 The Cupola Raspberry bushes, drooping in the rain, shuddered and dripped as they passed. “What made her so grumpy all of a sudden?” Ivan demanded. His foot slipped on a stone, his sneaker plunged into a puddle, and he felt cold water seeping into his sock. “It was your fault for poking me,” Daphne said. “It was your fault for crowding me.” Daphne didn’t answer, and Ivan decided to drop it. They were stuck with each other for the afternoon, and silence would be better than arguing. Ivan heaved back the barn door on its creaking rollers.Inside, it smelled strongly of hay. The pig lay on her side in a stall, with her eyes half-closed, the fine hairs on her side quivering as she breathed. Chickens fussed around the cousins’ feet. Ivan pushed the chickens out of the way and went to check their nest boxes for eggs. Nothing. He picked up a pitchfork and stabbed at the straw around the pig’s feet. Maybe if he cleaned the stall, that would be enough of a “quest” to get Daphne and him back inside the cottage. The pig grunted but didn’t move. Daphne watched him turn over the straw. “What do you think Aunt Adelaide meant about a treasure hunt?” Ivan snorted. “Nothing. There’s no treasure hunt. She said we have to find our own treasure. That means there’s no prize.” “But she gave us a clue.” “Doesn’t mean anything. She obviously didn’t have time to go out and hide any more clues. It’s a dead end. She was just trying to get us out of her hair.” “Still, it must mean something. Copula, a small attaching word, like is.” “As in, ‘This is pointless.’” “Or seems, as in, ‘This just seems pointless,’” Daphne said. Ivan shook out a forkful of straw. “Great, we’ll look for an is or a seems.” “There was another part to the clue.” He leaned on the pitchfork. “Yeah, anagram. You know what that is, I assume?” “Of course,” Daphne said. There was a moment’s silence. “So . . . tell me,” Ivan said at last. “You do know, don’t you?” Daphne grimaced. “It’s on the tip of my tongue!” Ivan snorted and went back to turning over the straw. After a while, Daphne said, “Let’s go up to the loft and look around, just in case.” Girls can be so annoying, thought Ivan as he leaned the pitchfork against the wall and climbed out of the pig’s stall. In disapproving silence, he followed his cousin up the narrow stairs to the hayloft. Dim light slanted in from the high windows, and the sweet scent of alfalfa blended into the dry scent of dust. Bales of hay lined the walls, and wisps of straw lay scattered across the floor. At one end of the loft, in front of the wide shuttered window, there stood a small, elevated stage, where they’d put on plays for Aunt Adelaide when they were younger. A couple of rickety, child-size chairs still sat on the stage, and an old blackboard leaned against a hay bale. Under each chair lay a small pile of books. Daphne picked through the books. “Didn’t we have a schoolroom in our last play? Here, wait, a notebook, I’ll take that.” She slid it into her jacket pocket. “I remember these books! The Silver Chair. The Phantom Tollbooth. The Number Devil. And here’s a dictionary.” Ivan peered over her shoulder. He made sure his voice sounded bored. “So, okay, look it up. Anagram.” She turned the pages. “Here it is. Anagram. Of course. A word or phrase formed from another by rearranging its letters. I knew that!” Ivan let that pass. “So what are we supposed to rearrange? COPULA? She said the clue had two parts.” He traced the letters in the hay dust on the floor. “I hate this kind of thing. POLUCA. PALOCU. LOPUCA. We need your Scrabble tiles.” Daphne pulled out her notebook and a pencil. “ALPUCO,” she said. “Isn’t that an animal? No. POUCAL.” Ivan hung over her shoulder. “COUPLA. As in, ‘What a coupla idiots we are.’” “Hey, that sounds really close. COUPLA . . . That’s it. CUPOLA!” “What’s a cupola?” “Why, it’s a . . .” Daphne shuffled the pages of the dictionary. “Kyoo-puh-luh. A light domelike structure on a roof, serving to admit light or air.” Ivan pointed. “You mean like that thing up there?” A trapdoor hung half open at the peak of the ceiling. Ivan figured it must lead to the little room he’d seen on the barn roof: a small squared-off tower with four windows. The trapdoor had a hole near one edge, and a length of rope dangled just out of reach. “We could build a stairway out of hay bales,” he said. With much grunting and argument, Ivan and Daphne shoved and tugged and heaved the bales into place. Hay dust billowed up into the slanting light. They climbed onto the top bale, and then Daphne stepped into Ivan’s cupped hands. She caught hold of the rope and pulled until the trapdoor grated open. A folded ladder lay snug against the inside of the door. When Daphne tugged on it, the ladder started to extend. Ivan staggered; Daphne fell onto the hay. Then they shoved the bales aside to pull the ladder all the way down. “No way Aunt Adelaide climbed up there,” Ivan said. Hay littered Daphne’s hair, and her cheeks glowed. “She could have, maybe, a long time ago. Anyway, let’s go see.” Daphne jumped onto the ladder and climbed, brushing cobwebs away from her face. Ivan still had his foot on the first rung when he heard her step onto the cupola floor and gasp. “What’s going on?” she asked. “What happened here?” Ivan scrambled up the creaking ladder. “Let me see!” The first thing he noticed, when his head cleared the trapdoor, was that the sound of rain had vanished. Daphne stood in a bright room, gaping at the window. He joined her and looked out into a world that made no sense. His first thought was that there had been a flood. The barn now stood in the middle of a pond with water reaching halfway up its sides. But why wasn’t water pouring in downstairs, around the edges of the door and into the stalls? The countryside beyond the pond didn’t look right, either. Ivan saw no sign of Great Aunt Adelaide’s farm—no cottage or garden, no river spanned by an arching bridge, no highway beyond, no wooded hillside—just a broad expanse of rolling meadow strewn with wildflowers under a cloudless blue. Sheep grazed in the distance, and far off at the horizon, steep white-and-purple mountains cut into the sky. “It’s another land,” breathed Daphne. “Not possible.” Ivan stood with his feet planted on the floor, trying to push away what didn’t make sense. “It’s some kind of optical illusion. A mirage.” “To seem or to be,” Daphne said. “I think it is.” She unlatched the window. Ivan drew back. “What are you doing?” “I’m going out there to see,” Daphne said, pushing the window open. “You shouldn’t!” Ivan grabbed her arm. “It might be some kind of parallel universe or something. You might disappear and never get back.” She shook him off. “Don’t you ever read any books? We go in, we have adventures, we come home. Maybe we find treasure.” “Right,” he said. “Nothing could go wrong with that.” She stamped her foot. “Don’t wimp out on me, Ivan. If we turn this down, we’ll never get another chance.” She climbed over the windowsill and edged out onto the roof. Ivan hesitated. This wasn’t the way he liked to do things, plunging in without a plan. Daphne did that and got scared later. He sighed. All the more reason he couldn’t let her go alone. With a groan, he crawled through the window after her and got gingerly to his feet. Ivan’s sneakers gripped the asphalt roof shingles. The countryside looked freshly scrubbed. A breeze carried the scent of fresh dirt and jasmine. He took a deep breath and felt the musty grumpiness of the last few days begin to blow away. “How are we going to get across the pond?” Daphne asked. Ivan felt his own confidence rising. “We’ll swim if we have to. Don’t worry.” The cousins edged down the roof like crabs and spotted a rowboat tied to a cleat on the barn. A pair of oars lay across the seats. “Just waiting for us!” Daphne said. Ivan lowered himself over the edge of the roof. He dangled his legs over the side, with his hands holding on to the shingles. Then he plummeted into the boat, which tipped drunkenly. Once he managed to steady it, he stood to guide Daphne’s legs as she, too, inched her way over the eave and into the boat. “But how do we get back up?” Daphne wondered out loud. “I guess we figure that out later,” Ivan said. Neither of them had ever rowed a boat. They spun in circles for a while, arguing about whether to sit backward or forward. Finally, they managed to paddle their way across the water. After about twenty minutes, the bow nudged the shore, and they dragged the boat onto dry land. “Now what?” asked Daphne. Ivan turned around. From the spongy grass underfoot, to the blue-gray line of trees in the distance, to the sheep grazing off to one side, this world looked so convincing. His heart skipped. This wasn’t a dream. “If it’s an adventure, we should just set out,” Ivan said. Continues... | 
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