As they left the garden, Tommy looked back at the lagoon and thought he saw the tiny island, the one shaped like a fish, lift its tail ever so slightly.
As Calder, Petra, and Tommy set off the next night for the movies, fireflies dotted the Robie House lawn and garden, and the sky above the trees glowed a dusky blue.
Tommy’s mom stood on the corner and watched until they were out of sight. After all, as Tommy had pointed out, it seemed silly for her to walk them right to the door of the movies when it was still light out. The three had agreed not to look toward the Robie House, and they marched along in a stiff line, hardly noticing the summer evening.
They circled around the block and crept up the alleyway behind the house. Moving one by one, they hid in the bushes between a weathered tool shed and a pile of lumber.
Within half an hour it was dark. Waiting until they couldn’t hear any traffic or pedestrian noises, the three crept out of their hiding place.
While Calder and Petra crouched in the shadows next to the Robie House, Tommy ran out to the sidewalk and peered both ways. He gave a thumbs-up sign. While the other two maneuvered the ladder up against the building, Tommy dashed back, the three made sure it was steady, and he started to climb.
Calder and Petra watched anxiously from below. When he reached the window, Tommy gave the glass a gentle push. Nothing. He pushed again. Still nothing.
“It’s locked!” he whispered, and leaned out from the ladder and squinted along the second floor. To his left he saw a window that didn’t meet the sill in the same spot as the others.
He hurried down, and the three hustled the ladder several yards along the building and repeated the whole procedure. As Tommy climbed the second time, they heard feet coming down the street. It was too late to hide, and the kids froze.
The feet moved on past the house, and Calder and Petra gave each other a silent high five: So far, so good.
Tommy was outside the second window now and pushed gently. It creaked open, swinging inward about six inches, and stopped with a dull thunk. Tommy reached his hand cautiously inside. He felt around for several seconds and carefully pulled the window shut again.
Petra was secretly glad it wasn’t her hand reaching into the blackness.
“There’s something like a file cabinet inside,” Tommy whispered as he climbed back down.
“Let’s keep trying,” Calder whispered back, and after leaving the ladder just where they had found it, they crept along the east wall of the Robie House property, by the garage, and ducked inside the gates. Slipping through an opening that led to the south side of the house, they found themselves in the garden next to the first-floor terrace.
Just then they heard voices, and sank to a sitting position with their backs to the garden wall. This side of the house was brighter than the rear because of streetlights, and it would be more difficult not to be seen.
The walking stopped on the other side of the wall, and they heard the jingle of metal tags and the pant-snuffle-snuffle of a large dog.
“Imagine the second-floor windows at night! I understand it looked wonderful, all those round lamps lit like so many moons….” Next they heard a plastic bag scrunching.
“Yes, so sad about the house coming down,” the second voice said, muffled by bending over to pick up something.
The three kids smelled the something. After the dog walkers had gone, Tommy unpinched his nose. “I’m glad I have a goldfish!”
Petra giggled.
“Shh! More people,” Calder whispered.
As they waited in silence for them to go by, Petra gazed at the first-floor windows, once the children’s playroom, and thought of Fred Robie’s son in his little car, zooming in and out the door to the courtyard, imagining nothing but a blissful present. Suddenly she felt pulled by the passage of time as if by a dark current, and wondered if one day some unknown person would think of her, a young girl with puffy hair and glasses, sitting in this garden on a summer night.
“Someone told me there are ghosts in here.” The voice was young, and sounded a little like Ms. Hussey.
“Yeah, like the ghosts in your library carrel,” someone else said. “You’d better get to work on that project and stop messing around.”
“And you should mind your own business,” the first voice said as they moved out of earshot.
“I like being invisible,” Petra whispered.
The three sat silently for several more minutes. Calder looked over at the front terrace to their left, and Tommy stared up at the second-floor balcony. “I could probably get in those French doors,” he whispered.
“Well, come on!” Calder said.
They crept, single file, up the steps to the terrace. Up three, around a corner, up eight more … Suddenly Calder felt as if he were climbing a giant W, turning right by a T, passing an L. He was moving into a dark pentomino world, a world of concrete and brick, a world made up of massive pieces he could no longer control. It’s a trick of the shadows, he told himself firmly, it doesn’t feel threatening during the day. Pay attention to what you’re doing.
A short wall next to them was the same height as the wall around the second-floor balcony, but a gap yawned between the parapets, a gap that opened over the cement walkway below. The drop was at least twelve feet.
Tommy climbed up on the wall. “It’s too far to jump with such a narrow place to land.”
“How about that lumber by the tool shed?” Calder said.
Minutes later, they had a plank about a foot wide and eight feet long up on the terrace. They laid it flat between the two walls, bridging the gap between terrace and balcony.
“Not good,” Petra said. “That would be a wicked fall.”
“Let’s try the roof,” Calder suggested. “If one of us gets up, maybe we can open a bedroom window.”
After a three-way conference about weight and height, Tommy and Petra made a square platform out of their arms by gripping each other’s wrists. Calder stepped up on it, one hand on each head. Straightening inch by inch, hardly breathing, he reached over his head and grabbed the copper drain at the edge of the roof.
“Got it,” he whispered, and began to pull himself up. An ominous, scratchy groan was followed by a metallic twang and a jolt. Calder looked down for the first time, and the ground far below lurched up at a sickening angle.
“Yeow!” he gasped as he let go. The three collapsed in a painful heap on the concrete terrace. Tommy had spiked Petra in the ribs, and she found herself lying on someone’s knee. They heard voices coming again and, hidden by the terrace wall, they untangled themselves silently. All were grateful for the dark.
“Isn’t that a board up there between the two sections of terrace? Should we look?” a woman asked.
“Oh, you remember they’re planning that pull-down,” a man replied. “There’s probably all kinds of lumber around.” The voices drifted on down the block.
“Sorry,” Calder said, and sighed. “At least the whole drain didn’t come down.”
“Not your fault,” Tommy said.
“Maybe we should give up,” Petra said. “It’s already nine-thirty.”
It was Tommy who hopped up on the wall of the terrace. Before the other two could say a word, he took a quick step onto the board and ran lightly across it, jumping to the balcony floor outside the French doors.
“Whoa!” Calder and Petra breathed in one startled voice.
“Throw me my backpack!” Tommy whispered. Calder did, and when he caught it, there was a loud clunk-rattle-rattle. Calder worried, in a flash, that Tommy was too impulsive. Whoever had broken into the Robie House earlier would surely not mind doing something bad to a kid, especially a lone kid carrying a listening device.
Watching Tommy slip through the shadows, Petra felt her stomach tighten into an anxious knot. Had they meant to do something this dangerous? Tommy’s round head looked vulnerable and small in the darkness. What had they been thinking, breaking into a wreck of a place that creepy men had been in
two nights before?
Tiptoeing along, Tommy tried every door handle. When he reached the end of the terrace, he stopped.
He knelt, and Calder and Petra watched him take off his sneaker.
“Careful!” Calder whispered, but Tommy didn’t seem to hear.
He pushed the heel of his shoe gently against one of the doors, just below the handle. He pushed harder, and his sneaker shot out of sight.
“Must be a patched place in the glass,” Petra whispered to Calder.
As Tommy reached his hand slowly into the dark room, both Calder and Petra tried not to imagine someone inside grabbing him. After a series of rattles and creaks, the French door swung open. Tommy stumbled, made an odd choking sound, and disappeared inside.
“Was he pulled?” Petra gasped. She pictured him being dragged across the floor, a big hand clamped over his mouth.
“Let’s knock on the windows in the prow,” Calder said anxiously. “If he doesn’t come, we’ll start yelling.”
Tommy never forgot the feeling of first stepping into that house.
The living room was empty and the ceilings low. Black and white triangles and parallelograms spanned the windows on all sides, and light from the street threw a crosshatch of shadows across the floor, as if a net had been dropped neatly underfoot. Without color outside or in, the lines between the glass became magnetic, almost powerful.
A fish in a net, Tommy thought, I’m held in a net. But instead of feeling caught, he felt embraced, almost loved. It was the strangest sensation, and for several moments he stood without moving. The house had a dry, old smell that reminded him of something long ago. How odd, he thought, that this feels so homey.
Hearing a gentle tapping on the glass at the far end of the room, he hurried over to look for a window that would open off the front terrace. Tommy found one in the prow, unlocked it, and after a quick check up and down the street, Calder and Petra scrambled in.
“Isn’t this the coolest?” Tommy said. “I love it!”
“Thanks for forgetting about us,” Calder muttered.
Standing inside, Petra’s imagination was already slipping back through all the families in the house. There were the Robie kids, and then the five boys who loved to run. There was the family with two girls. This was the last house one of the girls ever knew….
The younger sister had lived on in the house as an only child, and Petra remembered pictures of her dressed as a Spanish dancer, an elf, a gnome with a peaked cap. In one image, she stood by the second-floor French doors in a simple dress, half of her body dissolving in a radiant light. Her expression in all of those pictures was wistful and more than a little ghostly.
“Haunting,” Petra said, walking in a slow circle.
Calder was examining a series of wooden ceiling panels that lined the living room, grilles made up of long, parallel bars with cubes fitted in between at irregular intervals. “It’s like sheet music,” he mused. “Wait: Those cubes are in groups of three. Could be some kind of code.”
Tommy gave him a quick punch on the arm. “Come on! We’ve gotta find a good place to hide this monitor.”
The three crept quickly through the entire house. They twisted and turned, discovering three sets of stairs, and found it was hard to keep track of where they had been or what direction they were facing when they looked out. Up then down, right then left: Narrow halls opened out into spacious rooms that then flowed back into thin passageways. The moon was full, and the lines in Wright’s windows etched patterns that bent across the children’s faces and fell cleanly on bare walls and floors.
“We’re in the middle of a giant game of cat’s cradle,” Petra marveled.
“Let’s hope no one’s playing,” Calder muttered.
Tools and sawhorses lay here and there, and littered throughout the kitchen area on the second floor, at the rear of the house, were paper cups and fast-food wrappers. Looking outside, Tommy spotted his own bedroom window, and thought he saw the faint curve of Goldman’s bowl. “Good,” he said.
“Huh?” Calder said.
“All this trash must mean they meet here.” Tommy was already pulling the baby monitor out of his backpack.
Petra opened the door beneath the kitchen sink, and there was a sudden scrabble and a loud squeak. The three jumped, and Petra grabbed for the closest arm, which happened to be Tommy’s. Recovering her balance, she let go quickly.
“How about on one of these shelves?” Tommy asked, stepping up on a milk crate. He placed the monitor carefully between a stack of paper plates and a nasty cheese grater.
“Fine,” Petra said, moving away from the sink.
“You’re sure you turned it on?” Calder asked Tommy.
“Yup.” Tommy nodded happily, clicking on the hand-held receiver and fastening it to his belt.
Just then they heard a slow, irregular step in a distant part of the house. It was a person walking, but walking hesitantly. One, two … The steps paused, as if someone was listening, and then started again. Three, four … The Wright 3 stared wildly at one another, hardly daring to breathe. A ghost? All the stories they’d ever heard about hauntings flashed and sizzled in their minds: pirates, thieves, murderers, lost souls….
Several seconds of complete silence felt like hours. Even the building itself seemed to be holding its breath. Five … The steps sounded like they were on the third floor, far enough away so that the three could still escape.
“Let’s go!” Tommy hissed, and they ran back out of the kitchen, into the dining room, and toward the unlocked window in the prow. Halfway across the living room they froze, Petra piling up against Calder, who ran into Tommy. A man in dark clothing stood on the terrace. He had picked up the board that Tommy had sprinted across, and was looking at the casement window, the one the kids had left unlocked.
The Wright 3 were trapped.
Calder, Petra, and Tommy backed up, watching the man as he reached for the edge of the window. He stopped and put the board down. In the second before he pulled the window open, the kids understood the craziness and danger of what they were doing. No parents knew where they were, and they hadn’t left a note.
The three turned and raced back through the dining room toward the swing door to the kitchen. As they ran, a flashlight behind them went on and off, playing across their backs.
“Stick together!” Calder said. “Three to one!”
For several endless seconds they pulled and yanked on the back doorknob, but the lock wouldn’t give. All three paused, listening. There was no sound from the living room.
The man must know the back door wouldn’t open. But where was he? Which way was he coming? A long hall connected the kitchen with the dining room and living room. They had just come through the pantry, which opened back into the dining room, forming a circle.
A board popped loudly from the direction of the dining room.
“Upstairs!” whispered Tommy.
Instinctively, the three then did something they would never have done under other circumstances — they grabbed for each other’s hands, forming a human chain.
Just then the swing door to the pantry burst open and they took off, tearing through the dark channels of space that had seemed so magical just minutes earlier.
Two scary corners loomed ahead: One connected the kitchen passageway to the back hall; the other the hall to the third-floor stairwell. They rounded both without meeting anyone, and pounded up the stairs to the third floor. There wasn’t time to worry about the ghostly steps they’d heard just moments before — heavy footsteps were gaining behind them.
A deep voice called out, “It’s three kids! Stop them!”
The moment they rushed into the first bedroom, a heavy covering came down on their heads and rough arms squeezed them against the wall.
Calder punched and kicked, Tommy bit, and Petra shrieked, “Ow!” as the footsteps thumped heavily into the room.
“You wanna get hurt? Just keep it up, I got no problem breaking a few arms,” a sec
ond voice growled.
The Wright 3 stopped moving. The covering smelled nasty, and something was burning Calder’s nose. Suddenly he sneezed, and then again.
“Eeuw,” Petra mouthed, wiping off her cheek.
The tarpaulin was pulled off. The kids found themselves facing two men with black-net masks on their heads. One of them wore black glasses over the mask.
“A girl?”
“Looks like it,” Black Glasses said. He jabbed his finger at Tommy. “Thought I told you to stay away from here. Wrecking your place not enough?”
It was Petra who spoke first. “We didn’t mean anything — we’re just kids from the neighborhood.”
“Yeah, kids with enough nosiness to take us all down,” Black Glasses said.
As he spoke, he pulled a knife off his belt and ripped the tarpaulin into several long strips. He tied the kids’ arms behind their backs, and then, pushing them into a back-to-back triangle, ran a long, tight strip around all three of their waists. They squirmed miserably.
“There. You’ll drive each other crazy before you get anywhere.”
“Looks like we’ll have to speed up the whole plan,” Black Glasses said to the other man, who had a long, thin head.
“You mean fire it tonight?” Thin Head said.
“No choice. There are plenty of flammables we can use in the garage. Can’t keep these three little birdies around.”
“I got four windows ready to go on the second floor. How many you got up here?”
“Two in the master. One across the hall.”
“That’s enough to take us to the islands and find a dealer for the jade.”
So he did have the fish! Tommy nudged Calder, and Black Glasses noticed. He bent down until he was eye-to-eye with Tommy, their noses almost touching. Tommy froze.
“Thanks for the fish, kid. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose,” the man said slowly.
As he turned away, Petra tried to stifle a sob.
“And don’t even try the crying thing, girlie,” he snapped.
The Wright 3 Page 13