The Willoughbys Return

by Lous Lowry

  “So? Why would that be distressing? Over there in the S department is a book about skydiving, but it isn’t MBD. I think skydiving is scarier than mountain climbing.

  “And here!” Winifred chimed in. “In the Gs! A book about grizzly bears, but it’s not MBD. But in the O section: a book about orphans—and it’s MBD. I feel quite certain that orphans are not as distressing as grizzly bears. I’m not distressed at all about orphans, not one bit. Why would orphans be MBD?”

  Richie shrugged. “I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

  “It’s a mystery, then. I like mysteries,” Winston said. “Let’s try to solve it!”

  “How?” Winifred and Richie laughed at themselves, because they had said “How?” in unison.

  “Well,” Winston suggested, “we’ll start by making a stack of all the MBD books, and then we’ll see what they have in common.”

  “Yes!” Winifred said, and she started the stack immediately by placing Orphans on top of Mountain Climbing on the table in the center of the room. Then she reached for another book with the curious marking. “Hmm,” she said, examining it. “Parenting.” She added it to the small stack and reached for the next.

  26

  Mrs. Poore went home after dessert, carrying a container of leftovers her hosts had kindly offered her. The two mysterious unconscious B-and-B guests were gone, carried away in two ambulances, but a terrible mess had been left behind. Even Radish, the cat, who usually liked messes and frequently created some of his own, had fled.

  She had suggested to her children that they might return with her to the house and help with the cleaning. Maybe, she had said, even Richie would like to join them? They could all work together? But the children had been unenthusiastic.

  “I prefer not to. I don’t know how to clean things up,” Richie had said politely. “I never had to learn. We have maids.”

  “I think we should stay here,” Winston had told her. “We’ve been hired to be companions to Richie.”

  “Yes, we’re getting paid!” Winifred added. “And anyway, Mother, I’m afraid I might get sick if I have to clean up somebody’s else’s sickness. I’m quite certain it’s better if you do it alone.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Poore replied, “you sure you’re getting paid?”

  The children nodded. “Lots,” Winston said, though he wasn’t certain if it was true. Actually, Mr. Willoughby had just told him, quite mournfully, that money was soon going to be in short supply.

  “In that case you should stay, I guess,” their mother decided. “But not too late. I want you home by . . .” She hesitated. “Are you being paid by the hour?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Winston fibbed. “Absolutely.”

  “Well, then, stay. But not past midnight. Unless, of course, he agrees to a higher rate after midnight. In that case, I think you could even work all night.

  “But don’t expect me to save any of these leftovers for you,” she added, carefully stacking the containers of roast beef and strawberry shortcake so that she could carry them home. “There’s leftover salad you can have if you’re hungry later. The guests barely finished theirs before they fainted.”

  Now, back in her kitchen, she looked around with a sigh, then set the leftovers on the counter beside the squealing refrigerator. She put on her apron, filled a pail with water from the sink, picked up her mop, and began to clean.

  27

  Back at the Book Room, the three children continued their examination of the shelves.

  “Just point me to the geology books, okay?” Winifred said. “I am so interested in geology, and I’m hoping to—”

  “Here’s another MBD!” Winston announced. He added it to the pile of books that were marked with the identifying letters.

  “And one more,” said Richie, who had found one on a low shelf near the corner.

  “I just don’t get it,” Winston said, finally, looking at the stack. “Are you sure that what’s it stands for, Richie? Might Be Distressing? He picked up the book he had just added and read the title: “Cryogenics. Huh?”

  Winifred laughed. “I bet that one means Most Boringly Dull.”

  But Richie was certain. “No, for sure it’s Might Be Distressing. I remember when it started. When my parents first created the Book Room—it used to be a nursery, when I was little; it had a rocking horse and a big teddy bear—they sent away to a bookstore and a truck came, filled with books. My mother was arranging them, but she kept coming across things that she said might upset me. She was going to throw them away, but my dad said no, he’d paid a lot for them, so keep them but just put special markings on them. Might Be Distressing. And they told me maybe I could read them when I was grown.”

  “Look! Here’s one called The Swiss Postal System,” Winston announced, choosing another from the stack. “Why would that be distressing? Who would even care about that? Can you think of one single person who is interested in the Swiss postal system?”

  “Nope,” his sister said.

  “No,” Richie replied.

  “I am, in a way,” a deep voice said, “but we will not discuss it further.”

  The door had opened and a man was standing there, leaning on a cane. His hair was white, and he was wearing a bathrobe. “You are looking at a ruined man,” he announced.

  “Oh! My goodness! Good evening, Grandfather!” Richie said in a startled voice.

  28

  Back in the emergency ward, Mr. Willoughby finally opened his eyes. He turned his head and looked at his wife, who was lying on a nearby stretcher.

  “Your hair’s a mess,” he murmured to her. “You look like a shih tzu.”

  She turned her own head, weakly, and stared at him. “Sticks and stones may break my bones,” she chanted, and then fell silent because she had no energy and couldn’t remember what came next.

  A nearby nurse hastened to reassure her. “No, dear, you have no broken bones! You have severe gastroenteritis and potentially fatal ventricular tachycardia.”

  A doctor who was rearranging some instruments on a tray looked up and added, “The lab found thirty-eight different cardiac glycosides in your cells. The general structure of a cardiac glycoside consists of a steroid molecule, the nucleus of which consists of four fused rings to which other functional groups such as methyl, hydroxyl, and aldehyde groups can be attached to influence the overall molecule’s biological activity.”

  Mr. Willoughby raised his head slightly on his stretcher and muttered, “I hate when people don’t speak English.”

  “Lie back, dear,” the nurse told him. “You don’t want to dislodge your sphygmomanometer.”1

  The doctor continued: “The lab also found gray­anotoxins, which are low-molecular-weight hydrophobic compounds structurally characterized as polyhydroxylated cyclic diterpenes.”

  Mr. Willoughby groaned. “Don’t listen to them, Frances,” he said to his wife. “They aren’t speaking Eng­lish. We’re in some weird foreign country. Even Switzerland was better.”

  “You can Google all of this when you get home,” the doctor remarked.

  “We can what? Google? Is that what you said? Did you mean gargle?”

  The doctor ignored him and said, “Also, it appears that you have both been frozen and then thawed.”

  “Well, we knew that, you big showoff!” Frances Willoughby said in a very irritated voice, and reached down under the sheet to rub her blistered foot.

  29

  Winston and Winifred called, “See you tomorrow, Richie!” and returned next door to their house for the night. Radish, the cat, leapt out of the weeds and scurried inside behind them when they opened the door. They found their mother at the kitchen table, enjoying the last of the leftover shortcake while in the corner her mop soaked in a bucket of gray water. Radish sniffed at it but turned away in disgust.

  “Are the guests all right?” Winston asked.

  Mrs. Poore shrugged. “I haven’t heard. I’m going to charge them extra for the cleanup, though. If they’re a
live, of course.”

  “Poor people.”

  “No, no, we are the poor Poore people! We don’t have enough money, there’s no food in the refrigerator, your father is who-knows-where, not a single person has called to make a reservation for the B-and-B, and—”

  “But, Mother,” Winifred began. “we have no telephone. How could anyone—”

  “Oh, hush, dear. You sometimes have a whiny voice.”

  “I only meant—”

  “It’s bedtime,” Mrs. Poore told the children. “Go to bed. And by the way, there are no sheets. The sheets were ruined by the, you know, sickness. The throwing-up. I think I’m going to charge them more for the laundry. Maybe another ten dollars.” She reached into the wastebasket for a crumpled paper towel and began to prepare a new invoice.

  “Clean sheets would be lovely for the next B-and-B guests, Mother,” Winifred said, “but without a telephone, how can—”

  “Didn’t you hear me say bedtime? You just yammer on and on.”

  Winifred sighed. “Come on, Winston,” she said to her brother. “We’d better get some sleep. We promised Richie we’d be there first thing in the morning.”

  As the two made their way out of the kitchen, Winston reminded his sister of something. “Actually, we also have a Book Room.” He pointed to a closed door.

  “That’s only a storage closet,” Winifred replied.

  “Yes, but it’s a big closet. And it’s absolutely crammed with—”

  “I know. Outdated encyclopedias.”

  Both children groaned.

  30

  It was late afternoon. While the three children amused themselves upstairs in the playroom, Richie’s father was in the drawing room below. Tim Willoughby did have an office at the candy factory, but he rarely went there, because the factory ran so smoothly. It was filled with huge stainless-steel machines that mixed and stirred and flavored and compressed the ingredients, sliced them into bars, then weighed and measured them. Bright-colored labels, thousands every hour, appeared from the huge label-making machine and went by conveyer to the label-pasting machine, arriving there just as the newly filled boxes of candy appeared from another direction. The labels were slapped onto each box, then went to the robot, which placed the boxes, tightly packed, into large cartons; from there the cartons moved slowly and heavily onto a loading dock to which trucks backed up. One after another, every day, trucks filled with all varieties of confections, including the best-selling Lickety Twist, left the factory and rumbled across the highways to the supermarkets and movie theaters and variety stores where they would be sold, across the United States and even Canada.

  Usually Tim Willoughby sipped coffee and turned the pages of his paper to find the latest baseball scores while his trucks revved their engines every morning. There was a telephone beside him. Occasionally a call would report that a truck had had a flat tire and was slightly delayed. Sometimes there was news, relayed by telephone, of yet another accolade: “DULUTH KIDS CHOOSE FAVORITE SWEET,” for example, when Minnesota children had, to no one’s surprise, selected Lickety Twist. His nearby laptop showed continuous videos: a troop of Boy Scouts touring the factory, wearing surgical caps so that no single hair would ever make its way into a huge mixing bowl; a woman celebrating her one hundredth birthday in a midwestern nursing home would be interviewed, describing with a grin how she had sucked on a Lickety Twist every day of her adult life; an Employee of the Month pumped his fist in the air when he was given the news that he was entitled to a prime parking space with a special identifying sign: SWEET SPOT.

  But not today. Today was one terrible bit of news after another. The stock market had plunged. Sugar refineries were reporting huge losses because of the candy ban. The CIA was reporting an upsurge in chocolate smuggling throughout Central America. Sullen teenagers had been charged with illegal possession and were pictured on the news being arraigned in juvenile court. And Hollywood was abuzz about plans for several horror films featuring death-by-candy.

  Most of Consolidated Confectionaries’ trucks were returning, now empty, from the desert conflagration site. The factory machinery had fallen silent. Four hundred workers had been notified that their jobs were ending.

  Tim Willoughby leafed through his bank statements with mounting despair and watched his wealth disappear.

  31

  One of the company’s large vehicles was actually heading south from Anchorage, Alaska, toward Prince George, Canada, a very long drive.

  The driver had stopped overnight at a Days Inn in Whitehorse. Then he had driven all the next day and slept the second night in the cab of his truck. Now, finally, he was just beyond the small town of Smithers. Only a couple hundred miles left to go. But he was tired and bored, and needed someone to talk to, just to keep him awake. When he saw a hitchhiker on the road ahead, he eased up on the gas and put his foot on the brake, slowing the vehicle to a stop.

  “Mister?” he called to the hitchhiker. “Could you use a ride all the way to Prince George?”

  “Sure could,” the hitchhiker said.

  “That backpack looks heavy,” the truck driver commented.

  Ben Poore wrestled the pack from his own shoulders and lifted it up into the cab of the truck. Then he climbed up after it. “It doesn’t feel heavy when it’s filled with the knowledge of centuries,” he said to the driver. “Let me tell you about this incredible encyclopedia.”

  32

  “Dear?” Richie’s mother appeared at the drawing room door. His father looked up.

  “Yes?”

  “Someone from the hospital’s on the phone. About that couple who got sick next door?”

  Richie’s father sighed, put his disheartening bank statement down, and went to the hall where the telephone sat on an antique table with curved legs. He hoped the call wouldn’t take long. He was ready to put the bad bank information aside for the time being, because he had promised his son, along with those odd children from next door, that he would open up the elaborate tool set he had once purchased, and that together they would repair the small broken toy car that for some reason seemed to have significance for Richie. It would be a distraction.

  Upstairs, the two boys waited impatiently for Richie’s father. They had become bored with the MBD book project, having found absolutely nothing that connected the marked books to each other. Orphans had nothing in common with a study of private railway travel. Mountain-climbing was unconnected to the Swiss postal system. And Winifred, in particular, had lost interest in anything else when she happened on a book (no MBD label) about geology, her passion; she was curled up now in a comfortable chair reading about magnetite, iron pyrite, and tetradymite.

  “All right, boys, let’s get started!” The door to the playroom opened and Richie’s dad appeared, carrying a heavy box. “Look: I’ve got my eighty-nine-piece general purpose tool kit, never opened!

  “Excuse me, I meant ‘Boys and girl!’” he added, remembering Winifred.

  She looked up. “It’s okay,” she told him. “I’m just going to sit here reading.”

  “All right. Let us know if you decide to join us. I’m sorry to keep you waiting, boys. I had to take an odd telephone call.”

  He set the box on the playroom floor and the two boys sprawled beside it and tugged it open.

  “Why was your phone call odd?” Winifred asked. “I’m always interested in odd.” She marked her page in the geology book and set it aside.

  Tim Willoughby had picked up the small broken car and was examining it. “We may have to order a new wheel for this,” he said. “I doubt if my toolbox contains wheels.” He looked over at Winifred. “Ah, odd because—”

  “Cool!” Winston exclaimed, leaning over the large now open box. “Eighteen different wrenches!”

  “Six screwdrivers!” Richie added, holding up two of them. “All sizes!”

  “Richie,” his father said, “turn on your computer and see if you can find out how to order wheels, okay? Nothing expensive. Sorry,” he sa
id to Winifred. “I got distracted. The phone call was from the director of the hospital,” he told her.

  “Is that odd?”

  “No, it’s not. I donate a lot of money to the hospital. I mean, I used to.” He frowned for a moment. “I suppose those days are over now.”

  “We’re ruined,” Richie whispered to his friends, although he still didn’t understand exactly what that meant.

  “Of course the hospital people don’t know yet about my changed circumstances. So the director calls me often, wanting to know if I’d like a lab named for me, or maybe a room, or a whole ward. They already have the Richie Willoughby Fracture Unit. I donated that after my son broke his ankle. We were skiing and he hadn’t paid adequate attention to the instructor; he missed a turn on the intermediate slope.”

  “It wasn’t my fault, Dad! It was my dumb boots!” Richie looked over from where he was now seated at his computer.

  “Richie, those boots were the best. Thin-shell construction and an eighteen-millimeter oversize pivot. And they were perfect with your skis!”

  “But I didn’t want skis! I wanted a snowboard!”

  His father turned back to Winifred. “And there’s also the Commander Melanoff Orphan Care Department. I funded that some years ago and named it after my dad.”

  “Orphan care?” Winifred sat up straight. She and Winston glanced meaningfully at each other. A book about orphans was in the stack they had created in the Book Room.

  “My wife was an orphan. So, in fact, was I. We have a particular concern for orphans. But back to the phone call and why it was odd . . .”

  “Look! There’s a high-tension hacksaw!” Winston was still rummaging in the huge toolbox.

  Richie was now scrolling through sources of toy car wheels on his computer. “Winston, measure the wheels and see what size we need,” he said.

  “You remember the couple who needed the emergency care last night?” his father continued, talking to Winifred. “You were here when your mother came over and we called 911.”