The Summer Experiment Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by Cathie Pelletier

  Cover and internal design © 2014 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Will Riley for Sourcebooks

  Map design and illustration © Carl Hileman

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

  www.jabberwockykids.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.

  Worzalla-USA, Stevens Point, WI

  Date of Production: February 2014

  Run Number: 5000581

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Map

  1. Strange Lights

  2. Frog Hill

  3. The Alien

  4. Earthly Revenge

  5. A Close Encounter

  6. The Setup

  7. The Delay

  8. The Runaway

  9. The Search

  10. Back on Track

  11. Calley’s Ghost

  12. Missing Time

  13. The Denial

  14. The Siren

  15. Our Great Loss

  16. Mending Our Hearts

  17. More Breaking News

  18. The Grand Scheme

  19. Crying Wolf

  20. The Message

  21. A Smelly Encounter

  22. The Second Allagash Abductions

  23. The Spacecraft

  24. The Return

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  Doris Robichaud Lazore, who always took part in my wild plans when we were kids growing up in Allagash, schemes which included running away from home (via the St. John River) on a raft built from my father’s window shutters.

  Louis Allen Pelletier & Ethel Tressa O’Leary Pelletier for giving me the gift of childhood.

  1

  Strange Lights

  It was at Grandpa Carter’s birthday party that we first saw the strange lights in the sky. Everyone but me, that is. Roberta Angela McKinnon. That’s because I was in the kitchen getting a jar of mustard and my family was in the backyard. I don’t like missing anything. Generally, I’m known to be at the heart of the action. Sometimes, I even cause it. But when I went back outside, everyone was staring up at the sky, mouths open, like a nest of baby birds waiting to be fed. I looked up and didn’t see anything but stars.

  “Holy cow!” said Uncle Horace.

  “Wow!” Johnny said. “You missed it, Roberta!”

  “What was it?” I asked. I handed the mustard to Grandpa so he could put it on his hot dog. Grandpa won’t eat pasta. He says it’s just not American. So Mom always cooks him a hot dog when we have Italian spaghetti or Chinese food.

  “A weird light,” Johnny said. “It moved really fast.” Johnny is my big brother, and he is usually of sound mind. Usually. But now that he likes Miranda Casey, I’m doubtful.

  “What did it look like?”

  “It must have been some kind of jet,” my dad said.

  “I bet it’s something new that the military is testing,” said Uncle Horace. “Something secret.”

  “What color was it?” I asked.

  “Maybe a weather balloon,” said my mother. She was holding Tina, my baby sister, and looking at the mountain across the river. Tina is only four years old. I’m the middle kid, two years younger than Johnny, who is thirteen.

  “Could it have been the International Space Station?” asked Aunt Betty.

  “The space station doesn’t move that fast,” Uncle Horace said.

  “How big was it?” I’d only been in the kitchen a minute. Surely they hadn’t already forgotten that I existed.

  “The Air Force is probably testing a new weapon,” said Grandpa. He blames everything on Loring Air Force Base, even heavy snowfalls and summer lightning storms. And yet, the base has been closed for years.

  “Will someone describe it to me, please?” I felt invisible.

  “Maybe it was a helicopter from the forestry department,” said Grandma. When Grandma has even one glass of wine, she can see all kinds of things. But everyone who was in the backyard had seen the light. Everyone who was in the kitchen hadn’t.

  “WHAT DID IT LOOK LIKE?”

  They all stared at me like I was an alien or something. Mom and Dad say I tend to be dramatic. But it’s not easy being the middle child. And then, it’s not like excitement happens every day around here. Mostly, when school is out for the summer, I’m beyond bored. And God put me in the most perfect place for boredom to occur. I was born and raised in Allagash, Maine, right on the Canadian border. The middle kid in the middle of a wilderness. It’s the land of trees and lakes at the very end of the road. No ocean. No department stores. No fancy restaurants. No cell phone reception. Even Stephen King lives way down in Bangor, five hours south. Allagash is probably too scary for Mr. King.

  But for me, it’s mostly boring. Now and then, tourists who come here to take the Allagash River trip claim to see lights in the sky. Since they’re city people, they probably see moonlight bouncing off the horns of a moose and then panic. Rumors start that way. And we do have moose here. Plenty of them. Sometimes, I wake to see one swimming in the river behind my house or eating lettuce in my mom’s garden. But it’s a fact that tourists imagine all sorts of things once they get a few miles from an airport or a mall. Allagash tourists are a lot tougher than the city tourists who gather on the ocean down in southern Maine to eat lobster and sip wine. But they’re still tourists. They come down the Allagash River all summer long in brightly colored canoes or kayaks. The blackflies bite them and the mosquitoes feed off them. But they seem to enjoy themselves, especially once they get back to their laptops.

  So if any excitement happens, I’d like to be part of it.

  “It was a big, white ball,” said Dad. I finally got an answer. “And it had flashing lights on it.”

  “Where did it go?”

  Johnny pointed across the river in the direction of Quebec, Canada.

  “I hope those extraterrestrials got passports,” said Uncle Horace, and grinned. Not many locals were happy when the law changed and now everyone needs a passport to go to Canada. Even if it’s to have supper at the Maple Leaf Restaurant, which is just across the international bridge.

  “I still think it was a weather balloon,” Mom said. She was still holding my sister, her sweater wrapped around Tina’s chubby little arms.

  We all watched as Grandma lit the one huge candle in the middle of Grandpa’s cake. On cue from Mom, we broke into a pretty bad version of “Happy Birthday to You.” Grandma can hit notes so high that only dogs can hear them. This is why we own a cat.

  “I can’t believe that in four years I’ll be seventy,” said Grandpa when we finished.

  “Good thing you didn’t light sixty-six c
andles, Bob,” my dad teased. “They’d probably see the glare all the way down in Bangor and think it’s UFOs.” Grandpa popped him a fake punch on his arm. He says my dad is his favorite son-in-law, but then, Dad is his only son-in-law.

  “Roberta, would you go get Grandpa’s present?” my mom asked. “It’s in my bedroom.”

  Did I mention that the middle child is also the family slave? Roberta, get this. Roberta get that. Tina’s too little and Johnny is too grown-up and self-important to fetch mustard and birthday presents. Sometimes, I wish aliens would take me. I really do. At least I’d be free.

  I found the birthday present sitting on the end of my mother’s bed. I slipped a finger in under the ribbon and lifted it. I let the screen door slam behind me as I stepped outside. I could see my family still gathered around the outdoor fireplace, all orange in the glow. Grandpa was telling them something funny, probably one of his stories about working at Loring Air Force Base before they closed it.

  I started down the path, which is lined with my mom’s lilac bushes. It’s my least favorite place in the yard. At night, the bushes are spooky. They block the rays of porch light and cast shadows on the path. And that’s when I did something very stupid. I remembered the Allagash Abductions. Not all tourists who come here to take the river trip have a great time. One summer night in 1976, four men from Vermont put up their tents in a campground and then made a huge bonfire on the shore. They wanted it to burn for hours since it gets darker than dark in the woods at night. The four of them got in a canoe and paddled out into the lake to fish. That’s when they saw a round, white ball in the sky. One of the guys signaled it with his flashlight. When it started coming toward the canoe, they paddled like heck. Next thing they know, they’re onshore again and the big fire they had just made was almost out. Years later, they were hypnotized by an expert in UFOs. Sure enough, they’d been taken aboard a spaceship and examined by aliens, creatures with big heads and large black eyes. The man who hypnotized them wrote a book called The Allagash Abductions. So that’s our claim to fame here in town. But don’t take my word for this. Go ahead and google it. Go to YouTube.com and make up your own mind.

  So there I was, standing in the shadows of Mom’s lilac bushes right after my family had also seen a strange light in the sky. And now the bushes were moving in the wind like living things. Bushes, for crying out loud, Roberta. Lilac bushes! Get a grip. And that’s when I saw it. It stepped out in front of me and stood there. The large, round head, the big, black eyes. I felt the birthday gift drop to the ground at my feet. My heart was beating so loudly that I could hear it. I tried to scream but nothing came out. “Help me, Mom! Save me, Dad!” Those words stayed in my mouth. And then the head, with those awful eyes, moved out of the shadows and right up to me. A round, white head with huge black eyes…

  “Mom! Make Johnny stop scaring me!” Those words came out easily enough. And they got my mom’s attention.

  “Jonathan McKinnon, leave your sister alone and I mean this!” She always means it, but he never listens. Ever since he went to a movie with Miranda Casey, he thinks he’s all that and a bag of chips. She may be the prettiest girl in school, but how smart can you be if you go to the movies with my brother?

  “You are such a girl,” Johnny whispered, laughing his mean laugh. Then he bounced the soccer ball he’d been holding in front of his face. Huge white head with big, black eyes? A soccer ball! “Good thing a sweater can’t break or you’d be using your allowance to buy Grandpa a new gift.”

  I bent down and patted the ground near the lilac bushes, looking for the present. It had fallen on its side, but it seemed okay. And that’s when it happened a second time.

  “There it is again!” I heard my father say. “Now there are three of them!”

  “Awesome!” said Johnny.

  By the time I stood up, holding the present against my chest, it was over. Apparently the ball of light had zoomed back and brought a couple of friends. Or so I heard later from Mom. Then the lights disappeared over the mountain.

  “Did anybody else hear a whirring sound?” Grandma wondered.

  It took about thirty seconds for everyone to announce that they too had heard sounds, which varied somewhat. Humming. Buzzing. Droning. Whining. Purring. You name it and they’d heard it. Everyone but me.

  I stood there staring up into the night sky. I could hear the fire snapping in the fireplace. I could hear frogs croaking down at Frog Pond in the meadow. I could hear June bugs hitting against the screen door, trying to get inside. I could hear Mr. Finley’s dog barking from his doghouse a quarter mile down the road. I could hear the river lapping at rocks along the shore. But nothing whirred, hummed, buzzed, droned, whined, or purred. All I could see up in that enormous sky were thousands of softly twinkling stars. I could see the Milky Way streaking white across the heavens. And the crescent of moon, a fingernail above the mountain. I’d missed the excitement again.

  That’s when I felt something crawling, inching its slimy way along the back of my neck. I screamed as I whacked it away. It was a cold string of spaghetti held in the hand of my big brother.

  “You are such a girl,” he whispered. I didn’t even bother to report this one to my mother. What good would it do? I was stuck until he got old enough to move out of the house. Before I went back to the picnic table for a big piece of birthday cake, which I most certainly deserved, I looked up into that heaven of stars.

  “Take him, please,” I whispered. “Abduct my brother. And don’t ever bring him back.”

  2

  Frog Hill

  Most people in the little town of Allagash didn’t believe the story of the 1976 abductions. Some felt it wasn’t good publicity for the town, that it might frighten away our tourists. Besides, there were worse things to worry about, such as if we could get a permit to use fireworks at the big Fourth of July celebration. That’s why I was surprised the next day when everyone was talking about the strange lights.

  At the post office, Lila Jandreau asked if I’d seen them.

  “Nope,” I said. I paid for the book of stamps my mom needed and then hurried out. I didn’t want to hear how amazingly weird and altogether astonishing they were.

  At the grocery store, Bill Flagg asked the same thing. Did you see those wild lights? Did you see how they zipped around and then just disappeared? Did you see, did you see, did you see? I was sick of being asked. Even old Mr. Finley, who has cataracts in both eyes, saw the lights. And so did his dog, Mutt, which is why I’d heard him barking last night.

  The Bangor Daily News bragged about it: STRANGE LIGHTS SEEN OVER NORTHERN MAINE. HUNDREDS WITNESS THE SIGHTINGS. Well, count me out of the hundreds. Apparently, I’m doomed to suffer a life of boredom in the sticks at the end of the road. We don’t even get any serial killers this far north. It’s just too far for them to travel.

  For the next week, it was like living in Crazy Town. There were all kinds of sightings by just about everyone. Mr. Cramer at the gas station. Faye Hafford at the library. Chad Putnam, who drives the UPS truck. Wayne McBridy, who manages Allagash Canoe Rentals. Darlene Dumond at the River Café. Vernon and Sylvia Martin, who own the tree farm. UFOs for sure, everyone said. Cigar-shaped, dish-shaped, ball-shaped, kidney-shaped, you name it.

  However, the Bangor Daily News now quoted someone at an Air Force base in Vermont to put the mystery to rest. “We have determined that the sightings in northern Maine over the past few days are caused by the reentry of rocket debris into Earth’s atmosphere.”

  While most people didn’t believe that, they did believe, like Grandpa, that the Air Force was up to no good. My dad and Uncle Horace agreed. Secret tests for planes or maybe helicopters. However, a few UFO fans such as Mrs. Cramer and Josh Turner were certain that aliens had visited Allagash again. To me, it didn’t matter what the lights were. I just wanted to see them for myself. How else could I come to my own conclusions?

  T
hat’s why I was happy to run into Sheriff Mallory at the post office. Sheriff Mallory is pretty wise and he sort of put things in place for me.

  “Remember, Roberta,” the sheriff said. “No matter what you see, hear, or read, everything has a logical explanation. Don’t let folks fool you with all these sightings. I’m out there on patrol almost every night, and I’ve yet to see anything strange in the sky. I’ve seen the Space Station many times. Jupiter. Airplanes and shooting stars. It can all be explained.”

  That helped me a lot. But what finally brought me peace was that my best friend, Marilee Evans, also didn’t see anything extraterrestrial. Either that, or she was pretending so that I wouldn’t feel so, well, alienated. Marilee and I have been best friends for almost a year, ever since her mom moved back home to Allagash after her divorce from Marilee’s father. We bonded the first day we met, when I taught her how to pronounce Allagash. It’s “Al-UH-gash,” and not “ALL-uh-gash,” with two “ls,” the way some tourists say it.

  “You could write a story for the school paper,” said Marilee. “You know, how people have claimed to see UFOs for thousands of years. There are ancient caves around the world with drawings of spacecraft and creatures wearing helmets.”

  Marilee and I are about the smartest girls in our class. Well, not about the smartest, we truly are. I was just being modest. In science class, we’re awesome. Our big dream is to win the Maine State Science Fair if we can just come up with an amazing project. And guess what? I’m blond! I don’t know who started this “blonds are dumb” notion in the first place. Maybe a dark-haired boy like my brother, Johnny. I have long blond hair and I’m amazingly smart. You might say I’m narcissistic. But then, I can tell you without using Google who Narcissus was. I think this is why Johnny torments me. He calls me a science geek. But he’s jealous since he has to work hard to get Cs when all I get are As. I can get an A with my eyes closed, which is what they were right then. Marilee and I were lying on the two gigantic rocks that we had claimed as our own on the bank of the river. They were almost the size of my bed and flat enough that we could stretch out while we found shapes in the clouds and discussed our boring lives.