The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma

by Trenton Lee Stewart

  Moocho slapped his forehead with the spatula.

  “As for the clover,” Kate went on, laughing, “take a close look at the word and you’ll find ‘love’ in it. Bees, princes, and love—they’re all in clover, just in different ways.”

  Moocho thanked them heartily for the explanations, and after a brief exchange about the weather (Constance had predicted rain by evening), the conversation turned to some meat scraps Kate had asked to be set aside for Madge. Reynie quickly tuned it out and dove into his own thoughts, for after so long with nothing new to consider, he suddenly had much more to think about than he had time to think. Last night he’d lain awake for hours thinking about that strange incident with Constance, and in his few spare moments today he’d been trying (true to their assignment) to reflect on the solution to the riddle.

  Mr. Curtain had kept S.Q. around out of love? It seemed impossible—Mr. Curtain seemed incapable of love. But if you could make yourself believe otherwise, then Mr. Curtain’s tolerance of S.Q., his least competent Executive and now his last remaining one, no longer seemed so mysterious. Still, just as Mr. Benedict had said, sometimes the answer is only the beginning, and Reynie found that the riddle’s solution raised even more questions in his mind than it answered.

  He would have given a lot to be able to put those questions to Mr. Benedict, but since yesterday afternoon Mr. Benedict had spent every waking moment (and no doubt a few sleeping ones) down among the computers in the basement. At supper Number Two had taken a plate to him, and at breakfast this morning Rhonda had. Not even when they told Rhonda about Constance’s latest feat had Mr. Benedict made an appearance; in fact Rhonda hadn’t even summoned him.

  “Don’t get me wrong, what you’re telling me is important, but he’s asked not to be disturbed except in certain cases,” Rhonda said, without specifying what those cases might be. “He has a great deal of work to do in a very short time and is permitting himself few breaks.”

  Rhonda wouldn’t tell them what Mr. Benedict was doing or why it was so urgent, but in last night’s meeting of the Society Constance had speculated he was seeking the remedy for his narcolepsy. She hoped so, anyway, since he would lose his chance forever once the Whisperer was taken away. She had spent the rest of the meeting railing bitterly against Mr. Gaines “and that twitty committee,” for Constance loved Mr. Benedict (though she never exactly said so aloud) and felt every bit as protective of him as Number Two and Rhonda did. In fact she would have been his adopted daughter by now if only the authorities would recognize her existence, but due to the mysterious absence of certain official papers they had refused to do so. This was yet another reason for her bitterness. Few things infuriated Constance more than being ignored, and having her exis-tence denied struck her as the worst insult imaginable.

  “An empty box!” Constance cried now, breaking in on Reynie’s thoughts. She and Sticky had finally resolved their argument and resumed the exercise. “An empty box, sort of tilted to the side!”

  “Yes!” Sticky said with obvious relief, but then his face fell. “Oh, great, but now I have to tell you about the memory.” Mustering his resolve he began, “One time in a quiz championship I was asked to draw a rhombus. I froze up from the pressure—you know how I used to do that sometimes…”

  “Oh yes,” said Constance with an arch look. “You used to do that.”

  Ignoring this comment, Sticky pressed on, “Well, instead of a rhombus, which is an equilateral parallelogram—that’s the tilted box shape you saw—I got it into my head that I was supposed to draw an omnibus.”

  Constance frowned. “What’s that?”

  “A bus—‘omnibus’ is essentially an old-fashioned word for ‘bus.’ I knew what a rhombus was, of course, I just got so flustered and…” Sticky grimaced and reached for his spectacles. “When I think of how carefully I drew the wheels,” he muttered, “how I even put little faces of people in the windows, thinking I was being creative, while everyone there must have been shaking their heads, appalled that I thought this was a rhombus…”

  Constance was staring at Sticky with a look of extreme disappointment. “That’s it? Your empty box is just a dumb old rhombus? That’s the most boring embarrassment I’ve ever heard of!”

  Sticky’s eyes flashed, and he was about to argue when he suddenly realized that he’d gotten lucky. “You think so? Well, sorry, Constance, that’s the story.” For a moment he contemplated his spectacles, which he’d removed without thinking. He put them back on again. “And guess what? We get our pie and ice cream now.”

  “You’re right!” Constance exclaimed. “I guessed all three! Moocho, did you hear that? I guessed all three!”

  “Congratulations,” said Moocho with a grin, and to Sticky he said, “and also my sympathies. Allow me to give you both your just desserts.” He wriggled his heavy dark eyebrows, obviously pleased with himself.

  “Moocho!” Kate cried, laughing boisterously and clapping her hands. “What a joke! Oh, I wish I’d thought of that! Just desserts! Did you hear that, everyone?” She followed him into the kitchen and back, repeating his play on words over and over and laughing afresh each time.

  A short time later, having already eaten all of her ice cream and most of her pie, Constance was staring at her remaining few bites with exaggerated dejection. “Moocho didn’t give me as much ice cream as you,” she complained to Sticky, “and now I don’t have any to eat with the rest of my pie.”

  Leaning across the table, Reynie pretended to study her bowl. “I think you just misjudged your pie-to-ice-cream ratio, Constance. You took two bites of ice cream for every one bite of pie.”

  “Moocho gave you both the same,” said Kate, who was in the corner of the dining room doing handstand push-ups. “I saw him scoop the ice cream.”

  “No, he didn’t!” Constance snapped. “Sticky’s scoops were bigger!”

  Warily, Sticky slid his bowl closer to him and shielded it with his arm. “Well, you’re not getting any of mine.”

  “Oh no? Maybe I should just fish out some more of your embarrassing memories,” Constance growled, leaning forward and poking her finger at him. “I’d love telling people about them!”

  “Constance!” cried Reynie and Kate, horrified. “You wouldn’t!”

  The forceful reproach in their tone and the expression on Sticky’s face—an unsettling blend of revulsion, fear, and fury—cowed Constance a bit. “All right, all right,” she said, leaning back again. “I wouldn’t do that, I guess.” But she felt angry and resentful now, and she scowled at Sticky with a ferocity unusual even for her. She crossed her arms, her face turned bloodred, and with her nose wrinkling and her pudgy cheeks bunching up, she narrowed her bright blue eyes to slits.

  Reynie was impressed, but Sticky didn’t seem to notice. He was staring at his ice cream, blinking uncertainly, as if considering whether he could even enjoy it under the circumstances. And then, much to Reynie’s surprise, he seemed to come to that very conclusion.

  “Here,” Sticky said, shoving his plate toward Constance, who set upon the ice cream with a look of triumphant glee. “I don’t much like vanilla, anyway.”

  “You don’t?” Kate said, amazed. She dropped onto her feet and walked over to see what was going on.

  “I thought vanilla was your favorite,” Reynie said.

  Sticky’s eyes widened, and he looked at Reynie in confusion. “It… it is my favorite. Why did I say it wasn’t? For a second I actually believed it.”

  Slowly, disbelievingly, they all turned to Constance, who had already finished half the ice cream and was now clutching her head, much as Kate had done earlier. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut.

  “What’s the matter, do you have a cold headache from eating my ice cream?” Sticky said, his voice rising. “It serves you right, if you just did what I think you did! Did you, Constance? Did you make me think I didn’t like vanilla?”

  Constance opened her eyes, the anguish in them so apparent that Sticky drew back in surpri
se. “I did!” she wailed, and to Sticky’s even greater astonishment she burst into torrents of tears. “All right? I told you to think that! Now stop talking! Please! My head is splitting! Oh, it’s horrible, really horrible!”

  “Whoa,” Kate murmured, with a worried look at Reynie. “She said please.”

  Disconcerted, Sticky was frantically patting Constance’s arm, trying to soothe her. “Easy, Constance. You’ll be okay. You can… you can eat the rest of my ice cream, okay? Don’t you want it?”

  But this only made Constance sob all the more. “I can’t! I feel too sick! My head… my stomach… oh, I feel just awful!”

  The little girl’s wails had brought all the adults running, including Mr. Benedict (panting from the stairs), and straightaway she was carried up to her bed, where she lay moaning and crying for more than an hour, until finally, with Mr. Benedict holding her hand and her friends listening anxiously at the door, she mumbled, “I don’t believe I’ll do that again,” and fell into a fitful sleep.

  Hours later, Constance awoke looking as though she’d been ravaged by the flu. Pasty pale skin, red-rimmed eyes, hair a tangled mess. Nonetheless she felt much improved, and was surprisingly well-mannered, even meek, as she listened to Mr. Benedict’s stern admonitions. She quite agreed that she’d behaved badly and must never do that sort of thing again, and at any rate nothing could induce her to risk another bout of such agony.

  “But what caused it?” Constance asked, kicking free of her tangled sheets. “I mean, hearing people’s thoughts and all that never hurt me—it’s just sort of like having a conversation. But when I changed Sticky’s mind…” She shuddered and hugged her knees.

  “I suspect the main difference was the intensity of focus and mental effort involved,” Mr. Benedict said, patting her arm reassuringly. “If telepathy is like a mental conversation, then changing someone’s mind—essentially hypnotizing someone, as you did with Sticky—is like winning a long and exhausting argument, except that the entire argument is compressed into the space of a moment. In other words, I believe your sickness was simply the result of strain, my dear.”

  “So you think I can avoid it? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “If you are careful and prudent,” said Mr. Benedict. He raised an eyebrow. “Do you think you can be prudent? You haven’t had a great deal of practice.”

  “Oh, I can be!” Constance said. “I will be!”

  Reasonably satisfied, Mr. Benedict went back to his work, though not without some reluctance and a final, concerned glance from the doorway. “We’ll leave aside the mental exercises for now,” he said mildly, “and return to them when I can be more fully involved. In the meantime, my dear, rest and play—rest and play.” And with Number Two attending him he left Constance with the other children and hurried down to the basement.

  “You don’t have to say it,” Constance muttered to Sticky as soon as they were alone. “I’m sorry, okay? I really am.”

  Sticky regarded her solemnly. Then he put a hand over his heart and said, “I shall always remember this moment,” and Kate and Reynie laughed until Constance, blushing, covered her head with a pillow.

  That evening a cold rain set in that did not let up for days. There was no going outside, and in the drafty rooms of the house even the brightest lamps seemed somehow to cast more shadow than light. It was gloomy, in other words, and adding to the gloom for Reynie was an unpleasant realization that had come to him slowly: Once the Whisperer had been removed from Mr. Benedict’s care, the government would no longer think it necessary to guard the children and their families. All of them would be free to return to their lives.

  Which meant saying goodbye to his friends again. This time, perhaps, forever.

  The prospect put Reynie in a terrible mood. He ate little and spoke even less, and kept to himself more than usual. He saw no point in mentioning any of this to his friends—no point in depressing them, too—and he especially avoided Constance, who might divine his thoughts without even trying. Miss Perumal noticed, of course. She checked him for fever every day, and asked more than once if the incident with Constance had upset him more than he was letting on. But Reynie always insisted he was fine. He had many reasons for not wishing to discuss his concern with her, not least his dread of having his fears confirmed.

  Reynie was already troubled, therefore, when he bumped into Kate one afternoon in the kitchen. But what she told him made his stomach flop.

  “I just overheard Number Two telling Rhonda,” Kate whispered, glancing around to be sure they were alone. “The order’s gone through committee again.”

  “When?”

  “This morning, apparently.”

  “No, I mean when are they coming for the Whisperer?”

  “The day after tomorrow. Wednesday afternoon. They don’t intend to tell us until that morning. They don’t want to worry us.”

  “We’d better call a meeting,” said Reynie.

  Sticky had to be rescued from Mrs. Washington, who was once again begging him to let his hair grow out, and Constance had to be roused from a long nap that she had strenuously argued she didn’t need, but the Society eventually held its meeting. Sitting around the rug in the girls’ room as they had done so many times before, they spoke aloud their questions in hopes of generating an answer, or at the very least a clue.

  What would happen to the Whisperer when it left the house? Did Mr. Curtain’s spies know it was to be relocated on Wednesday? Even if not, even if the move was uneventful, would Mr. Benedict finish what he was doing before then? What was he doing, anyway? It had been several days now, and still he was down in the basement, working feverishly among the computers.

  “I suppose we’ll find out on Wednesday,” said Sticky, when after much discussion no answers emerged. “One way or another, we’ll get some answers then.”

  “One way or another,” Reynie repeated grimly.

  There followed a long silence, during which the three older children stared glumly at the rug. Finally Constance heaved an exasperated sigh and said, “Can we just talk about this and get it over with? You’re all thinking the same thing, you know. And don’t get mad at me for knowing, either. I can’t help it—your thoughts might as well be screaming at me.”

  Startled, they all looked at Constance, and then at one another, with expressions half-sheepish and half-relieved.

  “Sorry,” Kate said. “I know I’ve been avoiding everyone—”

  “You have?” Sticky said. “I have, too! I didn’t want…” He hesitated. “Well, it just didn’t seem decent to be worried about what happens to us, not when there’s this much more important question…”

  Reynie shook his head wonderingly. “I thought I was the only one thinking about it.”

  Kate snorted. “Are you kidding? It’s all I’ve been able to think about for days. And is it just me, or does anyone else think Mr. Benedict gave us that riddle as a distraction? Something to take our minds off what’s going to happen?”

  “I’ve wondered about that,” Reynie said. “And the exercise with Constance, too. It seems like quite a coincidence that he gave us so much to think about all of a sudden.”

  “Well, it didn’t work, I can tell you that,” Constance said peevishly. “I’ve been constantly worrying about what will happen if that nasty man gets his hands on the Whisperer again, and I can’t stand to think that Mr. Benedict might not have enough time to find a cure for his narcolepsy, and on top of it all there’s this thing with, you know…” She pointed at her head.

  “What, are you worried it will go off?” Sticky asked.

  “Ha ha,” Constance said, making a face at him. “You wouldn’t think it was so funny if you’d been through what I went through. I’ve never felt so sick in my life.”

  Sticky refrained from saying that the experience had not been exactly pleasant for him, either. “Listen, though, Constance, do you still think that’s what Mr. Benedict’s working on—a cure for his narcolepsy? You aren’t getting any
thoughts or vibes or whatever that it’s something else?”

  Constance rolled her eyes. “For one thing, I haven’t seen him any more than you have. And for another, I’ve been trying to keep my thoughts to myself, if you know what I mean. But I hope that’s what he’s working on, don’t you?”

  “I hope a whole lot of things,” Sticky said.

  “So do I,” Kate said.

  “So do I,” Reynie said.

  And they were all telling the truth, yet somehow, strangely enough, none of them felt very hopeful at all.

  On Tuesday afternoon, the day before the Whisperer was scheduled to be removed, Mr. Benedict was still at work. If it was a remedy for narcolepsy he sought, he obviously had not found it yet, for when an unexpected visitor arrived and Number Two hurried down to tell him who it was, he fell straight to sleep in his chair. He had seemed quite startled, Number Two told Rhonda upstairs (forgetting, in her fretfulness, to keep her voice down)—startled and even upset, and now she was having trouble waking him.

  “I’ll go back down with you,” said Rhonda gravely. She turned (they were just outside the dining room) and saw Constance in the doorway, listening. “Constance, would you go tell Milligan—”

  Milligan appeared behind her. “I already heard. Constance, scoot along upstairs, won’t you?”

  By the time Number Two and Rhonda had managed to wake Mr. Benedict, everyone in the house knew what had happened and who was at the door. The children were crowded at the girls’ bedroom window, which was open for the sake of the cool air, and were peering down into the courtyard for a glimpse of the infamous Mr. Pressius.

  “That’s him?” Constance muttered as Kate held her up. The rain had only just subsided, and on the shining wet stones of the front walk a well-dressed man stood talking to Ms. Plugg. He was evidently quite tall—he towered over the guard—and under his arm he carried a bouquet of pink carnations in the way some businessmen carry newspapers. “That’s the rich creep who made the deal with Curtain?”