His living room was not large, but cozy and welcoming. As the children and I sat side by side on a sofa, Isadora said, “We won’t takemuch of your time, sir. We’re here because we’re desperate to solve a mystery.” Chef Lattuada occupied one of two armchairs, while Rafael collapsed in front of the fireplace to bask in the heat of the burning logs. “Alida needs to ask Mr. Reinhardt about mice, but he’s off today, and the Symingtons aren’t home, as we expected them to be, so we have no one to turn to about mice except you.”
“And now that it’s you,” I said, “I have more than mice to inquire about, if that’s okay.”
“Why don’t we start with mice? It’s an unpleasant subject and best gotten out of the way, no less so than crocodiles.”
He knew how to keep a conversation lively. I smiled. “Well, I guess I need to know if we have a mouse problem here at the Bram.”
“Not in the house itself, so far as I’m aware. Summer of last year and again this past spring, there were mice in the garage.” The cars were kept in a building separate from the house. “It seems,” he continued, “the mice were eating the insulation off the automobile wiring. Personally, that’s a dish I don’t enjoy, and I would never prepare it for your dinner, but rodents seem to fancy it.”
“Did Mr. Reinhardt set traps for them?”
“No. He put poison in clever bait stations with entrances so small that only mice could get in to nibble at the stuff. It was so effective and quick-acting that the mice had no chance to complain to authorities.”
“So there were a lot of dead mice lying around if someone had a use for them.”
“Mr. Reinhardt is a kindly man who would not disappoint anyone in need, even when the people in need are seeking dead mice. May I say, Alida, you are so uncannily like Isadora, Gertrude, and Harry that you might all have come from Mars on the same rocket ship.”
The siblings liked that one very much. So did I. “I believe we’re done with the subject of mice,” I said. “You once told me you speakFrench, so I guess you might know some French people from your days in Europe.”
“I speak bad French. But I knew some good people there.”
“Did you ever know anyone or hear of anyone named Leveret? Is that a French name?”
“I suppose it could be. It’s not French, but people adopt names that gradually become widely used. A leveret is a young hare. Some French chefs have numerous recipes for hare, but I’ve never cared for the game taste. I knew people named Leverrier. Levesque. That’s the best I can do.”
“If Mr. Leveret is French,” I said, “then his middle name is likely also French. Maybe you’ll know. His middle name is Souris.”
“So we are not done with mice, after all. In French, asourisis a mouse. Evidently that’s not his middle name, but a nickname he embraced.”
Dead purple martins, dead mice, and a dead hare. The unknown person behind the Case of the Plethora of Dead Things was the same person who, months later, began to taunt the Fairchild children with photos and newspaper clippings.
My questions had made Chef Lattuada uneasy. Now my expression alerted him that this was something more than a foolish game. “You better tell me what’s going on here.”
I looked at my companions. They nodded. I said, “Someone has been sending threats to Isadora, Gertrude, and Harry. Things that didn’t seem like threats at first, things maybe no one but Nature sent. Dead birds, dead mice, a dead rabbit. Now I think someone close to the family blames Loretta and Franklin for something they didn’t do, for the death of a man named Martin Leveret, a bit player who was killed by another bit player on the set ofDarkmoor Lane.”
Chef Lattuada slid to the edge of his armchair and leaned toward me. “Someone close to the family. Who?”
“I don’t know. I hope it’s no one on the staff. Maybe someone who comes and goes, an outside service.”
Sensing the tension that had arisen, Rafael got up from his place by the fire and shook himself and came to stand with us.
“There’s something else.” I didn’t want to tell the chef that I’d been guided by a voice in a dream. Even an adult as open-minded as he would have doubts about a girl who claimed to hear a voice in her head or in dreams and acted on its instructions. I focused on the siblings. “Tell me about ‘a perfect world of peace and light.’”
They were startled.
“That’s nothing,” said Isadora. “It’s just stupid. It doesn’t have anything to do with the dead things and Leveret and all that.”
“I think it does. I haven’t been snooping on you,” I assured my fellow Tombaugh Club members. “It’s just ... I was told to ask you this by that fortuneteller we talked about earlier. I need to know what it means—‘the perfect world of peace and light.’”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Isadora said. “It’s boring grown-up wouldn’t-it-be-nice talk. It’s not something that could ever be, so it’s not important. We don’t understand it anyway, who she’s talking about, so we just tune it out.”
Gertrude said, “She doesn’t yammer on about it every day. Just when she’s in her lemon mood, all sour in her lemon mood, her face squinched up. After a while, she hears herself, how sour she sounds, so then she’s fun again, fun and nice, ’cause that’s who she really is, who she wants to be.”
Harry stood up from the sofa, apparently convinced that his full height must be utilized to give his words credibility. “So we never told anyone ’cause she’s always so sorry how she grumps about things. She asks us not ever to tell anyone. She just wants a better world and gets angry that it won’t get better. She’s maybe a little crazy about it sometimes, but everyone is a little crazy sometimes aboutsomething.I’m a little crazy about hating ham, how it tastes so salty and gross and hammy. You put ham on my plate, I won’t eat anything else on the plate. I might never eat off that plate again. I’m a little crazy about it, see?”
Chef Lattuada’s voice was tender and affectionate, with a note of sadness. “This is more than not liking ham. ‘A perfect world of peace and light’ is one of the slogans of a very dangerous group. I am so sorry for Miss Blackthorn that she’s been made to believe the things they teach and wants to make you believe them, too.”
Twenty-One
