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  For Holly and Missy, two of my cousin-sisters,

  because you know how much of this is true.

  I love you both very much

  CHAPTER

  1

  Nine Days After the Fire

  The day my mother exploded a copperhead snake with an elephant gun, I decided I was genetically destined to become a felon or a big-game hunter. That was good, since I had tried being a ballerina, poet, artist, and musician, and I sucked at all of those.

  Mom cleaned out a third of the water from our backyard pond with the snake shot, but that wasn’t the best part. “You flew backward up the hill seven whole feet.” I prodded her hip with my toe. “That was special. You should try out for the circus.”

  The air smelled like spring flowers and gunpowder. Mom grunted and said something like “crouton,” and something else that sounded like a swear word. She was probably trying to tell me to burn the snake’s carcass, because that’s what she did with all the snakes she killed.

  “We don’t have to burn the snake,” I told her. “Nothing left of this one.”

  Mom’s red hair splayed across the pine needles under her head, and her pretzel-shaped barrettes glittered in the sunlight. I couldn’t stand those barrettes. They looked like something little kids wore. A bruise was spreading across Mom’s shoulder and chest. The elephant gun lay in the holly bushes across the yard. Wicked. I couldn’t believe it flew that far. My BB gun, Louise, punched like a scared little sister when I fired her. Dad’s big rifle had to kick like a rhinoceros.

  I was carrying Louise because Peavine and his sister, Angel, were on their way over so we could go searching for two kids who went missing after a fire, but I figured I should keep Louise out of Mom’s line of sight. I set her down behind me, careful to keep my hand on her barrel so I didn’t drop her in the grass. After that kickback, one look at a BB gun might send Mom straight into a screaming fit.

  Mom had on green eye shadow that matched her shirt and sandals and her brand-new bruise. The sandals had green sparklies, too, the same color as her eyes, which I couldn’t see because she kept squeezing them shut. “Dad’s gonna be ticked that you pried open his gun case,” I said.

  “Crouton,” Mom mumbled. And then I realized she was trying to say, “Call your father,” except she couldn’t open her mouth all the way.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “I hear sirens. They might be after you, but Captain Armstrong’s charging up and down the main road in his running clothes and hollering ‘INCOMING,’ so maybe it’s him they want.”

  “Fontana. Call. Your father.”

  “Fiiiine.” She just had to use my proper name. Blech. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and speed-dialed Dad while I asked her, “Aren’t you glad he won the fight about getting me a phone?”

  Mom didn’t answer.

  The phone rang twice before Dad picked up with, “Honey, you know I’m busy.”

  I could hear people talking in the background because he worked as a dispatch officer in Bugtussle, Mississippi’s 9-1-1 call center. It was an important job, and a good one to have, with Mom as his wife and me as his daughter.

  “Mom shot a copperhead with your old Nitro Express rifle,” I told him. “We’ll be picking snake guts off the roof for a year.”

  It got so quiet on Dad’s end that I could almost make out what the other operators were saying. A lot of those calls were probably about the blast that just came from Sixty Erlanger Lane, because canon fire was unusual in our neighborhood. We lived on a nice cul-de-sac, in a big house with a basement that backed up to a pond in front of some woods. In Mississippi, all water had snakes, especially if it was muddy. Snakes didn’t care what kind of neighborhood you lived in.

  Mom groaned and shifted on the ground. A piece of mangled copperhead blopped off a nearby pine branch, which would have grossed me out if I had been a normal girl, but I was so far from normal, it wasn’t even funny—except, of course, when it was.

  “I’ll be right home,” Dad said. I waited for it, and a second later it came. “I’m sorry, Footer. I know this has got to stop.”

  The History of Bugtussle, Mississippi

  Footer Davis

  5th Period

  Ms. Perry

  1. The Meaning of “Bugtussle”

  Bugtussle, Mississippi, got a name with “bug” in it because it has way too many doodlebugs.

  Kingdom:

  Animalia

  Phylum:

  Arthropoda

  Subphylum:

  Crustacea like crabs and lobsters and shrimp

  Class:

  Malacostraca

  Order:

  Isopoda

  Suborder:

  Oniscidea

  Family:

  Armadillidiidae

  Genera:

  Armadillidium

  Species:

  vulgare

  Doodlebugs are a type of wood louse. They are also called pill bugs, and roly-polies. When they get upset, they roll into balls. Lizards like to eat them, but then the lizards get poisoned. Doodlebugs must be good at revenge. Some people who keep spiders for pets also keep doodlebugs, to eat spider poop and mold.

  II. What I Learned from This Report

  1. Spiders poop.

  2. My town is named after a wood louse.

  3. Whoever named our town was probably weird, because only a weirdo names a town after lice.

  C-

  More text, less illustration. Spider poop is not relevant to the town’s founding. Please take your assignments more seriously.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Nine Days After the Fire—Maybe Almost Nine and One—Half Days

  Ambulance driver: Your shoulder may be broken, Ms. Davis. I’d like you to come with me.

  Mom: My shoulder is fine, and no. I don’t like ambulances and hospitals.

  Captain Armstrong: Adele, they don’t mean you any harm. I know it’s hard, but let them look.

  Dad: Please, honey. Let’s just get your arm checked.

  Mom: I said it’s fine. I didn’t mean to pick the wrong gun, but snakes need to die. Besides, Peavine and Angel came over to play.

  Captain Armstrong: I’ll watch the kids.

  Mom: No.

  Ambulance driver: I’ll do whatever you want, Mr. Davis.

  Dad: Footer, why don’t you and your friends head on over to wherever you’re going? Just be back before dark.

  When life gets too weird, my brain cuts everything down to freeze-frames. Click. Dad was there. Click. Captain Armstrong was there. Click. The ambulance pulled up. Click. All the neighbors came out to stare. I so didn’t want to stay around and get gawked at. So, Peavine, Angel, and I headed for the woods. They didn’t say anything about the neighbors and ambulance circus. They were too used to it, like me.

  Everybody in Bugtussle knew about my mother.

  Adele Davis, she’s a pretty thing, but she ain’t right, bless her heart.

  That’s what people said behind my back, and to my face. People who don’t live in Mississippi think “bless your heart” means something nice, but it really means they think you’re too stupid to bother trying to explain things to you, or that you’re too crazy to help. People never say what they mean, except for Peavine, which is why he’s my
best friend, and why I’d rather think about him than my mom, whether her heart got blessed or not.

  Sometimes I’d rather think about anything other than my mom, like how Peavine and Angel were going to help me search what was left of the Abrams farm. Everybody else in Bugtussle knew about the murder and fire at the Abrams farm too, even if nobody could figure out how they happened, or why.

  Cissy Abrams was twelve, one year older than me. Doc was only six. I knew them a little bit, from seeing them around town and going to the farm a few times with Mom to take over some fudge at Christmas and stuff. She visited over there a lot, but she didn’t usually take me, because, she said, Sweetie, they have a few problems, and Mr. Abrams just needs a little help.

  Cissy and Doc’s dad, Carl Abrams, got locked in prison for selling drugs, and their mom lived down in Jackson. She didn’t have custody of Cissy and Doc, because she used meth and didn’t have any teeth and couldn’t take care of kids in her condition. Since old Ms. Abrams died from cancer, old Mr. Abrams raised Cissy and Doc by himself on his farm, which backed up to Wynwood Heights, where I lived. He believed in homeschooling, and he mostly kept to himself and made Cissy and Doc stay home and tend to farm chores and lessons. They weren’t allowed to have fun, not really, and I felt pretty bad for them.

  Then, just after the first of April, nine days ago, somebody shot Mr. Abrams to death and burned the whole place to the ground.

  I didn’t remember much about that Friday night, except waking up to the stench of smoke and a bunch of screaming sirens, and realizing Mom and Dad weren’t in the house. I’d been about to go out looking for them when Mom came upstairs. She looked exhausted. When Dad got back from his night shift, he was all frowns and head shaking.

  It’s bad, he told us. I had a thousand questions, but Mom just nodded and I knew better than to ask anything. Mom couldn’t handle too much stress, and I didn’t want to make her cry and have bad dreams and start talking about things that weren’t real.

  Later, the police said it was arson and that Cissy and Doc died in the fire. Then the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation said maybe Cissy and Doc didn’t die, because nobody found any pieces of them, not even teeth, and teeth weren’t supposed to burn.

  It was a mystery.

  “The Nitro Express.” Peavine poled along on his arm crutches and whistled. “I’ve always wanted to shoot that thing.”

  “Firearms are dangerous,” Angel said, following behind him through the woods, reading her book as she walked the packed-dirt path. “They should be outlawed.”

  I squeezed Louise’s stock and pressed her hard against the strap of my backpack. “Second amendment says we can have guns,” I told her. “Don’t you listen in social studies? Do they even have social studies in third grade? I can’t remember.”

  Angel, who really did look like an angel, with her golden curls and blue eyes and the bright, ruffly dresses she wore, kept reading her science-fiction book. The stupid thing was thicker than two bricks. Angel was only eight, but she had a thirty-year-old brain, and she talked like a politician. That’s why she had no friends and she had to hang out with us. Peavine and I, we looked after Angel, because our parents expected us to, and because she grows on you after a while, kind of like a nasty toenail fungus.

  “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed,” she said. “I don’t think school shootings and your mom obliterating helpless snakes count as the actions of a well-regulated militia.”

  “Leave off,” Peavine warned, and Angel went back to her book.

  “It’s okay,” I told him, because arguing about guns and the Constitution was better than worrying about Mom and whether or not she would go to the hospital. It was better than thinking about Captain Armstrong and the clump of other neighbors standing in front of the four other houses on our cul-de-sac gaping at Mom while she tugged her shiny new barrettes back into place and argued with Dad and the ambulance driver.

  Would Dad go with Mom? Would he call Peavine and Angel’s mom to come to the house to look after us? Ms. Jones always helped out. She could do that because she didn’t have problems like Mom did.

  My eyes darted to Peavine and then to Angel.

  Must be nice, having a real mom.

  Wow, that was mean. And I didn’t believe that. Not really. My mom was a real mom, and a good one. She just got different sometimes.

  I don’t think school shootings and your mom obliterating helpless snakes count as the actions of a well-regulated militia. . . .

  My face burned at the edges, even though pine trees shaded us as we walked. “Pit vipers aren’t helpless, Angel,” I said. “If a copperhead bites you, you get sick and puke, and your foot can fall off.”

  “Yeah.” Peavine’s short blond hair looked almost white in the sunlight filtering through the branches. With every swing of his legs he tipped like he would fall, but he never did. He was graceful, like a dancer or an acrobat, and he filled out his black T-shirt with more muscles than most boys I knew. I was the one who always got my feet tangled and cut my knees.

  “Is your mother off her medication again?” Angel asked, still reading as she walked.

  I glared at the back of her head. “Not that I know of. She doesn’t always tell us.”

  Actually, she never told us. Sometimes Mom flushed her pills down the toilet or threw them away. Not long ago, she hid a bunch in the backyard under some bushes near the pond. I found them when I was burying a squirrel the neighbor’s cat killed on our doorstep. Mom was upset about that squirrel, because she fed it peanut butter and toast every morning. The medicine probably would have helped her not cry so much when it died.

  “You remembered the camera, right?” Peavine asked, probably because he knew I didn’t want to talk about Mom. I never wanted to talk about Mom. What could I say, anyway?

  Yeah, she’s nuts.

  Yeah, it sucks.

  Yeah, one day I might be crazier than she is.

  Bleh.

  “My new phone’s camera is fine,” I told Peavine. “And your notebook is in the backpack, with the magnifying glass. We’re set.”

  “I read the clippings again,” Angel said. “Nobody had a motive to murder Mr. Abrams and take Cissy and Doc. It had to be some kind of accident.”

  “Mr. Abrams got shot dead,” Peavine called over his shoulder. “How could that be an accident? And the fire was set on purpose. Police said so.”

  “People get shot by mistake,” Angel said. “Fires can be set by accident too.”

  I didn’t argue with her, because once I tried an experiment with a magnifying glass and a bunch of newspapers, only I used too many newspapers and the grass was really dry and the sun was bright. At least the fire department didn’t charge for the visit. The fence didn’t catch fire with the newspapers, and I only messed up one corner of the yard, but it took me three months of allowance and chores to pay Dad back for the dirt and sod.

  Did Cissy Abrams use a magnifying glass inside her house? Was it possible to set a whole house on fire with a magnifying glass? But even if she made a mistake like I did, how did the barn burn, and who shot her grandfather?

  “Makes no sense.” Angel finally closed her book because we were getting to the end of the half-mile trail from my backyard to the edge of the Abrams farm. “Cissy and Doc probably died in the fire.”

  “I think somebody stole them,” Peavine said. Each time he planted his poles in the dry ground, puffs of dust scattered across his jeans, then drifted into the leaves and branches beside the path.

  I couldn’t smell the dust. My nose was still full of gunpowder, but I knew that scent wasn’t exactly real, because of another science experiment that used coffee and didn’t involve any fire departments. We learned in class that smell works by molecules, so noses can literally fill up with smells, and you can keep smelling them even if you’re not around them anymore. We sniffed coffee for a while. Then the teache
r took it away, and we could still smell it for a few minutes.

  I wondered if Mom could still smell the gunpowder from where she shot the snake. Did she get in the ambulance? Was her shoulder really busted? Would they make her stay overnight, or maybe take her up to Memphis again, like last summer? I hated it when Mom had to be gone a long time.

  “Okay,” Peavine said, swinging to a halt as the woods ended.

  Angel stopped beside him, and I pulled up next to her. Across the field full of ryegrass nobody was alive to mow, burned timbers of the house and barn jutted up like black skeletons. Broken tape slithered at the corners whenever the breeze picked up. It had been bright yellow when we first saw it, and stretched tight around the crime scene. Guys in uniforms and funny suits combed over the place for hours and days while Peavine and Angel and I watched from right about where we stood now. Local police, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation—everybody came and looked.

  They didn’t find anything except what was left of Mr. Abrams after somebody blew him away with a shotgun, but they kept a guard on the place until yesterday. The police no longer considered the Abrams case an “active investigation,” so we figured we’d finally get our chance to take a closer look.

  It’s not safe, Fontana, Mom’s voice whispered in my head. There might be snakes in those ashes.

  Mom thought snakes were everywhere. Snakes didn’t much bother me, but now that we were at the Abrams farm, I wondered if snakes might be better than what really lay beneath the ashes. The stench of char chased away the gunpowder lodged in my nose. My stomach felt funny.

  Angel coughed. “I used to like that smell. Now it makes me think of dead people.”

  “There aren’t any dead people,” Peavine said. “The police took the body away.”