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Beautiful creatures.
No horses out there, he noticed. The horses grazed closer to the main house.
At length, they left the trail and meandered through trees that gave way to a small pond with water so clear you could see straight to the bottom. He recognized the swimming hole from his recent horseback tour. There was a tire hanging by a rope from a tree limb that extended out over the water.
Maria stopped her machine and took off her helmet, shaking her curls free. Harrison pulled up alongside and removed his own. When he got off, his legs felt a little stiff. Partly from his trail ride yesterday. The other two pulled up in the same way, got off and removed their helmets. The two blond cousins, the siblings. He thought they were the youngest and tried to recall their names until Maria saved him. “You met these two earlier, my cousins Orrin and Drew.”
“We heard about your car,” Drew said. “That stinks. I’m really sorry.” The sparkle of youth infected her eyes and her sympathetic smile. She was young, twenty-one or two he guessed.
“Thanks. It’s just a car, and it’s insured.”
“I think your project being stolen stinks more,” Orrin said. He was probably a little bit older than Drew. Same coloring, same lithe build, but in a sturdier version. The exuberance was missing from the brother. He had a sullen look to him. In that way, he might be his kid sister’s opposite. “Maria told us you’d been working on it for seven years.”
“That’s why we’re gonna help you get it back,” his sister said.
“You are?” Harrison glanced at Maria, knowing she’d be ready with an explanation.
She didn’t disappoint. “Know how Drew got her name?” Then she grinned and nodded at Drew. “Tell him.”
Drew, nodding, said, “Mom’s a P.I. Penny Brand Investigations. And it’s got a penny on the logo, so you don’t really know if it’s the brand name or her name, but it’s really both.”
“Because her first name is Penny,” Harrison interpreted. “That’s pretty clever.”
“I know!” She kept talking while Maria unstrapped a giant picnic cooler from the back of her ATV. It was so heavy it seemed to stretch her arms. He hurried to take it from her, but she dodged him and said, “I got it.”
Drew hadn’t missed a beat. “Anyway, when my mom was a kid, she was nuts about Nancy Drew. The books were old, even for her generation. But she loved them. The stories inspired two of her life goals; become a P.I. and, if she ever had a daughter, name her Nancy.”
He was still trying to figure out how this connected to her helping him get his prototype back, but he had to admit, he was into the story at this point, so he paid attention. Orrin spread out a big blanket. Maria started taking food out of her cooler and laying it out with a stack of hard plastic plates and real silverware.
“But when she held me for the first time, and started calling me Nancy, Mamma said I howled. Every time she said that name, I would just wail. And then my dad?—”
“My Uncle Ben,” Maria said in a quiet aside as she took two covered dishes from the cooler and whipped off the lids. Leftover chocolate cake and a full-sized pie. Apple, maybe. His stomach growled.
“Well, my dad took one look at me and said, “Drew. Not Nancy, but Drew.” Well, I stopped bawlin’ and looked him right in the eye.”
She was beaming. What a happy young woman she was. Harrison smiled and caught Maria smiling too. They shared that for a second, smiling for the same reason at the same time like a shared secret.
He looked at Drew’s brother. “How about you, Orrin? Your name’s not very common.”
Orrin said, “I’m named after our grandfather, Orrin Brand. No magical story behind it.”
“Don’t be a pissant,” Drew said.
He didn’t reply.
Maria sat down, took a plate, and everyone else followed her lead. And for a while, they were too busy pretending to weigh the options before deciding on a piece of each. And then they were too busy eating to talk. They poured themselves long, tall glasses of sweet tea from a cooler Orrin had brought, and sat in a shady spot underneath a low, broad-limbed tree. The tree reached right out over the pond, some of its tendrils touching the water, like it was taking a sip.
“I can’t recall ever being in a more peaceful place,” Harrison said at length. “You’re so lucky to have all this.”
“Yeah?” Maria said. “I thought you planned to live in some University-owned mansion for elite professors who saved the world.”
“I don’t think I put it quite like that.”
“She reads into things,” Drew said. But she was looking from one of them to the other with curious eyes. Then she shook herself visibly, and said, “So the reason we’re here— our mom has resources we can… use. And we know the ropes.”
Orrin nodded. “We’ve been learnin’the ropessince birth.”
“We were either with her at her office or with Dad at his dojo our whole lives,” Drew went on. “So we can do two things really well. We can sleuth, and we can fight.”
