The Big Dig Read online

  Lucy rolled her eyes. “Would it really have made a difference?”

  “Hey! It’s the principle.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Tomorrow, I want all the details of the family reunion.”

  “How bored are you?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  Lucy turned around, walking backwards. “There’ll probably be nothing to tell.”

  “You might find out what happened.”

  She shook her head. “Doubt it.”

  As she made her way back to the house she gave herself a mental head slap. Why was she being such a weenie? Why hadn’t she just suggested they ask Colin’s mom? But then she remembered something he had said—his mom had “booted it out of here five minutes after she finished high school.” She may not have been around for the fight with Ellen. Lucy felt her shoulders sag. It looked like Ellen might be her only option after all.

  Josie was waiting for her on the front porch. She had changed her clothes and was now wearing a bright yellow dress with a matching yellow hat and sandals. She looked like a banana. A short, wide banana. “Go put a face on,” she ordered. “Then we’ll hit the road.”

  Put a face on. What does that even mean? Lucy schlepped up the stairs to her room. She pulled on a clean shirt, brushed her hair and looped it into a ponytail, then gave her lips a good coating of root beer Lip Smacker. There. Is this a face?

  Ellen lived on the other side of the Cape. It wasn’t a long walk, but the whole way Lucy felt all clenched up inside. What was Ellen going to be like? What should Lucy say to her? Should she pretend she was happy to meet her? Should she just act like everything was easy-peasy? That she was in the dark about everything?

  On Ellen’s front step, Lucy hovered behind Josie. She listened to the doorbell ring inside the house. What if Ellen hadn’t even invited them over and this was some plan Josie had cooked up? What if Ellen didn’t want to meet her either? Or what if Ellen was nasty, or all snooty and looked down her nose at her? I bet that’s what she’s like. Cruella de Vil.

  All those thoughts fell away as soon as Ellen opened the door. She looked so much like Lucy’s mom. A complete stranger, but not. It took Lucy’s breath away.

  “Josie. Lucy. Come in.” She sounded eager and nervous at the same time. “I can’t believe you’re finally here.” Her voice cracked on the last word, and she hugged them both. Lucy longer. As Ellen pulled away, she touched Lucy’s cheek. “You look just like your mother.”

  “So do you,” Lucy whispered.

  “You’ve grown so much,” Ellen said.

  Lucy nodded. Grown so much…since when? Lucy was pretty sure they hadn’t seen each other at Gran Irene’s visitation. When’s the last time you saw me? Maybe no matter how mad you are, you still go to your sister’s funeral.

  “Come on in.” Ellen gestured with her head. “I want you to meet someone.”

  They followed her into the kitchen. Ellen even walked like her mom.

  There was a girl standing at the counter with a spatula in her hand, frosting a cake.

  “Lucy, this is your cousin, Kathleen.”

  The girl looked up.

  Lucy felt her eyes stretch so wide she was pretty sure her forehead disappeared.

  It was Princess Leia. Again.

  Chapter 10

  “Kathleen.” Ellen moved her hand through the air like she was presenting a side-by-side refrigerator-freezer on The Price is Right. “This is Lucy.”

  “Hey.” Princess Leia barely looked up. She was focused on licking the icing off the spatula. “And I go by Kit.”

  Lucy smirked. You don’t say.

  Ellen sighed loudly and grabbed the spatula from Kit just as she was about to stick it back into the bowl, then she turned and smiled. “Hope you like chocolate cake, Lucy.”

  Lucy nodded.

  “Um….” Ellen seemed to be searching for something to say as she smoothed the top of the cake with a clean spatula. “How are you enjoying your stay so far? You’ve had a beautiful stretch of weather.”

  “Yeah, fine, good,” Lucy said hoarsely. Her voice didn’t seem to be working right.

  Ellen stepped away from the cake and said to Lucy, “I can’t tell you how happy I am that you’re here.”

  Lucy couldn’t help but notice her eyes were the same as her mom’s—same colour, same shape. She shifted uncomfortably beneath Ellen’s gaze.

  Josie cleared her throat, pulled out a cigarette that she’d tucked in her hat band, and held it up.

  “Kathleen,” Ellen said. “Go get Josie an ashtray.”

  Kit disappeared and after a second returned with a heavy crystal ashtray that she placed on the kitchen table. Then she looked at Lucy. “Wanna go to my room?”

  “Uh….” Lucy waited for some direction from the adults. None came. “Sure,” she said, and followed Kit upstairs.

  Once behind the closed bedroom door, Lucy said, “So you’re Kit?”

  “Yup.”

  “Unbelievable.” Lucy shook her head. “And in the field. Did you know who I was?”

  “Yup. Well…I suspected. And then once you told me your name….”

  “You could have said something!”

  Kit laughed. “And miss the look on your face when you got here? No way.”

  “Nice.”

  Kit bellyflopped across her frilly, lace-trimmed canopy bed and reached for something on the floor underneath. Sliding out a plastic bin heaped with candy, she rooted around and tossed something at Lucy. “Peace offering?”

  Lucy instinctively grabbed for it then looked in her hand. A Kit Kat bar. “Real funny.” It was her favourite, but she wasn’t about to tell Kit that.

  Kit chose a Coffee Crisp, and as they ate their chocolate in silence, Lucy’s eyes did a sweep of the room. First thing she noticed was that it was very pink—pinks walls, pink curtains, pink shag carpet. There were feather boas, strings of beads and baubles, a couple tiaras, assorted straw and floppy hats, numerous pairs of oversized sunglasses, all hanging off every bed post, dresser knob, anything that could serve as a hook. It looks like a dress-up trunk threw up in here. She did a double take when her eyes landed on a massive pile of Barbies. There must have been at least thirty, stacked like a cord of wood.

  “How old are you again?” Lucy asked.

  “Thirteen,” she said. “Pretty much, anyway.”

  Lucy raised her eyebrows.

  “Okay, I’m twelve. But almost twelve and a half, so then you just round up, right?” Kit picked a chunk of Coffee Crisp off her T-shirt and popped it in her mouth. “How ’bout you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Well, I’m very mature for my age, like, if you’re worried we won’t be intellectually compatible or something.”

  “Uh, okay. Good to know.” Lucy snapped another finger off her Kit Kat.

  “So,” Kit started, balling up her wrapper, “are you going to give me the scoop?”

  Lucy was nibbling a ridge of chocolate off the side of her bar. She always ate the chocolate edge first and saved the wafer for last. “Sorry?”

  “You know. The scoop.”

  “What?”

  Kit sighed dramatically. “Your mom? My mom? The big family secret nobody talks about?”

  Lucy lowered her finger of chocolate. “You mean their fight?”

  “Duh.”

  “Me? I know nothing.”

  Aiming for the garbage can, Kit tossed her wrapper. It hit the rim and tumbled to the floor. “There goes that plan.”

  “Sorry,” Lucy said again.

  Kit sighed. “When I asked Mom why she didn’t speak to her sister, why had I never met her, all she said was that they had a disagreement. Then she clammed right up. I could tell just by lookin’ at her, she felt bad about it.” Kit reached into her candy bin and pulled out an Ae
ro bar this time. “And probably even more now, what with your mom being dead and all, because there’s no way they can ever make up.”

  Lucy looked at her Kit Kat bar. Suddenly she didn’t feel like finishing it.

  “I think the fight had something to do with a desk,” Kit said.

  Lucy frowned. “A desk?”

  “Yeah. Some desk that belonged to our grandfather.”

  “They stopped talking because of a piece of furniture? No way.” Lucy shook her head. That didn’t sound like her mom at all.

  “All I heard,” whispered Kit as if on guard for eavesdroppers, “was there was some antique desk that my mom loved, came all the way from Scotland, always said she wanted it. You can fill in the blanks.”

  Lucy nervously picked at a hangnail on her thumb. From Scotland? Uh-oh. She knew that desk. They had that desk. It was in their living room. “So how did my mom end up with it?”

  “Gran gave it to her.”

  “Shouldn’t your mom be mad at Gran Irene, then?”

  “Maybe she thinks your mom shouldn’t have taken it. You know, since she knew how much my mom wanted it,” Kit added.

  Lucy wasn’t sure if she detected a tone there or not. She felt a twinge of guilt anyway.

  They lay on their stomachs across Kit’s bed, arms hanging over one side, feet dangling over the other. They didn’t say anything for a while.

  Lucy thought about the desk. And how when she was little, she had used it as an apartment building for her Fisher Price people—made them little Kleenex beds in all the cubbies. It was a nice desk, but not nice enough to cause a family war. Lucy wasn’t buying it.

  Kit rolled onto her side, resting her head on her hand. “So, Colin. What’s his deal?”

  “No deal, really.”

  “A bit odd, isn’t he?”

  Lucy swallowed the wrong way and had to sit up. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. “No.” She coughed and pounded on her chest. “He seems normal, I guess.”

  “If you say so.” Kit sounded doubtful. “He looked kinda sweaty. You like him?”

  “You mean like, like?”

  Kit nodded.

  “No,” Lucy said, wrinkling her nose. “Plus, he’s older. Maybe even high school.” And she’d had a mad crush on their paperboy for almost two years now. But that was definitely none of Kit’s business. “We’re just friends. The boredom brought us together.”

  “Okay. I guess that’s cool then.”

  “Why? You interested?” Lucy joked.

  “No siree.” Kit shook her head. “I’m looking for someone a bit more…posh.”

  “Of course you are,” Lucy said dryly. How old are you again?

  “What do you guys do? Just hang out around that hole?”

  “Pretty much.” There was another moment of quiet. It seemed to go on and on. “You could…umm…come by sometime, you know, if you wanted to,” Lucy offered. Shut up! What am I doing? Stop talking!

  “Hmmmm.” Kit rocked her head from side to side like she was thinking it over. “Maybe.”

  “Girls!” Ellen called from downstairs. “Cake!”

  They sat on the back deck for the rest of their visit and had iced tea and chocolate cake. Lucy wasn’t sure how she should act around Ellen. She didn’t think she should be too friendly, but she knew she couldn’t be rude either.

  Ellen asked Lucy a thousand questions—stuff about what she liked to do, friends, school. She really seemed interested. Maybe she was just being nice. Or maybe she was just nervous. Lucy knew she definitely was.

  Trying not to be obvious, Lucy studied Ellen from beneath her lashes. She couldn’t help it. It was like being in a parallel universe—her facial expressions, her voice, the way her hands moved. Lucy was finding it hard to follow the conversation. She was relieved when Josie announced it was time to go.

  Back on Josie’s porch, Lucy fluttered her fingers across Josie’s open Harlequin to get her attention. “What was Mom and Ellen’s fight about?”

  Josie frowned and blinked at her a few times.

  Lucy tried again, carefully enunciating her words and even throwing in some boxing moves.

  Josie’s expression remained unchanged. “Again?”

  Faker. There’s no way you don’t know what I’m saying. Lucy reached for the notepad and pen that were on the wicker table. They were still out from when Muriel had stopped by for a visit. Apparently, Muriel didn’t like to wear her dentures, and no dentures made lip-reading impossible, so she just wrote to Josie instead.

  Flipping to a blank page Lucy printed, in big letters, What did Mom and Ellen fight about?

  Josie’s frown deepened as she puckered and unpuckered her lips over and over. After a moment she said, “Honey, that’s not my story to tell.”

  Huh? She didn’t know what she’d thought Josie’s answer was going to be, but it wasn’t that. She obviously knew. But if she wasn’t going to tell her, who was? Her mom wasn’t an option. It had to be Ellen. “Will Ellen tell me?”

  “When the time is right, you’ll know everything you need to know.”

  What the heck does that mean? “So…from Ellen?”

  “I’m sure Ellen will have a talk with you at some point.”

  “But—”

  Josie held up her hand. “That’s all I’m going to say about it for now.” Her voice was firm.

  Why? Why won’t you just tell me? “But, but….” Lucy’s mind frantically raced ahead, not wanting to lose her chance to learn something, anything. “Was it over a desk?”

  Josie looked at her blankly.

  Lucy ripped the used pages off the notepad and quickly wrote the word desk in giant letters. She held it up, jabbing the paper with the pencil. “A desk. Was it about a desk?”

  Josie’s whole body did a little jerk. “A desk? Gawd! Who told you that?”

  “Kit. Kathleen,” Lucy corrected.

  “Kathleen?” Josie shook her head. “Don’t get me wrong, she’s a precious little thing, but she’s nuttier than a fruitcake. I’d take anything that comes out of her mouth with a grain of salt.”

  With a heavy sigh, Lucy closed the notebook and placed it back on the table.

  Josie pulled a cigarette from behind her ear. “I’m going out to the garden to pick some green beans for our dinner.” She said it as if their previous conversation had never happened, like everything was normal.

  There was a flip in Lucy’s stomach. Josie had cooked green beans a few nights ago. She’d boiled them for so long, they were no longer green beans; they were drab, grey-brown beans.

  Lucy watched her huff and puff her way across the yard.

  Mentally exhausted, Lucy headed for the quiet of her room. Once upstairs, she sank into the chair by the window and tried to weed through the tangle of thoughts in her head. Everything that had happened today only ended up creating more questions and no answers. It was like the cosmos was playing some joke that everyone was in on except her. And Kit. Whatever happened, it had to have been pretty epic to make everyone refuse to talk about it. Either that, or it was so stupid everyone was too embarrassed to talk about it. She dug her palms into her eye sockets and pressed hard. It shouldn’t be this difficult to find out the truth.

  She slouched even deeper into the chair, feeling frustrated and sulky. The tag on her T-shirt was rubbing against her sunburnt neck and she kept scratching at it. Every time she did, she winced. But she still kept doing it. The last scratch made her yelp out loud. “I need Noxzema,” she muttered. Josie would have Noxzema. Everybody had Noxzema. At least, that’s what her mom said.

  She tried the medicine cabinet in the bathroom first. Nail polish remover, hand lotion, a compact of robin’s-egg blue eyeshadow, a compact of blush, three lipsticks, a giant fluffy powder puff, Polident, a tube of something called Minard’s Liniment. She unscrewed the cap and took
a whiff. Ick. It made her eyes water. She’d smelled it before—on Josie. There was a roll-on deodorant, a bottle of Tums, but no familiar blue jar. She looked down the hall at the yellow room that used to be Gran Irene’s, now Josie’s. Lucy knew Josie hadn’t come back yet. Because Josie couldn’t hear herself, she tended to make more noise than the average person—a lot of banging and crashing around, doors slamming, that kind of thing. There was no way she could ever sneak up on anyone.

  Josie’s dresser was tidy. A comb and brush, some bottles of perfume, the biggest can of hairspray Lucy had ever seen, and that was it. She yanked open the first drawer. Underwear and bras, or brassieres as Josie called them. Drawer two: nighties. Drawer three: about a hundred pairs of pantyhose in varying shades of beige. So far, no blue jar. She was about to close the drawer when something caught her eye. Peeking out from beneath a clump of particularly light beige pantyhose, a patch of pink. She shoved the hosiery to one side. It was a bunny. A pink ceramic bunny.

  Chapter 11

  Lucy held the figurine in her hand and stared at it for a second. Was she losing it? Scrambling to her feet, she stuck her head out the doorway and glanced down the hall. All clear. She crossed over to her own room and stood there, frowning at the dresser.

  Her eyes went back and forth from the bunny to the dresser top. Yup, she nodded to herself. She was sure it had been there, part of the collection. She thought could even see the space where it used to be. So why did Josie remove it? Did she think Lucy would take it? Break it?

  Hmph. Lucy tried not to feel offended. But why just this one?

  Back in Josie’s room, she knelt down in front of drawer number three and pushed aside the mound of pantyhose. As she placed the bunny back in its spot, it snagged on some nylon. The actual figurine didn’t, but a tiny metal hinge on the back of the bunny’s neck, barely noticeable. The head opened—a bunny-shaped box.

  There was something inside.

  She pulled out a small pouch.

  It was shaped like an envelope, made of blue velvet, a single gold snap holding it closed. She undid the snap and slid the contents onto the floor. There were six tiny plastic bags with a kind of blue circle design stamped on them. In each one, a gold chain with a green stone. An emerald? She took one out and examined it closely. There was a 10K stamp on the clasp—the chain was real gold. She let the necklace dangle from her finger. The stone sparkled in the afternoon sun. It looked real, too. Puzzled, Lucy lined the other bags up in a row. Why would her mom have six identical necklaces? At least, she assumed they were her mom’s. They’d been in her mom’s room, inside one of her bunnies.