SandPeople: An Across Time Mystery Read online

  The breeze swirled and blew around her ears and through her hair. A sudden gust lifted her bangs and blew them to the side. Lea turned her head and her hair moved whenever the wind blew. The ends teased and tickled her ears, a new and funny feeling she was going to have to get used to.

  Laura was looking at her. "I like it," she said. "It's very different but it fits you, somehow. What's your mom going to say?"

  "I did it with my own allowance money," Lea said. "She said I could spend my own money on what I want." They pedaled slowly back home.

  "She's still going to kill you." Laura shook her head. "Do you want me to come home with you?" She looked worriedly at Lea.

  "No, that's okay, I better do this on my own," Lea said.

  "I'm going to head on home. Good luck." Laura pedaled off. Lea watched her go.

  Lea rode up her driveway. Now that her hair was cut, she was nervous about going inside. It had seemed only the right thing to do, she had thought, her old life was gone; like the farthest-out beach rocks that were washed by the blue Atlantic swell and disappeared when the tide came in. Well, not gone, but awash, she decided.

  She wheeled her bike into the yard and leaned it against the corner of the house. Dishes clinked in the kitchen and she climbed the back steps. She combed her fingers through her new short curls and pulled the door open to walk inside.

  "There you are. Are you ready for some lunch? I fixed some sandwiches." Mom turned to greet Lea and her voice faded to silence. "What did you do?" After a moment's calm, Mom's voice rose like a freshening breeze off of the water.

  Dad sat at the table, arms folded, drinking coffee, and reading some papers in a folder. At her mother's words, he looked up. He saw her hair and one eyebrow quirked up toward his own fading hairline.

  Lea walked across the kitchen to the far cabinets and got a glass down to pour herself some milk. She turned, holding on to the counter for support and looked at her mother.

  "I got my hair cut," she said.

  "I can see that," her mother nodded.

  "I used my own money," Lea said. "You said I could spend it on anything I wanted to."

  Dad leaned on his arms and didn't say anything. At last, Lea turned to look at him. His blue eyes were mild. "I like it," he said. "It looks cool and easy to take care of. Besides, that's how Lea wants to wear it, she's done it. No use fussing now." He went back to his reading.

  "No, no use now," Lea's mom agreed and turned back to finish rinsing dishes. "Lea, your dad, and brother are going to be leaving right after lunch. Go on and get washed up," Mom said and didn't look at her again.

  Lea stood stock still, frozen in place. Leaving and lunch in one sentence, like that was an everyday thing?

  “What do you mean ‘leaving’?” she asked. “Going where?”

  “Get washed up,” her mother replied. Lea’s heart sank and she stormed out of the room. The only thing worse than being told no was being told nothing. And that she already knew what her mother wasn’t saying made it even worse.

  Lea went up to her room and took what was left of her money out of her pocket and put it back in her dresser drawer. It worried her. Dad, who always seemed to understand better, was leaving. She reached up and touched her new, short curls. They bobbed against her fingers. She didn't feel better, yet.

  She hadn't realized Dad and T.J. were going to leave today. A whisper of sound at the door made her turn. Dad stood there looking at her.

  "We didn't know you were going to get your hair cut." His voice was even. "That's fine. But it's not changing any plans." She felt her cheeks grow warm. Somehow he always seemed to know why she did things. "Now, you can help me load my stuff, and then we'll do yours. Your mom has decided to leave today, too."

  Lea knew better than to argue further. She helped Dad move all the papers and boxes and suitcases from the porch to the old pickup truck. All winter he had been collecting information on this latest dig he was going on. The cartons were stuffed so full that the tops wouldn't fold all the way down. Carefully Dad wrapped twine around the boxes and tied it tightly before loading the last of the boxes into his car. He straightened and stood for a minute, tall in old khaki pants and shirt against the vivid blue of the ocean behind him. A wind sprang up and Lea felt the prickle of tears. She bit her lip. I won't cry, she told herself.

  "Do you want to take your bike, hon?" Dad asked her. He sounded so normal. Maybe he was glad to be getting rid of her.

  She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. It would keep him there a few moments longer. He wheeled her bike away from the stairs and lifted it to the roof of the station wagon and began tying down the handlebars and wheels.

  "Want me to use sailors' knots?" he asked into the silence. Lea looked at him. They had learned sailors' knots together.

  "No," she said.

  "Well, hon." Dad interrupted her thoughts. He tied the final knot and gave the rope a pat.

  "Done." He came to stand in front of her. "I'll see you at the end of the summer, okay?" He reached out and stroked her hair. She nodded blindly against his shirt front. Then his quick footsteps walked away from her.

  "Let's go, T.J.!" he called. The kitchen door slammed, rattling the glass-like always. Dad would never fix it now, Lea thought. She started crying hard then, at the thought of never getting the window fixed, at not being here to hear it rattle.

  The engine roared and the old truck rumbled out on the curving track through the pine trees to the highway beyond. Lea whirled around and ran through the house up the stairs to the window at the end of the house. From its height, she could just see the roof of the truck as it accelerated along the road. She stood and listened to the boom of the waves on the beach. She tried to make their boom block out the whine of the truck's engine on the road. Soon that sound faded from hearing. With a sigh, she turned and gathered up her summer packing and lugged it down to the porch. She stacked it next to the door and turned toward a sound in the yard.

  "Hi." Laura leaned her bike against the steps and walked towards Lea. "I came over to see if you wanted to go swimming, but it looks like you're all ready to go." She looked about as unhappy as Lea felt.

  "Yeah," Lea answered.

  "Lea, do you have your things together?" Mom appeared on the porch and called to her.

  Lea nodded and her mother vanished back inside for one last check of doors and windows. She turned back to Laura.

  "She's pretty mad at me," she whispered and touched her curls. Laura nodded. In a rush, Lea felt hot with shame at how she had treated her. She wanted to say so, but the words stuck in her throat. She pretended to be busy; she slammed the trunk of the car and turned toward the house. The ocean danced blue and white, teasing her just beyond. She sighed. Yesterday had been so beautiful and today looked as if it would be, too. The wind blew hard against her back and she braced herself against it. She could hardly believe that she wouldn't be here to see it. This is how I'll remember it, she thought. The Virginia ocean was at its best when it was blue and rolling under a warm sun and gentle breeze. Leaving would be easier, maybe, if it were gray and cold, the way May days could be here. Then she'd be wanting to go somewhere warm. Somewhere new. Somewhere else.

  Slam! Lea turned to see her mother locking the front door. She watched the trees that stood over the house instead. If she didn't watch the door get locked maybe it wouldn't happen.

  Maybe her mother would lose her keys...

  Maybe they wouldn't be able to go...

  "Ready, Lea?" Mom stood to one side, eyes bright.

  "I guess," she said. Now she looked at Laura and the tears rolled down her cheeks.

  "This is hard," she whispered.

  "I know," Laura whispered back and hugged her hard. "Write me, okay?"

  Lea nodded wordlessly and turned to get into the car.

  The tires crunched on the pine needles and sand as Mom started out. Lea turned and looked behind her. Laura stayed where she was standing at the foot of the steps. Her figure grew smaller and sma
ller in the rear window. Lea felt her throat grow tight and closed. When they turned on to the main road she turned and faced the front. She watched the sandy ground speed by next to the car as the tires took her further and further away.

  Would she make any friends where she was going?

  Chapter 2

  Lea woke with a start. She sat up and rubbed her neck, which was stiff from her having slept leaning against the car door. The last thing she remembered were the endless miles of Louisiana. The highway was built upon pillars above the swamp that covered the whole southern part of the state. She had seen ducks a few times and once an alligator sunning himself on a ridge of mud next to the quiet water.

  "Did you have a good nap?" Mom asked her from the other side of the car. Lea nodded and rubbed her eyes, trying to wake up. Her gaze fell on the atlas open on the seat in between them. On it, Mom had marked their roads in a thick red pen. Maps, thought Lea, gave you no idea of how the places looked that were on it.

  They came through the woods of East Texas and then angled down toward the Gulf of Mexico. The Texas heat was like being hit by a giant feather pillow. Even when the wind blew it didn't feel cooler.

  "You're going to be staying in a fisherman's house that’s over one hundred years old," Mom said.

  Lea frowned. Somehow it didn't excite her that a fisherman had lived there.

  "There are a lot of places older at home," she said and looked out of the window. In the pale moonlight mile after mile of flat, treeless ground met her gaze. "We've been driving forever," she said.

  Her mother glanced sideways at her and said, "Let's stop and get a bite to eat." Lea nodded, knowing she was grumpy, and Mom swung the car into the brightly lit parking lot of a small restaurant on the edge of whatever town they were in. Lea stared at the lights which made a small, comforting island of brightness against the night.

  In the ladies' room, she washed her face and rinsed her mouth out with cool, clear water. She felt better as she dried her face, more awake than she had when she first woke from her nap. She was tired of the car, and her dream had been strange and slow, all about home, and she had woken up not knowing where she was.

  "What will you have?"

  "I'm not hungry, just a drink," Lea told her.

  "Two cokes and hamburgers with the works," Mom smiled at the man taking orders behind the counter. They were the only customers other than a pair of older women sedately sipping a pale-pink drink in the first booth inside the door. Lemonade, probably, Lea decided.

  The cokes came in tall glasses beaded with moisture. They were full right to the very brim with soda and ice. Lea picked hers up and took a long swallow. It tasted good. The hamburgers smelled wonderful, of hot melted cheese and buttered, grilled buns.

  "Sure you're not hungry?" Mom picked up her burger and took a big bite.

  "Well, maybe just a French fry," Lea said and took one. She bit into the crispy fry, tasting salt and ketchup and hot potato. A minute later she, too, was eating her hamburger. Mom smiled at her across the table and took another drink of her soda. Lea felt a little surprised that she was hungry in the middle of all this upset, but she was. She gave her mother a tiny nod and kept eating.

  She has a nice smile, Lea thought, and took a sip of her coke. I haven't seen her smile much lately. Her mother looked tired; it had been a really long time since she had been anything except quiet.

  "You don't know your Aunt Meg very well. Do you want me to tell you about her?" Mom asked with a smile, trying to be cheerful.

  "I really want to know where I'm going to be staying," Lea said. She had met Aunt Meg, but maybe she would feel less nervous if she could fix in her mind a picture of where she was going to be for three long months.

  "You and Aunt Meg don't talk much," Lea said.

  Mom answered, "No, we don't." She was quiet again for a while after that. Lea decided her mother didn't want to talk about it by the tone in her voice.

  "I am four years older than she is. We had different friends and interests, I suppose."

  "But did you share a room?" Lea asked curiously.

  "We did, for a long time," Mom nodded.

  "Well, did you fight?" Lea asked.

  "No, not really. It's just that once I moved away and we didn't share a room anymore we didn't seem to have much to say to each other." She frowned. "You know, I really don't remember what we stopped talking about. We just did," she said honestly.

  Lea thought about T.J. and home, where tall pines and thick trees made coming to the ocean a surprise. You wound down out of the trees and there was the beach all of a sudden.

  She tried to imagine life without T.J. It would be quiet, she thought. That would be one nice thing about this summer; no little brother to hog the bathroom, eat her candy when he found it, or follow her and Laura when they were wanting to get away from him.

  She realized her mother was still talking.

  "You're going to be staying on the Gulf of Mexico," her mother said. "It's like a third coast, between the Atlantic and the Pacific, a place you've never seen. It'll be an adventure."

  "I don't want an adventure," Lea said, "I want things the way to be they were."

  Mom's steady gray gaze silenced her outburst. "But they aren't the same, Lea." She paused. "Things won't be the way they were. I think you're going to need to think about that this summer..." She stopped suddenly and looked so sad, Lea was immediately ashamed of her own bad mood. She knew that her mother and father were both not happy about the things that had happened at home.

  "Like Picasso," Lea said, trying hard. "We studied his yellow and blue periods in school, how the changes in his life affected his work."

  "That's right," Mom smiled at Lea. This time her gray eyes lit up. That's my girl, the look said. Lea sighed and punched her straw down into the crushed ice, all the way to the bottom, looking for a swallow more of soda.

  "Your Aunt Meg does that, too, with her work. She moves each year, studying something different that she wants to use in her work."

  "Does she always find something good?" Lea asked.

  "I don't know. Her work has stages or phases, and she finds a new place where she can really get to work. No one finds what they want at every single place." Mom drained the last of her soda. "Ready to go?"

  Lea nodded and they went outside. Mom started the engine and pulled back onto the road.

  "Only twenty miles to go," she said as the headlights cut through the dark. Lea rolled down her window and the heavy, salty smell of the ocean flowed in. She expected a cool breeze, but the air that flowed in felt as hot and heavy as daytime. There weren't many houses or lights once they got past the edge of the town and night folded around them as they drove. Below the road, the land dropped away suddenly to flatness. Just then the headlights picked up a sign for a smaller road.

  Mom braked to a stop at the corner of the smaller road and read her scribbled directions again. She had never been very good with maps or directions, Lea thought.

  "It must be the right road." Mom bent close to the map to pick out her thick red line in the feeble glow of the car light. She put her glasses back firmly on her nose. Lea sighed inside. She knew that gesture. It meant her mother was going to make the turn.

  She stared straight ahead out of the windshield and held a conversation with herself. Just back there in the Dairy Queen, she had made a promise to herself to not fuss, not complain. She was a trouper and could do anything for a summer. And she, Lea, took her promises very seriously; she didn't break them easily. But now she just had to speak up. Beyond the headlights, the road disappeared as two-wheel ruts through a tall stand of dry grass. The breeze caught the dry blades and they rustled and scratched against each other in the dark. Lea had thought the road they were on was small, that Aunt Meg might live a ways out, but this was a one-lane road. It was paved but it didn't look wide enough for two cars to pass each other.

  "Mom, are you sure?" she asked, breaking the promise that she had made to herself back at the D
airy Queen.

  "No," said her mother, and put her foot down on the accelerator. Lea hung on as the car rocked and jolted over ruts washed in the road where the pavement was missing. She told herself that eventually, they would have to stop when the headlights picked up a mailbox in the dark night. Mom slammed on the brakes, just missing the leaning mailbox, and read the name along one side.

  Reflecting letters shone out of the night, spelling "Moody", Mom's maiden name. Mom's name now, again, Lea thought. It was all very confusing. The shiny letters weren't quite straight, she decided.

  "Found it." Lea heard relief in her mother's voice. She sighed and shook her dark hair out of her eyes. She headed the car down the narrow driveway and put the headlights on High. The sound under the wheels changed to the crunch of sand. Outside Lea's window, the irregular shapes of sand dunes slipped past, looking like a line of fat and skinny people standing all in a row next to the road. The headlights suddenly picked up a building straight ahead of them, and Mom coasted to a stop. Lea unbuckled her seatbelt and stretched. She had the feeling that the Dairy Queen was going to seem like the big city by the end of her summer.

  She and Mom both gazed through the window. The house was two-story. It squatted comfortably between two good-sized dunes, one beside the far side of the house and one behind it. The bottom floor was tabby - sand and shell mixed with lime to make a sort of concrete. Lea had seen much of that along the Atlantic. The upper floor was wood, weathered dark from the salt wind and weather. Light spilled out of every window, even a funny little round one peeked one up under the eaves. Next to the car sat a trashcan, and a bicycle leaned against the corner of the house. A small path worn through the beach grass wound down round one side of the cabin.

  Mom opened the door and stood up, stretching after the long drive.

  And here we are, Lea thought. She opened the car door and stood up, stiff and cramped feeling. She listened to the sound of waves. The splash and roll of water told her they were hitting the beach. They must be close to the water, she thought, though she couldn't see the beach in the dark. Faintly, on the breeze, she thought she heard the sound of cattle mooing.