“I’ll make sure they bring their swimsuits.”
“By then,” Copperseed resumed, “EPA will have set a perimeter, assisted with the sheltering, and sent in a damage assessment unit to this area. I reckon six to eight hours.”
“One way or another, all four of us will be back by then,” Andy said.
Joey reacted when he realized the number four included the dog. “You mean five of us.”
“No, I mean four.”
“Oh, come on! After all I— What more can I do to prove—”
“Joey!” Kerri said, so commandingly that Tim mistakenly stood to attention. “You don’t need to prove anything, you already proved it. But we need you here. Blyton Hills needs you here. The people trust you; they’ll listen to you. Their lives depend on you moving them to safety.”
She waited for Joey to comprehend how literal her words were. He seemed to get it.
“If we fail tonight,” she continued, “and there’s a new tremor under the lake, everybody in Blyton Hills could go the way of the sheep. So it’s vital everyone gets out of town and authorities be ready to carry out more evacuations if we fuck up. A chemical plant exploding will keep them on their toes.” She held Joey’s blue-eyed stare until he nodded, steel-resolved. “At dawn, find a way through the perimeter, drive your truck to the lake, and stand guard in our car; we might need you.”
“Gotcha,” he rogered. “Why your car, though? The truck will drive better up there.”
“Because we’re gonna rig our car,” Andy one-lined, letting the science consultant expand on the premise.
“If a gas cloud rises, all combustion engines inside it will stop working. Fuel needs oxygen to burn,” Kerri explained. “We’ll attach one of the oxygen bottles we’ve got left to our carburetor, so we can switch to it if the worst happens. It might buy us just long enough to outrun the cloud.” She checked Captain Al, with whom she had discussed the feasibility of that part of the plan. “We hope.”
The captain nodded zenfully, and handed her the detonator. Kerri’s hair proverbially shivered with anticipation when she touched the device, her mind considering the fabulous implications of a single click.
“Once we do this, there’s no way back.” She offered the device to Andy. “Do the honors?”
Andy didn’t move. She was feeling like she had during the first day of their car trip together. She had never considered she and Kerri would ever be blowing up a chemical plant, but had she been able to foresee it, she would have expected the occasion to be more festive, not part of a life-or-death mission. That was a strange thought.
“Together,” she said.
She took Kerri’s hand, fingertips holding their breath on the contact, and hovered them over the switch, waiting for a third hand to join them.
“Nate?”
The boy was still camped a few feet away, just within earshot of the conversation, sunken in his thoughts more deeply than the girls had seen him ever since the loony bin.
“Nate,” Andy repeated. “We will never split up. I promise.”
Nate breathed in, then approached them, laid his hand on his cousin Kerri’s, and swallowed the dry Rubicon pebble in his throat.
KERRI: On three. One.
NATE: Two.
ANDY: Three.
They flipped the switch.
Four seconds passed.
Then six.
Captain Al stood up, a frowning Andy followed suit, and then the flak of the first explosion blossomed, out of synchrony with the ground-shaking boom, until both the subsequent flashes and the sounds mashed together in a thunderous ball of fire rising into the starry sky.
Andy averted her eyes just a second to confirm that Copperseed was now fully smiling, the red glow of burning collateral damage expectedly suiting his sharp, rugged features.
They remained on the knoll for a while, under the magical spell of things going kablooey in the night.
Tim had grown tired of all the boat trips and he spent this last one nested on the driver’s seat with Kerri, dismayed head draped over her thigh, hoping for some affection. The Pennaquick County Police had contributed to the Blyton Summer Detective Club’s arsenal with a pair of pump-action assault rifles, a new two-way radio, and loads of extra ammo, which Andy was jamming into every available pocket, along with small boxes of strike-anywhere matches to perform flame tests. Kerri was still holding on to her knife. They all had flashlights and respirators around their necks.
A last familiar shape lay between the empty bags on the deck after Andy had finished gearing up: it was the pickax—the one she had retrieved from the mines and inadvertently left in Joey’s boat the previous afternoon. She flipped it in the air, calibrating its weight, and decided to slip it through a belt loop in her pants.
“Can’t be too prepared,” she commented. “I’ll trade you Uncle Emmet’s shotgun for a rifle, okay, Nate?”
Nate sat astern in the dark, careful not to lean his arm over the bulwark.
“Nate,” Peter said beside him. “Lieutenant Ripley is talking to you.”
“We’re doing the same shit all over again,” Nate muttered, to no one in particular.
Andy couldn’t tell if she was supposed to overhear or just hear that, but she followed anyway.
“We’re retracing our steps,” she rephrased. “After the lake, after exploring the gold mines, we talked to witnesses, hit the library, connected the mines and the mansion, and we begged for someone to ferry us to the isle, until finally one evening exploring the lake we came across the rowboat, and here we are. This is the night we catch our guy.”
“Yeah, ’cause it went so well for us last time,” Nate snapped. “Remind me what’s different?”
Andy simply opened her jacket and let the weapons say hello. “We’re prepared. We know who the bad guy is.” A draft of ice-cold tailwind pushed a long-lost bang of black hair across her face. “And I, for one, am way angrier.”
She left to help Kerri dock the boat, and Nate stayed sitting there, savoring her words.
“She was always angry,” Peter sidenoted.
—
They were pulling over at the pier when Andy, rope in hand, noticed another line tied to the post. Kerri shut off the engine, and the hollow sound of the rowboat drunkenly nudging the pier became evident. The towering firs on Debo?n Isle remained silent in expectation.
They debarked, and the girls moored the motorboat while Nate advanced inland and confronted the mansion.
Atop the building, in the round attic window, a soft yellow light pulsed.
The three kids and the dog stood in silence at the foot of the front stairs, in the hazy light-puddle from that one lit room. Thirteen years, and Debo?n Mansion had not lost its arrogance.
Andy shoved a rifle into Nate’s hands, flung another one at Kerri, and cocked Uncle Emmet’s shotgun herself, single-handed.
Kerri, sight line pinned to the lit window, said, “We don’t fire until we see his face.”
Andy tried to make out the minutiae of her expression in the dark.