by Lous Lowry
“I wish I could study something interesting, like mushrooms,” Winifred said. She finished eating her soup now that she’d been reassured. “Something besides reading and arithmetic,” she added.
“My sister is a very good student,” Winston explained, “but she’s a little bored with school.”
“Choose any subject,” Richie suggested, “and then come to my Book Room and I’ll give you books about it. I have books about every single thing. You can take them home.”
“Geology?” asked Winifred. “I’m very interested in geology.”
“Done,” Richie said.
The door opened and from the kitchen the maid appeared. She moved about the table, quietly removing the empty soup bowls.
Richie’s father tapped on his water glass to get everyone’s attention. “Before I serve the roast beef,” he said, “I’d like to make a little toast.”
Richie whispered to the Poore children, “My dad loves to make toasts. Sometimes they go on forever.”
“Here’s to our lovely guests,” Mr. Willoughby said. “Winifred and Winston! So good to have you here. Here’s to your companionship with Richie!”
Winifred and Winston smiled politely and prepared to reach for their forks. The roast beef smelled delicious.
“And here’s to my lovely wife!” Tim Willoughby went on. Richie’s mother smiled affectionately at her husband.
“Next, to my adoptive father, Commander Melanoff, who is dining in his own suite tonight, first because of his advanced age. Ninety-seven years old!” Everyone murmured appreciatively. “And second because he is understandably devastated by the recent turn of events in the world of confectionary.”
“What does that mean?” Winston whispered to Richie.
Richie shrugged. He didn’t know.
“And to Other Barnaby,” Tim went on, in a reverent voice. “A moment of silence in his honor.”
“Is that somebody who’s dead?” Winifred whispered to Richie.
“No,” Richie replied. “Just silent. Shhhh.”
They all sat quietly for a moment, even Winston and Winifred, though they had no idea why. (Other Barnaby, Commander Melanoff’s son who, curiously, had the same name as the Willoughby twins, though his Barnaby was followed by Junior, had once been president of the family company. There had even been some discussion of a new candy to be called Junior Mints, after him. But he had decided to become a Trappist monk, instead, and now lived silently in a monastery in western Massachusetts where he was known as Brother Barnaby.)
Finally, still holding his glass up, Tim Willoughby went on. “And in memory of beloved Nanny! Such a wonderful woman, and a fantastic cook!
“And now,” he went on, “I believe I’ll recite one of my father’s poems. There once was a woman named Nanny—”
His wife interrupted. “No, Tim. Not the naughty one,” she said in a stern voice. “Not when we have company.”
Richie, giggling, leaned toward the Poore children. “It’s about her bum,” he whispered.
Tim Willoughby sighed. “Well then, we’ll not bother with the poem. Children? A toast from each of you, please?”
Richie held up his glass. “To my new friends!” he said.
Everyone was looking at Winifred and Winston. Finally, Winifred raised her glass and said, “To my father! May his travels end soon!”
Now only Winston was left. “Uh, to my cat, Radish!” he said, after a moment.
“You have a cat?” Richie said loudly. “I want a cat! Why can’t I have a—”
“Time to dine,” his father said. He began to serve the roast beef.
21
Next door, in the Poores’ kitchen, Mrs. Willoughby put down her fork suddenly. “I don’t feel well,” she announced.
“You look a little ashen,” her husband said. “Not a great look on you.”
“Sticks and stones will—” she began. Then she interrupted herself. “Excuse me,” Mrs. Willoughby said in a stricken voice, and ran to the bathroom.
“Whatever is wrong with her?” her husband said. Then he clutched his stomach, leaned over, and vomited on the cat.
Mrs. Poore, who had not eaten any salad, looked about her kitchen with dismay. Running a B-and-B was not turning out to be very much fun.
22
The doorbell rang at the Melanoff mansion shortly after dessert (strawberry shortcake! The Poore children had heard of such a thing but had never actually seen it—much less tasted it—before) had been served. The maid placed the last plate on the table and then scurried off to answer the door. But in a moment she was back.
“It’s a very distressed woman,” she told Richie’s father in a low voice.
“Oh dear,” Tim Willoughby said. “Will it ruin our dessert if you bring her in here so we can find out what she wants?”
“Sir,” the maid said, “nothing ruins strawberry shortcake. I’ll go and get her.”
Winifred and Winston looked up in surprise when their mother appeared in the doorway, wringing her hands.
“I’m Mrs. Poore, your next-door neighbor,” she said to Mr. Willoughby in an agitated voice. “I’m their mother.” She pointed to her two children.
“No need to check on them,” Richie’s mother said. “They’re behaving very nicely.”
“And look, Mother—we’re having strawberry shortcake!” Winifred told her.
“May I get you a plate? There’s plenty.” Richie’s mother suggested.
“No! I mean not now! I’d love to have some another time! But right now I have an emergency! And I don’t have a telephone—I’m too poor!”
Winston began to explain. “Our name is Poore, you see; but we’re also poor. Same as Richie? His name is Richie, and—”
Winifred whispered, “Shhhh.”
“We have a telephone,” Richie announced. “We actually have many telephones. We have a Grandstream GXP state-of-the-art phone system with dual gigabit network ports. The display languages include Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English . . .”
“She doesn’t need to know that, Richie,” his father said gently.
“French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian . . .” Richie couldn’t seem to stop.
“What exactly is your emergency, Mrs. Poore? Should we call 911?”
“Yes! I had these guests in my house, I mean my B-and-B, and right in the middle of dinner—”
Richie interrupted. “Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese . . .”
“Those must be the people I saw from the window,” Tim Willoughby said. “They looked vaguely familiar. What are their names? I think I must have met them in the past.”
“Their names. Their names. Ah . . .” Mrs. Poore wrinkled the hem of her stained apron nervously in her hands. “They’re Mr. and Mrs. Henry, I think. Or maybe Mr. and Mrs. Frances. I forget. One of those. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because they’re both of them lying unconscious on the floor now, and my cat! You should see what happened to the cat!”
“Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Turkish. And that’s it.” Richie looked up, beaming.
“Oh dear, is the cat all right?” his mother asked Mrs. Poore.
“I suppose so, but she’ll have to have a bath, and she hates baths! She’s completely covered in—”
“We have call forwarding, call hold, call transfer, call waiting, caller ID, and voice mail,” Richie declared.
His father had gone to the hall and was dialing 911.
“Do sit down, Mrs. Poore. Have some strawberry shortcake,” Richie’s mother said in a gracious voice.
“Emergency vehicles are on their way!” Richie’s father announced as he returned from the hall.
His wife served a plate of dessert to Mrs. Poore. “Whipped cream?” she offered.
“They didn’t throw up in my bed, did they?” Winifred whispered in an alarmed voice to her mother.
“Everywhere,” Mrs. Poore told her daughter. “Absolutely everywhere.” Then she turned to Richie’s mother. “Yes, whipped cream, pleas
e.”
“Diarrhea?” Winston asked. “Usually when you get—”
Mrs. Poore nodded and put her head into her hands. “Yes. The whole catastrophe,” she whimpered. Then she lifted her head, looked at the dessert in front of her, dipped her finger into the whipped cream, tasted it, and said, “Yum.”
“I’d offer after-dinner mints,” Mr. Willoughby explained to everyone at the table, “but as most of you know, mints have become . . .” He hesitated and choked back tears. “In fact, all candy has become . . . Oh dear, this is such a monumental disaster. Our fortune has depended on— And now—” He put his head in his hands.
Outside, from a distance, they heard sirens as the ambulances approached.
23
Poor Ben Poore was still trudging along in western Canada, weighed down by both his backpack and his sorrow. He missed his dear children. He regretted the four hundred and three bad decisions he had made in his life.1
Vaguely he thought about changing his name, maybe to Rich—but with an “e,” the way Poore had an “e.” Riche. But he realized people would pronounce it “Reesh” and he didn’t like the sound of that. Also: his wife. Though her name was Patricia, she was often called Trish. That wouldn’t work, for sure: Trish Rich? Or Trish Reesh?
Anyway, he thought, the name Poore had an illustrious history. One of his grandfathers had been a professor of something. And an uncle was a chiropractor.
He too could be illustrious, he thought. If only he could sell these dratted encyclopedias. Maybe in the next town—Prince George. Surely, he thought, there were people in Prince George who yearned to be educated and informed.
Behind him on the empty road he heard the faint sound of an engine. A car or truck was approaching. He took a deep breath, adjusted the backpack, tried to assume a pleasing and non-dangerous facial expression, and held out his thumb.
24
At the hospital, teams of doctors worked on the couple who had been brought in by ambulance from the house where they had been found unconscious. They gave them IVs and steroids and antibiotics and X-rays and MRIs and EKGs and glucose and biopsies and everything else they could think of.1 Meanwhile, in the administration office of the hospital, there was a flurry of confusion.
“This makes no sense,” the hospital director said. He picked up one of the two wallets that were lying on his desk. “They both have medical insurance cards, but the insurance company says they’ve never heard of them.”
“And I called the address on their driver’s licenses,” the assistant hospital administrator said. “It’s a very nice house—I drive past it every day on my way to work—but the woman who answered said her name is O’Leary and her family has lived there for years. She’s never heard of— What was the name again?” She picked up one wallet, peered at the ID, and said, “Willoughby.”
“There are credit cards,” the secretary said. “But they’ve all expired years ago. I called the Mastercard number, but they thought I was nuts. And no, they won’t cover the hospital bill.”
The chief administrator turned to the young EMT who had driven the ambulance. “Explain again where you found them.”
The EMT repeated the address. “It’s a very strange little house. I wouldn’t even call it a house, really—it’s so tiny. The shutters are a nice freshly painted blue, and you could tell that ordinarily, when no one has been vomiting everywhere, it’s very tidy. But there’s a straw hat hanging on the door. And the refrigerator makes a grinding noise—eeew, eeew, eeew—as if it has pulmonary problems.”
“And this couple lives there?”
“No, the woman who lives there, a Mrs. Poore, said they were her guests. But she didn’t really know them. She wasn’t even sure of their names.”
“The drivers’ licenses both say Willoughby.”
“I know. But this Mrs. Poore? She says that the name they told her was something else. An alias, I guess.”
A police officer was standing in the doorway, listening. He hadn’t been paying much attention because it wasn’t a homicide or a burglary—those were the things that interested him. But now he straightened his shoulders and stepped forward. “Alias?” he said. “Did someone say alias? That’s my department!” He took a small notebook from his pocket, wrote ALIAS in large letters and waited, poised, for more information.
“And there’s a problem,” the EMT went on.
“Definitely my department,” the police officer said, and began to write: PROBLEM.
“The thing is,” the EMT explained, “according to the DOB—”
“What’s that mean? DOB?” the police officer asked, his pencil waiting.
“Date of birth.”
The police officer wrote that down.
The EMT continued. “According to the DOB on the licenses, they should be sixty-something. Close to seventy.”
“They’re not close to seventy. No way.” The young doctor who had seen the couple in the emergency ward stepped forward.
“No, they’re way younger,” the EMT agreed. “I’d say thirties, tops.”
At her desk, the secretary tapped the keys on her computer. “I’m going to Google them,” she said. “Tell me the names again.”
The administrator picked up the wallets. “Willoughby,” he said, looking at the first one. “Henry, and—” He opened the second wallet. “Some soggy money in here. Foreign, it looks like. Here’s the name: Frances.”
Everyone waited. The secretary typed in the names. After a pause, she looked up, her eyes wide. “Whoa,” she said. “I got an obituary! They’re dead! Both of them!”
“Dead?” the policeman repeated, and began writing in his notebook. “My department for sure!”
“They’re not dead! They both had pulses,” the EMT said. “I took them myself. And blood pressures.”
The secretary read from the screen. “Died in Switzerland. Mountain climbing accident.”
The assistant administrator said, “I climbed Mount Washington once,” he said. “In New Hampshire? But I was way younger then.”
“Oh, be quiet,” said his boss. “What else does it say?” He turned to his secretary.
“This is weird.” She looked up, puzzled. “That accident was thirty years ago.”
At that moment the office door opened and a white-coated man appeared. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said. “But I thought you should have this information.”
He handed a clipboard thick with papers to the administrator. “I’m from Pathology,”2 he explained.
“Spell that,” said the police officer, and then listened carefully to the spelling. He added PATHOLOGY to his notebook page.
“The thing is,” the pathologist said, “we’ve been looking at these slides down in the path lab. They’re from that couple that was biopsied in the ER.”
“Henry and Frances Willoughby,” the secretary said. “I just Googled them. And—”
“They were frozen.”
“That’s what the obituary says,” the secretary, still looking at her computer screen, explained. “Frozen solid. They were inadequately dressed, and the temperature was—”
The administrator interrupted her. He turned to the pathologist. “You mean that you took the biopsied material and froze it to make slides for your microscope?”
“No, I mean—”
“Hold it,” said the police officer. “I’m getting this down. Frozen, you say? Same as the movie? My kid loves that movie. She’s always singing—” He began to sing the words. “Let it gooooo . . .”
The pathologist interrupted him. “Would you shut up?” he said. “What I mean is that the cell structure indicates that the tissues themselves, long before we got the specimens, had been frozen. And then, at some later time, defrosted.”
The room fell silent.
“Would insurance cover that?” someone asked.
25
Back at the mansion, with the excitement of the emergency over, the Poore children and their mother all had a second helping of strawberry shortc
ake. Then Winifred and Winston went upstairs with Richie to his playroom. Richie was carrying the broken toy car.
“I wish I had a little car like this,” he murmured.
“But, Richie,” Winston pointed out, “you have a zillion toy cars. Battery operated, hand carved, glow in the dark, remote control, every other kind. You don’t need another car. And this one isn’t anything special. It’s just a crummy, busted—”
“I know,” Richie said, stroking the toy, “but your father made it for you.”
Winifred and Winston both fell silent. They were thinking: Your dad pays the bills for everything you order. Your dad buys you all those toys. But they knew that it wasn’t the same. It made them feel sad.
Finally, Winifred, to change the subject, said, “Could I see your Book Room, Richie?”
Richie put the little broken car carefully on a shelf in his playroom and then opened a door to reveal what looked like a private library. There were shelves crowded with books against every wall.
“It’s alphabetically arranged by category,” Richie explained. “My dad hired a librarian to come in and do it. You see, over here? By the window? Nonfiction: Aeronautics and Animals and Architecture.”
He showed them around the room, pointing out the labels for different categories.
“What if you just want to read a story?” Winston asked. “I like stories.”
“Over here, on the north wall. All fiction. Of course, you have your choice of fantasy, historical fiction, adventure, realism, humor, or—”
“Why do some books have MBD written on them?” Winifred asked.
Richie thought for a moment. “I forget. No, wait—now I remember. MBD means Might Be Distressing. I’m supposed to ask my mother before I read one of those.”
“Why is this one MBD?” Winston had reached for a book in the beginning of the nonfiction section. She handed it to Richie.
“It’s about mountain climbing,” Richie said.