by Juliet Bell
“That’s Rosie,” I said, though I didn’t know why she was back there again, trying to get my attention.
“Ella,” she whispered again. “Come quick!”
“Sounds like it’s important.” Dad went into the bathroom and to the back door. It was stuck, of course—as we knew.
“You can’t open that one,” I told him.
“This old thing?” he said. “Sure you can. There’s just a trick to it.”
He lifted his heavy booted foot and kicked the brass doorknob, hard. “You have to do that first.” Then, cool as a cucumber (are all cucumbers cool? I mean, even if you don’t keep them in the refrigerator?), he turned the knob, the door opened and there, just like before, was my new friend, Rosie.
She seemed as astonished as I was that we’d gotten through there, like we’d magically entered into the fourth dimension or something, but my dad, cheerful again now, just grinned. “This used to be my room, too, you know, Belle.”
Well, no. It was one more thing I hadn’t known.
We didn’t pause now, though, as Rosie was urging me to follow her to the Library. She had been in there with Jason, she explained rapidly, to see him finishing up his work on the computer.
It turned out to be a good thing that I hadn’t been with Rosie, because she was able to get Jason into conversation by making a passing snide comment about “the Royal Violet.” (My friend was too polite to go into details about what she’d said.) She got the thumb dude chatting, turned away from his laptop, and then, she said, “I used my secret weapon.”
I looked blank.
“Lola.”
She could see I wasn’t completely keeping up with her, but she let it pass. So apparently right on the spot she made up a whole tale about how her cousin Lola had been talking a lot about Jason lately. As Rosie said slyly, “It isn’t a total lie … She did tell me about him.”
Even Tweedledums and Tweedledees are open to flattery, we learned. Like I say, Rosie might have a future in drama, or at least in creative writing, because her master stroke was remembering that Lola had gone to a pool party that day with some high school friends, and when she mentioned that, and how Lola had wondered if he would be there, Texty pulled out his phone and started going crazy with his thumbs, checking with someone else where this party was. By then Rosie was on a roll, so she emphasized that Lola was going to be there only for a little while, but if he headed over there fast, he might catch her.
Nice work, partner!
“But—now what?” I asked. I didn’t feel too bad about tricking Texty, but I didn’t see how it really helped us solve our case.
“Check the computer. That’s the whole point. He left it on, and his file’s still open. We’ve got to take a look.”
So Rosie and I sat in front of the Tweedle machine, trying to make sense of what was in front of us. I’m sure I hoped Jason would simply have left us a message that said in block letters “You’re right, I took Kepler’s Dream, I’m guilty guilty guilty!” Unfortunately it wasn’t quite that simple. The open file was a long list of author names and book titles. I wasn’t sure what any of them would have to do with the Morris Kepler, but there was nothing to do other than read through, looking for clues. At first it just seemed one long, confusing blur, but I did notice that some names were highlighted. Rosie agreed that seemed significant. We just didn’t know how.
The outer door creaked open.
“What are you girls doing?” came the alarmed voice of my grandmother, but right behind her was an echo from Mr. Cheerful, my dad, trying to reassure her.
There was a frozen moment of the GM looking at Rosie, and Rosie looking at the GM, and I think both of them were wondering if she was going to have a fit about Rosie being right there, in her priceless Librerery.
Here was where my dad earned his stripes, though. If he had stripes.
“It’s Holmes and Watson, Mother,” he said in his heartiest voice. “All Ella needs is a pipe. And one of those funny hats.”
The GM took in a sharp breath, and I had a distinct feeling that she was swallowing a whole sentence or two, of the kind that might have made reference to our old friend Phyllis Stine, or maybe someone even less favored.
“Well, girls?” was all she said. “And what have you found?”
Now I had to hope we had something useful to show for our trespassing.
We showed the open file to my grandmother. You could see from the GM’s grimace that the act of reading on the screen was distasteful to her, as if someone was getting her to swallow a nasty vitamin pill (like my mom used to make me do, in the mornings before I went to school). My grandmother agreed that what we were looking at was the inventory Tweedledum and Tweedledee had been working on all these weeks (I wasn’t about to try to tell her their real names, not now). She did not know the significance of the highlighted sections either.
I noticed that one of them was Waugh. It was linked on the screen with something called Decline and Fall. I remembered the book I had seen in Our Pest’s suitcase, that day he left when I had tried accidentally-on-purpose to rifle through his luggage. I told everyone about that, and about Abercrombie’s eagerness to hide the copy from me.
“Really?” The GM looked interested. “And did you see what the book was?”
“Well,” I told her, “he covered it up pretty quickly. But I did see W-A-U-G-H …”
“Waugh.” She raised a brow. “You’ve always been a great fan of the Waughs, Ella, have you not?”
I gave it right back to her. “The greatest. You betcha.”
My dad could see some joke flitting between his mother and me, and I could tell he was surprised. Impressed, even. It wasn’t every near twelve-year-old who would risk sarcasm with Violet Von Stern.
My grandmother walked over to a particular patch of bookshelf where, it seemed, Waugh and his brothers hung out. She moved a finger along a series of spines, naming titles under her breath. When she got to the end of the line, she issued a single, distressed sound. (Not an expletive, as it would have been with my dad, but it was close.)
“Decline and Fall,” she said wearily. “My first edition. A slightly foxed copy.” She paused for an educational moment. “In book collecting, Ella, that means lightly worn.” Then she faced all of us, her eyes a shocked water blue. Not icy. “My first edition is gone. It appears,” her voice was somber, “that Christopher is a thief, after all.”
From that point on, the four of us went back and forth between the highlights from the inventory Tweedledum and Tweedledee had created and the physical volumes on the shelves. Rosie or I would read out a name from the computer, like we were taking roll call, and Grandmother or my dad would compare the roll call with the volumes in her collection. Time after time we found that the boys were picking out the books of which she had doubles, and leaving those off their list.
The GM began to suspect that the “dire duo” didn’t plan on their employer ever checking over their work. (Ms. Nelson would have had a word to say about that. She was very big on people checking things over.) “I’m sure they thought that I was old and doddering and not paying proper attention. The policeman that night, Barker, believed the same thing. What is more surprising”—my grandmother’s voice became sharper—“is that Christopher himself was playing me for a fool. The way this list was being created, it is clear he was actively involved. He knew perfectly well which were the valuable volumes.
“Of course I have doubles: I have an early edition of Room of One’s Own, but I also have one that is signed. The signed copy—Virginia Woolf’s name, in her own wiry hand—is tremendously valuable. Christopher and I have talked about it, and I know he has coveted that copy. It is not on their list.”
I understood what my grandmother was getting at: Abercrombie had been trying, with the help of his nephew and Jackson, to erase the record of some of my grandmother’s most important books. And when he had done that, I was pretty sure, he’d come back and handily collect those books for himself. As he al
ready had with the Waugh.
“Christopher tried to persuade me—indeed, he had persuaded me—that he would grant me a magnanimous favor in coming to ‘safeguard’ the collection while I was next traveling.” My grandmother gazed around the Librerery: her room, her church. “He planned to come with a moving truck, no doubt, and remove select treasures.”
My dad reminded the GM that Edward had become wary of Christopher Abercrombie over the years, ever since the time Abercrombie sold him a precious volume that turned out to be a fake—something Grandmother said Mr. Books always denied he had known.
“Yes, but Father made Abercrombie take the book back and return the money.” My dad looked at her. “He was not terribly pleased about that, as you may recall.”
“No, he wasn’t,” my grandmother agreed. “But,” she protested, “in other ways Christopher has been a good friend to me …”
“Friend?” My dad did a Class A eye roll. Really, worthy of a sixteen-year-old. “Mother, the man tried to marry you!”
My grandmother blushed. “Well …,” she said. It was one of the first times I’d ever seen her at a loss for words.
“And I don’t think he was happy about your turning him down.”
“He had bad feelings about Edward, too,” I piped up. They both looked surprised that I had anything to contribute. “Abercrombie did. Rosie heard him talking about it. Remember?” Rosie nodded, and told them both the story of what she had overheard from the roof. My grandmother listened carefully and then sighed. Deeply.
“Well—perhaps this plotting on his part was a matter of settling old scores. Still, the insidiousness of the man! And the arrogance, thinking I’d never notice.”
How the GM had managed to miss this before, I would never know. If I hadn’t been a well-mannered young lady who tried, where possible, to be brave and good, I might have been tempted to say, What did I tell you? The guy’s a crook! He tried to make us mistrust Miguel. He said I galumphed. He probably secretly copied my words during Boggle games, too.
“I remember when you bought Kepler’s Dream from him.” My dad wasn’t finished with Abercrombie yet. “I thought you ought to have the copy authenticated.” Dad turned to define this for me and Rosie. “To make sure that it was the real thing.”
“What I chiefly recall,” replied the GM, some of the edge back in her voice, “was that you thought my purchase of that book was a waste of money and a complete folly.”
“Yeah, well.” He waved a hand. “Some of that was bluster. It was a lousy time, and …” His voice trailed off. Like I said, my dad wasn’t great at explaining himself. “I hadn’t been out on the river for a while. When I’m land-bound too long, it starts to show.”
My grandmother nodded. “Edward needed his time on the river, too. That’s a quality you shared.”
“Is that him?” Rosie asked, pointing to the old photograph sticking out of my dad’s shirt pocket. “Mr. Mackenzie?”
“Where did you get that?” my grandmother asked sharply.
“I found it,” I said, guiltily. I wondered if I’d get in trouble for being a thief, too. “When I was looking around one day. Just, you know—exploring.” I cleared my throat. “I just liked seeing a picture of Dad and his dad together. I—I was going to put it back before I left.” I wasn’t completely sure that this was true, but it seemed best to say so.
My grandmother looked at the small square for a long minute.
“Let’s put this next to the others, shall we?” She walked over to place it, unframed though it was, on the shelf near the wedding snaps of herself with Edward. From the expression on her face I figured she wasn’t going to give me a hard time, after all. In fact she suggested that my dad and Rosie and I could all go into that back room together (the GM didn’t know to call it the Chamber of Tchotchkes) and look through the albums and loose photographs there, if we wanted to.
We did.
“You carry on then, Walter. Why don’t you lead the way.” Maybe, the GM said, we might even find some old snaps of the Aguilar boys running around in the dust from those days. Rosie’s face brightened at that prospect.
Dad and Rosie went on ahead, but I hung back for a moment. There was a sadness pulling on the GM’s shoulders that made me feel bad for her.
“Don’t you want to see the pictures too, Grandmother?”
She didn’t answer at first. It seemed as though her thoughts were miles, maybe even light-years, away. Finally she said, “That sounds very formal, Ella, doesn’t it?”
“What? I mean—pardon?”
“‘Grandmother,’” she clarified. “It sounds rather formal, don’t you think?”
“I guess so.” It seemed politest to agree with her, though since when had formality ever been a problem for this person who put you under house arrest if you didn’t start the day with Good morning?
“Could we come up with something shorter for you to call me, do you think?”
“I don’t know.” By now I was used to sounding like I was in an old-fashioned play. It seemed late in the day to change the script, and besides, “Grandma” was still reserved for the name of my mom’s mom, the brownie baker in Los Angeles. Even if she wasn’t around anymore.
Then I thought of something. Taking my life in my hands, and trying not to sound nervous or mumbly, I said, “Well, how about—GM?” It was strange to utter the phrase aloud. That whole time I had only been hearing it in my head.
“GM?” She considered this as she opened the door for us back into the house. “Oh yes, I see. GM: Grand Mother. Or in German, Gross Mutter.”
I wasn’t going to touch that one. But I did add, “Or even, you know—General Major.” Boy, had I become bold. Those elementary school teachers should see me now.
Violet Von Stern smiled her small, satisfied smirk. “Yes. Occasionally, for General Major. Well, someone has to keep things in shipshape, and it won’t be the junior officers.” She raised an eyebrow at me. “Though the junior officers do have their uses, of course.”
She didn’t put an arm around me—like I’ve said, physical affection wasn’t my grandmother’s style. But she did let me walk by her side, keeping pace with her as we made our way back to the house. It was a place where the junior officers were, in rare summers, permitted to be.
TWELVE
IT ISn’T a TOTaL DISaSTer FOr a DeTeCTIVe aGenCY nOT TO be able to solve its very first case, but it’s not great for future business. Someone must have opened up that old cooler and happened on Kepler’s Dream, and it still seemed likely to the two partners of Aguilar and Mackenzie that short, speedy-thumbed Jason was the one. Then we figured he had come up with a way to spirit the copy to his uncle Christopher, to join the Waugh and who knew what else. How he could have managed to escape our eagle eyes—not to mention the peacock eyes around the property—was a mystery. That the Kepler book could never be sold would matter to any normal thief, but not to Abercrombie. He wanted that Dream for himself, I was sure of it.
But what could Rosie and I do about catching them? They had covered their tracks well, and the trail, after the excitement of the evil inventory intervention, had gone cold. Even with Lou on our side.
Anyway, time had pretty well run out. Up to that point, Time had been dragging its feet and hardly moving all summer, like a big fat horse stopping to eat weeds. Now suddenly, with the end in sight, Time moved into a gallop. It was a strange phenomenon, and if Kepler himself had still been alive, he probably would have had a theory about it. I figured if I ever became a scientist one day, I could make it a subject of my study: The way Time speeds up and slows down again over a long, busy summer.
For the past month and a half, all I’d wanted was to be able to visit my mom, but now that it was almost happening, I had butterflies in my stomach. It was surprising—I mean, this was Mom we were talking about!—but it felt like forever since I’d seen her. This was by a few light-years the longest time she and I had ever spent apart. Since I had never gone to wilderness or music camp, Broken
Family Camp was my first serious stretch away from home. And though everything I had written to my mom about her being like an alien, or a clone, with her new blood, were just jokes … the fact was, I was worried. What if she really did look different, sound different? What if she didn’t seem like herself?
Then there was me. I might have changed, too, and not just in the length of my hair. (Almost decent again, thank goodness, though it would need all of August to get to middle-school readiness.)
Sure, I’d been sending letters, and I guess Nurse Faye had read them out loud to Mom in the times when her eyesight or brain power were too weak to do it herself. But of course I left a lot out of what I wrote to her. I had to. There was only so much ground I could cover once a week, and besides, I had realized that sometimes you had to leave things out of the story you told, to keep things simpler.
It was especially hard to know what to tell my mom about my dad and my grandmother. When I was complaining about the GM, that seemed OK, because I never got the feeling my mom had been very fond of Violet Von Stern. But what if, by the end of my time at the GGCF, I actually, kind of, a little bit—liked my grandmother? What if I liked my dad?
Was that allowed?
For instance, I wondered if I would tell my mom about the nickname I gave grandmother, or finding that photograph of Edward and Walter, or for that matter any episodes that involved my dad. Mom had always hated the guy, after all. They were divorced—after all.
A situation Rosie, at least, was going to escape. It was pretty clear now that Miguel and Rosie’s mom had changed their minds and weren’t divorcing. In fact, Miguel was going to move back in with them at the end of the summer. He would keep working for Grandmother and mostly just use the cabin for his studio, to carve his birds.
Rosie was lucky: she was going to avoid the yo-yo, back-and-forth schedule and the nasty meetings in counselors’ offices. We talked about it on my last night in Albuquerque, when she and I were getting ready to go stargaze.