“Whatever his name was, you carried that book everywhere. You slept with it under your pillow.”
Glancing at me, blushing, Harry said, “A couple of my teeth fell out all of a sudden. I didn’t understand about primary teeth and permanent teeth. I admit to being kind of scared. Not actually scared but kind of. I didn’t want anyone to know. I thought they’d probably send me to the hospital and I’d never get out. I kept my mouth closed.”
Isadora said, “We called that the Time of the Great Blessing.”
Ignoring her, Harry said, “Once I learned all about teeth, I was okay. Dr. Sheldon Solomonson saved my sanity. But I never ever wanted to be a dentist.”
Plucking a fourth item off the wine-cellar table, Isadora said, “So this was what started us on a truly serious investigation last July. Before then, we were just the dumb J. Edgar Hoover Society, running around in the wee hours when it wasn’t a school night, being silly, with no real mystery, just stories we made up.”
“I was never silly,” Gertrude protested. “Anyhow, there was, too, a real mystery back then—the mystery of all the dead things.”
“Probably that was no mystery,” Isadora said, “although we pretended it was. That could maybe have been just Nature doing what she does, letting things die.” When she unfolded the paper that she had picked up from the table, it proved to be about two feet by three feet. “This was a publicity sheet for a movie—DarkmoorLane. Our mother wrote it, and both she and Daddy produced it in 1928. It was released early ’29, was well reviewed, did good business.” One side of the sheet featured the title and a shout line:Is it the road to happiness or a dead end?There were credit lines for the director and producers. Below were romanticized portraits of the four featured players. “Last year,” Isadora said, “Emil Jannings won as Best Actor—that new award they created—forThe Way of All FleshandThe Last Command. I liked the second better than the first, and in that one William Powell was every bit as good. Clara Bow is the ‘It Girl’ everyone’s been so gaga about. She can be very funny, but I predict trouble for her, maybe tragedy. Mary Pickford, a lovely person, can claim to be an enduring star. And Edmund Lowe is, as always, solidly Edmund Lowe.”
At that point, I had never seen any of those actors’ work, and in fact not one film, but I nodded along.
“The other side is what’s important,” Harry said. “Stop with all the name-dropping and show Alida the other side.”
“What else would I do, Harold Percy Fairchild? Set fire to it instead?”
Gertrude giggled and informed me that Harry hated his middle name. “He sometimes threatens to change it to Hercules or Rex.”
“It’s not a threat,” Harry corrected. “It’s a promise.”
The reverse of the publicity sheet featured a map of the route by which the fictional Darkmoor Lane wound through lonely hills from a town called Nonaville to an old, decaying windmill near the sea, with important landmarks of the drama identified along the way.
“This,” said Isadora, pointing to neat red lettering next to the windmill, “is not original to the map. Someone added it to this copy.”
The block lettering declared,Martin S. Leveret. dead.
“Where did you find this?” I asked.
“It was another Friday night,” Harry said. “Mom and Dad had an early call for Saturday, so we were going on a ghost hunt. There aren’t really any ghosts in the Bram. It was just a stupid game.”
“It wasn’t stupid,” Gertrude disagreed. “It was fun. Anyhow, you don’t know for sure there aren’t ghosts in the Bram. There could be ghosts all over the place, just waiting to scare the bejesus out of us.”
“When I snatched up my Eveready for the hunt,” Isadora said, “it didn’t weigh enough. Someone had removed the batteries, but I couldn’t imagine who or why. When I unscrewed the end to slide fresh batteries into it, I found this publicity sheet folded and tightly rolled inside. This was the first clue left for us. We’d never heard of Martin Leveret before that. Since then, the other clues just keep showing up.”
“We knew right away this was the start of a challenge,” Harry said. “The hardest part is waiting for each new piece of the puzzle to show up. We’re being taught the virtue of patience, I think.”
Isadora nodded agreement. “Which is one reason we changed from the J. Edgar Hoover Society to the Clyde Tombaugh Club. You have to be clever to solve crimes, but you have to be clever and extremely patient to find a new planet.”
I had felt uneasy since I was shown the photo of Le Clerc, if it was Le Clerc, and my uneasiness had grown. “Your parents can’t be copasetic about this.”
“They don’t know. We haven’t told them.”
“Why on earth not?”
“We think it might probably be them. They’re always telling us how important it is to exercise our imagination. After all, that’s what they do. They’re imagineers.”
“I don’t think it’s them,” I said. “There’s something too dark about this to be them.”
“If it’s not them,” said Harry, “then it must be someone on staff just having fun with us. We don’t want to get anyone on the staff in trouble. Mom and Dad might do something rash.”
“Your parents are the last people who would do anything rash.” Then I thought of how they had paid Captain forty thousand dollars and taken a biological oddity like me into their home. “Well, maybe not thelastto do something rash, but they’d be fair with whoever is doing this. No one would be fairer.”
“They’re very protective of us,” Isadora said. “Schooling us at home, always shielding us from the seamy side of the motion-picture business. We hear things anyway. Or overhear.”
Harry shook his head as if recollecting some astonishing gossip they had heard. “If you want to know, we scheme up situations where we can’t help but overhear. We’re not proud of it, but I’m pretty sure we’re not going to stop, either.”
