Crandalls' Castle

Crandalls' Castle

Betty Ren Wright

Chapter One

CHARLI

Charli Belland sat on the front steps and watched her Crandall cousins run happily wild around her. The four-year-old twins, Gene and Terry, were building a fort, using boxes and crates they'd dragged from the Belland garage. As soon as they completed a wall, they took turns riding their tricycles into it at full speed to batter it down. Two-year-old Mickey hurled toys out of his playpen in every direction.

“I cleaned up the whole yard this morning,” Charli said grimly. “I wanted it to look nice when Mom and Ray come home.”

Sixteen-year-old Dan, the only Crandall not in motion, laughed. “Why'd you bother?” he asked. “You knew we were all coming over for the big welcome home this afternoon. Aunt Rona knows what we're like, and Ray might as well get used to us. Every time he looks across the street at our yard he'll see a bigger mess than this.”

Charli nodded. She considered getting up to collect the toys, but she didn't. Waiting like this, not knowing what was going to happen next, was pleasant. She felt as if her whole life was about to change.

“If you think this is bad, look out,” Dan added. “I just found out we're getting a new kid in our family.”

Charli looked up at him, startled.

“Not another baby,” Dan told her with a grin. “It's a girl from Madison. She's related to someone my mom knows, and she has nowhere else to go. So …”

Charli understood. The girl in Madison had nowhere else to go, so of course Aunt Lilly had invited her to come and stay with the Crandalls. What difference would one more make?

“How old is she?”

“Fourteen,” Dan said. “And that's all I've heard, so don't ask.” He grinned. “You know my mother. Say yes and ask questions later—that's her motto.”

He broke off as a familiar car turned onto Lincoln Street and glided to a stop in front of Charli's house. At the same moment, the screen door burst open and Uncle Will and Aunt Lilly rushed out onto the porch.

“Here they come!” Uncle Will shouted unnecessarily. “Welcome home, newlyweds!”

Charli stood up and started toward the car. She wanted to be cool, but her heart was banging in her chest. Uncle Will galloped ahead of her, and as soon as her mother and Ray Franz, her new stepfather, stepped from the car, he grabbed Charli's shoulders and swung her around to stand between them.

“Smile!” he shouted, raising his camera. “Let's see the happy family!”

The camera clicked, and then everyone hugged and shook hands, as if the honeymoon had lasted a lot longer than two days. A print glided out of the camera, and they crowded around to examine it. Charli saw that her mother and Ray were smiling happily, while she stared straight ahead, somber as an owl, through her round glasses.

“Charlene looks as if she's getting ready to run,” Ray commented. “Is that the way it is, Charli?”

She glanced up at him, pretty sure he was teasing, but afraid he wasn't. “No,” she said. “I'm staying.” The whole family laughed, as if she'd said something clever instead of totally dumb.

Aunt Lilly threw one arm around Charli's mother and the other around Ray. “Come on inside your house,” she ordered. “Dan, bring the suitcases. Charli and I spent all morning decorating the wedding cake.”

“Cake!” Gene and Terry stampeded to the kitchen where the cake waited in all its glory on the table. When everyone had admired the rosebuds and plastic lovebirds, Rona and Ray together cut generous pieces and passed them out.

The littlest Crandalls took their paper plates and scattered around the backyard. Charli settled with Dan on the porch steps. He was four years older than she was and sometimes treated her as if she were a baby, but now he looked solemn, in spite of the frosting mustache that decorated his upper lip.

“Ray seems like an okay guy,” he said. “I guess he's a good basketball coach—everybody says Mount Pleasant is lucky to get him. You like him, huh?”

“He's all right,” Charli said. After all, she and her mom had been doing fine, just the two of them. She'd felt prickles of envy occasionally, when her friends at school mentioned their fathers, but she'd become used to having one parent. Her own father had died when she was three, and that had been that. At least, that was that until Ray came along.

She remembered the first evening he came to the house to take her mother out on a date. He had arrived in Mount Pleasant just a few days earlier to teach math and coach high school basketball. The morning he came to town to find a place to live and get settled, Rona Belland had served him coffee and pancakes at the Blue Water Café, where she was the manager. That was how they met.

“Do you like him?” her mother had asked the morning after the date.

“He's nothing like Uncle Will,” Charli had said cautiously. Will Crandall, her mother's older brother, was the only man she knew really well. He had been an important part of her life ever since her father's death.

“No,” her mother agreed. “Ray's nothing like our Will. They're both good and generous, but Ray's a very different kind of person. For one thing he's steady as a rock. I hope you'll like him.”

For the rest of that day Charli had felt uneasy and a little scared, but excited, too. Ray came over many evenings after that, filling a place in their lives that she hadn't realized was empty. Sometimes she'd wished he would disappear, but at the same time she'd practiced saying “my dad” when no one was around to hear.

“Your cake's slipping off the plate,” Dan pointed out now. “Are you going to be Charli Belland or Charli Franz?”

“Who knows?” It would be nice if they all had the same last name, but she had been Charli Belland for a lot of years. She felt like Charli Belland.

The screen door burst open and Uncle Will bounded out onto the porch. He was like a puppy, Charli thought—if you could imagine a tall, skinny, gray-haired puppy. When he threw himself down onto the steps beside them and stretched out his long legs, he seemed younger than Dan.

“Listen up, kids,” he whispered, pretending to check for eavesdroppers. “I've got a surprise! I don't want to tell you until everything's settled, but when I do you're going to be thrilled. Something terrific's coming off—great for us and maybe for Rona, too, Charli.”

Charli put down her plate, remembering some of Uncle Will's other surprises. He taught history at Mount Pleasant High, and one summer, the day after school closed, he'd bought a secondhand boat, “guaranteed to give us all a perfect vacation.” The boat had sunk like a rock with the whole family on board. Even though it was moored in shallow water when it went down, the shock had been terrible. The next summer he'd invited the family to come out to Eagle Hill to watch his first hang-gliding lesson. He'd broken his leg when he landed.

The worst surprise—Charli groaned, remembering—was the summer he'd painted the Bellands' house the incredibly bright blue it was now, while Charli and her mother were away on a camping trip.

“I wanted to surprise you,” he told them proudly, when they returned. “Turned out a little brighter than I expected, but you'll get used to it.”

“What kind of surprise is it, Dad?” Dan broke the silence. “Give us a clue.”

“No can do,” Uncle Will said gleefully. “You might just try to talk me out of it.” He scooped up a ball lying at the foot of the steps and jumped to his feet. “Catch!” he bellowed, tossing it toward the twins. He dived to retrieve it as it came bouncing back.

Charli looked at Dan, speechless.

“Oh, quit worrying,” her cousin muttered. “A month from now he'll probably have forgotten all about the surprise, whatever it is.”

The screen door flapped behind them, and Charli looked over her shoulder to see her brand-new stepfather. He was watching Uncle Will, who shouted and pretended to tackle first one twin, then the other. Ray winked at Charli and went back into the kitchen, but not before she'd seen his expression. He had been eyeing Uncle Will as if he were an alien from another planet.

“Ray thinks we're not his kind of people,” she muttered. “He thinks we're strange.”

“Well, we're not,” Dan retorted. “Ray's been around here long enough to know what our family is like. Besides, if Dad's going to do something weird again, it won't affect you. That's
our
problem.”

“Ours, too. We're all one family,” Charli said stubbornly. She looked up at the sky, half-expecting to see a black trouble-cloud sail over the house. “Uncle Will mentioned my mom,” she reminded Dan. “So we're mixed up in the surprise, and that means Ray will be, too. He won't like it.”

She already knew what her stepfather thought of at least one of Uncle Will's surprises. The day before the wedding he had mentioned that he hoped there would be time to paint the house a sensible color before school started this fall.

Chapter Two

SOPHIA'S JOURNAL

I should have given you a name a long time ago. After all, you've been my best friend ever since I moved in with my great-grandmother. It wasn't only that she never talked; it was as if she lived in this circle of quiet and no one else existed. I started writing to you that very first night.

Right now I imagine you sitting up in bed, same as I am, only you're in your own room in your own house, and you know everyone else who lives there and you love them all. You might even be wearing a Save the Animals T-shirt like mine—not that it matters. The important thing is, you listen. I can tell you stuff, like why I'm not in my great-grandmother's apartment anymore, and why I don't expect to be in this place long either.

I'll start with the cab ride in Madison this morning, because that's when I knew for sure my life was about to change again. It was my first ride in a cab, and I bet it was the first for my great-grandmother, too. Not that she said so, of course. All the way to the hospital she stared out the window, her wrinkled face as still as stone.

When I first met her, a year and a half ago, her face was pink and puckered. Now the puckers are like deep cuts carved into gray skin. I know she's going to die soon. I bet she knows it, too. I want to feel bad, because after all she's the only relative I have left, but I can't. Sorry about that. She's as much a stranger today as she was when I moved in.

We were pulling up in front of St. Joseph's Hospital when she finally spoke. “Your great-grandfather had a niece in Mount Pleasant. Nice girl. Maybe you can stay with her for a while.”

Naturally I had about a million questions I wanted to ask, but I just said okay because she wasn't going to tell me anything else. It was as if she'd peered out for a moment from that weird, silent place where she lives, and she'd noticed me next to her, and she'd said what she had to say. Period.

I was beginning to feel pretty weird myself. I knew the feeling because I've had it before, quite a few times. One minute I'm safe—well, semi-safe—and the next I'm floating in space. If I was an astronaut, that would be the moment when the line that attached me to my ship slipped away. Suddenly there's no up, no down, no
connections
. That's exactly how I felt then, sitting in the cab with my poor dying great-grandmother.

When you lose your connection, everything seems far away. A pointy-faced doctor examined my great-grandmother in the emergency room and scolded her for waiting so long to come to the hospital. After he left there were two nurses, a young one with red hair who smiled a lot and an older one who told me to follow her down a hall.

“I understand your grandmother is your guardian,” she said. “Our social worker will help you sort things out. She's very efficient.”

Whenever I hear “social worker” I start to worry. This one—her name tag said Rita—was nice enough, but she asked the same old questions other social workers had asked a hundred times.