“They don’t drool,” Isadora said disapprovingly.
“Well,Idrool inmysleep,” Gertrude said.
“Of courseyoudo.”
“I inherited night drooling.”
“Nobody inherits drooling.”
“Just because you’re twelve doesn’t mean you know everything.”
In the manner of all long-suffering older sisters, Isadora sighed with exasperation.
I returned them to the main subject. “What do the members of the Clyde Tombaugh Club hope to discover?”
“The darkest truths of the Bram,” said Harry. “Where did the suicide occur? Why is it never spoken of? Was it really a suicide, or was it murder? Is what we’ve seen a ghost or is it a sinister stranger living secretly among us? This is a house of a thousand secrets.”
“It doesn’t seem like such a place,” I said.
Lowering her voice to an even softer whisper, Gertrude said, “Houses of a thousand secrets never seem like what they really are. If they seemed like what they are, why, then they wouldn’t have any secrets. Isn’t that right, Izzy?”
“What would I know about it?” Isadora replied. “I’m only twelve years old. I don’t know everything.”
Being a boy of action, Harry was impatient to get on with the night’s adventure. “Are you in the club or not, Alida? Are you with us or not? Maybe you think this is just a stupid game, but it isn’t. This is serious business. Our future hangs by a thread. A spider’s thread. Are you with us or not?”
They lowered their Evereadys and stood in a puddle of light, staring at me expectantly. Rafael cocked his head and fixed me with his amber-brown eyes as if to say,Well?
I was five years older than Isadora, eight years older than Harry. Under other circumstances, that difference in ages would have been an unbridgeable gap. I was an adult, and graybeards like me could be expected to mock anything like the Clyde Tombaugh Club. But they had been told to treat me like a sister, which to a degree defined me as different from other adults. And my smallness made me seem less like an adult than like a child. To be mortared into this family as securely as a stone in a wall, I must win the trust and affection of these children. With a mind that was a library of beloved stories, I could commit to make-believe with no less enthusiasm than Isadora, Gertrude, and Harry.
He pressed me again. “Are you with us or not, Alida?”
“I’m with you,” I declared.
Could it be that I was welcome in this new nest, welcome beyond my fondest hopes? Were we four children now birds of a feather, five if we counted Rafael, floating down the warm California days in a future of peace and grace?
My companions responded to my words with four smiles and one wagging tail.
“Grab your flashlight and let’s go,” Harry said.
“Go where?”
“Wherever the terrible truth lies,” he said, for he had read his share of boy’s adventure novels.
And I knew the best thing I could do was stay alert always and everywhere.
Sixteen
Eventually I would learn that the Clyde Tombaugh Club was named for Clyde William Tombaugh, an astronomer who’d recently discovered the planet Pluto. His achievement inflamed the Fairchild children’s imagination, which had already been burning brightly. The year had introduced us to Wonder Bread, Mott’s applesauce, pinball machines, windshield wipers, and the first supermarkets. But nothing could thrill youngsters more than the revelation of another planet out beyond Saturn, beyond Neptune, a new world on which they would never set foot and to which they could therefore attribute a most colorful zoology of both enchanting and terrifying creatures. They had already been embarked on a mission to uncover the secrets of the Bram, if there were any. The glory of Tombaugh’s discovery inspired them to rename their group, which they had previously called the J. Edgar Hoover Society.
So it was that I found myself hurrying with my adopted siblings along the main second-floor hall as the last hour of Friday ticked toward midnight. Eventually I would learn all the rules by which successful investigations must be conducted. At that point, however, I had been informed of only two tactics. First, when running—and we would often be running when we weren’t stealthily creeping—we must not leap likegazelles or charge in the manner of stampeding cattle. The cavernous spaces of the residence were conducive to echoes that might betray us even though their hardworking mother and father were said to “sleep like Egyptian dead under the ancient pyramids.” To make as little noise as possible, Isadora and Gertrude and Harry were barefoot on these adventures, but I could not be seen without the concealment of shoes. Second, flashlights were essential to navigate the maze of passageways and the many chambers of abysmal darkness safely, but one must at all times keep one’s finger on the switch. At the first noise—the creak of door hinges, a footfall, a cough, a stifled sneeze—that betrayed a presence elsewhere in the house, our Evereadys must be doused in an instant.
Either Rafael had been schooled in the need for quiet or canine instinct informed him of it. His nails never clicked on stone or wood, and the pads of his paws didn’t thump on the Persian carpets as had been the case in my dream. He glided along as though he had studied the prowling technique of cats, and he seemed even to make an effort to suppress his panting.
By eight o’clock or so, after Chef Lattuada and the Symingtons had taken dinner together in the kitchen, they always retired to the bungalow and did not return until morning. The other employees were away at their own homes. Although there were four of us in the Clyde Tombaugh Club and though Loretta and Franklin would wake and respond if we had reason to scream for help, the Bram seemed to be a lonely place at that hour, dangerously so, like an abandoned monastery or a forsaken mausoleum. As we swarmed down the grand staircase, across the reception hall, and through a series of rooms, flashlight beams fencing with the gloom, I couldn’t escape the feeling we were not as safe as we assumed we were. A mild, crawly sensation of supernatural menace overcame me, and I chastised myself for indulging it. If somethreat arose, whether an otherworldly entity or a mere burglar, good Rafael had the sharp teeth and the canine courage to deal with it.
Our first destination proved to be in the basement, which had not been on the tour that Loretta and Franklin had given me. Instead of a stair-head door, access to this subterranean vault was through a legless Japanese cabinet more than four feet wide and over seven feet tall, a black-lacquered beauty lightly ornamented with a dozen butterflies rendered in gold leaf. This hulking and yet delicate piece stood against the end wall of a corridor. Isadora opened the doors, revealing a black interior with three empty shelves. She felt for a hidden release, whereupon the shelves swung away, as did the back wall of the cabinet to which they were attached. She stepped inside and was suddenly silhouetted by a light that came from the secret realm beyond, into which she proceeded. Gertrude followed her sister, and Harry ushered me after them. Beyond the back wall of the cabinet lay a wide landing and concrete steps leading down between rustic stone walls. At the bottom, a formidable oak door succumbed to a key that Isadora produced from a pocket of her pajamas. As Rafael wended among us, we passed through the door and into a chamber that was illuminated by a chandelier in the form of six little bronze men holding light bulbs shaped like candle flames. The basement did not extend under the entire house but was only about twenty by thirty feet. The walls were lined with wine racks that held hundreds of bottles of the most desirable product of France.
“Mother and father,” Gertrude assured me, “are not alcoholics, and they aren’t crazy-violent bootleggers either. They don’t own even one machine gun.”
