No, he’d do this alone.
Return to “Fibonacci Numbers”
After Tommy hung up the phone with Calder, he looked miserably at Goldman, who was back by his window. Then Tommy kicked the wall, and the fish shot around his bowl three times, his eyes huge.
“Sorry to frighten you,” Tommy said. “I was mad.” He noticed that Goldman had buried the stone carving without even being asked; only the tip of the tail still showed. Amazing the way Goldman always knew what was best.
Tommy’s mom was folding clothes in the next room, having just come up from the laundry room in the basement. “What, son?” she asked.
“Nothing. Just talking to Goldman.” Tommy sighed, and his eye landed on Petra’s rubber band, which was still on the floor. He reached down and picked it up. Now how had she done that? He experimented with loading it onto his fingers so he could aim and shoot, but it was harder than it looked.
Zelda Segovia came into the room and sat down next to him. “You look unhappy.” His mom always said what she thought, as far as he could tell, which he usually liked.
Tommy didn’t know what to say. He looked out the window.
His mom followed his glance. “How do you like the new scenery? It’s sad that the Robie House is going to be demolished, but I guess we’ll be able to see it all happen from here,” she said.
“Ms. Hussey said it was murder,” Tommy said. “She wants us to figure out how to save the building.”
“Save it!” Zelda Segovia laughed. “Well, that’s a tall order.”
“Do you know any secrets about the place?” Tommy asked, being sure not to let his eyes wander to Goldman’s gravel.
“Hmm … not exactly, but when I realized that our new apartment faced the back of the Robie House, you know what I thought of? Funny, actually, that you mentioned murder.”
Tommy now looked directly at his mom. He liked to focus on her blue eye more than her brown eye. “What?”
“A movie called Rear Window. It was old when I was a kid, but I adored it.”
“What’s it about?”
“Oh, a man spends a lot of time looking out the rear window of his apartment — a window not too different from ours — at other rear windows, and sees some suspicious stuff. But that’s all I’ll tell you,” his mom finished with a twinkle. “Why don’t you invite Calder and a couple of other kids over and I’ll rent a copy,” she suggested.
“Oh, that’s okay,” Tommy said. “But I’d like to see it, maybe just with you.”
“Great,” his mom said, standing up so that Tommy didn’t see her slightly sad expression. There had been so many lonely times for her son over the past year, and she had hoped that coming back to the familiar world of Hyde Park would make things easier for him. It didn’t seem like it had.
“How about tomorrow night? I’ll meet you at the library after school,” Tommy offered.
“Okay!” his mom said quickly, and ruffled his crew cut. “It’s a date.”
After dinner, Petra took her backpack up to her bedroom. She pulled out the stack of Robie House books. Then, unable to resist, she picked up the copy of The Invisible Man that she had been reading the day before.
She decided to leaf through the pages, put her finger down, and see what sentence she landed on. If Calder’s pentominoes were talking to him, maybe the book would talk to her. Nobody could see her doing such a silly thing, and besides, there had to be a reason she had stumbled on this old book — not once, but twice.
Closing her eyes, she first ruffled back and forth through the pages, pretending she was shuffling a deck of cards, and then picked one page and one spot on that page. She opened her eyes. Under her finger was the line:
IT WAS ALL LIKE A DREAM, THAT VISIT TO THE OLD PLACES.
A dream! She had talked about the Robie House as a dream this afternoon, and visited it this morning. And here was a visit to the old places…. She shivered and closed the book, suddenly afraid of it. The story seemed almost to be echoing her life — or was it the other way around? And if it was the other way around, where was the Invisible Man? She pushed the thought away firmly.
And then she remembered her neighbor Mrs. Sharpe. She had lived in Hyde Park forever. Would she know anything unusual about “the old places?”
Petra went to the hall phone and dialed Calder’s number.
“I have an idea,” she said right away. “How about we visit Mrs. Sharpe?”
Calder sounded uneasy. “Well, maybe. But we can’t go without Tommy.”
“So invite him,” Petra said flatly.
“I can’t.”
When Petra didn’t reply, Calder said quickly, “I have an idea I’m following up on my own tomorrow afternoon. How about you talk to Mrs. Sharpe, and then we can compare notes. Private investigators in the real world don’t travel around in clumps.”
On my own … the words hurt. A million things jumped to Petra’s mind, like, Why are you doing something without me when you know how well we work together? and, How long have you had this separate plan? and, Since when have we traded information like professionals? Aren’t we friends anymore?
All of this, she knew, was Tommy’s fault.
Afraid her voice might get wobbly, Petra said only, “Fine,” and hung up the phone.
She marched into her room, shut the door, and flopped down on the bed. She pulled out The Invisible Man and read some more — better to be scared than sad.
The book was wonderfully distracting. Petra noticed that it didn’t exactly tell you that the man was invisible under his clothing, but you got that idea bit by bit. As the story went on, the stranger became angry and violent, and crept around the village with no clothes on, once to rob a household for money. It was winter, and at times when the stranger was nowhere to be seen, a loud sniff would come from thin air — he had caught a cold. Hours went by when he stayed in his room doing what he called scientific experiments, occasionally cursing and breaking bottles. Empty sleeves slammed doors, clothing floated around by itself, and a chair once flew through the air and chased the innkeeper’s wife.
Again, Petra had to put the book down. The idea of a naked, furious, invisible man who could sneak around a house or a neighborhood was definitely terrifying. And embarrassing.
But the idea of being invisible … Petra could imagine the thrill of walking around without anyone seeing her. She’d be able to listen to conversations, read over shoulders, even slip inside the Robie House…. There could be an amazing power, a perfectly safe power, in being invisible. The thought was delicious.
Petra felt suddenly better, and called Mrs. Sharpe, who invited her for tea the next afternoon at four o’ clock. She told herself that going over there with both Tommy and Calder would have been too much, anyway. Three was a crowd.
The words too much, too much washed back and forth in her head as she was falling asleep. Just like waves on the sand, she thought, or water sloshing in a bowl … Suddenly she sat bolt upright.
Why had Tommy moved his fishbowl when they were visiting this afternoon? He’d been walking so quickly that the water sloshed back and forth, and she’d noticed Calder’s surprised expression. That sneaky little kid was trying to hide something, she just knew it.
Tommy was hiding something that he didn’t want Petra, and maybe Calder, to see. Something in the fishbowl.
What was it?
The next day, at 3:46, Calder, Petra, and Tommy each walked to a different part of Hyde Park, forming a scalene triangle that stretched rapidly. By 4:10, they had become the vertices in an isosceles triangle. A triangle of exactly the same proportions existed, oddly enough, in the Robie House windows, but none of the three knew that.
Calder knocked softly at the hospital room door.
“Come in,” a man’s voice replied, and Calder felt like running away. He now wished, with all his heart, that he hadn’t come alone. He stepped inside.
Henry Dare looked red and white and sticky, rather like a large candy cane. He had banda
ges around his head and his middle, and perspiration on his forehead, which was deeply sunburned. He was younger than Calder expected.
“Sit, kid.”
Calder did, and resisted the temptation to stir the pentominoes in his pocket. “We’re here about — I mean, I’m here about — well, a few of us were over at the Robie House yesterday, and well, we kind of saw the house breathe.” Calder’s eyes were skating around the walls as he talked. His throat got very dry just before he said the last word, and he had to stop and swallow.
There was a silence from the mason. When he spoke, his voice was kind. “Heard any stories about my fall?”
Calder’s mind darted back and forth like a trapped mouse. “No, what happened?”
Obviously he knows you’re lying, Calder thought to himself furiously. Of course I’ve heard stuff, or I wouldn’t be here.
Mr. Dare looked out the window. “It’s like this, kid: I was up on the roof four days ago, and some strange stuff ran through my head. I was feeling kind of free and invisible up there, and just glad to be alive on that spring morning, and right after that, the house twitched — like an animal or a fish or something. Like it knew what I was thinking, and wanted to tell me who was the boss.”
“Invisible?” Calder repeated. “And you said it twitched like a fish.” He and Mr. Dare looked at each other.
“Sounds nutty, doesn’t it?” the mason said.
“Not exactly,” Calder said slowly.
“And that’s not all.” Mr. Dare went on to tell him about the voice he thought he’d heard as he fell, the one that said either “Stay away!” or “Stay and play!”
“Will you be going back to work there?” Calder asked. This mason seemed like an okay guy; Calder wondered why he had taken such a nasty job.
“How could I go back?” Mr. Dare replied, giving each word equal emphasis, then grunted with pain as he tried to sit up. Calder wondered if he meant I’m not well enough. Or had he meant How could I go back to such a scary place? Or was it How could I work on a job like that?
“How could I go back?” Mr. Dare murmured again as he sank back into the pillows. His eyes closed and Calder tiptoed out.
Something bothered him about Mr. Dare’s story. The mason had mentioned feeling invisible, and he’d mentioned a fish … and Petra had found The Invisible Man, and Tommy a fish.
Was this just a coincidence? Or had he stumbled on a small piece of a much bigger pattern, a pattern that might help to rescue the Robie House?
While Calder walked home from the hospital, his pentominoes rattling busily, Tommy and his mom settled down with chips and salsa in front of the movie.
Rear Window was about a photographer with a broken leg who lived in a small, second- or third-floor apartment, a place that was almost exactly like the one Tommy and his mom were in now. It was summer, and very hot, and everyone’s windows were open at night. Stuck in a wheelchair for several weeks, the photographer began watching the drama going on across the courtyard. One apartment belonged to a man and his invalid wife, and they could sometimes be heard arguing. And then, one evening, the photographer heard a sharp cry from behind the lowered blinds in that apartment. All night he saw the husband coming and going from the building with a heavy suitcase. At dawn he saw him washing large knives in the kitchen sink.
By then, the photographer was truly curious and more than a little worried. The wife’s bed was now empty, and the husband could be seen opening and shutting drawers in her room, packing a huge trunk.
Afraid that he might be the only witness to a murder, the photographer, in his window, continued to watch the man across the way in his, and one tense scene led to another. By the end of the movie, Tommy had inched over until he and his mom were squashed together in a corner of the sofa.
“Wow,” Tommy said to her afterward. “I didn’t know old movies could be that scary.”
“The director, Alfred Hitchcock, is famous for suspense. You don’t see much violence, but you’re on the edge of your seat. His movies are almost more about the power of what you imagine than the reality of what you see,” Zelda Segovia said.
Later that night, while she brushed her teeth, Tommy’s mom heard scraping sounds of furniture being dragged across the floor. When she came in to say good night, she saw that her son had moved his bed directly in front of the open window, on the other side of Goldman’s bowl.
She smiled. “Watch out. You may become another Man in the Window. Sorry, Goldman: two men in the window. Better not turn that flashlight on—someone might see you.”
“That’s exactly right,” Tommy said quietly, peering out into the darkness. He lay awake for some time, watching light ripple across the segments of glass in the empty rear windows of the Robie House each time a car went by. Inviting, that’s what the house was. Tommy tried to imagine what the kids who lived on the third floor, so many years before, might have seen when they looked out through those patterns. A world of triangles and parallelograms? Not the bedroom he was lying in, that’s for sure. His building hadn’t even been built yet.
He heard a quiet, uneven tapping, as if a woodpecker had gotten up too early and was doing a careless job. This was followed by a metallic clink, a thud, then silence. Leaning on his elbows now, Tommy squinted at the house. He looked hard at the third-floor windows he had just been thinking about, and couldn’t help remembering his lie about the hand waving like a fan. What if it appeared? What if it waved to him right now?
To his relief, all was dark glass, brick, and the hint of flowers in a breeze pulling through the neighborhood like an unseen current. As if in response to the thought of water, Goldman took another lap around his bowl. Tommy lay down again, thinking that even though things weren’t as great as they used to be with Calder, it was good to be back in Hyde Park, good to be sleeping next to Goldman on this spring night, and good to be watching the rear windows of a house that felt so much like a home.
Felt, he wondered drowsily to himself. I’ve never been inside the place — how do I know what it feels like? He didn’t allow himself to wonder for even a second if he knew what a home felt like.
The best collectors are also travelers, he reminded himself. They take their homes with them. They live in many different places, and that’s the way they like it.
Tommy was fast asleep when the tapping began again. Neither he nor Goldman heard it.
Mrs. Sharpe lived around the corner from Harper Avenue, by herself, in a big house that she had been in for almost fifty years. As Petra stood on the front porch that Tuesday afternoon, she wished with all her heart that Calder was with her. The two of them had had tea with Mrs. Sharpe several times during the past fall, when they’d been working on finding the stolen painting, but Petra had never visited her alone.
The door flew open the instant Petra rang the bell, and Mrs. Sharpe said in an icy tone, “Hurry up, girl. You’re letting the cool air out.”
Passing lush Oriental rugs and walls covered with paintings and books, Petra followed her elderly neighbor into the kitchen. Mrs. Sharpe’s house smelled like furniture polish and chocolate. She had baked cookies just for Petra, and on a warm day! Mrs. Sharpe was full of surprises, Petra thought fondly. You could never quite relax around her, but Petra didn’t mind. After all, Mrs. Sharpe had at least four ideas behind her back for every one that you saw up front. She was a thinker, and as Ms. Hussey had once said, thinkers shouldn’t have to be predictable. Today she was wearing a silk dress that reminded Petra of a ripe plum, and her white hair was twirled neatly into its customary bun.
After she had poured them each a glass of iced tea with mint and Petra had eaten two warm cookies, Mrs. Sharpe said, “So. How’s the sleuthing business?”
“Well, our class visited the Robie House yesterday.” Petra knew that Ms. Hussey and Mrs. Sharpe had become friends the previous fall.
Mrs. Sharpe nodded her approval. “Ah. So that’s why you’re here. This plan is a dreadful end to an extraordinary piece of art.”
&
nbsp; She ran one bony finger down the side of her glass, leaving a trail through the condensation. “In 1955, there were thirteen of us living in the house, all students. I was only there for several weeks, while they completed a University of Chicago dormitory, but it was an experience I’ve never forgotten.”
“You lived in the house?” Petra squeaked. “You were a student here?”
“Art history,” Mrs. Sharpe said dryly. She looked at her lap for a moment, as if waiting for a fly to stop buzzing. Petra held her breath, determined not to interrupt again.
“Living in that house felt a bit like living in a slowly turning kaleidoscope. The light captured by those windows changes by the hour, and sometimes even by the second, and yet what you see always fits perfectly with everything else. It’s almost as if Wright managed to set up a resonance between the structure itself and all of the details — art glass, ceiling grilles, rugs, lamps, balconies — that changes continuously and yet remains seamless. I’m not sure anyone has ever been able to figure out exactly how he did it. A symphony, that’s what the place is like — a complex Bach symphony that sharpens your mind even if you can’t comprehend every strand of harmony. And when you stand inside, it’s almost as if you become part of the art yourself, an instrument in Mr. Wright’s hands. There’s the feeling of belonging to someone else’s imagination.”
Mrs. Sharpe had a faraway look Petra had never seen before. She knew Mrs. Sharpe liked to write, and now Petra knew why — her words fit gracefully and cleanly, in an of course kind of way. Petra was glad the boys weren’t squeaking chairs or crumbling cookies next to her.
Almost as if she’d forgotten Petra was there, the old woman continued, “Wright had a difficult personal life, and many people thought he was arrogant. He was a bit of a puzzle himself, a complicated person who could somehow make impossible situations look like they weren’t what they were.
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