Andi Unexpected Page 6

  Despite the tidy northwest corner and the continuous work of the three of us carrying junk down to the garage, the attic was still a disaster. The worst part was the corner where Colin and I had discovered Andora. Pieces of sailboat wallpaper littered the floor.

  I grabbed a garbage bag and began tossing the torn pieces into it. The flutter of paper caught Mr. Rochester’s attention, and he jumped off the bed and crouched a foot away from me, concentrating on the colorful pieces with his wide amber eyes and white whiskers. His orange stripes stood upright on his back like soldiers.

  The angle of the sunlight allowed me a clear view through the tiny doorway. I squatted in front of it, being careful not to block the light. Maybe I should clean it out, I thought. It might make an excellent place to hide things from Bethany. I grabbed the broom that was leaning against a metal rack full of old party dresses, put its business end through the opening, and pulled back hard.

  A thick cloud of black dust enveloped Mr. Rochester and me. He yowled before running under the bed. I coughed and stumbled backward, knocking a plastic bin full of wire hangers off an end table. They crashed to the floor.

  I froze, waiting for Bethany’s outburst from downstairs. When no sound came, I sighed in relief. I knew I didn’t want to mess with Bethany before ten in the morning. Not if I valued my life.

  One Sunday morning after we’d moved in with the Cragmeyers, I’d made the mistake of waking up Bethany just because I was excited to see my name mentioned in the Akron newspaper.

  I’d jumped up and down on her bed. “Bethany, wake up! Look!”

  “Leave me alone,” she’d growled from underneath her pillow.

  It was already after nine, and I’d waited as long as I could to tell her the good news. “Bethany, I won first prize in the Summit County Science Fair! They wrote about it in this morning’s paper. My project on photosynthesis beat all the other kids from all the other schools!”

  Suddenly Bethany sat straight up in bed, and she would have knocked me in the chin if I hadn’t jumped out of the way first. “Andi … Mom and Dad are dead. So no one cares what science experiments you do anymore. They aren’t here for you to impress.” Then tears appeared in my sister’s eyes, and she said, “Now go away.”

  Clutching my newspaper clipping, I’d silently backed out of her room.

  As I recalled that moment, I felt tears threaten at the corners of my eyes. But I shook them away. Andora had to be my top priority now. Not the science fair and certainly not Bethany.

  I picked up a flashlight and shone its beam through the small hidden doorway. The ceiling in the crawlspace tapered back into a slant until it finally met the plywood floor. The walls were bare beams without plaster or drywall covering them.

  While thinking of all the things I could hide in that space, I almost didn’t see it because it was the same nondescript beige as the plywood it was resting against. I reached into the cubby and pulled out a large manila envelope. Dust balls the size of small kittens flew into the air as I pulled it out of the cubby. And then I sneezed so hard I almost fell over.

  I rubbed my eyes and peered at the envelope. It felt dry and brittle like old construction paper. It was blank on the outside, but I could tell something was inside it. It felt heavy in my hand and contained a slight bulge. I slipped my thumbnail under the envelope’s sealed flap. The dried glue peeled away easily.

  Reaching my hand inside, I pulled out a short stack of old photographs printed on small rectangles of thin cardboard. I counted four in all. The first one depicted a woman whose face reminded me so much of Bethany that I almost dropped it. She stood outside the bottling plant holding a bicycle and smiling cheerfully into the camera. She had Bethany’s nose, eyes, and even her chin.

  The picture was black and white, so I couldn’t make out her hair color. I bet it looked just like Bethany’s long blond waves that I envied so much and often prayed would materialize overnight to replace my own pink mop.

  I flipped over the photograph; written in precise block letters it read, EMILY, June 1928.

  Emily. My great-grandmother.

  The next two photographs showed Emily and my Great-Grandfather Patterson standing with that same bicycle in front of the bottling plant. Each photo was taken in June 1928. Patterson, a tall man with laughing eyes and dark hair, had his arm around Emily, and the two smiled at the camera in delight.

  The fourth one took my breath away. It was a professional studio photograph of a baby girl in front of a white background. She wore a frilly dress and beamed at the camera with a toothless grin. My eyes darted to Andora’s trunk. I’d seen that dress before.

  The baby girl looked to be only a few months old, I guessed. Although, I didn’t know enough about babies to be sure. Excitedly, I turned over the photograph and read, ANDORA FELICITY, FEBRUARY 1930. My breath caught.

  Later that morning, I mulled over Andora’s photograph while polishing off the last of my cold strawberry Pop-Tarts. Colin walked into the kitchen with the casebook tucked under his arm. He was wearing the craziest outfit I’d ever seen.

  “Ready to get to work?” His voice was muffled.

  I took a big gulp of milk. “What are you wearing?”

  Colin wore jeans and a striped T-shirt under a hooded sweatshirt, which was all quite normal. But on his head he wore a red bandana underneath a Michael Pike University ball cap. Over his glasses, he wore a pair of chemistry lab goggles. A surgical facemask covered the lower portion of his face, and it was so big that it hid his cheeks, nose, mouth, and chin.

  Despite seeing only a small sliver of Colin’s face, I could tell he’d blushed at my comment. Hastily, he removed the mask.

  He cleared his throat. “I thought we could work in the attic today.”

  I blinked. “We will. But what’s with the hazmat suit?”

  “Bergita wanted me to wear it.” He looked down. “I have pretty bad asthma.”

  “Oh,” I said. “But you seemed okay the last couple of days.”

  He looked up, his eyes chagrin. “Yeah,” he agreed, “I was all right at the time. But I had to use my inhaler and drink two gulps of Benadryl after I got home. Bergita found out and had a fit.”

  “She didn’t say anything to me about it.”

  “Aw, she wouldn’t. ‘It’s my responsibility to take care of myself.’” He repeated the last part as though he’d heard it a hundred times.

  I shrugged. “I hope you don’t get too hot up there. We’d better find some more fans to use or else you’re going to fry.” Earlier that morning, the attic had felt stuffy. So I’d changed into a tank top and a pair of shorts. “We can try to pry open the window, too, if we can reach it.”

  “Thanks,” Colin muttered.

  Bethany walked into the room wearing boxer shorts and an oversized T-shirt that she uses for pajamas. She jumped when she saw Colin. “Andi! It would be nice if you’d tell me when your boyfriend’s coming over.” She tossed her glossy blond hair over her shoulder and took a seat beside me, her eyes roving over the breakfast table.

  Colin froze, and I glared at my sister.

  Bethany rubbed her eyes and noticed Colin’s outfit for the first time. “Are you dumpster diving or something?”

  Colin shook his head. “I’m working in the attic.”

  “We could use your help again,” I said to Bethany.

  She sighed. “We’d better make a bunch of money at the garage sale. I need some kind of reward after being stuck in the attic with the two of you.” She grabbed a Pop-Tart and waltzed out of the kitchen.

  CASE FILE NO. 10

  I’d hoped to find another clue linking Andora to my family. But over the next two days, Colin, Bethany, and I tore apart the attic without uncovering a single trace of her. It appeared that the trunk, the birth announcement, and the lone baby photograph were all that Andora left to this world.

  I threw another wire hanger into a box with hundreds of others that would soon go to the garage sale. I had no idea who’d want to buy h
undreds of hangers, but Amelie claimed someone would probably buy them. For what? Wire hanger sculptures?

  Surrounded by stacks of old flowerpots, Colin sat on the floor beside the hatch and busily sorted piles of papers. I didn’t know where Bethany was. She’d said she had “things to do” that day. Whatever that meant.

  Colin pushed his goggles higher up on his nose. “We aren’t getting very far with all this.” His voice was somewhat muffled by the surgical mask.

  “Thanks for reminding me.”

  “So we have a newspaper announcement about Andora’s birth and an old photograph of her, but that’s it. Nothing here tells us what happened to her. Searching online has been a waste of time too. So far the only thing we’ve learned from Googling your name is that there is a town in Italy called Andora; there’s nothing about Andora Boggs.”

  “I know.” I tilted one of the five fans that we’d placed throughout the attic so it hit me directly in the face. Outside, it was a beautiful day; it was way too nice to spend all of it inside counting wire hangers.

  “We need something more …” his voice trailed off. Taking his asthma inhaler from his pocket, he took two puffs absent-mindedly.

  “What we need to do is get out of here for a while.” I thumped him on the back. “You’re probably suffering from dust poisoning or something.”

  Colin looked up at me, his eyes buggy behind those gigantic goggles. “As far as I know, dust can’t poison you. It just affects your allergies, which are really just overactive enzymes trying to protect your body …”

  I groaned and helped him stand up. “Let’s go.”

  Downstairs, Colin removed his goggles, surgical mask, and hooded sweatshirt. Now he looked like any other normal kid standing in Amelie’s kitchen in jeans and a T-shirt. I laced up my sneakers.

  “Where are we going?” Colin asked.

  “I want to go back to the museum and talk to Mr. Finnigan. Maybe he can tell us something more.”

  Outside I rolled my bike out of the garage, which was now packed with furniture and boxes from the attic. How had all of that stuff fit up there? As I stepped out, I heard my sister’s voice coming from the front of the house and froze. “I can paint and draw right here. I don’t need classes,” she said.

  The next voice belonged to Bergita. “The classes will help you become a better artist. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “I want to go back home. I miss my life,” Bethany said quietly.

  “And your parents, I’m sure.”

  There was silence, and then Bethany said, “I miss them more than Andi does.”

  My stomach clenched.

  “Why do you think that?” Bergita asked.

  “Because all she thinks about now is this stupid Andora thing. Who cares about a baby girl who lived a long time ago? I mean, our parents are dead.” There were tears in her voice. “It’s not fair that I miss them more when they obviously loved her more. She was their protégé, the future scientist. All I can do is draw.”

  “Bethany, everyone grieves differently. When my husband died, I was brokenhearted. But the day after his funeral, I started packing up his clothes so I could donate them to charity. A friend of mine was offended by that. She’d kept her husband’s things for years after he died. She thought I was terrible for discarding my husband’s stuff so soon. She thought keeping her husband’s things proved that she loved her husband more than I loved mine.”

  I stepped closer to the edge of the garage, but I didn’t dare poke my head around the corner.

  Bergita continued, “I don’t believe your parents loved Andi more. They loved her differently—just like I grieved the loss of my husband differently than my friend did.”

  Bethany mumbled something I couldn’t hear.

  Bergita chuckled. “There is a class tomorrow afternoon. Come with me just one time. If you hate it, you never have to go back.”

  “I guess I have nothing better to do,” my sister muttered.

  The two of them moved away from the garage, and I ran down the driveway with my bike to meet Colin.

  “Where have you been?” he asked.

  “In the garage,” I said, leaving it at that. “Let’s go.”

  A sign on the bottling company’s door said the museum was closed on Saturday afternoons. I parked my bike. “Well, it can’t hurt to knock,” I said, banging on the door.

  Colin and I waited a couple of minutes, and then I knocked again—but a tad softer this time.

  “Maybe we should come back Monday,” Colin suggested.

  Just then, Mr. Finnigan opened the door. His face lit up as he said, “You came back!”

  “I know the museum is closed,” I said, “but we wondered if we could talk to you about something important.”

  “Is this about your mysterious Andora?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  Colin sneezed.

  “Then do come in. I’ve thought a lot about your little mystery over the last few days.”

  We sat in Number Three’s old office munching on Mr. Finnigan’s private stash of Double Stuf Oreos. Mr. Finnigan made himself comfortable behind the former ginger ale tycoon’s desk, and looked at the photograph of Baby Andora with a magnifying glass.

  “This is an original print,” he said. “I can tell by the weight of the paper and its general condition.”

  I dusted Oreo crumbs from my mouth. “We couldn’t find any record of her death in the attic or online. And from Bergita’s story, it sounds like my family kept her a secret until she vanished. How could a baby just disappear?”

  I held back the next question that ran through my head. How could my family let their baby disappear?

  Mr. Finnigan set the magnifying glass on the mahogany desk. “Times were tough back then. Really tough. But you’re right. I don’t know how a child, especially one born in such a small community, could simply vanish. I’m sorry. I can’t offer any suggestions. This truly is a mystery.” Mr. Finnigan thumbed the photograph of Andora. “Do you mind if I hang on to this to help me with the search?”

  “Do you think it will help? Can you match it with some pictures in the archives?” Colin asked.

  “Maybe,” Mr. Finnigan said with a slight catch in his voice.

  I looked at the photo in his hand, the only likeness of Andora that I had. “I’d like to keep it with me for now.”

  Reluctantly, Mr Finnigan handed the photograph back to me. I stowed it between the pages of the casebook inside my mini backpack.

  The bike ride home wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic as the ride to the museum had been. My legs felt heavy with disappointment, and my eyes passed right over the neighborhood sights. Colin was quiet as we pedaled past Killdeer Middle School, and my mind went back to Andora, the trunk, the elephant block, and her photograph that Mr. Finnigan wanted to keep.

  Colin stopped suddenly. I swerved sharply and just missed his back tire.

  “Hey!” I said. “What are you doing?”

  Colin ignored my protest. “I’ve got it!”

  My heart thumped. “You’ve got what?”

  “I know just what we need. We need someone old—someone who was alive in the 1930s, at the same time as Andora.”

  “That would be nice, but they’d have to be pretty old now.”

  “I know just the person.” He hopped back onto his bike seat. “Let’s go. We need to get home so you can ask Amelie if you can go to church with me tomorrow.”

  “Ask her what?”

  But he was already pedaling away.

  CASE FILE NO. 11

  Our bike tires spit white gravel into the front lawn. Bergita stood on the Carters’ porch with her hands on her hips. “Colin Carter, you get over here right now.”

  “What did I do?” he asked.

  “I told you this morning that your parents would be here for dinner tonight. Now hurry up and get ready.”

  “I’m sorry, I forgot. Andi and I were—”

  “You can tell me what you two were up to la
ter. You know they hate to be kept waiting. They both work third-shift rounds at the hospital tonight.”

  Colin looked at me. “I gotta go. Can you ask Amelie about church?”

  “Why?”

  “Colin!” Bergita called.

  “I know someone there who might know Andora. Just ask, okay?”

  He rolled his bike across the Carters’ front lawn.

  “I’ll ask!” I called after him.

  I found Amelie and Bethany in the kitchen. My aunt smiled. “You’re just in time for dinner. How does frozen pizza sound?”

  “Amelie, you might want to learn how to cook now that you’re raising two kids,” Bethany said. But there wasn’t the typical edge in her voice. In fact, I could be wrong, but I thought my sister might be teasing our aunt.

  I plopped down on a stool at the kitchen island. It’s where we always ate our meals because Amelie had turned Grandma’s dining room into a study.

  Amelie must have also noticed Bethany’s light teasing tone. Her cheeks twitched as if she were trying to control her smile. Maybe Amelie was afraid that if she looked too happy about her niece’s joke, she’d discourage Bethany from trying to be friendlier in the future. “Maybe I should take a cooking class. We could all take one. It would be something fun we could do as a family.”

  The smile quickly faded from Bethany’s face as soon as Amelie said “family.” “I don’t need to learn how to cook yet.”

  I swallowed and changed the subject. “Can I go with Colin and Bergita to church tomorrow?”

  Amelie dropped her pizza slice onto her plate. “Did you say church?”

  “Yeah,” I said uncomfortably. “He invited me.”

  “I can’t remember the last time I went to church,” my aunt said. “Maybe back when you were a baby, Andi.”

  Bethany eyed me over her pizza. “So you move out to the country and find religion?”