Alexis pulled back her long sandy
blonde hair and tucked it behind her ears. She had been growing her hair out
for the last year, now it was just past her shoulders. Alexis had an oval face
with bright blue eyes and a straight nose that was lightly sprinkled with
freckles. Right now her blue eyes were staring daggers into her parents’ backs.
Alexis sat in the back seat and kept
quiet, knowing full well how upset it was making her parents, George and Jenny
Tappendorf. They were guilty of the unforgivable: exiling their only daughter into the hands of
“ Great Aunt Mae.” At least, that’s how it felt to Alexis. No matter how many
times they explained it to her, it still felt like abandonment.
George glanced back at Alexis through
the rear view mirror and winked, but he was rewarded with a glare. With one
hand on the wheel he ran his other hand through his pepper-colored hair that
was receding a little too fast for George’s taste. He was also carrying a few
pounds more than he’d like as well, but he hid it with over-sized Hawaiian
shirts and khaki shorts. Her father’s eyes matched Alexis’s down to the very
round shape, but his nose was slightly crooked due to a bowling accident.
(George was so focused on his “bowling form” that once he swung the ball up to
launch it down the lane he ended up smashing his nose. Five stitches, a
particularly large splint and two black eyes later, her father swore off
bowling forever.) George Tappendorf’s face was roundish and his smile could
melt anyone. Except for Alexis this fine afternoon. She wasn’t budging.
George was laid off from his job at a beer
factory in Los Angeles. That was over a year ago and he had been looking for
work ever since. From fast food to retail, nothing lasted long. Alexis didn’t
mind so much, it wasn’t as if her parents ever let her starve. In fact, Alexis
thought that life was pretty good, even when they were forced to eat hotdogs
for an entire month. George grilled everything on a mini-grill they kept on the
back porch, a necessity really, since the electricity had been turned off. When
it first happened, Jenny told Alexis that it was like camping. Inside. In a
one-bedroom apartment. Then she became quiet and spent the next hour in the
bathroom.
Jenny tried to break through Alexis’s
ice barrier by pointing out a stray cow feeding off the grass. “Look, honey, he
looks like Duke.”
Duke was their neighbor’s cat in Los
Angeles, who was so ridiculously cute that any adorable animal since was always
followed by the sentence, “he looks like Duke.” But today Alexis’s response was
a shrug and a sigh.
Jenny turned back around and stared
straight ahead. Her pitch black hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail. She
had pale delicate skin and a small straight nose and high cheekbones. Her brown
eyes were almost too big for her face making her look a little like a Kewpie
doll. Jenny was athletically built, but in the last few years she had let her
muscles turn soft.
Research. Alexis thought
to herself with disdain.
That was all George and Jenny told
Alexis about their upcoming six-week absence. No matter how hard Alexis tried,
she couldn’t get any more information out of them. She wasn’t even sure if they
actually had more information. All Alexis knew was that
after six weeks her parents would be coming home with a twenty thousand dollar
check.
From research.
Yeah.
Alexis groaned from the back seat as
more and more giant pines, oaks, and hickories flew by her window. She missed
Los Angeles. Alexis felt happy there. Secure. As if nothing in the world could
touch her.
Not like Virginia.
Virginia was beautiful, yes, but it
wasn’t where she grew up. It wasn’t where her friends were. It was across the
entire country, in the middle of nowhere. And most of all, it scared her.
Alexis had never been away from her parents for more than a day, and now they’d
be gone for the whole summer! It terrified her. Alone with Great Aunt Mae. A
seventy-year-old lady that her parents described as a “barrel of laughs.”
Whatever that meant. Great Aunt Mae was Alexis’s grandma’s sister on her
father’s side, but when George’s mother died, they drifted out of touch. George
had never even seen Mae’s Summervale house. She and her husband, William, had
apparently moved there after George was already an adult, and living on the
other side of the country made visiting an expense the Tappendorf family could
never quite afford.
“Don’t worry, Alex,” George called
back from the driver’s seat, “you’ll have a lot of fun in Summerville. Aunt Mae
is amazing. She’ll make you feel at home.” Her father was the only one who
called Alexis “Alex,” and normally she loved his pet name for her. Today it
just made her angry.
“Summervale,
Dad,” Alexis said with a huff. “You can at least get the name of the town
right. You are abandoning me there after all.” At this
point she believed her parents needed to feel as guilty as was humanly
possible.
After a moment of disappointing
silence, Alexis picked up a booklet full of advanced Sudoku puzzles lying on
the seat next to her. It was the best way to take her mind off of her current
predicament. And she was quite good at the puzzles as well. Sudoku had become
Alexis’s obsession over the last year, her main escape from reality. She liked
the way it made her mind work, trying to figure out how to place the numbers
exactly so as to solve the riddle. It was one of the few things that Alexis was
good at. She whizzed through the beginner books in a matter of days and had
been trying to find a puzzle she couldn’t solve. Even the “advanced edition”
book she was working on now was too easy for her. Was there such thing as advanced,
advanced Sudoku puzzles? If there was, Alexis was sure she wouldn’t
be able to find it here in Virginia in the middle of nowhere. She quickly
solved the puzzle she was working on, but found to her dismay that the closer
they were to Mae’s the less the puzzle distracted her.
Alexis tossed the book aside and
stared out the window. If she hadn’t been so stubbornly set on making her
parents regret their decision, she probably would have appreciated the
countryside more. It really was beautiful, full of
lush green hills and deep green forests that looked like an impenetrable
fortress of trees they were so close together. Under normal circumstances,
Alexis would be ready for an adventure, mapping out the forest, pretending she
was in another world, anywhere her imagination would take her. But, these
weren’t normal circumstances: her parents were leaving
her and that was that.
The car headed over a rise and when
they were on the other side there was a large patch of rocks off to the right.
A man with a metal detector, dressed in khakis and a floppy sailor hat, was
meticulously scouring the rocks like a man possessed.
Alexis thought maybe he lost something
important the way he was searching the ground, but before she had time to think
on it further they had whizzed by the man.
But her mother had noticed him, too.
“That was weird,” Jenny said. “I
wonder what he was looking for?” She said it in an off-handed way, as if she
wasn’t really expecting an answer but was just curious herself.
“Maybe he was looking for the One
Ring,” George said with a smile making eye contact with Alexis
through the rear-view mirror.
Alexis rolled her eyes, not budging in
attitude. He must have thought the landscape looked like a fantasy world too,
but Alexis didn’t want to give her father an inch. A part of her felt guilty,
he was just trying to make her feel better, but in the end stubbornness won
out.
“I’ve had enough of this bratty
behavior!” Jenny whirled around with a face that always made Alexis’s heart
skip a beat. It didn’t happen often, but when Alexis’s mom was angry, watch
out! She could wither you with one look. “If you even try and pull this
attitude in front of Aunt Mae, young lady, we’re going to have problems. She
has offered her home to you without even batting an eye! You could at least show a little gratitude!”
Alexis immediately tried to shrink
into the back seat. “Y…you’re the one l..leaving me!” Alexis shouted back and was surprised to find
she was crying. She didn’t want her parents to be mad at
her: guilty,
yes, mad, no. And seeing how upset her mother was made Alexis begin to sob
uncontrollably.
Seeing her daughter’s tears, Jenny’s
face fell instantly. She reached her hand back and held Alexis’s chin lovingly.
“I know this is hard on you, but it’s hard on us, too. This was the last
thing we wanted to do. You saw how hard we tried to make it work in L.A. Trust
us, we don’t want to go either.” Jenny pulled her hand away and made brief eye
contact with George. Something unsaid passed between them.
“See!
Th…that look! Y…you always give
each other that look! You’re h…hiding
something from m…me and I can tell. And th...that’s why I’m so mad. I...I just
want you to tell me the t…truth. W…where are you going?” Alexis could barely
breathe through her choked tears, but she couldn’t let another one of those looks
go by. Then her father spoke.
“We love you, Alex, more than you’ll
ever know, but we just can’t tell you. It’s a part of the deal.” George kept
his eyes on the road, but Alexis and Jenny both heard the catch in his throat
and their hearts broke at the sound. George hardly ever cried. In fact, the
only time Alexis ever saw him get emotional was at his mother’s funeral.
Alexis took a few calming breaths and
wiped the tears from her eyes. “I’m scared,” she admitted.
Jenny looked back at her daughter and
gave her a reassuring smile. “So are we, sweetie.”
“We need to stick together if we’re
going to get through this,” George added, his voice steady again. “Can you do
that for me, Alex?”
All of Alexis’s anger was gone and it
was replaced with pain. She really was going to miss her parents, but taking
out her frustration on them would only make things worse later on. How would
she feel when they were gone and the last words she said to them were in anger?
Not very good, she decided.
“I can do that for you, Dad,” Alexis’s
voice was barely a whisper. She felt broken, as if by conceding to be civil she
was finally admitting that they were really leaving. “And I wasn’t going to be
mean to Aunt Mae, just you two.” Alexis realized how horrible that sounded as
soon as it left her mouth, but she was surprised to find that her parents
actually laughed.
“Well that’s something at least.”
Jenny rolled her eyes and smiled at her daughter.
“Aunt Mae is really wonderful, Alex. I
know you’ll love her. And if she’s decorated this house the way she did her
last one, you’re in for quite an adventure.” George raised his eyebrow to
emphasize his point.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jenny
looked at him, curious herself.
“Let’s just say, her late husband
William was pretty creative in his woodworking.” George enticed them. “And
after having a nice dinner with Aunt Mae we’ll leave in the morning,” George
said aloud to drive home the reality of the situation.
Alexis’s interest was definitely
piqued, as she knew was her father’s intent. “We better make the most of it
then,” she said trying to sound more enthusiastic than she felt. But she knew
her parents could see right through her fake bravado.
As they drove down the winding road,
another man with a metal detector was scouring the side of the road.
“What are they looking for?”
Jenny asked.
“Sounds like a mystery.” George looked
back at Alexis through the rear view mirror, eyes smiling.
Alexis’s eyes grew round with the
faint stirrings of excitement. A mystery. She loved mysteries. Her bag was full
of Agatha Christie novels. She was Alexis’s favorite author and she ate up
every word Ms. Christie wrote. Detective Hercule Poirot was her favorite
character of all time. She loved the way he asked questions and the way he
could put seemingly random events together to find the murderer. It was a gift
that Alexis related to. Sometimes things or events would appear completely
unrelated, but Alexis could see how they connected to each other like it was
the most obvious thing in the world.
Reading was another one of her escapes
in life. Whenever things were particularly bad at home or at school, Alexis
would pull out one of her beat up mystery novels and dig in. She loved trying
to figure out what was going to happen next. If these men with metal detectors
were a part of some bigger mystery, then Alexis was on it.
And, just as Alexis was going to
proclaim her interest in solving the roadside mystery, they passed yet another
man searching the ground with his metal detector.
“Seriously?! There has to be something
out there. Do you think they know each other?” Alexis asked, trying to make
some sense of it.
Farther down the road yet another man
was searching the ground with a metal detector, but this time two cops were
approaching him waving him to stop immediately.
As they drove by, Alexis watched as a
tall heavyset man in a suit stood next to the police officers like he was the
judge and jury himself. His demeanor scared Alexis in a way she couldn’t
verbally describe. It was just a feeling, but the man looked mean. Alexis kept
her eyes on the stranger as the cops handcuffed the man with the metal detector
and pulled him toward their car. The stranger turned his eyes on her suddenly.
For a brief second Alexis was terrified.
“Guess it’s illegal,” George
speculated. “I feel sorry for those other fellows. Wish we could warn them.” He
apparently hadn’t noticed or cared about the heavyset stranger.
“Maybe Aunt Mae will know something
about it.” Jenny turned around to see the wheels churning in Alexis’s head.
For the first time the mention of
Great Aunt Mae didn’t make Alexis want to throw something. Mae would have
to know something about this, and maybe who the stranger was. After
they were far enough away from the creepy man, Alexis relaxed and felt a surge
of excitement. Great Aunt Mae would be the first person she’d interview, just
like in her Agatha Christie books.
Alexis was determined to solve the
mystery of the metal detectors and the identity of the tall stranger.
