The Kumquat Legacy

by Randal Koster

  Her smile broadened. “I’m afraid,” she said, “that if you want to hear the answer, you’ll have to ask Gertie!”

  ****

  I have to explain about Gertie. You’ve already met Queen and Princey from the dollhouse. Well, Queen has some friends, ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’, who themselves have a 5-year-old child named Gertrude. What a monster this kid is! Spoiled, fat, and constantly throwing temper tantrums, Gertie is everyone’s worst nightmare – the kind of kid that, sitting next to you on a moving bus, would make you gladly jump out the bus’s window and kiss the pavement joyfully as you skidded along it. Gertie has a pear shaped head, blisters all over her face, a horribly grating voice, and, worst of all, a body that’s immortal. No matter what happens to her in the particular story she’s in, and bizarre things always seem to happen to her – some part of her body is always blowing up, falling off, or catching on fire – she survives to tantrum another day.

  I knew all this because over the past several months, I’d suffered through lots of Gertie dollhouse plays. Over time I’d discovered ways of avoiding them, but now, Loni had me cornered. She knew the answer to the puzzle, and she would only tell me through Gertie. For just a moment I was ready to yell at her, to demand that she tell me the answer without all this stupid nonsense. I caught myself, though. I didn’t want to be like Cyril.

  Loni handed each of us a wooden character: I got a knight in armor, and Brent got a forest woodcutter. Loni told us that we both had to act out a part in her play. We were to have these two travelers approach the dollhouse and ask Gertie for help. I think Brent was ready to throw his character down in disgust. “She knows the answer!” I whispered to him urgently. “We have no choice!” With a disgusted sigh, he gave in.

  We did as we were told. We bounced the characters along the floor to the dollhouse. Loni was waiting for us with her own character, a woman in a green skirt and white shirt.

  Knight (me): We would like to see Gertie, please!

  Woman (Loni): You mean my darling daughter? Well, one of her feet is here in my purse. Would you like to see that?

  Woodsman (Brent): What!?

  Woman (Loni, laughing gently): Oh, the silly dear kicked the door so hard this morning that her foot fell right off. Don’t worry, though – she’ll grow another one. She’s immortal, you know!

  Knight (me): We want to see all of Gertie, if that’s okay – all of her, in one piece.

  Woman (Loni): Yes, yes! Of course. Follow me, please! (She leads our characters to the other side of the dollhouse. Standing before them is a short, grungy doll with stringy blonde hair.)

  Knight (me): Hello, Gertie. We’ve come from far away…

  (Suddenly, the knight and the woodsman are attacked by huge soldier dolls that Loni has picked up. The two travelers back off.)

  Knight (me): What’s the matter?

  Woman (Loni): You asked to see Gertie. You didn’t ask to speak with her!

  Note to reader: it’s not too late to solve the puzzle. If you solve it, you can skip right to the end of this horrible play!

  Knight (me): We would like to speak to the Great Gertie! What must we do?

  Woman (Loni): Only those who sing Gertie her favorite song can speak to her. Here is a copy of the lyrics. (Loni scribbles some words down on a piece of paper and hands it to Brent and me.)

  Woodsman (Brent, looking at paper): This is the stupidest song I’ve ever seen in my life! I’m not singing this!

  Gertie (Loni, in a loud, high, screechy, horribly painful voice): Waaaaaaahhh! Make them go away! Waaaaaaaaahhh!

  Woman (Loni, calmly): Poor honey Gertie! You’re such a sweet sweetie – my little Pookums! Don’t cry, and I’ll buy you whatever you wish!

  Knight (me): Actually, we will sing the song. Won’t we, Woodsman?

  Woodsman (Brent): Uh…

  Knight (me): Won’t we!

  Woodsman (Brent, sighing): Oh, okay.

  Knight and Woodsman, together:

  Whose tantrums sound pleasant, like an angel’s sweet song?

  Who waddles her fat with the grace of a swan?

  Gertrude! Gertrude! Gertie, she’s our girl!

  Her face is like pizza, a food we adore!

  She gets what she wants, and always wants more!

  Gertrude! Gertrude! Gertie, she’s our girl!

  Gertie (Loni, giggling stupidly): Hee! Hee!

  Woman (Loni): Gertie is pleased, Gentlemen. You may now speak to her.

  Knight (me): Gertie, what is the connection between a penny, a quarter, a buffalo nickel and a pebble?

  Gertie (Loni):

  Knight (me): Why aren’t you telling us, Gertie?

  Woman (Loni): She said you could speak to her. She didn’t say she would speak back!

  Knight (me, standing up and yelling at Loni as loud as I could): WHAT????

  Gertie (Loni, gurgling stupidly): Cities!

  Knight (me): Huh?

  Gertie (Loni): Penny has Lincoln, Lincoln is city. Quarter has Washington, and that is city.

  Woodsman (Brent): Buffalo is a city too!

  Knight (me): And the pebble…

  Gertie (Loni): Think about Arkansas.

  Knight (me): Little Rock!

  Brent and I stood up quickly, gladly dropping the stupid dolls. That was it! We had the answer – or at least the first part of the answer.

  I ran to the den. Brent and Loni followed. I quickly pulled an atlas down from the shelf and found the page showing the United States. “Turn the scanner on!” I called to Brent. Our computer is connected to a scanner that also works as a copier. Soon we had made our own paper copy of the map.

  We quickly found the four cities – Lincoln, Washington, Buffalo, and Little Rock – and marked them with red dots on the copy. “What now?” asked Brent.

  “The puzzle poem says to connect the dots!” I said. I found a ruler and drew lines between every pair of dots. I ended up with a four-sided figure with a big X in the middle.

  “X marks the spot!” Brent cried. “How does the last part of the poem go, again?”

  “ ‘Nearby you will spy a world-famous guy!’ I looked at the map. “And there he is! Look!” I pointed my finger at a city just a little bit east of where the X crossed. The city was named after someone famous, all right: Christopher Columbus. The city was Columbus, Ohio.

  ****

  An unpleasant surprise was waiting for us the next day, when we got to our hotel in Columbus.

  Yes, my mom, Loni, Brent, and I took off for Columbus as soon as we could. The poem had said, “Go to the boss and say ‘Kumquat’”. Since Columbus is the capital of Ohio, and since the governor there is the boss of the state, we guessed that we were supposed to go to Columbus and talk to the governor. After all, according to Jeffrey Morton’s will, we were supposed to travel to solve the puzzles. I called the law office to arrange our flights. I spoke to the woman there I had met at the reading, the blonde one at the reception desk, and she set it up right away. We didn’t have to pay a cent.

  The flight was long and mostly boring, though the clouds out the window were amazing, and I enjoyed looking down at all the different shapes on the land below. I particularly liked the way the river channels cut through the desert in stringy patterns, kind of like the roots of the weeds you pull out of a garden. I played travel backgammon and hangman for a while with Brent, but he eventually fell asleep. Loni spent all of her time reading.

  It was very late in the afternoon when our plane finally touched down in Columbus. My mom rented a car and took us straight to the hotel. “The governor could be anywhere this late in the day,” she said. “We’ll see if we can reach him in the morning. I don’t know how we’ll do it, but we’ll try.”

  We brought the suitcases into the hotel room. Loni wasted no time – before I had even set down my suitcase, she was hopping back and forth between the two double beds in the room, trying to jump as high as she could.
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  “Loni! Stop that!” my mom barked. She sat down wearily in a chair and took several quiet breaths. “There’s a reasonable-looking restaurant down the street,” she said then to all of us. “We can go there in a minute. I still need to catch my breath!”

  Loni jumped off the bed and ran to her suitcase, probably to get her dolls. I went over to the far bed – the better one – and put my suitcase on top of it, to reserve it. Brent, eating an apple, turned on the TV with the remote and began flicking through the channels. “Stop there!” my mom called out. “That’s the news! Maybe they’ll say something about the weather!”

  We didn’t hear the weather. Instead, we got the unpleasant surprise I mentioned above. The screen showed a man yelling at another man, one who was walking down the steps of Ohio’s capital building. The yelling man had wild hair, bushy eyebrows, and a scruffy mustache. He looked very angry, practically in a rage.

  You’ve probably guessed who it was. Yes, Cyril Morton was yelling at someone on television. We didn’t hear what he was saying, though, because the newscaster was speaking, telling the viewers what they would be seeing after the commercial. “When we come back,” she said, “a bizarre incident at the Governor’s Mansion, apparently involving kumquats. Stay tuned!”

  Chapter 4: The Second Puzzle

  We sat anxiously and impatiently through commercial after commercial. I always find commercials annoying, but for some reason, these were particularly bad – some kids were eating macaroni and seemed much too happy about it, and the lady with the cat food seemed dumber than her cat. Finally, and thankfully, the newscaster returned. We all focused our attention on the screen.

  “At the capital building today,” the newscaster said, “the governor was assaulted by a man with – of all things – a fixation on kumquats. News 6 has obtained this exclusive footage, taken by a passing tourist.”

  “There he is again!” Loni shouted, pointing. “Shhh!” I whispered back. We were watching the same film clip we had seen earlier, only this time, we could hear what Cyril was saying. “Kumquat!” he shouted, standing on some steps outside the capital building. “Kumquat!” The governor, walking down the steps, turned to look at him and nodded in confusion. I’m guessing that he didn’t know what to think of this bizarre man. Suddenly, Cyril sprang forward, grabbed the governor by the shoulders, and shouted “KUMQUAT!” directly into his face, shaking him gruffly. Just as suddenly, two of the people that were with the governor sprang forward. They grabbed Cyril, wrenched him away, and shoved him off to one side. The governor, looking rumpled and dazed, wiped some spit off his face with a handkerchief. He stared at Cyril in amazement. Cyril, meanwhile, was now being held back by several bystanders. He struggled furiously against them, yelling “Kumquat!” whenever he could catch his breath. As the film clip ended, a policeman was running up the steps.

  “The shouting man is in police custody tonight,” the newscaster continued. “News 6 has learned that city psychiatrists have him under observation.” And that was it. The newscaster went on to describe a holdup at a liquor store, and we shut off the television.

  “Holy cow!” I found myself saying. “What does it mean?”

  “I know one thing it means,” said Brent, who seemed just as stunned as I was. “There’s no way I’m saying ‘kumquat’ to the governor tomorrow!”

  ****

  I was in a good mood the next morning, for two reasons. First, Brent had a really good idea. “Listen,” he said. “I just thought of something! We’re supposed to go to Columbus to talk to ‘the boss’, right? Well, maybe we’re supposed to talk to the boss of the city and not the state!” As soon as he said it, I knew he was right. Ohio has a governor, and the governor is in Columbus, but the city of Columbus also has a mayor. Maybe we were supposed to see him, instead…

  The second reason I was in a good mood was that I figured Cyril would be out of our hair for a while. I figured that he’d have to sit in jail for at least a couple of days, as he tried his hardest to convince people that he wasn’t crazy. Who knows? Maybe they’d never let him leave!

  That’s what I was thinking in the morning. Unfortunately, though, I was dead wrong about Cyril. Completely and totally wrong. As you’ll soon see, he turned up that very afternoon and made our lives more miserable than ever.

  The mayor wasn’t in when we arrived at his office that morning, and according to his secretary, he wouldn’t get there until after two o’clock. She didn’t think we’d get to see him anyway, since his afternoon would be very busy. We weren’t too worried. All we had to do was be around when he showed up and say “kumquat” as he walked past. Hopefully that would do it.

  We walked around downtown Columbus for a while, and then we went back to the hotel to go swimming. After lunch, at 1:45, we sat down in the mayor’s reception room and waited for him to arrive.

  We were there just in time. At 1:50, the mayor stepped into the room from outside. At first glance, I thought he looked like a defensive tackle – tall, with shoulders wide enough to fill the doorway. But then I noticed his well-fitted suit, his graying hair, and his quiet and intelligent face, and I almost laughed at the thought of him ever playing football. This fellow was too refined. He was more likely to be a chess player.

  He sent us a friendly smile, the kind of smile politicians often give to strangers who might be voters, and then he then said a few words to his secretary and opened the door to his office. “Kumquat!” we three kids said together, to his back.

  The mayor froze. He turned around slowly. He studied us with interest. He nodded and smiled again, this time in understanding. His eyes looked different, too – they were greeting us not as strangers, but as long lost friends.

  “Dolores,” he said, turning to the secretary, “hold my calls. I need to speak to these people!”

  “But sir! Your appointments…!”

  “Hold my calls, Dolores,” he repeated. He waved us in.

  So, Brent was right – it was the mayor. Eagerly, we followed him into his office and sat, at his request, at a small wooden table, the only surface in the dark paneled room that wasn’t covered with books or stacks of folders. We introduced ourselves. The mayor offered my mom some coffee.

  Any final doubts I might have had were erased when Mayor Winston (that was his name) opened a drawer of his desk and pulled out a small reddish wooden box – a box identical to the one I saw at the reading of the will, the one that contained the coins and the little rock. He set this new box down on the table in front of us. “I was expecting you,” he said, looking pleased. “Or, at least, I was expecting someone. I knew someone would be looking for me, after what I saw on the news last night!”

  “Were you a friend of Jeffrey Morton’s?” I asked, as he fitted a key into the box’s small padlock.

  “Oh, yes! For many, many years! He was a great man – a very wise man – and I was happy to help him out on this treasure hunt of his. We met and talked about it less than a year ago. We decided that…”

  The mayor did not complete his sentence. He was interrupted, all of a sudden, by a loud cry of “KUMQUAT!”

  Everyone looked up in surprise. Yes, it was Cyril Morton. He was standing at the doorway, grasping the doorjamb for support and breathing hard, his wild hair wilder than ever. Dolores the secretary stepped quickly past him and spoke to the mayor. “I’m so sorry, sir!” she said, alarmed and embarrassed. “He ran past me, and I couldn’t stop him!”

  “It’s fine, Dolores,” said Mayor Winston. He sighed quietly. “He can be here too.” Cyril stepped in, found an empty chair at the table, and moved the box so that it was right in front of him.

  Mayor Winston studied Cyril’s face for some time. “You are Cyril Morton,” he said finally, with no delight in his voice. Cyril, still out of breath, said nothing. “I remember you,” the mayor continued. “You were about the age of young Loni here when I visited your uncle in Paris.
First you floated your aunt’s good china in the bathtub, and then you tossed some rocks, which you called ‘meteors’, at the plates, hoping to sink them. Your aunt wanted to wring your neck! Your uncle said that sometimes, it was as though you wanted him to break the cycle of non-violence that has held your family in its grip for generations.”

  “What’s in the box?” Cyril said simply, ignoring the mayor’s memory. He stared at the box intently. He did not look at the rest of us.

  “Yes, the box,” said the mayor. “I was just about to open it.” The key in the padlock produced a sharp, metallic click. Mayor Winston pocketed the padlock and raised the lid of the box. We all leaned forward to look in.

  ****

  It’s hard to describe what I was thinking when I first saw them, lying there on the bottom. I was mostly just confused. What were those two things? Golden eggs? Huge gold nuggets? Mayor Winston pulled them out and handed one to me and one to Cyril. I studied mine closely and finally guessed what it was. It was a kumquat! Not a real one, of course – just a solid metal model of one. The outside looked like real gold. The inside was some probably some cheaper metal, though the way Cyril was looking at it, I had to wonder.