“Yeah,” Neely said. “I know about that.” She’d heard a lot about the bookstore from Mom and Dad, who seemed to remember it quite differently. Dad’s bookstore memories seemed to be about meeting interesting customers and reading all the great books, and Mom remembered worries about money and paying taxes.
It wasn’t until they’d pretty much covered the subject of the Bradfords in the pre-Neely-and-Grub days that Neely brought up the Hutchinsons and Halcyon House. The first thing she asked was if Lucie had ever met any of the Hutchinsons.
“Me?” Lucie said. “No, I never did. How old do you think I am, anyway? Dad remembers seeing all the cars going up to the mansion when he was a little boy, and then when he was a teenager I think he met Harold the third and his brother a few times. But even by then the family had stopped spending very much time on the coast. I think it was in the sixties, after Harold the second died, that they really stopped coming to Halcyon altogether. I don’t know why exactly. Maybe they couldn’t afford to come, or maybe they just weren’t as crazy about the place anymore. What made you think about the Hutchinsons?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Neely was a little disappointed that Lucie hadn’t much information that was new and exciting. “I was just wondering.”
It wasn’t until Lucie left to go back to Santa Cruz that Neely had a chance to talk to Grub. She found him in his room sitting on the edge of his bed, not reading or playing with anything. Just sitting. When she stuck her head in the door and said, “Hi,” he smiled and said, “Hi,” back. But the smile wasn’t real. He was in a mood, all right. A bad one.
Neely came in and sat down at the end of the bed. “Look,” she said. “I’m bored. How would you like to play a game of checkers? Or dominoes? Or maybe Scrabble?”
Grub looked all around before he answered, as if he hoped a good answer to Neely’s question were written somewhere on the walls of the room. Then he shook his head and said, “No. I don’t feel like playing a game. Not right now.”
Neely began to feel frustrated. “Well, what do you feel like then, you little dweeb? Just sitting there moping all evening?”
“I’m not moping,” Grub said. “I’m going to...I’m going to...read a book.” He got up off the bed, went to his bookcase, and picked up a book—without even looking to see what it was. “See. I’m going to read this book.” He held it out toward Neely and smiled.
There was something so pitiful about Grub’s phony smile that Neely felt guilty for getting mad at him. “Okay,” she said. “Read your book. But let’s do something special tomorrow. Okay? Something fun.”
“Okay.” Grub nodded, but his eyes said he didn’t much care one way or the other. “Like what?”
“Well... Neely racked her brain, and came up with: “Hey, I know. Tomorrow’s Monday. We could go to Halcyon House.”
Grub looked up quickly. “And go inside?” he asked.
“No. Not inside. We can’t do that anymore. It’s too...dangerous.”
“Oh.” Grub shrugged and turned away.
“Well,” Neely said. “I don’t know. We could just go there and see about it. We could visit Lion and see about going inside.”
“Okay.” A spark flickered in Grub’s eyes. “Let’s go see about it.”
Chapter 15
BUT THEY DID GO INSIDE HALCYON HOUSE THE NEXT DAY because, as it turned out, nothing else worked. Nothing else—not playing with Lion or watching the tadpoles, even though they were beginning to grow hind legs and were pretty interesting, or making up a new game to play in the stable—did very much to change Grub’s mood. It wasn’t until Neely suggested that maybe they could go back inside the house again, just for a little while, that Grub began to pull out of it.
“Okay,” he said, turning quickly to look at Neely. “We’ll just stay for a little while.”
“Right!” Neely said as they climbed up the wisteria vine and made their way carefully across the slippery shingles. “Just for a little while—and for the last time. That’s for sure.”
Opening the window was a little easier, but it still required quite a bit of tugging and pulling, and while Neely was still working at it Grub squeezed through ahead of her. She was just starting through herself, on her stomach, when from inside the room she heard Grub saying loudly, “We’re only going to stay a little while today.” But by the time she’d scrambled to her feet he was going through the drawers of the dressing table, and when she asked who he’d been talking to he only shrugged and smiled and said, “Myself. I was just talking to myself.”
They started at the top floor ballroom that day and really didn’t stay very long, at least not up there. Just long enough for Grub to play one record and for Neely to walk quickly around the long room, stopping briefly to look out the window behind the bandstand. The one with the window seat in front of the great view down into the canyon and then on out to the ocean.
On the other floors, too, they moved fairly quickly. As they entered each room Grub ran around opening drawers and cupboards and making comments about what was inside. He found old clothes and papers mostly, but sometimes interesting things like a hairbrush and mirror set with tarnished silver backs, a beautiful crystal paper weight shaped like a rose, and a collection of fancy perfume bottles.
Sometimes Neely went to look at what Grub had found, but mostly she just stood still, looking and listening. Looking to see if Grub was leaving any noticeable foot- or fingerprints in the dust and listening for whatever it was she couldn’t quite hear. After a few minutes of uneasy listening and watching she whispered, “Stop that, Grub. Stop touching things. And come on. We have to hurry.” Then she went around quickly smudging out Grub’s foot- and fingerprints before they left the room.
So their visit might really have been a short one if it hadn’t been for what happened in the library. After stopping briefly to stare at the family portrait over the fireplace, Neely began to read the titles on the old books. Most of them seemed to be about history or travel, but in a small alcove she came across some old children’s books. She sat down on the padded bench that was built into the back of the alcove, and for a little while forgot about hurrying.
Most of the books were about animals, mostly horses and dogs. And the ones that weren’t about animals seemed to be about girls. There was Little Women, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, The Secret Garden, and some others she’d not heard of before. But all obviously about girls. Still holding an armload of books, Neely went back to look again at the portrait and particularly at the little girl with the big eyes and the faint sad smile. Then she went back to sit on the padded bench again.
There was a peacefulness there in the alcove, and a different kind of quietness. A hush that didn’t feel like a barrier behind which other sounds were hiding. The silence in the library felt deep and real. The alcove was, she decided, the kind of place where someone could come and curl up with a book and feel private and secret and safe.
Neely had looked at several books and was a page or two into a horse story called Black Beauty when she heard a jingle and Grub stuck a bunch of keys under her nose. Heavy old bronze keys with large oval-shaped heads, each with a decorative border surrounding an engraved number.
“Look, Neely,” he said. “Keys. There’s eleven of them. I found them in that big old desk down there by the windows. Let’s go see if one of them is for the locked room.”
As Neely stared at the keys she felt it again, the sudden deep beat of fear that came from somewhere near the pit of her stomach. She shook her head quickly. “No. No, we couldn’t do that.” But even while she was saying it she could feel another part of her mind beginning to wonder. To wonder if one of the keys would really unlock the door, and if it did...what might be inside. “Grub,” she said. “We can’t do that. We haven’t any right to open that door. And besides, the right key probably isn’t there.”
Grub looked at the keys. “I know. It probably isn’t. But we could try them. You know, as a kind of experiment.”
Neely took
the keys from him. They weren’t like any keys she’d ever seen before. They felt odd in her hand—heavy and brassy. “Well,” she said. “I guess we could just try. But it probably isn’t one of these.”
She was still telling herself that the key to the locked room certainly wouldn’t be right there on the ring with all the others when they got to the door.
“Look,” Grub said. “They match.” He pointed to the keys and then to the bronze plate that surrounded the doorknob and keyhole. The embossed border pattern on the keyplate was the same as on the keys themselves.
“I know.” Neely nodded. “But that doesn’t mean anything. All the doors have keyplates like that. That doesn’t mean one of these keys will open this door. The key to this door is probably locked away somewhere in a safe, or a secret drawer.”
Grub nodded. “Probably in a secret drawer,” he said. “In books they always find keys to mysterious places in secret drawers, don’t they?”
Neely tried the keys in order, the number one first and then the one labeled two. When she got to number eight she stopped to say, “I told you so,” but then the very next key made a rusty clicking sound and turned—all the way around inside the lock. Grub reached out quickly and turned the knob.
The door opened on dark shadows and the smell of dust and mildew. Against dim light that filtered in through heavy drapes, dust hung in the air and swirled in small eddies where it had been stirred by the opening door. Neely coughed and covered her mouth and nose with her hand.
“I’m going to open the drapes,” Grub said. She grabbed his arm to hold him back, but he pulled away and began to make his way toward the windows, around large vague shapes that seemed to loom up in his path. Neely started after him and whacked her shin on something that made a creaking sound and began to move. She reached out quickly to keep it from falling and her hand touched something that felt like coarse hair. She jumped back, squealing with fright, but just at that moment Grub reached the windows and pulled back the drapes.
Blinking in the sudden light, Neely gradually became aware of a large room cluttered with boxes and chests and several pieces of furniture. Small, child-size furniture. And toys! Toys were everywhere, scattered across the floor, piled up in the corners, and crowding the shelves that ran around two sides of the room. Old-fashioned toys, the kind you sometimes saw in the windows of antique stores—old style cars, trucks, and trains, model forts full of toy soldiers, and model farmyards full of wooden horses, cows, and chickens. Against one wall there was a huge three-story doll house, and near the door stood a large rocking horse with a horsehair mane—the strange hairy creature that Neely had stumbled against in the dark.
And everywhere, coating every object and swirling in the disturbed air, there was dust. The thick, heavy, ancient dust of long, lonely years.
Chapter 16
GRUB CAUGHT HIS BREATH in a long drawn out “ohhh,” and then sneezed twice.
“It’s the dust,” Neely said. She poked him. “See, I told you so. It’s just a dusty old nursery. Nothing mysterious at all—and no bones.”
Grub nodded and started gasping. In between gasps he managed to say, “I never said...there’d be...bones,” before he sneezed again and went on sneezing. When he finally stopped he sniffed, wiped his eyes, and gave Neely one of his supergorgeous smiles. “Let’s dust it, Neely,” he said.
“Dust it?” Neely was astonished. It was a thought that for some reason caused a crawling sensation up the back of her neck. To clean a floor where no human foot had stepped for many long lonely years and to dust—she stopped to look around—to dust a toy soldier that no hands had held since...
Her shoulders twitched in a sharp shiver. A shiver that seemed a little bit about fear—but mostly about a bunch of excited questions that were spinning through her mind. Questions about whose hands had last held the toy, and what the owners of the hands would think if they knew that she and Grub were there in their room. And if it were possible that they did know...
She shook her head sharply, and came back to Grub’s suggestion—and to the surprising thought that there really wasn’t any reason why they shouldn’t clean the room a little if they wanted to. It wasn’t as if Reuben might discover what they’d done when he came in to clean, because he obviously never did. Not in this room anyway. It was very obvious that no one had been in this room for many, many years.
What she was careful not to think about was why they should want to clean a room they weren’t going to be in for much longer—and after today not ever again.
“I know where there’s a bunch of cleaning stuff,” Grub said. “In the closet next to that butler’s pantry. There’s a broom and a feather duster and a dustpan and all kinds of stuff.”
Neely looked around the room again, at the enormous dollhouse against the far wall, at the toys piled and crowded together on the shelves—old-fashioned windup toys made of tin—and at the enormous stuffed animals: a bear, a rabbit, a tiger. Then smaller animals made of all sorts of other materials: glass swans and unicorns, china pigs and dogs, and other animals made of everything from plaster to what seemed to be tarnished silver. There were also the soldiers: armies of tiny soldiers in old-fashioned uniforms carrying swords and muskets and flags. And on the top shelf what looked like enough equipment for a small orchestra: drums and horns and tambourines and even a violin and a small-size accordion.
“Okay,” she said. “Come on.” And taking hold of Grub’s arm she headed for the door and the closet next to the butler’s pantry.
They began by opening the windows. Neely would have liked to take down the heavy drapes, but since they had no ladder they settled for brushing them down with the broom. There were lots of spiderwebs and the dust was awful. They both sneezed continuously until Neely thought of making dust masks by pulling the necks of their T-shirts up to just below their eyes like the veils worn by Arabian women.
After the drapes they did the shelves. They dusted the soldiers with the feather duster, shook the stuffed animals out the window, and polished the toy musical instruments. Their progress was slowed by the temptation to stop and play, or at least to explore the possibilities—like how many of the windup toys still worked and what sorts of sounds could be made with the musical instruments. The furniture came next and then the floor, a slow job complicated by a clutter of train tracks, forts, and barnyards.
Much to Neely’s surprise Grub worked fast and efficiently. Not that he was usually opposed to work. He always started any chore Mom gave him to do without much complaining. It was just that he tended to lose track of what he was doing and wander off in a daydream long before the job was finished. But cleaning up the old nursery seemed to hold his attention better than ordinary work. And as he swept and dusted, from behind his T-shirt mask there came the familiar sound of humming.
In fact it was Neely who had a hard time keeping her mind on what she was doing. While Grub hummed and dusted without pausing, she found herself stopping now and then—bent over the broom, or with one hand lifted to dust—not to daydream but to listen and imagine. To listen for the voices and laughter that had once echoed from the faded wallpapered walls, and to imagine the slightest echo of warmth left by the fingers that long ago held the silver elephant that now lay in the palm of her hand.
It wasn’t until she began cleaning the dollhouse that she forgot to watch and listen. She’d saved it till last because it was so wonderful. Unfortunately it was completely empty, but even with no furniture or people it was fascinating—its many rooms were beautifully finished with tiny plaster fireplaces, windows of real glass, painted rugs, and a grand curving stairway leading from floor to floor. She was working on the living room, clearing out the cobwebs and dusting the floor, when Grub called to her.
“Neely.” He sounded excited. “Come here. See what I found.”
When Neely came out from behind the dollhouse she saw that Grub was kneeling in front of a large trunk. She had noticed it before when she’d been sweeping the corner of the r
oom where it sat against the wall. She particularly noticed its large size, the dome-shaped lid of stamped metal reinforced with bent wood slats, and the fact that it seemed to be full of something heavy. She had also checked carefully and found that it was locked. But now the domed lid was wide open.
Chapter 17
AS NEELY STARTED ACROSS the room she said, “Hey, what are you doing? That trunk was locked, Grub.”
Grub’s blue eyes in their frame of fuzzy lashes were wide and innocent. “I know,” he said. “But I just jiggled it a little. See, like this...and it went click and came open.”
“Jiggled it? What do you mean you... Neely began and then fizzled out as she stared down into the trunk. The top level of the trunk was a deep tray and it was full of the most beautiful dollhouse furniture she had ever seen. Tables, chairs, beds, dressers, lamps, and cabinets all carefully and intricately fashioned of shiny dark hardwood. There were upholstered chairs, beds complete with tiny quilts and blankets, and cabinets with doors that really opened and held sets of dishes and silverware. Neely was still opening tiny drawers and cupboards when Grub lifted one end of the tray by its leather handle and peeked under. “There’s a doll down there,” he said. “A big one.”
There was a doll, an old china-headed doll with stiff brown curls, a body of soft leather, and eyes that opened and shut. She was dressed in a blue-and-white plaid dress with a middy blouse collar and her black shoes were shiny patent leather.
The rest of the trunk held other toys. Lots and lots of horses, for one thing. Horses of all shapes and sizes, made of everything from plaster to tarnished silver.
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