A short while later, alone in my suite, I finished brushing my teeth. I returned the toothbrush to the ceramic caddy next to the bathroom sink and looked up to see that I wasn’t reflected in the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet. As if through a window, I saw Captain in a three-piece tweed and the albino gentleman in a sharply tailored gray suit and pale-gray fedora. They were standing in a dimly lighted parkinglot, next to a Chrysler convertible roadster, as a thin tide of night mist washed low across the blacktop. Captain said, “I must be crazy—paying a gumshoe this much by the hour.” The pale detective said he was worth twice what he charged and would at last have what was wanted by this time tomorrow.
“He’s looking for us,” I said, and my words erased the image from the mirror much like a hand would wipe a film of condensed steam from a pane of glass. I had not dozed off. This vision could not be dismissed as a daymare. I did not know what was happening to me. I could only hope that it never happened again.
Nineteen
While we are making luck of our own as best we are able, other people are making luck for us, good and bad. Sometimes luck falls toward us like dominos, bringing a series of insights, and something we have struggled to understand becomes clearer than we imagined it ever could be. The night of the peach ice cream, I slept soundly, but I dreamed of dead mice, dead birds, dead baby rabbits. This was not a nightmare, for each creature recovered from death. The birds flew out of slippers; mice scampered from under pillows; rabbits hopped out of sight into the safe concealment of verdant foliage. When I woke late Saturday morning, I felt that my subconscious, in its dreaming, had been telling me to be alert for revelations that would solve the mysteries that had baffled the children.
In the early afternoon of that sunny day, as Harry and Gertrude were playing badminton on the court behind the pavilion, Isadora and I were sitting on the rim of the fountain, enjoying the cool air that the breeze brought off the arcing streams spouted by the stone dolphins. Water spilled down a series of granite bowls, and it was on the edge of one of those that a bird landed to drink. “That,” said my companion, “is just like the bird that Gertie found in her slipper and like the one wefound lying in the back hall when we were chasing the ghost of Rudolph Valentino. Valentino didn’t die here in the Bram, of course. He never even visited this place. But since no one has ever died here, to the best of our knowledge, we have to settle for spirits who come visiting from elsewhere.”
Later, when Isadora went into the house for her piano lesson, when Harry and Gertrude retreated to their rooms to clean up for dinner after working up a sweat at badminton, I lingered in the gardens to admire the last roses of the season. Mr. Reinhardt, the groundskeeper, was trimming a low hedge that surrounded the roses. He and I began talking about flowers when a bird like the one at the fountain landed on the stone walkway. A few pill bugs rolled up tight in an attempt to avoid being eaten. As the bird pecked at them, Mr. Reinhardt answered my question about it. “Oh,fräulein, that pretty fellow is a purple martin. Migration season. He is passing through,ein klein Zigeuner, a little Gypsy. We have no great flocks of his kind at any time of year, but in summer a few families return to the Bram and stay till late autumn.” He pointed at two large birdhouses atop tall poles in the northwest corner of the property. “Swallows. Mere two-ounce swallows. But they chase bigger birds out of those apartments. Tough little guys.”
I wished him a good day off, for he didn’t work on Sunday, and as I turned away, I thought of another question. “With the estate wall all the way around, do we have rabbits?”
“Kaninchen!” His brow furrowed, and his eyes squinted behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “They come in through the driveway gate and eat my flowers. No roses. No begonias. But much else. When I catch one, I put it off the property.” He made shooing motions with his hands. “Weggehen, weggehen!I cannot kill them. They are too sweet. I put them off the property.Danken Gott, we have had only one hare. A hare has such longer legs than a rabbit. Catching one is a fool’s errand. And Rafael is no help. He refuses to chase a bunny. He just sits and watchesit and wags his tail. And the first time the one hare made a ten-foot leap, our fierce dog ran off and hid from it.”
At the word “dog,” the bird took flight, leaving half the order of pill bugs unconsumed, as if it knew what the word meant but lacked an understanding of Rafael’s gentle nature.
Assuming that the first exotic word the groundskeeper used meantrabbitin German, I said, “Has aKaninchenever produced a litter while inside the estate wall?”
“Once! Early last spring. A doe can have four litters a year. There were seven kittens in this one. What damage could have been done to my flowers, herbs, and exotic grasses. What devastation!”
“What happened to them, the kittens?”
He put down his hedge shears and took a plaid handkerchief from a pocket of his khakis. Judging by his expression, I thought he was going to cry, but he blew his nose. Then he said, “The kittens are born without fur. They look like tinyMeerschweinchen. Guinea pigs. The mother leaves them in a shallow burrow. She covers it with grass to hide her babies and returns every evening to nurse them. In ten days they double in size. They become covered in fur. In a month, they can leave the burrow to find their own food.” He tucked away the plaid handkerchief and withdrew a plain one from a different pocket. He took off his eyeglasses and polished them. “A month! So tiny, they were. So vulnerable. How could I wait a month? I kept thinking—hawks, owls, and rats.Dreckige Ratten!Stuffing themselves on the kittens. I couldn’t sleep. I moved them into my office with their mother.” His office and the gardening-supply room were behind the school bungalow. “I fed them vegetables from Chef Lattuada. I built a rabbit hutch to keep them safe. When they were two months old and quick, I drove them out into the hills. Five miles from here. I set them free, the doe and six, so small in those endless fields. It was a hard thing to do. A rabbit in the wild lives only a year or two. So many predators.” Having puthis glasses on a low garden wall, he was blotting his eyes with the plain handkerchief. “It was hard to do, but there was nothing else.”
“Such is the world,” I said.
“That is very true. ‘Such is the world.’ So very true, Alida.”
“‘The doe and six.’ Weren’t there seven kittens?”
“One escaped the hutch. I don’t know how. Perhaps when I was cleaning it, putting in fresh water, the door opened. I searched and searched but never found it. Poor thing.”
As he put on his wire-rimmed spectacles and picked up the hedge clippers, I stood in contemplation of what information the day had brought to me for so little effort on my part. I didn’t know quite what to make of them yet, but I realized that certain valuable facts had been laid before me like gold coins.
Dinner was another triumph for Chef Luigi Lattuada. His kitchen seemed to be a culinary wonderland where food was prepared not by the usual methods but by the application of magic formulas and rare ingredients passed down through countless generations ofsorciers de cuisine. Over dessert, Franklin declared, “When the day comes I’m so old and feeble that I can digest nothing but pabulum, I’m sure Luigi will find a way to make it delicious.”
“That could be as soon as Monday,” Gertrude said, and everyone laughed, especially the children.
After the family was well fed and after the chef had enjoyed his dinner with Julian and Victoria Symington, Mr. Lattuada and Franklin retired to the music room. During the past few years, on either Saturday or Sunday night, their habit had been to take one generous snifter each of fine and highly illegal cognac while they listened to music of which both had become aficionados. The music room contained a Steinway where Isadora took lessons but also comfortable chairs and a gramophone. Franklin had a collection of 78-rpm disc records that in those days were made from a shellac compound and were heavier than the vinyl records that would comeinto home use years later. To encourage the children to develop a wide background in culture, the door was left ajar; though they weren’t permitted to be in the music room and disturb the adults, they were encouraged to sit on pillows on the hallway floor and listen. That was my first weekend at the Bram, and I settled on a pillow between Isadora and Gertrude. They were familiar with the recordings and excited to hear them again. Isadora whispered that we might want to dance. If we did, we would have to move farther along the hall and do it quietly. So it was there—September 13, 1930—that I first heard the group called the “Hot Five” and the singer and trumpet player who fronted them. His name was Mr. Louis Armstrong, and of course everyone came to know him in time. “West End Blues,” “Savoy Blues,” “Tiger Rag” ... During an amazing number called “Heebie Jeebies,” he sang some verses in what they called “scat,” making vocal sounds in imitation of instruments.
After listening for a while, Isadora and Gertrude could contain themselves no longer. They got up from their pillows and moved about twenty feet along the hall, where they danced together, obeying the rule of silence. Harry stayed where he was, rapt by the Hot Five but full of boyish disdain for dancing. “Stupid girls,” he whispered. I felt the music in my heart, in my muscles and bones, and I wanted very much to dance, but I dared not. I was neither dressed for dance nor properly constructed for it. I sat and listened and comforted myself with the promise that I would dance in my dreams.
In fact, that night Ididdance in my dreams. I had never done so before, because I’d never for a moment considered I could one day dance either while awake or asleep. My imagination had not been able to encompass the possibility. Now it could. I did more in my dreams than dance. I explored the lush gardens of the Bram, which expanded far beyond their real-world dimensions, with new wonders everywhere I went. At all times, parades of rabbits proceeded and followed me. Small birds landed on my shoulders and sang to me. Mr. Reinhardt andI got aboard his Ford truck and drove into the hills and found the doe with her six kittens, and we brought them home. I was dancing again when a voice came to me out of the dolphin fountain:Alida, ask Mr. Reinhardt about mice. Ask the children about the perfect world of peace and light.It was a woman’s voice, one I did not recognize. I’d never had the experience of being spoken to directly by a disembodied voice in a dream. When the unseen speaker repeated those two instructions, I promised to do what she had asked. The fountain overflowed, and I danced effortlessly on running water, through ferns and flowers, into moonlight and stars, into darkness and quiet.
Twenty
Mr. Reinhardt insisted on working every Saturday in his beloved gardens, but he had Sundays off. Therefore, I was unable to ask him about the mice until Monday. Even if he’d been at the Bram, I could not have spoken to him right away that morning, for we were going to church. I had never been to a church before. The prospect inspired something worse than apprehension and less than fright. I assumed that everyone would stare at me in my unusual dress, would speculate about what the garment might conceal, and would one way or another express the opinion that I did not belong there. As it turned out, no one in the congregation had any unusual interest in me. I sat with Gertrude between Isadora and Harry, and we four sat between Loretta and Franklin. The organ music was stirring, and much about the service was beautiful, and I liked the fragrance of incense. The experience was over sooner than I expected, and we left accompanied by the tintinnabulation of bells.
From there we boarded the yellow Cadillac again, and Franklin drove us to a restaurant overlooking the Pacific, where we sat at a table with a view of the sea and had brunch. There were no little food windows, as in an Automat, and we were not required to deposit nickelsin a slot to obtain a meal. The ambience was very pleasant, though the diners were a noisy lot, especially considering that no booze was served in that establishment. I expected the waiter to admonish me to take off my gloves to eat. When he made no such comment, I wondered if Franklin and Loretta had in advance appealed to everyone in the church and restaurant to treat me as if I were an ordinary child. They would have needed to know all those people and would have required an inordinate amount of time to contact them prior to Sunday. I decided that was unlikely but couldn’t be ruled out altogether. The food was good, though it was not as exceptional as any meal at the Bram.
When we got back to the house, Franklin and Loretta revealed that a projectionist had been hired and that we children were to be treated to an afternoon of motion pictures in the screening room. We watched silent two-reelers—Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton—that elicited more laughter from me than anything other than Voltaire’sCandide, which I had read three times. Then the siblings wanted a full-length talkie, and they agitated forDarkmoor Lane. They had seen the film, and I had not, but we were looking less for entertainment than for something that might help us solve the case that currently preoccupied the members of the Clyde Tombaugh Club. We found it. At the very bottom of the opening list of performer credits were the names of two actors, bit players, who appeared in the movie as “Gangster 1” and “Gangster 2”—Martin Souris Leveret, now dead, and François Le Clerc, now serving fifteen years for the voluntary manslaughter of Leveret.
Darkmoor Laneproved to be a pretty good program picture, the kind that unspooled as the second movie of a double bill. However, we had trouble sitting still until the end card. Immediately after the screening, we were expected for dinner at the kitchen table with Franklin and Loretta. Chef Lattuada didn’t work Sundays and Mondays, but he stocked a refrigerator with some dishes that could be eaten coldand others that needed only to be reheated in an oven. We Tombaugh detectives ate at a measured pace and participated in the table talk as if nothing else in the world urgently called to us. After the six of us cleared the table and washed the dishes, Loretta and Franklin went for a walk in the artfully lighted gardens, whereupon I and my companions and our faithful canine sprinted for the library as though all the demons in Hell must be chasing us.
Closing the library door and standing with his back against it, Harry said, “The killing must have happened during filming. Or if the cameras weren’t turning at the time, Le Clerc at least rubbed out Leveret right there on the set.”
Gertrude shook her head. “We don’t know that for sure.”
