Hunter Moran Saves the Universe

  I take a quick look at him.

  “It’s ten minutes after two,” he says, holding his head. “And I have a meeting at nine in the morning.”

  Head down, I go up the front path. Zack is so close behind me I feel his breath on my neck.

  “I can’t get one night’s decent sleep,” Pop says, “without the two of you involved in one scheme or another.”

  We don’t say anything. What can we say? That there’s a bomb planted a couple of doors down, that I’m going to be toast, that Newfield may be a giant crater any minute?

  He’s not in the mood to hear all that.

  “Go to bed!” he shouts. “Don’t let me hear from you for the rest of the night.”

  Behind him, in the hall, stands Steadman, looking filthy as usual. “Hi, guys,” he says. “Welcome home.”

  IT’S THE SECOND DAY OF SUMMER.

  We’re still…

  Chapter 9

  Alive!

  I open my eyes with the sun on my face. I feel my arms and reach down to touch a bumpy scab on my knee. I’m still here. If Diglio weren’t out to get me, I could relax. We could go back for the bomb and get rid of it without worrying so much. I try not to think about the other guy jumping over the fence last night.

  Mary is singing in her crib, and Mom is downstairs frying bacon into cardboard.

  Pop’s footsteps come down the hall. “Don’t forget about Steadman,” he calls as he passes.

  Steadman. It’s always something.

  Zach groans from the bed across the room. “Cello lesson this morning.”

  Zack, the musical genius, has another major problem: the concert at the town round on Tinwitty Night.

  “Maybe it would have been better if the bomb had blown me to a Pacific atoll,” he says.

  I don’t know what an atoll is, but I get the idea. He’s had a year to compose a cello piece for the concert, but all he has is Do Re Mi Mi Mi. Or something like that. And the cello is in very bad shape. Ruined, as a matter of fact.

  That reminds me of Pop, on his way to the station, swinging his computer case, unaware that the innards are sloshing back and forth with every step he takes.

  “What’s going to happen when Pop opens the laptop?” Zack asks, reading my mind again.

  “Don’t think about it. Think about the cello instead.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have bashed it over William’s head after all,” he says.

  “What’s done is done. You just have to get a good story together for Old Lady Campbell.”

  We shake our heads together. She’s wicked old, with a wrinkled face, and she hobbles around on a cane, but our story can’t be … what’s that Sister Appolonia word … dubious.

  “Throw yourself on her mercy,” I say. “Maybe she won’t tell.”

  The bedroom door bangs open. Steadman is standing there. He’s really a mess this morning. The only thing about him that’s clean is his sucking thumb. He throws himself on my bed. “It smells down there in the kitchen,” he says.

  The first of the soup entries must have arrived.

  Steadman leans up on his elbow. “Mom wants to see you.”

  Now what? “We’re on our way down,” I say.

  “Want to hang out today, Steadman?” Zack asks.

  Steadman scratches one muddy knee. “You have a cello lesson.”

  “You can wait with Hunter. I won’t be as long as usual.” Zack looks relieved. It’s the end of cello lessons forever. He just has to tell Old Lady Campbell. Somehow.

  “Nothing to it,” I tell Zack, to bolster him up.

  Steadman is thinking. “Fred loves me. He’s always slobbering over me.” He looks up at the ceiling, happy about Fred’s slobbering.

  But then he shakes his head. “Nah, I have to stay home. I have some buried treasure to look at.”

  Zack and I shrug at each other. We can’t force him.

  “Besides, Pop won’t be home for hours,” Zack says. “What can Steadman possibly do while we’re gone?”

  One problem solved.

  But breakfast is something we hadn’t expected. Mom is holding an investigation. We sit at the table chomping down the bacon, then chewing on the granola Nana sends every month to keep us fit. It’s rock-hard and the crunch sounds like the garbage truck thundering down Murdock Avenue. At the same time, I try not to breathe in the soup that’s simmering on the stove.

  “This didn’t just happen by itself.” Mom points toward the trellis outside the window.

  I take a look. Usually it looks great, with roses all over it. Today it doesn’t look so hot. “Dead as a doornail,” I say through a chunk of granola.

  “How did it get that way?” Mom’s voice has an edge.

  “Somebody killed it,” William, with a head on his shoulders, says.

  Zack and I realize at the same moment. Last night. The climb. The shovel must have sheared off the root. Zack does that teeth-on-the-lip thing, one side to the other. His eyes slide away from mine. “Not somebody. Some …” He hesitates. “Thing?”

  I notice a long scratch down the side of his cheek. It must have come from the rosebush.

  Zack opens his mouth. He’s confessing?

  But no.

  “Blight kills bushes,” Zack says. “And fungus.” He raises his hand to his cheek, as if he’s thinking. He’s trying to hide the scratch. “It’s probably an army of—”

  “Moles?” I say. The perfect answer. Pop has been having a war with moles for years. The moles always win.

  Zack’s sneakers connect with mine under the table. A foot low five.

  Mom taps her spoon against her lips, and we wait.

  “Maybe,” she says, and then, “Climbing the trellis is not a good thing.”

  “You could break your neck.” I try to sound wise and fearful at the same time.

  Everyone is staring at us. A dangerous moment.

  “Well …” Zack pushes back his chair. “Time for cello. I’ll just get …” He runs upstairs for the empty case.

  “I’ll go with Zack.” I slide out of my seat, heading for safety. “I like to listen to the music.”

  William snickers. He still has a bump on his head from where the cello connected. Besides, he saw us burying the cello at the back of the yard two days ago. Zack and I gave it a great send-off, a funeral with a twenty-one-gun salute. Without the guns, of course.

  Linny shakes her head at Mom. Then Zack and I are off.

  “Are you going to tell Old Lady Campbell the exact truth?” I ask him.

  “Don’t talk,” he says. “I’m trying to think.”

  We head over there, and don’t even have to knock on her door. Fred explodes down the hallway; his eyes bulge and I can count his canines. He’s ready for a quick meal. Old Lady Campbell drags him by the collar and wrestles him into a bedroom as he looks back, snarling. She slams the door, just missing his muzzle.

  “Fred gets a little overexcited sometimes.” She smiles at us with yellow teeth.

  I remind myself to brush and floss so my own teeth don’t look like hers when I’m an old man.

  With a bony hand on Zack’s shoulder, she guides him into her studio. I sink into a kitchen chair to wait. Over my head, the curtains are sheared off halfway up. “Fred loves the taste of lace,” Old Lady Campbell told us once.

  I sit there, dying of boredom. I slide open a drawer. Knives, forks, and a bottle of Feel Like New tablets, four a day for four months. The pills are the size of elephants galloping though the rain forest … or wherever they gallop.

  Yuck.

  The next drawer is filled with pictures that might have been taken a hundred years ago. Looking at them makes me dizzy. Upside-down mountains. Tilted houses. And is the one on top Old Lady Campbell in goggles? Piloting a plane? Brown hair streaming out behind her?

  I tilt my own head. Maybe that was it. She was taking pictures of herself and the rest of the world from the plane.

  I’m right. The next bunch of pictures are all of planes, some just th
e wings, some just the tails, one just the wheels.

  Cheech! What a waste of time.

  I breathe in. Something is bubbling along on her stove. It’s mostly green with some yellowish lumps here and there.

  Let me guess. She’s going to enter the soup contest.

  There’s a crumb cake on the table. I pick a fat lump off the top. Delicious, but obvious. It leaves a blank space in the middle of the cake. I stare at it, turning the plate in different directions.

  What a trying summer this is. A spy after me with a bomb, Steadman, the trellis, and now this. It’s almost too much. Oh, and don’t let me forget Pop’s laptop.

  I poke at the lumps around the space, trying to edge them closer together, but it only disturbs the white sugar. Now, in addition to the space, a dark spot surrounds it, looking like a bomb crater.

  Something squirrels into my mind. But who can think with Fred barking like a maniac in the bedroom and a plane from Sturgis Air Force Base zooming overhead, its engine loud enough to rattle the dishes?

  Carefully, I edge a crumb off the edge of the cake. “Bom/Twin,” I whisper, and drop it into the crater.

  Not bad.

  Notes are sawing in the studio. How could that be? It comes to me in a flash. Old Lady Campbell is going to lend Zack a cello. He must be devastated.

  I reach into the drawer, slide out a wicked knife, and whittle a half-inch away from all four sides of the cake. Precisely. Like a surgeon amputating someone’s arms and legs. I chew thoughtfully.

  “Good job,” I hear Old Lady Campbell telling Zack.

  “Good job,” I say to what’s left of the crumb cake.

  But why am I uneasy?

  I have a lot to be uneasy about. And the very worst is Diglio, with a bomb unburied in his backyard.

  Bomb. I stand up. The chair tips over and bangs against the refrigerator. I rush down the hall—past the bedroom with Fred in a frenzy—and slam open the studio door.

  “We have to go home right now,” I tell Zack.

  In an instant, Zack catches on. “Hunter’s had some problems lately,” he says.

  “What’s the problem?” Old Lady Campbell yells over Fred’s noise.

  “It’s a sickness.”

  I can hardly talk, with what’s facing us at home. “It’s Olyushka disease,” I manage.

  “Rare,” Zack says. “We have to get him into bed.”

  We race down the hall. Behind us, Old Lady Campbell leans on her cane. “I may be old, but I’m not daft,” she mutters.

  Whatever that means.

  “Take the cello,” she calls out the door after us. “Be careful with it. It was mine when I was ten years old.”

  An antique.

  Outside, I blurt out, “Danger of the worst kind.”

  We dash across St. Ursula’s front lawn, get soaked in the sprinkler, and head for our kitchen door.

  Chapter 10

  Mom is in the backyard with Mary, pruning the rosebush. “Maybe I can save it yet,” she says.

  “Great.” I don’t stop.

  “Lunch sandwiches on the kitchen table.” She wipes her forehead. “How was the lesson?”

  “Learning Bach,” Zack says.

  I’m almost dancing up and down on the back steps as he launches into Bach’s life story.

  He’s probably making half of it up.

  At last we skitter into the kitchen and grab a pair of tuna fish sandwiches to take with us. Linny blocks the hallway. Not only is she reliable, she has reliably big ears. “I heard Pop tell you to watch Steadman,” she says.

  Becca is right behind her, ready to stick her nose into our business. “What are they up to now?” she says.

  “Let us pass,” I tell them desperately.

  Linny puts her hands on her hips. “Now I’m the one who’s been stuck—”

  “We’re going up to him right this minute.”

  Linny pokes her skinny finger in my face. “Good luck. He’s locked in his bedroom.”

  “And who knows what he’s up to,” Becca adds.

  “Out of the way,” Zack says, “or get bopped in the beano.”

  They step aside and we dash upstairs.

  “Remember last night,” I ask Zack when we reach the top, “someone jumped over the fence into Diglio’s yard?”

  “How could I forget?” But then he sees where I’m going with this. His eyes widen. “You think it was Steadman?” he sputters. “Out in the middle of the night with a buried bomb? By himself in Diglio’s yard?”

  “Not by himself. We were there.”

  Zack breathes in. “He went out the front door.”

  “And he was mud filthy—” I begin.

  “And ready to play with buried treasure.” Zack leaves tooth marks in his lower lip. “Yeow! The bomb! We’re all going to the stratosphere.”

  Linny’s right as usual. Steadman’s door is locked. I rattle the knob.

  “Let us in,” Zack says, nose to the crack.

  “What’s the password?” Steadman asks.

  He does this every time. It could be anything.

  “Tinwitty Night,” I say through a mouthful of tuna fish.

  “Soup,” Zack says.

  Steadman’s laughing. “Not even close.”

  “No time to waste,” I tell Zack.

  Zack nods. “Let’s go back to our bedroom.”

  “We’ll eat all that candy.” My voice is loud.

  “I’m coming.” Steadman fumbles with the door.

  We hear clicks and clacks and rattles.

  “It won’t open.” He sounds a little frantic.

  I crouch down, trying to look through the keyhole. “Just jiggle the thing again.”

  He jiggles. Nothing happens.

  “Listen, Steadman, what does your buried treasure look like?” Zack asks.

  Steadman bangs on the door. “I have to get out of here.”

  “Don’t worry,” I say.

  Zack and I look at each other. We’re worried, all right. “Out the window again,” he says.

  But this time it’s a different route. We race up the attic stairs, jump over a pile of old clothes, push aside our long-dead great-grandfather’s picture in what looks like gray underwear, and head for the window. Down below, Mom is still pruning, her shears flashing. Mary’s asleep on the grass. William sits in back on the cello’s grave.

  “Maybe the bomb won’t spread out as far as the yard,” Zack says. “The rest of the family might be saved.”

  “Are you kidding? St. Ursula’s will be a pile of rubble. And forget about Father Elmo’s lawn.”

  “Fred, too,” Zack says, with some satisfaction.

  I push up the window and release a thousand flies outside.

  Mom looks up and I duck back. “You’ll have to go down there,” I whisper. “Talk about Bach or someone.”

  Zack doesn’t waste a moment. He clatters down the stairs. I don’t waste a moment, either. By the time he’s telling Mom about Bach’s terrible bout with blindness, I’m out the window backward, reaching for Steadman’s sill with my feet. It’s terrifying. I don’t want to think what will happen if I miss. But we’ve done this before.

  Steadman opens his window and, moving an inch at a time, I finally tumble inside.

  I hold out my hand. “Where’s the treasure?”

  “Where’s the candy?”

  I reach into my pocket. All I have is a linty Life Saver. I hold it out. I see the black box, trailing dirt and tied up with a rope that has about a thousand knots. It waits for us, like a giant squid ready to destroy us.

  I have to think fast.

  The weedy woods are only a trek across the street, past the driveway of the empty house, and—

  I have a better idea. Lester Tinwitty’s soup kettle on the town round! That baby is so thick it’ll take the blast easily. Lester would be proud of me.

  I grab the box by the rope with one hand, unlock the door and drag Steadman down the stairs with the other. “Taking Steadman to the park, Mo
m,” I call over my shoulder.

  Zack catches up, and we dash along Murdock Avenue until we reach the town round. Already the stores have put up flags in their windows.

  And there it is, the enormous black soup kettle looming up in front of us. We wend our way down the path; up ahead Old Lady Campbell is giving Fred his daily outing.

  “Stay down here with Zack, Steadman,” I say. “I’ll climb up to the kettle.”

  He opens his mouth, but I pay no attention. I climb the six steps slowly, holding the box out in front of me, like Son of Dracula, Wednesday night, seven-thirty. I look back over my shoulder. I can see Diglio’s, St. Ursula’s, and the garbage cans in front of our house.

  A plane from Sturgis Air Force Base zooms overhead, and Steadman yells, “What are you doing with my treasure?”

  I don’t answer. The cover is opened a couple of inches. Not enough. I’ll need both hands for this. It’s heavy as lead. I put the box down and begin to push. After a minute or two of strongman effort, I raise myself up and peer into Lester’s Kettle. It’s soup, all right. Candy wrappers, dead flies, and a few leaves float around in a muck of leftover rain. Lester Tinwitty would be horrified.

  Steadman starts up the stairs.

  “Stand back,” I say, but before I can even add “Bombs away,” there’s something else to worry about. A black-and-white patrol car has just pulled up in front of our house. Two cops with nightsticks bristling from their belts are heading up our front path.

  Before I can drop the bomb into the pot, Steadman grabs it and runs, the bomb ticking its life away in his arms.

  Chapter 11

  “Come back!” I yell to Steadman, who zigzags across the street. He races through Father Elmo’s sprinkler and disappears around the side of the church.

  We gallop toward the church, too, glancing back at the patrol car.

  Zack reads my mind. “Let William with the head on his shoulders take care of the cops,” he says breathlessly.

  But Linny is heading our way. “Hunter! Zack!” she screeches. You’d think she’d be worried about the cops hauling us off.

  Steadman comes back, the bomb gone. Any minute, St. Eggie’s head is going to blast off all over Newfield.