Kepler’s Dream (24 page)

“He had bad feelings about Edward, too,” I piped up. They both looked surprised that I had anything to contribute. “Abercrombie did. Rosie heard him talking about it. Remember?” Rosie nodded, and told them both the story of what she had overheard from the roof. My grandmother listened carefully and then sighed. Deeply.

“Well—perhaps this plotting on his part was a matter of settling old scores. Still, the insidiousness of the man! And the arrogance, thinking I'd never notice.”

How the GM had managed to miss this before, I would never know. If I hadn't been a well-mannered young lady who tried, where possible, to be brave and good, I might have been tempted to say,
What did I tell you? The guy's a crook! He tried to make us mistrust Miguel. He said I
galumphed. He probably secretly copied my words during Boggle games, too.

“I remember when you bought Kepler's
Dream
from him.” My
dad wasn't finished with Abercrombie yet. “I thought you ought to have the copy authenticated.” Dad turned to define this for me and Rosie. “To make sure that it was the real thing.”

“What I chiefly recall,” replied the GM, some of the edge back in her voice, “was that you thought my purchase of that book was a waste of money and a complete folly.”

“Yeah, well.” He waved a hand. “Some of that was bluster. It was a lousy time, and …” His voice trailed off. Like I said, my dad wasn't great at explaining himself. “I hadn't been out on the river for a while. When I'm land-bound too long, it starts to show.”

My grandmother nodded. “Edward needed his time on the river, too. That's a quality you shared.”

“Is that him?” Rosie asked, pointing to the old photograph sticking out of my dad's shirt pocket. “Mr. Mackenzie?”

“Where did you get that?” my grandmother asked sharply.

“
I
found it,” I said, guiltily. I wondered if I'd get in trouble for being a thief, too. “When I was looking around one day. Just, you know—exploring.” I cleared my throat. “I just liked seeing a picture of Dad and his dad together. I—I was going to put it back before I left.” I wasn't completely sure that this was true, but it seemed best to say so.

My grandmother looked at the small square for a long minute.

“Let's put this next to the others, shall we?” She walked over to place it, unframed though it was, on the shelf near the wedding snaps of herself with Edward. From the expression on her face I figured she wasn't going to give me a hard time, after all. In fact she suggested that my dad and Rosie and I could all go
into that back room together (the GM didn't know to call it the Chamber of Tchotchkes) and look through the albums and loose photographs there, if we wanted to.

We did.

“You carry on then, Walter. Why don't you lead the way.” Maybe, the GM said, we might even find some old snaps of the Aguilar boys running around in the dust from those days. Rosie's face brightened at that prospect.

Dad and Rosie went on ahead, but I hung back for a moment. There was a sadness pulling on the GM's shoulders that made me feel bad for her.

“Don't you want to see the pictures too, Grandmother?”

She didn't answer at first. It seemed as though her thoughts were miles, maybe even light-years, away. Finally she said, “That sounds very formal, Ella, doesn't it?”

“What? I mean—
pardon
?”

“‘Grandmother,'” she clarified. “It sounds rather formal, don't you think?”

“I guess so.” It seemed politest to agree with her, though since when had formality ever been a problem for this person who put you under house arrest if you didn't start the day with
Good morning
?

“Could we come up with something shorter for you to call me, do you think?”

“I don't know.” By now I was used to sounding like I was in an old-fashioned play. It seemed late in the day to change the
script, and besides, “Grandma” was still reserved for the name of my mom's mom, the brownie baker in Los Angeles. Even if she wasn't around anymore.

Then I thought of something. Taking my life in my hands, and trying not to sound nervous or mumbly, I said, “Well, how about—
GM
?” It was strange to utter the phrase aloud. That whole time I had only been hearing it in my head.

“GM?” She considered this as she opened the door for us back into the house. “Oh yes, I see.
GM
: Grand Mother. Or in German, Gross Mutter.”

I wasn't going to touch that one. But I did add, “Or even, you know—General Major.” Boy, had I become bold. Those elementary school teachers should see me now.

Violet Von Stern smiled her small, satisfied smirk. “Yes. Occasionally, for General Major. Well, someone has to keep things in shipshape, and it won't be the junior officers.” She raised an eyebrow at me. “Though the junior officers do have their uses, of course.”

She didn't put an arm around me—like I've said, physical affection wasn't my grandmother's style. But she did let me walk by her side, keeping pace with her as we made our way back to the house. It was a place where the junior officers were, in rare summers, permitted to be.

TWELVE

IT IS
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'T
a
TOT
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FO
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a
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G
en
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OT TO
be able to solve its very first case, but it's not great for future business. Someone must have opened up that old cooler and happened on Kepler's
Dream
, and it still seemed likely to the two partners of Aguilar and Mackenzie that short, speedy-thumbed Jason was the one. Then we figured he had come up with a way to spirit the copy to his uncle Christopher, to join the Waugh and who knew what else. How he could have managed to escape our eagle eyes—not to mention the peacock eyes around the property—was a mystery. That the Kepler book could never be sold would matter to any normal thief, but not to Abercrombie. He wanted that
Dream
for himself, I was sure of it.

But what could Rosie and I do about catching them? They had covered their tracks well, and the trail, after the excitement of the evil inventory intervention, had gone cold. Even with Lou on our side.

Anyway, time had pretty well run out. Up to that point, Time had been dragging its feet and hardly moving all summer, like
a big fat horse stopping to eat weeds. Now suddenly, with the end in sight, Time moved into a gallop. It was a strange phenomenon, and if Kepler himself had still been alive, he probably would have had a theory about it. I figured if I ever became a scientist one day, I could make it a subject of my study:
The way Time speeds up and slows down again over a long, busy summer.

For the past month and a half, all I'd wanted was to be able to visit my mom, but now that it was almost happening, I had butterflies in my stomach. It was surprising—I mean, this was
Mom
we were talking about!—but it felt like forever since I'd seen her. This was by a few light-years the longest time she and I had ever spent apart. Since I had never gone to wilderness or music camp, Broken Family Camp was my first serious stretch away from home. And though everything I had written to my mom about her being like an alien, or a clone, with her new blood, were just jokes … the fact was, I was worried. What if she really did look different, sound different? What if she didn't seem like herself?

Then there was me. I might have changed, too, and not just in the length of my hair. (Almost decent again, thank goodness, though it would need all of August to get to middle-school readiness.)

Sure, I'd been sending letters, and I guess Nurse Faye had read them out loud to Mom in the times when her eyesight or brain power were too weak to do it herself. But of course I left a lot out of what I wrote to her. I had to. There was only so much ground I could cover once a week, and besides, I had realized
that sometimes you had to leave things out of the story you told, to keep things simpler.

It was especially hard to know what to tell my mom about my dad and my grandmother. When I was complaining about the GM, that seemed OK, because I never got the feeling my mom had been very fond of Violet Von Stern. But what if, by the end of my time at the GGCF, I actually, kind of, a little bit—
liked
my grandmother? What if I liked my dad?

Was that allowed?

For instance, I wondered if I would tell my mom about the nickname I gave grandmother, or finding that photograph of Edward and Walter, or for that matter any episodes that involved my dad. Mom had always hated the guy, after all. They were divorced—after all.

A situation Rosie, at least, was going to escape. It was pretty clear now that Miguel and Rosie's mom had changed their minds and weren't divorcing. In fact, Miguel was going to move back in with them at the end of the summer. He would keep working for Grandmother and mostly just use the cabin for his studio, to carve his birds.

Rosie was lucky: she was going to avoid the yo-yo, back-and-forth schedule and the nasty meetings in counselors' offices. We talked about it on my last night in Albuquerque, when she and I were getting ready to go stargaze.

We had wised up this time. No bare feet, no hypothermia: we had our dads' sleeping bags. If there is one thing you can count on Walter Mackenzie for, it's having a decent sleeping bag.
I think he was still surprised, even after a few days, to be in a real bed again. He told me he kept dreaming he was in Haiti, a place he'd never been, riding around on a motorbike in a strangely yellow light.

Rosie was the one who wanted to do a midnight feast up on the roof, as a way to say good-bye. I was surprised the GM let us, and she probably wouldn't have if I'd asked the wrong way. (“Me and Rosie want to …” or “Can we, like, go up on the roof?”) But since I used good manners and the correct grammar, she said Fine. She even gave us two slices of cake, wrapped in tinfoil, as a kind of blessing.

It wasn't easy to get all our gear up there. I used the beat-up old cooler as a stepping stool, then handed things up, with Rosie hanging half off the edge like a bat and Lou running around excitedly below. In the end we had sandwiches, cake, oranges and a thermos of cocoa. We ate and drank bundled up in our sleeping bags, under the big, cold, black New Mexico sky.

The peacocks paced back and forth suspiciously, but kept their distance.

Once we were settled, munching sandwiches, we talked about the trail ride we had taken earlier that day. It was my last time at the Circle C, though Carlos told me I'd better come back because Paloma'd be waiting for me. Carlos had decided my butt was in good enough shape by now, as he put it, so Rosie and I went out on the mesa together with Lola and Carlos, keeping to a walk or trot to be safe. Even so, it was a thrill for me to be out in the scrubby, rust-colored landscape at last. I finally felt I'd
earned those boots Abbie's mom had bought for me what felt like a thousand years before.

“You remember Kepler?” I asked Rosie.

“I know.” She gave a sigh. “I can't believe we haven't nailed it—”

“No, not that Kepler.” I was thinking of my first time at the Circle C. “The one I made up—that horse I was supposedly always riding back home in Santa Rosa?”

“Oh. Yeah.” She laughed. “Wasn't he a ‘pinto palomino'?”

“Yep. Pretty unusual horse.” I could still feel the hard
smack
when I hit the ground that day. You have to get back on the horse, like everyone says, but the truth is, you never forget a bad fall. “Maybe I'll try to find somewhere to ride when I get home, though. It's not like there aren't plenty of horses in Santa Rosa. My dad said he might go with me, if he visits.” The dim light helped hide the doubt on my face about my dad showing up. You never did know with him. Still, riding horses with my dad sounded good. It beat bowling.

Rosie and I stared up at the stars, wrapped up for warmth.

“You can see Orion really well tonight,” Rosie said.

“Oh, yeah? All I know is the Big Dipper.” It shouldn't have been true of the granddaughter of Edward Mackenzie, but it was. Some things, like star knowledge, aren't genetic: you have to acquire them all by yourself.

“Let me show you.” So Rosie traced out for me the four outer stars of Orion, and then the three close together within, that were seen as his belt. “Orion's a hunter, you know,” she told me. “
Some people call these three stars the Three Kings, or in Latin countries the Three Marys.” Her uncle Ignacio had taught her all this stuff. Rosie showed me Orion, and then Castor and Pollux, and then how a couple of stars on the end of the Big Dipper pointed the way to the North Star, sometimes called Polaris.

This was my first real lesson in who was who up in the heavens. The North Star seemed like an especially good one to know. The one fixed brightness in the sky: once you found that, you would always be able to figure out where you were.