The Tiny Mansion Page 5

  Next I tied the rope around a narrow tree trunk while I set my trigger. This was the really hard part. A trip wire would have to be thin so nobody saw it, but it would also have to be strong enough to support the weight of the trap.

  Unless . . . the trip wire wasn’t a piece of string or rope at all. What if it was actually a stick?

  It took a lot of experimenting, but finally I nailed it. I tied the rope to a short, thick stick and wedged it under a tree root that looped out of the ground. When I let go, it held the weight of the basket up in the air. Then I found a long, thin branch and carefully laid it across the trail so one end went between the short stick and the root like a lever. If someone stumbled into the branch, it would knock the short stick out from under the root—and the basket would fall on their head.

  And there was only one person I knew who was short enough to fit in it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Crime and Punishment

  The trap worked.

  Leading Santi to it was a heck of a lot easier than building it, which was disappointing because I’d hoped for more of a challenge. All I had to do was tell him I’d found a box full of candy in the woods—real candy, made from white sugar, with wrappers and everything. The poor jerk believed me and followed me down the path by the muddy creek. I had to go slowly so he could keep up on those short little legs of his.

  When we reached the trap, all I had to do was lift my foot over the trigger stick. He hardly lifts his feet when he walks anyway, so naturally he blundered right into it. I took a mental picture of him looking up, his open mouth forming a perfect O as the big wooden basket plunged down. I wished I’d remembered my phone so I could have had an actual picture.

  Now he was standing inside, his hands clutching the sticks like a little prisoner, begging me to let him go while I sat on the ground cross-legged and tried to decide what I could make him give me. Unfortunately, he didn’t have anything I wanted, and even if he promised to stop being annoying, I didn’t think he was capable of keeping that promise.

  “Dagmar, let me out!” he begged.

  “Not yet,” I told him. “I’m thinking.”

  “What are you thinking ’bout?”

  “Leaving you in there until tomorrow.”

  His eyes bugged out. “No! No! Don’t do that! Let me out now! Please, Dagmar!”

  The irony was that the basket wasn’t really that heavy. I think even Santi was strong enough to lift it if he tried. But he just assumed that, because he was in a trap I’d set for him, I was the only one who could set him free.

  IRONY: something contrary to what was expected and therefore amusing.

  “What will you give me?” I asked.

  “You can have . . . my rock collection!” he said desperately.

  That was not a tempting offer. His “collection” consisted of ordinary-looking rocks from his favorite places, like Children’s Fairyland, the beach, and the yards and alleys behind places we had lived. Honestly, I didn’t even know how he remembered which was which.

  “Not good enough,” I said.

  “I’ll do your chores,” he pleaded.

  That would have been a better offer, except for two reasons: one, he wasn’t tall or strong enough to do my chores, and two, even if he had been, actually watering the garden would ruin my plan for sabotage.

  “It’s going to have to be something else,” I told him.

  Santi’s face started shaking like Jell-O, and I knew what was coming next: a full-on geyser. Honestly, that kid cried so much, he must have been constantly dehydrated.

  So I wasn’t surprised when he started crying. But I was surprised by how loud he was. He tilted his head back like a coyote howling at the moon and let loose a wail that would have drowned out an ambulance.

  “Sshh! Sshh!” I tried to shush him, but it was useless.

  “LET ME OUT, DAGMAR!” he wailed.

  “Fine, I’ll let you out,” I told him. “Just pipe down!”

  But there was no stopping him. If anything, he got louder. I stood up, dusted off the seat of my shorts, and prepared to pull on the rope to lift the trap, disgusted that I wasn’t going to get anything good out of him.

  And that was how Trent and Leya found us: with me holding the rope and Santi trapped in the basket, crying his eyes out.

  If I had any hope that Santi would cover for me, that died in a nanosecond. As they looked from me to the basket and back again, maybe wondering if I was freeing him from some random trap he’d blundered into, Santi stuck his little arm through an opening and pointed an accusing finger straight at me.

  “SHE DID THIS,” he blubbered, one nostril inflating a snot bubble. “SHE WON’T LET ME OUT!”

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  WHAT FOLLOWED NEXT was surreal (possessing a dreamlike or irrational quality): the first argument I’d ever seen between Trent and Leya.

  It started slowly, because even with Santi flat-out telling them I was guilty, it took a while for Trent to believe it. Leya lifted the basket herself and threw it to one side, smothering Santi in a hug and then checking him over from head to toe to make sure he didn’t have a scratch on him. The only thing wrong with him was that his shirt was so wet from tears it needed to be wrung out.

  Under the circumstances, it would have been unfair to ask her to compliment my basket-weaving, which in a way reminded me of her art installation.

  When she was finally convinced Santi wasn’t hurt, she started chewing me out royally.

  “What is WRONG with you, Dagmar?” she screeched. “How dare you treat your brother this way?”

  “Half brother,” I mumbled.

  “WHAT?”

  “I was only playing,” I said.

  “Still, probably not very cool, Dag,” said Trent.

  “Not very COOL?” repeated Leya, turning on him. “Your DAUGHTER trapped our SON like an ANIMAL!”

  I was about to point out that five-year-old boys basically were animals, but Trent clearly didn’t like what she’d said.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said. “Our son but my daughter? And you expect them to behave like brother and sister? That’s not very cool either, Leya.”

  “Well, I’m not feeling very cool!” yelled Leya. “I’m upset!”

  “All right, I can understand that,” said Trent.

  Most dads probably would have gotten red in the face and yelled back, but Trent isn’t most dads. Like I said: punching a marshmallow.

  “You need to punish Dagmar!” demanded Leya.

  Trent and I looked at each other. We were both confused. Punishment just wasn’t really part of our vocabulary, so neither of us knew the definition. He didn’t have a lot of rules, so I’d never really broken any. If I made a bad decision, he told me he was disappointed, which made me think about making a different decision the next time. Sometimes I actually did.

  “Now!” added Leya.

  I could see Trent basically agreed with her that I’d done something wrong. But I could also tell he had no idea how to punish me. He couldn’t take away my phone, because my phone didn’t work out here. He couldn’t take away my allowance, because there was nowhere for me to spend money even if I did get a regular allowance.

  But then finally he figured out the one thing guaranteed to drive me crazy.

  “Dagmar,” he said, after drawing a deep breath, “I want you to go inside and stay there until we tell you to come out.”

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  THE TINY HOUSE was hot and stuffy. I could walk from one end to the other in about twelve steps, and that was if I kept my steps short. I poked my head up into the sleeping loft, but that was the hottest part of all, so I flopped down in the living room, which had a little bookcase, a fold-down coffee table, and just enough seating for four skinny people who didn’t mind being joined at th
e hip.

  Everyone else was still outside, so at least I had the place to myself. I could hear Trent and Leya continuing their argument outside—she was doing most of the talking, but the quieter he got, the more I knew he was arguing back in his own way—until Trent got in his truck and drove away. I guessed he was going for more milk and ice and granola, but I didn’t really know.

  Each of us had been allowed two shelves on the skinny bookcase. Leya’s books were a mix of novels and biographies of artists I’d never heard of. Trent’s were mostly reference books about carpentry and plumbing, although he did have a few political books and even some poetry. Santi had picture books and chapter books, nearly all of them featuring dragons. And my books—well, I don’t like to brag, but I have excellent taste in reading, and I had an awesome collection of adventure books and weird novels I’d found at library sales, the Salvation Army, and Little Free Libraries. My favorite one was called Isolate Islands and Atmospheric Archipelagoes, by someone named Kingsley van Dash.

  Unfortunately, I’d already read all of my books, most of them more than once. I picked up Isolate Islands and opened it to chapter one, but I just couldn’t get into it. I looked over Trent’s and Leya’s again, but none of them seemed that interesting.

  Just for something to do, I started opening drawers. Mostly they contained normal household stuff like tape and string and spare light bulbs, but one of them was labeled PAPERWORK. Inside I found folders marked BILLS and TAXES and TRENT’S BUSINESS. The first one was full of bills for everything from electricity to doctor’s visits to rent, all of them marked at the top with things like PAST DUE and FINAL NOTICE. A couple even had headings like NOTICE OF COLLECTION. I didn’t look at all the details, but it seemed like a lot of places charged us extra money just for being late. And an EVICTION NOTICE from our landlord made me realize we hadn’t really had a choice about leaving our apartment.

  The last folder was full of invoices and receipts and project descriptions, most of them printed in Trent’s blocky handwriting on wrinkled notebook paper. But the architectural plans for Helen Wheels had been drawn professionally and printed out on large sheets, which were now folded up and paper-clipped to a contract and an invoice for forty thousand dollars.

  I coughed when I saw the number. That was a lot of money! If Trent had been counting on getting that much to pay all the bills, we were in trouble. It made me start to wonder if I was only making things worse by committing sabotage.

  But how would things get better if we stayed out here?

  Leya was pretty good at arguing, but Kristen was even better. She used to accuse Trent of never dealing with anything, which was both fair and not fair. On the one hand, he worked hard and dealt with people and problems all day long. But he didn’t like dealing with boring stuff like money and bills—which I could relate to—so sometimes he let that stuff slide.

  And maybe she was a hypocrite, because she got tired of dealing with him. After she finished her law degree and business school, she moved across the bay, and ever since then, she’d been traveling all over the world.

  HYPOCRITE: a person who acts in contradiction to her stated beliefs.

  Technically, they had joint custody of me, but Kristen couldn’t exactly take me to Dubai for months at a time while I was in school—at least, that’s what she said—so I stayed with Trent, who seemed more than happy to deal with me.

  I replaced all the bills and papers and put the folders away. If I quit doing the sabotage, then we’d just stay out here and nothing would change. If I kept doing it, and it worked, and Trent and Leya took us back to Oakland, we wouldn’t have a place to live. But at least we wouldn’t be running away, and we’d have a chance to get back on our feet.

  Eventually, Trent returned. I watched through the window as he unloaded something heavy from the back of the truck and carried it behind the house. It looked like a small engine. When he ran an electrical cord from Helen Wheels to it and plugged it in, I realized what it was: a generator.

  He saw me looking out the window.

  “I figured ice in a cooler isn’t enough refrigeration, so this will let us use the fridge. The lights, too.”

  “Did you buy a cell-phone tower, too?” I asked.

  “Sorry, those were out of stock,” he said, playing along. “But our cell service is probably going to be cut off soon, anyway.”

  “Since we don’t get reception, how will we know the difference?” I said.

  “That’s a good point: we won’t even notice,” he said cheerfully.

  I sat down away from the window. He had never liked technology much to begin with, so he was probably happy to be off the grid. And he was obviously settling in for the long haul. So by the time Leya came in a little while later and told me I could go outside to do my chores, I had already decided I was going to do a terrible job again.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Around the World in Eighty Foods

  The next morning, tires sprayed gravel on the road above the compound. That was unusual in itself, because cars only passed a few times a day. What was even more unusual was when the car slid to a stop. Since the compound wasn’t visible from the road, no one had ever stopped before. One car door slammed, and then another.

  Trent put down the rock he was carrying. After giving Leya a worried look, he started up the hill. I followed him.

  Blake stood at the edge of the road, looking down. A moment later he was joined by Vladimir.

  “Hello, Blake!” Trent called, as if they were old friends and Blake wasn’t the one who’d invaded our privacy and let his dogs pee all over our trees. “Who’s your friend?”

  They started coming down, but Blake, Mr. No Social Skills, didn’t answer, so Vladimir said, “I am Vladimir.”

  Trent introduced himself and the rest of us, and a moment later, Blake and Vladimir were standing in the middle of the compound while we all stared at them, wondering what to do next.

  “Where are your dogs?” I asked.

  “At home,” Blake said.

  “Would either of you like a glass of water?” offered Trent.

  Both of them shook their heads. They were such amazing conversationalists, they should have had their own talk show. Leya and Santi stood back suspiciously, as if they didn’t quite believe it about the dogs.

  “Um . . . why are you here?” I asked.

  Blake looked like he had a mouthful of bad food and nowhere to spit it out. Finally he said, “I was wondering . . . if you wanted . . . to go to the mall.”

  To the mall?

  I am not the kind of girl who likes shopping. I think that would be true even if I did have money to spend. Also, I wasn’t sure if I believed there was a mall, because as far as I could tell, we were surrounded by trees and dead grass and blue sky and suffocating heat. And I definitely didn’t like Blake at all.

  But going anywhere felt like an adventure, so I nodded yes. If he wasn’t going to use an expressive vocabulary, I didn’t have to either.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Trent. “We don’t really know the first thing about you, Blake.”

  “You know who my dad is,” said Blake defensively.

  “But this isn’t your dad.”

  “Vladimir is my manny,” said Blake, using the same word Vladimir had the day before.

  “Your what?” asked Leya.

  “He’s like my nanny, but he’s a man, so he’s a manny,” said Blake. “Get it?”

  I got it—finally—but I wondered if Vladimir liked it.

  “Whenever my parents go out of town, he’s not supposed to let me out of his sight,” continued Blake.

  “Where are your parents now?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Dubai, I think? They’ll be home soon.”

  Maybe they’d run into Kristen, all of them doing whatever it was people did there.

  “And why should we trust
Dagmar with you, Vladimir?” asked Trent. It surprised me that he was so straightforward about it, but I guessed he wanted to make sure I’d be okay.

  Vladimir stood up straight and squared his shoulders, making himself even more rectangular than he already was. “I am highly trained bodyguard. I am black belt in tae kwon do and two-time mixed martial arts champion. In army I was medic. I graduate school for evasive driving and close protection. I am swearing to protect client from all harm using body as shield.”

  Trent whistled. “Well, that’s quite the résumé.”

  “Do you carry a gun?” asked Leya. “She’s not getting in that car if you carry a gun.”

  Vladimir shook his head. “No. Whole body is weapon.”

  Trent and Leya looked at each other and then shrugged in unison.

  “Well, I don’t see why not,” said Trent.

  “And you can take Santi with you, too,” added Leya.

  “WHAT?” I said.

  “That’s a good idea,” agreed Trent. “He’ll enjoy having a field trip, and he’s probably safer with Vladimir than he is with us!”

  Blake frowned, but Vladimir nodded sharply. “I protect him also,” he said.

  “I’m going to the mall! I’m going to the mall!” sang Santi, rubbing his dirty little hands together.

  I begged Trent with my eyes. If Santi was going, I wanted to back out.

  But the look he gave me in return told me there was no chance of that.

  “Have fun!” he said.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  THE RIDE TOOK forever. First, we wound along narrow gravel roads. Then we intersected a paved, two-lane road. That took us to a highway. And eventually that took us to a town. Nobody said a word the whole way. Vladimir drove in silence while I looked out the window and Blake and Santi played a game on a screen that came down from the roof of the SUV. Santi had no idea what he was doing, but he loved pushing buttons, so he was happy. It was some kind of cartoony shooting game, and honestly, I think Blake was the one who kept shooting Santi.