Treasure Island!!!

from an Optimum Diet chapter in a classroom-specific drone, the custom of lecturing to captive children having eroded her God-given ability to assess a listener’s interest. “Onions, no,” she said. “Butter, no. Salty foods, no. Dairy . . . ”
    “He’s dead and buried. Horrors!” I said, pulling open my sandwich for further study. “This chicken was taken off the grill too soon. What is she doing, trying to give me salmonella?”
    “Dairy, no. I distinctly remember cottage cheese. Tabbouli. Avocado chunks and even some bite-size Snickers. You couldn’t have fed Richard worse if you’d tried.”
    “It was Mom who liked to treat him.” With thumb and reluctant finger, I picked up a book on the floor,
Natural Healing for Parrots,
and quickly threw it down again. “Why are you reading all this? It’s a moot point.” I handed her my plate. “Would you taste this please and tell me if you think it’s underdone? Do you think it’s an insult, this sandwich?”
    “It’s not good, but it’s cooked.”
    “Aha! So no
intentional
harm.” I left the sandwich in her hands and went off to my room, satisfied that although Patty hadn’t yet forgiven me, she wasn’t aiming to kill me. But my sister, in her nest of books, hadn’t been gathering grass and twigs as light entertainment. She had a hunch. And while I took a late afternoon nap—the sleep of the innocent, the sleep of the slightly depressed—she rolled that hunch between her fingers until it grew into a thing of prodigious proportions. For years I have insisted that, despite her serviceable academic track record, Adrianna is not (warning: confidential family information)
all that bright
. Dogged, she is; organized, yes; pedantic, check; but possessed of a signal, sinuous, investigatory mind?
    Ha! Ha! Ha!
    And so it seemed incredible, in the highest sense of the word, that such an uninspired person should discover, in her imagination’s underbrush, the secret I had marooned on my desert island heart.

CHAPTER 22

     
    A few nights later when I was sitting at my desk, reading my book, Adrianna knocked: rat-a-tat-tat-BANG (four light knuckle swats, one lead fist).
    “Enter,” I said with superb indifference.
    Enter she did, rather wildly, tumbling through the door, her face aflame, her eyes lit up with madness. In her hands she held the T.J.Maxx bag—that oversized, unforgettably useful bag. I should have thrown it away—a murderer always throws away the weapon!—but knowing my mother’s fondness for recycling, I had put it in the pantry.
    “I think we should talk,” Adrianna said.
    “Can it wait till morning?”
    “No, it can’t.”
    “If this is about Mr. Tatum, I’ll tell you everything I know.”
    That diverted her for a moment. “This isn’t about Don,” she faltered. “But why—what do you know?”
    “I know he and Mom have been talking.”
    It was true that I had caught wind of some phone calls, but that had been days ago, when the news first broke, and even then I didn’t know for sure what my mother or Mr. Tatum had said. Only that he had been calling her.
    “Sit down,” I advised. “I didn’t want to worry you, but the fact is, it’s been worrying me. Do you think—oh, it’s too humiliating to even say it—do you think there’s any chance of Mom and Mr. Tatum getting back together?”
    I watched the idea of their union bloom in the great arid desert of her head like a time-lapse video of a blooming cactus. She must have changed color three times as she contemplated it. Then she laughed—her unattractive hyena laugh—and shook it off.
    “You’re crazy,” she said. “There’s nothing going on there. That was just a dalliance in their past.”
    “Sure it was, but who knows? If Mom isn’t satisfied with Dad—which, how could she be?—maybe your thing with Mr. Tatum wakened her old desires for him. And maybe his contact with
you
wakened his desires for the woman who got away. You know, there’s nothing like The One Who Got Away!”
    “You’re vile.”
    “I’m imaginative,” I admitted. “But it could be happening, without us knowing it, and just think! Your affair with Mr. Tatum might’ve been the spark that started it.”
    She sneered and shook the plastic bag at me. “You know why I’m here, don’t you?” she said in a low voice.
    “I
don’t
know, Adrianna. I just assumed . . . ”
    “Don’t play games. You hated your bird from the beginning and you neglected him for his whole sorry