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Chapter 1: Celestial Navigation 1 Celestial Navigation
MY LIFE WAS FILLED WITH countless embarrassing athletic failures. Three errors in a single inning of Little League. A particularly bad airball in front of my entire PE class. And a game of hopscotch that landed me in the emergency room. But none were as humiliating as being outrun by my grandfather.
My seventy-three-year-old grandfather.
It was dark and we were sprinting through the woods, but the results would’ve been the same on the track at school. This despite the fact that he had an artificial hip, two heart stents, and a surgically reattached pinky toe that he liked to brag could “still wiggle and everything.”
There were five of us running. My sister, Zoe, was out in front, because she apparently inherited all of the family’s sports genes. Next came my friends, Yadi and Lina, followed by Grandpa, with me in the rear. Which is exactly where I was in danger of getting bitten if we couldn’t stay ahead of the angry security dogs that were chasing us.
“Watch out!” Grandpa warned as he deftly hurdled a fallen tree in our path.
I gave it my best leap, but as I pushed off, my left foot slipped on some pine needles, which severely lowered my midair trajectory. (Can it be called midair if it’s less than twelve inches off the ground?) My right foot caught a branch that was sticking out of the trunk, and before I knew it, I slammed face-first into the ground and was spitting out dirt.
“Are you okay?” Grandpa asked as he helped me up.
My lip was starting to swell and my front tooth felt loose, but I could hear the barking getting closer. “I’m fine,” I mumbled due to the swelling. “Let’s keep moving.”
A few minutes later, we reached a creek about eight feet wide. I was momentarily afraid that everyone else was going to just jump over it, leaving me behind for the dogs.
“Should we follow along the bank or look for a spot to cross?” Zoe asked.
“Neither,” Yadi answered. “We should get in the water and run right down the middle.”
Zoe gave him a confused look. “Why would we do that?”
“Because the dogs won’t be able to track our scent,” he answered.
“He’s right,” Grandpa agreed. “It may be our best chance to lose them.”
“What about snakes and alligators?” Lina asked. “This looks like their kind of neighborhood.”
“They’re a concern, but still theoretical,” Grandpa replied. “The dogs, however, are very real. Besides, we don’t have to go far. Thirty or forty yards should be enough to cover our tracks. Then we can cross to the other side and try to make it back to the fence line.”
My non-participation in the discussion had nothing to do with a lack of interest and everything to do with the fact that I was trying to catch my breath without hyperventilating. When the others turned to me for some input, the best I could offer was a nod and a breathless “I agree.”
The water had a sour stink to it, and my jeans got soaked up to the thighs when my feet squished down into the muck. We didn’t really run so much as tromp, with lots of splashing and significantly more noise than intended. (Bright side: that noise may well have scared away the critters, because we didn’t run into any alligators or water moccasins.)
“Right over there,” Grandpa said, pointing at a cluster of trees and bushes up ahead on the opposite side. “We can hide in that thicket while we figure out how to get off the property and back to Roberta.” (Roberta was the name of Grandpa’s car.)
Finding her wouldn’t be easy, because we were totally lost. All we knew was that we were somewhere in the vast acreage of the Dades Valley Ranch, a very private lodge and very well-hidden retreat where the rich and powerful met to socialize and do business while “roughing it” in the Florida wilderness. Unfortunately, the wilderness came without cell service, which meant we didn’t have GPS. And since we’d all been so focused on eluding the dogs, we were turned around with no sense of direction.
“Does anyone have the faintest idea where we are?” I asked as I climbed up from the water onto some slippery rocks.
“Kind of,” Grandpa said uninspiringly. “Although it would help if the clouds would clear so I could use the moon and stars for celestial navigation.”
“Celestial navigation?” Zoe couldn’t believe it. “This isn’t the Lewis and Clark expedition. Here in the twenty-first century, we can use an app on our phones.”
“You’ve got service?” Yadi asked, surprised.
“No, but the compass works without it,” she replied. “If we follow it east, it will lead us to the fence, which will lead us to the road, which will lead us to the car.”
Grandpa was impressed, if maybe a bit embarrassed.
“Don’t feel bad,” Lina said as she patted him on the shoulder. “Lewis and Clark needed a woman to guide them too.”
“Before we do that, we should rest for a moment and make sure we’ve lost the dogs,” I suggested, trying to make it sound like a strategy rather than another chance for me to recover.
Luckily, there was enough moonlight for us to find an opening in the thicket. That’s where we hid as the barking decreased and eventually stopped.
“Nice,” Zoe said, offering Yadi a fist bump. “You were right about the water.”
“Yeah,” Lina agreed. “Good job.”
“Let’s give them a few minutes to go away, and then we can head east,” Grandpa said.
This wasn’t the first time we’d gotten in over our heads. It was an occupational hazard of solving mysteries. The five of us made up the Sherlock Society, and we’d come to the ranch because we were trying to crack a case more than sixty years old. We didn’t know much about Dades Valley, just that it was so secretive and exclusive it wasn’t marked on any maps. Still, this was where the clues had led us. Just a few hours earlier we’d been excited about what we might discover. Now not so much.
It’s amazing how dramatically things can change in a few hours.
“Does this mean we’re not going to keep looking for the lodge?” Yadi asked.
“For tonight it does,” answered Grandpa. “We’ll have to find it some other way that doesn’t involve sneaking around in the dark.”
“I vote for that,” Lina said.
“Okay, the dogs are gone,” I said. “Are we ready to go?”
“Ready,” answered the others.
Zoe checked the compass on her phone. She was just about to tell us which direction to head when we heard a low, rumbling growl.
She shot me a glare. “Cut it out.”
“It wasn’t me,” I replied.
“Don’t look at me,” said Yadi.
“Shh,” Grandpa said. “Listen.”
There was another growl. This one was lower and lasted longer.
“Is that an alligator?” Lina asked, panicked.
“A gator makes more of a croak than a growl,” Grandpa said. “But it could be something like a bear or a panther.”
Lina flashed a nervous smile. “Suddenly, alligator doesn’t sound so bad.”
When it growled again, we could tell that it was moving closer.
“I think it’s on the other side of these palmettos,” Yadi whispered. “Everyone, stay quiet while I take a look.”
I felt my heart all the way up in my throat as he carefully parted the palmettos and peered through them. When he turned back to us, the color had drained from his face.
“What is it?” Zoe asked.
“You won’t believe me,” he answered.
“So help me, Yadi, if you tell us that it’s a skunk ape...”
“Oh no, it’s way worse than the skunk ape.”
“What could possibly be worse than that?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know the answer.
Just then there was a loud rustling, some extremely heavy footsteps, and an even deeper growl as the animal moved out into the open.
“You’re right, that is worse than a skunk ape,” Lina remarked as we looked into the shimmering moonlight and saw... a rhinoceros.
We stood there for a moment, frozen by fear and confusion. The fear part intensified significantly when the rhino turned and looked directly at us.
“Don’t move,” Grandpa whispered. “Rhinos have terrible eyesight, but they notice sudden motion.”
“This can’t be happening,” Zoe said, stunned. “There are no wild rhinoceroses in Florida.”
“Yeah, we know that,” Yadi replied. “But who wants to tell him?”
The huge animal had a bored expression and lazily chewed on some grass while it kept its gaze in our direction.
“Any thoughts?” I asked.
“Just James and the Giant Peach?” Lina answered.
“What is this?” Zoe said. “Book club?”
“The story begins with a rhinoceros eating James’s parents,” Lina replied.
“Do they do that?” Yadi asked, flustered. “Do rhinos eat people?”
“The one in the book did,” Lina answered.
“Yes, but in that same book, James traveled the world in a magic peach with a talking spider,” I pointed out. “I don’t think we can count on it for scientific accuracy.”
“Rhinos are herbivores, so they do not eat people,” Grandpa reassured us. “But they are still incredibly dangerous.”
“What should we do?” Zoe asked.
“We wait until he looks the other way,” Grandpa replied. “Then we go.”
“In which direction?” whispered Yadi.
“Up,” answered Grandpa.
“Up?!” Lina and I replied at the same moment.
“There’s a pair of oak trees behind us,” he said. “We’ll be safe if we climb up and wait.”
“Wait for what?” Zoe asked.
“For as long as it takes for him to go elsewhere,” he answered.
We’d reached a point where there were no longer any good decisions to be made. Just bad ones that were a little less bad than others.
In the distance, one of the dogs let out a howl, and when the rhino turned its attention toward that, we made our move.
The fear of being trampled or gored did more for my athletic ability than any coach ever had. Not only was I the first to reach one of the trees, but I couldn’t have scaled it quicker if I’d had a ladder. (I guess a few of those athletic genes made it to me after all.) I didn’t stop climbing until I reached a nice thick branch about fifteen feet aboveground. Looking down, I was amazed by how quickly I had accomplished the feat, but also terrified because I had no idea how I was going to get back down without falling and breaking something. Still, that was a worry for later.
Yadi and Lina were in the same tree I was in, while Zoe and Grandpa were in the other. Our flurry of activity had attracted the rhino’s attention, and it moved toward us, but it seemed more curious than angry.
Even though the sun had set, it was still hot and buggy and the branch was super uncomfortable, but it felt good to be up there. We tried our best to blend into the darkness as we waited and watched.
“He can’t really see us,” Grandpa explained. “But he’s got excellent hearing, so we need to keep quiet and stay still.”
“Okay,” we whispered.
I looked over at Lina, who was sitting on a branch near mine, and gave her a reassuring smile. She returned the favor.
I looked back at the rhinoceros and tried to figure out how we’d gotten into this mess. It defied all logic, and I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t been there every step of the way.
It’s funny how things can spin wildly out of control. How one bad decision can snowball into another and then another. Our biggest mistake was when we decided to trespass on private property. But that’s not where this mystery began. It all started more than sixty years ago, when my grandfather was the same age as me, and Hurricane Cleo was about to slam into Miami.
