The Dastardly Deed

by Holly Grant

  “Besides,” Baldwin said, “you’re half Morfo, so you’re even less predictable.”

  “It might take you a little longer to start shifting,” Miss Apple mused. “And there is a chance you might not shift at all.”

  “Half Morfo?” Anastasia asked. “So my mom wasn’t a Morfo?”

  “No, dear. And I’m afraid that’s really all we know about her,” Miss Apple said. “We never got the chance to meet her. Fred wasn’t talking to us at that time, you see.”

  “But why not?”

  “There was a big family fight,” Miss Apple said awkwardly. “Fred moved to Mooselick, which is a long way from Switzerland. It took Baldy and me ages to track him down, and by that time…your mother was gone.”

  Anastasia stared into her cocoa.

  Secrets, as you may have already discovered, dear Reader, can be many things: delightful, or exciting, or shocking, or awful. One of the secrets Anastasia had learned in the hot-air balloon was shocking and awful. Trixie McCrumpet, the woman Anastasia had called Mom for almost eleven years, wasn’t actually her mom at all. Trixie was Anastasia’s stepmother, and she had run away with a podiatrist (foot doctor, that is) a few weeks earlier. Anastasia’s real mother had died when she was just a baby.

  “Fred was in a sort of daze,” Baldwin said. “He just cut himself off from everyone in the family.”

  “I think he didn’t want to be a Morfo anymore,” Miss Apple pondered. “He didn’t want to remember our—er—our special kind of trouble.”

  “But even if Fred didn’t want to be a Morfo, he was,” Baldwin said. “Even if he convinced himself that he was no more than a boring vacuum cleaner salesman. And Morfolk can’t just wander around defenseless, you realize. Not with CRUD stalking us.”

  “That’s when Baldwin and I went undercover,” Miss Apple said. “I got that librarian position at Mooselick Elementary so I could watch you at school.”

  “And I got a job twisting pretzels at the Mooselick Mall,” Baldwin said. “Employee of the Month seven times. Seven!”

  “So,” Anastasia said, “tell me about this family we’re going to meet.”

  “Your grandmother Wiggy is very excited to meet you,” Miss Apple said.

  “Wiggy?”

  “Short for Wigfreda. It’s an old-fashioned name. And speaking of names”—Miss Apple hesitated—“your last name isn’t really McCrumpet. It’s Merrymoon.”

  “Merrymoon?”

  “That’s right. Fred changed his name when he moved to Mooselick. But you’re a Merrymoon, dear.”

  Anastasia Merrymoon? Anastasia squirmed, trying the name on. It didn’t fit properly, not quite; it was like wearing someone else’s shoes.

  “And I’m not actually an Apple. That was my undercover librarian alias,” her aunt went on. “I’m a Merrymoon, too.”

  Anastasia blinked at her. “So…should I call you Aunt Penny?”

  “You can call me whatever you like.”

  “Aunt Penny.” Anastasia tested the new title. She smiled. “That sounds nice.”

  “It sounds beautiful.” Penny hugged her.

  “And you have another aunt,” Baldwin sighed, “but once you meet her, you’ll wish you didn’t.”

  “Baldwin!” Penny chided.

  “Admit it, Penny: Ludowiga’s a stinker.” Baldwin chomped another snickerdoodle. “Hard to believe she’s Fred’s twin.”

  “Twin!” Anastasia exclaimed. “My dad has a twin sister?”

  “Yep. But you wouldn’t know it just to meet her. She’s shaped like a stick insect and has a personality to match.”

  “Baldwin, that isn’t fair,” Penny protested. “Stick insects are perfectly pleasant creatures.”

  Baldwin hooted.

  “Ludowiga’s daughter is just six months older than you,” Penny told Anastasia. “Her name is Saskia.”

  Anastasia perked up. “So she’s my cousin? What’s she like?”

  Penny shrugged. “We haven’t seen her since she was very little. Remember, we haven’t been back to Switzerland since you were a baby.”

  “Ah, Switzerland!” Baldwin cried. “I can’t wait to go home!”

  The balloon trip across the Atlantic was going to take them, Penny estimated, about a week. Luckily the basket was large enough that they weren’t too cramped. There was even enough room for two people to lie down, snuggled into the plaid flannel sleeping bags Penny had packed for just that purpose. It worked out splendidly, because Penny and Baldwin had to take turns sleeping and piloting the balloon. They used a compass and all kinds of fancy golden gadgets to make sure they were on course, but Baldwin’s favorite method, as Anastasia would learn over the next few nights, was the stars.

  “The stars are better than any of these man-made trinkets,” he whispered to her. “They’ve been twinkling up there for ages, for longer than any of us has been alive. Find your star and follow it, Anastasia. Trust your star over anybody else’s idea of where you should go.”

  The only disagreeable aspect of the balloon journey was the dilemma of using the bathroom. There wasn’t a bathroom. Uncomfortable as it was, the passengers aboard the HMB Flying Fox had to perch on the edge of the basket and do as nature intended over the side, buttocks exposed to bracing wind and the impolite gaze of curious seagulls. Although Penny had erected a Japanese printed screen to create as much privacy as was possible aboard a hot-air balloon, Anastasia found herself wishing that she had packed her chamber pot from St. Agony’s Asylum.

  It was all rather like camping, but in the sky. Anastasia snuggled in her sleeping bag with Mr. Bunster, the stuffed bunny she had rescued from the asylum. Baldwin sang funny old sea shanties. Penny studied her maps and compasses. They toasted s’mores and drank cocoa, and at night they followed their stars.

  “Land ho!” Baldwin gripped his telescope. “There it is, ladies! Europe!”

  He sounded relieved. He had suffered balloon sickness all afternoon, spending several hours on the private side of the Japanese screen and making a painful ruckus that Penny and Anastasia pretended not to hear.

  “We’re over Newquay, on the coast of Cornwall,” Penny said, consulting her diagrams. “We should be in Switzerland in just under two days!”

  “Let’s take her down a bit, Penny,” Baldwin suggested. “We can show Anastasia England from above.”

  “No-oooo.” Penny hesitated. “Too risky.”

  “Oh come on,” Baldwin cajoled. “When are we going to fly over England again? Let’s have a little fun.”

  “Fun!” Penny said. “You won’t think it’s fun when we’re being shot out of the sky!”

  “Just for ten minutes,” Baldwin pleaded. “CRUD won’t spot us in ten minutes. Live a little, Penny! Please? Pretty please?”

  “Pretty, pretty please, Aunt Penny?” Anastasia joined in.

  “Baldwin, you’re a bad influence.” Penny yanked a cord on the silk envelope and the HMB Flying Fox dipped down toward the Earth.

  Anastasia lifted her telescope. Through its superb lens, cars crept against the dark ground like queues of fireflies, and windows twinkled like faraway birthday candles. As they swooped lower, she could even make out strings of colored lights blinking in trees and on the eaves of houses. She thought—although she probably just imagined it—that she could hear, very faint and far away, the sweet, high voices of children singing.

  “It’s Christmastime,” she said slowly. “I’d forgotten all about Christmas.”

  Baldwin pulled a pocket watch from his coat and peered at it. “By gum, it’s Christmas Eve. Time certainly flies when you’re evading murderous minions.”

  “Look how lovely Newquay is,” Penny said. “Isn’t it lovely, Anastasia?”

  Anastasia nodded, thinking of the shabby little McCrumpet house. There wouldn’t be any Christmas lights blinking upon its roof, because Fred McCrumpet had always been the one to string them up. He had never done a very good job—usually half the bulbs fizzled off and on, and the other half never lit up at al
l—but he always let Anastasia plug them in the first time, and he had always said in a solemn, proud way, “Magic!”

  She wiped her nose on the back of her sleeve.

  Baldwin looped his arm around Anastasia’s shoulders. “Let’s have a toast,” he said, handing her a thermos of hot chocolate. “To your first Christmas in a hot-air balloon.”

  Penny raised her mug toward the moon. “And to your first Christmas with Baldy and me.”

  Baldwin lifted his flask. “And to many, many more.”

  “Descent in twenty minutes!” Penny rustled a map. “Prepare for landing!”

  Through her spyglass, Anastasia followed the balloon’s shadow as it glided across the white-peaked mountains and pale hills swelling below. The green and flowered Switzerland that Baldwin had described was, for now, slumbering beneath a blanket of snow.

  “My goodness,” Penny said. “My glasses are icing over!” She removed her spectacles and blew on the rimed lenses.

  Anastasia lowered her telescope, flashing on a peculiar phenomenon from the asylum. “Aunt Penny, do Morfolk—um—breathe frost?”

  Penny paused. “No, dear. Why would you ask that?”

  “Well…I do. I breathe frost.”

  Baldwin grinned. “It’s so nippy today we can all see our breath.” He demonstrated by huffing a little cloud.

  Anastasia shook her head. “At St. Agony’s, whenever I breathed on a piece of glass—a window or a picture, and Prim’s glasses—it turned into frost.”

  A Grown-up Glance ricocheted between Penny and Baldwin.

  “The asylum was pretty cold, Anastasia,” Baldwin said. “No wonder you saw patches of ice! I’m surprised the entire blasted shack wasn’t frosted inside like the guts of a crusty old freezer.”

  “But it made pictures,” Anastasia insisted. “And words.”

  “Anastasia,” Penny said gently, “you have a marvelous imagination. And it’s entirely understandable that your imagination may have—er—invented some fun and fanciful things to help you endure your ordeal at the asylum.”

  “No harm in it,” Baldwin declared. “Why, I made an imaginary friend to help me get through seventh grade! Cuthbert Haberdash. Ah, he was a wonderful chap. His feet smelled, though.”

  “But I didn’t imagine it. Watch.” Anastasia twirled her telescope and puffed on the lens. As the fog evaporated from the glass, so, too, did her conviction fade. Perhaps her rattled brain had embroidered her weeks at St. Agony’s. She bit her lip, sheepish.

  “Don’t feel bad, dear. Imagination is the jewel of intellect.” Penny planted a kiss on Anastasia’s forehead. “Be thankful yours is rich and bright. Now, we’d better don our alpine gear.” She pulled a jumble of padded ski overalls from one of her trunks.

  The balloon dipped, inch by inch, toward the tips of the snowcapped trees. Cows tromped in the rolling pastureland, mooing in low cow voices. It was so quiet and still that Anastasia could hear the bells jingling on their collars.

  “That’s Dinkledorf!” Baldwin pointed at a cluster of houses huddled in a dell. From the balloon, Dinkledorf looked no bigger than the miniature porcelain villages that nestle beneath a Christmas tree.

  “We’ll land in the fields beyond that grove of pines, and then we’ll snowshoe into town,” Penny said. “We can’t exactly thump down in the middle of Dinkledorf.”

  “Do you think we’ll make it to the cuckoo clock shop before it closes?” Baldwin wheedled. “I’m just itching to buy one of Franz’s new cuckoos.”

  “For all your interest in timepieces, you keep forgetting that we’re on a tight schedule.” Penny fiddled with a gadget on the burner. “Wiggy is expecting us.”

  “Franz has marvelous cuckoos,” Baldwin told Anastasia. “He descends from the original cuckoosmiths of the German Black Forest, you know.”

  “Yes,” Anastasia said. “I know.” Baldwin had already mentioned Franz’s cuckoo-clocking forebears several times that afternoon.

  “Almost all the cuckoos in my collection are his work,” Baldwin went on. “His latest design is brilliant. I saw it on his website, cuckooforyou.​com. Instead of a bird popping out the door every hour, it’s a tiny opera singer, and she belts out the aria from The Magic Tuba.”

  “Have you ever heard an opera, Anastasia?” Penny asked.

  Anastasia had once heard a few seconds of warbly singing on the radio, but her stepmother had shouted, “Turn that ruckus off! If you want to listen to cats fighting, go find an alley!” She didn’t mention this to Penny, however. She just shook her head.

  “Then we’re taking you to one in January,” Baldwin announced. “There’s going to be a performance of The Flinging Fledermaus. Bellagorgon Wata, the world’s greatest soprano, stars in a tale of star-crossed lovers and premature death. It’s divine. You’ll adore it.” He flung his scarf over his shoulder.

  Anastasia leaned forward and stood on tiptoe to scrutinize her uncle’s lapel. “Baldy, I think you have dandruff.”

  “Dandruff!” Baldwin twisted his chin to peer at the white flakes spangling his jacket. “What the deuce!”

  “It’s not dandruff!” Penny said. “It’s snow!”

  And lickety-split, the vanguard of dainty crystals ushered in a squadron of huge kamikaze snowflakes.

  “By Zeus’s Zamboni, it’s coming down fast!” Baldwin exclaimed.

  The swollen snow bombs pummeled the silk balloon, slopping slush into the basket below. Baldwin swiped a row of tiny icicles from his mustache. “Should we take her back above the clouds?”

  Penny removed her frosted glasses and blinked up at the sky. “No. We need to land soon or we’ll blow completely off course.”

  “We’re blowing off course now!” Baldwin pointed out.

  “Crumbs!” Anastasia’s galoshes skidded as the basket pitched and she thumped to her bottom. “What just happened?”

  “The basket scraped against a tree!” Penny shouted over the shrilling wind. “We’re descending too quickly! All this snow is weighing us down!”

  “I say we go back above the clouds and wait for the storm to pass,” Baldwin yelled. “It might take an extra day or two—”

  “We don’t have the fuel! We’re almost out!”

  At this moment, two alarming things happened. First: the yellow glow of the balloon’s flame disappeared entirely. Second: the wicker basket smashed into something with a sickening crunch.

  “Hang on to your rumps!” Baldwin hollered. “We’re going down!”

  3

  The Cheesemonger’s Secret

  OBSERVANT READER, HAVE you ever beheld through the round window of an industrial washing machine the cataclysm of its spin cycle? Anastasia had, and she felt like a sweater churning through the belly of a particularly zesty washer as the world around her kaleidoscoped with scarves and boots and snow as they all went cartwheeling helter-skelter from the basket and down to the ground below.

  “We’ve landed,” Penny groaned. “Are you all right?”

  “I broke the Japanese screen.” Anastasia pulled her head from the smashed panel that had, not one minute before, been a lovely scene of a stork wading through a lily pond. “But I’m okay. Just dizzy.” Her stomach lurched as she staggered to her feet, and she wondered where the HMB Flying Fox Official Vomit Receptacle might be. She could dimly discern the basket smashed in the snow several yards away.

  “Does anyone know where the compass is?” Penny asked.

  “The balloon’s over there,” Baldwin piped up from a nearby snowdrift. Penny waded to the wreck of wicker splinters and began digging through the snow with the intensity of a squirrel seeking its favorite nut.

  “Ruff! Ruff!”

  “Baldy, is that you?” Anastasia asked.

  “No,” he said, “but I hear it, too.”

  Fear surged through Anastasia. As an aspiring detective-veterinarian-artist, she normally loved all beasts of the animal kingdom. However, as the old saying goes, Once bitten, twice shy, and while Prim and Prude’s vicious
poodle platoon hadn’t actually managed to chomp Anastasia, they had tried. She hugged herself, shivering. “Do you think it’s a guard dog?”

  The barking grew louder.

  “What if it’s a poodle?” Baldwin quavered, wallowing through the snow to Anastasia’s side. “You know I’m poodleophobic.”

  “That’s not a poodle!” Penny leapt up. “Würfel! Würfel!”

  “Fur…full?” Anastasia asked.

  “No. Würfel. He’s—”

  Before Penny could properly reply, a shaggy torpedo of doggy smell knocked Anastasia back to the ground. Something wet and warm rasped against her cheek. She opened her eyes just in time to observe a large glob of slobber splash down to her chin from the grinning jaws of an enormous Saint Bernard. A small barrel with a faucet was riveted to his collar.

  “Würfel!” Penny danced a jig of delight.

  “You know this dog?” Anastasia croaked as Würfel slopped her face with another canine smooch.

  “Indeed we do!” Baldwin said. “Ah, Würfel, you’re wearing your barrel. Fine fellow!” He patted Würfel’s fluffy pate. “Man’s best friend. Penny,” he called, “be a dear and find the brandy snifters, won’t you?”

  Würfel bounded out of sight into the whirling snowflakes, announcing the felled balloonists’ arrival with a volley of barks.

  Anastasia wiped her face with the back of her mitten. “Do I have any freckles left?”

  Baldwin stooped and peered solemnly at her cheeks. “Yes. Quite a few.”

  “Look!” Anastasia pointed at a golden glow bobbing toward them.

  “That must be Rolf,” Penny said.

  “Who’s Rolf?”

  “A Morfolk farmer,” Baldwin said. “He and Penny have been friends for ages. We were supposed to land in his field, and it appears that we have. What fabulous navigation!”

  The light brightened until they could see the silhouette of a man approaching through the bumbling snowflakes, Würfel trotting by his side. “Penelope? Baldwin?”