The Warden's Daughter Read online

  ALSO BY JERRY SPINELLI

  Stargirl

  Love, Stargirl

  Milkweed

  Crash

  Knots in My Yo-yo String: The Autobiography of a Kid

  Hokey Pokey

  WITH EILEEN SPINELLI

  Today I Will

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Jerry Spinelli

  Cover art copyright © 2017 by Liz Casal

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhousekids.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780375831997 (trade) — ISBN 9780375931994 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9780553494631 — ISBN 9781524719241 (intl. ed.)

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Jerry Spinelli

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Cammie - 2017

  Chapter 1

  Cammie - 1959

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Eloda - 1959

  Chapter 1

  Cammie - 2017

  Chapter 1

  Thank You

  About the Author

  To Springton Lake Village

  – and –

  Anthony Greco (Chubs)

  It’s a birdhouse now.

  It used to be a jailhouse. The Hancock County Prison.

  Cellblocks once rang with beanboppers on iron bars and bad words flying day and night. Now finches and warblers and scarlet tanagers sing and flutter behind walls of glass.

  The old Quiet Room, with its glass roof and tin wheelbarrow pouring water into a tiny pool, was designed to keep the prisoners calm. Almost no one went there but the trustees who tended the plants and flowers. Now children squeal as butterflies land on their heads and shoulders.

  Where there used to be two exercise yards—men’s and women’s—there is now a single garden, a paradise where turtles and peacocks roam. It has a second waterfall—high as the wall! Pebbled paths. Ponds. Water lilies. Foot-long goldfish.

  An occasional turkey buzzard lands wherever it likes.

  Except for the sign, it looks the same as always from the front: like a fortress from the Middle Ages. Massive, sooty stone walls. Arched oaken doors. A sky-piercing tower with narrow bow-and-arrow slots should the castle ever need defending.

  The prison was one city block long. It was home to over two hundred inmates, men and women, from shoplifters to murderers.

  And one family.

  Mine.

  I was the warden’s daughter.

  1

  Breakfast time in the prison. The smell of fried scrapple filled the apartment. It happened every morning.

  “I could teach you how to do it yourself,” she said. “It’s simple.”

  “I want you to do it,” I said.

  “You’ll be a teenager soon. You’ll have to learn someday.”

  “You’re doing it,” I told her. “Case closed.”

  Her name was Eloda Pupko. She was a prison trustee. She took care of our apartment above the prison entrance. Washed. Ironed. Dusted. And kept me company. Housekeeper. Cammie-keeper.

  At the moment, she was braiding my hair.

  “Okay,” she said. “Done.”

  I squawked. “Already?” I didn’t want her to be done.

  “This little bit?” She gave it a tug.

  She was right. I’d wanted a pigtail down the middle, but all my short hair allowed was barely a one-knotter. A pigstub.

  I felt her leaving me. I whirled. “No!”

  She stopped, turned, eyebrows arching. “No?”

  I blurted the first thing that came to mind. “I want a ribbon.”

  Her eyes went wide. And then she laughed. And kept laughing.

  She knew what I knew: I was anything but a hair-ribbon kind of girl. I sat on the counter stool dressed in dungarees, black-and-white high-top Keds and a striped T-shirt. My baseball glove lay on the other stool.

  When she had laughed herself out, she said, “Ribbon? On a cannonball firebug?”

  She had a point on both counts.

  Cannonball was my nickname. As for “firebug”…

  —

  In school two months earlier we had been learning about the Unami, the Native Americans from our area. This inspired me to make a fire the old-fashioned Unami way. For reasons knowable only to the brain of a sixth grader, I decided to do so in our bathtub.

  On the way home from school one day, I detoured to the railroad tracks and creek and collected my supplies: a quartz stone, a rusty iron track-bed spike and a handful of dry, mossy stuff from the ground under a bunch of pine trees. I laid it all in the bathtub. And climbed in.

  Over the mossy nest I smashed and scratched the stone and spike into each other. My arms were ready to fall off when a thin curl of smoke rose out of the nest. I blew on it. A spark appeared. “What are you doing?” said Eloda from the doorway. I glanced up at her—and screamed, because the spark had flamed and burned my thumb. Stone and spike clanked on porcelain. Eloda turned on the shower, putting out the fire and drenching me. When I dried off and changed my clothes, she put Vaseline and a Band-Aid on the burn and told me to tell people I had cut myself slicing tomatoes.

  —

  Eloda tapped my hand. “Lemme see.”

  I showed her. The burn was just a pale pink trace by now. She took my hand in both of hers. She seemed to hold it longer than necessary.

  “Number one law,” she said.

  “No more fires,” I said. She had made me recite the words every time she changed the Band-Aid. She still made me say it.

  Then her hands were off me, but I was still feeling her. It was her eyes. She was staring at me in a way that seemed to mean something, but I would not find out what till years later.

  “Tell you what,” she said, breaking the spell. “If you make it to three knots, I’ll get you a ribbon.”

  Again she started to leave.

  Again I blurted, “You’re so lucky.”

  Again she stopped. “That’s me. Miss Lucky.”

  “I mean it,” I said. “You get to have scrapple every day.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “That’s why I decided to live here. I love the scrapple.” She walked away.

  “Stop!”

  She stopped. She waited, her back to me.

  “You can’t go,” I told her.

  “I have work to do.” She stepped into the dining room.

  “I’m your boss!” I called—and instantly wished I could take it back. I added lamely, “When my dad’s not here.”

  Her shoulders turned just enough so she could look back at me. Surprisingly, she did not seem angry. She sighed. “Miss O’Reilly—”

  I stopped her: “My name is Cammie.”

  “Miss Cammie—”

  “No!” I snapped. “No Miss. Just Cammie.” She stared. “Say it.” She kept staring. “Please!”

  Now she was angry. My name, barely audible, came out with a blown breath: “Cammie.”

  She walked away.

  This was in mid-June, the fourth day of summer vacation when I was twelve, and I had decided that Eloda Pupko must become my mother.

  2

  Though I did not know it at the time, my decision had begun to form about a month earlier. On a Sunday.

  Mother’s Day.

  As always, that holiday began with my father and me driving to Riverside Cemetery, just west of town. As always, he parked on the grass and we walked up the hill. We stopped at the right of the big tree. We looked down at the headstone and once again read the words we knew by heart:

  ANNE VICTORIA O’REILLY

  APRIL 16, 1921

  FEBRUARY 3, 1947

  LOVING WIFE

  LOVING MOTHER

  As always, I put a vase of daffodils in front of the headstone. As always, we stood there, saying nothing, staring at the stone.

  I did not remember my mother. She died when I was a baby. She was hit by a milk truck a moment after saving me.

  It was the most famous accident in Two Mills that year. Maybe ever. It made me famous. The Baby Girl Whose Mother Saved Her from the Milk Truck. When my father became warden of the county prison, I became even more famous.

  As always, I knew it was time to leave the grave when my father said, “Okay.” We returned to the car and rode off.

  We always went somewhere then. Philadelphia Zoo. Boat ride on the Delaware. Lancaster County and the Amish buggies. This year we went to a Phillies game. We went to three or four games every year, always on a Sunday. But never before on Mother’s Day.

  At the ballpark they gave pink carnations to the mothers. We sat along the right-field line, in a spot where a lot of foul balls came down. As always, I had my glove. I loved baseball. Since I was a girl and could not join Little League, my next best dream was to catch a major-league foul ball.

  Halfway through the seventh inning everyone stood up, but no one faster than me. I took great pride in being the first one to stand for the seventh-inning stretch. I always made sure to flex my shoulders and arch my back, which by then, sure enough, were stiff from sitting for so long.

  Then something unexpected happened.

  The organ stopped playing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” The PA announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, please be seated.” Thirty thousand people sat. Then he said, “As you know, this is the day we honor our mothers.” A faint tremor went through me. “If you will direct your attention to the box seats on the first-base side, you will see mothers and wives of many of our Phillies ballplayers. Ladies, will you please stand.”

  Several rows of women stood and turned to the crowd. Every one of them was smiling and waving. Every one wore a pink carnation. The stadium clapped and cheered and whistled. You might have thought someone had hit a home run.

  Then the PA voice said, “And now we ask that every mother in the ballpark please stand and receive our love and thanks for all you do. Ladies…” And there was a great wave of movement throughout the masses, and hundreds, thousands of women came to their feet—young, old, a pink blizzard of carnations—all of them bathing in the cheers and whistles of the multitude.

  If I had to write my first thought at that moment, it might have been something like this: Wow, all these mothers and not one of them mine. It was just a flat calculation. There was no feeling to it.

  And then there was.

  For right beside me, inches from my shoulder, a presence that until then I had barely been aware of abruptly snapped to her feet. Her low-heeled shoes were gleaming white as Chiclets, with gold-trimmed white bows and quarter-size holes in the front for her big toes to peek through. Her dress was mint green. Her snowy white gloves had little slits at the wrists.

  I dared to look up at her face. I was surprised she was not smiling. Instead she looked proud. And then laughter suddenly burst from her and she was looking down to the other side as a little voice piped: “Yay, Mommy!”

  And then they were all sitting back down, thousands of mothers, and the game was resuming—and I didn’t realize that I had never stopped staring at her until she turned and cast on me the most dazzling smile I had ever seen, and for a moment it seemed as if this perfect stranger had known me all my life.

  And then I was bawling. Suddenly. No warning. No reason. Out, as they say, of left field. I couldn’t stop myself. Her smile changed instantly to something like horror. A white-gloved hand went to her bright red lips. “Oh dear,” she said. And then my father’s arm was around me, squeezing, and he was asking me what was the matter and did I want to go, and I blubbered “No!” and I pounded my fist into my glove until the last of the tears went away.

  We stayed until the last out. I did not look at the mint-green lady again, and no foul ball came anywhere near us.

  3

  How do you be a child to a mother you never knew?

  For twelve years my father had been enough. Family photos and a yellowing newspaper story had been enough.

  Sure, from the time I’d first heard the story, I’d thought about my mother. Anne O’Reilly. The lady who saved me from the milk truck. I cried for her. For myself. Sometimes. And that was it. That’s how the world was. Other kids had mothers. Cammie O’Reilly didn’t. End of story.

  Now, in the weeks after Mother’s Day, something was changing. Enough was no longer enough. Dormant feelings stirred by a smile at a ballpark moved and shifted until they shaped a thought: I was sick and tired of being motherless. I wanted one. And a second thought: If I couldn’t have my first-string mother, I’d bring one in off the bench.

  But who?

  A teacher?

  The next lady who smiled at me?

  The flash point came in five words.

  4

  “Put them in the sink.”

  Okay, back up….

  The last day of school had been a half day. I ran all the way home, burst through Reception, up the long stairway and into our jailhouse apartment. I sat myself down at the kitchen table, where my lunch was waiting. Peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Tastykake chocolate cupcakes. Empty glass—but not for long. A hand appeared, pouring chocolate milk from a Supplee Dairy glass bottle.