Hunter Moran Saves the Universe (5 page)

We sit up and lean against the side of the house. All is quiet now, even the crickets. Over our heads is a huge yellow moon that lights up Zack's face next to me.

He looks like a ghost.

We sit there, sucking on weeds that taste like chives.

“So who was it,” Zack says, “who came into Diglio's yard?”

I shake my head. “This guy was spider fast. He climbed Diglio's fence in half a minute.” I slap at a mosquito the size of a rocket ship.

“A real power ball,” Zack says.

I don't want to think about that. Instead I go back over the phone calls, the clues. “Olyushka. Original missing from
S-T-U.
It's all very confusing.”

“I forgot about the original,” Zack says. “What kind of an original would Father Elmo have?”

“And what was that torn paper at Vinny's Vegetables and Much More?”

“We're missing a few things here. But one thing is sure.
Bom/Twin
can mean only two things. A bomb and …”

Zack sighs. “Twins. Us. A pair of innocent—”

“Not twins,” I cut in. “Twin. Hunt. Me. I'm the innocent—”

I never get to finish.

Lights go on all over the house. The front door blasts open. I hear Pop's voice.

Heads down, we dig ourselves into the weeds again. A stone drills itself through my stomach, and Pop's hacksaw nearly cuts my ankle in two.

It's worth it. If Pop sees us …

He does, of course. His eyes are like lasers.

“What are you two doing out here?” he screams.

I slide out from under the hacksaw and stand up. It's a blessing he doesn't see his tools spread out in the weeds.

“The front door is wide open,” he says as we climb back over the fence and head toward the house. “Every mosquito in Newfield is zooming down the hall, and Steadman is wandering around saying he can't find you.”

I take a quick look at him.

“It's ten minutes after two,” he says, holding his head. “And I have a meeting at nine in the morning.”

Head down, I go up the front path. Zack is so close behind me I feel his breath on my neck.

“I can't get one night's decent sleep,” Pop says, “without the two of you involved in one scheme or another.”

We don't say anything. What can we say? That there's a bomb planted a couple of doors down, that I'm going to be toast, that Newfield may be a giant crater any minute?

He's not in the mood to hear all that.

“Go to bed!” he shouts. “Don't let me hear from you for the rest of the night.”

Behind him, in the hall, stands Steadman, looking filthy as usual. “Hi, guys,” he says. “Welcome home.”

IT'S THE SECOND DAY OF SUMMER.

We're still…

Chapter 9

Alive!

I open my eyes with the sun on my face. I feel my arms and reach down to touch a bumpy scab on my knee. I'm still here. If Diglio weren't out to get me, I could relax. We could go back for the bomb and get rid of it without worrying so much. I try not to think about the other guy jumping over the fence last night.

Mary is singing in her crib, and Mom is downstairs frying bacon into cardboard.

Pop's footsteps come down the hall. “Don't forget about Steadman,” he calls as he passes.

Steadman. It's always something.

Zach groans from the bed across the room. “Cello lesson this morning.”

Zack, the musical genius, has another major problem: the concert at the town round on Tinwitty Night.

“Maybe it would have been better if the bomb had blown me to a Pacific atoll,” he says.

I don't know what an atoll is, but I get the idea. He's had
a year to compose a cello piece for the concert, but all he has is
Do Re Mi Mi Mi.
Or something like that. And the cello is in very bad shape. Ruined, as a matter of fact.

That reminds me of Pop, on his way to the station, swinging his computer case, unaware that the innards are sloshing back and forth with every step he takes.

“What's going to happen when Pop opens the laptop?” Zack asks, reading my mind again.

“Don't think about it. Think about the cello instead.”

“Maybe I shouldn't have bashed it over William's head after all,” he says.

“What's done is done. You just have to get a good story together for Old Lady Campbell.”

We shake our heads together. She's wicked old, with a wrinkled face, and she hobbles around on a cane, but our story can't be … what's that Sister Appolonia word …
dubious.

“Throw yourself on her mercy,” I say. “Maybe she won't tell.”

The bedroom door bangs open. Steadman is standing there. He's really a mess this morning. The only thing about him that's clean is his sucking thumb. He throws himself on my bed. “It smells down there in the kitchen,” he says.

The first of the soup entries must have arrived.

Steadman leans up on his elbow. “Mom wants to see you.”

Now what? “We're on our way down,” I say.

“Want to hang out today, Steadman?” Zack asks.

Steadman scratches one muddy knee. “You have a cello lesson.”

“You can wait with Hunter. I won't be as long as usual.” Zack looks relieved. It's the end of cello lessons forever. He just has to tell Old Lady Campbell. Somehow.

“Nothing to it,” I tell Zack, to bolster him up.

Steadman is thinking. “Fred loves me. He's always slobbering over me.” He looks up at the ceiling, happy about Fred's slobbering.

But then he shakes his head. “Nah, I have to stay home. I have some buried treasure to look at.”

Zack and I shrug at each other. We can't force him.

“Besides, Pop won't be home for hours,” Zack says. “What can Steadman possibly do while we're gone?”

One problem solved.

But breakfast is something we hadn't expected. Mom is holding an investigation. We sit at the table chomping down the bacon, then chewing on the granola Nana sends every month to keep us fit. It's rock-hard and the crunch sounds like the garbage truck thundering down Murdock Avenue. At the same time, I try not to breathe in the soup that's simmering on the stove.

“This didn't just happen by itself.” Mom points toward the trellis outside the window.

I take a look. Usually it looks great, with roses all over
it. Today it doesn't look so hot. “Dead as a doornail,” I say through a chunk of granola.

“How did it get that way?” Mom's voice has an edge.

“Somebody killed it,” William, with a head on his shoulders, says.

Zack and I realize at the same moment. Last night. The climb. The shovel must have sheared off the root. Zack does that teeth-on-the-lip thing, one side to the other. His eyes slide away from mine. “Not somebody. Some …” He hesitates. “Thing?”

I notice a long scratch down the side of his cheek. It must have come from the rosebush.

Zack opens his mouth. He's confessing?

But no.

“Blight kills bushes,” Zack says. “And fungus.” He raises his hand to his cheek, as if he's thinking. He's trying to hide the scratch. “It's probably an army of—”

“Moles?” I say. The perfect answer. Pop has been having a war with moles for years. The moles always win.

Zack's sneakers connect with mine under the table. A foot low five.

Mom taps her spoon against her lips, and we wait.

“Maybe,” she says, and then, “Climbing the trellis is not a good thing.”

“You could break your neck.” I try to sound wise and fearful at the same time.

Everyone is staring at us. A dangerous moment.

“Well …” Zack pushes back his chair. “Time for cello. I'll just get …” He runs upstairs for the empty case.

“I'll go with Zack.” I slide out of my seat, heading for safety. “I like to listen to the music.”

William snickers. He still has a bump on his head from where the cello connected. Besides, he saw us burying the cello at the back of the yard two days ago. Zack and I gave it a great send-off, a funeral with a twenty-one-gun salute. Without the guns, of course.

Linny shakes her head at Mom. Then Zack and I are off.

“Are you going to tell Old Lady Campbell the exact truth?” I ask him.

“Don't talk,” he says. “I'm trying to think.”

We head over there, and don't even have to knock on her door. Fred explodes down the hallway; his eyes bulge and I can count his canines. He's ready for a quick meal. Old Lady Campbell drags him by the collar and wrestles him into a bedroom as he looks back, snarling. She slams the door, just missing his muzzle.

“Fred gets a little overexcited sometimes.” She smiles at us with yellow teeth.

I remind myself to brush and floss so my own teeth don't look like hers when I'm an old man.

With a bony hand on Zack's shoulder, she guides him into her studio. I sink into a kitchen chair to wait. Over my head, the curtains are sheared off halfway up. “Fred loves the taste of lace,” Old Lady Campbell told us once.

I sit there, dying of boredom. I slide open a drawer. Knives, forks, and a bottle of Feel Like New tablets,
four a day for four months.
The pills are the size of elephants galloping though the rain forest … or wherever they gallop.

Yuck.

The next drawer is filled with pictures that might have been taken a hundred years ago. Looking at them makes me dizzy. Upside-down mountains. Tilted houses. And is the one on top Old Lady Campbell in goggles? Piloting a plane? Brown hair streaming out behind her?

I tilt my own head. Maybe that was it. She was taking pictures of herself and the rest of the world from the plane.

I'm right. The next bunch of pictures are all of planes, some just the wings, some just the tails, one just the wheels.

Cheech! What a waste of time.

I breathe in. Something is bubbling along on her stove. It's mostly green with some yellowish lumps here and there.

Let me guess. She's going to enter the soup contest.

There's a crumb cake on the table. I pick a fat lump off the top. Delicious, but obvious. It leaves a blank space in the middle of the cake. I stare at it, turning the plate in different directions.

What a trying summer this is. A spy after me with a bomb, Steadman, the trellis, and now this. It's almost too much. Oh, and don't let me forget Pop's laptop.

I poke at the lumps around the space, trying to edge them closer together, but it only disturbs the white sugar.
Now, in addition to the space, a dark spot surrounds it, looking like a bomb crater.

Something squirrels into my mind. But who can think with Fred barking like a maniac in the bedroom and a plane from Sturgis Air Force Base zooming overhead, its engine loud enough to rattle the dishes?

Carefully, I edge a crumb off the edge of the cake. “Bom/Twin,” I whisper, and drop it into the crater.

Not bad.

Notes are sawing in the studio. How could that be? It comes to me in a flash. Old Lady Campbell is going to lend Zack a cello. He must be devastated.

I reach into the drawer, slide out a wicked knife, and whittle a half-inch away from all four sides of the cake. Precisely. Like a surgeon amputating someone's arms and legs. I chew thoughtfully.

“Good job,” I hear Old Lady Campbell telling Zack.

“Good job,” I say to what's left of the crumb cake.

But why am I uneasy?

I have a lot to be uneasy about. And the very worst is Diglio, with a bomb unburied in his backyard.

Bomb. I stand up. The chair tips over and bangs against the refrigerator. I rush down the hall—past the bedroom with Fred in a frenzy—and slam open the studio door.

“We have to go home right now,” I tell Zack.

In an instant, Zack catches on. “Hunter's had some problems lately,” he says.

“What's the problem?” Old Lady Campbell yells over Fred's noise.

“It's a sickness.”

I can hardly talk, with what's facing us at home. “It's Olyushka disease,” I manage.

“Rare,” Zack says. “We have to get him into bed.”

We race down the hall. Behind us, Old Lady Campbell leans on her cane. “I may be old, but I'm not daft,” she mutters.

Whatever that means.

“Take the cello,” she calls out the door after us. “Be careful with it. It was mine when I was ten years old.”

An antique.

Outside, I blurt out, “Danger of the worst kind.”

We dash across St. Ursula's front lawn, get soaked in the sprinkler, and head for our kitchen door.

Chapter 10

Mom is in the backyard with Mary, pruning the rosebush. “Maybe I can save it yet,” she says.

“Great.” I don't stop.

“Lunch sandwiches on the kitchen table.” She wipes her forehead. “How was the lesson?”

“Learning Bach,” Zack says.

I'm almost dancing up and down on the back steps as he launches into Bach's life story.

He's probably making half of it up.