It turned out to be Carmen, the old woman who had been Curtis’s father’s nursemaid, and was now, according to Curtis, the family’s cook and housekeeper. She had seen them, she said, from the kitchen window and had come out to say hello. Carmen was short and sturdy, and gloomy in a cheerful sort of way, as if she thought everything was pretty bad but she was too used to it to let it get her down.
“Guess you’re the Bradford children,” she said to Neely as she led the way into the huge old kitchen. “Curtis said you’d be coming to play today but I didn’t know whether to believe him. You can’t always tell with Curtis. Come on in. Real nice to have company in this lonely old ruin. Terrible old wreck of a place. Not like it used to be, I can tell you.”
That was intriguing—the “used to be.” The thought of talking to someone who knew so much about the way Halcyon used to be fascinated Neely. She had several questions in mind, but to her surprise Grub asked one first—several actually. Stepping in front of Neely he asked, “Why is Lion tied up? Did he do something bad? Can I untie him?”
Carmen put her hands on her hips and stood for a moment staring down at Grub while her grumpy frown gradually got mixed up with a halfway smile. “No,” she said, “he didn’t do anything bad that I know of, but I don’t think you’d better untie him. He’s just tied up because Curtis and his father are afraid of dogs.”
She studied Grub’s face for a moment more before she said, “He’s only tied up during the daytime, dearie. Mr. Hutchinson lets Reuben turn him loose as soon as it gets dark.”
“But—” Grub was beginning when Curtis suddenly appeared in the kitchen door.
“Hi,” he said, “you’re late. Come on. Let’s go upstairs.”
As they were leaving the room Carmen called after them, “Don’t forget to introduce your friends to your mother, Curtis. You promised you would. She’s in the game room.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. He changed directions and headed for the front of the house. In the entry hall he stopped and said, “Wait till you meet my mom. She’s really something.”
“Something?” Neely asked.
“Yeah. Like glamorous and beautiful. And young. Like, she looks a hell of a lot younger than your mom, for instance.”
“Well, she probably is younger,” Neely said. “My parents had another family that were almost grown up before they got around to Grub and me.” She started to explain about Aaron and Julie and Lucie, but Curtis didn’t seem interested. Instead he just went on about his mother.
“She was working in Hollywood when she met my dad,” he said. “She was thinking about being in the movies. She could have been if she’d wanted to. She was about to get discovered when she met my dad.”
When they got to the game room Curtis’s mother was sitting at one of the card tables smoking a cigarette and playing solitaire. She was wearing a purple velvet robe with silver embroidery, her hair was so blond it was almost white and she had on a lot of makeup. She looked young all right, and glamorous maybe, but not exactly what Neely would call beautiful.
“Well, would you look at this,” she said when she looked up from her cards and saw them. “Here you are, just like Curtis said you’d be. The new little girlfriend and her brother. Come over here and let me look at you.”
The way she rolled her eyes and smiled when she said “girlfriend” made it obvious she was making a big mushy deal out of it. Which was pretty ridiculous, but it didn’t bother Neely all that much. She’d met adults before who thought it was pretty funny to make comments like that about kids.
When kids made unfunny jokes Neely tended to handle it with a very long, very cool stare, but with adults she usually pretended she hadn’t heard. That’s what she did this time. Going over to the card table, she put out her hand. “Good morning, Mrs. Hutchinson,” she said. “I’m glad to meet you. My name is Cornelia Bradford and this is my brother, Gregory.”
“My, how poised and polite,” Mrs. Hutchinson said. “Curtis, you could certainly take lessons from this young lady. And, oh my. Look at this.”
Curtis’s mother was staring at Grub. Neely had a sinking feeling she knew what was going to happen—Mrs. Hutchinson was about to start making a fuss over how gorgeous Grub was.
“Oh my,” Mrs. Hutchinson said again. “What a handsome child. What a heartbreaker. My dear,” she said to Neely, “have your parents looked into getting an agent for this child? They should, you know. He is simply outrageous.”
Neely knew Grub was hating it. His eyes said so.
“Mrs. Hutchinson,” she said firmly. “Please don’t fuss over Grub. He doesn’t like it.” She turned to Curtis to say something like “Let’s go”—and wound up not saying anything. Something in his face made her forget what she’d meant to say. It wasn’t till later, when she’d had time to think, that she figured it out. Actually it wasn’t too hard to understand why homely old Curtis had been looking so angry.
Chapter 26
NEELY WAS CURIOUS. ON THE WAY UPSTAIRS SHE GLANCED at Curtis once or twice. His eyes were squinted and his lower lip was jutting out. When Neely said, “Your mom is pretty glamorous all right,” he only shrugged and made a snorting noise.
A minute later he said, “She thinks she is anyway.” He was breathing deeply. “The Hutchinsons don’t think so though. They think she’s cheap. That’s what my cousins say. They say nobody wanted my dad to marry her.”
Neely didn’t answer. She didn’t know what to say—and besides, they turned the corner just about then and there was Curtis’s father coming through a door at the end of the hall. He was dressed this time in a shirt and khaki pants but the same ratty old bathrobe was still draped around his shoulders. When Neely started toward him to say hello, he turned and went back through the same door.
Neely looked at Curtis questioningly but he only shrugged and said, “He doesn’t like to talk to people when he’s working on his book. Writers are that way.”
“Oh yeah, I guess so,” Neely said. “My dad knows some writers. Some of them are pretty strange at times. What is your dad’s book going to be about?”
“Survival, mostly,” Curtis said. “It’s mostly about survival. You know. About how to go build a fortress in the mountains and protect yourself when a war comes or a revolution. My dad’s always been real interested in survival.”
Neely might have asked some more questions about the survival book, but they’d reached the nursery by then and there were other things to think about.
While Curtis was unlocking the door she hung back—bracing herself for how bad things might be inside. As Grub ran into the room eagerly, practically vibrating with excitement, she followed slowly—and almost froze in amazement. It looked exactly the same. Nothing had been changed in any way. The circus and battleground were just as Grub had left them, and the toy soldier who had been chosen for the role of kidnapper still lay in front of the window of the dollhouse right where Grub had dropped it.
“Hasn’t anybody been here?” she finally managed to ask. “Since we were here, I mean?”
Curtis looked uncomfortable—and then tried to cover it with his phony supercool act. “Naw. I just didn’t feel like it. I had too much else to do.”
“You haven’t been back here at all...since Saturday?” Neely asked.
“Sure I have. I came in and got the key—and your lunches, didn’t I?” Curtis said.
“And you locked it back up. Why did you lock it back up?”
“Carmen told me to. And besides, why should I want to come in here? I don’t play with this kind of kid stuff.”
So Neely’s worries about what Curtis had been doing in the nursery had apparently been unnecessary because Curtis “didn’t play with kid stuff.” At least that’s what he said. But when Neely suggested that maybe he’d like to go somewhere else to play he quickly said no. And before very long he seemed to be having a great time making the toy soldiers have an extremely bloody battle. Grub played with him for a while and then went back to the circus game and,
Neely noticed, to his invisible playmate. And while Grub played and whispered, Curtis went on mowing down whole regiments of soldiers.
Neely had been fooling around with the dollhouse—making up stuff about the kidnapping in between thinking about other things—when suddenly she realized what had happened. Or what hadn’t happened—and why. Curtis had simply been afraid. He’d been afraid to be alone in the nursery. She was pretty sure she was right, but she decided to check it out.
Neely put the mother doll back on the bed where she’d been weeping for her kidnapped child, took pity on her and produced her baby from where he’d been hidden by the kidnappers and put him back in his mother’s arms, then got up and went over to the battlefield and sat down beside Curtis.
When Curtis looked up from firing off a line of cannons she said, “Did you get a chance to talk to Carmen about Monica?”
Curtis’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Yeah,” he said. “I talked to her. Why?”
“I don’t know. Just curious, I guess. What did she say?”
Curtis looked at Neely through narrowed eyes. But then his desire to be the one who knew something important obviously got the better of his suspicious nature. Putting down a cannon, he turned around, grinning in a strange, almost gloating way. “Well,” he said, “at first she said it had all happened a long time before she was ever here and it was all just talk, but then”—he paused for dramatic effect—“then she said that nobody knew for sure...but the Monica kid was probably murdered.”
Neely gasped. She’d been wanting something mysterious and exciting, but not something as bad as that. It was too unbelievably awful. She was still staring at Curtis in speechless surprise when she became vaguely aware that Grub was standing behind her. “Murdered?” she finally managed to ask. “How? Who murdered her?”
Curtis looked up at Grub and then at Neely, obviously pleased at the effect his story was having. “Well, see,” he said, settling into the telling, “this old woman told Carmen that all the servants were told Monica died of some kind of disease, but it had really been, like, an accident. What really happened was that she’d fallen out of a window. And, she also said that some of the servants thought it hadn’t just been an accident...like maybe she was pushed, or something.”
For a long moment Neely was silent, her mind racing. She heard Grub whisper something under his breath, but before she could ask him what he’d said, Curtis went on, “Carmen said this one old servant who’d been Monica’s nanny said that some of the other kids had pushed her because they hated her.”
“Hated her?” Neely asked. “Why would they hate her?”
Curtis shrugged. “I don’t know. Carmen says that Monica’s nanny said it was because the grown-ups liked her best. Especially their grandfather who had all the money liked her best, so she always got all the best stuff.” He grinned and shrugged. “But maybe it was just because she was a dirty little snitch. I have a cousin who’s like that.” He laughed noisily. “I might push her out a window if I got a chance.”
Neely gave him a cold stare and after a moment he clutched his elbows and grinned sheepishly. “Just joking,” he said.
On the way home that day Neely kept thinking about what Carmen had told Curtis. Grub must have been thinking, too, because he was very quiet. They were almost to the gate when she remembered that she’d wanted to ask him what he’d whispered while Curtis was talking.
“Grub,” she said. “What did you say when Curtis said Monica fell out a window?”
“I said, ‘that window,’” Grub said. “I said, ‘maybe out that big window.’”
Neely thought she knew what window Grub meant. All the rest of the way home she kept picturing the big window behind the bandstand in the ballroom and wondering how it happened. Wondering if the two iron bars that protected the lower half of the window had been there when Monica fell or if they’d been put there afterward when it was too late. Too late at least for Monica. Because it didn’t really seem possible that anyone could fall clear over the bars—unless they were pushed pretty hard.
She wanted to ask Grub what he thought, but he didn’t seem to want to talk about it anymore. Several times when she asked him something he just shook his head, but finally when she asked, “Do you think someone pushed Monica?” he nodded slowly and said, “Someone. Someone pushed her.”
Neely stopped walking and grabbed Grub’s arms and shook him. “Who?” she demanded. “Who pushed her?”
Grub turned his face away. “I don’t know,” he said.
Neely shook him harder. “Then how do you know she was pushed?” she said.
But Grub didn’t answer. He pulled away and ran down the hill toward home.
Chapter 27
JUST A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER THE PHONE RANG EARLY IN the morning and it was Curtis. “Hey,” he said, “our phones are working. You want my number?” And after Neely said “Sure” and wrote it down, he went on, “Hey, why don’t you come up for a while today?”
“Well... Neely hesitated. She had been thinking about going into town with Dad to spend the day with Mimi. But when she said so, Curtis said, “Well, how about tomorrow then? Or the day after? Or this Friday?”
The problem was that Neely still wasn’t sure whether she wanted to keep going back to Halcyon House. Or to be more specific, she was sure and she wasn’t.
She wanted to go back, on the one hand, because Halcyon was still an intriguing place, even though the arrival of Curtis and his family had spoiled it in some ways. There was still, after all, the unsolved mystery of Monica and the possibility that there were more fascinating facts to be discovered about her. And she really wanted to find out more about the murder thing, from Carmen or maybe even from Curtis.
And then, too, there were probably many other interesting things to find out about other star-crossed Hutchinsons, as well. She was really intrigued by the thought of all those other old Hutchinson mysteries that might yet be uncovered.
And, she had to admit, she was curious about Curtis and his family too. She’d never known a person like Curtis who flip-flopped from one kind of personality to another in such an unpredictable way. Or anyone whose father didn’t have to work except maybe to spend his time writing a book about survival. (Neely wasn’t sure she believed that story any more than she believed the bank manager one.) Or whose mother sat around all day in a velvet robe playing solitaire. There were, she decided, a few mysteries about the present-day Hutchinsons to be solved as well. And mysteries, particularly tragic ones, had always been hard for Neely to resist.
She also was tempted to say yes because Grub wanted to go back to Halcyon so much. And at the moment, the moment being August, with the beginning of school coming nearer and nearer, Grub really needed something to take his mind off his worries.
Grub had always hated for school to start and this year he hated it more than usual. Most people, and especially Mom, couldn’t understand it because, unlike most kids who hate school, Grub was a very good student. Neely, herself, couldn’t understand it entirely.
When she asked him about it once he said something like, “I don’t know. I guess I just don’t know how to do it right.”
“Do what right?” Neely had asked. “You’re great at school. You’re fantastic at reading, and you know more history and geography than most high school kids, and you’re even pretty good at math. What do you mean you don’t know how to do it?”
Grub sighed and turned away. But a moment later he said, “It’s everything else I’m not good at. Like doing things the right way.”
“What things? What kinds of things don’t you do right?”
“Everything,” Grub said. “Everything...like saying funny things and laughing real loud.” And after he’d thought some more he added, “And yelling and pushing.”
She understood part of that, particularly the part about yelling and pushing. Watching a bunch of second-grade boys at recess, you couldn’t help but understand how important it was to be able to yell and push, not to
mention slug and kick. Grub had just never learned how to do that kind of thing, and he probably never would.
It wasn’t that the other kids were mean to Grub. At least, not as mean as they usually were to people who were different. She didn’t know why for sure except that, even though he was different, there wasn’t anything about Grub that really invited meanness—he wasn’t pushy, or hard to get along with, or ugly. And another reason no one was ever very mean to Grub was because they knew that if they were, they’d have Neely to deal with. And perhaps that explained why Grub was even more depressed than usual about school starting this time. Because this year, for the first time, he and Neely would be going to different schools.
But whatever the reason, Grub was right on the edge of a serious case of gloom and doom, and Neely knew that having a visit to Halcyon to look forward to would help.
So there were some good reasons to say yes to Curtis’s invitation. Some good solid reasons. And the arguments on the other side were much less solid. In fact there was nothing much Neely could put her finger on—just a vague, uneasy feeling that something wasn’t right.
But after Curtis changed the date three or four times—“Well, how about tomorrow then? Or the day after? Or this Friday?”—she finally found herself saying yes.
“Sure,” she said. “Friday’s okay. I’m not doing anything on Friday.”
After she hung up she went to find Grub and tell him, and when she did he went from gloomy to cheerful in half a minute. It wasn’t until she was back in her room that she realized that Curtis hadn’t said anything about Grub being invited too.
“Not that it matters,” she told herself. “He probably just forgot to mention Grub.” She threw herself down on her bed and opened her book to where she’d been reading when the phone rang.
“Yeah,” she said. “He just took it for granted that I’d know that Grub was invited too. That’s probably it. That better be it, Mr. Curtis Hutchinson.”
Chapter 28
The Trespassers Page 9
