It's Up to Charlie Hardin – eARC Read Online Free PDF Page A

room where four boys waited on wooden crates, having set up a plank as a table between storage boxes. A half-dozen old cups, each with a dye tablet, awaited hot vinegar water from the pot.
    “You busted one of Charlie’s and one of Roy’s,” said Jackie Rhett as he watched eggs being dipped out with a wooden spoon.
    “How can you tell?” Sue Ann said, unmoved. “They might both be yours.”
    “Yeah, eggs is eggs,” Roy added.
    “Alla my eggs better be perfect,” Jackie grumbled.
    Aaron said, stressing the first word, “ Whose eggs?”
    Jackie glared a reply but said nothing because Sue Ann represented adult supervision. Aaron knew, because Jackie bragged about such things, that all six of the eggs Jackie supplied had been obtained by stealth in Jackie’s pockets from the big Checker Front Grocery.
    Aaron had brought no eggs, claiming that Easter was a topic his mother preferred not to explore, so the boys were soon pushing thirty hardboiled eggs around on the plank while Sue Ann slowly half-filled the cups with water still hot from the pot. “Not yet,” she said, as Roy isolated an egg. “Wait for the fizz to stop.” And with this she began to stir the brilliantly colored, briskly foaming stuff in the cups with her spoon handle. “Charlie, can you roll the cracked eggs onto that old cup towel? I can make egg salad for lunch and there’ll be seven eggs for each of you. Okay, Jackie?”
    A quick nod from Jackie and three sighs from the others; Sue Ann was a born diplomat. Charlie pushed the two damaged items aside and knelt beside the girl, their heads nearly touching, and while the other boys foraged in corners for small sticks they had brought in during earlier projects, Charlie was content to kneel there, inhaling a scent more mysterious than vinegar. It disturbed and intrigued and ensnared him, and reminded him of another encounter with Sue Ann the previous October.
    * * *
    It had been the day Roy broke a favorite Kinney vase and promptly disappeared, and Sue Ann had enlisted Charlie in a search. Because the girl seldom seemed to give much attention to Roy’s friends, and Charlie was teasing a tiny horned lizard with a twig at the time, he had said, “Why me?”
    And she had tossed that yellow mop of hair from her face, and batted her eyes, and smiled. He later decided her power was the smile, or maybe the faint hint of lilac he had never noticed before. “Because you’re nice. And smart. I bet you know everywhere Roy would hide. I bet you know just about everything, Charlie.” And because Charlie did not know that half of diplomacy is allure, something in him had glowed like a lightning bug.
    Horned lizards were common enough and Charlie abandoned his task, especially with the stirring of something new in his breast. Soon, at his suggestion, they arrived at a historic local mansion, a stone pile set on a steep slope and known to all as “the castle.” Charlie peered into bushes that surrounded the high ancient stone wall, knowing those bushes were favorite hideouts for Roy. Sue Ann had stopped at the wrought iron bars of a gate that had once admitted horse-drawn carriages to the grassy courtyard inside, a space dominated by an enormous live oak. “I don’t know if he could squeeze between these bars,” she said.
    “He can, but he’d better not,” said Charlie. “Sometimes they yell at you from the castle.” He had paused to gaze at the vast stone structure that squatted uphill from above the courtyard. “I don’t think he’s here.”
    “Just us.” For a moment they had stood at the massive gate in silence that, for Charlie, seemed perfect. Then: “Charlie, there’s something I need to know. I think it’s bad but I can’t ask my mom; I think she’d have a hissy fit.”
    “Moms will do that.”
    “And Daddy? Worse.”
    “Uh-huh. What’s it about?”
    “A word. Just a word a boy asked me about after class. He acted like I was supposed to know. Charlie, I didn’t know what to