by Mikki Lish
“Wings?” Uncle Peter asked.
Hedy coughed and glared at Max. “Um … chicken wings. Mrs. V has a secret recipe.” To cover the slipup, she stood up in front of her cousin and said, “Hey, Max, can you bow like this?”
She took a deep, arm-waving bow. As she did so, the printed article in her pocket fell out and dropped to the floor. Uncle Peter picked it up, and his eyes widened at the picture and Hedy’s questions surrounding it. “What are you doing with this?” he asked softly.
Hedy had brought the article so she could ask Uncle Peter about it, but now felt unprepared. “Um … we were looking at Grandpa John’s Kaleidos.”
“Why?”
“Well, because of Grandma Rose. We … we want to know what happened to her. Do you know?”
“No one knows what happened.” Uncle Peter shook his head at the photo. “That wretched box.”
“Grandpa John said he got rid of it,” Hedy said, “so that it wouldn’t hurt anyone else.”
A stricken look passed over Uncle Peter’s face. “Are you sure?” Hedy and Spencer nodded. “I thought he kept it somewhere.”
“Do you know where?” Spencer asked eagerly.
“I don’t know. I only thought …” He trailed off.
“Do you know Albert Nobody?” Hedy asked.
Uncle Peter looked startled. “That pompous, one-trick show pony? Why?”
“I read he was there on the night,” Hedy said.
“He was. But he died some time ago, and in any case he wasn’t terribly kind about your grandfather when everything happened.” He stared at the photograph and Hedy’s handwriting for a long time, and then gave Hedy a searching look. “Understand that these memories of your grandmother are painful for John. I think it’s best not to dredge up this history while you’re staying there. He was under suspicion for some weeks, you know. It was a difficult time.”
“But what if we could find her?”
Uncle Peter put a gentle hand on her head. “You can’t. Don’t lose yourselves down rabbit holes, chasing the impossible. You’ll be going home in a matter of days. Are you going to unearth skeletons only to leave him to deal with them all alone? I couldn’t think of anything more unkind. You should throw that article away. Concentrate on the here and now.”
Hedy had an urge to tell him about the writing in the dust, Doug and Stan, the Woodspies, everything, just to prove him wrong. But she stopped herself. It was all too likely he would tell Grandpa John, take his side, and then they’d never find Grandma Rose.
“Could they stay here, Grandad?” Jelly slyly suggested. When Hedy frowned at her, she added, “Just so we can hang out more.”
“Of course, you’d be welcome,” Uncle Peter said to Hedy and Spencer. “If you want to?”
Hedy could feel Spencer’s pleading eyes on her, and she thought back over their perfectly normal and enjoyable visit here, where things were simple and fun. But then a shaft of light caught the cape that Max wore. That dark green reminded her of Nobody’s chandelier, his card trick, and the darkness that had rolled over them—that darkness Nobody had said Grandma Rose was trapped in.
“No,” Hedy said, “we should go back with Grandpa John.”
Grandpa John didn’t tell them where he had been, but whatever he had bought had put him in a good mood. From the way his hand kept checking his pocket, it was small.
Spencer was silent most of the way back, and Hedy figured it was because he didn’t want to talk to Grandpa John. “Maybe Nobody’s already found the Kaleidos,” she whispered as the car finally wound through Marberry’s Rest.
Spencer squinted through the window at Hoarder Hill, which looked especially quiet and lonely after their visit with Uncle Peter and their cousins. “I hope so.” He glanced at her angrily. “I wish we’d stayed at Uncle Peter’s.”
Grandpa John shifted his shoulders in a way that made Hedy wonder if he had heard. Despite everything, it felt wrong to hurt his feelings.
When they walked into the house, Hedy half hoped that they’d find their grandmother miraculously returned, pacing the hall or perhaps sitting at the large kitchen table. But all was still and silent inside. No Rose awaited them, and while Grandpa John was bustling around, they couldn’t exactly go hunting for Nobody either.
Neither Hedy nor Spencer felt very talkative that afternoon. They picked at their dinner listlessly, and then Hedy lied that they weren’t feeling very well and wanted to head to bed early. The trouble Grandpa John took to tuck them in and prepare for a night of two unwell children was touching. He put a bucket beside each of their beds in case they suddenly needed to throw up, and made sure Spencer had his inhaler nearby. After reading some very detailed instructions that Olivia had written out and placed in the medicine kit she had left, he set up children’s Tylenol and crackers on a plate on the shelf, in case he needed to administer them during the night.
“Call me if you need me,” he said, hovering worriedly in the doorway.
“Thanks, Grandpa. I think we just need to sleep,” said Hedy. She scrunched herself under her duvet and forced herself to remember that he might have caused his own wife’s disappearance.
As the sound of Grandpa John’s footsteps receded, both children sat up in bed. Hedy studied the ceiling. “Mr. Nobody?”
“Is he here?” Spencer asked, hugging his pillow.
Hedy waited a moment. “I don’t think so. I was only checking.” She hopped out of bed and beckoned Spencer. “Let’s see if we can find him.”
“Where?”
“I guess we should start with his room first.”
They sidled down the hallway to the stairs. Fortunately, there was no movement below; Grandpa John must have gone into his study. When they reached the third floor, Hedy dared to switch on her flashlight, and they darted along to Nobody’s room.
“I’ll open the door, and you shine the flashlight inside,” Spencer said. “That’s how the police do it on TV.”
“We’re not the police, Spence,” Hedy said, “and this isn’t a gun.” But she agreed to do it his way, which would have been all right except that, in his anxiety, Spencer pushed the blue door a bit too hard and it swung back so forcefully it knocked the wall.
“Be careful!” Hedy admonished him.
She shone her flashlight inside. The floor where they had placed Nobody’s creepy relics was clear, and when they softly called Nobody’s name, there was no hint of his blue light, or his voice.
“He’s not there,” Hedy said, closing the door.
Spencer edged in closer to the beam from Hedy’s flashlight. “Do you think he’s still in the house?”
A sharp psssst caught their attention from down the hall. Hedy swung her flashlight. The ghostly head of Simon appeared in the darkness, poking through his yellow door.
“You must warn the Master,” he said, his voice thick, as though he had been crying. “Warn John.”
“Simon, what is it?” Hedy asked. She shuffled closer with Spencer at her side, feeling the air cool as they approached the ghost pianist.
“Albert Nobody has escaped!”
“He—he … he’s helping us look for our grandmother,” Hedy stammered.
Simon looked horrified. “You released him?”
“Remember you said we could ask him about Grandma Rose?” Hedy said defensively.
“Ask him, yes. Release him, non!”
“Why? What’s he doing?” Spencer whispered.
“He stole my middle C!” Neither Hedy nor Spencer knew what that meant. Insubstantial tears welled in Simon’s eyes and ran down his face to fall from his chin, but they disappeared before hitting the floor. “He stole five keys from my piano. How can I play without them? My concerto sounds like Swiss cheese—full of holes! Why, Wellington’s bust atop my piano has been beheaded. The head dented my poor piano when it fell. Nothing is safe with Nobody abroad! You must warn the Master, or I will. I will draw his attention up here and tell him it was your doing!”
“No, pleas
e don’t tell Grandpa John,” Hedy pleaded. “Nobody promised to help us look for Grandma Rose. That’s all we’re trying to do.”
“When we see him, Hedy will tell him to stop this mucking around,” Spencer added.
Simon did not look convinced.
“We’ll find the piano keys for you and bring them back, okay?” Hedy said. “Do you know where they are?”
Dabbing his eyes with one frilly sleeve, Simon shook his head. “I cannot travel far from my piano stool. It was on that stool that I took my last breath, you see. So I could not follow him. I do not know where he took them.”
“Did he say anything at all?”
“Only teased me about giving them a ‘beautiful view.’ ” He crossed his arms mulishly. “If you cannot find and return them, the Master will have to be told what you have done!”
Hedy and Spencer assured the ghost they would do their best, and he faded from view, still looking pained. They tiptoed away and downstairs, alert to any hint of Nobody. Could he be hiding in one of the other locked rooms they’d never been inside, with doors of muted pink or red or azure?
“Do you think he’s going to keep his promise?” Spencer asked.
Hedy crossed fingers on both hands. “I hope so. If he doesn’t, I don’t know how we’re going to find Grandma Rose.” She paused outside Doug and Stan’s room. “Let’s check that Stan hasn’t been poked with more darts.”
When they opened the green door, it was a different scene of wretchedness that greeted them. Doug was turned over on the floor, rumpled, as though he had been in a fight. He cocked his head as Hedy and Spencer knelt beside him and said glumly, “Don’t honey the stinger, cubs. How bad is it?”
“How bad is what?” Hedy asked.
“I told him it’s not that bad!” Stan called out nervously. “It isn’t really.”
“Turn me over,” said Doug.
Together the children flipped Doug onto his front and had to stifle their gasps. There was a stripe of fur missing from his back, as though someone had taken a razor to it. And not only that: His tail was missing.
“Oh, Doug,” Hedy whispered. Spencer, meanwhile, was speechless.
Doug closed his eyes. “I knew it was bad.”
“Does it hurt?” Hedy asked.
“In the rump.”
“What happened?” Spencer finally managed to say.
“I didn’t see,” Doug said, trying to get a look at the spot where his tail should have been. “Stan, you tell them.”
Stan licked his nose nervously. “It was a pearl-handled blade, shining in the dim light,” he began, “held aloft by an unseen agent.”
“Here we go,” muttered Doug.
“I’m only trying to give your misfortune a sense of magnitude,” pouted Stan.
“Just get on with it, you nutty pincushion,” said Doug.
“So should I merely blurt out that a knife came out of nowhere, shaved you to resemble a skunk, and then hacked off your tail?”
Doug threw his paws into the air. “Yes!”
“Well,” Stan huffed, “the conclusion is that we still have no conclusion. We don’t know what it was. The Master’s done something, and it’s set off this mischief.”
Hedy found it hard to swallow. “I think we know what it was.”
Haltingly, the children told Doug and Stan what had happened the previous night—Nobody’s card trick, releasing him from the chandelier, the head of the Roman charioteer. As they went on, Hedy spoke less and less, allowing Spencer to fill in the gaps. Small waves of strain had been worrying her lately—of not knowing what to think about Grandpa John, of looking after Spencer, of guilt over Stan’s nose, Simon’s piano keys, and Doug’s tail. Now those small waves were fusing into one great swell that was threatening to break over her. She tried to squash it back.
“We did say not to trust Nobody,” Stan said, shaking his head.
“And not to let him out,” added Doug.
Their exasperation brought the tidal wave crashing down upon Hedy, and she began to cry. Spencer stared, baffled by this sudden change in his dependable sister. When he put an uncertain arm around Hedy, she wept even harder.
“Why the tears, little one?” Doug asked.
“I … I’m sorry we let him out,” she sobbed.
“Well, what’s done is done,” Stan murmured. “You were trying to do the right thing.”
“But I feel so bad that you got hurt. And, Doug, your tail …” The surge of guilt and regret washed over her again and again, and the others did the best thing they could do, which was to let her cry.
It took some time, but her jagged breaths slowly steadied, and Hedy realized there was one thing above all that was bothering her. “I don’t want to hate Grandpa John.”
“Me neither,” Spencer said. His arm was still around Hedy, patting her shoulder every now and then. It was an unusual feeling, being comforted by her younger brother for once, but a heartening one.
“No, indeed,” sighed Stan. “He’s a strange one, even for a human, but I don’t like to think he was hiding a secret like that.”
“What are you going to do?” Doug asked.
Hedy took a deep breath, unexpectedly feeling less overwhelmed now. “We have to find Nobody again. Get him to stop all the troublemaking, remind him that he’s supposed to be helping us.”
“Well, he sliced my tail off hours ago,” Doug said. “I hate to say it, but what if he’s bored of making mischief here and sailed off to do it elsewhere?”
“The freed beast doth flail and thrash,” Stan proclaimed.
“Wossat?” Doug frowned. “A verse?”
“No, I just made it up,” Stan said proudly. “That’s why he’s behaving so waywardly. He’s like a caged tiger that’s got out and wants to claw something.” He paused. “Perhaps I could create a verse out of it.” Closing his eyes, he whispered the words to himself again.
“You’d better get out of here,” Doug counseled Hedy and Spencer. “He’s going to get poetical, and you haven’t got that sort of time to waste.”
Small telltale signs of Nobody began to appear throughout the house, even though he didn’t speak to them or show himself. Hedy’s and Spencer’s toothbrushes were dropped in the toilet. A page was ripped from the book that Hedy had left in the living room. Around mid-morning, a Woodspy nudged the head of one of Spencer’s wrestling figurines around the floor of their bedroom.
“That’s it!” Spencer fumed, picking up the head and jamming it back onto the plastic body. “Just because he’s a decapitation expert doesn’t mean he gets to behead my toys!” Grabbing Hedy by the hand, he pulled her downstairs to the laundry room, where he started to grapple the vacuum cleaner out of its corner.
“What are you doing?” Hedy asked.
“Maybe we can suck up Mr. Nobody with this.”
Hedy gave him a doubtful look. “Where’d you get this idea? From a movie?”
“Well, do you have a better one?”
She didn’t, so they made up a story for Grandpa John about Mom and Dad having promised to pay them some pocket money if they did some cleaning for him.
“You won’t break anything, will you?” Grandpa John asked as he rather skeptically watched them vacuum the hall. “Perhaps I should pay you not to vacuum?”
“We’re learning responsibility,” Hedy smoothly assured him. “And the value of hard work.”
“I’ve got to find something else to keep you kids occupied,” he said, shaking his head.
Grandpa John watched them vacuum the hallway and the living room until he was satisfied they weren’t going to accidentally destroy things, and then he eventually drifted off to his study.
“Okay,” Spencer said, “let’s try it.”
Together, he and Hedy swung the head of the vacuum up into the air, and they slowly wheeled it around the room.
“How will we know if we do suck him in?” Hedy asked.
“Maybe his tooth and his eyeball and other bits will show up in ther
e,” Spencer said, pointing to the clear plastic barrel of the vacuum where dust whizzed around.
They did all the rooms of the ground floor with no sign of Nobody and then headed upstairs. Arms aching from holding up the hose, they sucked at their bedroom, the hallway, and even did a quick sweep through Doug and Stan’s room. But it wasn’t until they trundled the vacuum to the bathroom that it worked, although not as Spencer had imagined.
“You two look ridiculous,” said a voice.
Hedy and Spencer dropped the vacuum hose with a clatter. The light on the left side of the bathroom mirror was flickering blue. Hedy swiftly shoved the vacuum out into the hall so that Grandpa John would think they were still working, and then closed the bathroom door.
“Why are you mucking around with our stuff? And Grandpa John’s things?” Hedy demanded, glaring at the blue light.
“The freed beast doth flail and thrash,” Nobody said, mimicking Stan’s voice.
Spencer recoiled. “You were spying on us last night?”
There was a snicker. “I was investigating!”
“Oh, really? Well, don’t try to tell us you were ‘investigating’ when you cut off Doug’s tail!” Hedy said.
“Oh, poor tailless teddy!”
“You owe us.” Hedy’s eyes narrowed. “Have you just been going around hurting things, or have you actually found something?”
“Well, actually, I did find something very intriguing—and illuminating—at the top of the house.” Nobody sounded very self-satisfied.
“Do you mean the top floor?” asked Spencer.
“Think higher. La bella vista. The belvedere.”
“The thing we call the turret,” Hedy said to Spencer. To the light, she asked, “What’s up there?”
“I’m not going to spoil the surprise,” Nobody purred. “But you’ll find it indeed has a beautiful view.”
Hedy twitched. Beautiful view. That was what Simon had said. Were his piano keys up there too?
“So, just say my name when you get up there,” Nobody said casually. “Oh, and I wouldn’t bother lugging the vacuum cleaner up there if I were you.”