Home Sweet Motel Read online

  “Make sure you give the name of the motel a couple times,” Gloria said, coaching me. “And stop yawning.”

  “Right.”

  “Remember to be polite. Courteous. Grown-ups like polite and courteous kids.”

  “You got it.”

  “And stop yawning!”

  “Right.”

  Mom was up for what Mr. Ortega called the “live remote,” too. She was cradling a thermos mug of coffee and acting giddy again. Maybe it was strong coffee with lots of sugar. Maybe it was the cameras. Or maybe it was Mr. Ortega. His teeth were bright and shiny—even at five a.m.

  “This is so exciting,” Mom gushed to Gloria’s dad.

  Grandpa was sleeping in. “It’s your show, P.T.,” he’d said when Gloria and I told him I was going to be on TV talking about the big treasure hunt. “Just give ’em the old razzle-dazzle.”

  “Right,” I said.

  But when we walked away from Grandpa’s workshop, Gloria arched an eyebrow and said, “Razzle-dazzle? Does that mean he wants you to wear that red-and-white-striped jacket again?”

  I laughed. “Don’t worry. I won’t.”

  In fact, I dressed for my broadcast debut in a simple Wonderland Motel polo shirt and tan shorts.

  “I’m so happy they let you do this story even though it’s not sports,” Mom said to Mr. Ortega.

  “They want me to do some human-interest features as part of my new job with the sports team,” he told her. “And as a human, I find what these kids are doing here at the motel to be very interesting.”

  A woman toting a huge video camera climbed out of the van.

  “We’re live in fifteen seconds, Manny.”

  “Thank you, my friend.” He turned to me. “You ready, P.T.?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “P.T.?” said Gloria.

  “Yeah?”

  “Would you puh-leeze stop yawning?”

  The camerawoman turned on an extremely bright light mounted to her rig.

  Mr. Ortega cleared his throat, waggled his eyebrows, adjusted his sport coat, and tugged at his tie. Then he started chanting “Five frantic frogs fled from fifty fierce fishes” to warm up his lips and tongue.

  Gloria slipped out of camera range to “live tweet” my TV appearance.

  The camerawoman counted down from five with her fingers.

  Mr. Ortega nodded and smiled at somebody on the other side of the lens, then said, “That’s right, Buffy. While many local middle school students are spending their Spring Break sleeping in and slaying video-game monsters, young P.T. Wilkie is helping out here, at his family’s motel, reviving the fun and excitement that, once upon a time, in a Florida far, far away, was part of Walt Wilkie’s Wonder World—the Sunshine State’s original magic kingdom. Tell me, P.T., what’s today’s wacky activity?”

  “Well, sir,” I said very politely, “here at the Wonderland Motel, 7000 Gulf Boulevard, there are always marvels to behold and stories to be told. Today we’ll be hosting a pirate treasure hunt.”

  Mr. Ortega gave me a good TV-guy chuckle. “Heh, heh, heh. Is it real pirate booty?”

  “Oh, yes, sir,” I said, because we put those bags of Pirate’s Booty cheese curls in the treasure chest. “This statue here? That’s to commemorate Stinky Beard, the smelliest pirate on the seven seas.”

  “Who?”

  “Stinky Beard, the first pirate to land on St. Pete Beach. All the other pirates made fun of him because his beard stank. He always dribbled his clam chowder down his chin.”

  “And you know where Stinky Beard’s treasure is hidden?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s somewhere under the sand near the Wonderland Motel, 7000 Gulf Boulevard. My grandfather, Walt Wilkie, found Stinky Beard’s treasure map years ago but forgot where he hid it until yesterday.”

  “And now you’re making that treasure map available to the general public?”

  “That’s right.” I waved a copy of the parchment- paper map at the camera. “For the first time ever! Plus, we added in a few modern-day riddles and wrinkles to make the treasure quest even more challenging.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “And it’s inexpensive, too. It only costs ten bucks for a map and a shovel.”

  “What’s the grand prize?”

  I smiled right at the camera lens. “Whoever finds Stinky Beard’s treasure chest gets to keep everything they find inside. Plus, everybody gets to have a whole lot of fun in the sun!”

  “When does this fun start?” asked Mr. Ortega.

  “Nine o’clock. No early birds, please. Some of our guests like to sleep in.”

  Mr. Ortega chuckled and turned to talk directly into the camera. He also pulled an old-fashioned postcard out of his sport coat pocket.

  “There you have it, Buffy. Young P. T. Wilkie, re-creating the kind of zany amusements this one-of-a-kind resort was famous for back in the 1970s, when it was Walt Wilkie’s Wonder World.”

  He showed the postcard to the camera. It was the same one Grandpa had given to me and Gloria. I figured Gloria had given hers to her dad when she’d “pitched the story” to him.

  “For Channel Ten News, this is Manny Ortega. Keep your sunny side up!”

  “We’re clear,” said the camerawoman.

  “That means we’re off the air,” explained Mr. Ortega.

  “And,” said Gloria, thumbing her smartphone as she strolled over to rejoin us, “we are also off the charts. My tweet about the treasure hunt is being re-tweeted like crazy!”

  “The studio loved the segment,” reported the camerawoman, touching her earpiece. “Our Facebook page is lighting up with requests for more information.”

  That’s when it hit me.

  “We’re going to need more treasure maps.”

  You wouldn’t believe the number of people who showed up for the treasure hunt.

  Hundreds. Maybe a thousand.

  Lots showed up at nine o’clock sharp. Lucky for us, no one found the buried treasure right away. So more treasure hunters kept trickling in.

  It helped, of course, that it had been a slow news day and channel ten replayed snippets of my interview on all its morning newscasts. Also, Gloria kept sending out tweets.

  My job was to make the whole thing fun.

  “Don’t get too close, folks,” I told the crowd gathered around the pirate statue, “or you might learn why they called this bean-burrito-loving pirate Stinky Butt when they weren’t calling him Stinky Beard!”

  Everybody laughed. So I, of course, kept going.

  “As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, Stinky Beard lost one leg and one hand during his years of swashbuckling. He also lost about five hundred pirate hats. They kept blowing off. And if he tried to catch them, he’d just hook himself in the head.”

  We sold five hundred treasure maps and rented out the sand shovels five hundred times. We also sold a lot of Freddy the Frog’s Frozen Green Pond Scum ice cream and Stinky Beard’s Grisly Green Grog. (Pinky Nelligan came up with the idea for the gloppy slop when some Green Pond Scum ice cream melted in a bowl.) Meanwhile, Mom and Gloria kept running back to Dollar Bill’s Discount Barn to buy souvenirs we could resell. Because the Tampa Bay Buccaneers is our local NFL team, there was plenty for them to choose from: pirate flags, pirate eye patches, even bobblehead pirate dolls.

  All in all, we took in close to six thousand dollars.

  More important, people had a blast following the clues and digging holes in the sand. The beach was so cratered it looked like the bright side of the moon. The college kids spent most of their time laughing, calling each other “dude,” and flinging “sandballs” at each other. Grandpa dressed up like a pirate and entertained the youngest kids.

  A sixth grader from Canada and his sister found the buried treasure chest around four o’clock and shared some of their gold chocolate coins with everybody else.

  The treasure-hunt stunt also attracted a whole bunch of new guests who wanted to book a room at “such a wonderfully fun motel.�
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  Early in the evening, Mr. Ortega and his camerawoman came back to the Wonderland to do a follow-up on the treasure hunt. He interviewed a lot of the guests, including a senior citizen who had just flown up from Miami.

  “Name’s Bob Jones,” he told Mr. Ortega. “I’d always heard about Walt Wilkie’s Wonder World. In fact, a young lady friend of mine once sent me a postcard from here.”

  Mr. Jones, who sported a pencil mustache and looked like he was about Grandpa’s age, showed the camera a postcard that looked exactly like the ones Grandpa had given to Gloria and me. From where I was watching the interview, I could see the back of the old man’s postcard. It had scribbling all over it and—gross—a big lipstick smooch plastered on top of the stamp.

  “Didn’t know if the place still existed,” Mr. Jones continued. “But then I saw that young boy on TV down in Miami. Made my day.”

  Wow, I thought. They even ran my silly story about Stinky Beard down in south Florida?

  “And,” said Mr. Ortega to the camera, “Mr. Jones from Miami definitely picked up a win today, Tiffany. He booked the Wonderland Motel’s last available room!”

  That’s right. For the first time since 1970-something, Grandpa flipped on the “No” part of our No Vacancy sign.

  We were completely sold out!

  Wednesday morning we went back to Croaky Karaoke, but to be honest, the crowds were a little thinner.

  To make matters worse, one family checked out of the motel. Our Pirate Chest Treasure Quest had been “too loud.” We’d woken up their baby. Long story short, that “No” part of our No Vacancy sign wasn’t lit very long. Not even twenty-four hours. We barely burned the dust off its neon tubing.

  “We need a new gimmick,” said Gloria after we did the nine a.m. Freddy show for that old guy, Mr. Jones, and a couple of kids splashing around in the pool, who told the frog to “shut up, please,” because “Take Me to the River” was making it hard for them to hear each other screaming “Marco” and “Polo.”

  “We should do another treasure hunt,” I suggested. “That’s been our biggest moneymaker. We could restock the treasure chest with chocolate coins and—”

  Gloria shook her head. “We need something brand-new, P.T. That’s the problem with marketing stunts. People move on. They look for the next big thing. You can’t sell a lot of heart-shaped boxes of Valentine’s chocolates on February fifteenth. It’s yesterday’s news.”

  “Well, how about we give the treasure-hunt idea a fresh twist?”

  “Go on. I’m listening.”

  “We do it like an Easter egg hunt. But—and this is what makes it huge—it’s a dinosaur egg hunt.” I cocked my thumb at the big statue of Dino looming over the parking lot.

  “Do we bury this egg in the sand again?” asked Gloria. “Because that’s a big yawn. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt and the eye patch.”

  “No holes. We hide the grand prize, the biggest plastic Easter egg we can find, somewhere here on the property or out on the beach—not buried but maybe behind something.”

  “We could toss it over Mrs. Frumpkes’s fence,” joked Gloria.

  “Nah. She might bake the kids who found the egg into gingerbread cookies or something.”

  “But how do we make this event pop?” asked Gloria, stroking her chin and pacing.

  “Easy,” I said. “We make sure our humongous plastic egg is filled with something really cool. Not candy or trinkets from Dollar Bill’s Discount Barn. This time, we give away a brand-new Xbox—preloaded with a Jurassic: The Hunted dinosaur video game.”

  “We do that, we’re incurring significant start-up costs, P.T.”

  “True. But we need a prize we can brag about.”

  “Fine,” said Gloria. “Cost of doing business. We’ll take it out of the nine thousand four hundred eighty-five dollars and thirty-nine cents we’ve taken in so far.”

  I guess while I’d been doing stuff like eating and sleeping, Gloria had been doing stuff like crunching numbers.

  “We should also hide a couple dozen smaller eggs filled with smaller prizes,” I said. “We can scatter them all over the property. That way, we have lots of winners. When people see winners, they want to play, too.”

  “Okay,” said Gloria. “This might work. But we need a hook. An angle.”

  “It’s Dino’s birthday party! He just turned sixty-five million years old.”

  “Huh,” said Gloria. “Guess he can finally retire.”

  I laughed and kept tossing out ideas. “We decorate the whole motel with balloons. Maybe get a Barney the purple dinosaur cake from the supermarket. We see if Grandpa can dress up in safari clothes and a pith helmet like he’s an archaeologist on a dig….”

  “I like it,” said Gloria. “But we don’t ‘decorate’ with balloons. We sell them. We sell the cake, too. A dollar a slice. And Grandpa charges to have his picture taken with kids, Santa-style.”

  Jazzed and totally pumped, we hiked to the parking lot to check out the fiberglass dinosaur statue. It was kind of dusty and dingy.

  “We should probably hose him down,” I said.

  “Definitely. We don’t want the star of our show looking gross and grungy.”

  I was about to go grab the hose when a convertible pulled into the parking lot.

  The man in the dark suit was behind the wheel.

  He had a passenger.

  That guy was wearing a dark suit, too.

  Both of them were checking their hairdos in the rearview mirror. The Wonderland was about to have another alligator attack. But this time, the gators were sharks!

  Since Gloria and I are kids, we were basically invisible to the two adults blabbing in the car.

  They kept yakking at each other, not at all worried that we were hearing every single word they said.

  “We’ll take possession in just over three weeks,” said the man I recognized as Mom’s banker. “No way will the Wilkies be able to scrape together one hundred thousand dollars to satisfy their balloon payment. It’ll pop, right in their faces.”

  All of a sudden, I wasn’t so eager to do the balloons for Dino’s birthday party. They’d just be colorful reminders of how much money we owed the bank.

  “How about all this other junk?” said the slick-looking man in the convertible’s passenger seat. I think he combed his hair with motor oil. “The giant dinosaur. That ridiculous rocket ship. And what’s that thing on the roof?”

  “A rooster. I think. No. Wait. Could be a court jester. You know—the clowns with the funny hats. But don’t worry, Arnold. You can knock it all down. Maybe sell some of the pieces to kooks who collect this kind of garbage.”

  I guess the banker thought Grandpa was some kind of a kook. And that his life’s work was nothing but “garbage.”

  Well, call me a kooky garbage lover, but I thought the Wonderland’s art collection was totally awesometastic. Okay, maybe it wasn’t art, but it sure was fun. No way could we let two land sharks in dark suits tear it all down.

  “I’m definitely demolishing the whole motel,” said Arnold, who I figured might be some kind of big-deal real estate developer. We have a lot of those in Florida. “It screams ‘1965’! I’ll replace it with Florida’s finest, most spectacular, most magnificent modern beachfront condo complex.”

  “That would be huge, Arnold. Huge.”

  “Hey, if you have to think, why not think big? I’m talking high-rise. Fifteen, maybe twenty stories tall. Block everybody else’s ocean view. Fancy appliances and shiny granite countertops in all the kitchens. I could sell the units for two, three million each, easy.”

  “We’ll be happy to partner with you on that, Arnold,” said the banker.

  “You can handle all the mortgages.”

  “Sweet,” joked the banker. “We’re bankers. We love us some mortgages.”

  “So how much longer do these Wilkie people have to scrape together the one hundred K?”

  “Twenty-five days. And believe me, there’s no way these
penny-ante pikers are capable of raising that kind of cash that quickly.”

  Gloria had overheard enough.

  She strolled across the parking lot to the convertible.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but, well, you guys both talk pretty loudly. Are you a banker?”

  “That’s right. Now if—”

  “Which bank?”

  “First Florida Sunshine Savings.”

  “Oh. Right. I read about you guys.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “That article in the Wall Street Journal.”

  “I’m not familiar with any—”

  “Riiight.” Gloria turned to the other guy. “Good luck, sir. You’re going to need it. From what I read, FFSS has a bad CAMEL rating. You know: capital, assets, management, earnings, and liquidity.”

  “Now, see here, young lady,” sputtered the banker.

  But Gloria kept on going. “I don’t think it’s enough to start a run on the bank or, you know, a full-scale liquidity panic—not right away, anyhow—but thank goodness for the FDIC, you know what I mean?”

  The passenger looked a little queasy. He was turning green around the gills.

  “Then again, Arnold”—Gloria could tell she had the guy on the ropes—“maybe potential insolvency, knowledge-process outsourcing, and balance sheets that don’t actually balance aren’t the kinds of fiduciary irregularities that make you lose sleep at night. Maybe that’s just me. Have a great day.”

  She waltzed away.

  I waltzed after her.

  “What was all that stuff you were talking about?”

  “More business buzzwords. I’m not even sure what they all mean. But hopefully I said enough of ’em to make that particular vulture buzz off.”

  And once again, I was seriously happy that Gloria Ortega was on Team Wonderland.

  Grandpa knew a lawn-and-garden-supply place that had just what we were looking for.

  “Heckerman’s has kept my garden gnome collection up to date for over twenty years,” he explained. “I already called Izabel Heckerman. She has a giant plastic Easter egg in her warehouse. She said she’d pull it out of storage for us.”