Joplin, Wishing Read online

  Dedication

  In memory of my amazing mother,

  Fay Grissom Stanley

  Contents

  Dedication

  1. Paparazzi

  2. Treasure

  3. Some Rather Unpleasant Stuff

  4. Lucius Doyle, Antiques

  5. A Mean Species

  6. Show-and-Tell

  7. Fake Apologies

  8. Wishes

  9. The Boy with All the Hair

  10. The F-Word

  11. Someplace to Live

  12. The Short Version

  13. The Mystery Man

  14. Strawberry Fields

  15. Whatever It Takes

  16. Still Warm from the Oven

  17. A Really Ugly Lady

  18. What Happened Here?

  19. A Family Thing

  20. The Letter of the Law

  21. Do or Die

  22. Old and Wise

  23. A Force to Be Reckoned With

  Postscript: Three Years Later

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Diane Stanley

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Paparazzi

  WE DRAGGED INTO NEW YORK on Friday afternoon, all wrung out from nine hours of highway driving. Mom and Aunt Jen took turns at the wheel so we could keep going straight through, stopping only for gas, bathroom breaks, snacks, and to change drivers.

  Now I ask you: Who in their right mind drives from Penobscot, Maine, to New York City in a single day? Surely that’s what motels are for.

  To make things worse, I was crammed in the backseat with a mountain of boxes looming over me. The boxes took up most of the space, so I couldn’t lie down or stretch out. Halfway through the trip, my legs started getting twitchy, and I couldn’t seem to sit still. Mom kept telling me to stop fidgeting. I kept saying I couldn’t. It went on like that for hour after mind-numbing hour, until we finally reached the Village and turned onto Perry Street.

  I was like, Thank you, Jesus!

  But my joy lasted exactly a nanosecond. Because right there, in front of our apartment, was this mob of reporters with cameras and microphones.

  “Oh, expletive!” Jen groaned.

  She locked all the doors and stopped at the curb. There we waited, while reporters crowded around and peered in at us, which made me feel even more claustrophobic than I already was. I bared my teeth and made animal claws at the guy outside my window. He just smirked and took my picture.

  “I’m calling the police,” Mom said, pulling out her cell.

  “Seriously?”

  “They’re harassing us, Jen. And we can’t unload these boxes with reporters swarming all over us.”

  “I guess you have a point there.”

  So we sat in the car, surrounded by strangers with cameras, while Mom made her call. Aunt Jen turned around and gave me a wink and a smile, which made me feel instantly better. She’s good at that: cheering people up.

  Just to be clear, Jen isn’t really my aunt. I call her that because she feels like family. She’s been Mom’s best friend since their boarding school days, and I’ve known her all my life. Even when we lived in California, she visited us all the time. Then, after the divorce, Mom and I moved to New York. Jen’s been our roommate ever since.

  “Watch this,” she said when Mom had finished her call. She rolled her window down a crack and shouted through the gap, “We’ve called the police, you vulture scum!”

  The reporters were totally unimpressed. A few seemed to think it was funny. But the bottom line was, they didn’t move.

  Just then, through the mass of annoying reportorial bodies, I spotted Upstairs Chloe sitting on our front stoop. Chloe used to be my regular babysitter, which was very convenient since she lived right upstairs in the second-floor apartment. That’s why we call her Upstairs Chloe.

  That day she had on short cutoff jeans and a halter top, her go-to outfit for “catching rays.” I had explained to her more than once that “catching rays” was a bad idea because it totally damaged your skin. If she kept it up she’d be wrinkled and spotted by the time she was forty. But did she listen?

  Chloe had a drawing pad in her lap and seemed to be sketching the reporters. Or more likely, knowing Chloe, she was just trying to annoy them.

  “Mom?” I said. “Can I go sit with Chloe?”

  “Wait till the police arrive,” she said. She didn’t even turn around.

  “I’m gonna lose my mind if I have to sit here one more minute.”

  Silence.

  “Mom?”

  “Joplin, will you please leave me alone?”

  “Glad to!” I muttered, getting out of the car and slamming the door behind me.

  The reporters moved back after I almost knocked one of them over with the door. I pushed my way through the crowd and climbed the steps.

  “Hey!” Chloe said when I sat down beside her. “Wild, huh? Paparazzi on Perry Street!”

  I agreed that it was wild.

  Then she dropped her smile and put on a serious look. “Sorry about your grandfather,” she said.

  “It’s okay. I’m not upset. I never actually met him.”

  “Really? That’s weird. Was it a nice funeral?”

  “We didn’t have one. He left this letter for Mom saying he didn’t want any kind of service. Maybe he didn’t have any friends, so it’d just be a lot of crazy fans and reporters anyway. He said Mom should feel free to throw his remains in the trash if she wanted. He didn’t really care one way or the other.”

  “Wow, that’s kind of harsh.”

  “Yeah, I know. Apparently he was a strange man.”

  “Did you? Throw his ashes away?”

  I shook my head. “We scattered them in Penobscot Bay. Kind of, you know—dumped ’em in and had a moment of silence, then got back in the car. Nobody even cried.”

  I think Chloe was feeling a little embarrassed, hearing all that private stuff. She didn’t say anything for a while after that, just went back to sketching. She drew really fast with a charcoal pencil, smudging the shadows with her finger.

  I leaned over to take a look. She’d drawn several small scenes on the one big page. And though there were lots of different people in each scene, she’d grouped them together so they made a single shape. It was much more interesting that way. Maybe that was something she learned at Pratt, the art college where she was a student.

  “Whoa, what’s this?” Chloe said as a patrol car arrived, lights flashing.

  “My mom called them. She thinks we need protection.”

  “Wild!”

  Two officers stepped out and looked around, sizing up the situation. My mother got out of the car then and pushed her way through the scrum. The reporters went nuts, of course, taking pictures and shouting questions.

  “Okay, people,” one of the officers shouted. “Move along. You’re being a nuisance and blocking the sidewalk.”

  Cameras click-click-clicked as they grabbed a few more quick shots of Mom with the police. Then they crossed to the other side of the street, where they continued to wait.

  “What’s with all the boxes in the car?” Chloe asked, busy with her pencil again. Now she was drawing my mother and the policemen.

  “Papers from my grandfather’s office. They were the only valuable thing in the whole place.”

  “Well, I guess they’d be valuable! Unpublished work by Martin J. Camrath? That’d be worth a fortune!”

  “We don’t know what’s in there. Mom and Jen just shoved it all into boxes. But there sure was a lot of it.”

  “How come you never told me he was your grandfather?”

  “Mom said not to. People get
all weird when they find out. And I guess she would know.”

  “Joplin!” Mom called. “Come help us unload.”

  I was still mad and I didn’t like her tone of voice, but I got up and trudged down the stairs.

  “Me too,” Chloe said, leaving her tablet and pencils on the stoop and following right behind. “I can tell the guys at school I helped unload Martin J. Camrath’s boxes.”

  “Technically, the boxes weren’t his,” I said. “We bought them at Office Depot. It’s the contents—”

  “Oh, don’t be such a little pill.”

  I wasn’t actually trying to be a pill. Sometimes I just did it by accident.

  Jen unlocked our front door while the officers stood guard on either side of the car, glaring at anyone who even thought of daring to approach. Then Mom, Jen, Chloe, and I carried box after box into the apartment, stacking them against the walls of the living room, wherever space allowed.

  There was a lot of locking and unlocking of doors, like something out of a movie. I half expected guys in ninja suits to rappel down from the roof on ropes.

  When we’d finished and Jen had driven off to put the car away in the garage, Mom thanked the officers and promised to send a generous donation to the police Widows’ and Children’s Fund.

  I thought they’d leave after that, but they didn’t. They seemed to be enjoying themselves. I guess helping a pretty lady, who was part of a big news story and was being hounded by paparazzi, was a lot more fun than arresting drug dealers or writing parking tickets.

  “You got an alarm system?” one of them asked.

  “Yes, Officer, we do.”

  “Good. Use it, even when you’re at home.”

  “Hey, isn’t this the block with the big garden in the middle?” the other officer said.

  Mom nodded.

  “Then that’s a second point of entry, not visible from the street. Please tell me you don’t have a sliding door.”

  “We don’t have a sliding door.”

  “Good. Make sure you keep the door to the garden locked. And you might want to find a safer place for those papers, if they’re as valuable as you say.”

  “Don’t worry, Officer. I have a plan.”

  Finally they left. Mom smiled and waved sweetly as they drove away. Then her face sagged back to its new normal. We went inside and locked the door behind us.

  2

  Treasure

  OUR ANSWERING MACHINE WAS FLASHING when we came in. It was a relic from the past that Mom insisted on keeping because she was fanatically careful about giving out her cell phone number. I think only five or six people had it. Everyone else called the landline. This was all about controlling her life and protecting her privacy—being the daughter of a celebrity and all.

  Mom took one look at the flashing light and slumped. Why she’d be surprised, I couldn’t imagine. We’d been gone a week, plus her father had just died. Of course there’d be a lot of calls.

  For half a minute she stood there in front of it, scowling. Then she heaved this big, dramatic sigh you could’ve heard from the back row of a Broadway theater and pressed the blinking arrow.

  “You have thirty-seven messages,” said the robotic voice.

  She pressed stop, sighed again, went into her bedroom, and shut the door. Leaving me standing alone in the middle of our living room, now crammed with the same annoying boxes I’d been riding with all day, and feeling completely abandoned.

  I’d only wanted to go up to Penobscot, instead of staying with Upstairs Chloe, because it meant I’d get to miss a week of school. Also, I was kind of curious to see the house where Mom had lived when she was little and the room where Martin J. Camrath wrote his super-famous books. I guess that last part actually was kind of interesting, but mostly the trip was not fun, just a lot of work packing and hauling boxes, with Mom in this really foul mood the entire time.

  On the drive up to Maine, she had told me I could have any of my grandfather’s things I wanted. All she cared about were his papers.

  I thought it would be cool to have something that had belonged to him—a set of cuff links, maybe, a watch, something small—but only because he was so famous, not for sentimental reasons. He hadn’t ever been part of my life. He never came to visit us, never called, and never sent so much as a birthday card. It was almost like he’d never existed.

  That first day in the Penobscot house, while Mom and Jen were packing up his office, I wandered through the rooms, searching for anything that might be of interest. But the prospects looked pretty dim. The place was old and run-down. The furniture was shabby. The rooms were damp and dark. They smelled of mildew and dust, with a hint of boiled cabbage, wet dog, and old man.

  I guess when my grandparents got divorced—Mom was seven at the time—my grandmother took the pretty things with her and Martin J. never bothered to replace them. He went on living alone for the next thirty-plus years, just him and a series of Labrador retrievers, in that stripped-down, half-empty, giant, depressing old house.

  There were still hooks on the walls where the pictures used to be. Couches with no lamps or side tables, bare spots with dents in the carpet from the feet of vanished chairs. If you added a few fake cobwebs and hung some rubber bats, it would have made a perfect Halloween haunted house.

  In a way, I guess it really was haunted. Or at least Mom seemed to think it was. She said it held bad memories—so bad that she refused to sleep there, though it meant we had to pay for a motel. She wouldn’t go upstairs either, not even to visit her old childhood bedroom.

  She said that the caretaker, Mrs. Gee, would go up there after we left and clear my grandfather’s stuff away. She had no desire to see any of it.

  But I was still looking for my treasure. And even though Martin J. Camrath had been a hermit, and maybe a not-nice man, maybe even a little bit crazy, he was still my grandfather. A quarter of the genes on my chromosomes came from him. And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed important to own at least one thing that had once belonged to him.

  I searched the downstairs rooms but found nothing at all. The kitchen, my final stop, was especially depressing—the old chipped plates, the stained drawer liners, and the yellowing linoleum floor, curling up in places. The room felt dirty and had a slight smell of old garbage.

  Eager to get away from there, I headed up the back stairs to check out the bedrooms.

  There were two of them in the back, separated from the front by a laundry area and a set of double doors. I figured this must have been where the servants lived in the olden days.

  Both rooms were empty. I mean completely. No rugs or furniture at all. I assumed that one of them had been my mom’s, back in the 1980s. The other one, across the hall, was probably for guests.

  I checked the closets. They were empty too, as was the bathroom. Not a towel, not even any toilet paper. And though it was spring, the room felt cold, like it had held on to years and years of hard winters.

  The front of the house had a bathroom and two bedrooms, one of which had been turned into a study. Books lined the shelves. There was a grungy old couch, a moth-eaten rug, and a big, soft chair. A couple of lamps. A globe. I had the feeling Martin J. hadn’t used it in a long time. Like he pretty much lived in his office, ate in the kitchen, and slept in his bedroom. The rest of the house felt abandoned.

  By that point it was becoming clear that if I was going to find anything interesting at all, it would be in my grandfather’s bedroom. And to be honest, I wasn’t too keen on going in there.

  True, it was where his valuable stuff was most likely to be. But I was beginning to suspect he wasn’t a cuff links and gold watch sort of guy. Also, I was creeped out by the thought of going through his stuff. I didn’t want to look at his clothes, his toothbrush, his drinking glass with the lip prints still on it. He had died in that room just a couple of days ago. Just the sight of his bed, stripped down to the stained mattress, made me kind of sick.

  Then, as I stood in the doorway trying
to nerve myself up to go in, I noticed something sitting on the dresser. It caught my eye because it was red and shiny. I took a deep breath and went to have a look.

  It was a round metal tin, the kind you put cakes or cookies in. There was a picture of a poinsettia on the lid.

  My first thought was: Moldy fruitcake? It would certainly fit with everything else in that house, like the ratty old bedroom slippers and the Formica-topped kitchen table with the cigarette burns on the edge. But when I picked up the tin, I was surprised by how heavy it was. Also, it rattled, like big, hard things were sliding around inside.

  I pried off the lid and sure enough it was filled with bits of broken china. Blue designs painted on white.

  They were beautiful, like perfect little works of art. Each fragment was a small part of a bigger picture. I found bits of trees, the heads of some geese, a tiny windmill, part of a dress, part of a girl’s face.

  I knew right then that this was the thing I wanted.

  I carried it downstairs to show to Mom, but she hardly looked up. She just nodded and went back to hauling files out of the cabinet and putting them into boxes.

  “Can I have it?” I asked.

  “Sure. Whatever you want.”

  I’d felt a strange surge of pleasure then, owning that little round box with its mysterious contents. I’d held it to my chest and given it a squeeze.

  Now, as I stood in our silent apartment, my mother moping behind her closed door and Jen gone off to park the car, I saw my cookie tin perched on one of the boxes.

  I carried it into my room and set it on the desk. Then I sat down, removed the lid, and took the pieces out one by one. I arranged them according to subject, putting like with like, the way you do with jigsaw puzzles, except that this was a lot more interesting.

  For one thing, jigsaw puzzles come with a picture on the box that shows you what they’re going to look like. My puzzle was a mystery. I could tell it was some sort of country scene with a windmill, geese, and at least one girl. But the rest was yet to be revealed.

  Also, my puzzle was the work of a real artist. Just touching those little bits of broken china, I felt I was in the presence of something great.