Connect the Stars (16 page)

We all leaned over to examine the bandanna. It was
still knotted, and there was even a ketchup-colored hair caught in the knot.

“So she did come out here,” said Kate. “But why?”

None of us had an answer. A little while later, when we were even deeper into the wildest part of the wilderness and Louis found an empty plastic Baggie with the broken-off end of an almond in it, we were more mystified—and, with the sun beating relentlessly down and no water source in sight, more afraid for Daphne—than ever.

El Viaje a la Confianza

BY THE TIME WE GOT back to our rendezvous point, Audrey, Kate, Louis, and I had decided we had to tell Jare what we'd found. Sure, we thought he might be a maniac, but we weren't positive. If we knew something that might save Daphne and didn't share it and then something happened to her—well, none of us wanted
that
on our consciences. So the team elected me to fill Jare in on the two clues.

Jare was already talking when we arrived. “Every year, somebody can't measure up,” he was saying to the other search parties, who had gotten back before us and found spots on the ground in the blazing sun to collapse. “Every year somebody gets discouraged. Every year somebody quits. It's part of the el Viaje mystique.”

“Daphne measured up!” cried Randolph truculently.

“I'm afraid I have to disagree with you, Captain
Knucklehead,” replied Jare disdainfully. “Daphne
didn't
measure up. Daphne was—is—a girl with serious shortcomings.” Randolph stuck his bottom lip out and seethed.

“Whatever was going on with Daphne,” observed Kate, “she didn't seem discouraged.”

“She seemed
mad
,” said Enod.

“At you,” added Audrey.

“Plus she was actually pretty good at hiking and camping, even if she was a total jerk,” tossed in Kevin.

“And since, every year, somebody runs off across the desert, usually in the most nonsensical direction possible,” continued Jare, ignoring as many of us as he could, “there is a standard procedure for the event of a self-initiated camper disappearance. That is the procedure we are now following, and will continue to follow, in order to establish last known direction of travel.”

“Tell him!” Audrey mouthed silently. She was right. This was as good a time as any to tell Jare what we'd found, since, even though none of us was sure we trusted him, we couldn't keep the bandanna and the trail-mix bag a secret forever, and the longer we stayed quiet, the madder he would be when we finally told him.

“We found her bandanna,” I said. “And on the way back, we found her trash.”

“So. When were you planning to tell me?” asked Jare, studying our team with an expression I couldn't figure out. I glanced at Audrey. She shrugged. She couldn't figure out what Jare was thinking either.

“I . . . just . . . you were talking . . . ,” I began. “We didn't want to interrupt. We were going to tell you.”

“Did you bother to keep track of
where
you found all this?” asked Jare dismissively. He glanced at his watch.

“We left everything where it was,” said Kate.

“Like on
Law and Order
,” said Louis. “We didn't think we were supposed to disturb evidence.”

Jare just shrugged. “Probably the smart play, all things considered,” he said. “Come on, Sherlock Holmes. Show me the clues. Everybody on your feet. I need all eyes for this.”

But Randolph was already on his feet and headed into the desert. “I'm
definitely
going to find her now!” he crowed. He was so busy enjoying visions of his own heroism that he stepped right in the middle of a fire ant colony. “Ow ow ow ow,” he cried.

“That's gonna hurt later,” observed Jare. “Now stop clowning around and get going.”

As we hiked back to the spot where we'd found the trail-mix bag, Jare got talkative, even for Jare. He told us
there was a lesson in all this: if you face challenges with a can-do attitude and a will to win, you will turn adversity to account. For example, Jare said, we should consider him. We should consider the time he was quarterback of his high school team, the Hillsdale, Montana, Grizzlies, and he noticed a three-hundred-pound linebacker charging full speed through the line toward his star halfback. To meet this challenge, Jare had manned up and gotten his can-do attitude in gear, and he had charged right back
at
that linebacker, with no regard for his own personal safety, and despite the fact that quarterbacks almost never do this kind of thing, he had laid a crack-back block on him that basically saved his teammate's life, probably, Jare was pretty sure. Now
that
was turning adversity to account. Got him a full ride to a Big Ten school too, when the scouts saw it on video. Small-town boy makes good. Ha ha ha.

Or, Jare continued, consider the fourth quarter of the 2007 Bowl Championship Series title game, when his favorite receiver, Terrell Brandeis, had suffered a concussion with two seconds left to play, and his team was behind by four points. Jare called a play where
he
ran the ball in for the score, winning the game and the championship and saving Terrell from getting hit in the head and bruising his brain any more than he had to, all because Jare had made
the decision to turn adversity to account and meet this formidable challenge head-on. Literally. Ha ha ha.

“Ha ha ha,” muttered Kate.

As Jare told us of these exploits, and others, I noticed Audrey's expression growing puzzled. “Wait,” I whispered to her. “Is he telling the tr—”

“If you were so great in college,” Audrey burst out before I could finish asking, “then how come you never played in the NFL?”

“I wasn't one of those guys who wanted to devote my entire life to tossing an oblate spheroid around an Astroturf field,” Jare said. “I wanted more.”

I couldn't help noticing he'd already delivered this line during the speech he gave on our first day on el Viaje. I also couldn't help noticing that he'd gotten the shape of the football wrong that time too. And even though I'd learned enough by now to keep my mouth shut about things like this, Jare must've noticed the expression on my face, because he glared at me and said, “Not a word, Memory Boy. Not a stinking word.”

We came to the Baggie impaled on the agave spine. “There it is,” Kate told Jare.

“Already?” he replied, glancing at his watch, and then at the sun. “That was quick.”

Jare snatched the plastic bag off the agave. He looked it over. “Definitely her litter, though. Look, everybody. Even got an almond in it.” He held the Baggie up for us all to see. “Definite clue.” He jammed it into his pocket. “Now where's the bandanna?”

I pointed to the cottonwood tree out in the desert.

“Had skulls on it and everything, just like Daphne's?” he mused.

“Right,” Kate said. “Daphne's. Who else is wandering around out here dropping pretentious fashion statements?”

“Good point, Little Miss Sunshine,” said Jare. “It's probably Daphne's.” He glanced at his watch. He checked the sky again. “Let's go see.” We went.

Once Jare had the second clue in his pocket, he checked his watch again and said, “Outstanding. But here's the thing. We need one more clue.”

“Aww,” said Randolph. “What? Why?”

“Because, Mr. Einstein, two coordinates don't necessarily tell us which way she's headed,” said Jare. “She could be zigzagging, walking in a circle, anything. If we can find one more clue, and it lines up with what we've already got, then we'll have a direction I can trust. Now let's see. How do I want to do this?” He spread out his crinkly new map.

“Randolph, you and your grumpy pals head down this
old mine trail,” he instructed. “Audrey's team, take that sector over there.” Once again, he directed us into the emptiest, flattest, driest, hottest part of the countryside. “And if there's anything to find, you better find it. And if I come along behind you and find there was something to find, and you didn't find it, then there's not gonna be anything left of
you
to find.”

“Jare has
such
a way with words,” muttered Audrey as soon as we'd worked our way out of his earshot.

“Why'd Jare send us out here?” wondered Louis, scanning the emptiness all around. “There's no way Daphne came in this direction. She'd have to be crazy. I'll bet you a night in the presidential suite at the El Paso Doubletree that she took off down that mine trail he sent Randolph to search.”

“You know,” Kate said, “it
would
make Randolph's day—”

“Week.”

“Year.”

“—if he were actually the one to rescue Daphne.”

“So maybe Jare hopes it'll make him easier to live with,” concluded Kate.

We searched in silence for a while, and Louis spotted a roadrunner nest and I found a tangle of barbed wire left over from somebody's old cattle ranch. Louis found the
skeleton of a mountain lion, fangs and all.

“Wow. Jare wasn't kidding,” I said. “Mastodons to mountain lions.”

Kate spotted a brass button.

“You know what I can't figure out?” asked Audrey finally.

“What Randolph does with all his T-shirt sleeves after he cuts them off?” asked Louis.

“Ha ha ha. I can't figure out why Jare would lie about his reason for not playing in the NFL,” said Audrey.

“Yeah, why does he have to keep saying he had better things to do?” asked Kate. “What football player has better things to do than the NFL?”

“Hold on,” I said. Because as soon as Audrey brought up Jare and the NFL again, I scanned a few pages of the old NFL record book where I used to find facts to amuse Hardy Gillooly. “Jare isn't lying about his
reasons
.”

“He's not?” said Audrey. She sounded dubious. “He sure looks like it to me.”

“He's lying about
playing
,” I said. “Because actually, he
didn't
skip the NFL. He got drafted by the Cleveland Browns, and he started at quarterback the first game of his rookie season!”

“Then why does he keep telling us he didn't play?” asked Louis.

“Because,” I said, turning the page of the record book in my head, “he was the worst quarterback ever to suit up in the National Football League.”

“How can somebody be the
worst
quarterback?” asked Kate.

“You have to be really special. Especially bad. Like Jare. He holds the all-time record for single-game futility,” I replied. It was all there at the bottom of the last page of the chapter on quarterbacks. I'd never noticed it before. I guess I'd never looked. Because what fun would records like this have been for Hardy Gillooly? Hardy was all about winners. He wouldn't have wanted to hear about Jare. “During his first and only NFL appearance, Jared Eastbrook threw a total of four passes. Each was intercepted and two were returned for touchdowns, all in the first half. Eastbrook was benched before the start of the third quarter and did not take the field again. Eastbrook sustained an unsubstantiated toe injury in practice the following week, and subsequently never played football again.”

“Wow,” said Louis quietly. “Poor Jare.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “It's almost enough to make you feel sorry for him.”

“Almost,” said Kate.

“But not quite,” threw in Audrey.

“He's not actually one of the all-time winners. He's one
of the all-time losers,” observed Louis.

“Maybe that explains a few things about Jare,” I said.

“How?” asked Audrey.

“This is his playground, right?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Kate. “Like we talked about when Daphne knocked over the hoodoo. This is his playground, and he's the bully.”

“So why do people turn into playground bullies?” I asked.

“Because they're losers!” said Louis. “They hate themselves, they hate their lives, and they take over the playground and act like the king.”

“And the bigger the loser, the bigger the bully, and the bigger the bully, the meaner the king,” continued Kate.

“Plus,” added Audrey, “if the desert really
is
Jare's kingdom, the point of his weird, lonely life is to protect it. And Daphne is a barbarian trying to destroy it.”

“Which is why Jare totally flamed out on her,” said Louis. “Yeah. All this does explain a few things about him. . . . Hey,” he said, spotting something on the ground in the distance. “What's that?” Slowly he made his way through the clumps of desiccated bunchgrass to stand beside a tiny barrel cactus with enormous yellow flowers. Kate followed him and reached down to pluck off the
fingerless black glove impaled on the spines.

“Don't!” Louis reminded her. “We have to leave it for Jare. Let's go get him.”

“Let's just yell,” said Kate. “Nobody's very far away yet. Plug your ears, Louis.”

“Hey! Over here!” shouted Audrey into the distance. “Jare! Everybody!”

For half a mile around, we could see glimpses of searchers turning in the brush to head in our direction.

“What?” said Jare to Audrey as he arrived. Audrey pointed at the glove on the cactus. “Now that,” he said, “is definitely Daphne's. Nobody else would be stupid enough to wear gloves while making her desert getaway.” He stuffed it in his pocket and glanced at the dropping sun. “Who's making our dinner tonight?” he asked.

“Me,” said Edie in a small voice, “and . . . Daphne?”

“Figures,” grumbled Jare. “You,” he said, pointing at Audrey, “are pinch cooking. Get going.”

As Edie and Audrey made their way back to camp, Jare spread out his map on the ground, weighting the corners with stones. Then he used jagged pebbles to mark the three places we'd found Daphne memorabilia. “Look. All you have to do is connect the dots. She was walking in a straight line.” He traced a trail between pebbles. “She went on for
a while, got hot, and found herself a nice bush to crawl under, not far from where we're standing.” He tapped our location on the map and glanced around, as if he expected to see Daphne crouched under a creosote plant nearby.

“Then we hafta—let's go—now we can find her!” spluttered Randolph, gesturing helplessly in the direction Daphne had been walking.