Finding Fortune by Delia Ray Read Free Book Online Page B

heights?”
    Hugh pointed past the fading purple blooms over my head. I took a careful step out from under the bush and squinted into the sunlight. He was pointing at the tower.

 
    SEVEN
    TO GET TO THE TOWER, we had to go back inside, make our way to the third floor, open a narrow door hidden in a crook of the hall, and climb up twelve more steep steps. At the top, Hugh shoved open a trapdoor. I clambered through after him and stood up slowly, reaching for the railing to steady myself. When I looked out, my stomach flipped over and my breath caught in my throat. You could see forever—past the cornfields, past the roofs of Fortune poking up through the trees, all the way to the Mississippi River. Dad likes to call it the Mighty Mississippi, but the river didn’t look so mighty from up in the tower. It looked more like a flat brown snake sliding across the countryside.
    I could tell Hugh had been up in the tower before. He didn’t even bother to grab the railing as he stepped around the trapdoor and looked down on the backyard of the school. “Whoa,” he said. “Garrett got a lot more shells this morning.”
    I edged over to see what he was talking about. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again, trying to make sense of the strange scene below. There was an old baseball diamond out back, and surrounding it were mountains and mountains of salt-and-pepper-colored shells. At the edge of the ring, a huge man with a scruffy blond beard stood in the back of a green pickup truck shoveling more shells on top of another pile. So that was Garrett, Hildy’s handyman who wrote on the blackboards. Hugh had pointed out the door to his room on the third floor when we were on our way up to the tower.
    â€œWhat the heck is he doing?” I asked.
    â€œMaking a labyrinth.”
    â€œA labyrinth?”
    â€œIt’s kind of like a maze,” Hugh explained. “Garrett used to fix up old castles and churches in England, where they had a lot of that kind of stuff. He says he’s always wanted to make a labyrinth. And he thinks it’ll help get more people to come see the museum.”
    â€œWow,” was all I could say. I had been in corn mazes before, and Nora and I had gotten lost in a giant boxwood maze when we went on vacation to Colonial Williamsburg. But I’d never heard of anything like that being made out of shells. Then again, I’d never heard of a button museum until about an hour ago.
    While we were watching Garrett, I began noticing all the graffiti in the tower. It wasn’t like the graffiti I had seen scribbled in bathroom stalls and under the bleachers at school. It was the antique kind—hundreds of names and sayings carved on the floor and the railing. There were so many, it seemed like every kid who had ever gone to school in Fortune must have owned a pocketknife and climbed up to leave a mark in the tower. FCS is the Best! … Peggy Anne and Emma Jean—Friends 4Ever … Fortune Hunters-B.Ball Champs of ’69 .
    Hugh called me over to see a carving on the handrail.

    â€œIf they got married,” he said, barely able to contain himself, “her name would be Mrs. Hazel Nutt.” He started laughing so hard, showing those funny front teeth of his, that I got the giggles too and couldn’t stop until Hugh knelt down and pointed to where Hildy had carved her name on the floor near the trapdoor when she was a kid.

    â€œHow do you know that’s her?” I asked.
    â€œBecause she asks me to get her mail out of the mailbox by the road sometimes, and I’ve seen that name on her letters. Hilda Larson Baxter.”
    â€œSo she must have been picked to be the button queen right after she finished high school.” I kept staring at the date on the floor, trying to add up the numbers in my head. “If Hildy was eighteen when she graduated,” I said, “that means she’s got to be … more than eighty