THE HILL WAS A WATER SLIDE. Hardened as the ground was, the rain shot off it in sheets. By the time they reached the Den, Mercedes’s beautiful skirt was a sodden, muddy disaster. She stepped out of it, then tossed it on top of the toolbox.
“That’s better,” she said. “Now I’m streamlined for action.”
They shouted.
“Dottie! Dottie! Dottie!”
“The rain’s so loud.”
“So are we.”
“Dottieeeeee! Dottieeeeee!”
Mo was so accustomed to being quiet in these woods, to making herself as invisible as she could, it was hard to force her voice out into the air. She imagined the mother fox, watching from her den. So. She’s just one of them, after all. Just another loud, stupid human blundering around here, making trouble. She’ll never get a look at us, that’s for sure.
“It’s my sister,” she told the hillside. “I have to find her.”
Mercedes spun around. “What?”
“Why was I so mean to her, Merce? All those times I forced her to wear underwear. And last night I locked her out of my room.”
Mercedes planted both feet firmly, the way Da did, which was a considerable challenge on that slick slope.
“Sometimes mean is the only way you can go. I should know.” She wiped her streaming face with the hem of her jacket. “And that reminds me. What do you know about that handbag?”
“I was keeping it. I knew it’d freak you.”
“You were right.”
Inside her rubber tent, Mo grew very warm. She flapped her arms a little.
“You think I only see the up side of things. But Starchbutt’s not that bad. She’s almost kind of…” She was going to say “cute,” but she could already hear Mercedes replying, Yeah, cute like a tarantula. Like a rabid vampire bat.
But Mercedes didn’t even notice Mo hadn’t finished her sentence.
“There was something strange inside it,” she said. “At first I couldn’t understand what it was. I mean, I knew what it was, but I didn’t know why it was. So I showed Da. She took one look and said, ‘Aah.’” Mercedes tilted her face, aiming that Walcott chin toward heaven.
Mo squinted upward, trying to see what Mercedes did.
“I’ve heard of messages in a bottle,” Mercedes went on. “But never a message in a handbag.”
In this weather you couldn’t tell the difference between rain and tears. Mercedes wiped her cheeks. “It’s so weird. It’s like…like all my atoms and molecules somehow got rearranged, not to mention my DNA, and I’ve been turned into a different person.”
“You look the same.”
Mercedes shook her head. “Don’t, Mo.” It wasn’t a lecturing, I-know-better-than-you voice. It was a quiet, truth-speaking voice. “I’m not.”
What wasn’t Mercedes telling her? Whatever the secret was, it felt as enormous as this storm, but Mo had lost the right to demand an answer from her former best friend. The only reason Mercedes had come on this search party at all was because Da was so worried about Dottie. She wasn’t doing this for Mo’s sake, that was certain. Outside her poncho, the rain streamed down, and inside it, Mo began to sweat. What was in the purse? Something that had changed Mercedes’s life yet again. To think she’d almost thrown it away, in her fury at Mercedes for not being Mercedes anymore!
But then Mercedes said, “Come here.”
They huddled inside the Den, out of the rain. It was cooler in there, and misty, so when Mercedes un-Velcroed one of her jacket’s many pockets and drew something out, she seemed to be pulling it out of another place, or time, altogether. She handed it to Mo. A photo. Its colors hadn’t held up, and the two people in it, and the air all around them, basked in an unreal, orangey glow. A pale young man in an army uniform, holding himself very straight, had his arm around a beautiful woman who held her chin just so. Da in her younger days? Merce in the future? Mo’s brain tilted.
Monette. That’s who it had to be. She stood a head taller than the army guy and clasped a big purse. Even though they both looked right into the camera, you could tell their smiles were really for each other.
Inside Mo, a thought began to stir and stretch, like a beautiful animal waking up.
“It was in his things,” said Mercedes. “From the military. The stuff they sent home after he died. She only opened it this summer. More than ten years later. She says she never…never had the heart before.”
The message in the handbag.
“We think it was the day he left for the service,” Mercedes said. “A friend must have taken it.”
Mo looked more closely at the handsome, kindly-eyed man in the photo.
“He and Monette always liked each other, all the way back to when they were little, but she…his…” Mercedes faltered. “Da says Mrs. Steinbott never wanted them playing together. My mother was always into so much mischief, and he hated upsetting his mother. He was all she had. Da says he was as obedient and sweet as Monette was wild. And it wasn’t as if Da encouraged them to be friends. She’s so proud-she never really forgave Mrs. Steinbott for snubbing her all those years.” Mercedes wiped her eyes again. “They’re two of a kind, really.”
Mo gazed down at the photo. Even though the colors had faded, she could tell his eyes had been blue, like chips of sky.
“He…he looks nice, Merce. He looks really nice.”
Mercedes seemed to be trying to decide if what Mo said was true.
“He never knew. About me. We figured it out. He died too soon.”
All these years she’d thought her father had taken off and never looked back, when the truth was, he’d never even known about her. Which hurt more? Was this good news or bad news?
“I can’t believe it,” Mercedes whispered. “I mean…she’s my…”
“Grandmother.”
Mercedes nodded.
Outside the Den, the rain fell harder yet, sheets and sheets of it, so you could hardly tell the sky from the ground. The world had lost its up and down. It had no back and front, no now and then, no them and us. At this moment, Fox Street itself was probably no longer a road but a river, solid turned liquid.
“She’s been trying to tell me all summer, in her own loony way,” Mercedes said. “And I just kept running away. Chances are excellent that if it weren’t for you being so nice all the time, I still wouldn’t know.”
Mercedes took the photo back and carefully slid it into her pocket. She fastened the Velcro, then held her hand over it a moment.
“Come on,” she said at last, and ducked back out into the wind, Mo right behind her.