“I’ll keep it in mind,” said Cookie after a moment’s thought. “Right now I have just one question.”
“What is that?” Sharon asked.
“Is there any way at all in or out of here that isn’t through the storm door in Jefferson Judge’s room or the mailroom door?” Cookie asked.
“No, there is not. At least not that I know of,” said Sharon with a frown.
Cookie gave a nod. “That’s all I needed to know.”
More than ever, there was just one thing I wanted to do. The only trouble was that in order to do it, I had to get through my mother first. And even before that, Cookie and I had to get back upstairs.
With Peter’s agreement, Sharon escorted us back to the stairs. If Sharon was with us, he said, we were far less likely to get attacked by other supernaturals.
Going up the stairs was almost as slow as coming down. Cookie’s rickety old knees had trouble supporting her, and it took us a long time to get back to the mailroom.
Unsurprisingly, everyone was waiting for us when we did.
Grant had tucked himself into a corner and was sitting on the floor with his head bowed. When we came to the door he stood up and snapped to attention.
My mother looked up but stayed quiet.
“What happened?” Pep asked.
“False alarm. We checked everything and we talked to Peter. The smoke merely came from a candle,” Cookie said. “The explosion was a skeleton tap dancing class. . .”
Everyone looked at her incredulously. Usually it was a bit easier to at least pretend to believe her nonsense. No one bothered this time.
“Is this candle the size of a dining room table?” said my mom.
“About that,” said Cookie.
“So you aren’t going to tell us anything?” my mom asked.
“I’ve told you all I know,” said Cookie.
Grant’s eyes never left my face, and I found myself shifting uncomfortably.
“I’m glad you came back safely. I’d like a full report tomorrow. We haven’t had information on Down Below in years,” said my mom. “For now we might as well call it a night.”
Grant looked like he was ready to say something to me, but Cookie intercepted him. In the moment of confusion, I had a second to slip away. I made eye contact with Pep and Lark and hoped they knew where I was heading.
I raced down the hallway and slipped into the quiet library. As usual, the fire was roaring and the heavy drapes were thrown open. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows I could see the sparkling sky outside. It was a clear, crisp evening.
I hurried back to Cookie’s enchanted books in the library. Now more than ever I needed to gather some information about everyone involved in this mess. Were the two mysteries connected? Why, of all the times when Mr. Nutcracker might have returned to the mansion, had he chosen now? I didn’t care what he claimed, it couldn’t possibly be a coincidence.
My grandmother’s revelation that the crown was still on the property added another layer to the puzzle. If the crown was still here, it seemed likely that whoever took it was still here as well. I didn’t like that at all. It meant that my speculation about Grant could almost be true. How could someone possibly steal a crown made of jewels and then keep it hidden for any length of time?
I answered my own question by reminding myself of our search for the sword. But that was the opposite of comforting.
With many more questions than answers and not a lot of time, I got busy reading.
My first topic was a brief history of the Speedy Spider Delivery Service. Horticulture had started it seven years ago, and it had quickly become indispensable for fast delivery. Spiders had always worked in the back of trucks because their long arms were so useful for package sorting and handling.
The service had expanded over the years. What had started as two trucks was now a whole fleet. Horticulture was known as a shrewd businessman, but as far as Cookie’s random notes were concerned, everything he was known to be doing was perfectly legal.
There were, however, no notes from the time before he started the delivery company. I wondered what he’d done earlier, and whether that had been perfectly legal as well.
Having found nothing of much use so far, I flipped to the next person on my list: Jefferson Judge. There was a lot more on him in the notes.
He had been a judge when he was alive, and a very respected one at that. He had worked in his profession for over forty years, deciding all kinds of cases. Not long after he retired, he passed away of a heart attack.
Haunted Bluff’s haunt hunters had found him in the cemetery and brought him to the mansion. He was glad to come, because he’d been bored at the cemetery. When he got here he started officiating everything from card games to ghost football matches, but above all, he was here for the company of other supernaturals.
Judge, in fact, had come specifically to move Down Below. Since the mansion’s basement had become ever more unruly in the years before he arrived, we had recruited him in part to straighten it out.
All of this amazed me. I didn’t know anyone was ever specifically recruited for Down Below. Why had the Fudge ever agreed to it?
As it happened, there was an answer right in the notes.
The Fudge hadn’t had a choice. It was accept Judge or close down. The Garbos weren’t going to tolerate the fighting emanating from the basement anymore.
Reluctantly, Fudge had agreed to allow Jefferson Judge to move Down Below on a trial basis, and he had never left.
Until this week.
As it turned out, Fudge ended up being happy with Judge’s influence; he didn’t lose his power, he just had less chaos to manage. Judge, for his part, was never bored.
In other words, Fudge had been just as happy to have Judge Down Below as Judge was to be there.
So said Cookie’s notes.
But what if it wasn’t true? Or was once true, but had changed? What if the Fudge had tired of Jefferson Judge’s rule-following ways? What if Judge’s disappearance, and the alleged theft of the crown, were all part of an elaborate scheme concocted by Fudge to get rid of the one thing that stood between him and the additional criminal activity he wanted to mastermind?
It was definitely worth pondering.
Unsurprisingly, Cookie had no notes on any of the cases Jefferson Judge had decided Down Below. In the supernatural criminal underworld, you probably didn’t talk about the Judge who decided which vampire got the nicer of the stolen coffins. And even if you did, no one would tell Cookie.
I was so busy poring over all this information that I didn’t hear the door open, so when Lark spoke, I nearly jumped out of my chair.
Lark and Pep wanted to know everything that had happened, so I brought them up to date with the honest version of the story that Cookie had given my mother.
“I can’t believe the smoke was fake. They just wanted to get you down there to see what you knew? I also can’t believe Sharon is on your side,” said Pep.
“I’m not entirely sure she is. I mean, she didn’t feed us to the other supernaturals, but until tonight Peter didn’t like her at all,” I said. “And we didn’t have any chance to talk to him without her overhearing, so for all I know he still doesn’t.”
“It’s still very strange,” said Pep. “I can’t believe Cookie held out on us. I mean, I can believe it. I’m just not happy about it.”
“It doesn’t change what we have to do, though. Our job is to find Jefferson Judge,” said Lark.
“What else would it be?” I asked.
“To find the crown. If it’s still on the estate, it’s reasonable to think we might look for it. We just aren’t going to,” Lark explained.
“Do you think that if we found the crown, we would also find Jefferson Judge?” I said.
“I have no idea. I have no idea who took the crown or who killed Blu or anything else,” said Pep, suddenly wringing her hands.
“For all we know, Blu stole the crown and Jefferson Judge killed him for
it,” I said.
“I doubt it,” I said. “If Judge is as law-abiding as everyone says, I doubt murder is in his repertoire. He’d probably just try to arrest Blu. Besides, if Blu had the crown, we would have found it by now. The amount of time between when Blu rang the doorbell and when we opened the door was minimal.”
As I spoke, trying to be as logical as possible, something was nagging at the edges of my thought train that I just couldn’t grasp.
I frowned and glanced down at my notes, and suddenly inspiration struck.
I stopped dead and looked at my cousins. “We don’t know that Blu rang the doorbell. It could have been anyone.”
“What you talking about? Wasn’t it Blu?” Pep asked.
“Not necessarily,” I said. “Don’t forget, there was no one there when Cookie and I opened the door. And I don’t think anyone has asked Orwell how long they were in the driveway. He should have some idea, because the truck would have come to a stop. But he says he nods out sometimes, so I guess he might not really know.”
My theory was taking shape. It explained how Blu died so quickly: he didn’t. He wasn’t the one who rang the doorbell, his killer was. We were summoned outside only when the killer was ready.
The one unanswered question was why the killer had summoned us at all. He could have just let the truck sit there and waited for Cookie to come out and tend to her cauldron.
Okay, so we had a new line of inquiry. I explained all this, made a note, and moved on to the next item on my list. Having exhausted the topic of the murder, we turned to the Vice Chancellor.
“Cookie really doesn’t like him. She usually doesn’t like people, but it seems extreme in this case,” I mused.
“So I assume the next step is to find out everything we possibly can about him. It isn’t a coincidence that he showed up here right now,” Lark said.
I agreed with her, and with that we got back to work on our research.
We pored over Cookie’s enchanted notebooks for an hour, actually having fun at times.
Cookie liked to doodle in the margins, favoring elaborate drawings of flowers. I hadn’t thought of her as the flower type, but somehow the drawings fit.
In amongst them were all sorts of tidbits. Like, instead of using a laundry basket for dirty laundry, Cookie always used a dresser drawer.
Pep shook her head at that one. “It doesn’t even make sense,” my cousin muttered.
It took us longer than I would’ve liked to find any details about Mr. Nutcracker, but we finally figured out that Cookie had one specific book into which she stuck all the people she didn’t like. Surprise surprise, it was the thickest volume.
Mr. Nutcracker’s biography was long in its own right, and Cookie had added her own embellishments, most of which were bitter.
Mr. Nutcracker had started out as an investigator and worked his way up, spending long, hard hours on the job. He married his high school sweetheart and they had three children, now grown. After he finished his investigative career he turned to politics, where he quickly showed a knack that had him rising through the ranks in a hurry. He was a talented warlock, though not in the top tier. He became famous as one of the first warlocks to run for office. Historically, the government had been the witches’ domain. It turned out that politics worked well with warlocks involved, and with Nutcracker in particular.
For the last twenty years he had enjoyed enormous popularity. Now, as Vice Chancellor, he worked to enact programs that helped supernaturals, witches, and warlocks live in harmony.
After that official biography were some scribbled notes of Cookie’s. They were barely legible, but I managed to read them.
“She says here that he came to the funeral with his wife. He said he was very sorry. Cookie rolled her eyes and walked away,” I read.
“I can’t believe what it must have been like for her, having to bury all her sons, and all at once,” said Lark.
We were too young to remember our fathers’ funeral, and neither my mom nor Meg ever talked about it. Audrey also avoided the subject, and Cookie certainly didn’t mention it. She hated anything that reminded her of that day, including Mr. Nutcracker.
“She doesn’t say anything about why she might dislike him otherwise,” said Pep. “I was hoping for some factual reason.”
“You know Cookie only dabbles in facts,” said Lark.
“Was he still an investigator at the time of the funeral, or had he already switched to politics?” I said.
“He’d already switched to politics a couple of years before that,” said Pep, examining one of the notebooks.
“But he probably knew our dads,” I said.
“Probably. I doubt he was just at the funeral as a figurehead,” said Lark. “It sounds like it was personal.”
We were treading in dangerous waters, so I decided to switch gears. “Does it say anything about his own family?” I asked.
We looked through the notes again.
Scribbled in one of the books was a note that said Nutcracker had grown up in Florida. His father was a construction worker and his mother was a teacher.
“That’s all?” I said.
“ Looks like it,” said Lark.
Pep sighed, then scrubbed at her face. It was getting late and we were all tired. I was ready to call it a night. I felt like there was a connection we are missing, but I had no idea what it was.
I closed the enchanted books and put them back where we’d found them. A lot had happened today. What would happen tomorrow, I had no idea. For now it was time to sleep.
Chapter Nineteen
When I went downstairs the next morning I was in for a shock.
There was no breakfast.
I happened to arrive at about the same time as Kip and Lizzie, and both of them looked as confused as I was.
Since Kip was particularly fond of breakfast, he was especially fragile when it wasn’t provided. He didn’t do well unless he was fed first thing in the morning, so when there were no stacks of eggs and pancakes awaiting him he started to get very concerned.
On this occasion his lumberjack beard started to quiver. “What do think happened? You think there’s been an attack? Another murder?”
He looked so lost that Lizzie tried to soothe him. “I’m sure it’s nothing like that.”
“Then where’s the food?” he asked.
I walked over to the kitchen sink, which was underneath a window with a beautiful view of the ocean that rewarded anyone who did the dishes. I don’t know what I expected to find—there were no remnants of breakfast in the sink, certainly—but my mom came in just then and we all looked to her for an explanation.
It was clear from her demeanor that something was up. She was in a shirt that actually fit her instead of being several sizes too large. She had even combed her hair.
“You look nice,” said Lizzie, frowning.
“What happened to you?” was my sparkling opening.
“We’ve been invited to the manor house,” she said.
Lizzie look delighted, while I was just confused. Kip was still muttering about breakfast.
“When were we invited?” Lizzie asked. “Should I change? I just threw something together.”
As usual, Lizzie was dressed in black leather from head to toe. She looked like she would be more at home in a club than at a breakfast in an old mansion house.
“Vice Chancellor Nutcracker invited us,” said Mom. “I think what you’re wearing is fine.”
Of course my mother would say that. My mother had no sense of fashion. Aunt Meg was the one who might have an opinion worth listening to; she cared about fashion in a way that my mother never would. But Meg wasn’t at hand to chime in.
“We’re going this morning. We leave in twenty minutes. I expect everyone to go.” Mom gave me a sharp look. “I won’t have you staying here and getting into trouble, Jane.”
She left before I could respond, looking especially frazzled by this unexpected invitation.
“Wh
y does she always think I’m the one getting into trouble,” I muttered.
Lizzie gave me a dirty look. “Because you are,” she said just loudly enough for me to hear. Then, pretending a businesslike detachment, she said, “I have to go change.”
“Your personality or your clothes?” I muttered again.
“What was that you said?” Lizzie asked sharply.
Kip was snickering, and now Lizzie glared at both of us.
“Nothing,” I said with a smile.
I used the secret passageway to get back upstairs to the attic. I had come down in my blue pajamas, and that wouldn’t cut it for brunch with the Vice Chancellor, however casual he might be.
Rose had left my room extra early that morning to go chase mice, but she was back now, curled up on the orange couch. When I came in she opened one eye a slit. Her outfit was orange today, blending very strangely with the sofa. It was as if the orange couch had a pattern of a white cat’s face.
When I told her where we were going she said, “The Vice Chancellor wants something. I just wonder what it is.”
I couldn’t have agreed more, but that made it all the more important that I go along. My mother had it wrong. I didn’t want to stay here doing more research when the action was likely to be at the manor.
Besides, I’d been hearing about how weird and wonderful the manor was for half my life. Now I had a chance to see it for myself.
Shimmerfield, Maine, had a substantial population of witches and warlocks. We tend to congregate in certain towns and not others, so there were plenty of other towns in Maine that had no one at all with any magic living in them.
To put it a different way, Haunted Bluff was by no means the only place in Shimmerfield where witches and warlocks could be found. They were all over.
Just as the mansion had internal union meetings, witches would come together for important events and townwide meetings throughout the year, and the manor was usually where they were held.
Spooky Spider Page 13