“Whoa, that’s some hair,” said Scooter.
“Whose, her aunt’s or her date’s?” asked Calhoun.
“Both of them,” said Lucas, and everybody laughed.
“Erastus Peckinpaugh is my aunt’s old boyfriend,” I said, pulling out my cell phone. “Don’t you get it?” I scrolled through the pictures on it, hoping I hadn’t deleted the one I’d taken on our field trip to the covered bridge. Nope, there it was. I enlarged the bit that showed the graffiti on the rafter. “See there, inside that lopsided heart? Where it says ‘E and T Forever’? That’s got to be Erastus and True! That’s the exact place she chose for her yearbook picture, and I think it’s their meeting spot.”
My friends stared at the program and the picture, digesting all this information. Then Scooter looked up and grinned.
“What are we waiting for?”
Two minutes later, we were running down the road that led out of town, the only light to guide us the full moon above and the faint beams below from the flashlight apps on our cell phones.
We heard the river before we saw it. It was flowing freely again, thanks to the thaw, and as we approached we heard a loud CRACK, followed by a tremendous splash, as a great chunk of ice crashed from the falls into the water.
“Cool,” said Scooter, aiming his light in the river’s direction. “It’s like the Titanic or something.”
We jogged through the mouth of the covered bridge, our footsteps echoing in the dark as the sound bounced off its wooden floor and walls.
Jasmine giggled nervously. “Spooky,” she said.
I shone my light up at the rafters, trying to remember where I’d been standing when I’d seen the graffiti. “It was somewhere in the middle, I think,” I told my friends. “Can you guys all shine your lights up here too?”
They did, and it didn’t take long to spot what I was looking for. “There it is! See? That heart with ‘E and T Forever’ inside? This has to be their meeting place.”
“The envelope’s probably taped to the top of the rafter, just like it was in the steeple,” said Lucas.
“I’ll take a look.” Scooter climbed up onto the railing.
“Watch out!” cried Jasmine, grabbing her twin’s lower legs to steady him. The X-shaped crosspieces along the wall of the bridge left too many wide gaps for comfort.
Scooter batted her away. “Relax, Jazz, I’ve got it.”
Grasping a crosspiece with one hand, he stretched his other up toward the rafter. I glanced down at the moon’s reflection in the river and shuddered. It would not be fun to take a nosedive into that dark, frigid water.
“I can’t quite reach,” Scooter said finally. “I’m not tall enough.”
“I’m the tallest,” I said as he hopped down. “Let me try.”
“No, Truly, don’t,” begged Cha Cha. “Please.”
“I’ll be careful,” I assured her. “Don’t you want to know if it’s up there?”
I hoisted myself onto the railing. The soles of my new heels were slick, and I edged my way cautiously along until I was standing directly under the graffiti. A sharp gust of wind made my coat and dress billow around my legs. I shivered. The tights I was wearing offered little protection, except perhaps for keeping Scooter from singing any more ditties about my underpants.
Holding tight to a crosspiece, I stretched up on tiptoe and reached for the rafter, just the way Scooter had done.
“There’s something here!” I said after a moment of fumbling around.
“Is it an envelope?” Jasmine’s voice was shrill with excitement.
“I think so—hang on a sec.” I took off my mitten with my teeth and picked at the edge of whatever it was with my fingernails. “Got it!” I mumbled triumphantly a moment later, my mouth full of wool. “It’s an envelope!”
I waved my duct-tape prize in the air in triumph, then handed it down to Jasmine. The others crowded around as she held it under the beam of Cha Cha’s flashlight app.
I was climbing down to join them when my left shoe slipped.
“Whoa!” I cried. My arms windmilled as I tried to regain my balance. For a heart-stopping split second I teetered on the railing. And then my big feet betrayed me once again. Or, rather, my big shoes did. Both of them slipped out from under me completely and I landed on the railing with a spine-jolting bounce, then toppled through a gap between the crosspieces.
And then—well, then I did the Polar Bear Swim.
The last thing I heard before the river closed over my head was Cha Cha and Jasmine screaming. The next thing I heard was me screaming. Or what would have been me screaming, if I’d had breath enough to scream. The frigid water had knocked every scrap of it out of me.
I’d never felt anything that cold.
I thrashed in the icy current, gasping and choking. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t see, and worst of all, my jacket was dragging me down. Somehow I managed to wrestle myself out of it. The river swept it away under the bridge, and then it started to sweep me away. I panicked. Flailing blindly in the water, I smacked my hand against one of the pillars that held up the bridge and grabbed at it frantically, trying to get a grip on one of the stones in its base.
I clung there for a few seconds, trying to catch my breath. Somewhere far above my friends were shouting, but I barely heard them. I was too focused on not being swept away again. My shoes were long gone by now, and I jammed my ice-numbed toes and fingers into the crevices between the rocks, scrabbling clumsily as I pulled myself onto the base of the pillar.
Slowly, painfully, I began to inch my way up, collapsing in tears when I finally reached the top of the pillar’s rough, narrow ledge. Only a minute or so had passed, but it felt like an eternity. My head ached. My teeth were chattering like a woodpecker on a tin roof. I was even colder now than I had been in the water, if that were possible, thanks to the bitter wind.
“Truly!”
Someone was calling my name.
“Here!” I croaked. “I’m here!” I looked up and saw Calhoun leaning over the wall of the bridge.
“Scooter and the girls ran for help!” he hollered down.
“We called nine-one-one, too,” added Lucas, who was beside him.
I gave a feeble nod.
Calhoun stretched out his hand. “See if you can reach up and grab hold!”
I eyed the distance between us and shook my head. I didn’t want to risk slipping again. The ledge was so narrow!
“Come on, Truly!” he urged.
With Lucas holding on to Calhoun’s belt for all he was worth, Calhoun stretched even farther down toward me.
“Bravery comes in all sizes,” Aunt True had once said. I took a deep, raggedy breath. Did it come in mine?
I absolutely truly hoped so.
Shaking, I rose to my knees.
“You’re almost there,” Calhoun called down in encouragement as I forced myself to my feet and reached an arm up overhead. “A little to the left.”
His left? My left? My knees were knocking and I was afraid my legs were going to collapse under me. I waved my hand back and forth. My fingertips grazed something. Or someone.
“That’s it!” Calhoun shouted. “I nearly had you!”
It was my height that saved me. That and my Truly Gigantic, size-ten-and-a-half Amazon feet. Summoning every ounce of strength that I had left in me, I stretched myself up on tiptoes as high as I could and reached for Calhoun one more time.
“Gotcha!” he cried.
I promised myself right then and there that I would never, ever complain about being tall again.
It was agonizing. I was afraid to move even a fraction of an inch, for fear I’d plunge back into the river, dragging my friends with me. My toes, my legs, my fingers—my entire body was cramped with cold. I ventured a glance downward, which was a bad idea.
This is definitely at the very top of the list of things I’m not good at, I thought, closing my eyes to block out the terrifying sight of the dark water flowing swiftly past.
> My arm felt like it was being pulled from its socket. What am I good at, then? I listed the things that came to mind: Swimming. Bird-watching. Sudoku. Window displays at the bookstore. And pre-algebra, thanks to my father’s tutoring.
My father.
Lovejoys can do anything, he’d tell me if he were here.
Even this?
I wasn’t so sure.
And then, finally, I heard a siren in the distance, followed by the sound of voices shouting my name. Footsteps pounded on the wooden floorboards of the bridge overhead. There were more shouts directly above, and then a voice I recognized. I opened my eyes and looked up to see that it was my father. A great sob of relief burst from me.
“Hang on, Truly!” He anchored himself to an eyebolt with his hook and reached down to me with his good hand.
“Don’t let go, Dad!” I begged him as his fingers closed around my wrist. “Please don’t let me go!”
“Never,” he told me. “Cross my heart and hope to fly.”
CHAPTER 38
“I’m really, really glad you went with Captain Hook tonight, Dad,” I said later, when we were safely back at the Town Hall. The music had stopped and people were milling around everywhere. They’d burst into spontaneous applause when the rescue vehicles finally pulled up out front.
“Me too, honey,” he replied, putting his good arm around me and kissing the top of my head.
The rescue was a bit of a blur. My father held on to me until the fire department arrived and pulled me to safety. I was shoeless, of course, and practically blue with cold, and I’d gotten pretty bruised and scraped up too. But at least I was alive. The firefighters bundled me into blankets and made me take off what was left of my wet, tattered dress so I wouldn’t get hypothermia, and then they took me directly to my mother.
She started to cry when she saw me. “You’re safe!” she kept repeating, hugging me tightly as if to assure herself that I wasn’t going to go flinging myself from another bridge at any moment. “My brave girl!”
I shook my head, which was buried in her shoulder. “It was Dad,” I told her. “Dad’s the one who’s brave. He didn’t let go, and neither did Calhoun and Lucas.”
I smiled at my two friends, whose faces were pink from all the praise they’d been showered with. Lucas’s mother had him in a death grip, though. The poor kid would probably never be allowed out of the house again.
My mother kissed the top of my head. “What were you thinking, sweetheart, going down to the bridge like that?”
“We were looking for something,” I told her.
“This,” said Cha Cha, pulling the duct-tape-covered envelope out of her jacket pocket.
Erastus Peckinpaugh, who had been hovering at the edge of the crowd that surrounded me, looking more stork-like than usual, suddenly froze.
My mother’s forehead puckered. “That trash was worth risking your life for?”
“It’s not trash; it’s for Aunt True,” I told her. “From Professor Rusty—I mean Professor Peckinpaugh.”
At this, Pippa, who had barnacled herself to my leg the second I climbed out of the fire truck, finally let go. “Punkinpie! Punkinpie! Punkinpie!” she chanted, twirling, and the people gathered around us started to laugh.
Cha Cha took out the envelope and passed it to my aunt.
“You really should read the other letters first,” I told Aunt True. “But they’re back at home.”
We explained about finding the envelopes, and the quotes that were on the letters. Calhoun recited a few, and when he stumbled, his dad stepped in to help him. Aunt True listened silently as we told her how we’d followed the clues, casting a glance up at Professor Peckinpaugh now and then.
“Astounding,” she said when we were done. “You did this all on your own?”
My friends and I nodded.
“Please read the last letter to us,” begged Jasmine. “We have to know how the story ends.”
“Why not?” said Aunt True. Opening the envelope, she drew out the faded piece of paper inside. “ ‘For B,’ ” she began. “ ‘When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.’ ”
“Is that it?” asked Cha Cha. “Just another Shakespeare quote?”
“No, there’s more. It also says, ‘True, will you . . .’ ” My aunt’s voice trailed off. She looked up at Professor Peckinpaugh, her eyes wide with surprise.
“True, will you what?” I reached for the letter, but Aunt True clutched it to her chest. Wait a minute, had Erastus Peckinpaugh just asked my aunt to marry him?
Aunt True shot to her feet. “Why didn’t you say something, Rusty?” she demanded, advancing on the bushy-haired professor. “After I left town you never wrote, you never called—I never heard from you again!”
“I thought you’d followed the clues and found the letters, and you weren’t interested,” he protested, taking a step back.
“How could I possibly have followed the clues?” Aunt True sputtered. “You hid them in a book that didn’t belong to you, and that I never found! What were you thinking, Rusty?”
Erastus Peckinpaugh looked miserable. “I was trying to be clever,” he told her. “I knew that Charlotte’s Web was your favorite book, and when I saw it lying there on the floor that day at the bookshop it seemed like a good idea. You were always the one who tidied up at night; I figured you’d find it right away.”
Aunt True shook her head. “You should have just mailed the letter to me. At least I’d have gotten it that way.”
Professor Rusty sighed. “I was planning to. I’d even picked out a stamp to remind you of all those Civil War reenactments I dragged you to.”
Cha Cha and I exchanged a glance. Another piece of the puzzle solved.
“The point is, I didn’t even see the stamp!” Aunt True snapped.
He glanced at her ruefully then hung his head. “I just assumed you would, just as I assumed you’d put two and two together.”
“What, and get five?” Aunt True threw up her hands.
Dr. Calhoun winked at my friends and me. “ ‘There is a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her,’ ” he quoted in a whisper. “ ‘They never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them.’ ”
Aunt True and Professor Peckinpaugh were still bickering as we gathered our things to leave. On the way out, we passed Ella Bellow, who was collecting her coat from the big rack near the door.
“Hold on a minute, what’s this doing in there?” she demanded as a fuzzy white head poked out from one of the pockets. “This doesn’t belong to me!” Ella’s voice rose in alarm. She spun around, sweeping the crowd with her eyes. Her gaze narrowed when she spotted Belinda Winchester. “Did you put this creature in my pocket, Belinda?”
“Don’t look at me; it isn’t one of mine,” Belinda replied. Turning away from Ella, she gave Lauren and me a mischievous smile. “And that’s not a lie,” she murmured. “Technically speaking, it isn’t one of mine. I didn’t give birth to it.”
My sister and I giggled.
In the end, Ella Bellow went home with a kitten, and the rest of us went home with both mysteries solved at last.
EPILOGUE
The January thaw lingered for three more days after my dramatic rescue, or what everyone in town was calling “a truly big splash.”
That was the headline that had appeared on the front page of the Pumpkin Falls Patriot-Bugle the morning after my rescue. I was mortified at first, but the publicity really gave our bookstore a boost. The news wires picked up the story of the brave wounded-warrior-turned-bookseller who’d saved his daughter, and while Dad isn’t thrilled being in the spotlight—he’s been giving interviews to the media right and left ever since—he’s definitely happy about the effect that the rescue had on our store’s bottom line.
The Winter Festival Committee gave me an honorary blue ribbon for the Polar Bear Swim, which I pinned to the bulletin board above my desk, and Principal Burnside held a special ass
embly at school. He commended Calhoun and Lucas for their part in the rescue, and me for what he called my “valor and panache” (I think that’s another way of saying “bravery”), even though, as he pointed out sternly, we had absolutely no business being at the covered bridge in the first place without adult supervision.
Lots of people have been stopping by the bookstore to meet Dad and check up on me, both locals and tourists passing through. And just like Aunt True predicted, they sample our mini pumpkin whoopie pies and end up buying books.
So everything worked out for the best in the end.
The warm west wind that blew into town along with all the publicity carried with it the promise of spring. It melted the snow sculptures and released the frozen river from the grip of the ice, and ensured what Annie Freeman says will be a S-T-U-P-E-N-D-O-U-S maple syrup harvest this year.
I’ve been spending lots of time in the backyard since that night at the covered bridge, making friends with more of my grandfather’s chickadees. I also added a cedar waxwing and an evening grosbeak and a ruffed grouse to my life list.
There would be more birds to add, come spring. Spring meant the return of meadowlarks and barn swallows, orioles and towhees, tanagers and buntings. And out on Lake Lovejoy, there would be osprey to watch diving for fish.
It might not be so bad to be stuck here in Pumpkin Falls, I decided, come spring.
Plus, my birthday was just around the corner, and that meant Mackenzie’s visit. I was looking forward to introducing her to my new friends.
“You know, I could have saved myself a whole lot of trouble if I’d just given that envelope to Aunt True in the first place,” I mused to Cha Cha and Jasmine, stepping carefully around a puddle of slush as the three of us made our way downtown after school one afternoon.
“Yeah, but if you had, we might not all be friends,” Cha Cha replied.
“And there’d be no Pumpkin Falls Private Eyes,” added Jasmine.
They had a point. I was going to miss our adventures, but a town this small couldn’t have any more mysteries to solve, could it?