. “Forgive me for intruding, but I heard you out here, and thought you could use a cup of coffee after being up all night trying to find an antidote for, you know. . . .”
She walked into the room, her footsteps creaking the wood planks, then lightly knocked at the bathroom door. I could hardly hear it with my heart thundering in my ears. I held my breath, hoping she wouldn’t discover that Boots wasn’t in the john after all. Even though his latest masterpiece was.
“I’m sorry, Stanley,” she said with tears in her voice. “I know you told me not to use those eggs, but I thought