The Atomic Weight of Secrets or The Arrival of the Mysterious Men in Black (41 page)

“He’s got to be one of ours,” said Noah, shaking his head.

“Shouldn’t we tell him? Shouldn’t we let him know?” asked Lucy.

“Absolutely not,” Faye whispered loudly. And they watched
as the man, full speed, rode past them.

“He’s headed toward our house,” said Lucy. The man was gone before she finished her sentence.

“No!” warned Faye in her most dangerous voice.

“Why not?” begged Lucy, picking at a bit of sticky tar stuck to her shoe.

“Because,” Faye said, her voice deep and soft, “this is our chance to get back at them, to get away, to rescue our parents.”

“Get back at them?” asked Jasper.

“They stole our parents and ruined our lives,” said Faye, quietly.

“So this is all about getting back at them for taking our parents?” Jasper said, looking accusingly at Faye.

Her devious expression dropped from her face. She suddenly realized what she had just said and how it sounded both to her and the others.

“I didn’t mean... that is, I...” She didn’t know what she meant. Did she truly feel that the men in black were kidnapping evildoers? Or did she just hate them because her parents were gone?

“Whatever Faye may or may not be feeling,” Noah said, “we have got to get going now. Whatever the men in black want, they don’t want us to get to the schoolhouse today, and we’ve got to get to Miss Brett. With all the danger in this crazy place, she could well be in the middle of some herself.”

After that, Lucy’s instructions led them in a perfectly straight line. By going straight instead of in circles, Lucy got them to the
edge of Dayton in fifteen minutes instead of well over two hours.

“What’s that sound?” asked Wallace. He heard a hissing noise as they rode along the quiet road.

Stopping, they saw quickly that Noah had a flat tire.

“It’s a shoe nail,” said Jasper, pulling out the culprit. He quickly put his finger against the hole to keep the air from seeping out.

“We’ll never make it with a flat tire,” groaned Faye. She bent over to look at the nail. Lucy slipped and fell into her.

“Sorry, Faye,” said Lucy, pulling tar from the bottom of her shoe. A truck with roofing tar must have recently passed.

“I can ride with you,” Noah said to Faye. But his gangly legs were an impossible fit for Faye’s bicycle to hold them both.

“Can we switch the tire with Faye’s?” suggested Jasper. Since Noah’s bicycle was bigger, they could both fit on Noah’s bicycle.

“The tires aren’t the same size,” Faye said as she shoved Noah off her bicycle, “and we have no tools to change them.”

“There’s got to be a way to fix this,” Noah said, looking around.

“If we can’t, we’re doomed,” Faye said.

“Oh, no, we can’t be doomed!” cried Lucy.

“Just hold on, there’s got to be something...” Looking around, Jasper began to feel hopeless.

As Wallace watched Lucy pick at the tar stuck to her shoe, an idea hit him. “Lucy, let me have that tar,” he said. With the help of a small bit of dirt from the side of the road and the magnifying glass he kept in his pocket, Wallace melted the tar with the magnifying glass and mixed it with the dirt and sand. He then plugged the hole with the mixture.

“We’ll need to let it set,” said Wallace, but the hole plug was
holding well.

Faye put her hand on Wallace’s shoulder. “Well done, Wallace.”

“Where to from here?” asked Noah as they waited for the plug to harden, nibbling on Rosie’s sandwiches and drinking some water. It was not very warm, as autumn had come upon them, but they had been riding hard and fast and they were feeling warmer than the weather.

“Oh, it’s just straight up the road,” said Lucy, pointing to the middle of three roads leading out from Dayton toward the fields and farms of the countryside.

“Amazing,” said Jasper, putting the cover back on his canteen. “It really was a straight road, nearly, from our homes to the farm.”

Suddenly, they all realized what that meant. The beefeater on the unicycle might well have been on his way to their homes and now knew they were not in them. The men in black might be along any second. Which could be one of two things—good, if they were coming to take them to the schoolhouse, or very, very bad.

Without a word, the five children scrambled onto their bicycles and sped down the center road as fast as their bicycles could carry them. They’d have to hope Wallace’s plug would hold. With luck, it would get them to Sole Manner.

A
N
A
PPLE
F
OR
T
EACHER

OR

WALLACE EMPTIES HIS POCKET

T
he rest of the trip back to the farm would have given the world’s calmest person the jitters. They rode as fast as possible, only to fly off the road and hide in a ditch every time a cart, horse, or tractor came by. They did not encounter a single member of the men in black brigade, but they could not tell for sure until the farmer or milkman or traveler passed them. Only then did they drag their bicycles up onto the road again and resume their lightning-fast ride. They didn’t know which was more tiring—the racing or the constant stopping.

After about forty minutes, Jasper was exhausted. Although Lucy pedaled when she could, she was small and her legs were only so strong. The others were tired, too, but Jasper was determined not to show how beat he really was.

“We’re nearly there!” he called, without a clue whether this was true or not.

Suddenly, Lucy called out, “Look, look! It’s the twirly-twisty-birdy-boxy thing!”

“Lucy, what are you talking about?” Jasper asked.

“It’s the, you know, where they live and people feed them, only
this one has that twirly-twisty thing upon it.”

With no clue as to what she was talking about, Lucy’s four mates looked around until they saw it. Indeed, there was a twirly-twisty-birdy-boxy thing. In English, it would be called a barn, with a tall wrought iron weathervane with a large hummingbird on the tip.

“Ah, but of course,” said Noah in his best French accent. “Eet ees the traditional twirly-twisty-birdy-boxy thing. What fools we be,
n’est-ce pas
?”

“And what, pray tell, does it mean now that we see the twirly-twisty-birdy-boxy thing, Lucy?” asked Faye.

“It means we’ll be at the farm in about five minutes.” True to Lucy’s word, the beehives at the edge of the apple orchard were soon in view.

Not knowing what they might find, the children decided not to patrol the property once they arrived. Instead, they climbed down from their bicycles and walked them over to the drainage ditch. There, they lay their bicycles down behind the beehives, leaving them out of view of the road and out of view of the farmhouse.

The apples from the nearby orchard were still quite small and hard as a rock. Luckily, the leaves on the trees were plentiful, and that helped to hide the children as they sat on a branch and searched for any movement in the schoolhouse.

“I can’t see a thing,” said Jasper, looking through Lucy’s spyglass. “We’ve just got to get over there and get inside.”

“Get inside?” Noah asked.

“Yes,” Jasper said. “We’ll have to figure out a way to do it carefully.”

“What should we say?” asked Lucy.

“We should act normal,” said Wallace.

“Normal?” Noah said. “Normal? You mean we should come in wearing black rubber flippers and black wooly mittens on our noses? Or perhaps a black sombrero and a pair of black stilts?”

“I mean like we’ve just come back after a weekend at home,” said Wallace, not finding this funny.

“I don’t know,” said Jasper. “I think we should be quiet and sneak inside.”

“We don’t want to appear to know anything is wrong in there,” said Wallace. “We don’t want Reginald Roderick Kattaning to
do
anything.”

“I think you’re both right,” said Lucy. “We should come in quietly, but if someone sees us, act as if we’re coming back as always.”

Approaching the schoolhouse, they couldn’t help but notice how quiet it was. Usually, they could hear Miss Brett humming, or they could smell whatever she was cooking for supper. This time, even the birds and the clouds and the trees seemed to be silent, except for one bird nearby making a strange, eerie cooing sound.

Jasper took some time to reattach the hanging, twisted wires so the telephone would work. He had to untangle the wires before he could reconnect them.

Walking around to the front, the children found the door slightly ajar. Lucy peeked through the crack and put her hand to
her mouth to stifle her gasp.

The whole classroom had been ripped apart. The desks seemed to have been systematically shredded into tinder. The test tubes and beakers were crushed. The drawings and sketches were crumpled and torn to bits. Miss Brett’s desk was overturned and broken nearly in half. All her desk drawers, now mostly broken, were pulled out and strewn about the room. It was as if some giant fiend had trampled everything. Even the blackboard was torn from the wall and the slate smashed.

Wallace quietly stepped into the room before anyone could stop him. He lifted a bottle that still contained a clear liquid. He tilted it. There was a crack, but it seemed otherwise to be fine. He placed the bottle on the table. He then bent down and picked up something from the rubble—a small glass vial. This, too, was cracked, except the bottom was broken clean off. Wallace panicked for a moment, then reached into his pocket, pulling out a vial of his own—intact, corked, and sealed. The vial contained a gold, viscous liquid.