by Helen Wells
Dr. Monroe, more relaxed now, said: “Thanks, Miss Ames. I’ll give the injection myself. Tim Crane’s been calling for you. Won’t go to sleep until he’s told you good night.”
Cherry swiftly slipped into Timmy’s bedroom which was only dimly lighted now. There was no sign of Henry or Jan, but she could hear Mrs. Crane’s happy laughter floating through the half-open door to the living room of the suite.
Timmy, exhausted by too much excitement and the agony of anticipating what Santa would bring him, cried fretfully:
“I won’t go to sleep till I open just one present. Just one present, Cherry. Please!”
“I’ll have to ask your mother,” Cherry said. Oh, where were Jan and Henry? Was impulsive Jan in trouble?
She opened the door to the living room a crack wider and then let out a long sigh. Sitting on the sofa, talking animatedly to an apparently completely captivated Henry Landgraf, was Jan Paulding! Sitting on his left, vying for the attractive “pirate’s” attention, was Timmy’s mother.
Mrs. Crane arose when Cherry caught her eye, and came to the door.
“Is it all right if Timmy opens one present tonight?” Cherry asked. “And hadn’t you better lock the door to the corridor when I leave? I found it wide open.”
Mrs. Crane flushed. “I did lock it once. He must have gotten out of bed and opened it himself. He wanted to be sure of catching you when you passed on your way to the doctor’s office. And, of course, he may open one present.”
Timmy, who had been listening, bounced up and down with joy. “Open your mouth and shut your eyes, Cherry,” he ordered. “Then reach under the bed and pick out a present.”
Cherry did as she was told and produced a small package. It was wrapped in thin, white tissue paper, held together in two places with Santa Claus stickers. But it was not tied with string and there was no card on it. Cherry said tiredly:
“I don’t know who gave you this, but let’s open it anyway.”
Timmy peered at the package in the dim light. “It has to have a tag, Cherry. All Christmas presents have tags.”
Cherry, thinking that the donor perhaps had written his name on the white tissue wrapping itself, held the package close to the bulb in Timmy’s bedside lamp. Magically, the white paper took on a bluish tinge, and three large, printed words leaped into sight:
MILK OF MAGNESIA!
CHAPTER XVIII
Christmas Jugglery
TOO LATE, TIMMY YELLED:
“Oh, I forgot, Cherry. We can’t open that present. I can’t even open it tomorrow. That’s our secret. Henry’s and mine. It’s Henry’s very own Christmas present, but it got lonely in his cabin, so after we hung up my stocking we put it under the bed with all my presents. Henry’s going to come in early as anything tomorrow morning and open it when I open mine.”
“I bet he’ll come in early,” Cherry thought grimly. “And with quick sleight of hand he’ll substitute another similarly wrapped package for this one.”
Cherry herself did a swift juggling act then. With one hand she pushed the gift-wrapped milk-of-magnesia bottle down the floor to the very end of Timmy’s bed. At the same time she snatched up another present and handed it to Timmy.
“Let’s see what’s in this one,” she said, trying to sound calm and collected.
While Timmy yanked the red ribbon into hopeless knots, and tore the colorful paper into shreds, she said:
“Wait a minute. I’ve got some lonely presents in my cabin too. I’d like to open one of them with you right now.”
“Okey-dokey.” Tim grinned. “But hurry.”
Cherry hurried—so much so that she stumbled at the foot of Timmy’s bed. When she lurched to her feet she was clutching in the folds of her uniform skirt “Henry’s lonely gift.”
Then, as though on wings, she flew down the corridor to her own cabin. She remembered that one of her “stocking” presents had looked like a pint-size bottle of perfume. It was undoubtedly something with an impossible odor—a joke from Charlie.
But it was even better than that. It was a bottle of cheap, powdered bath salts! “Carrying coals to Newcastle,” the card read. Cherry snatched a tiny enamel funnel from her nurse’s kit. It took but a minute to transfer the exotic-smelling ambergris to her hot water bag and fill the milk-of-magnesia bottle with gardenia bath salts.
Henry, thank goodness, had licked his Santa Claus stickers so hastily there was still plenty of glue left. When Cherry had finished rewrapping the blue pint bottle no one would ever have known it had been tampered with.
“Two can play at this game,” she said, chuckling inwardly. “Maybe I can’t pick locks as expertly as he can, but I can unseal and reseal packages even better!”
She could see it all now: Mrs. Crane caught up by a group of her friends as she and Henry, with Timmy on his back, pushed their way into the crowded living room; Timmy hanging up the two red stockings but refusing to go to bed on the dot of nine; Henry saying indulgently:
“All right, Tim. You wait here in front of the fireplace while I go get my lonely present.”
But instead of going to his cabin he had strolled diagonally across the corridor to the purser’s office. Nobody in that milling Christmas crowd would have noticed that he was inserting his master key into the door of the office, not his stateroom.
Then those strong, deft fingers had worked swiftly but surely on the desk lock and the sealed package. Before coming to Timmy’s cabin earlier he had, of course, tucked tissue paper and stickers in one pocket of his gabardine suit, and a bottle of real milk of magnesia in the other. Tomorrow one of the passengers would discover his or her loss. But there would be no hue and cry about that—a clumsy maid had, of course, broken it while dusting.
Henry, with his master key—or keys—had indeed been master of the situation. He had made but one error and Cherry had played right into his hands. In his haste to get back to Timmy before the little boy made a scene, he had not slammed the desk drawer quite hard enough.
But it didn’t matter now. Because Cherry was now mistress of the situation.
Timmy, busy with a box of cardboard pirates, did not notice when Cherry slipped a package under his bed. He said without much enthusiasm:
“Open your present, Cherry. I’ll bet you didn’t get pirates.”
Cherry had brought along Dr. Joe’s “stocking” gift too. It was a child’s doctor’s kit, complete with stethoscope, wooden thermometer, and tiny forceps. Timmy immediately pounced upon it. Expertly he hung the toy stethoscope around his neck and shook down the thermometer.
Cherry laughed. “It’s my Christmas Eve present to you, Timmy. And now you must go to sleep.”
Obediently, he nestled under the covers, pirates, stethoscope, and all. Cherry tucked him in and laid her cheek against his for a minute as he sleepily mumbled his prayers:
“God bless Mummy, God bless Daddy, God bless Henry, God bless Cherry—” He was sound asleep.
“God bless you, ‘Tiny Tim,’ ” Cherry whispered as she tiptoed out of the room. “If it hadn’t been for you, we never would have found Jan’s ambergris.”
Cherry slept with her hot-water bottle under her pillow. She dreamed happily of ferocious pirates who, decked in leis of gardenias, danced around the tall blue and silver Christmas tree. Sometimes they wore Santa Claus masks and sometimes they twirled long, black mustachios, but they were, each and every one, Henry Landgraf.
She awoke to the sound of loud knocking and shouts of “Merry Christmas, Sleepyhead. Merry Christmas!”
It was Brownie, proudly displaying a wrist watch from her parents and a lovely little friendship ring from, as she said, “My very best boy friend.”
Cherry opened her other “stocking” presents then: A tiny celluloid octopus from Midge—Timmy would enjoy that in the pool. A miniature plum pudding from her mother, and a cardboard stocking full of candied cherries from Dad. “Sweets to the Sweet,” he had written.
Cherry promptly succumbed to another wave of homesi
ckness. Tears welled up into her dark-brown eyes. Cherry blinked them back, laughing at herself. Brownie, scraping one index finger across the other, hooted:
“Sissy for shame, Cherry Ames. You’re a big girl now.” She snatched up the pillow and tossed it at Cherry. And there, in plain view, was the red hot water bottle. Brownie gasped. “For goodness sake, Cherry. What on earth were you doing with that last night? It was as hot as anything in my cabin. The air conditioning wasn’t working properly.” She reached for the rubber bag, but Cherry snatched it away just in time.
“I had a toothache,” she fibbed nonchalantly, and carried the hot water bottle across the room to toss it up on the top shelf of her closet.
Brownie, admiring her new ring and wrist watch, said vaguely, “Thought you put an ice bag on your face when you had a toothache.”
“Sometimes you do,” Cherry admitted. “Sometimes heat is the only thing that helps.”
Brownie yawned. “Well, I’d better scramble into uniform and get up on A deck. It’s Christmas for the passengers, but it’s just one more day to us poor slaves.”
Cherry celebrated by taking a hot saltwater shower. She took the hot water bottle into the glassed-in compartment with her. She was not going to let that little rubber bag out of her sight until she had delivered it in person to Jan Paulding. After that it was no longer Cherry’s responsibility. Jan could turn it over to the captain until the ship docked the next day in Willemstad. Jan could have Henry Landgraf arrested, if she liked.
But Cherry doubted if Jan would do that. From the glimpse she had caught of them chatting together the evening before, in the Crane suite, they were now as thick as thieves.
And Henry? When he took one whiff of those violent “gardenia” bath salts, he would know that although he had played his cards close, poker-faced throughout, Lady Luck, in the form of Tim Crane, had deserted him.
Would he throw down his cards now and admit defeat? Or would he deal another hand? Time was running out. He had but one more day and one more night. Even he would have no way of knowing that the precious ambre blanc was now shifting around inside the hot water bottle of the ship’s nurse.
Cherry slipped into her uniform and was just pinning on her cap when someone tapped on her door. For a moment she was frightened. Was it Timmy’s pirate? Had he somehow discovered her juggling act of the night before?
The other occupants of the women’s crew quarters had already gone off to their duties. Cherry was alone in her cabin in the dim, narrow passageway off the main corridor. It would be inviting disaster to open her door. And then, frozen with horror, she remembered that she had not locked it when she came back from her shower.
The only thing to do was to brazen it out. Cherry squared her shoulders and said in a clear voice:
“Come in.”
It was Jan! She had flung a seersucker bathrobe over her pajamas. Cherry threw her arms around the tall young girl and cried hilariously, “Merry Christmas, darling. A very merry Christmas!”
Jan hugged Cherry and said, “I guess it’s just about the merriest Christmas I ever had. Oh, Cherry, I can hardly believe it. I’m going to college after all.”
Cherry stared at her in amazement. How could Jan know that her precious ambergris was safe and sound? Before she could get out a word, Jan went on ecstatically.
“I don’t care if he is a—well, a shady character. He’s so gallant, Cherry. After we left the Cranes’ last night I invited him in to our suite. I wasn’t going to let him out of my sight, remember? Mother is simply wild about him. She hung on every word he said. And then it came out that I was Uncle Benedict’s niece, and just as I thought, he’s Uncle Ben’s ex-partner.”
Cherry managed a weak: “Oh? Then what?”
“Well, then nothing much,” Jan admitted. “Not last night, anyway. We talked about everything but ambergris, of course. And he told us the most fascinating stories about some of the fantastic adventures he and Uncle Ben had had in all the most foreign spots in the world. He called him ‘Uncle Ben’ too, you see, and really thought of him as an uncle, because Henry hasn’t any family of his own. And until Mother and I told him, he thought Uncle Ben didn’t have any nephews or nieces. He read in the newspaper, stories when Uncle died, about his prominent brothers and sisters, but there wasn’t any mention of me.”
Jan, her hazel eyes glowing, began to pace up and down the tiny cabin. “Don’t you see, Cherry? I know now that he was after that ambergris too, but he felt it belonged to him. After all, my uncle practically adopted Henry about sixteen years ago when he was only twenty-two. He was in some sort of trouble with the French police and Uncle Ben rescued him.” Jan dimpled. “Henry says the ‘trouble’ was simply that he couldn’t speak French then, but I’ll bet it was not quite so simple as that.”
“There we see eye to eye, Jan Paulding,” Cherry muttered. “My guess is that the ‘trouble’ had something to do with breaking and entering. He may have reformed after Uncle Ben ‘adopted’ him, but he hasn’t forgotten any of his old tricks.”
But Jan wasn’t listening. “Those blue, blue eyes of his! They’re as blue as the Caribbean Sea.”
“And just as hypnotic,” Cherry mumbled.
Jan laughed. “That’s right. Anyway, he didn’t leave until midnight, and then it was Christmas. And I just knew anybody as gallant as that wouldn’t steal anything on Christmas Day, Cherry.”
“Christmas Day or Christmas Eve,” Cherry said tartly, “it’s all the same thing. And he did steal your ambergris, Jan.”
“I know.” Jan shrugged. “But you can’t call it stealing. Not really, Cherry.”
Cherry gasped. Was Jan going to do a complete right-about-face of character and go sentimental? Hypnotized, was she going to let Henry Landgraf keep the ambergris simply because he had felt he was her uncle’s rightful heir?
Cherry’s mind reeled. And how in the world did Jan know that the ambergris had been stolen?
Jan herself answered that question. “Don’t look so shocked, Cherry. He only did it as a Christmas surprise for me. Honestly, you could have knocked me over with a feather when Waidy arrived this morning with that package.
“ ‘Merry Christmas, Miss Jan,’ he said. ‘Compliments of Mr. Landgraf.’ And then when I tore off the paper and saw that milk-of-magnesia bottle, I just tucked it in my bathrobe pocket and came racing down here to you.”
With a flourish, Jan produced from her bathrobe pocket a cloudy blue bottle. The very one Cherry had filled with Charlie’s bath salts on Christmas Eve! Jan unscrewed the top and then she wrinkled up her dainty nose.
“Oh, Cherry,” she wailed, “this isn’t ambergris! It hasn’t got a delicate fragrance at all. It’s more like that ghastly perfume you have to breathe on crowded buses.” She crumpled down on Cherry’s bunk and burst into tears. “That horrid man! He’s played a trick on me.”
Jan did not spend much time in idle tears. She was angry, indignant, chagrined. Jumping from Cherry’s bed with clenched fists, she moaned, “Oh, what a miserable fool I’ve been! I let him soft soap me into thinking him a romantic pirate with a heart of gold. And then—then—!”
The young girl now was pacing up and down within the narrow confines of Cherry’s stateroom. She kept clenching and unclenching her hands, striking one tight fist against the other.
“What does he think I am—a child?” she raged. “Does he think I don’t know the difference between dimestore junk and real ambergris? That cold-blooded thief wasn’t satisfied to steal what was going to pay for my education—what he knew my uncle whom he professed to idolize had left for me—but then he tried to make me think he had restored it to me as a Christmas present—”
Cherry made an effort to calm the girl’s violence. “Jan,” she cried, “stop it! You’ll make yourself sick. Calm down! Your precious ambergris is safe—”
But Jan wasn’t listening. She continued her tirade. Her voice rose almost to a scream.
“He’s the meanest man in the world! He woul
d steal pennies from a poor box and then slip a note in their place ‘blessed are the poor.’ I’m going to the captain and I’m going to have Henry Landgraf exposed for the miserable sneak thief he is. Oh, I wish I knew—”
Cherry had had enough of Jan Paulding’s hysterical outburst. She arose and putting her two hands firmly on the girl’s shoulders, forced her down to a sitting position on her bed.
“That’s enough, Jan! You’ve had your big scene. Now you are going to hear what I’ve been trying to tell you ever since you came into my stateroom. I’m glad you’re over your schoolgirl crush on this highhanded young man. What I tried to tell you was that your ambergris is safe.”
Then, having quieted the trembling young girl, Cherry told her of last night’s adventures. Jan listened, wide-eyed, without interruption.
“So you see,” concluded the smiling cruise nurse, “you’ve got nothing to worry about, darling. I have your ambergris safe and sound. See? It’s right here in my hot water bottle. Take a whiff and prove it for yourself.”
Cherry unscrewed the top of her hot water bottle and held it under Jan’s nose. One sniff was all she needed. With a glad cry she hugged Cherry until the latter cried, “Stop, you’re bashing in my ribs!”
“You’re a wonder, Cherry,” said Jan, her voice deep with emotion. “I’ll be grateful to you all my life. How wonderful that you were able to beat Henry Landgraf at his own game. What are we going to do now—go to the captain?”
Cherry thought a minute. “For the present,” she said, “I believe we ought to leave the ambergris right there in my hot water bottle. You run along now, dear, and try to act as though you had the stuff in the bottle just as Mr. Hijacker Landgraf gave it to you. A Merry Christmas, Jan!”
Jan stooped and planted a kiss on one of Cherry’s red cheeks, then darted away, slamming the door behind her. Cherry stood stock-still for a minute, then she slowly went over and locked the door. The ambergris, she realized now, was not safe in her hot water bottle—not as long as Henry Landgraf remained aboard the Julita. She doubted if it would be safe anywhere on the ship—in the purser’s safe, even in the captain’s cabin—now that the thief knew that someone had switched the contents of that milk-of-magnesia bottle which he had slipped under Timmy’s bed.