Doll Bones (14 page)

Their twin expressions of disbelief only made his smile wider.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

P
OPPY NEARLY CAPSIZED THE BOAT GETTING INTO IT.
Zach sat in the center, fingers splayed against the hull, with his legs in the shallow cockpit as she climbed down rungs drilled into one of the pilings. First she handed him her backpack, which he dumped next to his, in a small cavity under the centerboard. The boat rocked lightly. When her foot touched the edge of the deck, though, it tipped dangerously toward her. Zach threw his weight hard to the other side, hoping to balance it out. Poppy staggered, falling on her knees with a yelp. After a few moments of wobbling, the boat settled.

“Wow,” she said, trailing her fingers through the water and lifting them up, like it was marvelous to be so close to the river and not swimming in it. “We’re actually doing this thing.”

“You’re next,” Zach called up to Alice. “If Poppy goes to the prow and I stay in the center, it won’t be as hard for you to come aboard. At least I think it won’t be hard.”

“Let me cast off the lines first,” Alice said, beginning to untie the boat from the pilings.

“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” Zach said. “We can untie them from here and leave the ropes.”

Zach tried to remember everything he’d ever read about sailing, which was a lot. The prow was the point of the boat and the aft was the back end—he was pretty sure about that. And the stern was another word for the back end. The mast was the big thing sticking up from the center of the boat. Starboard was to the right and port was to the left. The boom was the other metal part that the sail attached to, making the L shape that swung the sail where it was supposed to be to catch the wind. And the rudder was the part that you steered with. But that was just vocabulary, and none of it would help him at all if he couldn’t recall the principles.

Alice put her hand on her hip. “What if we have to dock in East Liverpool? We can’t dock without rope.”

He couldn’t argue with that, but he could worry as the boat, no longer held by a line at its bow, began to angle more sharply in its berth. Then Alice untied the aft line. At first the
Pearl
swung closer to the piling, one of the boat’s fenders bumping against the floats holding up the dock. But while Alice scampered down the piling, the
Pearl
began to drift away from the dock.

In books, Zach remembered, there was some kind of pole that you used to cast off, hooking on to the dock to hold the boat in place once the ropes were released, and pushing off with the pole when everyone was on. He didn’t have anything like that. He scrambled to grab hold of a piling, but it was too late.

“Jump!” Zach yelled to Alice. “Now!”

And she did. She pushed herself off the piling and half fell into the cockpit, making Zach have to crouch low to keep his balance. The boat sat lower in the river with a third person weighing it down, water sloshing up over the edges of the hull, but it didn’t tip over. As Zach pushed off the far piling that marked the outer edge of the berth, he realized that they’d done it. They were moving. They’d pirated a boat.

For better or for worse, they were on Beaver River, the current swinging them toward the Ohio. The wind overhead gusted with the promise of good sailing.

And despite the fact that Alice hadn’t even wanted to come, she was laughing.

Sailing was supposed to be simple, so long as the wind was right behind you. You just let out the sail—Zach remembered that term and that it involved letting the sail billow, which must be done with one of the three ropes attached to the deck, although he wasn’t exactly sure which one—and the sail filled with lots of air, which propelled the boat straight forward.

But if the wind was coming from the side—which it usually was—then things were harder. You still caught the wind, but because of the keel on the bottom of the boat, instead of just moving away from where the wind was blowing, you mostly went straight. Mostly.

At least that was how all the books said it was supposed to work. But reading about it and doing it were completely different. He understood the theory, the ropes, the figuring out the wind, and the positioning yourself on the boat, but he couldn’t seem to make the Sunfish actually sail. They sat in the water, pushed around by the current, spinning slowly.

Poppy was strapping herself into one of the life vests, while Zach flailed around, overwhelmed, pretending to know what he was doing, pulling on ropes and testing things out. She offered the other vest to Alice, who took it grudgingly. Although Alice seemed to have accepted that they were continuing on the quest, she clearly hadn’t come close to forgiving Poppy. It was a very tiny boat, but Alice managed to sit as far from Poppy as was possible.

Zach wanted to say something to them, to make them talk to each other, but it was hard to concentrate on that while he was pulling on lines to lift the sail. They were coming up on the two bridges. The first one was high enough not to present much of a problem, but the second had more pylons underneath it, and Zach wanted to be sure they steered wide of those.

He suddenly remembered that he hadn’t dropped the rudder. Crawling to the stern of the boat, he pushed it down and grabbed the tiller so he could start to steer. Alice started working on the sail. It billowed wildly, flapping back and forth, the boom swinging to the right.

Starboard,
some part of his brain reminded him.

“Tighten it,” he yelled, and she did, pulling the rope until the wrinkles went out of the sail. And suddenly they were moving. Spray splashed up off the water and wet their hair and faces like raindrops. Wind ruffled Zach’s hair.

Despite the fear of Poppy finding out about the Questions and the weirdness of Poppy and Alice having some secret, in that moment he felt pretty happy. He loved the feeling of the river beneath them and ahead of them and behind them. He was the
captain
of a real ship, a real ship really called the
Pearl
. It was almost too much magic to bear, but for once he didn’t question it. He threw back his head and grinned up into the blue of the sky.

On either side the banks were green, occasionally punctuated with oil tanks and industrial buildings and a few stretches of houses. Alice let out the sail more, and the boat sped, tilting starboard, the port side rising up and making them lean against it with their feet balanced against the edge of the cockpit, trying to flatten things out. They were cutting through the water, faster and faster.

“We’re going to flip!” Poppy yelled.

“Hold on,” said Alice.

Zach pushed the tiller so that they moved to the left, and they slowed a little, flattening. The sail began to luff, flapping noisily, and Alice tightened it to their new, slower speed. That had been exhilarating but also scary.

Poppy scrambled into the cockpit and got the Queen from her pack, zipping the doll beneath her hoodie. “In case we flip,” she said. “I’m afraid of her going overboard.”

“Don’t you think she’d be safer where she was?” Zach asked.

“Obviously, I don’t,” Poppy told him.

Alice raised both her eyebrows, as if to remind Zach that Poppy was crazy.

It took a while to get used to what made the boat move faster, when to let out the sail or tighten it, what to do when the wind changed slightly (which it seemed to do every ten minutes), and how to stay out of the way of other boats.

They sailed for what seemed like hours, but was really only a single hour. Usually when Zach was doing something, even walking, he could kind of zone out and think about other things. But handling the boat was like playing basketball—it demanded every bit of his attention. Maybe if he’d been more experienced at it, things would have been different, but half the time he was terrified that the boat was going to topple over because it was zooming along at such a steep angle. The other half of the time, the sail hung slack, and he barely could get it to move.

Occasionally, a massive barge would pass by, sending a wake that forced them to grip on to anything they could as the sailboat careened from side to side, nearly throwing them off like a bull at a rodeo.

“Do you think the
Pearl
’s owner has noticed their boat’s gone?” Poppy asked as they passed a rocky island rising up on the right-hand curve of the river. A few scrub trees grew on it.

Zach shifted uncomfortably. When he’d played William the Blade robbing people, he was always able to find a good excuse—mostly that that were bad guys—but in real life, excuses felt different. “When we dock in East Liverpool, we’ll call the marina and tell them where the
Pearl
is. The owners will be able to pick up the boat, so hopefully they won’t worry for too long.”

Alice pointed to the island, clearly not listening to Zach and Poppy. “It seems like anything could be there, doesn’t it? I bet no one has ever stepped foot on the shore. Imagine if there was a gateway next to one of those rocks and no one knew it because everything that goes there disappears.”

Zach looked at the island as they sailed past, imagining.

Around the curve was an industrialized stretch of river with houses along the eastern shore and pipes, tanks, and barges along the other. Many were docked, and a few powerboats raced between them, making the water choppy. The constant rocking of the boat made it hard to steer. Zach’s muscles were sore from leaning hard in one direction, and his clothes were soaked through with spray.

Alice checked her phone.

“What time is it?” Zach asked her.

“About two forty,” she said. “We’ve got an hour to get there and find the bus station.”

Poppy looked over nervously. Even though this had started out as her plan, Zach thought that she looked as worried as the rest of them.

“This is taking longer than we thought,” Poppy said finally. “Longer than those boys said.”

Zach was tempted to point out that it would have taken a lot longer if they were rowing, but he didn’t. Even though they didn’t have much time, he was still feeling pleased. He and Alice had gotten good at sailing the little boat. They were going faster, catching the wind and skimming through the water like a bike speeding downhill.

Zach leaned back and watched the shoreline, watched the woods turn to town and highway and then back to woods again, watched the few houses built close enough to the river that he could spot them. In other places, houses on the river would have been big estates with their own private docks and vast lawns, but here were regular houses, like it was no big deal to live on the water.

Then they passed more industrial buildings, these a lot older-looking, with crumbling chimneys reaching into the sky. The city beyond them reminded him a little of a more sprawling version of his town—a couple of nice Victorian houses with boarded-up windows and a sluggish central square. There was a small metal bridge, which the boat was about to pass beneath. He could hear the rattle of cars across its metal supports. Up ahead, the river curved south.

“Wait,” Poppy said, pointing back at the town they’d just passed. “You’ve got to turn around. That’s East Liverpool. That’s the old pottery factory. Look.”