Chapter One Accidents Professor Griffin asked looking up Accidents from his salami sandwich in alarm Chris feeling terribly guilty for disturbing the Professor over lunch tried to explain When we didn’t find anything at the church Carrie and I realized that there must be a parish register that didn’t get moved to the new building one that holds the key to the location of the San Telmo And we’re going to the site of the old parish to look for it tomorrow Which is why I wanted to tell you about the treasure today In case of he made vague yet hopefully significant hand gestures accidents It was as Chris had feared 5
really hard to explain his and Carrie’s search for the San Telmo and have it make sense Also Chris had hoped that bringing Professor Griffin an extra sandwich from the bakery that he really liked and surprising him with fresh muffins from the same place would make up for the fact that Chris and Carrie had cornered their oldest family friend in his office over his lunch hour and poured out a tale of secrecy mystery and terror but the muffins didn’t seem to be making that much of a difference Yes Carrie spoke up Accidents Like what happened happened to Aunt Elsie Neither Chris nor Carrie really wanted to get into detail about what they meant by accidents or what happened happened to Aunt Elsie but they were starting to realize that just saying accidents to someone who hadn’t had a near miss with a car crash that wasn’t really a car crash wasn’t clear enough Chris poked Carrie Carrie swatted him back Professor Griffin continued to look alarmed I think he said folding a discarded muffin wrapper carefully into a triangle that this is a lot to 6
take in smaller Kingsolvers And you’ve been carrying this all by yourselves this whole time We weren’t sure who to trust Chris admitted If Chris was being honest with himself he still wasn’t Professor Griffin at least was trustworthy though they might be putting him in terrible danger by getting him involved But they had to because who other than Chris and Carrie would Aunt Elsie have left her clues to Chris was still a little okay actually a lot but he didn’t want to admit it nervous about trusting Dr McRae even as far as they’d had to already It was only the fact that Chris and Carrie and Maddison were about to go into the woods looking for the ruins of an old Spanish mission church that had driven Chris to tell Professor Griffin why they might not come back alive The day before they had been for once hanging out in Maddison’s house rather than Chris’s Mainly because Maddison had better access to maps than Chris and Carrie did since her dad had an impressive collection of Florida topographical maps and was on 7
