Surviving Summer Vacation

  “Look, Billy!” I said, pulling him up beside me. “See the buffalo?”

  He glanced out the window, then pulled away. “I want to play with William,” he stated.

  “They’re too far away,” Harry complained. “I hope we’re going to get closer than this to some of them. I thought we were going to see them right up close.”

  I was imagining myself riding with the hunters, fitting an arrow to my bow, ready to bring down the meat to feed my family. I didn’t want to listen to Harry.

  A glance at my sister showed she was thinking that way, too. “Look, Ariadne, there’s a baby one,” she said, and Ariadne put her nose against the glass to watch as we passed the buffalo and left them behind.

  Before we got to Madison, where the road branched, we had seen two does, one buck, and another half-dozen buffalo. None of them was close enough to suit Harry. I was beginning to get tired of Harry.

  Billy refused to put down the cat and look out at the wildlife. After a while, I stopped trying to coax him. To heck with the Rupes, I thought. I was going to enjoy this trip in spite of them.

  We turned off the main road for the first time at the parking area for the paint pots. It was just about full, and Mr. Rupe decided the only thing to do was to park behind a half-dozen cars, though it was obvious that they couldn’t get out until he moved.

  “They all came to see this stuff too,” he said, taking the keys out of the ignition. “Let’s go take a look.”

  Harry looked bored. “We have to walk out on that boardwalk? I think I’ll stay here and make a sandwich.”

  “You’ll get out and come with the rest of us,” Mr. Rupe said. “Move it.”

  There were warning signs before we got onto the boardwalk that had been constructed throughout the area:

  DANGEROUS THERMAL AREAS:

  Boiling water—thin crusts. Always stay on constructed walkways. Drive carefully in steamy areas.

  It is unlawful to throw objects into pools, take pets into thermal areas, feed or molest animals, deface or remove specimens from thermal areas, litter or smoke in thermal areas.

  “Uh, Billy, you’d better leave the cat behind,” I suggested.

  His lower lip jutted out. “I want to take him,” he said. “He’ll get lonesome by himself.”

  “Hang on to him tight,” Mr. Rupe said. “If he falls into one of these hot pots, it’ll cook him.”

  Alison and I seemed to be exchanging glances pretty often. The Rupes didn’t appear to think the signs and warnings referred to them, and after what Mr. Rupe had said, I didn’t see how I could insist on leaving ­William behind.

  Because Billy needed both arms to hold the cat, it wasn’t even possible to hold his hand while we walked, the way Alison was doing with Ariadne. And we hadn’t gone very far along the wooden walkway before it began to make me very nervous.

  The land around us looked like alkali desert in the old Zane Grey novels my grandpa stored in his attic, except that in a lot of places steam was coming out of the ground. And then we were in the middle of the paint pots.

  Even Harry was a little bit impressed by them. “Hey, weird!” he commented. “Pink mud!”

  It was not only pale pink, it was boiling hot. The mud was thick and made bubbles that sort of burped and sent globs up in the air and even onto the edge of the walkway. I couldn’t hold on to Billy’s hand, but I felt safer resting a hand on his shoulder. At least he didn’t resist that.

  The paint pots were mostly sunk into pits in the ground, but the contents bubbled hard enough to bring them splattering out of the tops of the holes. There was pale orange, and a sort of yellowish tan, and a grayish blue. I wondered what the first explorers who saw them had thought. All over the whole area there was steam in the air, drifting and blowing enough to carry its warmth to us.

  Alison grinned at me. “Neat, aren’t they?” she said.

  We went on around the paint pots, and ­circled back to rejoin the main walkway to the parking lot. Right after we’d passed a sign that cautioned STAY ON THE WALKS, Harry suddenly stepped off into a little trickle of a stream and dipped his hand into the water.

  “It’s warm enough to take a bath in,” he marveled.

  An older couple stared at him disapprovingly, but it didn’t bother Harry. “No problem getting off there,” he said loud enough for the couple to hear him. “There’s no boiling water.”

  I muttered under my breath to Alison. “Let’s pretend we don’t know him.”

  “For sure,” she murmured back. And then, looking ahead, she frowned a little. “Lewis, isn’t that the car that’s been right behind us practically all the way here?”

  “The blue Crown Victoria?” I said before I got so much as a glance at it.

  “Yes. Do you . . . think it’s kind of suspicious?”

  Harry overheard that and turned to speak to us. “What’s to be suspicious about? Half the cars from Missoula on were coming to Yellowstone, weren’t they?”

  “They stayed in an RV park with no RV,” I said slowly. “And then they got a trailer and kept on behind us. I think it’s the same car. I remember the license number. Let’s check it out.”

  “It’s the same car where that guy was who said he lost his keys near our motor home. The ones Lewis found in our coach,” Alison said, and now it was out in the open, not just in my own mind.

  “Like Ma said, Billy probably found them and took them inside,” Harry pointed out.

  Billy, with William draped over his shoulder, scowled and said, “I didn’t.”

  “Ariadne, then,” Harry said.

  “What?” Ariadne demanded.

  “Found the guy’s lost keys and took them into the motor home.”

  “No,” Ariadne said. “I didn’t have any keys.”

  Harry swept a careless glance over their faces. “You’re compulsive liars, both of you,” he said, and jogged on ahead, leaving us to deal with the insulted denials.

  Mr. and Mrs. Rupe got back to the coach before we did, and before we reached them, we realized that several angry tourists were swarming around like bees ready to sting. They didn’t like the way the motor home was parked so they couldn’t move their cars.

  “It was pretty darned inconsiderate, pinning us in like this,” one man was saying as we walked up.

  “We were only gone about twenty-five minutes,” Mr. Rupe defended himself.

  “Yeah, and we’ve been held up for twenty minutes waiting to get out. Get that thing out of the way, will you?”

  It was embarrassing. I wondered if Mr. Rupe was as inconsiderate of his customers at the bank as he’d been of people on this trip. “Watch Billy again,” I told Alison. “I’m going to walk over and check out that license plate.”

  Harry didn’t seem to be embarrassed. In fact, he said rudely to one of the protesters, “Hold your horses, mister. We have to load up everybody first.”

  I trotted past the people who were listening to the exchange over the parking, took a quick look, and returned to whisper as we climbed into the coach. “Same license number,” I said. “And that one guy sure looks familiar, but I can’t think where I saw him first. Besides in the car, I mean, coming out of the Columbia River Gorge.”

  “Really?” Alison moved over to peer out the window to where two men were getting into the Crown Victoria. “Hmm. He looks familiar to me, too. I think . . . maybe we saw him in a uniform, or a uniform cap or something . . .”

  That was enough to trigger my memory. “He’s the guy—” I began, but at that moment Mr. Rupe climbed in, slammed the door and practically knocked us down getting into the driver’s seat.

  “Sit down,” he barked at us kids, and then said to his wife, “What a bunch of soreheads. Where else was I supposed to park? There was no more room.”

  I forgot about the Rupes for the moment.

  I knew where I
’d seen the man who had dropped the keys. I couldn’t wait to talk to my sister about it, and I wondered how long it would take to get her alone to do it.

  Chapter 7

  Getting a few minutes alone with my sister was hard to do. None of the Rupes ever took charge of Billy and Ariadne at all. If Alison even took time to go to the bathroom, they were unsupervised and got into trouble, unless I held on to them.

  From the time we left home, we’d both caught Billy digging into other people’s luggage and purses and private belongings. He just seemed to be curious, and he didn’t actually hurt anything, but we didn’t feel as if we could let him do it. I stopped him from stuffing the cat into the map pocket on the back of the driver’s seat. I rescued the Cheerios when Ariadne tried to dump them all out for the birds. I even picked up one of Mrs. Rupe’s cigarettes after it fell out of an ash tray onto the table, where it left a brown burn mark.

  Those things all happened before we even left the paint pot parking area. We waited for a private moment after we turned off on a side road.

  “When we get out,” Alison said softly, “let’s hang behind everybody else, okay?”

  We tried. There were shallow lakes, filled with colorful algae and with steam rising from them, and signs saying not to throw anything into the water.

  “How hot is that water?” Harry asked. “I’m going to see how fast some ice cubes will melt,” and he got out a plastic bag to hold them.

  “Hey, this is neat!” he said a moment later when the ice disappeared the moment it hit the surface of the nearest lake. “You want to dump some in, Billy?”

  This time Billy’d left the cat in the coach, so he dumped in ice cubes and went back for more. Alison, holding tightly to Ariadne so she couldn’t possibly fall into the hot water, rolled her eyes at me.

  Then she straightened up and looked past me with a sober expression. “They’re still with us. The guys in the blue car.”

  “I remembered where I saw that guy before, the passenger, the one who lost his keys in our coach,” I said.

  “So did I,” Alison said. “In a uniform shirt and cap. He’s the one who tried to trade a different motor home for the one we already had. The name on his shirt was Syd.”

  I nodded. “Right. Funny, how someone in uniform looks different in other clothes. I don’t know why it took so long for me to realize why he looked familiar. So why’s the guy from the RV rental place following us?”

  “He might not be following us,” Alison said cautiously. “He might just have been coming here in the first place.”

  “And Harry might follow all the rules,” I said. “Not likely. I’ve been thinking about it ever since we left the paint pots. Syd ­whatever-his-name-is wanted to exchange motor homes, and probably anybody but the Rupes would have done it. So why is it important enough for them to follow us and try to get inside this one?”

  “The money Billy found,” Alison said, stealing my idea. “If he picked up that hundred-dollar bill in the motor home, maybe there’s more hidden there.”

  “A new employee didn’t read the papers carefully enough and just took one that was the right model. When the guys who hid the money in this one discovered what had happened, they tried to trade back, and when Mr. Rupe refused, they came after us. You know, I heard that man snooping around that first morning, and he came back several times hoping to sneak in. He probably knows right where the money is hidden.”

  “Do you think he had something to do with the fire that night at the campground?” Alison asked. “Like maybe he set it to create a diversion so we’d all leave the motor home unlocked while we went to look at the fire?”

  I hadn’t thought of that angle yet, but I nodded as if I had. “And when I went chasing after Billy, the guy was over there by our rig. He was probably the only person in the whole camp who wasn’t curious about the fire.”

  “So what are we going to do? Do you think there’s any point in telling Mr. and Mrs. Rupe?”

  We looked at each other and rejected that idea without further discussion. “What should we do, then?”

  “Try to find the money. Billy could probably tell us where it is, if he would. He must have poked into every cranny in the whole rig.” I glanced over to where Harry was lifting Billy onto a railing, where he balanced him right above the steaming water. “Jeez, if he lets Billy fall—”

  “Let’s see if we can get Billy to walk with us,” Alison suggested, “before he gets boiled alive.”

  It wasn’t a joke. We got really nervous, watching, and it was a relief when Harry swung his little brother down onto the boardwalk again.

  The men in the blue car had parked on the edge of the road, but they didn’t get out and look at anything. I wished I was driving so I could take some maneuvers to prove, once and for all, that they were following us. If it had been Dad, I’d have bet he’d have felt the same, but Mr. Rupe probably wouldn’t even listen to me.

  So we finally went on around the loop—everything at Yellowstone seemed to be on a loop, so you didn’t have to turn around and go back the way you’d come—and headed on to see Old Faithful.

  All around in the distance there were geysers and steam vents. I knew it would be ­dangerous—and forbidden—to walk out and look at them up close, but I imagined what it would be like. I wished Mom and Dad had brought us here, instead of the Rupes; I knew with them we would have found out a lot more about the whole park. The Rupes didn’t seem to want to know anything.

  When we turned in at the road to Old Faithful Lodge, I caught a glimpse of a light blue car just ready to turn behind us. Of course Old Faithful was the most famous landmark in the whole park, so probably everybody stopped here, but my heart was thudding as we cruised into the lot, looking for a place to park.

  It was a huge area, and there were people walking in every direction. Mr. Rupe almost ran into a couple of teenagers who darted out from behind a bus. He swore and slammed on the brakes. They gave him the finger, and Mrs. Rupe said, “Kids have no manners these days.”

  The lot was crowded enough that there wasn’t much maneuvering room, and Mr. Rupe had a terrible time trying to get the big coach into a parking spot. He clipped somebody’s mirror and pushed it out of place, and almost backed into a car that was trying to pull out. Finally he gave up and drove to the very back of the lot. There, there were several spaces next to each other, and he managed to park right in the middle of them, taking up four car spaces.

  “This way,” he said with satisfaction, “nobody’s likely to run into us.”

  My eyes were getting tired from rolling them back in my head.

  Mrs. Rupe had scanned the signs around us while all this was going on. “There’s a general store and a photo shop—you can get some film, Milton, and get pictures of Old Faithful—and I think there’s a place to buy lunch, too.”

  Alison and I were the last ones off the coach. She gave me a worried look. “Do you think those guys will try to break in while we’re gone? They may even have a duplicate key from the RV place.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t see how we can stop them. So far I think they’ve only tried to get in when the motor home was unlocked. If I didn’t want to see Old Faithful myself, I’d stay here and guard it.”

  “I’d be very nervous about you staying here alone,” Alison said. “I think those people have to be crooks. I’ll bet they stole the money they hid in here. Maybe you can get Billy to tell you where it is, Lewis.”

  But Billy denied that he knew where there was any more money. He said he didn’t remember where the hundred-dollar bill had come from. Harry overheard the end of our conversation and offered to carry the money Billy already had, but Billy shook his head. “It’s mine,” he said.

  There didn’t seem to be anything to do except get out and go with the others. I looked around for the blue car and saw it several rows ahead. Nobody had gotten out of it yet.
br />   It was harder to keep it in view when I was down on the ground. As we crossed through that row, though, I could tell there were still two people in it. And when I looked back a minute later, they were gone.

  “I’m going to duck back for a minute,” I hissed to Alison. “If I don’t catch up before you get there, I’ll meet you at the general store, okay?”

  She looked worried. “Don’t take any chances, Lewis. You aren’t the hero type.”

  That stung. I stared after her for a few seconds as they all moved on, wondering why she’d had to say that. I knew I wasn’t an athletic champion, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t do something heroic.

  I wasn’t an idiot, however. I wasn’t about to have a confrontation with two grown men. I saw them already. As I’d suspected, they’d gone in the direction of our motor home, which pretty well proved to me that our suspicions were on target. Everybody else was walking toward either the cluster of buildings where we were headed or on down the path toward the famous geyser.

  Right while I watched, mostly hidden behind a brown van, one of the men shook the door handle. It was locked, of course. Even Mr. Rupe wasn’t stupid enough to leave it open. And it didn’t look as if the men had an extra key for it.

  I hoped they wouldn’t dare force the lock, not there in broad daylight with people all around.

  Alison and the Rupes had disappeared, and not knowing what else to do, I ran in the direction they’d gone.

  The Rupes hadn’t missed me, and Alison looked relieved when I showed up right near the store.

  “They tried the door, but I think they gave up,” I said to her under my breath when I got close. “Boy, this place has a lot of stuff, huh?” I added as we stepped in the door.

  We bought some souvenirs to take home—a Yellowstone cup for Dad, a bracelet for Mom, and I got a black T-shirt with a neat wolf’s head on the front of it, and YELLOWSTONE printed underneath. Alison got one in dark blue with a bison on it.