“And then Fred Robie’s elderly father died suddenly. Because Robie had once promised, long before he built the house, to pay off his father’s debts, he felt he had to do it. It turned out they were enormous, and he went bankrupt overnight.”
“Boy, bad deal,” Tommy said. “Rotten dad.”
There was an awkward silence.
Petra nodded and continued: “Mr. and Mrs. Robie broke up, and within a year the house had been sold. So that’s the first tragedy.” She turned the page and read silently again.
Calder had taken his pentominoes out of his pocket and was down on his elbows, squinting at a tall shape made from five pieces.
Petra went on: “The next family was the Taylors. They had five boys. Here it says the boys were allowed to run laps from the end of the dining room to the end of the living room, ‘about one hundred feet or so,’ and that twelve laps equaled half a mile. The boys remembered loving the house —”
“No, really?” Tommy interrupted in a mocking voice.
“I’m just reading what it says,” Petra snapped, and went on. “Another boy was born after they moved in — man, what a nightmare — and then Mr. Taylor dropped dead suddenly. Within a year of buying the place! How do you like that?” Petra asked.
“The curse of the Robie House …,” Tommy whispered.
“Exactly,” Petra said, and Tommy closed his book happily. As she read on, she tried to tuck escaped hair back into her ponytail, then yanked the elastic out irritably. Using her pointer and her pinkie, she loaded the rubber band onto her hand in a shooting position. Tommy noticed she did this without looking.
Black curls fanned out around her face as she said, “So by November of 1912, two years after the house was finished, it had its third family. Now it’s the Wilburs and their two girls. Mrs. Wilbur wrote in her diary that six other families wanted the house when they bought it. Blah blah …” Petra ran her finger down the page.
“Oh! The oldest daughter died in 1916. How awful. So that makes the second death in the house in six years. Whoa — that’s one family disaster after another: divorce, then a dad dies, then a child dies.
“Wright visited the house at least three times while the Wilburs lived there. The youngest daughter said years later, in an interview, ‘I remember him well, his cape flying …’” Petra glanced at Calder. “A cape.”
Calder sat up.
Tommy looked from one to the other and said, “What’s the big deal about a cape? Doesn’t mean he was Superman or anything.”
Neither Calder nor Petra responded. She continued, “The daughter also reported that Wright said, ‘This is the best example of my work.’ Wow. That was in the 1920s, after he’d built lots of other things.
“And here Mrs. Wilbur says in her diary, ‘Frank Lloyd Wright called 4:30 P.M…. and asked if he could see the house…. He wants to buy the house to live in and build glass extension on S. first floor.’ Strange he wanted to buy a house he’d designed for someone else, don’t you think?”
Calder looked at Tommy. “That’s the south side, the garden area,” he said as he scooped up his pentominoes.
“I know that,” Tommy said. “I don’t think it’s surprising he wanted to live there. Who wouldn’t?”
Petra shut the book carefully. “So, to sum it up, each family thought they’d landed in paradise when they first moved in. That’s a lot of happiness mixed up with a lot of sadness. Three families, three sets of broken dreams.”
She looked toward the Robie House. “Three again …”
“Where’d you learn how to do that?” Tommy asked Petra. She looked surprised until she realized he meant the loaded rubber band. She shrugged and promptly shot him in the toe.
“Ow!” Tommy yelped. “Cool. I’ve gotta master that one.”
After Calder and Petra had dropped books into their backpacks, she said evenly, “Ever look out at night? With the lights out?”
“Kind of,” Tommy said, realizing he hadn’t.
“Yeah, Tommy, you could really keep an eye on the place,” Calder said, getting up and pressing his nose against the screen. Late sunlight danced through leaves, dappling the brick on the rear wall.
“Sure,” Tommy said. “Ghosts and all.”
“Ghosts?” Petra asked quickly. “You sound awfully relaxed about it.”
“It’s obvious, with all that sad history.” Tommy shrugged, as if the idea didn’t bother him.
He heard a splash from the kitchen. Goldman was telling him to be quiet.
Then, as the kids gazed out the window, an agonized moan floated out across the flat, bright light of late afternoon. It seemed to be seeping from the house itself, from the bricks and glass and wood.
The three kids froze.
Petra was the first to speak. “Did you hear that?”
Calder and Tommy nodded. It was hard to know what to say. Sharing as a threesome wasn’t exactly comfortable.
Petra found herself thinking, I’m sorry that you’re sad, house. You’ve lost so much.
As the boys turned away she stood in front of Tommy’s window for another few seconds. It was then that one of the third-floor windows sparkled back at her: A three-part shape like a wrapped candy — two triangles on either side of a rhombus — became instantly, dazzlingly clear. Petra sucked in her breath sharply.
Three! The window seemed to signal back. Three!
A moment later, the glass was dark and still. That was for me, Petra thought to herself — but what was it?
As Calder and Petra headed for Harper Avenue, Petra said, “I think the house heard me thinking.”
Calder looked curiously at her. “What do you mean?”
“You know that strange sound we heard. Well, I sent the house a silent message. I felt bad for it after everything I’d just read, and a window kind of answered me. This may sound crazy, but it answered me in threes.”
Calder stirred his pentominoes as Petra described seeing light catch the three rhombi in window after window on the first floor yesterday, and now the candy-shape on the third floor. “I didn’t notice the repeating threes so much yesterday until I saw the three today,” she finished.
“And I built structures that looked like parts of the Robie House with that group of three pentominoes, the F, the L, and the W — as if those three jumped into my hand,” Calder added.
“And this all began on June third, the day Ms. Hussey read us the article,” Petra said.
They walked silently for a minute or two, each sorting through their thoughts. Neither mentioned the three of Calder, Petra, and Tommy.
“You didn’t believe Tommy’s story about the hand, did you?” Petra asked.
“He doesn’t like being left out. And I know he thinks he missed a lot this year.”
“Yes,” Petra said, not unkindly. “So he lied?”
“He might have exaggerated,” Calder corrected.
They walked quietly for a few more steps.
“He kept interrupting me,” Petra said. “Like he didn’t really care about the research. Is he always like that?”
“Sometimes,” Calder said. “Petra?”
“Yes?”
“The pentominoes are doing strange things.” Calder stopped walking. “I pulled out five in Tommy’s apartment and got the F, L, and W again, just by chance, and the I and T. As I was building and listening to you read, I realized that I’d made a section of the Robie House wall and terrace, complete with a narrow casement window, and that I had added The Invisible Man to Frank Lloyd Wright’s initials. Not only that, but they overlap. The W shape can also be the M, like there’s a link there. Crazy, huh?”
Petra stared at him, her mouth slightly open.
“Magical,” she said softly. “What link do you think there is between The Invisible Man and Wright?”
“I don’t know,” Calder said. “Maybe just us thinking about both of them at the same time.”
“Or maybe the house is thinking about us, and the Invisible Man is a clue,” Petra s
aid slowly. “Maybe there is a ghost, an invisible spirit attached to the house that made me find the books and notice the windows twinkling and the five petals on a pansy with three for the face. Maybe something is making you pick up —”
“Did you say the five and three of a pansy?” Calder asked. “And the house is supposed to be pulled down on June twenty-first — I think there’s some kind of famous math sequence that has those numbers in it.”
Petra grabbed Calder’s arm. “I wonder if something from the house has tried to communicate with Tommy, too, and he just hasn’t known it.”
Calder’s heart sank. The stone fish! Was there a message in Tommy’s latest find? Tommy had told Calder that for some reason he’d wanted to dig in that one spot in the garden. He’d called it luck. Calder was dying to blurt out the secret of Tommy’s fish to Petra, but knew he couldn’t, not without his old friend’s permission.
What had Tommy done with the fish, anyway?
Calder phoned Tommy after he got home. “Where’s the fish?” he said immediately. “Now that you and Petra and I are doing research, you’ve got to tell her about it.”
“Why?” Tommy asked.
“Why not?” Calder said irritably. “Are you afraid she’ll read up on it and figure out it’s a treasure you can’t keep?”
“Thanks a lot, Calder. You think she’s the only one who knows stuff?”
“Of course not,” Calder said. “It’s just that we’re trying to save this house, and every piece of the puzzle might matter. Who knows — maybe the fish is a clue.”
“What would a little stone fish in the yard have to do with saving a falling-down house?” Tommy asked, as if Calder were some kind of idiot. “And why can’t you and I have secrets together anymore?”
“We can,” Calder said. “But not secrets that don’t make sense. I mean, if the three of us work together on this, we might come up with something. And finding an old carving in the yard is pretty exciting.”
“I don’t see what it has to do with the house,” Tommy said.
“Fine,” Calder said, starting to feel angry. “If you can’t share, don’t expect other people to include you.” He was thinking now about the Invisible Man books, and about how he’d been planning to tell Tommy about them.
“Include me? So you and Petra have secrets that you haven’t told me?”
“Tommy! You’re being such a jerk! I’m just saying that three brains are better than one. Or two.”
“Says who?” Tommy banged down the phone.
Calder sat still for a moment, looking straight ahead and not seeing anything. Why was Tommy being so selfish and pigheaded? He pulled his pentominoes out of his pocket and slapped them on the kitchen counter.
At that moment, Yvette Pillay breezed into the kitchen, stopped, and said, “Bad day?”
“Not really,” Calder said in a dull tone. Propping his chin on one fist, he began building. Echoes of the Robie House leaped immediately to mind. Moving the pieces, he recognized a section of the front terrace, then the balcony over the entryway. He smiled. Pentominoes were amazing, the way they chased the real world.
“Mom, isn’t there a pattern with 3 and 5 and 21 in it?”
His mom closed her eyes for a moment, then said, “0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, and so on. They’re called Fibonacci numbers. Why?”
Calder sat up. “No special reason.”
His mom went on to tell him that Leonardo Fibonacci was a famous Italian mathematician who was born in the twelfth century and did some extraordinary mathematical thinking.
“He helped introduce our modern number system to Western Europe. He also discovered a sequence of numbers in which, starting with 0 and 1, each number is the sum of the two numbers before it. So 0+1=1, 1+1=2, 2+1=3, 3+2=5, 5+3=8, and so on. And the magical thing about the Fibonacci Sequence is that the ratio between each of the numbers, as they increase, stays the same: 1.618.”
Calder nodded.
His mom went on, “And that’s not all: That ratio is called the Golden Ratio, and there’s also the Golden Rectangle and the Golden Spiral. The Golden Rectangle is a rectangle that has a ratio of length to width that’s 1 to 1.618. Many people believe that rectangles with these proportions are particularly pleasing. They’ve appeared in art and architecture for centuries, sometimes on purpose, sometimes just because they seem to turn up. You still with me?”
“I think so.”
“It gets weirder. Fibonacci numbers appear in nature, particularly in spiral shapes — leaves or petals that spiral, certain shells, pineapples, seed heads, even cabbage and lettuce. Wait —” She rummaged in the refrigerator, then clicked her tongue in irritation and headed outside. Calder followed.
In the front yard, she bent over a clump of iris. “These have three petals, and I know buttercups and pansies have five, and let’s see … most marigolds have thirteen, and I think black-eyed susans have twenty-one. Many trees have branches that grow in Fibonacci patterns — 2, 3, 5, 8, and so on. Once you start looking for the sequence, it’s hard not to see it.”
“Awesome!” Calder found himself thinking of the spirals on Tommy’s stone fish. And of Petra’s pansies. And how about the Robie House? Wright must have known about Fibonacci numbers.
After his mom went back inside, Calder stayed in the garden, bending over one group of plants after another. Sure enough, the 3, 5, 8 sequence was appearing everywhere — it was in leaves sprouting from delicate stems, even in the structure of veins in leaves. This Fibonacci guy identified one huge pattern.
“Lose something?”
Calder stood up at the sound of his dad’s voice. “Hey, Dad. You just coming home from work?”
His dad nodded and knocked the mud off his boots. Calder followed him inside.
Walter Pillay sat down at the kitchen table and rubbed his eyes.
“What’s the matter, dear? You look tired,” Yvette Pillay said.
“I was just at the Robie House.”
“What were you doing there, Dad? Our class walked over this morning. Ms. Hussey called the plans murder.”
“She did?” Calder’s mom said. Appropriately enough, she had just stabbed the opening on a frozen pizza box with a large knife.
“She says that dividing the house up would kill it. We’re trying to dig up any secrets about the place that could save it,” Calder explained.
Calder’s dad unlaced his boots. “The foreman told me about a mason, a Mr. Dare, who fell from the roof the other day. The man claims the roof kind of shook him off.”
Calder was all ears. “Go on, Dad.”
Walter Pillay looked at his son with a dazed expression. “I was half-listening to this fellow while I examined the area where he wanted to move a line of bushes, and suddenly I thought I saw the building expand and then contract. I mean —” He broke off and looked at his wife, who was frowning. “The glass in the windows rippled as if it were flexible, as if it were the skin of an animal or a reptile. I saw a — well, a wave of color as all those little segments of glass moved sequentially.”
Calder stared at his dad.
Glancing quickly at her son, Calder’s mom reached for three glasses and put them down firmly on the kitchen table. She poured three lemonades.
“You saw a bizarre optical illusion,” she said in her driest mathematician voice. “It is an extremely complex structure. And, now, an unstable one.”
“Like the building breathed in and then out,” Calder said quietly.
Walter Pillay nodded. “Exactly. My impression was that it took a deep breath and sighed. The man I was meeting with had his back to the building when it happened, and didn’t see it. No one witnessed it but me.”
“‘Witnessed’ is a strong word.” Yvette Pillay had her head on one side, and her apricot hair caught the late afternoon sunshine, drawing a flowery softness into the kitchen. She looked pointedly at Calder, worried that he was a bit too interested.
“You’re not going to help them, are you, Dad?�
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Walter Pillay shook his head. “No, I found myself saying that I wouldn’t do the job.”
“Good.”
Suddenly Calder had an idea. Grabbing the phone book from the top of the refrigerator, he hurried upstairs and looked up the number for the University of Chicago Hospital.
“Mr. Dare?” a woman’s voice asked. “Who’s calling, please?”
“A kid who knows something,” Calder said awkwardly.
“Just a minute,” the voice on the other end said, and Calder could hear a condescending smile in her tone. Why did some grown-ups always underestimate kids?
“Henry Dare here.” The voice was deep, and Calder suddenly felt young and shy.
“Uh, Mr. Dare — I mean, my name is Calder Pillay and my class and I are trying to save the Robie House, and I have something to tell you.”
There was a silence on the other end, and then, “What do you know about me?”
Calder wished Petra was with him — she always knew what to say. “Well, that you fell.”
He felt himself blushing about the accidental rhyme. He sounded like an idiot.
“Yup, Jack and Jill time,” the mason said. “A wicked tumble, but no broken crown.” The mason snorted. “And no Jill.” He snorted again.
Why was the man talking in nursery rhymes? Did Calder sound that young to him?
Calder cleared his throat and lowered his voice as much as he could, trying to sound like his dad when he wanted to wrap up a discussion. “Would it be possible for me to stop by after school tomorrow? I have a story that I think you’ll want to hear.”
Mr. Dare agreed to a short visit.
After Calder hung up, he gave the air a high five, then patted himself on the back with a quick whack. He’d done it, and done it alone! Suddenly the possibilities felt enormous, and the faded light of early evening, which Calder usually avoided by turning on the lights, looked magical.
Should he ask Tommy and Petra to come to the hospital with him?
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