Even in an estate that seemed like Eden, in a beautiful house with exquisite finishes, with wonderful art and thousands of books, where there was compassion and friendship and love in abundance, a family history was likely to include dark chapters, sharp memories of suffering and even of despair. Such is the world.
We clicked off our Evereadys because the roof was bathed in moonlight. In spite of Mr. Thomas Edison’s genius, which had for decades increasingly pressed back the darkness, Los Angeles and its many suburbs had not yet acquired sufficient glow to rob the night sky of its splendor. We moved around the observation deck, wondering at the sea of stars among which were planets in the millions and forever beyond discovery.
Standing beside me at the waist-high parapet, Isadora pointed to a thin ribbon of light in the west. The Bram was on an upland, and wewere more than forty feet above the ground. From that high vantage point, we could see for miles, beyond all habitations, to where the moon pressed its reflection on the waters of the Pacific. “I’m going to cross all that one day,” she declared. “I want to see Japan and China. I want to see India. I want to see everything.”
Her ambition rendered me short of breath. I could understand the yearning to experience all that the world had to offer, but I could not imagine having the freedom or the agency to fulfill such ambition. With my deformities and limitations, the world would best become mine through books. I didn’t want to see everything firsthand at whatever cost in misfortune, but instead to be safe from the many cruelties that were provided in greater abundance by new places and new people. I had been made for a cloistered life, and miraculously I had at last been delivered into the security of Bramley Hall. I was too grateful for this grace to be jealous of Isadora’s ability to one day indulge in wanderlust.
The house featured pitched roofs to the north and south, attics with oculus windows, and chimneys. The only vertical element on the flat deck was in the center: a six-foot-tall obelisk mirrored on all four sides, supported by four stone balls resting on a black-granite plinth. Moonlight as pale as frost gathered on the mirrors, and the mystery of the thing was a magnetism that inevitably drew us to it. According to the siblings, the obelisk had no purpose other than to encourage them to marvel at it on a moonlit night, squint at it when it flared like a beacon in the sunshine, and fashion dreams around it, dreams that sometimes disturbed their sleep with delight and sometimes with terror. I wondered how many parents, even among those who had the financial resources, would go to such lengths as Loretta and Franklin had gone to kindle wonder in their children and fuel their imagination; I decided the answer was very few.
We didn’t notice—but Rafael did—an item that had been tucked in the space between the plinth and the base of the obelisk, amongthe stone balls. The shepherd growled and first reared up to claw at the object with his forepaws, but then he thrust his snout into the gap and finessed an envelope out of it with his teeth. He dropped it at Isadora’s feet and licked his chops. Picking up his offering, she sniffed and said, “It feels greasy, smells like bacon.” Someone had assumed—or known—the children would take me to the roof during the night’s adventure and had made sure Rafael would find what had been left for us by smearing it with a scent he couldn’t ignore. Isadora put down her Eveready, and we focused our beams on her hands as she tore open the envelope. A label from a jar of Gerber baby food—pureed peas—slid into her left hand. She turned it over, but nothing was written on the back of it. The other puzzle pieces had suggested a larger picture that would prove sinister when complete; this message appeared unrelated to the previous four.
“Maybe,” Gertrude suggested, “whoever’s tormenting us is just someone who likes peas a lot.”
“Nobody likespureedpeas,” Harry said.
“Babies like them. Babies think Gerber is the bee’s knees.”
“Well, I’m pretty damn sure it’s not some stupid baby leaving all these things for us to find.”
“Don’t say ‘damn,’ Harry.”
“Ha!Youjust said it.”
“This is creepy,” Isadora said when she took a closer look at the front of the Gerber label. “See? The picture of the smiling little tyke? Someone blackened his eyes.”
The eye sockets appeared empty, suggesting not that the chubby-cheeked symbol of the company was blind but rather that a malevolent presence lived within him, an entity with black eyes that could see as clearly in absolute darkness as in daylight.
“Maybe you should think about telling your parents, after all,” I advised.
“No, no! Nuts to that,” Harry said. “This isn’t a threat. It’s just spooky. It’s still only a game. We go running to Mom and Dad, we’ll look like big babies. I’m not a big baby, and I don’t want to look like one. Any of you makes me look like a big baby, the wrath of Harry will crash down on you like the Katmai volcano crashed down on Alaska.”
“‘Wrath of Harry,’” Isadora said. “I shudder at the thought. Don’t you shudder at the thought, Gertie?”
“I’ll never sleep again,” Gertrude said.
Harry snorted with disgust. “Why couldn’t I have two brothers?”
“Relax, Katmai Harry,” said Isadora. “There’s no reason to tell mater and pater. Alida worries too much. That’s what happens when you get to be seventeen. You start worrying too much. She’s never going to tattle. She’s true blue and loyal. The Clyde Tombaugh Club will find the miscreant who’s been tormenting us and wring from him an explanation.”
We stood staring at the label in Isadora’s palm, transfixed. Like a visitant materializing from the spirit world, a great horned owl swooped low over our heads, startling us. As one, we doused our Evereadys. The huge bird, with a four-foot wingspan, soared to the steep roof of the south wing, settled on a chimney, and began to ask the eternal question of its kind. The night was crowned with stars, and the moon poured light as pale as skim milk into the mirrored obelisk. The air grew cold. Our exhalations shaped brief plumes. I sensed change of some kind coming. Rafael made the thin beseeching sound with which he expressed the need for affection, and I knew how he felt.
Eighteen
Under the silence of the heavens, within the hush of the great house, having retreated to the kitchen where the Frigidaires softly hummed, by candlelight in the first hour of Saturday, the four of us gathered at the round table to eat Chef Luigi Lattuada’s homemade peach ice cream. This frozen treat had been produced by a White Mountain ice cream freezer with a hand-crank churner, using ice and salt and cream and muscle. We enjoyed larger servings than the one we gave to Rafael, but he was happy with his portion and expressed his pleasure with a long sigh and an odorless fart.
Our conversation was minimal at first as we brooded about the disturbing, eyeless Gerber baby. Soon, however, the siblings were informing me about what they called the “Case of the Plethora of Dead Things,” which had baffled the J. Edgar Hoover Society earlier in this same year.Plethorameant an overabundance, an excess. I doubted Sherlock Holmes—or especially Mr. Hoover—would have used such an uncommon word in the title of a case, but the siblings were proud of it. Isadora remained somewhat skeptical that a criminal type had been sneaking around and leaving dead creatures in places where they wouldn’t ordinarily be found; she was willing to consider that it mighthave been just Nature in action. But Gertrude and Harry were still adamant that a clever trickster with a mysterious purpose had been behind it all, and their sister didn’t rule out that possibility.
The previous March, in the first instance that suggested an evil-minded schemer at work, Gertie had been preparing for bed when she found a dead bird in the closet, in one of her slippers. She called Izzy to her room. Neither of them was able to explain to their satisfaction how a bird had come to be in a windowless space. They were mature young women, not repulsed by the tiny carcass. With respectful solemnity, they wrapped the dead bird in a lace-trimmed handkerchief, tied the hanky shut with a length of blue ribbon, and set it aside for burial in the morning.
The next grisly discovery came four days later. The Fairchild children were required by their parents to make their own beds in the morning and turn down the bedclothes every evening rather than leave those tasks to the housemaids, who were busy enough. As Isadora was preparing her bed one night, she found a dead mouse under her pillow. At that point she hadn’t yet begun to wonder if this might just be Nature being Nature. Then and for weeks, she believed a villain must be in the house, engaged in skullduggery. In fact, she and Gertrude suspected their brother of being the culprit. However, because their parents schooled them in the moral imperative of having plenty of evidence before accusing anyone of anything, they remained mum, watched, waited, and plotted revenge in case it might be justified.
Five days later, Harry hurried them to his bathroom to see a dead mouse, this one curled in the water glass that stood on the apron of his bathroom sink. This exciting development gave them a yet more important reason not to report these incidents to Franklin and Loretta. Even good parents, fair and well meaning and with a sense of wonder, would take the investigation from their children and pursue it as an urgent inquisition, resolving the matter in short order. What was thefun in that? For more than a year, Izzy and Gertie and Harry had been late-night adventuring, inventing ghosts and vampires to chase down, devising dire mysteries for members of the J. Edgar Hoover Society to solve—and now arealmystery had sprung up around them. A drama. A puzzle. Achallenge.Their self-respect, their integrity, theirhonorrequired them to pursue the truth of this situation themselves, for it was them, not their parents, on whom it had been bestowed. They could not shirk their duty.
Occasionally through April and mid-May, dead creatures appeared in unusual places. A second bird. A third mouse. Most distressing was a cute little rabbit, one of a spring litter, with blood around its nose and mouth but no wound. Then the plague ended. Bird, mouse, mouse, bird, mouse, rabbit. As time passed with no further cadavers, Isadora became more willing to conclude that perhaps no human agency had been responsible for these bizarre occurrences. If some twisted individual had been tormenting them with dead things, what was his purpose, what message was intended? No less than sane citizens, mad people had their motivations. If the purpose had been to frighten and disgust the Fairchild siblings, why stop? Lunatics weren’t known for losing interest in their obsessions so easily.
Now, months later, he hadn’t stopped but, after a hiatus, had only changed tactics. The Case of the Plethora of Dead Things was surely related to the recent business regarding Le Clerc, Leveret,Darkmoor Lane, and the Gerber’s baby. The Case of Darkmoor Lane, if that’s what it should be called, seemed to suggest a perpetrator who harbored a grudge or, at the very least, believed that he was on a mission to right an injustice.
As we sat at the kitchen table in front of our empty dishes and our licked-clean spoons, I knew I ought to go straight to Loretta and Franklin with what I’d been told. However, if I did so, I would risk alienating my fellow members of the Clyde Tombaugh Clubfor a while and perhaps permanently. From my extensive reading of novels, I well understood that even happy children lived in a condition of quiet rebellion against the world of adults and that, among those whom they welcomed into their secret society, they valued loyalty above all else. Isadora, Gertrude, and Harry had accepted me with surprising generosity, but weeks or even months would be required for the cords that bound us to become so tightly knotted that they could not be undone. I would rather deny myself ice cream and cake and books—even books, even forever and ever—than forfeit the grace of friendship and belonging that I’d found with these three bright souls. I loved their mother and father, but I loved my siblings no less. Indeed, I might have loved them more, for I recognized my own vulnerability in them and knew their fears; in a world ruled by the strong, shared weakness spawns a binding sympathy. In the years to come, considering how busy Loretta and Franklin were, I would be spending more time in their children’s company than in theirs. I told myself that if the unknown tormentor meant to hurt them, he’d have done so already. I told myself that my experience of evil would ensure I’d see danger coming before any harm could be done, andthenI would go to Loretta and Franklin. I told myself, in the meantime, I would solve this mystery, after which any risk that might exist would have been removed. I knew I was being selfish, but I did not believe I was reckless. I would heed Harmony’s advice. I would enjoy life, but I would stay alert. All would be well if I remained alert.
