by L. L. Samson
Cato Grubbs Goes Too Far
or Be Careful When You Try to Teach Someone a Lesson. Your Regret Could Easily Outweigh Their Learning Experience. Then Again, You Might Have No Regrets at All.
Ophelia! Linus!” Aunt Portia called up the attic staircase.
“Are you children all right?”
Ophelia ran to the steps. “We’re fine,” she whispered. So far Uncle Augustus didn’t know about the attic, and they wanted to keep it that way.
“What about Tom?” Aunt Portia seemed to be only a voice in the dark stairwell.
“I ain’t skeered!” shouted Tom.
Ophelia winced and cast a “Shh!” in his general direction. “Where’s Uncle Auggie?”
“He decided to go play cribbage. Don’t worry, dear. Your secret is still safe.”
“Everything all right downstairs?”
“On this floor, dear. I’m just about to check on the shop.”
“No!” Ophelia cried. “Umm, what I mean is, let us do that for you.”
“Whyever is that nec—”
Walter suddenly appeared next to Ophelia, holding the flashlight. “Just trying to do our bit, Aunt Portia.”
She clapped her hands. “Well, aren’t you delightful! Please, go ahead then. I’m just as happy to return to bed.” She backed out of the stairwell and closed the door behind her.
Ophelia puffed out a sigh of relief.
Linus stood up as Tom climbed to his feet, laying his knife and wooden stick on the table under the window.
“Let’s go,” said Walter.
The shop was dimly illuminated by a battery-powered night-light near the section labeled BRITISH POETRY, 1800–1875.
They circled their flashlights around the room.
“Let’s see if we can find the door to Cato’s room,” said Ophelia.
They all tromped down into the dark basement, the briny smell of the floodwaters that had filled this room in July still saturated the air. Talk about a swimming pool! Everything had been removed and most everything discarded. It was just a bunch of Cato’s old junk anyway.
“It shouldn’t be too hard to find,” said Ophelia.
Oh, Ophelia!
They carefully ran their lights along the masonry (stonework), hunting for irregularities in the mortar connecting one stone to another. They even pressed on the stones, hoping to find a spring-loaded device that might expose a hidden door. (Perhaps that only happens in the movies where nothing is too much trouble.)
No luck.
“Cato must go in and out through the tunnels,” Walter said. “There’s nothing here.”
“Or he’s hidden the entrance beyond our ability to find it,” said Ophelia.
Linus didn’t doubt that for a second.
“Well, at least Joe can’t get in the house,” said Ophelia. “So things are looking up, right?”
Allow me a bit of foreshadowing here, dear reader. Maybe you’ll realize later on in the story what I was referring to. Or maybe not.
Imagine Tom’s feelings about now. Imagine finding out that the man who knows you testified against him in a court of law for a murder he committed out of greed and revenge—a man you thought was dead and would trouble you no longer—breathes once again and is sleeping in a secret basement room in the very house in which you are staying.
“Are you sure I can’t go back through that circle now?” Tom asked, picking up his whittling.
“Unfortunately, yes,” said Linus.
Ophelia felt sick. If anything happened to Tom … “Cato could take you back, but I don’t see that happening.”
“Maybe you had better tell us more about Joe,” Walter suggested.
“Well,” Tom hesitated.
“Would you like me to tell them?” Ophelia asked in a gentle voice.
Tom nodded. “I’d be obliged.”
“One night,” she began, “Tom and Huck went to the graveyard to get rid of some warts with a dead cat that Huck bought off a boy for a blue ticket and a bladder he got at the slaughterhouse.”
Tom stared openmouthed at Ophelia. “Why, you really do know where I been and what I done!”
“Uh-huh. Anyway, they were waiting to do their thing over a freshly dug grave when three men appeared.”
“Hold up.” Linus raised a hand. “A dead cat cures warts?”
“Sure does,” said Tom. “But not as good as stumpwater and eleven steps after midnight.”
“Folk remedies,” said Ophelia, casting a glance in her brother’s direction to silently inform him that this was neither the time nor the place for a lesson about how a virus, not a frog, brings on warts.
“Okay.” Linus shrugged.
“Apparently, one of the three men had snubbed Joe—”
“Not Joe Harper, Ophelia. Injun Joe,” said Tom.
Oh dear, she thought. “We don’t use words like injun anymore.”
“Whyever not?”
“Would you like being described as ‘White Tom’ all of your life?”
Tom laughed and laughed. “Why would anybody want to call me that?”
“We just try to be a little more respectful nowadays, give people a chance to be who they are without attaching other names to them that they weren’t born with, especially names that might cause others to view them suspiciously—even if they’ve never done anything to hurt anybody.”
“But Injun Joe is a thief, a liar, and a murderer. And he’s a drunk to boot!”
“Anybody can be those things, mate, no matter what the color of their skin might be,” said Walter.
“But what does callin’ him ‘Injun Joe’ have to do with—”
“Nevermind!” cried Ophelia. “We’ll just call him ‘Joe’ from now on, all right?”
“I s’pose,” said Tom.
Trying to explain twenty-first–century polities to a boy who lived that many years ago would take much longer than five minutes. Ophelia could only hope she’d given Tom something to think about.
She continued the tale. “Doc Robinson wanted to exhume (dig up) a man’s body, and he’d paid Joe and a man named Muff Potter an agreed upon amount to do the digging. After the body was raised, Joe demanded more money for the job. You see, he was seeking revenge for being poorly treated by Doc Robinson five years earlier. When Joe had asked the doctor for a handout (money or food given to a needy person), Doc Robinson had turned him away without a dime. So after the doctor refused to pay Joe and Muff more for their digging work, a fight broke out. In the end Joe stabbed Doc Robinson in the chest and killed him.”
“But Muff Potter got knocked out cold by Doc Robinson afore then!” Tom supplied. “So Joe blamed it all on Muff.”
“Right,” said Ophelia. “And Muff had been so drunk at the time, he figured that because he’d woken up with the murder weapon in his hand—where Joe put it—it must be true.”
“So they throwed Muff in jail instead,” said Tom. “Huck and I were mighty afeard to tell the truth of it all, but we tried to do right by old Muff. We tried to make his stay a mite easier.”
“It’s true,” said Ophelia. “Well, the truth finally came out because Tom was brave enough to tell it. Joe was convicted and sentenced to hang, but he escaped. He left the area for a while too. But now the problem is that we don’t know from which spot in the book Cato yanked him over to Real World.”
“It might have been before the murder?” Tom asked, with hope shining in his eyes.
Ophelia nodded.
“We have to find that out,” said Walter. “It will make all the difference.”
“On it,” said Linus, swiveling on his stool toward his worktable. He slid the notebook toward him and grabbed a pencil.
He turned back to the group. “What now?”
The clock chimed ten. The lights flickered back on.
“I’d better get back,” said Walter, “before Madge discovers I’m missing.”
After he left, Ophelia picked up her worrying string once more and began fidgeting with it. “Maybe we should work on
finding the burglar. There’s nothing we can do about Joe for now.”
“We could do homework,” said Linus.
They looked at each other, hesitated, then said in unison, “Nah!”
“How about it, Tom?” Ophelia asked. “Want to help us solve the mystery?”
“Does it include buried treasure?” he asked.
Ophelia remembered the empty shelves in the cave by the river. “It just might.”
thirteen
To Catch a Thief
or Why Do People Like Dirty Old Things Anyway?
Linus never trusted antiques. Consider that blue sofa in the attic. Ophelia and Walter heedlessly flopped all of their weight on the old piece, trusting—like motorists driving across a bridge about which they know positively nothing—that those one-hundred-year-old legs will support them. His parents, the lepidopterologists (entomologists who specialize in the collection and study of butterflies and moths), adored old stuff—particularly creepy portraits of long-dead people whom none of them knew.
Dr. Julia Easterday would come home with a new one at least once a month, claiming she pitied the poor man or woman trapped, unloved, inside some store and not living in a proper home. (Oh, the irony!) Ophelia, on the other hand, fabricated (made up) fanciful stories about not only the stoic faces staring down at them from the walls, but the furniture, the candlesticks, even the antique linens that had been handed down on the Easterday side of the family for generations.
“I just think they smell funny,” Linus always said.
The lad and I agree about that. And imagine the decades of germs built up on that fabric. Heavens, it’s almost too overwhelming to contemplate. Linus, however, was not worried about germs and dirt, as his mountainous pile of dirty laundry would attest. It sat on the floor next to the beanbag chair that both Tom and Ophelia refused to sit on. Talk about something smelling funny.
Linus, Tom, and Ophelia were now gathered in Linus’s bedroom. At Ophelia’s suggestion that they find a link between the stolen items, Linus opened a search engine on his desktop computer.
“Two Louis the Fourteenth side chairs,” said Ophelia, reading down the list that Father Lou had distributed to the community group. “A Napoleon era sideboard. A Fabergé egg.” She looked up. “Wow. I’d like to have seen that for myself.”
Fabergé eggs, dear readers, fashioned of gold and precious gems by a man named Carl Fabergé, are some of the most delightful pieces an eye will ever behold. Tsar Nicholas of Russia owned several. (Not that they did him any good in the end, but never mind about that.) Look them up! You’ll be glad you did.
“Hey,” said Ophelia. “Look at Aunt Portia’s list! The books are by Dumas, Hugo, Pascale, and Descartes.”
“They’re all French authors,” said Linus.
“French antiques.” Ophelia jotted that note next to the list of stolen goods. “What about Ronda’s missing jewelry?”
“We could ask her,” said Linus.
“Okay. I guess that’s not all that important. What’s important is that we’ve got a French connection going here.”
Ophelia had no idea that she’d just referred to a movie from the ‘70s. The child watches little television, bless her soul.
We should see if there are any similarities between the victims, Linus thought.
“What about the people whose things were burgled?” asked Ophelia.
The three of them sat in a circle on the floor with the list in the middle of them.
“I don’t know them folks,” said Tom. “Sorry.”
“Let’s see.” Ophelia ran her index finger down the list. “I don’t know all of them, but it seems like an awful lot of them work at the University.”
Linus scanned the list. “Except for Aunt Portia and Ronda.”
Now you might be wondering whether Portia and Ronda were in cahoots with one another, donning black clothing and skulking about town in the dark early morning hours, with sacks in hand, purloining (stealing) French loot from the pleasant, unsuspecting citizens of Kingscross.
Don’t worry. I wasn’t either.
“Now let’s go through everyone’s guest list by alphabet,” suggested Ophelia.
“A, B, C, D, E …” Tom recited.
Ophelia, not wishing to correct him again, let him get all the way to Z. “Excellent. Now let’s find all of the names beginning with A on these lists.”
Anderson, Angelo, Appmann, Azalea.
“Azalea?” said Linus.
“How pretty!” exclaimed Ophelia.
Linus and Tom exchanged you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me glances. They burst out laughing.
“What?” asked Ophelia.
“Azalea? Really?” Linus laughed again.
“Whatever.” She returned to the lists. “None of the A names are found on all of the guest lists.”
“How about them Bs?” Tom reached for an apple from the bowl that Ophelia had brought upstairs for the occasion.
“All right. Let’s see.”
Tom bit down with a great crunching snap. A brief puff of fresh apple cider scent hovered between the three. Linus reached for an apple too.
“Baker, Bandolino …” Ophelia slid her finger down the rosters. “Oh. Wow.”
“What?” Linus leaned over the paper.
“Birdwistell. At every single event.”
Linus raised his eyebrows.
“What’s a bird’s whistle got to do with this here?” asked Tom.
“Not a what,” replied Ophelia, “but a who.”
“Professor Kelvin Birdwistell,” Linus supplied.
“Who’s that?”
Ophelia huffed. “Only the meanest, most prideful man that’s ever come to this house.”
“Meaner than Injun Joe?”
“I don’t think he’s murdered anyone, if that’s what you mean, Tom.”
“Well, that’s good.” Satisfied, Tom leaned back against Linus’s bed.
How’s that for perspective?
“Maybe we should check the rest of the names, you know, just to make sure he’s not the only one,” she said.
For the next fifteen minutes, she made her way through the lists of names while Tom threw Linus’s baseball in the air, looking as bored as a boy stuck inside a room on a rainy evening should.
“Somebody named Betty Holiday and Frances Clark-Sanderson, she teaches art at the University, are the only other people who attended all of the events.” She set the lists aside. “My money’s still on Birdwistell.”
Linus clacked away on his keyboard. At his old school, he’d been the eighth-grade typing champ, typing ninety-five words per minute without a mistake.
This just goes to show you, young person, that even if you can’t play football or ice skate, there may be nothing wrong with your hands. You might be picked last in P.E. class, but that doesn’t mean you can’t become a great artist or musician someday. So remember that when your classmates make you feel as worthwhile as a bucket with a hole. You can be more than they ever dreamed. Take me, for example, not that my colleagues in the English Department recognize such genius.
“Give me a minute,” Linus said. “I’m almost in.”
“Are you hacking?” asked Ophelia.
“What’s ‘hacking’?” Tom got to his feet and stood beside Linus. He’d already been shown the computer, and it seemed like no fun whatsoever to Tom. “Who wants to stay home all the good long day and look at pitchers?” he’d said.
“Birdwistell’s email?” Ophelia leaned over and examined the screen. The website banner displayed the words KINGSCROSS UNIVERSITY and the school crest of a pelican, four keys, and a severed head.
FACULTY LOGIN proclaimed the reason for the webpage, and the email address and password boxes shone white.
“The email address is easy enough.” Linus typed [email protected]. “Now for the password.”
Asterisks appeared on the screen as he typed. Then he pressed ENTER with his right pinkie. Two seconds later, Pr
ofessor Birdwistell’s emails cascaded down the page arranged by date, listed from today all the way back to December two years ago. The older ones were from his sister, Cecily.
“What was his password?” asked Ophelia.
“Password.”
“Are you kidding?”
“It’s an age thing,” said Linus. His eyes glowed. “Let’s look at some mail.”
Yes, yes, yes! I know it’s against the law! I’m not saying Linus was within his legal rights. I’m simply telling you what happened. If you don’t like it, please contact Father Lou Wellborne, All Souls Episcopal Church, 297 Rickshaw Street, Kingscross.
Linus clicked on the oldest email first. “Wow.”
Ophelia gasped.
“What?” asked Tom.
Ophelia pointed to the email address: [email protected].
Linus pulled up another window on the browser and typed in the Web address. Up popped the website for Birdwistell Antiques in Chantilly, Virginia.
SPECIALIZING IN FRENCH ANTIQUES proclaimed the tasteful crimson letters on a cream background. Underneath that, a flashing banner advertised that Birdwistell Antiques was having a liquidation sale.
“Bingo.” Linus sat back in his chair.
“Huh?” asked Tom.
“We’ve got him.” Ophelia squeezed Linus’s shoulder and turned to Tom. “We found the burglar.”
“Looks like he’s been trying to keep his sister’s business afloat,” said Linus.
Ophelia felt sad at that piece of information. But just a little.
Ophelia checked the computer’s clock. “Ten forty-five.”
“Pretty good,” said Linus.
“We made quick work of that, didn’t we, Tom?”
“I can’t wait to see his face!” Tom said.
“I’ll tell Walt.” Linus stood and grabbed a hoodie off the bed.
After he left the room, Ophelia turned to Tom. “Are you sleepy?”
“Naw.”
“Me neither. There are only about twelve hours until you go back. Anything you want to do?”
“Can we go back downstairs? I reckon I’d like to take a copy of my book back with me. Only this one—” he slid the dog-eared paperback out of his jacket pocket “—might be suspicious looking with this floppy cover. Ours are a lot harder.” He handed the book to Ophelia. “I was reading it at the park this morning,” he explained.
