Little Lion

by Ann Hood

  “Inside that peony is what you need in The Treasure Chest. Surely you have one just like it,” Great-Aunt Maisie said.

  Maisie reached into the egg. The peony’s petals lay open at the top, and she placed two fingers into that opening.

  “But there’s nothing there,” she said.

  “What?” Great-Aunt Maisie said harshly. She pushed Maisie’s hand out of the way and lifted the egg to her face, jabbing her own gnarled fingers inside it.

  Slowly, Great-Aunt Maisie lowered the egg back to her lap. Her face had gone pale, and her eyes—teary just moments ago—were now steely.

  Great-Aunt Maisie raised her fist and then slammed it hard on the arm of her chair. Then she said just one word, with a deep anger: “Thorne.”

  Just then, their mother walked into the room.

  “What are you two doing here?” She was wearing her work clothes: a vaguely rumpled moss-green pantsuit, low-heeled pumps, and a briefcase slung over one shoulder.

  Felix stood at the bedside table, where he had just returned the peony egg to the drawer.

  “Just visiting,” he said.

  Maisie kneeled by their great-aunt’s side.

  “But how in the world did you get here?” their mother asked, her face creasing with worry.

  “The bus?” Felix said tentatively.

  “It was even easier than the subway, Mom,” Maisie added quickly. “And super safe.”

  “Did it ever occur to you two to call me before you did this?” their mother said. But even as she said it, she started to smile. “That is so sweet of you guys.”

  But when she saw Great-Aunt Maisie’s pale, worn face, her smile vanished.

  “Oh, darling,” she said. “Are you having a bad day?”

  Great-Aunt Maisie snarled, “I am having a horrible day.”

  “Oh, no,” their mother said. She looked at Maisie and then at Felix. “You haven’t worn her out, have you? Or upset her?”

  They both shook their heads.

  “I brought you those scones you like so much,” their mother said, handing a white bakery box to Great-Aunt Maisie.

  Great-Aunt Maisie swatted it away. “I would like you all to leave me alone.”

  “But—”

  “All of you!” she growled.

  The three of them quickly said their good-byes and headed toward the door.

  “Children,” Great-Aunt Maisie said, ringing the little silver bell hard, “without a piece from that vase, our journey is over. You must have one. You must.”

  “Now what do you want?” the nurse with the purple Crocs said, pushing past everyone.

  “I want to go to bed,” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “Now.”

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  On the ride back to Elm Medona, their mother praised Maisie and Felix for their ingenuity in going to see Great-Aunt Maisie on their own.

  “But the poor darling,” she said. “She seemed to make so much progress, and now it looks like she’s going backward again.”

  “She was lively this morning,” Maisie said. “She talked about her father and her brother, Thorne, and her childhood.”

  “Mom,” Felix asked, “whatever happened to Thorne?”

  Their mother shrugged. “They had a big falling out when they were still very young. I’ve heard he lives in London, but I’m not sure.”

  Felix settled back in his seat. Great-Aunt Maisie had a way of getting him excited about things. Here he was, ready to time travel again, his mind full of mysteries. Why would Thorne steal what was in Great-Aunt Maisie’s egg? Even worse, would he really steal the third egg? The Pickworths had more secrets than he’d ever imagined. Felix smiled to himself. And he had thought moving here would be dull!

  “Has anyone ever tried to find him?” Maisie asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” their mother said. “Once I asked Aunt Maisie if she wanted me to try to find him. This was when the Internet first started up, and I thought it might be fun to search for Thorne. But she practically took my head off, screaming about him being untrustworthy and possibly even a thief.”

  “The pineapple egg,” Felix said. “That’s what she was telling us about, too.”

  “Poor thing,” their mother said. “At her age, she should be able to forgive and forget. It’s likely that Thorne has passed away by now.”

  When they pulled into the driveway of Elm Medona, Maisie didn’t get out of the car right away. Instead, she peered up at the mansion, to the place where The Treasure Chest was hidden.

  Their mother took a bag of groceries from the trunk and headed up to the apartment.

  Felix rapped on Maisie’s window. “You coming?” he asked.

  Maisie didn’t answer him. She just kept looking up. Then she broke into a grin.

  She opened the door, practically knocking into her brother.

  “I got it!” she said.

  “Got what?”

  “What Great-Aunt Maisie was telling us. Remember? She said she had a piece, and we had to have one, too, or else we would never have been able to time travel. Well, we have that piece.”

  “We do?” Felix said, confused.

  “My shard! From the Ming vase!”

  “You think that really matters?” Felix said.

  Maisie nodded. “Absolutely. There were two pieces missing from that vase. I have one, and I bet Great-Aunt Maisie had the other one. That’s what she kept in that secret compartment. Thorne probably took it so he could continue to time travel.”

  “That’s great, Maisie,” Felix said. “But where is your shard?”

  Maisie’s face fell. “That’s the only problem,” she admitted. “I had it in the pocket of my fleece vest. But it wasn’t there when I got dressed this morning.”

  “You’re sure?” Felix asked.

  “Yeah. I was going to take it out and put it in my jewelry box, but it was gone.”

  Now it was Felix’s turn to get excited. “Mom did the laundry!” he said, already moving up the driveway to the door. “It must have fallen out in the washing machine!”

  “Yes!” Maisie said, remembering.

  She ran fast enough to reach the door before him. By the time he got halfway up the stairs, she had already gone into the apartment and was opening the laundry room door.

  “Not here!” Maisie said when Felix ran in the laundry room, panting.

  “Did you check the dryer?” he said. Without waiting for an answer, he opened the dryer door and looked inside, running his hands around it as he did.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “First you go visit Great-Aunt Maisie on your own. Now you want to do the laundry? You are definitely up to something,” their mother said, stopping at the door.

  “No, no,” Maisie said so quickly that their mother narrowed her eyes even more suspiciously.

  “I just lost something.”

  “In here?” their mother said.

  “It was in my fleece pocket. I think it fell out in the wash,” Maisie told her.

  Their mother shrugged and moved the strap of her briefcase to her other shoulder.

  “I emptied pockets into there,” she said, pointing to a jelly jar on the shelf beside the detergent.

  Maisie resisted the urge to frantically look inside the jar. She didn’t want to raise their mother’s curiosity even more.

  “Great,” she said, trying not to sound too enthusiastic.

  Felix nodded.

  “Okay,” their mother said, studying their faces. “Well, I need to get back to the office for a couple of hours and finish this deposition. How about we get pizza when I get home?”

  “Great,” Maisie said again.

  Their mother kissed them each good-bye on the top of their heads. Maisie and Felix step
ped out of the laundry room to watch her walk through the kitchen and out the door. They waited until the door closed and they could no longer hear her heels against the floor.

  Maisie grabbed the jelly jar from the shelf.

  “Here it is!” she said triumphantly, holding the shard up for Felix to see. “Let’s go!”

  “Wait!” Felix said.

  He went to the kitchen and checked the big bulletin board on the wall there. Beside the school lunch menu and a pizza delivery flyer under a yellow pushpin, he found the big preservation society calendar with the schedule for tours of Elm Medona marked in red. None were scheduled for that afternoon.

  “Phew!” he said.

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  Felix and Maisie went back down the dumbwaiter, into the basement Kitchen, up the stairs that led to the Dining Room, and then out into the Grand Ballroom and up the Grand Staircase.

  “Thank you,” Felix whispered as they ran past the photograph of Great-Aunt Maisie.

  Then he paused.

  “Maisie?” he said. “Maybe Great-Aunt Maisie’s shard is somewhere in the house. Maybe it’s in her old room. Or even in Thorne’s.”

  “What if it is?” Maisie said. “All we need is ours.”

  Felix hesitated. “I know,” he said. “But she seemed so happy when she thought it was in that egg. Since we’re already in here, couldn’t we just poke around a little?”

  “Well,” Maisie said, considering.

  “Five minutes?” Felix offered.

  “I guess it would make her happy if we did find it,” Maisie said, remembering how Clara Barton had told them to be kinder to Great-Aunt Maisie. Maisie sighed. “Five minutes.”

  Maisie and Felix walked down the long hallway that led to what used to be the family’s bedrooms. First they passed Ariane Pickworth’s room. The walls were a Robin’s Egg Blue, and the ceiling was painted with white fluffy clouds. From each corner of the ceiling, a fat cherub smiled down at them.

  “So creepy that she died in there,” Felix said in a hushed voice.

  He walked past the room quickly.

  Beside Ariane’s room was the nursery, a smaller room that still held two matching white cribs, two matching white rocking chairs, and two matching white chests of drawers. In fact, everything in that room was white.

  Next came Thorne’s bedroom.

  “Should we poke around in there?” Felix asked. “I mean, if he took it, maybe he left it here.”

  Maisie sighed. Two rooms? They would never get to The Treasure Chest. But then she pictured Great-Aunt Maisie and her delight at that egg and at sharing the anagram with them.

  “Sure,” she said.

  Great-Uncle Thorne’s room had a jungle mural painted on the walls, the dark green leaves reaching upward onto the ceiling. A rug made out of a lion’s skin, with the head still attached and the mouth opened in a silent roar, took up most of the floor. The blanket on the bed was made of dark brown animal fur.

  “Ugh,” Maisie said, wrinkling her nose. “Who would ever sleep with all this dead animal stuff around them?”

  Felix had already started to open drawers.

  “Empty,” he said.

  Maisie opened the closet and peeked under the bed.

  “No one’s been in these rooms in years,” she said. “Of course they’ve been emptied out.”

  “We’ll still check Great-Aunt Maisie’s real fast?”

  “Fine,” Maisie said impatiently.

  She opened the door in the room that led to a bathroom with a claw-foot tub and a toilet with a big chain that had to be pulled for flushing. The towel racks had thick white towels on them, with the letters TPP monogrammed on some in dark red and MAP on the others in Robin’s Egg Blue. Another door on the other side of the bathroom opened into Great-Aunt Maisie’s room.

  When Maisie and Felix walked in, they grew very quiet. It almost felt like being in church. Each item on the dresser—a heavy silver brush and comb and mirror—had the letters MAP engraved on them. One table held a dozen music boxes of different sizes and designs. Another had rows of dolls with real hair and creepy, realistic-looking faces staring back at them. The bed was so high that there was a little step stool to climb onto it. Under an elaborately embroidered canopy, the bed itself was stacked high with pillows.

  “It looks like a little girl’s room,” Maisie said softly.

  Felix nodded.

  “I don’t know why I feel so sad all of a sudden,” Maisie said.

  The walls here were a midnight blue, and the ceiling had constellations painted on it. Felix could identify the Big Dipper and Orion the Hunter.

  “Look,” Maisie said. Her fingers traced white lines that ran along one wall. Above the lines were numbers.

  Felix studied them carefully. “They’re longitudes and latitudes,” he said finally.

  “Four of them,” Maisie said.

  “I wonder where they lead to?” Felix said, imagining the globe that sat in his classroom with lines of longitude and latitude circling it.

  Maisie pointed to another set of numbers.

  “Dates,” Felix said. Two of the dates were the same, and two were different and years older.

  “Birthdays?” Maisie said.

  “Great-Aunt Maisie’s and Great-Uncle Thorne’s?” Felix pointed to the two that were the same.

  “We should go,” Maisie said, feeling suddenly as if she were trespassing.

  “But the shard could be in one of those music boxes or . . . or anywhere.”

  Maisie shook her head. “It’s not,” she said.

  Somehow, Felix knew she was right.

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  For the second time that day, Maisie pressed the spot on the wall that opened it to reveal the staircase. As Felix followed his sister up the secret staircase, he remembered his mantra.

  “Home,” he whispered. “Home, home, home.”

  In The Treasure Chest, Maisie scanned the desk for the blueprints to the Holland Tunnel.

  “I’m sure I put them right here,” she said, lifting up the other items. She moved a porcupine quill, a compass, and a bouquet of dried flowers.

  “We don’t want those, anyway,” Felix said, even as he repeated home, home, home in his mind.

  “Yes, we do!” Maisie said, pushing things aside roughly. “They’ll get us back to New York, just blocks from home.”

  With a sweep of her hand, a silver coin fell off the desk, landing with a loud thunk on the floor. The light bounced off it so that it practically glowed.

  Felix bent to pick up the coin at the exact same time as Maisie did.

  “Leave it alone,” Maisie said, cross.

  But he didn’t.

  They both touched the silver coin, and the room filled with the smells of salt water, coconut, and something sweet. A wind rushed past Maisie and Felix, carrying the sounds of sails flapping and palm tree leaves fluttering.

  In an instant, they were gone.

  The Orphan Boy

  Felix landed with a splash grasping his glasses tight to his face. He opened his eyes and saw that he was underwater. Not just any water, either. This water was so clear that he could see Maisie’s legs thrashing, a school of bright-yellow fish swimming past, and the soft, sandy bottom way, way beneath him. He swam upward, kicking his legs hard until he reached the surface. When his head finally popped out of the water, he took a big deep breath and looked around. In the distance lay a white sand beach fringed with palm trees. But all around him, Felix saw nothing but beautiful turquoise water until Maisie appeared, sputtering and shaking the water from her hair, the coin pressed firmly in her fist.

  “Over here!” Felix called, waving to her. He had certainly not expected this. Not at all. They were in the ocean!

  Maisie looked
about as angry as she could look. Felix watched her dive into the water and swim purposefully toward him. She was a good swimmer. And so was he. They had learned to swim when they were five at the Carmine Street Pool and had tied for first place in a relay race there when they were seven.

  The sun shone bright and warm above them. Felix lay on his back and floated gently, gazing up at the clear, blue sky.

  When Maisie reached him, she treaded water beside him.

  “This,” she said, “is not New York.”

  Felix smiled. “Nope,” he said.

  “This is all your fault,” she said. “If you’d just let me find those blueprints, we wouldn’t be in the middle of the ocean right now.”

  “First of all, we’re not in the middle of the ocean. The beach is right over there. And second of all, this is actually kind of nice.”

  Maisie sighed. Clearly her brother was not going to be any help in figuring out where they’d landed. Or why. She took a breath, stretched out her arms, and began to swim.

  “Hey! Where are you going?” Felix called after her.

  “To shore!” Maisie yelled back. And then she kept on swimming.

  As she neared the beach, the waves grew large enough to carry her forward. She caught one just right and it lifted her and brought her right to shore, depositing her in a sandy heap. Riding that wave felt familiar. When the family used to go to Cape May, Maisie and her father would bodysurf for hours. She liked tumbling in the water, then landing on the beach beside her father, laughing and spitting salt water. She liked how tired she’d get by the end of the afternoon, how they would collapse on the beach blanket and close their eyes, how the smells of suntan lotion and fried foods and salt surrounded her. Even lying still, Maisie would still feel like she was moving through the cold Atlantic Ocean.

  Maisie stood. This water wasn’t cold at all. In fact, it was as warm as bathwater. She looked at the sugar-white sand and the tall palm trees. Maybe they hadn’t landed in the Atlantic Ocean, she realized. Maisie tried to picture a map of the United States. A whole bunch of states had palm trees and warm water. Like . . . Florida . . . and . . . definitely some other ones. Maybe this is the Atlantic Ocean, but way down south, she thought, walking up to the beach, her feet sinking in the soft sand as she did.