Hector said, but the lines between his brows deepened. “I’m beginning to think he might be right.”
Sylvia Carrillo sat on the sofa, pinching the bridge of her nose. Tyler, horrified, looked from one to the other and said, “You’re not really going to sell to him, Mr. Carrillo, are you? Not to Stillman. He’s Uncle Gideon’s worst enemy!”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do if Gideon Goldring won’t even talk to me.” Hector Carrillo banged his beer down on the little round table. “How many times can I beg the man to talk to me? How many times do I have to let him treat me like a dog?”
“But it’s not really Gideon’s fault!” said Lucinda. Everyone turned to look at her.
“What do you mean?” Tyler asked.
Lucinda shook her head. “I’m not sure-but it’s not! I mean, there’s something really wrong with him… ”
Grandma Paz chose this moment to emerge from the kitchen with a glass of tomato juice and plop herself down on the couch next to her daughter. “So,” she asked, “have you and Hector told them about the mina frecuentada yet?”
“Mother!” Silvia Carrillo almost screamed it.
“Whoa! Doesn’t that mean ‘ghost mine’ or something? asked Steve. ‘Sounds like an amusement park ride. What are you talking about?”
“Nothing,” said his father sternly. “Your grandmother just likes to tell crazy old stories.” He gave Paz a very hard look. “It’s her age.”
Sylvia stood up, an expression of pain and weariness on her face. “Enough for tonight,” she said. “Have you all forgotten about the evening milking? The cows must be full to bursting. It’s time for work! We’ll finish this later.” But she looked as if she hoped they would never, ever return to that particular subject.
Chapter 24
Days passed at Cresta Sol without anything changing. July turned into August, the end of their summer vacation loomed, and still Lucinda and Tyler remained banished from their great-uncle’s house and land. Ragnar met with Mr. Walkwell at the Cresta Sol property line every few days, but according to the ancient Greek things had not improved: Gideon Goldring was still sickly and still doing pretty much what Mrs. Needle told him. She did not even allow the exiles’ names to be mentioned in Gideon’s presence.
Ragnar slept in the Carrillos’ dairy barn and helped Hector and Silvia with the farm. Lucinda and Tyler hung around with the kids. It was fun to have time with Carmen and the others, but Lucinda was beginning to feel like the old Ordinary Farm had been a dream and now they had woken up.
I could have been spending all this time getting to know Desta, learning how to really talk with the dragons, Lucinda thought. Is anyone giving her carrots? She enjoys them so much! Haneb must be so busy with us gone, especially Ragnar-will he have the time to pay some extra attention to her…?
Tyler flopped down beside her. He looked around the empty living room as if there might be spies hiding behind the sofa cushions, but it was late afternoon and everyone was out of the house doing chores or running errands. “Grandma Paz-she knows a lot more than she’s telling,” he said in a dramatic voice.
“Well, duh.”
“What does that mean?”
Lucinda sat up carefully-her head sometimes still pounded if she moved too quickly, but otherwise she was feeling better, although she still had no idea what had happened to her that day in the garden. “ Everybody around here knows more than they’re telling-except us kids. That’s the whole point. The place is full of secrets.”
“Well, I’m going to find out what she’s hiding. You can tell she’s dying to tell somebody… ”
Lucinda sighed loudly. “And then what? You’ll ride Eliot the Sea Serpent up Kumish Creek, throwing hand grenades until Colin Needle and his mother surrender?”
“What is your problem? Why are you being like this, Luce?”
Tears came into her eyes. “Because I’m tired of listening to you talking about all the things we’re supposed to be doing when we’re helpless. I wish we’d never learned about this stupid place. It’s all been just… trouble. And scary, dangerous things. I want to go home.”
Tyler stared at her as if she’d announced she didn’t want to have Christmas anymore. “You’re crazy, Luce.”
“Well, I’m tired,” she said, “and I still feel lousy!”
“But you’re totally in love with those dragons…!”
“You don’t get it, Tyler. I don’t care anymore! It’s too hard! Even the grownups can’t make this work-what are we supposed to do? We’re kids!”
“But the grown-ups can’t make things work because they’re grown-ups!” Tyler shouted.
Lucinda rolled her eyes and said, “I’m going to go take a nap.”
Tyler followed her down the hall to Carmen’s room. He was angry now, too. “So you’re just going to give up? We’ve got a few days of our summer left-that’s all. And you want to let the Needles have the farm and all the animals and do whatever they want while we go back home-while we go back to school?”
“What else can we do?” Lucinda knew she was being hard on her younger brother: he wasn’t feeling as lousy as she was, so of course he was frustrated. But she really did feel exhausted-whatever had caused the strange fever was not entirely gone. Suddenly it was all she could do to stumble to her bed.
When Lucinda woke up it was mid-afternoon. The sheet stuck to her sweaty skin and the air in the Carrillos’ house was hot and close. She wanted to take a shower, but she needed fresh things to put on afterward or getting clean was pointless. She rummaged through her jumbled suitcase for unworn socks and underwear until she had emptied the suitcase completely, but she still couldn’t find anything clean. Because she had been sick she had let everything go, but now it seemed she would either have to find out how to use Silvia’s washing machine or just wear dirty stuff. She began to search through the suitcase’s various zipper pockets, hoping a clean pair of underpants might have strayed into one of them somehow. To her surprise, she found something in one of them, but it wasn’t underwear.
She lifted out the old, yellowed envelope with the Madagascar postmark. It was the letter she had been holding when Mrs. Needle burst into her room their first night back on the farm, the night Tyler found the box mailed to Grace Goldring. Lucinda had tried to gather up all the letters when Mrs. Needle came in, but several had fallen onto the floor. This one must have gone under the bed or something, and Pema and Azinza had found it when they were packing her suitcase and just stuck it in.
She climbed onto the bed. The envelope was still sealed-the letter had never been opened and Grace had never read it, which was a strange thing to think about. Did the person who wrote it wonder why she had never replied? Lucinda couldn’t help wondering what Doctor Grace Goldring had really been like. In all those pictures in the memorial parlor she looked very calm, very pretty, very smart-exactly the kind of woman Lucinda wanted to grow up to be. Now here in Lucinda’s hands was an unopened letter addressed to the woman, sent from half a world away, in a box of biological specimens from Madagascar. She held it up to the light to read the now-faint handwriting. 13 July 1989, it said, sent by someone named Fabien Koto.
Her heart beating faster, she slit the envelope carefully with scissors from Carmen’s well-organized desktop and pulled out the yellowing paper. The letter was printed but looked old enough and strange enough that she guessed it had been written on a typewriter.
Dear Dr. Goldring,
I send you my best wishes! The weather here has been good-Antananarivo is a very pretty place in the spring and I hope you and Gideon will come here some day! It would be a great pleasure to show you around! In the meantime, I send you the fruits of my last trip to the market. The Chamaeleo belalandaensis would have been a much more exciting find if it was still living, but even the dead ones are seldom seen these days, and this is well dry and I think not too unpleasant!
You were right that it is the people of the southwestern coasts that come across the strangest discoveries,
