The Summer Experiment Read online

  As I was snipping dead leaves from the plants, I noticed a man standing in front of a tombstone near the back fence. When he saw me, he waved and I waved back.

  “How are things going, young lady?” he asked.

  It was Mr. Mallory, our former sheriff. I stood and brushed the dirt from my jeans. Then I said a quick good-bye to Grandpa, with a promise to visit him again the next week. I made my way past other headstones, pausing now and then to pay my respects when it was someone I remembered, such as Mrs. Ethel O’Leary. Mrs. O’Leary had been my babysitter from the time I was born until I got old enough to stay home on my own.

  “Hello, Mr. Mallory,” I said. “I guess things are going okay,” I added, finally answering his question. I looked at the writing on the stone he was visiting. Simon Joseph Mallory. 1930–2001.

  “You probably don’t remember my father,” he said, and nodded at the name.

  “No, sir,” I said. “But I heard of him. Grandpa used to say he was a very fine lawman.”

  “He was,” Mr. Mallory said, his eyes looking sad. “He was, and he taught me everything I know.”

  “Why do people have to die?” I was surprised I asked this. But it just sort of popped out. I mean, I sort of know the answer. It’s all a part of the Great Plan, whatever that is.

  “Well,” said Mr. Mallory. “That’s a tough one. And there are all kinds of answers to it. As many answers as there are religions in the world. And for those folks who don’t believe in a religion or a god, I guess their answer would be that it’s just nature’s way.”

  “It’s a stupid way,” I said, “no matter how you answer it.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” he said. “But all we can do while we’re on the planet, Roberta, is our very best. My dad used to say we should leave Earth better off than when we found it. If we can do that, then we’ve done our part.”

  “How can we leave it better?” I asked. “By recycling maybe?” I needed to get that Coke bottle out of the trash and put it in Mom’s recycling barrel. What was I thinking by throwing it away?

  “That’s one way, for sure,” said our former sheriff, although it was still hard for me to think of him that way, especially now that Harold Hopkins seemed likely to become his replacement at the next town elections.

  “Do you still miss your dad?” I asked. I was hoping someone would tell me that one day the sadness would go away.

  “I do,” he said, “and I think of him every day. But our job as those left behind is to live and enjoy ourselves while we’re here. Your grandpa would want you to do that, Roberta.”

  “Grandpa told me not to spit into the wind,” I said then. “He told me to always keep the wind at my back.”

  “Well, that’s certainly good advice,” Mr. Mallory said. “Bob Carter was a fine man.”

  “Grandpa was always giving me advice,” I said. It was true. Never give the devil a ride ’cause he’ll want to drive. Don’t change horses in the middle of the stream. A whistling girl and a crowing hen always come to a bad end. Although, I have to admit I never understood that last one.

  “My father gave me good advice too,” Mr. Mallory said then. We both watched as a rabbit scooted out from behind a headstone and began munching the clover that grew nearby. “He always said, ‘To thine own self be true.’ That’s pretty good counsel.” I kicked the end of my Nike at a red plastic rose that had blown off one of the floral pieces and watched it roll a few inches and stop.

  “Yup, Sheriff, I reckon it is and that’s a dang fact,” I said. I don’t really talk like that. I mean, I’ve never said the words “reckon” or “dang” in my life. But I had just watched an old black-and-white Western with Dad. In one scene, a cowboy pushes his hat back on his head and says that to the town sheriff. Then he kicks a tumbleweed with his boot. I thought it was the coolest line. And when was the last time you kicked a tumbleweed, which is really a hedgehog with no legs?

  “Yup, I reckon it is,” I said again and kicked the plastic rose once more. I saw a slight smile play around Mr. Mallory’s mouth.

  “Well, I better be getting on home,” he said. “Mrs. Mallory has probably called Harold Hopkins by now and reported me missing.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about him finding you,” I said. “Not unless you stop at the River Café for a donut.”

  Mr. Mallory smiled outwardly this time. But before he left, he looked again at his father’s grave. Beneath the name and the date were these words that we read together silently: Lord, who may dwell in your sanctuary? Who may live on your holy hill? He whose walk is blameless and who does what is righteous, and who speaks the truth from his heart. —Psalm 15:1–2.

  “Now, that’s a dang fact, Sheriff,” I said, when I’d finished reading.

  ***

  About 3 p.m., while Stanley Mallory and I were visiting the cemetery, something interesting happened out on Highway 42, right at the turnoff to the Tom Leonard farm. Our mailman, Larry Fitz, saw a red jeep pulled off to the side of the road. A baseball cap lay near the front tire. It was Joey Wallace’s jeep, the only red jeep in Allagash. It was his favorite cap, the one with a fly hook pinned just above the words “Gone Fishing.” The keys were still in the ignition, but there was no sign of Joey. Word of this went around town in minutes. Had anyone seen Joey Wallace? It was finally determined that he was last seen buying a hot dog and an orange pop at Cramer’s Gas & Movie Rentals. Then, he’d driven off in the direction of Highway 42.

  That Joey Wallace was our local clown didn’t help matters, since almost everyone believed it was another of his foolish pranks. “Crazy Joey Wallace” is what Grandma had called him when he asked Sheriff Mallory if he’d been drinking beer that day of the press conference. Joey once took a sheet of white cardboard, four feet long and two feet wide. On the front, he drew a perfect check and made it out for a million dollars. Then he stuck on a fake mustache, put on a pair of eyeglasses, and dressed in a suit. He knocked on Mrs. Barton’s front door and pretended to be the man from Publishers Clearing House. It took her neighbors twenty minutes to calm Phyllis Barton down long enough to tell her that she hadn’t won a million dollars.

  Another time, during a full moon, Joey climbed to the top of the Allagash water tower and spent the entire night up there on the walkway near the top. When we asked why he did it, he said, “I wanted to get a closer look at the moon.”

  A month or two rarely passed without Joey Wallace playing some stupid trick on someone. So, while folks were concerned, everyone felt pretty sure that Joey was hiding out someplace, probably near a telephone so he could make crank calls. We figured he wanted us to think aliens had taken him. That would top all of his other jokes and maybe get him national attention, which he craved.

  Whether Joey was joking or not was really none of my business. I was still disappointed in my fellow man, considering most of them were ostriches. But, mainly, I was brokenhearted over losing my grandfather.

  17

  More Breaking News

  The next day, when I got home from returning a book to the library, Marilee was sitting on my front steps. She followed me up the stairs to my bedroom and waited until I closed the door on any ears within hearing distance.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “It’s time we got focused again with our science project. Those aliens aren’t going to sit up there and wait forever.”

  “What?” I asked. I figured my ears had filled up with wind and dust as I biked back from the library. “Is this the Gutless Wonder I see before me?”

  “Henry has a new project,” Marilee said. “I heard him telling his mother on their back porch. His bandages are off now and he’s back in action.”

  “What’s his project?” I asked, my heart wondering if it should beat calmly or wildly.

  “He’s crossing a hollyhock with a burdock,” said Marilee. “He’s calling it ‘the Helmsby Hollydock.’”
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  “But what’s the point in even doing that?” I asked.

  “It’s something about how the flower will then have prickly needles protecting it so that bees can’t steal the pollen,” she said. I thought about this. It sounded like it might or should be important to mankind, but I still didn’t see how.

  “When was the last time a hollyhock filed a burglary charge on a bee?” I asked, and Marilee laughed out loud. I mean, bees need pollen to eat. But mostly, they carry pollen from one flower to another to fertilize them. Did Henry think the world had too many hollyhocks, one of our prettiest flowers? Okay, this might be the best time to tell you about Henry Helmsby and the Barbie dolls.

  It all started when Henry decided he could improve upon Barbie’s hair. He had put strands from his sister Pearl’s doll under his microscope and saw that they were made of synthetic fibers. So Henry wondered if plant fibers such as bamboo might also work. If so, it might save the Mattel toy company something like fifty cents a year. They would get all excited and want to buy his research. As I said, Henry is a science geek. He’s not an accountant. He did some figuring with a pencil and decided that he needed twenty-five Barbie dolls to conduct his work.

  A Barbie doll isn’t cheap, but Henry’s father is. Henry’s weekly allowance of three dollars meant he could buy one Barbie every two months if didn’t spend a penny on anything else. He soon realized that he’d be in high school by the time he could even begin his research. Therefore, Barbie dolls started disappearing all over town.

  Shawna O’Neal had left three of hers lying on a picnic blanket in the school park. When she returned from getting a soda pop, all three were gone. Lexi Desjardins had put hers in her mom’s shopping cart while she inspected the potato chips at Flagg’s Grocery. Same thing. Gone. Caitlin Overlock left two Barbies sitting on her porch steps discussing their wardrobes while she went inside to answer the phone. No sign of the Barbies when she returned.

  Over and over again, everywhere in town, little girls were losing their Barbie dolls and calling Sheriff Mallory and bursting into loud tears. After the sheriff’s ears couldn’t take the crying anymore, he decided to let Deputy Harold Hopkins do a stakeout with his granddaughter’s Barbie. He figured Harold would be able to handle a doll caper. The stakeout Barbie was dressed in a snappy red sweater and a blue denim skirt and was placed strategically near the drop box at the post office. Deputy Hopkins sat hidden behind the oak tree across the road and ate a box of chocolate donuts as he waited.

  Sure enough, in no time Henry Helmsby was observed crawling, crab-like, out from behind the mailboxes at the side of the post office. He snatched up Barbie and ran, the deputy right behind him with the blue light swirling and the siren roaring on the police car. Sheriff Mallory wasn’t happy that Harold had made the arrest of a boy over a Barbie doll so public. It wasn’t really an arrest anyway, since the sheriff just drove Henry over to his house and talked quietly to his parents.

  Mr. Helmsby found a box up in Henry’s room with twenty bald Barbies all reaching their arms up, as if pleading for help. Henry was forced to mow lawns all that summer to pay for the dolls that Mrs. Helmsby drove to Caribou to buy and replace. When Pearl Helmsby got her new doll, she kept it under lock and key in her bedroom. The kids at school figured Barbie might just pack her suitcase one night, throw it into the trunk of her pink Corvette, and drive away from Allagash, rather than live in the same house with Henry.

  “Are you even listening to me?” Marilee was asking and waving a hand in front of my face.

  “Sorry,” I said, and shook the cobwebs from my mind. “I was thinking of Henry.”

  “I’m really not here about Henry,” she said. “I know you’ve had the heart kicked out of you lately. I mean, I still have both my grandfathers. So it’s time your best friend took charge for a while.”

  Somebody get the smelling salts—and get a lot of them. But I knew she was just saying this stuff to cheer me up. All I had to do was call her bluff. And once I got my heart back, that’s just what I would do.

  “What do you think happened to Joey Wallace?” she asked then. The whole town was humming about his disappearance. You could almost hear it too, like the noise you make when you rub a wet finger around the mouth of a glass.

  “I don’t think aliens would take Joey,” I told her. “If they did, they’d know in thirty seconds it was a mistake and put him back.”

  “Then where is he?” Marilee asked.

  “Uncle Horace says Joey has a girlfriend down in Caribou. He says that’s who abducted him. He’s probably hoping this will get big enough for the story to go viral.”

  “Girls?” Mom was shouting up the stairs, a habit of hers lately. “You should come down and hear this.”

  ***

  In the living room, Mom had the TV on. I could see Stanley Mallory’s face. They had interrupted the local news, Mom said, for an important message.

  “I had hoped this UFO thing would quiet down so we could live in peace,” said Mom. “I don’t think the White House has this many press conferences in a month.”

  After a few blasts of feedback from the microphone, Stanley Mallory cleared his throat and looked directly into the camera.

  “Folks, I’ve had a lot of sleepless nights in the past month,” he said. “I’ve been tossing and turning over what is right and what is wrong. Yesterday, I paid a visit to someone I haven’t talked to in a long time, someone who always gave me good advice along with the cold, hard truth.”

  “‘Lord, who may dwell in your sanctuary?’” I recited. “‘Who may live on your holy hill?’”

  “What?” asked Mom.

  “What?” asked Marilee.

  “Nothing,” I said, my eyes still glued to the television.

  “Now I stand here before you today,” Mr. Mallory continued, “ashamed to admit that I lied to you all. I also want to thank a young citizen of this town for helping me make this decision I’m about to announce.”

  When Mom glanced suspiciously at me, I shrugged my shoulders. But I could feel my heart coming back to me. I could feel my old self rising up and wanting to enjoy my life again as Grandpa would want me to, just as Stanley Mallory had said.

  “I saw something that night on Highway 42 that I couldn’t identify or explain,” he was saying now. “That means it was a UFO. More than that, I doubt it’s a craft of the planet Earth. It was eons ahead of any technology we have here. I should have stuck to my story, since it was the truth. Now, someone from this town is missing.

  “I’m not saying Joey Wallace was abducted. You all know Joey and how he loves a good joke. But I should have done my job to protect him and all of you. I didn’t. Now, I don’t care if this makes the mayor unhappy and the entire Chamber of Commerce. The truth is the truth.”

  Tons of questions flew at him, but he refused them. He held up a hand for silence.

  “And what’s more, I am withdrawing my resignation as sheriff. I have a missing person report to deal with. If you folks no longer want me in this job, then you can vote me out at the next town meeting.”

  Cheers flooded the room. Faces were smiling and hands clapping, everyone but poor Harold Hopkins, who would be just a deputy again. Even the journalists stopped writing to applaud. Mom turned off the television.

  “Where did you go yesterday on your bike?” she asked.

  I would have answered her, but I was already out the door, Marilee behind me. We stopped on the front porch and looked at each other.

  “Oh, my gosh,” Marilee said. “They really exist, don’t they?”

  “Marilee,” I said. “We have less than a month before school starts again.” It was true. It felt as if the summer had rolled up like a caterpillar and just disappeared on us. “We can think up a new project, but why switch horses in midstream?”

  “I guess you’re right,” Marilee said.

  “Of course, I’m
right,” I said. “Otherwise, we’re spitting into the wind.”

  “I suppose.”

  “We can’t let Henry Helmsby win,” I said. I was on a roll. My heart felt good to be talking again and now it wouldn’t shut up. “If we do, that’s like giving the devil a ride and letting him drive.”

  “Hmmm,” said Marilee, and I knew she was thinking about the devil driving a car.

  “And remember,” I said, “a whistling girl and a crowing hen always come to a bad end.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’ve got a plan,” I said. “I worked on it the whole time you were grounded, and also while you had your head in the sand. I put it aside when Grandpa died. But now I’m taking it off the back burner and putting it right on that big burner at the front of the stove. It makes anything I ever planned before in my life look like kindergarten.”

  “No!” said Marilee, shaking her head. You could understand her hesitation about ingenious plans, I suppose. After all, she was the one living next door to the Helmsbys when their greenhouse blew up.

  “Just hear me out before you say no,” I pleaded. “Let’s go lie on our rocks by the river and discuss it.”

  “Didn’t you just hear me say no, Robbie?”

  “It’s gonna be big, Marilee. Humongous. Right up there alongside the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel. Trust me.”

  “No!”

  But she crawled on behind me as I put the four-wheeler in gear.

  18

  The Grand Scheme

  “Just listen to it, okay?” We were lying on our rocks, watching the clouds float by. Hearing Sheriff Mallory admit what I knew to be true had fueled me. “I’m not talking state science fair now. I may not even be talking national. This would be so big, Marilee, that it could very well be international.”