But, except for the fact that the Professor didn’t offer to give back their things, it was a very successful visit. As April was getting ready to go, she said, “Well, good-bye, and thanks again, Profes—I mean Dr. Huddleston. My grandmother says your name is Dr. Julian Huddleston. Are you really a doctor?”
“Not a medical doctor. A doctor of philosophy—a Ph.D. I once taught at the university, but that was a long time ago. I’d be most pleased if you and your friends continued to call me the Professor. I’d prefer it, in fact.”
“So do I,” April said. “Okay, good-bye, Professor. And thanks again.”
When April got back to the apartment, there was a letter waiting for her. It was from her mother. It was the first letter April had had for over a month. Of course, Dorothea would probably have written if she’d known about April’s narrow escape, but she hadn’t known. For some reason, April hadn’t told her, and she’d asked Caroline not to either. When Caroline had asked April why, she’d just said, “I don’t know. What’s the use. It’s too late now.”
But today there was a letter, and an invitation.
Darling,
Nick and I are planning on spending three or four days in Palm Springs over Christmas. We want you to hop on a plane and fly down to us. There’ll be swimming and sunning and lots of fun. We’ll meet you at the airport if you let us know when and where. We’re dying to see you again.
Love,
Dorothea
April took the letter to her room. She sat down by the window and reread it three times and felt around inside herself for reactions. She found some, all right, both good and bad; but not nearly as much either way as she would have expected. Not as much happiness to be asked, and not nearly as much anger to be asked so late and for so little. After a while she got out some paper and wrote an answer. Then she took both letters and went looking for Caroline. She found her in the kitchen sewing sequins on a Christmas stocking made of felt. Without saying anything, April put the letters down in front of her.
Dear Dorothea, (April’s letter said)
Thank you for inviting me to Palm Springs. It sounds like lots of fun. But Grandma and I have our plans all made for Christmas Eve and I have a date to spend part of Christmas Day with my friend, Melanie. So I guess I can’t make it this time.
Love,
April
P.S. You should see our tree. We decorated it yesterday and it’s great.
Caroline was such a quiet person it was hard sometimes to know what she was thinking. But lately, April usually thought she could tell. Right then, Caroline only smiled and said, “That’s a very nice letter, dear,” and bent her head back down over the sequins. And the sun coming in the little stained-glass section of the breakfast room window made her smooth gray hair look just like a pigeon’s wing.
Christmas Keys
ON THE MORNING OF CHRISTMAS EVE, CAROLINE had a telephone call from the Professor, and afterwards she asked April to phone all the members of the Egypt gang and ask them to come to the Halls’ for just a few minutes that night after dinner. “The Professor wants to see you,” she said. “He said he knows you’ll all want to be with your families tonight and he won’t keep you long. But he wants to see all six of you for just a few minutes.”
“What for?” April asked.
“I think he wants it to be a surprise,” Caroline said.
So April called up all the other Egyptians and made the invitation sound just as mysterious and intriguing as she could. Personally, she had a suspicion that the Professor was just going to give back all their stuff, but as Toby said, there’s nothing like keeping things livened up.
After dinner Caroline made some hot spiced cider, and April arranged a plate of fancy Christmas cookies that she and Caroline had baked. Just about then the guests started to arrive. Ken and Toby came first, looking slightly embarrassed to be visiting where a girl lived. Then Melanie arrived with Marshall, and Elizabeth came a few minutes afterwards. They sat around for a while drinking cider and listening to a Christmas carol program. They speculated about what the Professor had in mind, and had just about agreed that he was probably bringing back all their stuff, when he arrived—apparently empty-handed. So that was the end of that theory.
The Professor gave April his coat and said hello to everyone in his strange formal way. Caroline got everyone seated again and turned the music down very low; but for a while they all just sat there feeling uncomfortable. The whole situation was so unusual that nobody knew quite how to act.
At last the Professor put down his cup, looked around the room, and said, “I’ve come to tell you a story.”
Out of the corner of her eye, April saw Ken and Toby exchange raised eyebrows. She narrowed her eyes and nailed them both with her fiercest glare. When somebody saves your life, it makes him sort of your property, and nobody was going to make fun of the Professor with April around, even if he was going to treat them as if they were little kids.
“A Christmas story?” Marshall asked.
“No—” the Professor began, but then he paused. “Yes,” he said, “I suppose it is. I suppose it is a Christmas story, in a way. But it’s a sad story—a terrible story—too terrible for children, perhaps. And yet, I feel that it’s something the six of you ought to know.”
April felt, rather than saw, Ken and Toby prick up their ears. She gave an internal nod of approval. He had them now. The Professor was doing all right.
“The story begins when I was a young man. I was really a professor then, at the university. I was always a very quiet and reserved person and at that time my life, even my work, was beginning to seem rather dull and routine. But then one day, a young woman enrolled in one of my classes and changed my entire way of life. Her name was Anne.”
April and Melanie looked at each other and their eyes made extravagant comments.
“Anne was an artist,” the Professor went on. “My subject was anthropology, which, as you may know, is the study of all the various kinds and conditions of mankind. Anne was not particularly interested in anthropology, but she enrolled in a class I was teaching on primitive and ancient peoples because of her interest in primitive art. Anne used to tease me about anthropology—she said anthropologists were only interested in people in general and she liked people in particular—and she did, too. All kinds of people. She was at ease with everyone—lighthearted, fun-loving, enthusiastic and optimistic. There was a hopefulness about her—Well, after we were married I began to see life in a new way.
“Anne was delighted when I decided to travel and do research. While I studied various tribes, she studied their art forms and collected samples of their crafts. And usually she managed to get involved in various efforts to improve the living conditions of the people of the area. The A–Z store was Anne’s idea, in the beginning. Her plan was to make it an outlet for some of the native handicrafts from areas where we had worked. It was on our last visit home together that she bought the building and made the first arrangements.”
The Professor paused as if he was trying to think what to say next. “On our last trip,” he went on at last, “Anne was visiting a mission where she was trying to set up a production center for native handicrafts. The people of the area were very poor and she thought it would provide them with a means of earning a better living. There had been some unrest in the next province, but we thought—Well, there was an uprising, a small local rebellion. The mission was attacked and Anne was killed—by the very people she was trying to help.
“I came back here. I had no desire to teach, so I sold our house and moved into Anne’s store. I had some idea of opening the store and operating it along the lines that Anne had planned, but I soon gave it up. I gradually broke off many of the contacts that Anne had made and let the store become a junk shop. I had a small income so I didn’t have to make the business pay, but for some reason I kept the store open.
“As the years went by, the store and I became dusty junkyards, and after a while I didn’t care.”
The Professor looked up and around the circle of intent faces, and his lips moved in their slight smile. “And then one day,” he said, “I heard a strange noise in my storage yard. At first, I told myself I was watching to make sure nothing was damaged and no fires were started. You know, sacred fires can be just as dangerous as ordinary ones. Then, after the murder, when my business dropped to almost nothing and I had little else to do, I watched more and more often.”
“You mean, you watched us do the Ceremony for the Dead and the oracle and all that stuff?” April asked.
“Yes, all of that.”
The Egyptians exchanged sheepish glances, and Ken hit himself on the forehead in an agony of embarrassment. “Sheesh!” he moaned.
“The oracle!” Toby said suddenly. “Hey! You didn’t have anything to do with—”
The Professor nodded. “I’m afraid I must plead guilty to that, too. I watched you leave that night and I saw the octopus left behind in the rain. I went out and pried open the old padlock and went into the yard. The wind was blowing the rain into the shed quite badly and under the altar covering seemed the driest place. I was getting wet and was in such a hurry that I didn’t stop to consider that it might be hard to find. Then, as I was watching the next day I suddenly conceived of a plan to direct you to the lost article by way of”—he paused and his lips moved again in his small stiff smile—“the oracle.
“What I did then, in behalf of Security, was done on the spur of the moment, and afterwards I tried not to think about it. I think I decided to play the part of the oracle because I felt obligated to let you know what I had done with Security, and the oracle offered a way to do it without any direct contact. And contact—involvement—was what I had spent years eliminating entirely from my life.
“I had begun to suspect, however, that one of you”—the Professor looked at Marshall—“knew that I was watching. But he was very careful in the way he watched back. I wasn’t entirely sure until the night of the attempt on April’s life.
“I was reading when I heard a sound in the storage yard and, of course, I went immediately to the window. When I saw—when I realized what was happening, my first reaction was the natural one. I grabbed up a block of wood—but then, twenty-five years of self-imprisonment took control. I couldn’t bring myself to break the glass and call.
“I stood there holding the block of wood in my hand, and then Marshall turned around and looked at me. I could see that he knew that I was there and that he was asking me to help. And then I broke the glass—”
The Professor’s voice stopped and everyone waited until, at last, it became clear that his story was over, even though it hadn’t sounded like an ending at all. For a long time no one moved or talked. The room was very still except for a boys’ choir singing “Hark the Herald Angels” very softly on the radio.
But then Marshall leaned over and poked Melanie. “Is that the end?” he whispered loudly.
“Shhh!” Melanie said, and nodded.
“But what was the Christmas part?” Marshall whispered even more loudly.
The Professor must have heard Marshall but he didn’t answer. Instead he began to feel around in his jacket pocket. There was a jingling sound, and he brought out a handful of shiny new keys. The keys had long chains to wear around your neck, and on the head part of each one a name was engraved. The Professor read off the names one by one and handed out the keys. “Elizabeth, Toby, Melanie—”
“Is it—is it to Egypt?” Elizabeth whispered as she took her key, and at the Professor’s nod there was a storm of comment.
“Hey, neat!”
“Awesome!”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Hey, yeah, thanks.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Of course, you’ll have to enter on the other side of the yard now,” the Professor said. “I’ve had a new padlock put on the door—a padlock with just six keys—”
Caroline got up and went to the kitchen for a fresh round of cider and cookies, but everyone was too busy talking and planning to be much interested in food. “No, not tomorrow,” Melanie said. “Tomorrow’s Christmas and we’ll have to be home most of the time. But the next day—”
“Yeah,” Toby agreed, “we’ll be doing the togetherness bit at our pad tomorrow, too. My dad’s even promised to stay out of his studio all day. But the day after’s okay by me.”
So the date was made—Egypt, the day after Christmas, right after lunch. Then everybody got up and started getting ready to go home. At the door Ken turned back. “Uh, Professor,” he said. “Are you going to—that is—are you still going to watch us all the time?”
Everybody laughed. “No, I’m afraid I won’t have time,” the Professor said. “I seem to have gotten myself involved in being a real storekeeper. I’m going to try to do some importing again, handicrafts and curios. I’ll be doing quite a bit of traveling for a while until I get my stock lined up. But perhaps, once in a while when I’m home, you’ll invite me to a special occasion.”
“Sure,” Toby said, “that’ll be great. And thanks again for the great present. I sure wish we had something for you.”
“Yes,” some of the others chimed in. “We should have brought something for you.”
The Professor held up his hand. “But I thought you understood,” he said. “You’ve already made me a gift—a very important one.” He smiled his strange solemn smile and put his hand on Marshall’s head. “That’s how I should have ended my story—if I could have explained it—with your gift to me. That would have been the Christmas part. That’s what makes it a Christmas story.”
• • •
Late the next afternoon April and Melanie lay across April’s bed and chatted. They were stuffed to contented laziness with Christmas dinner and they had been down to Melanie’s apartment to look at her presents and then up to look at April’s.
They had talked about Christmas and presents until the subject was exhausted and then they began to talk about the keys and the Professor and what he’d said the evening before.
They just lay there for a while, dreaming and digesting, and then Melanie suddenly sat up. “I feel sad,” she said.
April made a “why?” expression. “Oh, I don’t know,” Melanie said. “It’s about Egypt. Going back and everything. It seems like it won’t be the same.”
“Yeah,” April said. “I thought about that, too.”
“We’ll go back, thinking it will be so terrific—and what will we do? The same things all over again? We’ve done just about everything exciting about Egypt.”
“Yeah, and it’s just awful when you go back to something that was so great the way you remembered it and it’s no good anymore. It even ruins remembering.”
Melanie nodded tragically and they both collapsed again. They lay there, staring into the future gloomily for a while, their chins on their hands. Then April turned towards Melanie, slowly and thoughtfully.
“Melanie,” she said, “what do you know about Gypsies?”
Turn the page
for your first glimpse of
by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
CHAPTER
I
is birth certificate, if he even had one, probably just said Willy Baggett, but for most of the seventh grade he’d been signing his school papers William S. Baggett.
William S. Baggett
But that, too, would change as soon as he made his move. No more Baggett then—and good riddance.
Actually, he’d started thinking about running away almost seven years ago. That was when he’d started going to school and began to learn, among other things, that not everybody behaved like Baggetts. And not very long after that he began putting every penny he could get his hands on into what he thought of as his Getaway Fund. Well, not quite every penny. He did spend a dime, now and then, on a Saturday matinee at the Roxie Theater. Watching how your favorite movie actors could make you believe they were all those different people was one thing he’d never been able to d
o without.
In spite of an occasional movie, his secret stash had grown pretty fast while the Baggetts still lived in the city, where there were lots of lawns to mow and flower gardens to water and weed. And even after they had to get out of town, he’d managed to add a few coins now and then by doing odd jobs at school—carrying stuff for teachers, and mopping up on rainy days for Mr. Jenkins, the janitor.
He’d made other plans and preparations too. Besides saving his earnings, he began to keep a long, narrow knapsack beside his bed, and all his most important belongings right there within arm’s reach, ready to push into it. And then, someday, he would take his Getaway Fund out of its supersecret, hard-to-reach hiding place, sling his knapsack over his shoulder, and simply walk away. And that would be that.
But what then? Where would he run to? Over the years he’d changed his mind a lot, but just recently he’d come up with some interesting possibilities. Like, how about Hollywood? Or Broadway in New York City? Or even better, Stratford-upon-Avon. Okay, not likely. But, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” Right?
He never told anyone, of course. Not even Jancy, at least not until after she’d pretty much guessed. But the little bit Jancy knew didn’t worry him that much. His sister would never do anything to ruin his future career. He was sure of that. Well, he had been sure anyway, until the day her guinea pig got flushed down the toilet, which not only messed up the plumbing, but apparently changed everything.
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