Home Sweet Motel Read online

  “If you’ll have us,” said Mr. Ortega, “we’d like to book the room for a whole month.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful,” said Mom, sounding a little like Stephanie Gross, this girl at school who really, really, really likes boy bands.

  I arched an eyebrow. Mom flipped back to her professional desk-clerk face.

  “I mean, we’d be happy to have you, Mr. Ortega.”

  Mom clacked on her computer keyboard. Mr. Ortega smiled some more. I wondered if he painted his teeth with white shoe polish or something.

  “We appreciate your hospitality, Mrs. Wilkie.”

  “Please,” said Mom, “call me Wanda.”

  “The game is always tougher when you’re on the road,” said Mr. Ortega. “But Gloria and I don’t really want to start house hunting until we’re absolutely, one hundred and ten percent certain that WTSP is the right fit for me,” he said. “I have another offer from a station in Boise, Idaho. I do love double-baked potatoes.”

  “Don’t we all?” said Mom, sounding funny again. “Will Mrs. Ortega be coming down to help you two find your new, permanent home? I mean, if you decide to stay in St. Petersburg, of course.”

  “No,” said Gloria very matter-of-factly. “My mom died five years ago. We were living in Scranton at the time.”

  Mr. Ortega nodded. “WNEP-TV 16.” He said it like those were the saddest letters and number in the whole world.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” said Mom.

  “Thank you,” said Mr. Ortega. “We miss her every day.”

  “So where’s Mr. Wilkie?” asked Gloria. I could tell she wanted to change the subject. “I haven’t met him yet.”

  “Yes, you have,” I said. “Except I just call him Grandpa. I think he’s taking a nap. All that singing kind of wore him out.”

  “I meant your father.”

  “Oh.” I looked at Mom.

  She answered for me.

  “He isn’t here, Gloria. P.T.’s father left a long, long time ago.”

  Yep.

  It was so long ago I’d never even met the guy.

  That night, Gloria didn’t ask me any more questions about my dad.

  I was happy about that. Hate to say it, but the whole topic’s sort of a buzzkill.

  Instead, Gloria and I went to work. I took her on a tour of the Wonderland grounds so we could brainstorm, blue-sky, and spitball new attractions. (She was also teaching me some of her business buzzwords.)

  “That used to be a Muffler Man,” I said, pointing to the twenty-five-foot-tall fiberglass statue of a bearded guy in blue jeans and a red shirt. “Grandpa bought him from a tire-repair place up in Michigan years ago. He used to hold a muffler in his hands. That’s why one palm’s up and the other one’s down like that. So he can hold stuff.”

  “Who’s he supposed to be?” asked Gloria.

  “Smilin’ Sam is what Grandpa calls him.”

  “Why?”

  “Beats me. But if we grab a ladder, we could paint his cap silver so it looks like a helmet. Then we could attach a bunch of fake feathers to the side and make it look even more like conquistador headgear. Add a plywood sword down the side of his pants, and—BOOM!—I could tell everybody he’s Ponce de León.

  “I’d say, ‘Folks, Ponce de León never found the Fountain of Youth, but he definitely located the legendary Fountain of Tall.’ We could bottle tap water and sell it to short guys who want to play basketball. Or we could play the history angle and book school visits. We just wouldn’t tell Mr. Frumpkes.”

  “Cute,” said Gloria. “But I think we need something bigger.”

  “Bigger? Hello? Did I mention that Ponce here is twenty-five feet tall?”

  “I mean a bigger idea.”

  “All right,” I said, moving around to the side of the motel. “How about the jackalope?”

  I pointed to the statue of the giant jackrabbit with antelope horns. It had a saddle on its back that you could climb onto, cowboy-style. If you put a quarter in its money box, the jackalope rocked back and forth on its hind legs so you could pretend you were riding the fearsome critter like a bucking bronco.

  “What do we do with him besides charge twenty-five cents per ride?” asked Gloria.

  “Make up a story.”

  Gloria was shaking her head. “I think we need something better than just a story.”

  “Just a story? Might I remind you, Miss Ortega, that a story is what turned Freddy the Frog into a cash machine?”

  “I know, Phineas. I was there. But to take this thing to the next level, we need a story plus.”

  “Plus what?”

  “I don’t know. Something interactive. Something that people can participate in—even if they’re not staying at this motel. Something that’ll grab the whole beach’s attention.”

  “How about a jackalope hunt?” I suggested. “We could buy a bunch of Super Soakers…”

  “And have people chase after a fiberglass statue that isn’t running away from them?”

  “Okay. Forget the jackalope hunt. How about a treasure hunt? We’ve got just the pirate for it.”

  “Where?”

  “The Putt-Putt golf course.”

  “Show me.”

  I led Gloria to the palm-and-grapefruit grove that shaded Grandpa’s nine-hole miniature golf course. It was only about fifty feet away from the beach.

  “That’s the footlocker I took to camp once,” I said, pointing at the pirate’s treasure chest. “Grandpa painted it up like that when I told Mom how much I hated camp and never wanted to go back.”

  “Perfect!” said Gloria.

  “You hated camp, too?”

  “No. Actually, I’ve never been to camp. We move around too much. But the treasure chest is perfect. First thing tomorrow, we need to head back to Dollar Bill’s Discount Barn.”

  “Grandpa will drive us,” I said. “What will we be looking for?”

  “Treasure. Enough spangly baubles and shiny trinkets to fill that box. We need a pair of sand shovels, too.”

  “You mean for making a sand castle?”

  Gloria shook her head again. “Nope. The big kind. We need to bury some treasure!”

  The next morning, Gloria, Grandpa, and I basically grabbed every kind of ten-cent toy we could find at Dollar Bill’s Discount Barn.

  Bouncy balls. Whistles. Clapping hands. Squiggly snakes. Wax lips. Vampire fangs. Fake money. Rub-on tattoos.

  And lots of gold-foil chocolate pirate coins.

  “Seriously?” said Gloria when I grabbed two bags, each loaded with two hundred shiny coins. “Four hundred years ago, pirates buried a treasure chest filled with chocolate under the hot Florida sand and it never melted?”

  “Of course not. Pirate chests were always vacuum sealed,” I told her.

  “And extremely well insulated,” added Grandpa. “They were the first ice chests.”

  “And you expect people to believe that the chocolate coins have been buried for hundreds of years because…?”

  “Because we believe it,” said Grandpa. “That’s how you sell a bit, Gloria. You believe in it. That’s how you sold Freddy the Frog’s Frozen Green Pond Scum.”

  “True,” said Gloria.

  “Besides,” I added, “everybody loves chocolate. Nobody asks too many questions when they find it for free. And look at those skulls and crossbones stamped into the gold foil. Come on. That’s pirate-y.”

  Grandpa nodded. “Very pirate-y. Downright buccaneerish.”

  “Fine,” Gloria said with a laugh. “P.T.’s the one who has to make it sound believable.”

  “Trust me,” I told her. “I’m very good at making fake stuff sound real.”

  Grandpa put his hand on my shoulder. “Taught the boy everything I know!”

  After we shopped for treasure, we loaded up on plastic beach pail-and-shovel sets, even though all we really needed was the shovels. They were a dollar each. We bought a case—forty-eight buckets and shovels. Total cost for the pirate chest exhibit?
One hundred three dollars and forty-six cents.

  Our last stop was the grocery store, to pick up a couple of bags of Pirate’s Booty. I thought the salty, cheesy snack would go well with all that chocolate. Grandpa agreed. Gloria rolled her eyes (something she does so often I wondered if they were loose).

  “Fine,” she said. “Whatever. I believe, I believe.”

  Finally, we lugged all the loot back to the motel and started loading the chest inside Grandpa’s workshop.

  Well, Gloria and I did. Grandpa needed a nap.

  I helped myself to a few of the chocolate gold coins. A couple of Pirate’s Booty cheese curls, too.

  “You know we can’t use that bag now, right, P.T.?” said Gloria.

  She was right. So I finished the whole bag.

  “Come on, P.T.,” said Gloria. “You can’t keep eating the treasure before we bury it!”

  “I’m not eating it. I’m plundering it.”

  “Whatever. Save some for the paying customers.”

  We finished stuffing the footlocker with loot and sealed it up tight.

  “Once we bury the chest,” I said, “we’ll draw a map.”

  “Make sure you put in all sorts of twists and turns,” said Gloria. “Make it easy but hard.”

  “Definitely. I’ll work in some rhyming clues, too. Riddles the treasure hunters have to decipher.”

  “Perfect. Is there a copy machine in the office?”

  “Yep. Mom said we can run off as many as we want.”

  Gloria whipped out her cell phone. It had a calculator app. “If we sell the maps for five dollars each, we need to sell twenty-one to break even.”

  “What if we ‘rent’ the shovels for another five dollars?”

  Gloria grinned. “Now you’re catching on.”

  “We just have to make sure the maps look like they’re worth five bucks.”

  “You can use this parchment paper,” said Grandpa, coming into the workshop just as we were double-sealing the lid on the treasure chest with clear packing tape so sand wouldn’t leak into it and turn the chocolate coins into round Nestlé Crunch bars.

  “I thought you were taking a nap,” I said.

  “Who can nap when life is all of a sudden exciting again? Here. I bought this stuff years ago. See how it’s sort of torn around the edges? I used it to print up scorecards for the Pirate Pete’s Putt-Putt course—back when people liked to play Putt-Putt.”

  “It’s perfect for a treasure map,” I said. “Extremely pirate-y.”

  “Aye, that it is, matey,” said Grandpa, squinting like he needed an eye patch. “Arrrrr!”

  Gloria and I both laughed.

  Grandpa dropped his pirate voice and said, “You kiddos are doing a fantastic job.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Here,” said Grandpa. “I want you each to have one of these. They’re almost antiques.” He handed us two old-fashioned, slightly faded postcards. “Thanks for keeping my dream alive, P.T. You too, Gloria.”

  “Well,” I said, “we’re trying, Grandpa.”

  “But we have a long way to go,” added Gloria.

  “Well, thank you, then, just for trying.”

  The old postcards were pretty awesome. They showed Walt Wilkie’s Wonder World back in its glory days.

  And Grandpa smiling. Just like he was now.

  Gloria and I waited until the sun set.

  Then we trekked from the pirate statue (our starting point), around the pool, to where treasure hunters would have to pick up a clue from the Freddy the Frog’s Frozen Green Pond Scum stand. We were hoping if it was a hot day, all the customers grabbing their clues would want to buy an ice-cream cone, too.

  If they deciphered that clue, it would take them to the rocket ship, where, if they answered a riddle taped to one of its fins, they’d be told to go to the pink flamingo in the rear parking lot.

  At the pink flamingo, they’d pick up a second map (my idea), which would lead them down to the beach and tell them to take a sharp left at the trash barrel, take a right ten paces later, then go east, away from the ocean, toward a short stockade fence penning in a bungalow’s backyard.

  “X marks the spot,” I said, setting down the treasure chest so I could dig a hole that in the morning would be shaded by the fruit trees on the other side of the fence. (Okay. I was a little worried about the chocolate coins melting. Shade was a good idea.)

  Gloria had been keeping detailed notes while I blocked out the course. They would serve as the outline for our two clue-filled treasure maps. The first one would be available in the motel lobby for just five bucks!

  The beach was dark. No one was watching what we were doing except a pair of pelicans.

  I had a garden shovel that I had borrowed from the groundskeeper’s toolshed. We didn’t really have a groundskeeper—just a guy who showed up with a riding lawn mower and a rake every other week. But maybe if the Wonderland really bounced back, we could hire the guy full-time and put in flower beds or topiaries shaped like unicorns and warthogs—the kind of stuff they have at Disney World!

  “How deep should we bury it?” I asked.

  “Not too deep,” said Gloria. “But not too shallow, either.”

  “How about two feet?”

  “Sounds good.”

  At Gloria’s insistence, we had wrapped the whole tightly sealed treasure chest inside a clear plastic recycling bag, “to keep all the creepy sand crawlers out of it,” as she put it.

  Fine. If we were burying plastic party favors, foil-wrapped candy coins, and a standard supermarket bag of Pirate’s Booty, we’d sort of blown the whole “authentic pirate treasure” angle anyway.

  I dug down two feet.

  Together, Gloria and I lowered the loaded treasure chest into the hole. We shoveled and shoved sand back in. The second we were finished, a beam from a flashlight blinded me.

  “What’s going on back there?”

  I recognized the voice.

  “Uh-oh,” I quickly whispered to Gloria. “That’s Mr. Frumpkes. A teacher from school.”

  “Mr. Wilkie? I’m waiting for your answer. What are you doing with a shovel in my mother’s backyard? Any exotic seashells you happen to find belong in her collection, not yours!”

  “This is the beach,” I said.

  “Correction. This is the beach behind my mother’s house.” Mr. Frumpkes glared at me over the fence—I think. I couldn’t really see his face with that flashlight frying my eyeballs, but come on—Mr. Frumpkes always glares at me.

  “That doesn’t mean she owns it,” said Gloria, who, since she hadn’t officially enrolled at Ponce de León Middle School yet, could say that kind of snarky thing to an off-duty teacher.

  “Who are you?” asked Mr. Frumpkes, swinging his locomotive beacon over to blind Gloria.

  “None of your beeswax.”

  “Oh, it’s my beeswax, Missy Miss. I will not have juvenile delinquents vandalizing my mother’s property.”

  “It’s not her property,” said Gloria. “It’s a public beach. Your mother’s property is on the other side of the fence.”

  “Oh. I see. You’re a little legal beagle. Getting all technical with me. Well, Missy Miss, just because my mother has the misfortune of living down the block from that sorry excuse for a motel—”

  “The Sea Spray?” I said, because it’s one of our nearest neighbors. “I think it’s pretty nice. Their pool’s not as much fun as ours, but—”

  “I was talking about the Blunderland,” said Mr. Frumpkes. “Don’t forget, Mr. Wilkie, I am a history teacher. I know all about your grandfather’s past failures. The Wonderland is nothing but a bloated white elephant.”

  “Aren’t all elephants kind of bloated?” I said. “And my grandfather is not a failure.”

  “Ha! He’s been washed up ever since that other Walt, the successful one, opened his world of wonders over in Orlando.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Mr. Frumpkes sort of had me there. I started fiddling with the s
hovel handle.

  “Are you this bad when you teach school?” asked Gloria.

  “I beg your pardon?” sniffed Mr. Frumpkes.

  “Do you mess up your facts like this when you teach history?”

  “I’ll have you know, young lady—”

  “Walt Wilkie’s Wonderland Motel isn’t a failure. If it were, how come it’s being featured on TV first thing tomorrow morning?”

  “Oh, really?” scoffed Mr. Frumpkes. “Are the cameras coming to record the authorities finally hauling the kooky old coot off to jail? What’d he do? Forget to pay his real estate taxes?”

  “You’ll see,” said Gloria. “Just be sure you watch Ten News This Morning tomorrow, Mr. Grumpkiss.”

  “Frumpkes!”

  “Whatever. Come on, P.T. We don’t need some old lady’s stinky seashells. Let’s head for home.”

  Fact: Gloria Ortega is kind of scary when she gets mad like that.

  Double fact: she’s also kind of awesome.

  We hiked down the beach toward the surf.

  When we were beyond the reach of Mr. Frumpkes’s flashlight, I said, “So, Gloria. How can you be so sure that channel ten is going to put the Wonderland on TV tomorrow morning?”

  “Because that’s where my dad works.”

  “I know. But…”

  “You’re going to be on their morning show. Live. Talking about the treasure hunt.”

  “I am? What time?”

  “I don’t know. First I have to pitch the story to my father.”

  “You think the TV station will really send somebody out to cover our treasure hunt?”

  “They don’t have to. Dad’s already here!”

  Did you know that some people watch local news at five o’clock in the morning?

  Well, that’s when the channel ten morning news show starts. A satellite van from the TV station pulled into our parking lot at four-thirty a.m. Mr. Ortega wanted to interview me, live, at five-twenty-five.

  I don’t usually get up before seven. But to be on TV? I’d get up before I even went to bed!