Doubtless everything was very lively for bike and horse riders, and even more for the film crews that were scrambling to keep up with them. But back here in the clearing with nothing to watch but Grandfather, Dad, and Caroline talking on their radios—and the ever-present volunteer guards hovering—the level of excitement dropped considerably. More of the locals began drifting away. The boys were getting restless, and after three games of Uno, they began to ask if they could go for another ride in Caroline’s caravan.
“I have an idea,” Michael said. “Everybody into the van!”
I didn’t ask what his idea was. I wasn’t even sure he had one. Maybe he was just getting us into motion and planning to think of an idea on the fly. I’d been known to do that when dealing with cranky, bored toddlers.
But he definitely had a plan today. We took off down one of the faint dirt tracks that led out of the clearing and, after several minutes of rough uphill driving, we pulled into another small clearing.
“Our official emu observation tower!” he exclaimed.
It was actually a fire lookout tower. Either it had been abandoned or the danger of fire wasn’t high enough today to be worth staffing it. It looked sturdy enough, its metal was unrusted, and it was at least forty feet high and at the top of a sizable hill. We were at the foot of a steep gravel track leading up to it.
“Castle!” Jamie exclaimed.
“Space ship!” Josh countered.
“I talked to one of the forest rangers yesterday,” Michael said as he downshifted and steered the Twinmobile toward the gravel road. “He said hikers are welcome to use it as long as it’s unmanned. And this particular tower has an excellent view of today’s search area.”
“I’m glad someone has talked to the rangers,” I said. “I’ve been worried that Grandfather might be barging in with the bikes and horses and balloons without clearing any of it with them.”
“He would have,” Michael said. “But Caroline had the same worry and contacted the local ranger station.”
“Caroline is a wonder.”
“And found that the park rangers were already aware of our mission and enthusiastic about getting rid of their unwanted ratite guests,” he went on. “Miss Annabel had already called to arrange everything.”
“Miss Annabel is also growing on me,” I said. “If she’d just break down and talk about Cordelia—”
“Give it time,” he said.
I nodded. I realized I felt guilty about Annabel. More than once since learning about my grandmother’s death, I found myself wondering how different things would be if Annabel had been the one killed in the generator explosion. If I’d actually gotten to meet my grandmother. As I got to know Miss Annabel, and even to like her, in spite of her difficult and prickly personality, I was thinking that less. But still, I felt guilty that I’d thought it at all. Did it mean that subconsciously I was blaming Annabel for being alive? And wouldn’t it make more sense to blame my grandfather for waiting so long before hiring Stanley? Or even blame Cordelia herself for not getting in touch for more than half a century?
Water under the bridge. Annabel might be a little eccentric, but she was intelligent, sensible, and admirably efficient. Maybe instead of regretting my lost chance of meeting Cordelia, I should focus on appreciating the cousin I had left. Not just as a doorway to Cordelia, but for her own sake.
In fact, at the moment I liked Annabel a lot better than the elusive Cordelia.
I was startled out of my reveries. The van had stopped. The boys erupted out of their car seats and dashed toward the tower.
“Hey!” Michael called as he ran after them. “Last one to the top of the tower is a rotten egg!”
Michael supervised the boys’ scramble up the stairway to the tower while Natalie and I, resigned to rotten egg status, followed more slowly with the picnic provisions and mats for the boys to nap on later.
At the top of what felt like several hundred flights of stairs we entered the cabin atop the tower through a trapdoor in the floor. The cabin was only about ten feet square, but that was plenty of room for the five of us. And the windows were low enough for the boys to see through, but not so low that I’d worry about them falling out.
“Look!” Michael pointed. “You can see the balloon!”
He handed the boys their binoculars. Josh and Jamie alternated between waving at the balloon and watching it for a few minutes, while Natalie and I passed out fruit and juice boxes. Michael appeared to be scanning the hillsides below us, and I was pleased to see that there were stretches of meadow as well as woods, so we might actually see something after all. I even saw some of the horseback wranglers trotting through a clearing on the side of the next hill over, and closer at hand, we could not only see but hear a posse of bikers buzzing along a meadow. And what was that ahead of the bikers?