Peering out at us was a woman, very gaunt and pale, with short, frizzy red hair. Her eyes were electric blue.
“What do you want?” the woman said.
“We need to speak with I. M. Fine,” Beamer explained. “We won’t take long, I promise. But it’s very important.”
“You have the wrong house,” she snapped, and shut the door.
I looked at Beamer and Beamer looked at me.
I knocked again. The door opened immediately. The woman must have been standing there, waiting for us to leave.
“Will you please get off my property?” she said.
“I’m really sorry,” I said, trying to sound harmless and sweet, “but we must have gotten bad directions. Do you know which house he lives in?”
“No, I don’t. And I would like you to go now.”
“Okay,” we said in unison, and scurried off the porch and down the hill like a pair of terrified rabbits.
We stood in the park area, gazing up at the house.
“Okay,” I said. “Here’s the big question: Who the heck is that woman?”
“You don’t think we just got the wrong house?”
“Well, I mean maybe . . . but it matches Joanne’s description.”
“He might have moved.”
“Yeah, but if that’s the case, why didn’t she say so?”
“I don’t know, Franny.”
“I think he’s there and she didn’t want us to know.”
“Why not?”
“Well, you remember that Stephen King movie we saw on TV? About the writer who is held hostage by a crazy fan?”
“Yeah—with Kathy Bates.”
“Well, what if that lady is keeping I. M. Fine a prisoner in there?”
“You know what, Franny? You watch too much TV.”
“Oh, shut up, Beamer. Let’s concentrate.”
“I am concentrating. And what I think is, we need to stop it with the wacko theories and find out whether he actually lives in that house or not.”
“It was not a wacko theory,” I said. “But okay, I agree that is the key question. So maybe we should ask the neighbors. . . .”
But Beamer wasn’t listening to me. He was gazing up the street, with his eyes bright and his mouth hanging open.
“What?” I said, following his gaze.
And then I saw it, too. Happy days! Here came the mailman.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked.
“Yes, I am—only . . . isn’t it against the law?”
“What?”
“Tampering with the U.S. mail.”
“Who’s tampering? I just want to see who the mail’s addressed to.”
“Yeah, so do I.”
We waited until the postman put the letters into the mailbox. I decided that if the lady came out and got her mail before we could sneak up and look at it, I would chase down the mailman and ask him. But she didn’t. We sat there in the shadow of the trees and watched for a full ten minutes, and no one came out.
“She probably doesn’t know the mail has arrived,” I said. “If we’re going to do it, we need to do it now.”
“What if she’s watching out the window?”
“Then she would have seen the mailman.”
“Yeah. All the same,” Beamer said, “let’s go up to the blue house and cut over to the porch from the side. It won’t be so obvious.”
I agreed. We got as far as the flower bed, then turned and headed across the lawn to the gray house. We ducked down slightly as we came around the side of the porch, then tiptoed up the steps.
“Let’s do this quickly and get out of here,” I whispered.
Beamer nodded silently. He reached up and opened the mailbox. He pulled out a few letters and some catalogs. Then Beamer held out an envelope for me to see, a huge smile on his face.
It was a bill from the telephone company and it was addressed to I. M. Fine.
17
Now what?” Beamer said. We were back down at the park, having repeated our scampering rabbit routine a second time. I was too breathless and excited to answer for a minute. I put my hand over my heart and took some slow, deep breaths.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s think this through. What did we find out? First: I. M. Fine does live there. And second: The lady who answered the door said he didn’t live there. So she was lying. Am I right so far?”
“Right.”
“Now she wouldn’t have any reason to lie unless she was covering something up—do you agree with that?”
“No. I think she’s probably his wife or his housekeeper or something, and she was just trying to make us go away.”
“But why would she tell us we had the wrong house? Wouldn’t she just say, ‘Mr. Fine is too busy to see fans’—something like that?”
“Well, most people would. Maybe she thought it was easier to lie.”
“I don’t buy it, Beamer. I like my original theory.”
“What—that I. M. Fine is being kept a prisoner up there?”
“Yes. And Beamer, before you jump down my throat and tell me I’m crazy, just remember that you thought I was crazy when I said that his books were giving kids headaches.”
“That doesn’t make you right all the time, Franny.”
“Yes, I know that. But listen—there’s more to it. Like how do you explain this guy writing books for years and years and they don’t affect kids in any special way—and then all of a sudden, this year, they turn toxic?”
“I don’t.”
“Well, I do. I think that lady has him locked in the basement or something and is making him write those bad books.”
Beamer rolled his eyes, then sighed.
“Even if your theory is right, Franny, what are we supposed to do about it?”
I thought for a minute.
“Well, we could wait till she goes out. Then see if we can sneak into the house and, you know, rescue him.”
“No way!”
“Okay, Beamer. How about we just peek in the windows? See what we can find out.”
Beamer shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Well, then, let’s hear your big idea.”
“Obviously, Franny, I haven’t got one. We’ll wait.”
And we did—for about two hours. I actually fell asleep there for a while. Fortunately, Beamer didn’t, because he poked me and whispered, “Franny! There’s a car backing down the driveway!”
I sat up and watched. The driver was our lady all right. And as far as I could tell, she was alone.
“Let’s go,” I said.
We hurried back up the hill. There was an iron gate at the entrance to the backyard, but all we had to do was slide a little bolt and push. I don’t think anyone had opened it in a while, because it was stiff and creaky and didn’t open all the way. We squeezed through, then followed a stone path along the side of the house to the garden.
It must have been beautiful once. High hedges surrounded it and a stone fountain stood in the center. At the fountain’s edge was a statue of a fish rising up on its tail and opening its mouth really wide. That was probably where the water was supposed to come out, only there wasn’t any water anymore, just moldy leaves. Around the fountain, there were stone walks alternating with flower beds, all of them full of weeds.
“Wow!” I said. “It’s like the secret garden!”
“The what?”
“The Secret Garden. It’s a book. About this man whose wife had this beautiful garden, and she loved it so much, she spent all her time there. Then one day, she fell off a tree branch and died. And so after that, the man hated the garden and he shut it up, and no one went in there for years and years and everything withered and died. Then two kids came along and found it and brought it back to life!”
“Hmm. Okay.”
“Never mind, Beamer. Let’s have a look.”
We crept up the back porch and peered through the glass top of the kitchen door. There was a lot of reflection on the glass, so
it was kind of hard to see. But I could tell the kitchen was really big and kind of old-fashioned-looking. Not like in olden times, with butter churns and woodstoves—more like a kitchen from the fifties. It was tidy, though. No dishes lying around or anything.
I opened the screen door and tried the knob. It was locked, naturally. I closed the screen door again, then turned to look for Beamer.
He was leaning over and looking into a window. I mean right into the window.
“Beamer! It’s open?”
“Yeah. Sounds pretty quiet in there,” he whispered. “I don’t hear any prisoners screaming.”
I went over and pushed the window up farther.
“Oh no you don’t!” Beamer said. “We agreed to look in through the windows—not break and enter.”
“No breaking necessary,” I said, hoisting myself up over the sill and through the window headfirst. “You can stay out there if you want.”
I found myself draped across the kitchen counter—a sort of ugly linoleum with a design of yellow-and-gray squares. I had to move a couple of pots of herbs before I could get my legs through and turn around.
“Are you out of your mind?” Beamer hissed though the window.
“I guess,” I whispered back. “Yell if you see her coming.”
I looked around the room. The main kitchen door was open, and I could look through and see all the way down the hall to the front of the house. There were three other doors in the kitchen as well, not counting the one to the backyard. I checked them out, one by one. The first was a pantry and the next one was a broom closet. The third opened on to a hallway and a set of stairs.
I knew what those were—the back stairs. Lots of old houses had them. My grandmother said that in the old days when rich people had servants who lived in the house, the servants used the back stairs to come and go from their bedrooms.
The stairs were dark, but I didn’t think it would be smart to switch on the lights. So I climbed slowly and carefully, hanging on tightly to the banister. At the top landing, I looked around. It wasn’t as dark up there, because the doors to the rooms were open and, of course, the rooms had windows. I knew right away there was nobody there—it was just too quiet. It had an untouched feel, and I could tell at a glance that the rooms were being used for storage. Still, I looked into each one just to be thorough.
I returned to the kitchen. Beamer was still looking through the window with a horrified expression on his face.
“Franny,” he whispered, “that is so against the law!”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “But I’m doing it anyway, so stop bugging me.”
“Franny.”
“What?”
“At least unlock the back door so you can get out fast if you need to.”
“Good thinking,” I said.
I decided to try the basement next. I knew some basements had entrances from the backyard, with these big metal doors you pull up. But I hadn’t seen one outside, so I figured that there would be an inside door. Remembering my grandmother’s house, I decided to look under the back stairs.
This time, I turned on the light in the little hall off the kitchen. And sure enough, on the long wall at the side of the stairs, there was a door.
It felt a lot creepier opening that door than it had going upstairs. I told myself there was no logical reason for this, took a deep breath, and turned the knob.
I felt a wave of cold, damp air pass over me. With it came a musty smell. The only light I saw was a bare bulb hanging above the landing of a crude wooden staircase. I thought, What the heck! and pulled the chain.
It was just a regular basement—dusty and cold and full of pipes and spiderwebs. I shut the door and went back to the kitchen again.
“Well?” Beamer whispered. “Are you satisfied?”
“Nothing in the back rooms. Nothing in the basement. I’m going to try the front of the house now.”
“If the police come, Franny, I’m out of here.”
“Fine!” I said, and crept very softly down the front hall.
The dining room, on my right, was dark, the velvet drapes on the windows tightly shut. It looked like nobody had eaten in there for about a hundred years.
Across the hall from it was a large living room. I could see that the lights were on, so I peeked around the door frame very carefully. Nobody there, either. But someone had been in there not too long ago. There were books and newspapers scattered around and a coffee mug on the end table by the armchair.
It was an elegant room, with antique furniture and a marble fireplace with built-in mahogany bookshelves on either side of it. The books looked old, their spines kind of dark and faded. But I saw something in the far corner of the bookcase that caught my eye—a whole string of paperback books in bright modern colors. I knew what they were from across the room: the complete works of I. M. Fine.
I went over and took one off the shelf. It was number seventeen, Grave’s End. The cover showed a graveyard with all sorts of really awful, partially decomposed bodies rising up out of the dirt. I put it back. The books, I saw by the series numbers on the spines, had been neatly arranged in order of publication.
I looked around for anything else of interest. There was a desk at the back of the room, so I went over to check it out. I saw bills and papers arranged in neat piles, and I was just noting the fact that there was no sign of a computer or typewriter when I heard the soft tread of footsteps in the hall. Frantically, I looked for a place to hide. I dashed across the room and ducked down behind the couch.
The footsteps came closer. Then I saw the shoes. They were Beamer’s shoes. I stood up.
“Cheez, Beamer! You scared me.”
“I couldn’t stand waiting out there any longer,” he said. “But please—let’s hurry and do this and get the heck out of here.”
“Look,” I said grabbing his wrist and dragging him over to the bookcase. “They’re all here. Organized by number.”
“Sweet,” he said. “So I guess there isn’t any doubt, is there?”
“Not a shred. Come on. Let’s look upstairs.”
“After you,” he said.
The first bedroom we came to was obviously the woman’s. There were personal things on the dresser, like lotions and perfume, and there was a pair of ladies’ shoes on the floor. The closet was full of women’s clothes—and only women’s clothes.
I wondered what that meant, exactly. I mean, if the lady was I. M. Fine’s wife, wouldn’t they be sharing the same room? And if she was his housekeeper, it would be odd for her to get the master bedroom.
Beamer signaled for me to keep moving.
There was a smaller room down the hall. It was furnished with twin beds in matching white chenille bedspreads. It was perfectly neat, but there was a layer of dust over everything. This place was starting to remind me of Sleeping Beauty’s castle.
Finally, we tried the third room. Like the master bedroom, it faced the front of the house and had a nice view of the park. It had been made into a home office, with a computer, a printer, filing cabinets, a copier, and a fax machine. There were reading glasses and an empty Coke can on the desk.
I noticed a faint smell in the air. It seemed familiar. What was it?
And then I realized. It was perfume. I had smelled it in the bedroom.
“Beamer,” I said, “I was wrong. That lady isn’t keeping I. M. Fine a prisoner here.”
“No?”
“Because, Beamer, that lady is I. M. Fine.”
18
I pulled open the filing cabinet to the left of the chair. Inside were book files, neat as pins, the titles carefully lettered on the green-and-yellow tabs in dark blue ink. They were all there: The Worm Turns, Mind Wave, Sinister Serpent Surprise, The Ghost of Creepy Hollow, and, right in front, a new book, The Avenging Word.
I pulled out the file and sat down to look it over while Beamer went through the other filing cabinet. He was muttering under his breath. Something about the police and going to jail.
The first thing in the file was a manuscript with “The Avenging Word, by I. M. Fine” typed on the cover sheet. Down at the bottom, it said “Riverbend Press, Inc.” The manuscript was pretty thick—more than a hundred pages. After that, I found a contract.
AGREEMENT: Between Ida May Fine (hereinafter referred to as “the Author”) and Riverbend Press, Inc., a New York corporation having its principal place of business at . . .
“Beamer, look at this!” I said, really excited. “I was right! Her real name is Ida May Fine.”
Beamer was sitting cross-legged on the floor, studying a file of his own. He looked up and nodded but seemed more interested in what he was reading.
“What’s that? What’ve you got?” I asked.
“A file—named ‘Doomsday.’”
“Doomsday!”
“Yup.”
“Yikes, Beamer. That sounds scary. What’s in there?”
“It’s a will. Here—look.”
I put the contract for The Avenging Word back into the file and put the file away. Then I took the paper from Beamer.
It was a single page. Not a regular legal document like the contract, just typed on the computer.
THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF IDA MAY FINE
It is my desire, at the time of my death, that all my worldly goods, including the money, stocks, and other investments in my two accounts at Merrill Lynch, my house at 1407 Pleasant Hill Rd., Wimberly, PA, with all its contents, plus any future income from the sale of my books, be used for the support of my dog, Jake—should he still be living at the time of my death—in the utmost comfort for the rest of his natural life.
“Wow, Beamer! Can you believe that? She wants to leave her fortune to her dog!”
“So what have you got against dogs?”
“Nothing, Beamer. But cheez . . .”
“Keep reading, Franny. The clock’s ticking.”
“Okay. Right.”
After Jake’s death, I don’t really care what you do with the remainder of my estate, with one proviso. I have videotaped a speech, which I wish to have broadcast widely throughout the country. This will probably require the purchase of commercial time on television stations nationwide. The executors of my estate are to spend whatever is necessary to assure that the maximum number of viewers is reached. After that, they can get their greedy hands on my money to their hearts’ content. It won’t really matter one way or another.
The Mysterious Matter of I. M. Fine Page 8