He had the grace to look a little shame-faced.
Lucinda tried to sit up, which was no easy thing with her brother going boing, boing, boing on the edge of the bed. She had a clean bandage on her hand, and the cuts beneath didn’t hurt too badly at all. “Okay,” she mumbled, pushing herself out of bed. “Just let me put my shoes on.” She frowned at herself in the mirror. “And comb my hair.”
Tyler rolled his eyes but got out of her way. “Just don’t take forever. Man, you should see all the awesome stuff there is on this farm, Luce. I spent a few hours doing the rounds with Ragnar-you know, the guy with the beard?”
“Stop bouncing or wait outside, will you?”
“I like Ragnar. But, man, I hate that Colin guy.”
“Would you quit obsessing about Colin? What did he ever do to you?”
“Why? Do you like him or something?” Tyler stopped in the doorway and stared at her with horror. “Oh, perfect-my sister has a crush on the evil henchman.”
“Tyler! He’s not an evil anything. Just shut up. My head hurts.”
“Come on, Luce!” Now he was jumping up and down in the hall.
“ Okay! I’ll be right there!” She slammed the bedroom door shut on him, which punished no one but herself.
Normally that would have been enough for them to stay silent with each other for hours, but Tyler kept trying to talk to her as they sat on the wagon in the hot sun. At first it just made her more irritated, but after a while it occurred to her that for once Tyler was actually trying to communicate. It was like someone had stolen her little brother and substituted some kind of pod boy.
“There’s been so much stuff going on!” he said. “I tried to wake you up before we went out this morning, but you were totally snoring. It was so cool! Ragnar let me feed the griffins. They’re little. There isn’t a mom or dad. They’re, like, birds-they have eagle beaks, but they have bodies like something else. Ragnar said people used to say they were part lion, but really it’s just that they’re kind of yellow like a lion and they have this kind of weird fluffy fur on the back end where the feathers stop-”
“So why won’t anyone tell us where they come from? What’s the big secret?”
Mr. Walkwell half turned in his seat, as though he was going to say something, but instead he just flicked the reins and muttered to the horse.
“I know,” Tyler said quietly. “I asked Ragnar that. He just says it’s up to Uncle Gideon. But it has to be some kind of DNA thing, because otherwise why would they have baby griffins but no mother?”
“How should I know?”
“And there’s other stuff I found out too.” He was whispering now. “I’ll tell you later. The house is haunted.”
Which was just what Lucinda and her headache didn’t really want to hear.
Standard Valley was not a town in the sense Lucinda thought of the word. It only had a couple of main roads and one main shopping district-if you could call a gas station, a feed and hardware store, a bank, a grocery store, and a coffee shop, all in a row across from the train station, by any name as fancy as “shopping district.” Lucinda found it depressing, but at least the sun had gone behind a swirl of dark clouds, making the day much darker. It was still unpleasantly hot but the glare was gone, and she thought she could even smell something like rain in the air.
As the horse-drawn wagon clopped into the center of town, a few men standing around a truck parked next to the gas station looked up. One of them-a gray-haired man with a big belly and a baseball cap pushed far back on his head-grinned and gave a kind of salute, then shouted, “I see you’re still driving last year’s model!”
To Lucinda’s surprise, Mr. Walkwell shouted back, “At least when this one backfires all I am smelling is hay!” And then he actually smiled. It took her a few seconds to figure out that not only had secretive, grumpy Mr. Walkwell acted like he knew the man, he had even made a joke.
“Who’s that guy?” she asked.
“Hartman,” said Mr. Walkwell. “He owns the gas station. I have met worse men in this world than him.” Which meant he sort of liked him, as far as Lucinda could tell.
“Look!” said Tyler as they rolled to a stop in front of the feed and hardware store. “A hitching post! Just like in a cowboy movie!”
Lucinda, sipping the last from a bottle of water, was more interested in the idea of getting hold of some lip gloss and maybe some sunblock. Her lips were already dry and cracked after only a couple of days, and she could just see surviving the summer and returning to school only to have the other girls make fun of her because of her farmer tan and ruined lips.
They spent a boring half hour in the general store. Lucinda found her skin-care products and Tyler, for some reason, bought a flashlight and a ton of batteries. Mr. Walkwell put in an order for some supplies-apparently the feed and hardware store and grocery store were run by the same people. As he limped around looking at things, the few other customers nodded at Mr. Walkwell as if they knew him. The heavyset woman behind the counter smiled at the children and asked them their names as they paid for their goods.
“You staying for the summer?” she asked. “Oh, you’ll have fun. It’s nice for city kids to spend some time on a farm. See how things really work!” Lucinda wanted to laugh, but of course she didn’t. If this woman only knew! “Are you having a good time so far?” The stout woman was really looking at them, Lucinda realized. “They don’t get many visitors on that Tinker farm…”
Suddenly Mr. Walkwell was there, hands resting heavily on the children’s shoulders. “We must go now,” he said. “Much work to do.”
Lucinda could tell the woman would have liked to ask more questions. In fact, she noticed most of the other customers in the store had been listening too.
“You must not talk to strangers,” Mr. Walkwell said as they stepped outside. “Time to go back.”
“Ragnar said we could get a milkshake,” Tyler protested. The sky was dark and the air was close-Lucinda could feel a few tiny drops of rain. “Because he said I did good work this morning.”
Mr. Walkwell made a sour face, but turned them toward the diner. “Very well. But remember, many people here are curious about our farm and we must keep our secrets. Your great-uncle has shown great trust by bringing you here.”
“If he’s got so much trust,” Tyler muttered, “why isn’t he telling us any of the secrets?”
Mr. Walkwell only snorted.
Almost every store around here was called Standard something or other, so Lucinda was glad to see that the diner was called Rosie’s, although someone hadn’t been able to resist putting up a cutout wooden sign in the shape of a coffee cup, which stood on the roof next to a sign that said, OUR COFFEE IS WAY ABOVE STANDARD!
Half a dozen or more people were in the coffee shop, most of them men in farmer’s caps, eating lunch, talking, or watching the television in the corner-some kind of local weather report. There was a long counter, as she expected, but instead of booths the rest of the place had a scatter of tables and chairs. Nothing much on the walls but a calendar and some hand-drawn posters for events at the local school. They didn’t have a waitress, either-you just told your order to the grumpy-looking guy that everyone seemed to call Rosie, although Lucinda couldn’t tell if that was a joke or not. He sure didn’t look like a Rosie.
Tyler apparently decided he was much more than just milkshake hungry and ordered himself a cheeseburger and fries, but Lucinda still felt queasy. They found a table and Mr. Walkwell sat staring silently. Lucinda was happy just to hold a glass of ice water to her forehead, soaking in the wonderful cool.
The food came and Tyler went into Full Scarf Mode, shoveling everything in like it would vanish in two minutes if he didn’t. He was just filling his mouth with the last chunk of his burger when Lucinda realized that three black-haired, brown-eyed kids, more or less her and Tyler’s age, were standing beside the table watching them.