Andi Unexpected (4 page)

We found my red mountain bike
sitting in Amelie’s garage. I was so glad to have the bicycle back that I didn’t care where Colin planned to take me just as long as I could ride there. Mrs. Cragmeyer shipped the bike off to Amelie’s house after our house sold because she insisted that I couldn’t keep it in the Cragmeyers’ garage. She said I’d scratch Mr. Cragmeyer’s Oldsmobile.

Colin collected his blue bike from his grandmother’s garage, and off we rode. I didn’t pay that much attention to where he led me. I was having too much fun letting the wind whip through my pink hair as we pedaled faster and faster. Colin pumped his pedals as fast as he could as we rode through town, past the Victorian and colonial houses, fast-food chains, and the middle school I would attend in the fall.

The brakes of Colin’s bike screeched as he skidded to a stop outside the old bottling company. I stopped my bike behind his and dismounted, wishing our bike ride could continue all the way to the equator and back. But I knew there’d be time for bike rides later. Finding this mysterious Andora was more important.

“Now will you please tell me where we’re going?” I asked Colin.

“We’re here.” Colin panted and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his T-shirt.

“The old bottling company?” I looked at the building that loomed in front of us. Tilting my head back to get a better view of the towering brick chimneys, I noticed the tops of them were crumpled and uneven. It looked like they could topple over in the lightest breeze. Ivy crawled along the side of the building, weaving its way around windows and gutters.

Colin grinned. “It’s more than that now.” He chained his bike to a lamppost, and I followed suit. “Come on.” He went inside the building, and I followed him.

We stood in the middle of a wide-open room. The ceiling hovered fifty feet above us, a maze of exposed rusted pipes and dark wooden beams. The tile floor beneath our feet no longer displayed a recognizable pattern. Maybe it had been worn down by the heavy steps of hundreds of plant workers. In my mind’s eye, I could see the men walking in front of me wearing grimy coveralls and denim train engineer’s caps. At least that’s what I imagined they might have worn. Our sneakers squeaked on the tile.

“Can I help you?” A deep male voice came out of nowhere, and I jumped.

Colin waved at the voice’s owner, a man who looked to be a few years older than my parents. Maybe in his early fifties. He was pencil thin. And even though he sat behind an old wooden desk, I could tell he was tall by the way his too-long legs stuck out from underneath the desk. He had snow-white hair and a black mustache that looked as though he combed it a lot. He wore round glasses, a blue short-sleeve button-down shirt, and a dark green bowtie. On the desk a nameplate sat beside a computer that looked at least fifteen years old. The nameplate read, P
ATRICK
F
INNIGAN
, C
URATOR
.

Colin ran over to the man, his sneakers squeaking all the way. Mr. Finnigan grinned as Colin approached. “How’s my favorite boy genius this morning?” His voice boomed and echoed through the old factory as though an internal megaphone amplified it.

Boy genius?
I glanced at Colin.

“I’m doing okay,” Colin said.

“Who’s your friend?” Mr. Finnigan asked.

I walked over to the desk, consciously picking up my feet so they wouldn’t squeak, and sat down in the other armchair across from the desk.

“This is Andi Boggs, Amelie’s niece,” Colin said.

“You don’t say.” Mr. Finnigan held out his hand across the desk, and I shook it. “Amelie told me you and your sister would be living with her. I’m very sorry about your parents.”

“Thank you,” I murmured. Then I quickly changed the subject. “You know my aunt?”

“You get to know everybody in this town,” he said matter-of-factly. “That is, if they stay around long enough. We are really proud of Amelie here—especially now that she’s on the faculty at Mike Pike, just like her Grandfather Patterson was. And let me tell you, that’s no easy task. But you come from a long line of academics.”

“Mike Pike?” I asked, confused. I glanced at Colin for help, but he just grinned back.

Mr. Finnigan smiled. “That’s the local-yokel name for Michael Pike University. It’s not as stuffy sounding. And I’m sure the university administrators love the nickname.”

“My great-grandfather taught there?” I had never heard this bit of info before.

“He most certainly did. Taught there for twenty years in the science department as a biology professor.” He stared at me for a moment. I shifted in my seat, wondering what he was thinking. Did he wonder if I possessed any of my great-grandfather’s attributes?

Mr. Finnigan blinked. “So enough about that.” He clapped his hands together. “What brings you here today? I can’t remember the last time you stopped by the museum, Colin.”

Colin glanced at me before answering, and I suddenly knew why Colin had brought me to the museum and to Mr. Finnigan. What I didn’t know was whether it was a good idea.

Before I could make up my mind, Colin said, “We’d like to find someone.”

“Is this person local?”

Colin nodded. “From Killdeer.”

Mr. Finnigan pulled a blank piece of paper from his desk drawer and licked the tip of his pen before touching it to the paper. He drew a cluster of squiggles in the corner of the page to get the ink going. When the pen made consistent black doodles, he said, “All right. What do you have for me?”

Colin fidgeted and gave me another fleeting glance. “It’s more complicated than that. We’re not entirely sure this person exists.”

Mr. Finnigan glanced up, his bushy eyebrows making an upside-down V.

“You have to promise not to tell anyone what I’m about to tell you,” Colin said in a low voice. I wondered why he felt he had to whisper. Maybe the mice would overhear? I’d bet the old factory was crawling with all types of critters.

I pinched Colin’s arm warning him not to say any more. He hadn’t mentioned talking about Andora to anyone else. How did we know we could trust Mr. Finnigan? I didn’t know him at all.

Colin winced and pulled his arm away from me.

I felt sorry for pinching him, but not sorry enough to want to take it back.

Mr. Finnigan peered at Colin.

Colin rubbed his arm. “We can’t tell you unless you promise.”

Mr. Finnigan steepled his fingers. “I promise—unless someone is in danger. And then I’ll break my promise without thinking twice.”

“It’s nothing like that,” Colin said quickly.

“Okay, I promise I won’t tell.” Mr. Finnigan picked up his pen again.

“Colin,” I hissed.

Colin looked at me while still rubbing the sore spot on his upper arm. “Andi, trust me. Mr. Finnigan knows everything about this town.”

“I wouldn’t say
everything
,” Mr. Finnigan said with false modesty.

“If there is information to be found, he’s the one who will find it.”

I looked from Colin to Mr. Finnigan and back again. Of course Mr. Finnigan was the man for the job. He was the town curator, for crying out loud. Maybe I hesitated because I was feeling protective of this mysterious Andora that no one knew anything about. Because she shared my name, I felt I had some claim to her … that I should be the one to look for her. But that was ridiculous. Colin and Mr. Finnigan were only trying to help. “Go ahead.”

Colin stopped rubbing his arm, and I noticed a red welt. Maybe I shouldn’t have pinched him so hard.

Colin spoke fast, as though I might suddenly change my mind, and told Mr. Finnigan about the trunk in the attic and the story Bergita had told me that morning. As Colin spoke, I watched the older man’s face. The curator listened intently, but I couldn’t guess what he was thinking. Did he think we were crazy for wanting to find Andora? When Colin finished talking, Mr. Finnigan began jotting cryptic notes on his paper. His handwriting was terrible, but I was used to reading my parents’ scientist scrawl and was able to decipher the upside-down script:

It was gibberish to me.

“What we need to do,” he said finally, “is check the news archives from the
Michael Pike Record
, the local paper prior to 1950. That should be easy enough. I would guess from the contents you found in that trunk that we are dealing with a baby or a small child. If a child were born in town back then, the papers would announce it. Newspapers don’t have birth announcements anymore—not unless the baby is born to a family that’s considered political or important. It’s possible your Andora was a wartime baby, which would make her birth very newsworthy indeed. Not too many babies were born in Killdeer during World War Two because all the young men were serving over in Europe or the Pacific.”

“Where can we find these archives?” I asked.

“You’re in luck.” Mr. Finnigan pushed his chair back from his desk. “They’re right here in the museum. The newspaper sent them over last year.”

Colin gripped the arms of his chair. “Can we see them?”

Mr. Finnigan unfolded himself from under the desk. “Follow me.”

As we walked through the building, Mr
. Finnigan gave us some background information about the museum.

“This plant represents the largest employer in Carroll County between 1890 and 1932. And it was all thanks to Michael Pike Senior and his famous ginger ale.”

“Famous ginger ale?” I paused in front of a life-sized photograph of a plant worker standing by a row of old-fashioned soda bottles making their way down an assembly line. The man wore a gray coverall—just like the ones I’d imagined—and looked bored out of his skull.

Mr. Finnigan stopped mid-stride, and Colin, walking close at his heels, stumbled into him. “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of Pike Ginger Ale?” He gestured toward a portrait hanging on the other side of
the hallway. The picture showed a dark-haired man with an olive complexion, and the nameplate read, M
ICHAEL
P
IKE
, S
R
.

I shrugged.

Mr. Finnigan shook his head sadly.

Colin rubbed his nose where it had rammed into the curator’s bony back.

“At one time,” Mr. Finnigan said, “Pike Ginger Ale was the most sought-after soda in all of Ohio and parts of West Virginia and Pennsylvania.”

“What happened?” I got the feeling Mr. Finnigan liked my interest and, not for the first time, I wondered how many visitors the old bottling plant received. It wasn’t exactly Disney World, and Killdeer was at least an hour’s drive from the closest interstate. A person would really have to be a fan of Pike Ginger Ale to make the drive.

We moved on to the next two portraits. In the painting on the left, the man’s likeness was nearly identical to the man in the first portrait. But the inscription said, M
ICHAEL
P
IKE
, J
R
. Next to that was another portrait of, according to the nameplate, Michael Pike, III. The family resemblance was strong between the three men. Dark hair, olive skin, and hooked noses that looked like angry beaks.

“The Crash,” Mr. Finnigan began mournfully, “practically cleaned the family out. They held on for a few years, but Pike Ginger Ale never truly recovered. The plant officially closed once Margaret Pike, the fourth generation of Pikes to run the business, finally cut her losses and donated the factory to Killdeer. But
the Crash caused the first financial blow to the family business and marked the beginning of the end.”

I peeled my eyes away from the portrait of Michael Pike, III. “You mean the Great Depression.”

“Of course!” He looked at me suspiciously. “What do they teach kids in schools now-a-days?”

I smiled thinking back to how my fifth grade teacher had spent a whole month talking about the history of rock-and-roll. I guessed Mr. Finnigan would not approve of that teaching unit, even though Cleveland
does
have the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Mr. Finnigan continued, “When the first Michael Pike opened the factory in 1890, it started as a small operation housed in a shed on the back property of his father’s home. His father didn’t approve and said ginger ale would never take off. He was wrong, of course. Michael began small, selling his drink to local restaurants and families. He soon had a following and enough money to build this factory.” He gestured toward the last two portraits. “His son and grandson expanded it after the turn of the century and throughout the Roaring Twenties. You know, your great-grandfather, Patterson Boggs, worked here while putting himself through college.”

My eyes widened. “He did?”

Colin didn’t seem to have much interest in the old portraits. He stood at the other end of the hallway examining an old piece of machinery. It consisted of three egg-shaped tanks that were as long as I was tall, lying on their sides with copper tubing running from tank to tank. Iron legs held the tanks above the floor.

“What’s this?” Colin called out.

“Ahh, I just had that moved here from the factory floor so visitors could have a better look at it. It was a bear to move, and it took four men to do it. It’s an old carbonating machine.” Mr. Finnigan walked over to Colin. I followed close behind.

“Carbonation is what makes soda pop fizz,” I said.

“Exactly,” Mr. Finnigan said, pleased. “Seems like you are a chip off of the old scientific block.”

I grinned and took a closer look at the machine. Made of heavy copper, it had half a dozen gauges and knobs on it. “This is just one of the many old machines we have here in the building, but this wasn’t the big one that the Pikes used when mass-producing ginger ale. It’s one of the older ones that Michael Pike Senior used when he was still perfecting his recipe. Do you guys want a tour of the factory?”

“Sure,” Colin said. “I haven’t seen this place since you moved in.”

I shot him an annoyed look. Even though Mr. Finnigan’s stories were interesting, my focus was Andora.

“Great, follow me.” Mr. Finnigan’s black mustache turned up at the corners in a smile.

We backtracked down the hall and returned to the main lobby, where Mr. Finnigan turned in the opposite direction from his desk. “This is the old factory floor.” He pointed up toward a rickety set of metal stairs with a D
O
N
OT
E
NTER
sign hanging between the handrails. The last step at the top led into a small room. “That’s where the foreman or another boss would sit while the men were working on the floor. That spot allowed one man to supervise the entire floor at one time.”

Above where the old foreman used to sit, I spotted a large embossed brass circle with a bird in the middle and P
IKE
G
INGER
A
LE
etched along the sides. The bird stood in stoic profile and reminded me of the seagulls that flew over Lake Erie. “What’s that?” I asked.

“That, my dear, is the great seal of Pike Ginger Ale. The bird in the middle is a killdeer, the symbol of Pike Ginger Ale chosen in honor of the town. Killdeers are very special birds.”

Colin nodded. “Killdeers live in fields and protect their young at all costs. Their nests are in the high grasses. To keep predators away from their eggs or chicks, they will pretend to have a broken wing to make the predator chase them instead.”

I blinked at Colin. He was like a walking Wiki site.

Mr. Finnigan pointed to the assembly line below the killdeer plaque. It was as long as a football field and spread across the factory floor. He explained how the plant workers used to stand in their assigned stations along the line and perform repetitive tasks. Mr. Finnigan walked to each of the workmen’s spots and explained their jobs, “The man standing here would measure the ingredients and add them to the vat … this man would monitor the temperature … this man would monitor the bottle washing and remove any bottles that weren’t clean enough.” Mr. Finnigan walked further down the line. “And finally, this man would put the cap on each bottle, and then the machine would close it with an airtight seal.”

I visualized the line of men as if they stood right in front of me, watching the gauges and putting cap
after cap on the ginger ale bottles. I wondered which station my great-grandfather had worked. Had he been an ingredients guy, a bottle washer, or a foreman? I made a mental note to ask Amelie if she knew.

I grew anxious to search the archives for any trace of Andora, and I felt sure that if I asked Mr. Finnigan about my great-grandfather, we’d be here all day.

Colin peered inside a box full of old factory tools: screwdrivers, pieces of pipe, and monkey wrenches.

“I’m planning on making a display using those tools. Fascinating, aren’t they?” Mr. Finnigan said.

Colin nodded, picking up a hefty-looking monkey wrench.

“You never told us why the company shut down,” Colin said. “I mean, if it made it through the Stock Market Crash of 1929, what happened after that?”

To my relief, Mr. Finnigan turned away from the factory floor. “Let’s head back to the archives, and I’ll tell you on the way.” As we made our way, Mr. Finnigan began explaining things to us again.

“The twenties were a time of excess. Michael Pike III enjoyed the profits he received from the family business, which he inherited in full after his father died in ‘27. But he wanted more. In those days, ‘spend now and save later’ was the mantra. And Number Three strictly adhered to it.”

“Number Three?” I interrupted.

“Michael Pike III. ‘Number Three’ was a town nickname for him. I’m sure he hated it. He wasn’t the kind of man who’d appreciate cutesy names. Anyway, Number Three took out numerous loans to try to expand
the business into the root beer and even cola markets, hiring dozens of new employees in a manner of weeks. He threw lavish parties and made dozens of donations to Michael Pike University, which his father started twenty years before in honor of the original Michael Pike. He might have made it, too, but then the Crash happened. Like so many entrepreneurial businessmen, he was too dependent on the soaring price of his stock and the loans from his banks.”

Mr. Finnigan shook his head. “They did everything they could think of to save the business. They downsized and produced only ginger ale again, they laid off seventy employees, and they closed the ranks. But the writing remained on the wall. The business probably could have held it together if the public had stayed loyal and continued to drink ginger ale. Unfortunately, people didn’t spend money on ginger ale back then because they didn’t even have enough money to buy milk for their children. Sometimes they had to send away their children to live with another family or even strangers because they couldn’t support them anymore.”

“Sounds like you know a lot about this,” I said as we re-entered the hallway and walked past the three portraits of the hook-nosed Michael Pikes.

“I grew up in Killdeer, and the bottling company’s history is a piece of town lore.” He shrugged. “And since we moved the historical society archives in here and opened the museum last year, I’ve recently completed quite a lot of research on the family. The Pikes were fascinating people.”

He stopped in front of another large portrait, this one of a woman in her thirties. “This is Margaret Pike, but everyone called her Peggy. I know her personally. She lives somewhere north of here now, and she’s married with kids and grandkids, too.”

Colin wandered back to the carbonating machine and started poking at the engine as I stared at the woman’s portrait. She had pale skin and red hair that was parted in the middle. Her top matched her cheerful green eyes. As I glanced between her and the three Michael Pikes, I wondered what her mother had looked like.

Colin rejoined us. “So where are those archives?”