“I made the muffins,” her mother reminded her, using the same petulant tone as her daughter.
I led them into the kitchen, so I could put the knife back in its drawer. “There,” I said, kneeling down so I could face Poppy. “All gone.” She nodded warily and allowed me to take her hand.
“Try one,” Heather said of the muffins, thrusting the plate at me. “Homemade. So much better than store-bought.”
“This house is small,” the younger boy, whose name was Lucian, noted as Heather looked around at the worn-out kitchen with a defeated air. It seemed she’d had a much grander vision of her simple country house than ramshackle little Fool’s House. They had some money, Miles would tell us later. Ollie was a scientist and smart enough to have invested a little in biotech stocks, and had been somewhat successful. But not quite enough for the lifestyle they expected they were supposed to lead in New York City: a townhouse in Brooklyn with four kids at private schools, and nannies to make sure nobody was getting neglected, and orthodontists, tutors, coaches, vacations, and, naturally, a second home.
Fool’s House was the kind of place they might be able to buy, if they stretched and scraped and made do, spending vacations there instead of traveling, getting rid of a nanny or two now that their kids were a bit older. But it would never be the house of their dreams.
“Yoo-hoooooo,” Laurie called in through the screen door. “You were early,” she said to Heather in an accusatory tone. She wore a minidress, this one acid green and sleeveless to show off her bony shoulders, and she clattered in on high heels, distracted and glaring at her phone. “Did you tell them to come early?” she asked me, suspicious perhaps that I was going to cut her out of the deal.
I assured her I was not plotting anything and told her to go ahead and give them the grand tour. “You might want to avoid Peck’s room for a while, though. She and Miles are just getting up.”
“Miles Noble is here?” Laurie glanced quickly at me.
Ollie looked shocked. “What’s Miles doing here?”
I shrugged. “He’s with my sister.”
Laurie shepherded the Bosley parents into the living room after giving me a nasty look and they left the children with me in the kitchen. Dylan, the older boy with the long hair, wanted to know if we had any donuts.
“We’re not allowed to eat donuts,” explained Clementine, the oldest. She sported a midriff-baring tank top and terry-cloth shorts so tiny they really could have been more accurately considered an undergarment. In her mouth was a purple candy pacifier that made it look like she was wearing purple lipstick. “But we eat them all the time anyway.”
“Our mom’s too busy to notice.” Dylan looked around for the stash of sweets he seemed to know we would have.
“Stay-at-home moms are always busier than the working moms,” his little brother, Lucian, informed us. He sounded like he was parroting one of his older siblings or something he’d heard on television, but he spoke with conviction. “Everyone knows that.”
Clementine pulled the candy pacifier out of her mouth to explain. “The stay-at-home moms have to do all the work at the schools and the charities. But the office moms don’t have to do that stuff. They feel guilty for working and come home and bake cookies with you and stuff. Stay-at-home moms, they don’t have time to bake. Unless it’s for a bake sale. But then we’re not allowed to eat any of it.”
“So, are there any donuts?” Dylan asked again. He shrugged as though he knew he might sound slightly rude, but survival depended on it.
We didn’t have any donuts but there were plenty of freshly baked cupcakes, frosted in pink.
“Frosting, awesome!” declared Lucian, smiling at me as though his opinion of me had suddenly gone way up. They all seemed to view me differently now that baked goods—not rock-hard health muffins with bits of carrot and zucchini, but cupcakes, with frosting—had been provided. Little Lucian appeared to have fallen in love. He patted my hand as he stuffed half a cupcake into his mouth in one bite.
“My friend Jesse has a Prada mom,” Poppy declared through her own enormous mouthful of vanilla cake and pink frosting, quite proud to be able to offer something to the conversation. Then she quickly shoved the rest of her cupcake into her mouth, as though she wanted to get it finished before her mom showed up and took it away from her.
“What’s a Prada mom?” I asked, surprised by how much I was enjoying their company. I could actually imagine the four of them spending their weekends and summers in this house, reading on the porch, making forts in the small closet under the stairs, learning how to play tennis on the crumbling old court.
Poppy paused, unable to answer my question. Then she spoke through a mouthful. “I don’t know.”
Clementine had left her candy sucker on the counter and was pulling apart the cupcake I’d given her. “It’s a mom who wears cool clothes and is skinny and wears her daughter’s jeans. You know, a fashion mom. As opposed to, say, the office moms who wear suits—those are called power moms. Or there’s the Lilly moms.”
“What’s a Lilly mom?” Poppy asked the question for me.
Clementine rolled her eyes before answering, in that singsong teenage way that makes every sentence sound like a question that should be followed by a “Duh.” “The proud-to-be-preppy kind. The ones who wear Lilly all the time? Lilly Pulitzer?”
“What other kinds of moms are there?” I figured I might as well do some research. I hoped to become a mom myself one day.
“Our mom’s a yoga mom,” Dylan said. “There’s lots of those at my school.”
“They make you eat edamame,” Poppy complained. “And organic ketchup. It’s disgusting.”
“They don’t know anything about fashion,” Clementine added. “They try to make you buy no-brand jeans. As if.”
“They’re obsessed with summer reading,” Dylan added, making it sound like a disease.
“What’s wrong with summer reading?” I asked in amusement.
“Reading is boring,” Lucian explained in a gentle manner, as though he didn’t want to hurt my feelings by pointing out something so obvious.
“The woman who lived in this house was obsessed with summer reading too,” I told them. “She was my aunt. Her first question would have been ‘What are you reading?’ and if you told her, ‘Nothing,’ she would have screamed in horror. Then she would have gone to the shelf in her living room and gotten a book for you and made you read it. She would always say it was the way you learn what matters in life. And then she would probably tell you to try writing one of your own. She always wanted everyone to write their stories down.”
“Our mom always says she’s going to write a book,” Dylan said. “But she never does.”
“What kind of mom are you?” Lucian looked up at me, pink frosting on his nose and in his hair and on the tips of his very long eyelashes.
“I’m not one,” I said, wiping the frosting off his nose with a napkin. “Yet.”
“You can babysit for us,” Lucian said, gazing up at me again with those bedroom eyes. “Any time you want.”
“You have a husband?” Poppy wanted to know, like a journalist firing questions at a subject.
“That’s rude,” Dylan told his sister. “You’re a pimple.”
She let out an angry whine. “I am not a pimple. You’re a pimple. You’re a pus pimple.”
“You don’t even know what a pus pimple is,” Dylan pointed out. “And you have very bad manners.”
“It’s okay,” I said, grinning. With four kids in this small house, it would never be too quiet. “What about the dads? Are there different kinds of those?”
“The dads are stressed out all the time,” Clementine said.
Dylan added quickly, “The dads are the sports police.”
“What’s the sports police?” I asked, taking mental notes. Four kids seemed like the right number, and I found myself thinking Finn would probably want at least that many, after having grown up with all those brothers. Then I quickly dis
missed that thought: What difference did it make to me how many children Finn Killian wanted to have? “Like referees?”
“Nah, they just force you to be on all these travel teams. Even if you don’t want to.” Dylan folded his arms over his chest as though he had decided then and there not to be a party to any of that sports ridiculousness ever again. “Even if you suck at sports. They sign you up without asking. And then they make you go to the games and practice ’cause they say you can’t let the team down. But you didn’t even want to be on the stupid team.”
“They’re the ones who coach stuff,” Clementine added for clarification. “Or get in fights on the sidelines.”
“Can moms be sports police too?” I asked her.
Clementine nodded. “They’re called soccer moms,” she said. “They try to pretend it’s just supposed to be fun. But they get really mad when—” All of a sudden she let out a loud squeal, startling all of us. “Look at him!”
She was pointing at the back door, where Trimalchio had appeared, draped in a velvet cape tipped in faux leopard. He looked ridiculous. And he knew it.
I opened the door to let him in. “Who did this to you?”
Trimalchio was a good sport, benevolently allowing himself to be caressed by four sets of sticky hands. Then Biggsy appeared behind him. He followed the dog with his video camera over his shoulder. Only he didn’t realize the screen door was shut and he walked right into it, thrusting his elbow through the screen, jabbing a large hole into it.
The two younger Bosley children, Poppy and Lucian, thought the hole in the screen was the funniest thing they’d ever seen and burst out laughing, as though it was a clown act and he’d done it on purpose. Maybe he had. “Hello, Cassie,” he said, all friendly. “I see you found the cupcakes I made.”
“You made these?” I was suddenly afraid he might have slipped something into the cupcakes.
“Just trying to help out,” he said, giving me a look. I wondered if he realized he’d become our number-one suspect in the mystery of the missing painting and now the case of the missing book.
“Do it again,” Poppy demanded. “Again.”
“Is that your dog?” The children clamored around Biggsy. “Why is he wearing a costume?” “Are you making a movie of him?”
Biggsy made a face at me, as if to say, See? They want me here. “Hey, kids,” he said to them. “Want to be in a film?”
The younger ones immediately said yes. Clementine wanted to know if their mother needed to sign a release.
“Hey, man, this is art,” he said, as he zoomed in on Trimalchio’s patient mug.
“They ate the cupcakes,” I said to him, in a warning tone. He was weird and probably a thief or at the very least a nuisance, but I didn’t think he would actually hurt any children. They were smiling happily, rubbing sticky fingers over Trimalchio, and none of the four of them appeared to be frothing at the mouth or writhing in pain from some sneaky poisonous ingredient.
“Weren’t they good? Did Miss Cassie tell you about the ghost of Fool’s House?” he asked, now focusing on tiny Poppy’s face, which immediately scrunched up in preparation for tears at the word ghost.
“What ghost?” Lucian asked in excitement.
I quickly reassured them. “It’s just a story some people like to tell. There’s no ghost.”
Biggsy swung the video camera into my face. “Of course there is. He likes to play backgammon.”
“I play backgammon,” the older boy, Dylan, said.
“I don’t want to live in a haunted house,” Poppy whispered to me.
“If you leave a backgammon game unfinished, the ghost will play it out. And red will always win,” Biggsy continued. “He takes paintings off walls and moves things around. He’s a good ghost.” Both boys deemed a ghost cool and awesome and Clementine didn’t care. Even little Poppy gazed up at me with total trust, believing the ghost was just a made-up story. So if he’d been trying to scare them, he was unsuccessful.
Biggsy clapped his hands, trying another tack. “Want to look in the refrigerator?”
The three older ones nodded warily while Poppy gave me a nervous glance. “That’s enough,” I said. “Show’s over, Fool. You can go now.”
He ignored me as the children stared up at him. “For some reason, people always want to open the fridge when they look at houses,” Biggsy explained to them. “We don’t know why. It’s just one of those nosy human things that we do. It’s instinct. Or habit. So go right ahead.”
Dylan hesitated for a few seconds and then pulled open the door to the refrigerator. They all examined our groceries.
Lucian was the first to notice. “What’s that?” He pointed at something.
We all looked more carefully. “It’s an arm,” Clementine announced in a bored matter-of-fact tone, as though it were not only normal but expected to find a severed limb in the fridge. After all, wasn’t that where they belonged?
“How did that get in there?” Biggsy directed his words at Trimalchio. The dog looked like a grand stage actor ready to take five, weary of a role he’d been playing for too long but for which he’d become famous.
In planning his little prank, intending to scare off another set of possible buyers, Biggsy had forgotten a most important rule: know your audience. The Bosley children were unfazed by the arm. Only four-year-old Poppy got excited about it, and that’s because she thought it was fantastic. In fact, they all seemed to think it was great, and they grew animated at the thought of living in such a fun house.
Laurie brought Ollie and Heather back to the kitchen amid the excitement. Ollie saw a severed arm as an opportunity to demonstrate his razor-sharp wit. “This house must be cheap,” he said. “It didn’t cost an arm and a leg. Only an arm.”
Laurie laughed as though those were the cleverest words ever uttered by a man. Clearly she must have thought the showing had gone well.
“Follow me, children,” Biggsy said, leading the four of them out the back door with Trimalchio following. I was about to suggest that we go too, rather than leaving the children alone with him, when Peck came into the kitchen in a cloud of freshly applied Jo Malone. She was wearing an old-fashioned bathing suit, the full one-piece armored kind. This one was red with white polka dots and made her boobs and butt look huge. She also sported an enormous straw hat, candy-red lipstick, and very high platform espadrilles.
“Welcome to Fool’s House,” she cried out. “Can I offer you a Bloody Mary? How about some fresh lemonade? Or pancakes!”
“The children might like that,” Heather suggested, somewhat flabbergasted by the sight of Peck in her elaborate getup, exactly the desired effect.
“Children? What children?” Peck’s smile faded a bit. She didn’t have much tolerance for small people who couldn’t partake of her famous Southsides and had little in the way of amusing anecdotes to share.
“I would take a cappuccino,” Ollie offered.
Peck made a face. I knew what she was thinking: Some people have such bad manners. This would be the perfect excuse for her to refuse to sell them our house, even if they did make an offer. “We do not,” she enunciated, “have a cappuccino maker.”
Laurie Poplin smiled coldly at Peck and said she hoped they hadn’t woken her up. “It’s almost eleven,” she pointed out in a snide way that made me think Finn had been right about her feelings for Miles Noble. She glanced toward the hallway before asking the Bosleys if they wanted to go back up and see the bedroom that they’d missed.
They shook their heads. “We got the idea,” Ollie said.
“We’ll probably want to come back at night,” Heather added.
Ollie only mentioned Harvard once. “I had a blanket just like that at Harvard,” he noted with enthusiasm, of the popcorn spread that covered the bed in my room. And Heather liked the studio above the garage, which she planned to use for her pottery and yoga and, as she put it, “my writing.” Their shift in attitude toward the place from the beginning of their visit until the end wa
s palpable and Laurie Poplin bounced on the balls of her feet as she walked them to their car.
We stood on the porch watching them load the four children into the predictable hybrid. Biggsy had disappeared again, his motorcycle gone.
“I. Did. Not. Like. Those. People,” Peck announced as the Bosleys pulled out of the driveway while Laurie stood there waving at them.
Laurie had just pulled away in her own car when Miles Noble came out to the porch wearing Peck’s silk paisley robe. His hair stuck out from his head in tufts and his face was puffy. “What people?” He kissed her on the neck. “Hey, Stella.”
“People like that don’t deserve such a place.” She was still glaring down the driveway. “This house is special. And those people, your houseguests, were . . . uninspired. Uninspiring.”
Miles looked confused. “Which houseguests?”
“The Bosleys,” I explained, trying not to notice how the sash to Peck’s robe was coming loose—it was clear that Miles was not wearing anything underneath it. “We met them at your place on Saturday night. Remember? They said they wanted to look at our house?”
Miles barked out a laugh. “They did? A house they would actually pay for?”
“See,” Peck said to me in a quick shift. “They’ll never make an offer. This conversation is moot.”
Miles couldn’t keep his hands off her. “Moot,” he said, nuzzling her ear. “I want to moot you.”
“Miles,” she admonished. “Get a room.”
“Maybe I’ll buy it,” Miles said, grinning lazily. “I like it here.”
Peck turned to me. “Miles and I like it better here,” she said. “His house is too big.”
Miles nodded somewhat sheepishly. “My house is ridiculous.”
“Literally. I got lost,” Peck explained. “For like an hour. Plus, it’s horribly ugly.”
“It’s really ugly,” Miles said to me. “I should sell it.” He looked over at Peck and ran one finger along her cheek. “I’m going to sell it. I hate it. So, what’s for breakfast? Where’s that butler dude?”
“He’s disappeared again,” I said. “And I think he took Lydia’s copy of The Great Gatsby. I can’t find it anywhere.”
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