The Secrets of Ordinary Farm

Chapter 24

Days passed at Cresta Sol without anything changing. July turned into August, the end of their summer vacation loomed, and still Lucinda and Tyler remained banished from their great-uncle’s house and land. Ragnar met with Mr. Walkwell at the Cresta Sol property line every few days, but according to the ancient Greek things had not improved: Gideon Goldring was still sickly and still doing pretty much what Mrs. Needle told him. She did not even allow the exiles’ names to be mentioned in Gideon’s presence.

Ragnar slept in the Carrillos’ dairy barn and helped Hector and Silvia with the farm. Lucinda and Tyler hung around with the kids. It was fun to have time with Carmen and the others, but Lucinda was beginning to feel like the old Ordinary Farm had been a dream and now they had woken up.

I could have been spending all this time getting to know Desta, learning how to really talk with the dragons, Lucinda thought. Is anyone giving her carrots? She enjoys them so much! Haneb must be so busy with us gone, especially Ragnar-will he have the time to pay some extra attention to her…?

Tyler flopped down beside her. He looked around the empty living room as if there might be spies hiding behind the sofa cushions, but it was late afternoon and everyone was out of the house doing chores or running errands. “Grandma Paz-she knows a lot more than she’s telling,” he said in a dramatic voice.

“Well, duh.”

“What does that mean?”

Lucinda sat up carefully-her head sometimes still pounded if she moved too quickly, but otherwise she was feeling better, although she still had no idea what had happened to her that day in the garden. “ Everybody around here knows more than they’re telling-except us kids. That’s the whole point. The place is full of secrets.”

“Well, I’m going to find out what she’s hiding. You can tell she’s dying to tell somebody… ”

Lucinda sighed loudly. “And then what? You’ll ride Eliot the Sea Serpent up Kumish Creek, throwing hand grenades until Colin Needle and his mother surrender?”

“What is your problem? Why are you being like this, Luce?”

Tears came into her eyes. “Because I’m tired of listening to you talking about all the things we’re supposed to be doing when we’re helpless. I wish we’d never learned about this stupid place. It’s all been just… trouble. And scary, dangerous things. I want to go home.”

Tyler stared at her as if she’d announced she didn’t want to have Christmas anymore. “You’re crazy, Luce.”

“Well, I’m tired,” she said, “and I still feel lousy!”

“But you’re totally in love with those dragons…!”

“You don’t get it, Tyler. I don’t care anymore! It’s too hard! Even the grownups can’t make this work-what are we supposed to do? We’re kids!”

“But the grown-ups can’t make things work because they’re grown-ups!” Tyler shouted.

Lucinda rolled her eyes and said, “I’m going to go take a nap.”

Tyler followed her down the hall to Carmen’s room. He was angry now, too. “So you’re just going to give up? We’ve got a few days of our summer left-that’s all. And you want to let the Needles have the farm and all the animals and do whatever they want while we go back home-while we go back to school?”

“What else can we do?” Lucinda knew she was being hard on her younger brother: he wasn’t feeling as lousy as she was, so of course he was frustrated. But she really did feel exhausted-whatever had caused the strange fever was not entirely gone. Suddenly it was all she could do to stumble to her bed.

When Lucinda woke up it was mid-afternoon. The sheet stuck to her sweaty skin and the air in the Carrillos’ house was hot and close. She wanted to take a shower, but she needed fresh things to put on afterward or getting clean was pointless. She rummaged through her jumbled suitcase for unworn socks and underwear until she had emptied the suitcase completely, but she still couldn’t find anything clean. Because she had been sick she had let everything go, but now it seemed she would either have to find out how to use Silvia’s washing machine or just wear dirty stuff. She began to search through the suitcase’s various zipper pockets, hoping a clean pair of underpants might have strayed into one of them somehow. To her surprise, she found something in one of them, but it wasn’t underwear.

She lifted out the old, yellowed envelope with the Madagascar postmark. It was the letter she had been holding when Mrs. Needle burst into her room their first night back on the farm, the night Tyler found the box mailed to Grace Goldring. Lucinda had tried to gather up all the letters when Mrs. Needle came in, but several had fallen onto the floor. This one must have gone under the bed or something, and Pema and Azinza had found it when they were packing her suitcase and just stuck it in.

She climbed onto the bed. The envelope was still sealed-the letter had never been opened and Grace had never read it, which was a strange thing to think about. Did the person who wrote it wonder why she had never replied? Lucinda couldn’t help wondering what Doctor Grace Goldring had really been like. In all those pictures in the memorial parlor she looked very calm, very pretty, very smart-exactly the kind of woman Lucinda wanted to grow up to be. Now here in Lucinda’s hands was an unopened letter addressed to the woman, sent from half a world away, in a box of biological specimens from Madagascar. She held it up to the light to read the now-faint handwriting. 13 July 1989, it said, sent by someone named Fabien Koto.

Her heart beating faster, she slit the envelope carefully with scissors from Carmen’s well-organized desktop and pulled out the yellowing paper. The letter was printed but looked old enough and strange enough that she guessed it had been written on a typewriter.

Dear Dr. Goldring,

I send you my best wishes! The weather here has been good-Antananarivo is a very pretty place in the spring and I hope you and Gideon will come here some day! It would be a great pleasure to show you around! In the meantime, I send you the fruits of my last trip to the market. The Chamaeleo belalandaensis would have been a much more exciting find if it was still living, but even the dead ones are seldom seen these days, and this is well dry and I think not too unpleasant!

You were right that it is the people of the southwestern coasts that come across the strangest discoveries, things often found floating on logs or root-system rafts. I am not sure I understand your argument as to why that precise spot at Moromboke should prove such a nexus for biological oddities and events, but I am very happy to report the fruits of my success! That is to say, I indeed found myself overwhelmed with the diversity of new botanical specimens. And am herewith sending many back to you.

I have a funny feeling they are not all Madagascan. Sorting through and understanding what we have here will take time and study. However I do wish to draw your attention to the prize of the group (as far as I am able to tell!) It is a fungus completely unlike anything I have ever known. I have included a small piece for you, but in the safety of a glass tube! Again, it is not native to Madagascar, but enough have landed on the shores over the years that the Mikea tribes have incorporated it into their myths, naming it what is best translated as “Call-You Spirit Plant”. Their tales claim that the thing is something like the Sirens or Loreleis of the esteemed ancient poet Homer! Many tribal stories tell of people summoned to die by the “Call-You”, and that they are helpless to fight against it-as if their will was no longer their own. My tests suggest it is simply a fungus, although a highly complex one! Anyway, I send it to you, learned Dr. Goldring, with the hope you may find it as interesting as I did…

The letter was signed, “Your friend and colleague, Fabien Koto.”

Lucinda put the letter down, her heart beating wildly. An entire box of rare and unknown specimens had been sent to Ordinary Farm-to Gideon’s wife Grace, a scholar and a scientist trusted with the handling of rare and possibly quite dangerous specimens. But instead they had been hidden away for twenty years and now had fallen into the hands of Patience Needle. Had the specimens been labeled? Lucinda knew that Mrs. Needle and her son, unlike the rest of the farm’s workers, actually knew how to use a computer. Had Mrs. Needle been able to find out something about the dangerous secrets that had been lurking in that box all these years? Had she decided… to grow some of them?

Several things clicked into place in Lucinda’s mind all at the same time. On the night they found the box Tyler had said the tubes were full of seeds, plant cuttings, and fungus. Mrs. Needle loved things like that. She was an expert in these things-botany, herbology. And the logical place to try to grow unknown tropical species would be

…

The old greenhouse.

And if the witch was going to plant one of those weird specimens, which one would she want to grow? Lucinda knew the answer to that one, too.

“Many tribal stories tell of people summoned to die by the ‘Call-You’ fungus, ” Fabien Koto had written, “ and that they are helpless to fight against it-as if their will was no longer their own.”

Those spores-it must have been the “Call-You” that I breathed at the greenhouse! she realized. I’m so lucky I only got a tiny bit… !

And what better way to control someone’s mind than with the mysterious Call-You, which even most doctors would never have heard of? What better way to make sure that Gideon Goldring behaved the way Mrs. Needle wanted him to behave? And what better time to do it than right when he was about to change his will to give Lucinda and Tyler the farm?

And once the witch is certain she’s figured out how to use it, she could use it on anyone… or on everyone. Then it wouldn’t be just mice and birds and bugs dying outside the greenhouse, pulled helplessly by the Call-You, it would be any victim Mrs. Needle chose.

The thought of what had almost got her, and what was probably still lurking inside her, made Lucinda feel ill all over again.