“No,” Carly told her sympathetic listeners, “I guess I wasn’t looking in the right direction. I didn’t see anyone throw them, and after the trellis fell on me, I couldn’t see anything at all.”
It seemed that none of the parade spectators had seen the firecrackers thrown either. And Arthur, who was determined to find the guilty party, had learned that neither had any of the other Symbols of Patriotism on the Presbyterian float.
“It was almost as if those firecrackers came right down from the blue,” Mrs. Jenkins said before she patted Carly’s cheek for the third time and hurried off to get some more of her own famous corn soufflé before it was all gone.
Carly was as baffled as everyone else, and it wasn’t until some time later, as she was finishing her apple pie and ice cream, that she just happened to recall something that seemed like an important clue. The clue had come from Brother Tupper’s sermon.
Thinking, as she was, about parades and explosions, she suddenly remembered what Brother Tupper had said about bombs—bombs that had been thrown during meetings and rallys and parades. According to Brother Tupper the bombs had been thrown by atheists and were a part of their last-days attack on the innocent and the righteous. And while Brother Tupper hadn’t specifically mentioned throwing firecrackers at Presbyterians, there certainly were some similarities.
It was a fascinating idea. With her spoon hand frozen halfway to her mouth, Carly went over the evidence—and came to a conclusion. The conclusion was that what was needed was an investigation by Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson—and the sooner the better. Quickly scooping up the last spoonful of ice cream, she stood up and looked around for Matt.
He couldn’t have gone far. Carly had seen him only a few minutes earlier at the dessert table. In fact, she’d seen him at the dessert table at least three times. But now, when she needed him, it seemed that he’d finally had enough to eat and gone elsewhere. She would have to go looking for him—and quickly, before somebody made other plans for her.
By leaning to one side she could just see the empty spot at the hitching rack where the Hartwick surrey had been until poor Nellie left for home. That had been almost an hour ago. At any time one might expect to hear the clop and jingle of the returning horse and rig—announcing Father’s arrival. The investigation, if there was to be one, would have to begin immediately.
Getting up from the table with what she hoped was a casual, unhurried air, Carly looked around for the best avenue of escape. In one direction Aunt M. was busy talking to Elvira Hopper of Elvira’s Hat Shop, and in the other Lila was picking daintily at a piece of berry pie. Both Charles and Arthur had already finished eating and disappeared. Carly moved to the end of the table, put her plate and utensils in one of Nellie’s baskets, and then kept moving.
Making her way down the row of serving tables, she pretended to be scanning the remaining food, as if she were looking for something more to eat. But once past the dessert table, covered now with almost empty tins and plates, she turned sharply to the left and ducked into the crowd around the horseshoe pits. Old Grundy Appleton was throwing against Grandpa, and most of the spectators were nearly as old as the contestants. She stopped for a moment to watch Grandpa Díaz pitch a shoe that missed being a dead ringer by no more than two inches.
“By jingo! Would you look at that,” someone said. “Blind as a bat and he durn near throws two ringers in a row. What would the old coot do if he could see?”
“Wahoo! Go to it, Grandpa,” someone else shouted, and others chimed in. “Hurrah for Grandpa!”
Excited by the general enthusiasm, Carly joined in the cheering, and her “Hurrah for Grandpa” carried unexpectedly over the deep rumble of old men’s voices. Some of the men looked at her and laughed and she ducked her head and blushed, and then, encouraged by their friendly smiles, she cheered again. She liked the excitement of the match and the comfortable companionship of the crowd, with its familiar homey old-man smell of wool and starch and tobacco. She wanted to stay long enough to see if Grundy would do as well as Grandpa Díaz, but it took him so long to smooth out his pitching stand, spit on his hands, and wind himself up that she decided she couldn’t wait. She ducked through the horseshoe spectators and began to run.
She would try the racing field next. Matt was a fast runner and he liked to enter races. Squeezing through a tightly packed crowd at the starting line, she checked out the runners lining up for the next race. It was a gunnysack race and the contestants were boys, all right, but too young—first and second graders. Nearby a group of young ladies, high school girls mostly, were practicing carrying potatoes on soup spoons. The starting gun went off, the little boys bounced off down the track holding the gunnysacks up under their armpits, and the young ladies moved up to the starting line.
Carly waited until the gunnysack boys had finished and been awarded their ribbons, and the young ladies had started down the track. They looked very lovely, she decided, gliding gracefully in their long skirts and frilly shirtwaists with their potato spoons carefully balanced before them. Not as beautiful as Lila would have looked, of course, if she had entered. Carly wondered why she hadn’t.
Everyone laughed and cheered, and then gasped with sympathy when Edna Purvis’s potato bounced out of her spoon and she left the race, wrinkling her freckled nose in disgust. Carly watched until tall, lanky Emily Stone came in first and was awarded the blue ribbon. Then, still picturing Lila receiving the ribbon—Lila, smiling her small perfect smile, her lovely head with its heavy load of hair held proudly erect—Carly left the field and moved on. She would go next to the ball field. Matt liked baseball a lot too. It was likely that he would be at the game. As it happened, Matt wasn’t—but Lila was. And so was Johnny Díaz.
Chapter 21
THE MOMENT CARLY came out of the sycamore trees that grew around the millpond, she saw Lila near the stands, with Johnny right beside her. They weren’t talking to each other, at least not that Carly saw, but as she got nearer they glanced at each other and then turned away, and in a moment looked back again. It was a quick secret look, but Carly knew what it meant.
She had known the secret for a long time, ever since the warm spring night more than two years ago when she sat down by Lila on the front steps and asked her why she looked so sad—and to her surprise Lila had answered. With her chin in her hands, her face a gleaming ivory cameo in the soft moonlight, Lila began to talk, not so much to Carly as to the wide night sky. Slowly, almost as if she were talking in her sleep, she went on and on reciting every tiniest detail of the day when Johnny Díaz had told her that he loved her. Johnny had been seven years old at the time and Lila was only six, but she had been in love ever since.
Johnny Díaz was seventeen, now. He had blue-black hair so heavy that it looked like a thick cap of curls, and his eyes were dark and sharply watchful, like the eyes of a wild colt. He had a quick white smile, a graceful, sauntering walk, and a face that Aunt M. said could “break an angel’s heart.” Carly thought that Johnny was too handsome to have been born in modern times. He should have lived when men wore velvet coats and plumed hats and carried shining swords at their hips. She also thought that Johnny and Lila were just exactly like Romeo and Juliet. That was because Johnny was a Díaz, and the Díazes were—different. The difference was complicated and puzzling.
The Díazes had lived in the Santa Luisa valley for longer than anyone except, of course, the Indians. Although Grandpa Díaz spoke Spanish and had come to the valley from Mexico, some people said he was not Mexican, but Spanish, and that seemed to be important. Although most of the Mexican families lived all together on the south side of town near the river, or on the ranches where they worked, Johnny’s family lived at the end of Hamilton Valley on land that still belonged to them, although it had been leased for a long time. Unlike the other Mexican women, Johnny’s mother and grandmother were sometimes invited to socials at Citronia and other important houses. And his father, Fernando, belonged to the Odd Fellows and the volunteer fire depar
tment.
But if being Spanish was a difference that wasn’t too serious, there were others that were. For one thing the Díazes were Catholics. That would have meant trouble enough, but even more of a problem was the fact that most of the Díaz land was leased to the Quigleys. In fact, Johnny’s father, Fernando Díaz, was a member of Alfred Bennington Quigley’s water company and had voted against Aunt Mehitabel’s request for membership and a share in the company’s irrigation water. And those differences explained what happened the one time Johnny had come calling on Lila. Father had sent him away and ordered Lila never to speak to that Díaz scamp again. So Johnny and Lila were not only young and beautiful and in love, but also from families that hated each other—exactly like Romeo and Juliet’s.
Watching them now, reading the secrets of their silence, Carly wrapped her arms around her middle and shivered in painful ecstasy. It was all so frightening and forbidden and wonderful that it made her stomach ache. She went on watching and shivering while Johnny and Lila looked at each other several more times before she realized what a perfect opportunity was presenting itself. An opportunity for her to play a part in a love story. Springing into action, she leapt forward, almost running over two little girls playing jump rope. “Hello” she said as she skidded to a stop. “Hello, Johnny. Hello, Lila.”
Both Johnny and Lila stared at her in a way that was not particularly welcoming. Almost stammering in her eagerness to make them understand her good intentions, and the value of what she was offering, she managed to say, “C-c-could I take messages? I mean, Father didn’t tell me not to talk to Johnny. I mean, if you both tell me things to tell each other, then you wouldn’t really be talking—to each other, that is.”
Johnny rolled his dark eyes and laughed and Lila said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Carly. Go away. Would you just go away, please?”
Carly was surprised and a little hurt. It had seemed like such a good idea. “Well, all right,” she said. “I was just trying to help.”
As she walked away, she looked back several times over her shoulder. Johnny and Lila still didn’t seem to be talking. It was possible that people in love didn’t need to—that people in love were able to read each other’s minds.
It was only a minute later, as Carly was just reentering the sycamore grove, that she saw something very dangerous—for Lila and Johnny. It was Father. He had stopped to talk to someone near the millpond, but he was obviously headed for the ball game. Carly turned and ran.
Back beside Lila at the edge of the ballpark, Carly breathlessly whispered, “Father,” and in a split second Johnny disappeared into the crowd of spectators. Lila didn’t say thank you, but a few minutes later, as the three of them were on their way to hear the Fourth of July speeches, she looked right at Carly and smiled. It was something she didn’t do very often, and it gave Carly a nice warm tingle somewhere behind her eyes. She smiled back as hard as she could.
Lila hadn’t argued when Father said they were going to the speeches, but Carly had at least tried. “Don’t you want to eat before you go?” she asked Father. “The food’s awfully good.”
Father’s smile, tight and one-sided, was not a good sign. “I ate before I came. I can’t understand this strange passion for eating under the open sky like savages, unless one prefers one’s food seasoned by dust and insects.”
Carly’s next attempt had consisted of repeating some of the comments Father had made about last year’s speakers, but that didn’t work either.
“Don’t criticize your elders,” Father said, and that was that. A moment later they arrived at the bandstand.
The next day the Santa Luisa Ledger said that Colonel J. C. Edwards’s oration abounded in eloquence, wit, and instruction, and that Miss Maudie Longworth’s recitation of the Declaration of Independence was given in a most impressive and masterly manner, and that the organ, borrowed for the occasion from the music room of the Quigley mansion, was presided over with much elegance and grace by Miss Penelope Titus.
Carly supposed it was true. If she herself had failed to be instructed and impressed, it was probably because her mind had been elsewhere. Just before the three of them had taken their places in the audience, she’d caught a glimpse of Matt hanging by his knees from the limb of an oak tree. By dropping back a few steps she’d been able to motion to him, a frantic waving of arms which she wasn’t at all sure he read correctly. It had been a complicated message to send by sign language, and his face hadn’t exactly lit up with understanding. But on the other hand, understanding might be hard to read on a face that was upside down. So all during the instructive speeches and elegant music, she’d been busy wondering if Matt would be waiting for her.
But when she finally managed to edge away from Father during an intermission, Matt suddenly appeared at her side.
“Sure,” he said, “I knew. You were saying to wait around until you could sneak away from your pa. I knew that right off.”
Carly giggled, and then, deepening her voice to a pitch more suitable for Sherlock Holmes, she said, “A brilliant deduction, Dr. Watson. Or—what was that Indian’s name?”
“Eenzie,” Matt said.
“A brilliant deduction, Eenzie. Come on, let’s run.”
They ran through the park and out onto the shortcut path to Palm Drive, where they had to stop for breath. Clutching his side, Matt said, “By hokey, you sure can run some for a girl, Carly. Where the Sam Hill we goin’, anyways?”
“We’re going,” Carly said, “to solve the mystery of the Fourth of July Assassins.”
“The Fourth of July who?” Matt asked.
“Assassins. The evil murderers who threw the bomb under the royal coach.” When Matt went on looking as blank as a barn wall, she sighed and said, “Okay. That part is just pretend. But there’s a real mystery, and we’re going to solve it. We’re going to find out who threw the Big Reds at the Presbyterians. My theory is it was done by atheists.”
After a minute Matt closed his mouth and grinned. “Shucks,” he said. “I never heard tell of any—what did you call them?”
“Atheists,” Carly said.
“Yeah. I never heard of any of them in Santa Luisa. What do they look like?”
“They don’t look like anything special. But Brother Tupper—he was the visiting preacher from Carolina—Brother Tupper says they’re people who don’t believe in God or Congress or policemen, and they go around throwing bombs at the righteous. Some of them might live right here in Santa Luisa and we wouldn’t even know because they usually act like ordinary people except they don’t go to church or vote or pay their taxes.”
Matt grinned. “That part sounds like my grandpa.”
“Really?”
Matt stopped grinning. “He didn’t do it, Carly. He don’t even hold with firecrackers. He heard about a boy in Santa Barbara got his eyes put out, and since then he won’t let me have anything but ladyfingers.”
Carly laughed. The idea of Dan Kelly throwing firecrackers was pretty ridiculous. “I know he didn’t,” she said. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Chapter 22
WHEN CARLY AND Matt reached the corner of Palm and Main, the street was deserted. Except for some scraps of paper streamers and a few more orange peels and candy wrappers than usual, there was nothing to indicate that a parade had recently passed that way—or that a tragedy had nearly happened on that very spot. Their most exciting find was a few scraps of red firecracker paper in the middle of the street.
“Big Reds,” Carly said excitedly.
“That don’t mean nothing,” Matt said. “Lots of people have Big Reds.”
Carly nodded. She picked up a few scorched shreds of paper and carefully put them in her pocket. Then she looked up and down the street. Up and down—and up again, to the second story of the Olympic Hotel. Suddenly she grabbed Matt’s arm and pointed.
“Up there. The assassins must have been on the roof of the hotel. See, they could have been standing behind that false front where no one could see them,
and all they had to do was light the string and toss it over.”
“Yeah.” Matt said. “By hokey, Carly. I bet that’s it, all right.”
In the lobby the clerk, Elmer Somebody-or-Other, a pale, pointy-faced young man from Ventura, was slouched down in a swivel chair with his feet up on the desk, sound asleep. Carly and Matt tiptoed past him and up the stairs. She’d never been upstairs in the Olympic before, but it wasn’t hard to find the second flight of stairs and the door to the roof.
The incriminating evidence was right there, where Carly had expected to find it. On the tar-paper roof directly behind the false front, there were several burnt matchsticks and a couple of firecrackers that had obviously pulled loose from a string.
“See, I told you!” she said. “Big Reds. We’ve solved the mystery. We found where they, the atheists, were standing.”
“Okay,” Matt said, “but who are they? What do they look like?”
Carly sighed impatiently. “Like I told you, they probably look pretty much like everybody else. We’ve just got to get a good description of them.”
“How’re we going to do that?”
Carly began to shake her head, but all of a sudden she nodded instead. “I know,” she said. “I know how. Let’s go down and ask the clerk. Maybe he saw somebody go up on the roof.”
“Maybe,” Matt said. “’Less he was asleep at the time. Reckon he wasn’t, though. Not during the parade. Maybe he did see something.”
Carly had started down the first flight of stairs, with Matt right behind her, when suddenly she stopped dead. Turning back, she put her finger to her lips and then squatted down behind the bannisters. Behind her Matt did the same thing. By peering out between the rungs they were able to get a clear view of the front desk, where Elmer was now wide awake and talking to a visitor. The visitor was wearing a fashionable linen summer suit and a motoring duster and his large portly shape was strangely familiar. It looked like—and it was—Alfred Bennington Quigley.
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