The Secrets of Ordinary Farm

Chapter 12

As Colin Needle walked toward the library he watched the male dragon Alamu flying in long, lazy circles a few hundred feet above the house as if enjoying the sight of Colin’s mother’s sprawling gardens. A little afternoon sun peeked through the heavy clouds, glinting off the creature’s coppery scales and shining through the gray membranes of his wings-the only brightness Colin had seen in hours. A storm was moving in on the valley, a swell of thunderheads crouched above the farthest hills like an angry genie. Alamu glided low, then swung high into the air again.

Electric fences are all well and good, Colin thought, but what if Ed Stillman and his men are camped out there on Springs Road taking pictures with a telephoto lens right now? It’s going to be hard for him to miss an actual dragon flying around. His stomach flopped in queasy discontent: just one more thing to worry about.

The billionaire Stillman had double-crossed him last summer, but what was worse was that Colin had fallen for the man’s lies-in fact, he had been as gullible as one of the Jenkins kids. That still didn’t sit well. Now Ed Stillman was just one more, apparently permanent problem. Somebody was going to have to solve these problems and save Ordinary Farm. Gideon Goldring was gone, maybe dead; Colin’s mother was busy picking up the slack of Gideon’s absence; and Walkwell and Ragnar and the Jenkins children were no use at all. Only Colin Needle could solve the farm’s problems and make everything work again.

The sad thing, though-the truly infuriating thing-was that only Colin himself seemed to understand that.

In the library Colin sat among the papers and books piled on his table and felt something like despair. Almost every weekday for two months he had been sitting here, keeping an eye out for another Magic Necklace Drop (as he sarcastically thought of it) and had filled the time studying everything he could find about the science of the Fault Line (because none of his plans for the farm would work if he couldn’t use the Fault Line.) And what did he have to show for all that work? Piles of physics books he could barely read, let alone understand, because they were full of crazy terms like ergodicity and Poincare Recurrence Theorem and Loschmidt’s Paradox, terms that Colin couldn’t make much sense out of even when he found them in ordinary science books. Still, he had worked his way through all of them, making plenty of notes at first, but as it became clearer and clearer that the science was far beyond him he had mostly given up. Despite what he’d said to Tyler Jenkins, Colin knew he was never going to make a Continuascope on his own; he had only threatened it to make his enemy worry.

As for finding Grace, he didn’t think he was going to have any luck with that either. She had disappeared so completely on that night twenty years ago that almost everyone on the farm assumed she’d somehow wound up in the Fault Line. But if she had, why should her golden locket turn up here in the library, a thousand yards away from the silo and the strange phenomenon hidden beneath it? Gideon only had Tyler Jenkins’ word that it had actually come from the library, but the old man had still stuck Colin in the library, lonely as a lighthouse keeper, waiting for some other memento of Grace’s to show up, all on Tyler Jenkins’ dubious say-so…

A new and startling thought came to Colin then, an idea so astonishing that for a moment he forgot to breathe. The Jenkins brat had already been in the Fault Line once and traveled to the Ice Age-by accident, he had claimed-then walked back out again no worse for wear, the cave girl Ooola trailing after him like a lovesick puppy. But what if that hadn’t been an accident? What if Tyler had found a Continuascope of his own-perhaps some early prototype of Octavio Tinker’s? If so, then he might have found the locket somewhere in the Fault Line and just pretended to find it here in the library, to keep everyone fooled about where it had really come from…

But if Tyler Jenkins had his own Continuascope, why was he always asking questions about the whereabouts of the old one? That didn’t make sense. Colin knew that if he had a Continuascope, he’d be in the Fault Line every time he had the chance.

So much was happening, and it was so hard to make sense of it all. The Jenkins kids were back on the farm. Gideon had disappeared. Kingaree had returned. Could all those things happening at the same time really be coincidence?

Thunder rumbled over the distant hills. Colin Needle decided he was tired of secrets. It was time to talk to the one person who almost certainly knew more than she had told him so far… about everything.

His mother stood in front of the elaborate old Victorian washstand and the pretty, black-haired woman in the mirror looked back at her, expression thoughtful and pale face somber. She was so beautiful! Looking at her now, Colin couldn’t believe he had been about to tell Lucinda Jenkins that he suspected her of knowing more than she was saying about Gideon’s disappearance. Yes, his mother might have a temper, but he felt certain she would never do anything to harm the man who had saved her life…!

She extended a finger and her nail touched the surface of the glass with a soft click. She moved her finger and then touched the surface again. The same click. Colin watched her, both repelled and fascinated. “Tell me, Mother,” he said at last, “why did you go to the trouble of having this thing hauled up the stairs and installed in here?”

“I’m not entirely certain.” She gazed somberly at her own reflection. “It feels… strange to me. Older than it looks. But perhaps you’re going to tell me differently?”

He was sure she was teasing him-mocking him. “What do you mean, Mother?”

She flicked the mirror with her nail again- tik, tik, tik. “I seem to remember that I asked you to bring me anything you could find about the piece or its acquisition in Octavio Tinker’s papers.”

“There’s nothing. I told you that already.”

“I hoped you had come to tell me you were wrong, Colin. That you found out something about it. Because it intrigues me, and I am seldom if ever wrong about such feelings.” She gave the mirror another dreamy stare. “Something, there is something… ”

“I came to ask you some questions, Mother. Still no news about Gideon?”

A sharp, annoyed stare. “Why on earth are you asking me? Do you think I would hide it from you if we heard something? Really, Colin, just when I have so much extra work to do.” She stared at him for a long silent moment. It was all Colin could do not to turn away from his mother’s hard, fierce eyes, but there was something in her face he had seldom seen before. It took him a moment to recognize the unfamiliar expression: she was anxious. But why? Did his mother know something about Gideon Goldring’s disappearance after all?

“You’re worried, aren’t you, dear?” she asked, more lightly than before. “It’s not good for you to brood about things, Colin. We’re all worried about Gideon.”

Something about the casual way she spoke upset him. “Really, Mother? All of us?”

Her lip curled in a snarl. She looked so angry he took a startled step back. “What is that supposed to mean? You do say the most incomprehensible things sometimes. I’m glad you’re going out for the evening tomorrow. It will be good for you.”

It took him a moment to realize what she’d just said. “Going out? What do you mean?”

“Oh, didn’t I tell you? The people on the next farm over, those

… Spanish people… asked you over for their holiday celebration. Surely you remember that tomorrow is July the Fourth. Independence Day, don’t they call it?”

“The Carrillos? They invited me?”

“Of course. They sent us a letter and it said, ‘the children are invited.’ Like it or not, you are still one of the children, so of course you are expected to go.”

Colin found it very hard to believe the Carrillos wanted him at their Fourth of July gathering. “I don’t want to go to their stupid party.”

“Nevertheless, you will go-I insist, Colin. We owe them several favors. Also, before he disappeared Gideon was rather rude about not answering Mr. Carrillo’s questions, so we must do our best to be polite to them. I want you on your best behavior.” She turned back the mirror, gazing at it again as though it was a magical picture that showed her heart’s desire. “Oh, and would you please go tell Caesar he may come up for his physic? I’m brewing his special tea.”

Colin was walking downstairs toward the kitchen when he suddenly realized that he had never asked his mother any of the questions he’d planned to ask. He also realized that going to Cresta Sol dairy farm for the evening tomorrow had nothing to do with the Carrillos at all, except that they provided a useful excuse: it was his mother who wanted him gone. He had no idea what she planned to do, but he was certain she didn’t want to do it in front of him.

Thunder boomed again, and outside the window a flash briefly turned the sky white. Lightning, and not very far away.

Another son would have felt disturbed by his mother’s secrecy, and might even have marched back upstairs to argue about it, but Colin Needle was used to being inconvenient, to being kept in the dark, and he was also used to doing what Patience Needle wanted him to do, or at least appearing to do so.

He would go to the Carrillos-but nothing on earth, not even his beautiful, cold, clever mother, could make him enjoy himself.