Lucky Breaks (10 page)

Lucky and Paloma peered into the Lost Brooch Well, leaning on the old timbers that framed the waist-high opening. Two ancient wooden posts with notches cut in their tops extended up from the sides, and a heavy metal pole lay across them, resting in the notches. A very show-offy person, Lucky imagined, could do pull-ups on that metal pole—but if she lost her grip, she would fall straight to the bottom of the well and be smashed to smithereens. Lucky was not that type of person, show-offy, but she
was
adventurous and brave, and there is a difference. She was almost almost almost eleven, and she was intrepid.

HMS Beagle finished sniffing around and lay down in the crooked shade of a nearby Joshua tree.

They couldn’t see the bottom of the well, only darkness. “Oh good,” said Lucky. “There’s a ladder.” She was eager to get down there and look for the missing piece of the brooch.

“Yeah,” said Paloma, but not in a way of someone agreeing
to a good thing. It was more a way of saying that a ladder wasn’t really a good thing at all.

“I’ll go first,” said Lucky.

“You have a flashlight?”

“In my backpack.” Lucky no longer carried a complete and thorough survival kit backpack everywhere, the way she used to before she was sure that Brigitte would stay in Hard Pan, but she had brought basic necessities of toilet paper, Pixy Stix, water, a flashlight, and of course her new compass.

Paloma leaned over the edge again. She frowned. “This gives me the jimjams,” she said.

“The ladder’s fastened to the side of the well. It won’t move. What could happen, as long as we hold on to the ladder and go slow?”

“I don’t know. It just looks really scary.”

“But think of the glory when we find the other piece of Paloma’s brooch,” Lucky said. “
Your
brooch!” She imagined a photograph of herself and Paloma on the front page of the
Eastern Sierra Star News
, with a big headline saying:

INTREPID GIRLS FIND BEAUTIFUL MURDERED WOMAN’S FAMOUS LOST BROOCH!

But Paloma was gazing at the canyons and gullies and hills all around them. There were no roads or trails, and no sight of the town. Flies buzzed, and a huge crow cruised overhead.
They could hear the
whomp, whomp, whomp
of its wings. An ancient abandoned car lay sunk in the sand a little distance off. Lucky could see that Paloma’s intrepidness was turning a little shaky.

Paloma scrunched her mouth over on one side. She said, “Hey, Lucky, guess what. This idea is arsy-varsy, which, let’s just
say
we went into the well and not really do it.”

In fact, Lucky too was becoming hesitant. The well looked bottomless, as if it went all the way to the center of the Earth, and an ancient, moldy smell came wafting up. But her adventuresome DNA overcame her cautiousness DNA. You cannot go around being scared of everything if you’re a true scientist.

“Listen,” she said. “I’ll climb down while you wait here. When I get to the bottom I’ll shout up to you, and then you’ll know it’s safe and you can decide if you want to climb down too.” Lucky looked into Paloma’s droopy, worried eyes. “Or not. It’s okay if you don’t want to. I won’t start looking for the wing until you decide.” She was willing to give Paloma first dibs on actually finding the brooch, although she would be sure to tell the newspaper reporters that it was she, Lucky Trimble, who climbed down first on the ladder.

Paloma shook her head. “I don’t want
you
to go down there either,” she said. “It’s too creepy. And no one knows where we are,
I
don’t know where we are, and if we get in trouble it’ll be
real bad
double trouble.”

Lucky clicked her tongue. This was exactly the sort of
argument Lincoln would make, because it wasn’t just about going into the well: There was also a built-in fear because they were alone out in the desert and no one knew where. “I promise nothing will happen,” she said. “Think of all the people who went up and down that ladder when they dug the well. It’s no big deal. Look.” Lucky hoisted herself up backward to sit on the frame of the opening, then swiveled around and swung her legs over so they dangled into the well. It felt sort of like being perched on the edge of the Grand Canyon. Then she took a deep breath and got a good grip on the old wood ladder. She reached for a rung with one foot and then the other, found it, and hung there, facing the inner wall of the well. She was sure the hardest part was over.

The only thing she had to do, now that she was actually in the well, was ignore the little clench of scariness in her stomach when she looked down into the blackness. Standing on the ladder, grinning up at Paloma, she lowered herself carefully down one rung.

She let go with one hand long enough to give a thumbs-up to Paloma when she had gone down another two rungs. It was up to her to show how fun and easy it was to be daring.

“Be careful,” Paloma said. “Jeez. Hold on to the ladder.”
Lucky could see that she was clutching the wooden beam at the top of the well so hard her fingertips were white.

“I am, don’t worry. This is like going down stairs. Even
Miles
could practically do it.”

But actually the rungs were far apart, being sized for a grown man, and required more strength than Lucky had anticipated. She took it slowly, not hand over hand but one rung at a time, pausing each time before reaching down again. A fleeting worry about how hard it was going to be to haul herself back
up
the ladder flashed into her mind, but she ignored it. She kept a good, firm grip on the splintery rungs, concentrating on each movement as she descended. It became cooler and darker, and once when she looked up she saw that Paloma’s head had become a small dot against the blue of the sky.

After a few moments, Paloma called down, “I can’t see you anymore, Lucky. You better come back up now.”

“I’m sure I’m almost to the bottom,” Lucky answered, her voice echoey. She hoped she was right, because she could not see much in the gloom, and certainly not the bottom of the well. How deep
was
the well, anyway? It seemed she’d been going down and down for a long time.

A tremendous surge gripped Lucky, of needing to finally reach her foot down and touch solid ground, to be done with climbing, to be able to rest. The muscles in her arms and legs trembled from the strain of supporting her body. She
began, for the first time, to think this was a mistake.

Then two bad surprises occurred, and resulted in a third very bad thing, which caused Lucky to make a yowl that flew wildly up to the top of the well and straight into Paloma’s terrified ears.

What happened was this: As she was reaching down to the next rung, a splinter of wood pierced the palm of Lucky’s hand. At the same time her right foot found a lower rung, and that rung snapped. Yowling, Lucky lost her grip and fell.

She had the wind knocked out of her from the suddenness of the fall, from the hard, painful slap to the bottoms of her feet as she landed, and from the sharp jab of the flashlight in her ribs when she lurched over onto her backpack. The floor of the well was damp, the smell thick and moldy.

“Lucky?” Paloma’s voice sounded high and thin, the voice of someone who was about to cry.

It took a minute for Lucky to get her breath. Then she yelled, “Paloma! I made it! Well, I kind of made it!”

Lucky was shaking all over, and her hand felt like a hot needle had been driven inside it. She scrounged around in the backpack for her flashlight. Its beam was dim, the batteries very low. She got to her feet and shone the light on the broken ladder rung, which turned out to be the very bottom one. It was above her head and higher than her reach.

Paloma called, “What was that noise? Are you okay?”

“I got a splinter and I fell off the ladder. I can’t stop shaking.”

“HMS Beagle is acting very worried. She wants you to come up
now
.”

Hey! Good idea! Why didn’t
I
think of that?
Lucky said to herself sarcastically. The bottom of the well was cold, cramped, dark, and musty, like some kind of cave where trolls would live. Suddenly she was tired of acting brave, weary of adventures, and sick of the well. Her brain corpuscles felt grouchy and snappish. “Well, fine!” she called. “I’ll climb up as soon as I can figure out how to reach the ladder!”

“Is there anything down there you could stand on to reach it?”

Lucky rested for a while, beaming her dim flashlight around. There was a lot of junk that people must have thrown in: cans, an old tire, a boot. She saw a metal rod like the ones mechanics use to measure oil, and poked it through the trash.
Nothing solid enough to stand on and reach the ladder, not enough stuff to pile up to make a stool. Besides, she didn’t think she had the strength to pull herself up to the unbroken rung.

Lucky looked up at the little patch of sky and the tiny head of Paloma. “Listen,” she called. “I’m trapped in here. You’re going to have to go get Short Sammy. Tell him not to tell Brigitte,” she added.

“Okay.” After a pause, Paloma said, “Which way?”

Lucky’s flashlight got dimmer and dimmer and then went out altogether. Lucky ground the heel of her good hand into her forehead. “The way we came! Go back up that hill, over the crest, and you’ll see Hard Pan on the other side.” Lucky gestured toward Hard Pan, but Paloma, of course, couldn’t see her.

“There are hills all around here, Lucky. I can’t remember which one we came from.”

“It’s toward the southwest.” Silence from above. “Paloma?”

“I don’t know which way is southwest,” Paloma admitted.

Lucky gripped the smooth round compass in her pocket. Useless! “BEAG,” she shouted. “Go get Sammy! Go!”

“She hears you and she’s sniffing all around the well,” Paloma said. “But she’s not going anywhere. Now she’s lying down right next to the well.”

“Look, Paloma, this isn’t a TV show,” Lucky said, even though sending her dog for help had been her own idea. “We need to get home before your parents arrive. Do you think you could
try
to find your way back? Because if you don’t, we’re
stuck here until somebody happens to notice we’re missing and they send out search parties. And that won’t be until tonight, because of all the fuss about the party. And then we’ll really be in trouble. You
have
to go.”

“What if I get lost? You’re not supposed to go wandering around in the desert alone.”

“I know, they always tell you that, and I wish there was some way I could give you the compass. But nothing’s going to happen.” Lucky heard the echo of herself saying these very words before she climbed down the ladder, before something actually did happen. “Just remember to look back every so often and keep the well in sight. It’s not that far. You’ll be fine.”

After a few minutes, Paloma leaned her head over the edge and said, “You’re right. I’m going for help. I just want you to know that if…it doesn’t work out, I don’t blame you. You’re the best friend I ever had. Good-bye, Lucky.”

“Me too! Plus, you are the bravest! Tell Short Sammy to hurry!” Lucky wanted to get out of there, and the faster the better. She
hated
being in the well. “Go as fast as you can, okay?” Lucky craned her neck back again to see Paloma, but when she looked there was only the sky, bisected by the metal pole.

She frowned. She thought about Paloma trudging along in the sand. Paloma, who had absolutely no idea of direction. Paloma, who had hardly ever been to the desert before, never mind in the backcountry where there were no roads or trails. Who didn’t know to make a triangle shape out of old tin cans as
a signal that you needed to be rescued, or how to do SOS with a flashlight. Lucky began to realize that she had made a mistake in sending Paloma to get help. Maybe a very, very bad mistake.

There was still, probably, time to call out, to tell Paloma to stay put and wait. Lucky knew this would be the right thing to do. And she almost did call out. But then a gland she never knew existed started pumping thoughts about her own poor trapped self, and these thoughts grew so big, so important, that they grabbed Lucky’s vocal cords and held them tightly closed. So after a while, when Lucky finally did call out, when she shouted and screamed as loud as she could, there was no answer, no head of Paloma peering down at her.

It was too late.