Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls

by Claire Legrand

  “You don’t understand,” said Mr. Tibbalt. He put his cap back on and stumbled to his feet. “This way.”

  Victoria grabbed a poker from the hearth and followed him, Gallagher trotting at her heels.

  “What’s that for?” Mr. Tibbalt grumbled, pushing on a door wedged shut with stacks of papers and books.

  “In case you try to hurt me,” said Victoria. “I exercise, you know, so just watch out.”

  Mr. Tibbalt nodded. “That could come in handy, if you’re serious about this.”

  “About what?”

  “Getting them out,” said Mr. Tibbalt. “Parents, police, reporters, they won’t help you. You’ll be on your own. And it probably won’t work. You’ll get stuck too. She’ll have you. And if you get out, you won’t remember enough to tell anyone, and even if you do end up remembering, you won’t want to, and you won’t want to say anything. You’ll be too afraid. Like me. And if you don’t get out, you’ll never, ever leave.”

  Mr. Tibbalt mumbled this as he tried to open the door. Victoria stared at him. His words sounded crazy, but he was the first person to take her seriously and actually talk to her. She relaxed her grip on the poker.

  “It happens all the time, year after year, decade after decade,” Mr. Tibbalt continued, pushing through old sofa cushions and a hat rack. The room had a lot of windows and a large chandelier. Shelves of trinkets covered most of the walls. “She’s been here a long time, and Belleville has always been hungry for perfection. People don’t care about much as long as everything looks as it should, as long as they can show off and feel good about themselves.” Mr. Tibbalt paused and raised a bushy gray eyebrow. “You understand about that, Victoria.”

  Victoria put up her chin and said, “Yes, I do,” refusing to look away.

  “Sometimes, though,” Mr. Tibbalt continued, “she gets overly ambitious. Takes groups of children at a time. That’s when people wake up and start noticing. They can’t help but notice. That’s when things get bad.” He sighed, wiping his brow. “Like when I was a boy.”

  “But where does she come from?” said Victoria. “She just appeared one day and started snatching kids?”

  “As far as I can tell.”

  Victoria almost stamped her foot. “But what does she want them for?”

  “Haven’t you been listening?” said Mr. Tibbalt, his mouth going all twisty like a wrinkly fruit. “She wants to fix them. A place like Belleville doesn’t think well of odd children or ugly children or children who don’t quite do what’s normal. That’s where she comes in.”

  “But . . .” Victoria paused. If she wasn’t careful, Mr. Tibbalt’s mouth might twist around till it disappeared forever. “Why does everyone let her?”

  Mr. Tibbalt’s mouth twitched into a frown. “Sometimes you get what you ask for, and sometimes . . . you get more than that. Much more.”

  Victoria’s mind rebelled against this nonsense, and yet . . . the knot in her stomach wouldn’t go away. “But how does she make her house so much bigger on the inside than on the outside?”

  Mr. Tibbalt froze. “On the inside? How do you know about the inside?”

  “I’ve been there,” Victoria said. “I went there, just to see what I could see. There was something beating on the window in her parlor. And she let me go, but I don’t know why. I thought she might lock me up, but she didn’t. She said she liked me. She said I was like her.”

  “Ha. She would like you, yes.”

  Victoria bristled. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You like things to be just so, no matter what the cost,” said Mr. Tibbalt, pulling out a large photo album from underneath some moldy newspapers. “So does she. So does everyone around here. And as far as how she does what she does, I’d rather not know.” Mr. Tibbalt glanced up at her. “There are magic tricks, like pick-a-card and white rabbits, and then there are other tricks. Nasty ones. I’d guess that’s what Mrs. Cavendish is all about. But I surely don’t want to find out.”

  Deep in her bones, in a place she’d never felt before, Victoria shivered. She quickly changed the subject. “Beatrice said I may be all right, since Mrs. Cavendish likes me.”

  “Or maybe you’re worse off than anyone.”

  “Yes, that’s what Beatrice said.”

  “Poor Beatrice,” said Mr. Tibbalt. “She’s seen it happen before, several times, just like me. But it’s hard for her to see awful things. Not strong enough. She never spoke up, just like I never did. It kept us safe, you see. We were so afraid. We are so afraid. You can’t help being afraid, being a child and seeing your friends get taken away and not really remembering they were your friends at all—till they come back. Different. Changed. Or maybe they don’t come back at all, and you never remember they were there, and you have mad dreams, wondering how many people you’ve known and forgotten.” His voice was bitter. “But staying quiet, it kept us safe. Safe.”

  “Beatrice left,” said Victoria.

  “She’d almost left several times, over the years. But it’s hard to leave a place when you’re tied to it by fear, when it’s broken you with fear, when it’s all you’ve ever known. Even then, though, even then . . . there’s only so much a person can take.” He sighed. “I wasn’t always like I am now, you know.”

  Victoria’s eyes filled with tears as she stared at the floor. “My parents are being weird.”

  Mr. Tibbalt paused.

  “They aren’t acting like themselves,” said Victoria. The tears grew, but she didn’t let them fall. Everything looked like she was inside a bubble. They surprised her, these tears. Till this point, she had been so busy trying to figure things out that she hadn’t had time to worry about her parents. Now the worry struck her right in her belly. “Will they be all right?”

  “Hard to say,” said Mr. Tibbalt. “Come here, look at this.”

  They sat on two wobbly stools, and Mr. Tibbalt opened the photo album and spread it out on his knees. Photographs, newspaper clippings, and sketches lined the pages. Mr. Tibbalt turned them slowly. His fingers, purple and gnarled with the cold, smoothed out wrinkles and cleared away dust.

  “This is from when I was a boy. I lived here with my parents.” Mr. Tibbalt pointed to two waving people with a boy in the middle. “I was sixteen when it happened.”

  “When what happened?” said Victoria.

  “When Vivian disappeared.”

  Mr. Tibbalt turned another page and pointed to a photograph of a young girl. She had wild black curls and a crooked smile. She wore overalls rolled up to the knee and a wide hat, and she held a basket full to the brim with berries. Around her neck sat a cheap-looking heart-shaped locket.

  Mr. Tibbalt pointed to it. “She kept my picture in there, you know.”

  “Who is she?” said Victoria.

  “Vivian Goodfellow,” said Mr. Tibbalt. He wilted a bit in his seat as he stared at the photograph. “She had such a lovely voice. She lived at Eight.”

  “The Bakers live there now.”

  Mr. Tibbalt continued over her softly. “Vivian was always saying things she shouldn’t have, going where she shouldn’t have been, poking her nose into places she shouldn’t have poked. When Teddy Tibbalt disappeared, she was the only one who noticed, the only one who bothered to look for him.”

  In her surprise, Victoria almost stepped on Gallagher’s paw. “Teddy Tibbalt? Was that you?”

  “No. He was my brother.” Mr. Tibbalt turned back to the photograph of the waving people. He pointed to the boy in the middle, and then to another boy Victoria had missed the first time—a smaller boy crouched in the background. “See? There he is. He never liked pictures. All he liked was burning things, and building things in the backyard and breaking them.”

  “Why would you want to build things only to break them?” asked Victoria, wrinkling her nose.

  “That was just Teddy. He wasn’t a bad boy. He was just a strange, angry boy.” Mr. Tibbalt breathed in and out, his throat rattling. “Till he disappeared. And when h
e came back, he wasn’t Teddy. He was someone else, like someone had broken the old Teddy and built a new one.”

  “And your parents didn’t do anything when he was just gone all of a sudden?” Victoria sniffed. “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Do you?” said Mr. Tibbalt, frowning.

  Victoria thought of her missing schoolmates. Her shoulders felt suddenly heavy as she considered the thought that she and crazy old Mr. Tibbalt, who was too frightened and too old to do anything about it, might be the only ones who realized they were gone. “Well . . . no. I guess not. After all, nobody seems to care about”—she took a deep breath—“about Lawrence being gone. I believe you.”

  “Quite so. I can’t even explain to you how it happened, Victoria. One day he was there, and the next he wasn’t, but I didn’t care. Neither did our parents. There was a cold fog over us. The days were blank but peaceful. I went to school, did my homework, went to bed, just like normal.”

  Something crashed outside. Victoria darted over to the window, but it was impossible to tell anything, what with the storm picking up and the wind blowing Mr. Tibbalt’s garbage around.

  Mr. Tibbalt wiped his sweating brow again. “Vivian tried to figure it out. She was the only one to keep her head. I’d always thought she was swell. She was a real beaut, you know. Inside and out. She tried to tell us something was wrong, she came over every day to search the house, all of that. My parents threw her out over and over. She got so angry with me that one afternoon . . .”

  Victoria waited at the window for Mr. Tibbalt to continue. When he didn’t, his hands covering his face, she started feeling extremely uncomfortable. She hated soothing people.

  “There, there,” she said, gritting her teeth and patting his shoulder. “Keep going.”

  “She said she thought I was different, that I could see people’s value. But then she said, ‘You’re just like everyone else, Bernie.’ And she cried, she was so angry. She left. She went to the Home—I saw her march straight through that gate.”

  Mr. Tibbalt raised a finger and pointed through the walls of his house toward Nine Silldie Place.

  “Teddy came back one day,” he whispered. “I remember. I hardly recognized him, but I didn’t say anything. Life went on. But Vivian never came back.”

  “But how did you figure out that it was Mrs. Cavendish?” said Victoria. Talking seemed really impolite, what with Mr. Tibbalt’s tremendous old-man tears pooling at his eyes, but she had to stay focused. Just like at school, Victoria, she reminded herself. Just like at school with all those idiots trying to distract you.

  “I never forgot Vivian,” said Mr. Tibbalt, but he wasn’t speaking to Victoria anymore. He was speaking to himself, or maybe to the photos in his lap. “How could I? But everyone else could. And it kept happening, year after year, and no one noticed. I would have been one of them, I think—happy to let children come and go, happy to ignore the fact that they were coming back different or not coming back at all. But Vivian was always there in the back of my mind, not letting me forget.

  “And one day I went to the Home, just to see. I went inside. I thought I would find some house of horrors. But all I found was an orphanage, a nice lady, happy children playing games. I saw what she wanted me to see.”

  “But it’s not normal like that, it’s awful, it’s much bigger than it looks, and there’s something really creepy about it,” said Victoria.

  “Yes,” Mr. Tibbalt said, wiping his eyes. “Mrs. Cavendish sends me nightmares about it, I think. She knew I wouldn’t let go of my questions—let go of Vivian—unless I thought I was crazy. And I did, and I do. And here I am, caught forever. I know what really happened, and yet . . . and yet it’s so hard to think about it. It’s like there’s something weaving around in there, confusing my memories into knots.” Mr. Tibbalt tapped his temple and waved his arm at the filthy house. “And I won’t ever be able to clean all of this—never.”

  “Well,” said Victoria after several moments during which she seriously questioned her sanity because of what she was about to do, “Mrs. Cavendish doesn’t know everything.”

  “She doesn’t?” Mr. Tibbalt said, stroking Vivian’s picture with one trembling finger.

  “No. For example, she doesn’t know that I’m not afraid of her, that I’m still thinking quite clearly, thank you, and that I won’t let her do this to people.” Victoria set down the fireplace poker and headed toward the front door. “It’s completely illegal.”

  Mr. Tibbalt’s hand stopped her from grabbing the front door latch.

  “You don’t understand, Victoria,” he said. “No one will help you.”

  “But my father’s a very important lawyer—”

  “That doesn’t matter. He won’t help you. Neither of them will.” Mr. Tibbalt’s eyelids lowered a bit, like he was too tired to keep them open much longer. “She goes for the parents, those closest to you. She does things to them, gets them all wrapped up, makes them forget and ignore what’s happening. They can’t help it. And no one else will want to step in and help them. They’ll be too afraid to get involved. They’ll be too afraid it might happen to them next. Just like me.”

  “Professor Alban was helping,” Victoria said, her shoulders squaring with Academy pride. “He was at the library with me. He knew something was wrong, and he wasn’t afraid.”

  “Oh, yes? And where is Professor Alban now?”

  Victoria paused. “He’s . . . gone.”

  Mr. Tibbalt’s eyes narrowed. He nodded in grim triumph. “There you have it.”

  “But why didn’t she take me? And, really, why doesn’t she take you? Why only some people and not others?”

  “She takes whoever is useful to her, and of what use am I to her?” Mr. Tibbalt laughed. “I’m old, I’m frightened, I don’t even step outside my gate. She’s gutted me, this town has gutted me. I’m a shell. I’m not dangerous. You, though . . .” Mr. Tibbalt rubbed his stubbly mouth. “She said you were like her. She said she liked you, which I very much doubt. She doesn’t like many people, I wouldn’t think. But she did say it, and that could be something, couldn’t it? That could be something, indeed.”

  “Something . . . like what?” Victoria frowned. “I’m not like her. I don’t steal people.”

  Mr. Tibbalt watched her, saying nothing.

  The silence made Victoria bristle. “Well, I don’t.”

  “Let me ask you something, Victoria.” Mr. Tibbalt leaned forward. “What scares you the most?”

  “Failure,” Victoria said. She did not even have to think about it. “I’m the best. I’m always the best. I have to be.”

  “And what could keep you from being the best?”

  Victoria paused. “Jill. Jill Hennessey, at the Academy.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because she gets good grades too. She’s smart and studies a lot, and—” A chill raced up Victoria’s arms. “She’s like me. Other people aren’t smart enough, don’t study hard enough, I can beat them, easy, but not Jill. She’s too . . . like me. But I don’t like Jill. I pretend to, but I really don’t. I want her to fail all her classes, I want her to fall on her stupid face, I want her to . . . stay out of my way. . . .”

  “You might say this Jill is dangerous, then,” Mr. Tibbalt said. “She could keep you from accomplishing your goals.”

  Could I be dangerous to Mrs. Cavendish? Victoria thought. “Mrs. Cavendish said she liked me,” she said slowly, “but maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe she’s only pretending?”

  Mr. Tibbalt settled back into his chair and made a hmm sound in his throat.

  “Well, I’m not going to just sit around like you did,” said Victoria, stalking outside. She did not want to think about Jill or if she, Victoria, was like or not like Mrs. Cavendish. It was late; she had wasted enough time here, and Lawrence could be screaming and crawling with bugs somewhere, right this very minute. The thought made her slam the front door open in fury. “I hate when things don’t make sense or get all mix
ed up. I’ll make them make sense.”

  Mr. Tibbalt hobbled after her, using the poker to hobble down the steps. “This isn’t school, Victoria.”

  “Oh, don’t act like you know me.”

  “I suppose I don’t, do I? Not like Lawrence, anyhow, eh?”

  Victoria stopped at the gate.

  “If you know what’s good for him, you’ll just go home and do as you’re told,” said Mr. Tibbalt. Gallagher paced in nervous circles in front of him. “Maybe it’s not too late for Lawrence. Vivian went after Teddy, and he came back wrong, and she was gone forever. Is that what you want?”

  “Well, no offense, Mr. Tibbalt,” said Victoria, opening the gate, “but Vivian wasn’t top of her class, was she?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Thank you for your time,” Victoria said briskly, slamming the gate shut behind her. Once it was closed, the wind wailed and snapped at her skin. It tried to push her down the street, toward the Home, but Victoria put her head down and fought it. Getting through her own gate and up the walk toward her front porch was the hardest of all.

  “Stop it,” Victoria scolded the wind, although she could hardly speak past it. The storm was so cold that Victoria’s skin pricked into painful chills. She kept hearing things in the flower gardens and whirled around, ready to fling her book bag at whatever roaches or gardeners lurked in the shrubberies—but she saw only wet black branches and bright autumn flowers coming apart in the storm.

  “Oh, they’re all going to jail, every last one of them, once Father gets ahold of them,” Victoria growled, tugging at the door latch. It wouldn’t budge. She put in her house key, and it wouldn’t turn. She pounded on the door—

  —and something pounded back.

  Victoria jumped away.

  Bang.

  That one almost knocked Victoria’s teeth loose. She turned and ran, hoping that maybe the back door would be unlocked and she could get in and grab her parents before it was too late.

  Surely Mrs. Cavendish hadn’t gotten them. Surely they wouldn’t be all roachy and weird like Mr. Waxman and Professor Carroll and the Prewitts and—and everyone, except for Mr. Tibbalt, who didn’t have anything left for Mrs. Cavendish to snatch. No, they wouldn’t let anything happen to their daughter.