Free Zack by William Bell Page B

made into a trinket, forever lost.
    I turned back, put my hand on the door handle. The bell sounded once more. Mr. Piffard was not in the shop. Thoughts flashed in my mind. Get the nugget back, now! No, keep the money. The nugget is priceless. But I needed the cash. The gold was agift so I could do what I had to do.
    The curtain at the back moved. A hand appeared, pushing it aside. I turned and ran from the shop.

Chapter 2
    O n the last Friday of June, I hoped my eagerness to get Mom and Dad out of my hair didn’t show. Although their plane didn’t leave until eleven o’clock, Dad was up at six, clanging and banging around, over-organizing things and tripping over his own feet.
    The night before, Mom had packed three guitars into their hard cases—the electric, her favourite six-string and, “in case some old-timers want to jam folksy,” her twelve-string—and one suitcase for clothes. Her toiletries she stuffed into a backpack at the last minute, along with a few novels and her sunglasses. She was a veteran traveller.
    You’d never have known it by Dad’s peppering her with questions. Should we bring this? Did you pack that? He, who was basically a groupie after all, had two suitcases containing everything from his laptop to exams to mark, to journals he wanted to catch up on, along with enough clothes to outfit a platoon for a month.
    The last thing he did really burned me. Without even making a secret of it, he copied down the odometer reading from the pickup. He wanted me to know I wasn’t to use the truck too much. Getready for a big surprise when you come home, Dad, I thought.
    We loaded the whole catastrophe into the back of the truck and headed for the airport. An hour and a half later Dad pulled up to the curb on the departure deck under the watchful eye of a Mountie who looked at us as if we were shipping bags of cocaine back to Colombia for a refund.
    “Be careful,” was all Dad said as he loaded the gear onto a cart.
    “Now, we’re trusting you to act sensibly while we’re gone, Zack,” Mom told me for the tenth time. “Don’t let us down.”
    “Yes, Mom.”
    “Remember to turn out all the lights and lock the doors when you leave the house. And don’t leave dirty dishes around.”
    “Yes, Mom.”
    “And water the plants. Give the lilacs and the flowers in the yard a good soaking.”
    “Yes, Mom.”
    She kissed me and laughed. “I’ll bet you wish I’d shut up and get on the plane.”
    “Yes, Mom.”
    “All right. We’re leaving. Bye, dear.”
    “Bye, Mom. Bye, Dad.”
    I watched them push the cart through the automatic doors and heaved a sigh of relief. As I drove off I even waved to the Mountie.

    The first thing I did when I got back to town was hit the supermarket, where I bought two cases of apple juice in small bottles and a case of tonic water—sue me, I don’t like cola—three boxes of soda crackers, a big jar of crunchy peanut butter, three blocks of cheddar cheese, half a dozen packs of sliced meat and two bags of ice cubes for the cooler. At the Canadian Tire store I picked up a Canada/U.S. road atlas, a plastic rain poncho, some bug lotion and sun block. Next stop, the bank, to buy American dollars.
    Back home, I packed the food into the fridge and tossed the cubes into the freezer chest. In a trunk in the cellar I located Dad’s old sleeping bag and took it out into the yard to air out in the sun. I removed the thick foam mattress from one of the chaise longues on the patio and retrieved a pillow from my room. Sleeping accommodations done.
    I stuffed enough clothes for a week into a flight bag Mom never used, threw in a couple of detective novels from the bookshelves in the living room, added my portable CD player and some discs and headed for the garage.
    Suspended from the rafters by a series of pulleys and ropes that only my father could have devised was a truck cap he had bought at a garage sale and used once—on the way home from the garage sale. It tookhalf an