The Great Unexpected Read online

  “Naomi, do you think I should ask the Cupwrights to investigate?”

  “No, Lizzie, I do not.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Cupwright were Lizzie’s foster parents. They were strict beyond strict and believed in minding their own business. Mr. Cupwright’s favorite comment was, “Don’t know nothin’. Ain’t none of my business.”

  If you asked Mr. Cupwright about his brother Ned, Mr. Cupwright would say, “Don’t know nothin’. Ain’t none of my business.”

  If you asked Mr. Cupwright if his other brother was out of jail yet, he would say, “Don’t know nothin’. Ain’t none of my business.”

  Lizzie had been with the Cupwrights for two years, ever since her parents died up in Ravensworth, one right after the other. She said her mother died of “diseases” and her father died of heartbreak. Her only aunt was “a little funny in her head,” and her only uncle was homeless in Michigan. The Cupwrights told Lizzie they might adopt her, but that was two years ago and they hadn’t mentioned it since. Lizzie was hopeful, though.

  “Oh, Naomi,” she said, “I know they would adopt me if they could get everything in their lives to run more smoothly, and what with the barn falling over and the cow stuck in the pond and the electric wires catching fire, they have a lot of other things to worry about right now. I will have to bide my time.”

  Sometimes Lizzie would say, “I need to go stand on the moon awhile,” and she would look up into the sky and close her eyes and breathe deeply, and then a few minutes later, she’d open her eyes and smile and say, “There. Much better.”

  Lizzie said that if you imagined you were standing on the moon, looking down on the earth, you wouldn’t be able to see the itty-bitty people racing around worrying; you wouldn’t see the barn falling in or the cow stuck in the pond; you wouldn’t see the mean Granger kids squirting mustard on your white dress. You would see the most beautiful blue oceans and green lands, and the whole earth would look like a giant blue-and-green marble floating in the sky. Your worries would seem so small, maybe invisible.

  The first time I tried standing on the moon, what I saw in my mind was a million billion people, every one of them with problems, all running here and there and screaming for help. It was a scary trip to the moon.

  When we were there in the riverbed digging clay, Lizzie closed her eyes and went to stand on the moon, and when she came back to earth, she said, “There. Much better.”

  I was going to have to practice that moon-standing more often because it was remarkable the change in Lizzie when she came back from the moon. She had been wading in the water, troubled about “that poor Finn boy” from her toes to her frizzy hair, but after standing on the moon, she had the most peaceful look on her face.

  “Naomi! I know exactly what to do!”

  “And what’s that?”

  “You and me—together we will go find Finn!”

  “I can’t. I need to get home.”

  “You silly, I don’t mean today. I mean tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER 6

  ACROSS THE OCEAN: THE SOLICITOR

  MRS. KAVANAGH

  It was late when the solicitor arrived at Mrs. Kavanagh’s. It was long past the entertaining murder and the jam and tea. Mrs. Kavanagh’s companion, Miss Pilpenny, answered the bell.

  “I do apologize,” Mr. Dingle said. He was a tall, slim man, immaculately dressed in tweeds fashionable decades earlier. The faint smell of mothballs trailed him. “Mrs. Kavanagh did say it was permissible to come after the theater.”

  Miss Pilpenny nodded. “And sure it is fine and not all that late for the pair of us, now, is it?”

  Mrs. Kavanagh was seated in her usual place beside the fire. The ancient fireplace let as much smoke into the room as up the chimney, but this did not seem to bother Mrs. Kavanagh.

  “Charles,” she said to Mr. Dingle. “How good of you to come.”

  “My pleasure entirely.” Mr. Dingle glanced around the sitting room. With a wink, he said, “I see you’ve taken down all the Master’s portraits.”

  Mrs. Kavanagh smoothed the afghan on her lap. “The fool. The bombastic, cruel fool.”

  “The room looks so much brighter now.”

  “The whole house is so much brighter now,” Mrs. Kavanagh said. “The whole yard. The orchard. The whole town!”

  “That one man could cast such darkness over people—simply intolerable.”

  “And yet—and yet—we tolerated, didn’t we? You tolerate or you go hungry. But enough of that, Charles. Here are the papers. I’d like you to read them through and see if all is in order.”

  Miss Pilpenny tapped at the door. “Would you like some sherry, Mr. Dingle?”

  Mr. Dingle brightened. “Yes, indeed. Yes, thank you.”

  “Sybil?”

  Mrs. Kavanagh put her fingers to her lips. “Mm, yes, lovely.”

  After the sherry had been sipped and the papers had been studied, Mr. Dingle leaned toward Mrs. Kavanagh. “Absolutely splendid, Sybil. You see, things do right themselves in the end, don’t they?”

  “But do you see any obstacles here?”

  “I will have to investigate a few matters—”

  “I’ve appreciated your investigations over the years. This time, I’d like for you, personally, to go to the States and pave the way.”

  “Absolutely. You read my mind.”

  “I wish I could join you, but these old legs, alas—” She tapped her knees with her cane. “These old legs and these old bones will not last much longer.”

  “Sybil—”

  “Now, now, let’s not pretend. I am ancient as the hills; I am ready to go now that my revenge is in place.”

  Miss Pilpenny, reentering the room on those last words, said, “And a fine, fine revenge it is.”

  Mr. Dingle rose from his chair. “Indeed.”

  CHAPTER 7

  NULA AND JOE

  “I can see you’ve been to the creek, girl, what with the clay on your cheeks and in your hair and all about your clothes, isn’t that right, Naomi?”

  She wasn’t mad. This was the way Nula talked. When I was little, we’d play Mean Gran and Poor Little Girl. Nula would put on a mean voice and say, “For the love of sausage, girl, you are not going to leave this house until you clean every inch of it.”

  And I would reply in my most feeble voice, “Oh, no, please. Please let poor little me go out in the sunshine.”

  Nula would whack a wooden spoon on the counter and say, “Don’t pull those tears on me, you little worthless lump of dust. Wash the floors. Wash the windows. Wash the dishes. Wash the bedding …”

  “Poor, poor pitiful me. I am a poor child all alone in this world.”

  “Quit your moanin’, lass, and get to work!”

  And so I would rush around, madly waving rags over everything, pretending to clean.

  So now when I came back from digging clay in the riverbed with Lizzie, Nula said, “No gruel for you tonight unless you wash all those clothes and clean up your shoes!”

  Nula and her husband, Joe, took me in when I was three years old. I don’t think they intended to keep me, but I guess they never got around to finding another place for me. They said I could call them Gran and Grandpa, and sometimes I did, but more often I simply called them Nula and Joe. I didn’t realize I wasn’t related to them until I went to school.

  If you looked at Joe, you wouldn’t guess he had a sense of humor. He was a short, wiry, bowlegged man who walked with a rocking gait. His face usually sported gray stubble with which he could “beard” mischievous children. Tufts of gray hair stuck out of his head. He didn’t smile. He always looked as if he’d just heard bad news. Joe didn’t talk much, but he’d occasionally drop a line or two that caught you by surprise and made you laugh. He didn’t laugh back, though. Instead, he would act as if he couldn’t understand what was so funny. You had to watch his eyes and his mouth. If his lips were closed and moving about as if he were chewing on them from the inside, and if his eyes looked sparkly, then he was fu
nning with you.

  Nula was in many ways Joe’s opposite. She was taller than Joe by a good four inches, plump and soft-looking, with hair the palest, palest, faded red mixed with white and piled loosely on the top of her head. Nula’s real name was Fionnuala, pronounced fin-NOO-luh, but most people called her simply Nula (noo-luh). She was proud of her Irish roots and her Irish name, but unless you were born and bred in Blackbird Tree and your parents were born and bred in Blackbird Tree, you were and always would be a foreigner, and you’d best keep your “strange ways” to yourself.

  When Joe came in from the fields and we three sat down to dinner, I told them about the body falling out of the tree.

  “Now, which tree would that be?” Joe asked.

  I said it was the one with the green leaves on it.

  Nula said, “Ah, lass, I know exactly which one you mean. The one with the branches, right?”

  Joe’s lips were moving about.

  “That’s the one, Nula. So the body falls out of the tree and knocks me over and I think it’s dead. It wasn’t moving or anything.” I told them about Lizzie coming along and blowing on his forehead and all, and how he didn’t want any help and his name was Finn.

  “Finn?” Nula said. “Finn? Not a name you hear much around here, though I knew a few Finns back in my time, that’s for certain. There was Finn O’Tanoran and Finn Murphy and Finn O’Connor—a charmer, that one. And oh, Finn McCoul—you’d best stay away from him. Finn, eh? And where did he come from and where is he now?”

  I said I didn’t know where he came from, but he was headed up Black Dog Night Hill.

  “He wouldn’t be living up at the Dimmenses’ place, now, would he?” Nula asked. “Finn? Are you sure he said Finn?”

  Then Nula wanted to know how old the boy was and what he looked like and if his clothes were clean or dirty and if his hair was tended to or shaggy and was he barefoot or did he wear shoes and if he wore shoes, were they proper-fitting shoes?

  That night, after I went to bed, Nula leaned into my room to say good night. Then she said, “Finn? Are you sure it was Finn?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Mmm-mm. I knew some Finns in my day, I did.”

  CHAPTER 8

  FAMILIES

  Two years ago, we had a teacher who didn’t last long. She arrived full of sparkle and new clothes and manicured fingernails. On the very first day, she gave us an assignment. We were to write about our families.

  “Which ones?” someone asked.

  “Why, the ones you live with, of course. Your families. You know, your mother, your father, your sisters, your brothers.” She smiled at us as if she were thinking, The poor, ignorant dears, they do not even know what the word family means.

  So the next day, we straggled in with our precious essays about our ragtag families. She made us read aloud. Well, the first five people, that is.

  Angie lived with a foster family with eight children and four donkeys and seven cats and three snakes. Her real parents were still in jail.

  Lizzie lived with her foster parents, who were definitely going to be her adoptive parents, and they had no other children because her foster mother got headaches. Her real mother had had headaches, too, but that was from “diseases that made her die”; her father died “of the maximum grief.”

  Carl lived with his uncle, who lost both his legs in a car wreck, and so Carl had to do all the cooking and cleaning and grocery shopping and it wasn’t too bad except when his uncle got ahold of the liquor.

  Delano said he wasn’t allowed to write about his family while they were under investigation.

  And then there was me. I told about my mother giving birth to me and on the second day of my life, she looked at me and said, “Gosh, I feel peculiar,” and then she dropped me on her stomach and died of a blood splot that went where it wasn’t supposed to go. I started to tell about how my father died of an infection, but the teacher stopped me.

  “Oh, my,” she said. “Oh, dear.” She turned her back to us and rummaged in her purse for a tissue and blew her nose, and then still with her back to us, she said, “Excuse me for a minute, please,” and she left the room.

  “What?” I said, when everyone turned to look at me. “Is it my fault? Again?”

  The next morning I told Nula that I couldn’t go to school because I had turned into a fairy.

  “Really, now? And what does that have to do with school?”

  “Fairies don’t go to school, you ought to know that. And I won’t be wearing shoes anymore because fairies don’t wear shoes. And I might have to move soon … to a flower.”

  The “families” teacher didn’t last but three months. She told Mrs. Tebop over at the general store that we were “simply too tragic.”

  We didn’t think we were tragic. We thought we were normal. All any of us wanted was for somebody to care about us, and if we couldn’t have that, then at least somebody who wouldn’t be too mean and who would feed us from time to time. I suppose the only thing I wanted beyond that was that it wouldn’t be my fault. What “it” was, I couldn’t say. But “it” was usually bad and always unexpected.

  CHAPTER 9

  BLACK DOG NIGHT HILL

  Lizzie and I stood at the base of Black Dog Night Hill, not a place I wanted to be.

  “Lar-de-dar,” Lizzie warbled, “it looks completely fine.” She was referring to the path that led up the hill. “Those are probably only rumors about the black dog and the yellow eyes and the skeletons. There is probably not an ounce of truth to them, and I really do not believe that the Dimmenses keep trespassers in chains. How silly is that? How—how—ridiculous. Right, Naomi?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How many of them do you think live up there now, Naomi?”

  “Dimmens people? Nula says it’s a whole clan. Maybe fifty.”

  “Fifty? But isn’t there just one cabin?”

  “Last I heard there was only the one.”

  “Then, truly, Naomi, fifty people cannot live in one cabin.”

  The day was cloudy and cool, with enough breeze to keep the skeeters away. Poison ivy trailed along one side of the path; nettles clumped along the other side. A garter snake slithered from the ivy to the nettles.

  “Ooh!” Lizzie said. “Eww. Surprised me, that’s all. Eww. We’ll go a little ways and see what we see, okay?”

  “Not going.”

  “Ten feet, let’s just go ten or thirty feet.” Lizzie chattered as she walked. Reluctantly, I followed. “I do not understand why people are so hard on the poor Dimmens family,” she said. “I think it is a downright shame that the children have to be homeschooled now because they don’t get along with anyone. If those parents would teach them some manners, then maybe they would get along with people and could come to school like normal people.”

  “I thought they were homeschooled because it was too far to trek back and forth to school every day.”

  “Oh. Wait! Listen. Hear that? A dog?”

  She said dog the way most people might say skunk or bobcat.

  “Hear that, Naomi? Was that a dog? What if it’s the black dog, Naomi? The one with the yellow eyes and the dripping blood, the one that jumps to your throat, the one that—”

  I was already up the nearest tree.

  We listened. Something was coming through the brush.

  Lizzie was as pale as a potato. “We’re going to die.” She scampered up the tree after me.

  We heard a rifle shot. Then another. A small red fox dashed across the trail and dove into the bushes on the other side. A boy with a rifle, not in any hurry, appeared on the path.

  It was Finn.

  “Don’t you dare shoot that fox,” I called. “Don’t you dare.”

  Finn swiveled toward me and my tree perch. “Who said anything about shooting it? What’re you two doing up there?”

  “Nothin’.”

  “Seems a funny spot for two girls to be doing nothin’.”

  “Naomi is scared of dogs,” Lizzie
said.

  “Lizzie!”

  “Well, she is.”

  “I don’t see any dogs, but that explains her up the tree,” Finn said. “What about you?”

  “I was keeping Naomi company,” Lizzie said, jumping to the ground.

  I could’ve punched her.

  “Aren’t you coming down?” Finn asked.

  “I’m fine where I am.”

  “She’s afraid of dogs,” Lizzie said.

  Finn looked up at me. “You? Didn’t I hear that you gave Bo Dimmens a black eye?”

  “Who’d you hear that from?”

  “Bo himself.”

  “He was asking for it. He kept tripping me, and I got mighty tired of falling face-first in the dirt.”

  Finn nodded. “And didn’t I hear tell that you knocked out some boy’s tooth?”

  “That tooth was already loose.”

  “And didn’t I hear you had an imaginary pet, a dinosaur—”

  “You sure hear a lot,” I said.

  Lizzie felt obliged to chime in. “Her dinosaur was toothless. It drank flesh shakes. Flesh shakes.”

  “Is that right?” Finn said. He stared up at me. “Seems to me that a girl as tough as you oughtn’t be afraid of a dog.”

  Lizzie said, “Her daddy got eaten by a dog.”

  “What?”

  “Lizzie, you shut your mouth.”

  Lizzie shrugged. “Well, he did. And look at her arm. Dog did that. Nearly chewed it off. That’s why it’s so shriveled up.”

  “You nut head, Lizzie.”

  Finn’s mouth was hanging open. He looked from me to Lizzie and back again.

  I still wasn’t coming down out of the tree. I made myself comfortable up there.

  “Finn boy,” Lizzie said, “are there really fifty people living up there at the Dimmenses’ place? I mean, I know it’s not any of my business, but people do talk and they’re saying that at least fifty people live up there, and I say, ‘How can that possibly be true, what with the Dimmenses’ place being so little and all?’ Mm?”