would be like to get a note from my dad saying he’d been living in Chicago all along. Weird.
I could have stared at that photo all night, but we had work to do. We plowed through the rest of the stuff in the trunk. Not far from the bottom we found a heavy cardboard box. We set it on the floor and lifted the lid. Dozens of crystals and colorful rocks glistened under the lamplight.
“This could be it.” Violet’s eyes gleamed as bright as the crystals.
One by one, we picked out the stones and examined them until we came across a chunk of amber. It looked like a nugget of hardened golden honey.
“Score!” Violet lifted it up in victory.
“Oh my, let’s see!” Rosalie Claire set down the remedies book and Violet handed her the amber.
“Is it the magic piece?” I asked, realizing that in the blink of an eye my grandmother could be back to normal again.
Rosalie Claire sighed. “Sorry, it’s not. The one we need has a tiny frog trapped inside. In fact, my grandmother was never quite sure if it was the frog that was magic or the amber. I always thought it was the combination.”
“Wait a minute,” said Noah. “Since amber was liquid tree sap that hardened, couldn’t we just melt that piece down, press a dead frog into it, and let it harden again?”
Rosalie Claire shook her head. “If only that would work, Noah. Sadly, there’s no tricking magic.”
“And where in the heck would we find a magic frog anyway?” Violet asked.
Violet was right. There were about a bazillion gift shops in Jacó and I was pretty sure not one of them carried ancient dead magic frogs.
We were just about to give up hope when we found an old videotape at the bottom of the trunk. On it was a tattered sticker. “Daisy’s Special Remedies,” it said, handwritten in black Sharpie. I felt a tingly rush of hope.
“Maybe Grandma Daisy says something about curing rare jungle diseases.” I handed the tape to Rosalie Claire. Was this the thing my gut told me I needed to find?
“This could be the answer to our prayers.” Rosalie Claire kissed the black plastic case. “Now where’s our old tape player?”
Thomas retrieved it from the top shelf in the hall closet and hooked it up to the TV in the corner of the living room.
The image on the tape was scratchy from age. Even so, I could still make out the famous Grandma Daisy. I’d always imagined her being surrounded by silver sparkles of fairy dust, but when I saw her in action, I could tell that the sparkles lived right in her eyes, the same way they did in Rosalie Claire’s. My mom used to say you could tell a lot about a person just by looking into their eyes. She said it was a window to their soul. Grandma Daisy’s soul must have been filled with a galaxy’s worth of glittery magic.
On the tape, she sat at her kitchen table in the house next door to where my grandmother and I still lived in Truth or Consequences. It looked almost the same as when Rosalie Claire had lived there except for one big difference. Thumbtacked on the wall was a calendar, flipped to May 1994. The tape had been recorded nearly twenty years ago.
For an hour Grandma Daisy talked about remedies. She recommended herbs for fighting the flu, for curing stomach cramps, and getting rid of warts. She suggested magical crystals to treat headaches. She didn’t mention a single word about rare tropical diseases.
By the end of the tape, my heart felt as if it had been hit with a hammer. I’d been so sure that this was what I was supposed to find. Rosalie Claire must have sensed how I felt. She wrapped her arms around me and we touched forehead-to-forehead.
“We’ll think of something,” she whispered. “Don’t give up hope, Madison. I can feel in my bones that the universe will deliver something. I just don’t know what it is yet.”
I wished I felt as sure as she sounded.
Even though it wasn’t even eight thirty, we were all dog-tired. We told Rosalie Claire we were heading to bed. “Why don’t you kids get some fresh air and take the long way around through the garden? Being outside usually makes things better.”
I slipped my birth announcement into my pocket. Then I peeked in on Florida. She was muttering something in her sleep about accidentally buying a vicious warthog from a shopping show when she’d meant to order a diamond ring.
“We’ll figure something out,” I whispered, even though I knew she couldn’t hear me. “I promise.”
I headed outside into the night with Violet, Noah, and Leroy. A gigantic full moon lit up the garden. Rosalie Claire had been right. It felt good to be outside. It was still warm enough to be in shorts, but a slight breeze cooled my skin. We followed the trail behind the inn, being careful to whisper so we wouldn’t wake the guests as we passed their rooms. Only Riptide and Wingnut’s light was still on. We could hear the beeping sounds of computer games through their open window.
My brain buzzed a million miles a minute. Why hadn’t we found anything in that trunk when my gut said we would? Did we miss something in the videotape that contained the secret we needed?
I glanced up at the night sky just as a billowy cloud slid across the moon. Clouds always made me think about my mom. It may sound weird, but there’s part of her that lives up there in those clouds. When things get tough I talk to her and I’m pretty sure she’s listening. I concentrated hard, trying to remember the sound of her voice. A gust of wind swirled around my legs and I almost felt as if she were with me. I spoke to her in my head because I didn’t want my friends to think I was crazy. Mom, I lost you, I thought. I can’t lose Florida, too. Tell me what to do, OK? If only she’d appear by my side and guide me. I watched for a sign as the cloud danced in front of the moonlight.
That’s when it hit me. Maybe the video was the answer. Maybe, if we got the MegaPix 6000 back, I could teleport into it while the tape was playing, the same way I had into a real TV show. Then I could zap with Rosalie Claire’s fanny pack to the past and ask Grandma Daisy to recharge it.
And if I went into the past, would I get to see my mom?
I watched as the cloud evaporated into the night sky.
We settled into our room. Noah laid down on his futon on the floor. I crawled into bed, and after Violet switched off the lamp, she sailed in next to me. She could barely contain herself. “So what you’re saying is, if we had the magic TV, we could travel to the past? How awesome would that be?”
“That’s what I’m thinking. Except I don’t even know if it works with a videotape. Or how we’d get the TV back.”
“Can you track down the guy who delivered it the first time?” Noah asked.
“Mike? I have no clue where he is. Or even where he came from.”
We whispered in the dark until I heard my friends’ soft breathing and Leroy’s snores. I tried to sleep, but a slew
