“Maybe you don’t know, but I do. It’s how it had to be. The scenario requires it. Dramatic structure. How often have we heard about good dramatic structure? Like a thousand times.”
I said, “Wouldn’t your parents have told you if it happened on the set?”
“Definitely not,” Isadora said. “They wouldn’t want to distress us. They would worry that we weren’t old enough to handle it.”
“I just handled it,” Gertrude declared. “So there.”
Harry shrugged and turned his hands palms up as if to invite an explanation. “What’s to be distressed about? Someone gets bumped off on the set. It’s exciting, that’s all.”
“If they’d told us,” Isadora said, “we’d have worried about them being murdered every time they went to work.”
“Hey, it wasn’t murder, just plain old killing. No malice. No premeditation. I explained all that.”
“So you’re saying we would have been all right with Mother and Father getting killed at work, just so they weren’t murdered? Are you really nine, little brother, or do we have the math wrong?”
Harry resorted to a raspberry. “Okay, so they didn’t think they should tell us, but now someone else is telling us. Someone thinks we should know, and now we know.”
“It’s more than that,” I said as I paced to facilitate clear thinking. I had never paced for that purpose before. I’d always been on a small stage, in a small room, in the back seat of a car, with no space to pace. “Whoever’s sending you these messages, these clues, is making a statement.”
“What statement?”
“You never solved the Case of the Plethora of Dead Things.”
“Thanks for rubbing it in. It feels so much better now.”
“I mean that case is this case. All the same thing. Whoever’s sending these photos and newspaper clippings started out earlier in the year, leaving dead things around to scare you and disgust you and get your attention. Yesterday, Isadora, you pointed out a bird like the one found in Gertrude’s slipper. Later, Mr. Reinhardt said it was a purple martin. I didn’t think much about it at the time because I was more interested in his story about the rabbits.”
“Martin Leveret,” she said.
“There’s a book,” I said. “I saw it the other day.” With the siblings close behind, I hurried across the room to a section of shelves devoted neither to fiction nor biography, but to volumes about the natural world. The tome I wanted was thick and oversize—Mammals of the World: An Illustrated Zoology. I carried it to the main library table and opened it and paged through the alphabetical listings to rabbits. Three pages were devoted to the species, with several photos. The four of us crowded around, scanning the text.
“What’re we looking for?” Gertrude asked.
“I’ll know it when I see it,” I said.
When I didn’t see it anywhere in that entry, I paged toward the front of the book until I found the section on hares, another three pageswith photos. The word seemed to leap from the text. “Leveret,” I read aloud. “A young hare is called aleveret.”
“You’re so clever, Alida,” Gertrude said. “If my parents insist that I go to some boring college, I’ll want you to go with me and do all the learning and test-taking for me.”
I heard the same voice that I’d heard in my dream.Alida, ask Mr. Reinhardt about mice.The speaker sounded somewhat like Madam Zena, the fortuneteller in the carnival. “I’m supposed to ask Mr. Reinhardt about mice.”
“What about mice?” Harry asked.
“Well, I’m not sure. A voice in a dream told me to ask him. It might have been the voice of a carnival fortuneteller I once knew.” Voices in dreams, carnivals, fortunetellers—combined, they were a stimulus that caused my friends to tremble with excitement. I said, “Maybe mice have been a problem for Mr. Reinhardt or maybe it’s something weirder than that. But he’s not here today.”
“Mr. Symington would know about mice,” said Isadora. “He knows about everything Bram.”
“But this is a day off for the Symingtons.”
“They don’t often go anywhere. They usually stay here, in their apartment on the second floor of the bungalow. They won’t mind a quick visit. We can apologize effusively for disturbing them.”
The one thing you could say with absolute confidence about the Clyde Tombaugh Club was that the mere prospect of adventure, however slight, inflamed its members into the reckless pursuit of it. As we were about to leave by the exterior library door, Harry clasped Rafael’s burly head between his hands and met the shepherd’s eyes. “We’ve got to avoid Mom and Dad. They’re in the gardens. You know their smell. Do not fail us.” The dog sneezed as if to confirm his reliability and commitment to the cause. Isadora opened the door, and Rafael went through first. We followed, avoiding the landscape lightingwhere possible. Ten acres equals a few blocks of ordinary backyards, allowing us to stay off the paved paths and move through planting. We remained close to the estate wall and arrived at the bungalow without having to explain ourselves to a parental patrol.
The windows were dark in the Symingtons’ apartment, for this was one of the rare occasions when they went somewhere on a day off. However, lamplight warmed the windows of Chef Lattuada’s quarters. Buck Rogers, up there in the twenty-fifth century, would not give up and go home just because his intended target for the night was off to Santa Monica for an evening of dining and dancing, and neither would we. The siblings believed the chef liked them all but had a special soft spot in his heart for Gertrude, not because of her deformed hand so much as because of her attitude and the way she couldn’t help but often mispronounce his name as Lugenie Lanaconda. “Also,” she said, “because he’s kind enough to pity anyone named Gertrude.” She took the front position in our little group and rang the bell.
When Chef Lattuada opened the door, I was happy to see that he was holding a novel he’d been reading, happier that it wasA Tale of Two Cities. The final chapter of that work moves me profoundly with its honoring of self-sacrifice and its celebration of forgiveness. The last two lines always make me cry in the best way.
Even as Chef greeted us, our gaggle of amateur detectives peppered him with apologies for the interruption and with not entirely germane questions about mice and martins and hares and whether another batch of peach ice cream might be spun up sooner than later. His hands were big enough to juggle cantaloupes, and he used the bookless one to make a settle-down gesture. “If you have not come here to raid my refrigerator, I am pleased to invite you into my home. Just understand, I will defend my precious Frigidaire and its contents to the death.”
