by Tony Abbott
“It takes a lot to scare that little girl,” he said with a sound like chuckling. “I’m gonna trim the hedge.”
“Wear your hat. It’s sunny out there,” said Randy.
“Never leave home without it,” he chirped. A second later, we heard the front door click.
“What about Emerson Beale and my grandmother?” I asked.
Randy shifted on the couch. “I know he was her boyfriend, but her old man didn’t like him. Why is anyone’s guess. Tried to shoo him away. After the accident in that crazy, experimental autogyro thingy, which Monroe blamed himself for since he was driving it, his vast empire began to crumble. He sold off pieces of it to pay for doctors, unorthodox treatments, procedures, going to clinics all over the world so that his daughter might walk again. He tried it all, gave her anything and everything —”
“Except what she really wanted,” said Dia. “Nick Falcon.”
“Emerson Beale,” I said.
Randy shrugged, his eyes flicking nearly to my face, then away. “She was married to a man named Walter Huff. But he died overseas, they say. They had a son — your father — but who knows how she took care of him. The old man wasn’t crazy about that, either. I get the impression she really loved your father as best she could, but she was so ill, disabled after the accident, and Monroe kept sending him off to schools and things. I can’t imagine what that must have been like, but he’s probably told you that already.”
Dad hadn’t told anyone, of course, not the whole story. Mom knew about Walter Huff being only a name, and she suspected Fracker of something not quite right, but that was only part of it. There were Dad’s years as a boy living day after day with a sick mother and a cold grandfather. That was part of what he kept inside. That was the reason he was the way he was. It was so odd, and sad, hearing this from a stranger.
The room went quiet for a while.
Dia showed Randy the postcard of the Ringling house, and he smiled. “These postcards. Sometimes you can see buildings, places that don’t exist anymore except on one of these cards.”
He chuckled to himself in his usual way. “The strange thing I’ve noticed is how if you look at these cards long enough, the real world begins to take on these colors. The grass, the cars, the buildings. It’s like the artificial becomes real. As for the Ringling estate,” he said, handing the card back, “it’s still there, and it’s still like that. It’s an attraction now, but I’ve been on the grounds of the estate when everyone leaves, and it’s something you’ll never believe. The whole now falls away when you’re at that house. Old Florida comes alive out of the air.”
Something I wanted to say then but just couldn’t bring myself to, Dia blurted out. “But you’re helping to tear down old Florida. The hotel, for one thing. And your luxury mall? The DeSoto Galleria? Are you kidding?”
He breathed in. “Right. I know,” he said slowly. “The truth is, we don’t live in the past. We can’t. But you can love parts of it. And you pick and choose. This house, the house my wife grew up in, my father-in-law’s house to begin with, she loved it. If you can believe it, it was originally built in one of Monroe’s developments for his railroad workers. Nineteen-twenty-eight. We’re restoring it to the way it was. Spanish style. Sarah’s dad’s helping me, as you see. And the mall will use fixtures from the old hotel, the columns, the woodwork. Which I made sure of. You pick and choose. And do your best.”
Randy Halbert was looking at us now. “The best of it, of old Florida,” he said, nodding at the postcard in my hand, “is in a place like that. It’s so . . . beautiful.”
Dia stood. “We want to go there. We need to go there.”
He nodded. “I’d even take you, but my wife’s out and my granddaughter . . .”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”
“Watch out for yourselves,” he said.
“Which reminds me,” said Dia when we got up. “What exactly is the Secret Order of Oobarab?”
He snickered. “It was a group of circus folk who claimed to be the descendants of the real first circus from Baraboo, Wisconsin,” he said. “Most of them never made John Ringling’s cut. But they hung around and were perfect for Monroe. To do his dark dealings. If any of its members are still alive, they must be quite ancient by now. The Order must have long since disbanded.”
“Not so much,” said Dia. “The Oobarabs are back. Jimbo and I have seen them.”
Randy frowned at our knees. “Who’s Jimbo?”
“Me,” I said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
We took a Greyhound from the bus station and were in Sarasota in under an hour and a half. It had been hot all morning, but was cooler now that the sun was on its long drop into the Gulf of Mexico. It was afternoon by the time we passed under the pink arch of the gatehouse and into the visitors’ center. We got the cheapest tickets we could that included a tour of the house — we were big on house tours by now — and walked out into the sun.
Thick, gnarly trees grew in clumps on either side of the paved foot path. They looked like muscles punching up from the ground. Dia said they were banyan trees. What I thought were vines dangling from the upper branches were roots, driving straight into the ground. Signs said not to touch them or we’d damage the trees. Palms with flailing leaves, woodpeckers, butterflies, birds sweeping and bubbling and cooing and chirping were alive over our heads. Ringling had grown a jungle around himself.
“Randy wasn’t kidding,” Dia said when we first glimpsed angular pink walls through the trees. “Look at that house.”
House? Ca d’Zan was a fantasy palace, an enormous stack of pink boxes decorated with fancy stonework and balconies and arched windows and cutouts. It was like a cross between an old church and a wedding cake.
We walked slowly around to the back of the house, where rose-tinged stone glowed orange in the sun. The great wide piazza (a word from the brochure) spread out like an airfield of zigzagging marble stones surrounded by a thick stone railing as high as your waist. The greenish-blue water of Sarasota Bay gulped and splashed against the sea wall beneath us. If we were a hundred feet out on the water, looking back, we’d see the same image as on the postcard.
“The mansion was built in 1924,” Dia said. “Ringling’s wife, Mable, really liked Venice. This house is like ones you see there.” Doves warbled in the nearby trees, or maybe from the eaves. There were plenty of those.
I had been holding off — why, I’m not sure — but I now set my eyes firmly on the tower. The red-tiled roof loomed over us from what seemed like a mile away. A short outdoor staircase swirled from some inside room and swept to the top. The tower itself was an awesome piece of building, a square, open crown with pillars rising and splitting into fancy stone cutouts. A band of sculptures ran around the walls just under the roof. The tower was so clean and high and bright in the sun. I saw a woman’s brown-haired head leaning out of the top with a camera in her face. It didn’t look right to have regular people up there, but it was where Dia and I needed to be.
“Do you think Fang brought Marnie here? Hid her inside this house?” she asked.
“You mean, Quincy brought Grandma?”
“Same thing.”
I looked at her. “So we’ve pretty much given up the idea that this is just a story? I keep thinking about the kitten and the tiger. And the Awnings and the Towers. What about them?”
“Details,” she said.
I guess I believed that, too, and really just wanted to hear someone else say it. I only hoped we’d find the answers we were looking for. I was growing certain that the story was almost over. It was heading for an ending, and it was heading there fast.
“We need to get into the tower,” I said. “Let’s get on the tour.”
“Yeah,” she said with a grin. “I want to hear how somebody could build an Italian palace in Florida. Inside, Teddy, inside.”
As the group gathered, Dia went up to the guide, a silver-haired older man whose name tag read Dick.
“Is the tower on the start of the tour or the end?” she asked.
Dick frowned. “The tower is not on this tour at all,” he said. “You only see it on the Private Places tour.” He glanced at our wristbands, then checked his watch. “The last one is starting at four. Another half hour. You still have time to run up to the visitor’s center and get a ticket for that one. It’s a green bracelet today. You’d be the only ones on that tour.”
I gulped. “How much is it?”
“Twenty dollars,” he said.
“Each?” asked Dia, and he nodded.
We dug into our pockets and came up way short.
He smiled. “I’m sorry. Maybe next time?”
Okay, this was bad, but Dia gave me a look that said she was already thinking of something. “It’s okay, sir. We’ll be happy just to see the fabulous rooms.”
She was really good at getting us in and out of tours, and we tried to stay to the rear of the group, but Dick was always careful to round everyone up before moving on.
“This guy knows his stuff,” she whispered to me.
The walls of the giant rooms were draped with tapestries and classical paintings. The ceilings were painted with legendary figures and scenes. We walked slowly from room to room as the guide told us about the Ringling family — there were five brothers; they started in Baraboo, Wisconsin; the house was built by John Ringling for his wife Mable and finished in 1926, but she only lived until 1929; and so on. I wondered again what my great-grandfather had to do with it all. Could he really have stayed here? Did he actually hide Grandma here?
Moments before we left the final room on the second floor, Dia nudged me and proclaimed loudly that she had to go to the bathroom.
“Excuse me, sir. I’m sorry. Is there a —”
“Bottom of the stairs and left through the kitchen,” Dick said.
She nodded, then turned to me. “Joshie, come with?”
I smiled to myself, but grumbled. “Oh, all right!” We turned away from the group as it continued to another room, and made for the stairs. The moment they were out of sight, we jagged off to the left.
“Up the stairs,” she whispered. “Sneak!”
I nearly laughed. “You’re just a little criminal, aren’t you?”
“Developing skills, Babe.” We tripped quickly up a narrow set of curving marble stairs to the third floor. No one was up there. I guessed were were getting into the “private places.” Going around the stairs again we came to a dark space. Bright white sunlight outlined the shape of the door. Dia tried it. Of course, it was locked.
“Except I don’t think so,” she said. Digging into a pocket, she pulled out a ballpoint pen. From another, she drew her library card. “Now, shhh. And don’t tell the Mirror Lake librarian you saw me do this.”
Her fussing seemed to take hours. I thought of Dad again and winced when I realized how many miles away from the hospital I was. I’d never called him, knowing that this whole strange adventure would end the moment I did.
“This is taking way too long. I should be with my dad —”
She turned to me, aghast. “You haven’t gone to see him yet? My gosh, it’s been, like, a month!”
“What?” I said. “How could I —”
“You should go. I’d be there the whole time if it were my dad, bringing him stuff. Iced Tea. Sports Illustrated. What the heck kind of son are you?”
I glared at her. “How could I have gone? I’ve been rushing around with you —”
Click.
“Finally!” I hissed.
“Like you ever break into places for us,” she said.
“I didn’t mean —”
“You never mean. Come on!”
When she pulled the little door open, it was as if we had been underwater and were coming up for air. Sunshine flooded over us. Pushing the door lightly closed behind us, we scrambled up and around the short, tiled staircase to the outside. Gulf winds rolled warmly over us as we stepped into the square room of the tower.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
West over the Sarasota Bay, beyond a wandering strip of islands, sat the big black broadness of the Gulf of Mexico. The breeze, constant and warm, smelled of seawater.
“Can I look at the card?” she asked.
I gave it to her. “The breeze is strong. Don’t let it blow away.”
“Right. Because I would do that.”
That didn’t bother me. Nothing bothered me, really. For — what? — three minutes? — for three minutes in that tower, I felt peaceful. All that had happened since I’d set foot in Florida was getting into my head. The old people. The painted postcards. The little boxy houses. The sun and the heat. The lime-green grass, its smell when being mowed. I thought of awnings breathing in the wind and moss dangling from oak limbs. Palm trees, of course, their clattering leaves, whirring insects, sitting quiet in that dark, dark bungalow with Dia. All of it was seeping into me. Or I was seeping into it. We were seeping into each other.
I thought about it and thought about it, and then I stopped thinking about it and just let it wash through me like water through air. I was standing very, very still next to her, quietly amazed at how things were becoming different. . . .
“Holy crikes!” she said.
And the spell was broken.
I turned to her. “What’s wrong with you?”
Dia was staring up at the roof on the water side of the tower and jumping up and down. “The tile. That tile! Look. The lady. The lady!” She turned me around and forced my head up. “There!”
Running all the way around the tower under the eaves was a row of painted designs raised in relief. There were flowers and vines and little horned, bug-eyed devil heads and bigger tiles of orangey stone with zodiac figures on them. The one on the corner to our right was a crab. The one above us was a lion. And there, next to the lion, was the figure of a lady.
She had wings. She was flying.
“Oh, man. Oh, man.” My body went electric.
“You have to go up there,” she said softly. “You have to get to that tile. That’s got to be where he hid it. The story has to be there. It has to be —”
“I understand,” I said. “Say it a few more times.”
“So give me your foot,” she said.
I looked at her. “Excuse me?”
“Your foot, Wilmer. The pinhole points to the flying lady. Of course, it points to the flying lady! Which means I have to boost you up there.”
“It’s a hundred-foot drop if I fall, you know —”
“More like sixty, but at that height it hardly matters. Your foot. Please.”
There was no use arguing. Dia stood by an arch facing out to the water with her fingers laced together. With a deep swallow, I grabbed her shoulders, put one foot into her hands, and jumped up. The stone cutout nearest the corner was small, but I got a good grip on it and hoisted myself up. I put my feet on her shoulders. They were strong.
“Oh, man,” I said, as she held my shoes with her hands.
“No kidding,” she said.
Slipping one arm through the cutout, I pulled up, leaving only one foot on her. I reached for the next cutout and set the other foot on a carved decoration where the column blossomed up into the arch.
My heart was stuttering like a machine gun; my blood was icy. I couldn’t imagine how many laws I was breaking right then. Not to mention the danger of it. But I tried to push those thoughts away, took a breath to calm myself, took another when that didn’t work, then shifted my weight and brought my right foot onto the same little pedestal as my left. I was astonished I didn’t just collapse to the floor, but I jerked my left arm and left foot to the next cutout and pedestal and swung my body over, hugging the stone tightly.
I was more or less under the flying lady now. She was naked and flying toward my right (south, I figured, though why I spent my brain working that out, I can’t tell you). The blue area behind her was a series of flowery half circles. Waves, I thought. She was flyi
ng over water.
“Anything?”
“The tile’s set into the tower. Maybe I can move it.”
“Try,” she said. “But don’t fall.”
“Because I hadn’t thought of that,” I said.
“You hush.”
All this time, I was wondering why no one happened to glance up, see me, and start screaming. Maybe I was being quick about it? Maybe all these things were happening in minutes? Less? The sun was starting to lower into the Gulf, and the west face of the tower was glowing a brighter, more intense orange. Now my shadow was moving over the flying lady. Over Marnie.
“I guess I shouldn’t tickle you now?” she said.
“Ha-ha.” With my right hand, I reached up and touched the frame of the tile. It was solid. Of course, it was solid. The thing had been there for I don’t know how many years. Through wind and hurricanes. Even assuming Emerson’s story was ever hidden behind it, what if the tile had ever come loose in a storm and the story had blown away to nowhere? Huh? What then?
I moved my fingers all around the frame of the tile, pushing in and up with my thumb. It slid a little from side to side. My heart heaved into my throat. I pressed my fingers up under the bottom of the tile and tried to lever it out. It came a tiny bit, but only at the bottom of the tile. The top stayed in, as if it were hinged. This was good. I didn’t know what I would do if the tile fell out and smashed my face. Or the lady cracked on the floor. Or on Dia’s head. I glanced down at her.
“Eyes up, Pervo. You on vacation up there?”
Pervo? What? Jeez, always with that! I heard the thudding of doors below us. One, then another, then another. But the first one sounded nearer than the second and third.
“They’re closing the house,” she said. “Keep going.”
I drew in a final breath and pulled out on the tile until it was open a good inch at the bottom. It stopped there. Working my fingers behind it, I felt at first only dust and rough stone. I edged my fingers upward as flat as I could —
“Owww!”
“What?” she said. “What is it? A booby trap?”
“No . . . ,” I said. “A paper cut.”