I saw that yet another box was stacked with dirty cups and dishes. For a fleeting second I was reminded of the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Then I reminded myself that Mrs. Chewbley was a prisoner; the setting was hardly her own choice.
Mrs. Chewbley smiled sadly. “While you were napping in the dining car, Bowl Cut crept up behind me, covered my face with a chloroform-doused cloth,” she leaned forward and lowered her voice ominously, “and dragged me off.”
I’d read up on chloroform for a report to last month’s Neighborhood Block Watch meeting. (Funny—the meetings were getting smaller each month. Good thing I was such a steadfast attendee.) I adjusted my glasses thoughtfully. “Chloroform stinks. I’m surprised the smell didn’t wake me up.”
Mrs. Chewbley reached inside the basket for a deviled egg sandwich. “Maybe you were too tired to wake up.” She took a large chomp.
“But,” I objected—Mother and Madge often complained that “but” was my favorite word—“wouldn’t someone have seen Bowl Cut dragging you off? Beanstalk was in the dining car. Maybe he’s part of this too.” I sighed. “Are there many people on the planet who aren’t?”
“Or maybe Bowl Cut bribed him.” Mrs. Chewbley waved the remaining crescent of egg sandwich at me. “Bowl Cut is ruthless, Dinah.”
I sank down on a carton labeled GARDEN ORNAMENTS: SOLID STONE! LARGER THAN LIFE! since there weren’t any other chairs. “I haven’t even spotted Bowl Cut on this train. Some junior sleuth I am.”
“Oh, no,” Mrs. Chewbley soothed. “You’re a very good sleuth, Dinah—just over your head on this one. Here, let me find you some creamer for your tea.” Whistling, she rummaged in the picnic basket.
I was in full self-pity mode by now. “Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t have snoozed while a material witness was kidnapped,” I mourned. “And, in the best Pantelli Audia tradition, I felt ready to heave when I woke up. Not very suave.”
Woo-hoo, woo-hoo-hoo. Mrs. Chewbley was whistling the cuckoo’s tune now. In her search for the creamers, she was withdrawing more sandwiches, fruit, chocolate creams…Bowl Cut certainly kept his prisoners well fed.
Much as I liked Mrs. Chewbley, found her a food soul mate and all that, I couldn’t help thinking that Mr. Wellman would have been a way better match for Bowl Cut. Though in his late fifties, my agent worked out daily at a gym. Rather than allowing himself to be dragged off, the lean, agile Mr. W. would have landed a few good punches on Bowl Cut’s smug, dinner-plate face.
Mr. Wellman would also have dealt much better with Head Conductor Wiggins than I had. Being loud and tactless, I tended to alienate authority figures. Smooth Mr. Wellman charmed them practically to purring.
If only Mr. Wellman hadn’t got sick!
Still whistling Woo-Hoo in her beautiful pitch, Mrs. Chewbley pulled out a squashed nougat bar in her quest for creamer.
But, I thought regretfully, Mr. Wellman had caught the flu from that would-be client, the one he’d told me about on the phone. Not even a very promising client at that, he’d said. One who whistled.
I gaped at Mrs. Chewbley. A whistler had visited my agent. Had breathed all over his lunch, and he’d promptly got sick, preventing him from making the train trip.
Got sick. I’d heard this refrain before, from Mother, about Mrs. Grimsbottom.
Pantelli’s regular piano teacher got sick, so Mrs.Chewbley, a new neighbor down the street, has taken over his lessons for the summer. She’s very nice, not like that sour old Mrs. Grimsbottom. Mrs. Chewbley has offered to give you lessons too, Dinah. Apparently she has the patience of a saint.
I’d replied, Oh, ha ha ha, Mother. What I was thinking now was, Oh, ho-ho-hold on. Mr. Wellman, Mrs. Grimsbottom. In both cases, they’d got sick—and Mrs. Chewbley had stepped forward, beaming, as a substitute.
Did Mrs. Chewbley have something to do with their getting sick? Rather than breathing on Mr. Wellman’s lunch, she could’ve added something to it when he wasn’t looking. Could’ve just pretended to be sick herself.
Nooo. Far-fetched, Dinah. Not likely.
Well, not very likely.
But suppose she had poisoned them. In that case, Mrs. Chewbley wasn’t quite the sweet old lady she seemed.
In that case, she might be involved with the people trying to get hold of the stamp.
I thought rapidly. Mrs. Chewbley had moved into our neighborhood just before Ardle got out of jail. Did she know he’d head for our house? Was she tracking down the stamp by keeping watch on Ardle—and on us?
“What are you thinking, Dinah?” twinkled Mrs. Chewbley.
“Ummm. About what a nice piano teacher you’ve been to Pantelli and me.”
Too nice, I thought all of a sudden. Would a proper piano teacher praise every single note Pantelli played, when, with no Mrs. Grimsbottom to bully him, he’d been slacking off for the past few weeks? Would a proper piano teacher fail to object when I bashed out my Edna May Oliver exercises so deafeningly?
R-r-rip! Tearing open the creamer packet, Mrs. Chewbley sprinkled the contents into my teacup. “Poor child, you’re pale! This tea will have you right as rain in no time.”
I stared at my reflection in the tea. Then I wasn’t seeing my reflection, but rather Mrs. Chewbley prowling about in our front yard under the horse chestnut trees. Looking for her glasses, she’d explained.
But maybe she’d really been looking for something else.
For horse chestnuts.
Horse chestnuts are way too bitter to eat, unlike sweet chestnuts, Pantelli had said. Toxic and poisonous…The effect all depends on the dose…
He’d also said, Mrs. Chewbley’s cool. Unlike Mrs.Grimsbottom, she doesn’t mind when I rant on about trees.
She didn’t mind—because she was busy listening and learning.
I gulped. All at once I knew that under no circumstances should I drink this tea.
“Drink up, dear,” Mrs. Chewbley said brightly. A little too brightly. Her tiny, currant-like eyes were brilliant, and her cheeks burned with two scarlet points.
The steam from the teacup roiled up to my face. I blinked at it—and my eyelids almost stayed shut. I was exhausted. I wanted, oh how I wanted, to oblige Mrs. Chewbley by knocking the tea back and sleeping for a hundred years. Naw, not a hundred. That’d be a mere catnap. Sleeping Beauty got ripped off. I wanted to sleep for the next millennium.
Mrs. Chewbley pushed the teacup closer to me. “Drink up, Dinah.”
My groggy brain was hatching a plan. A lame plan, but a plan. It was so very lame it just might work.
“Mrs. Chewbley,” I said, “there’s a huge black spider right behind you.”
The piano teacher gave me a broad, knowing smile. “A spider,” she repeated. With a faint shrug, she turned.
I grasped the handles of the two teacups, hers and mine, and pushed the cups around. When she turned back, the tea in both cups was bouncing. Would she notice?
The piano teacher’s smile, now revealing small, rather pointed teeth, was downright unpleasant. It must’ve always been, except that she’d covered it with cute twittering and lots and lots of chocolate creams.
“I take it back. You aren’t really a very smart junior sleuth, Dinah,” Mrs. Chewbley said—and switched the cups. “Yours for mine. Did you honestly think I wouldn’t guess what you were up to with that stupid spider remark? The old drugged-drink switcheroo is stale as last week’s donuts.”
Raising her cup to me, Mrs. Chewbley downed her tea all at once. “Now,” she said, running her tongue over her lips to gather the last drops of the tea, “are you going to drink your tea and fall into a lovely, deep sleep, or do I call my associate?”
“What do you call him?” I joked nervously. I had to play for a bit of time. Just a bit. “Or maybe ‘her,’ if you mean Nurse Ballantyne. The ‘he’ is Bowl Cut, I assume.”
Mrs. Chewbley shoved the still-full teacup at me with a pasty white fist. “Now drink up. I wouldn’t want to have to force it down your throat, would I?” She started to rise.
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“Fine.” And I drank my tea, every last drop.
Chapter Twenty
Dinah Gets into the Vanishing Act
For a minute the only sound in the luggage car was the smooth hum of the Gold-and-Blue speeding along the tracks. Mrs. Chewbley and I eyeballed each other without blinking.
Then, finally, the piano teacher sagged back in her seat. A begrudging grin cracked her plump features. “You never switched the cups. I was wrong about you, Dinah Galloway. You are a smart—no, make that brainiac—junior sleuth. You’ve outwitted me fair and square. I’ve just downed the tea-dissolved sleeping pills I’d intended for you.” She shook her head, and more hairpins cascaded.
I gulped. My impulse was to burst into tears of relief, but that could wait. I had to question Mrs. Chewbley while she was still conscious.
“You made Pantelli’s piano teacher sick,” I accused. “You made Mr. Wellman sick—and you put something into my Coke yesterday in the dining car. No wonder you didn’t want a taste of it when I offered! I thought I felt awfully queasy for just having taken a normal nap. Meanwhile, you calmly walked away to this hiding spot in the luggage car, where you already had,” I gestured to the romance novels, “your reading material to help pass the long solitary hours.”
Mrs. Chewbley shut her eyes. “I had to make you come and look for me, Dinah. Alone, without your oh-so-protective buddies. I thought I’d have to slip out in the dead of night to summon you in secret, but then, much more conveniently, you snooped your way here. And now I must ask you for the king. If I don’t get it from you, my assistant will—and ‘dead of night’ will become more than just an expression. It’ll be your epitaph.”
“But I don’t have—”
Loud, descending-the-scales-type yawn from Mrs. Chewbley. “Gracious, you’ve given us far more trouble about stealing back the king than we thought you would. A loudmouth twelve-year-old,” Mrs. Chewbley marveled and opened an eyelid at me. “I could use a helper like you, Dinah. Ideal to train ’em young.”
With a snore, she tipped forward. I grasped Mrs.
Chewbley’s shoulder and shoved her back into an upright position. “My goal is to sing at Carnegie Hall,” I informed her, “not become the next Artful Dodger.”
I heaved the dregs of both teacups at Mrs. Chewbley. She spluttered awake. “Now, talk,” I ordered. “What do you mean, steal the king back? Was he yours to begin with?”
Mrs. Chewbley giggled. “Sure he was—after I’d stolen him! Never mind from where, though. Thievers, keepers, I like to say. But then one night, just over seven years ago, my son was in a card game with Ardle McBean. The foolish boy ran out of money and offered the king up as an eighty-thousand-dollar bet. Ardle won the king—by cheating.” Mrs. Chewbley tsked disapprovingly.
There was an irony in here somewhere, but I was too tired to pin it down. “Go on,” I urged.
“Then Ardle, wanted by the police for a whole packet of break-ins and thefts, turned himself in and got slapped in jail for seven years. All that time I had to wait for my king—talk about your seven-year itch,” Mrs. Chewbley sighed, and her eyelids began to flutter again. I gave her a not-too-friendly shake.
“Huh? Oh, right. Anyhow,” she resumed, “I visited Ardle in jail, pestering him to tell me where the king was. I said we’d give him eighty grand.” Here Mrs. Chewbley snorted. “The king’s worth way more ’n that now, not that we told Ardle, of course.
“Finally, just before he got out of the slammer, Ardle admitted—spilled the McBeans, you might say—that he’d entrusted the king to your late dad. So I moved into your neighborhood to keep an eye on the Galloway household. I became the sweet, befuddled old lady fond of chocolate. And I listened. It’s amazing what you find out if you listen. Most people don’t have that gift. I found out that Mrs. Grimsbottom taught piano. That among her students was a friend of yours, Pantelli Audia. That your mom thought it’d be good for you to take lessons too, from someone far more patient than sour Mrs. Grimsbottom.
“Whom, yes indeedy, I served horse-chestnut-spiked tea to. She grew violently ill, our Mrs. G.”
Our Mrs. C. lapsed into a nostalgic, if sleepy, smile. “As did your agent, later on.
“Of course, I pretended not to know Ardle, and vice versa. It was part of the deal we were supposed to have. He gave me a start when he showed up at your window—I was afraid he’d tip you off to me! Like I say, you just can’t trust that McBean.
“And then the stupid, soft-hearted man had a change of heart. Said he’d decided to be law-abiding, as he’d promised his late friend Mike Galloway. Ardle intended to retrieve the king from you and return it to its rightful owner! I knew I’d have to get the king from you myself—and silence Ardle before he blabbed to you.” Mrs. Chewbley yawned. “Silence him…faster than a speeding Buick, shall we say?”
“Cut the jokes, Mrs. Chewbley,” I said, unamused. The dissolved sleeping pills had relaxed the piano teacher into a would-be Ben Stiller. “Who is the rightful owner, anyway?”
“As to that,” eyes shut, Mrs. Chewbley lolled around in her chair, “you’ll have to find out yourself, Dinah Galloway.”
With a sleepy shudder, the piano teacher fell face-first into an open box of chocolate creams.
I, however, was cured of any urge to snooze. My first thought: Scram in case Nurse Ballantyne shows up, with her baleful wompf!s and whispers.
Jumping up, I began to investigate the on-end trunk, which Mrs. Chewbley had claimed didn’t open from the inside. Now that I knew she wasn’t a kidnap victim, a prisoner, there was no reason to believe her.
But where was the exit? The trunk definitely didn’t open from the inside. I heaved at it with my shoulder. Ow. Not smart, Dinah. That was my left shoulder, the one Nurse Ballantyne, in her guise as the Whisperer, kept wrenching out of its socket.
Never mind the Whisperer, whatever happened to Bowl Cut?
Deafening snore from Mrs. Chewbley. I guessed that was the only answer I could expect for the moment.
Massaging my shoulder, I leaned against the fabric-covered box to the left of the trunk.
And toppled backward. The box was hollow!
So that’s how Mrs. Chewbley got in and out of her hiding place, I thought, gingerly picking myself up in the passageway. Well, at least now I could go for help.
I was about to propel my increasingly sore body toward the luggage-car door when it slid open to reveal a dark-trench-coated figure with hat pulled low. Even in the throes of poison ivy, Nurse Ballantyne couldn’t resist gliding about menacingly.
I dove back into the box.
“Ma,” Nurse Ballantyne hissed. Whoa. Mrs. Chewbley was Nurse Ballantyne’s mother? This was the most charming mother-offspring match since Mrs. Bates and Norman.
Soft footsteps padded along the passageway. Any second the fabric would be thrust aside, and here she’d find me, stuck with the snoring Mrs. Chewbley.
I had to get out. But how? All those boxes, cartons and trunks loomed around me, hemming me in.
“Ma.”
The footsteps padded ever closer.
Sir Edmund Hillary I was not. As I frantically clawed my way up a stack of Lola’s Lingerie boxes, one broke loose. Pink nightgowns slipped out, unfolding in mid-air to float down on Mrs. Chewbley. Soon her sleeping body was draped from head to toe.
I nearly toppled, but grabbed the edge of a wooden crate in time and heaved myself up. Below, I heard Nurse Ballantyne croak, in best Whisperer fashion, “What are you supposed to be, Ma, a giant strawberry sundae?”
Ah, a rare flash of humor from our poison-ivy-ravaged nurse. Strange—when not in Whisperer guise, Nurse Ballantyne never wisecracked.
Then the nurse erupted into an interesting assortment of whispered swear words—who said sleuthing wasn’t a learning experience?
I also heard vicious slaps. Nurse Ballantyne was trying to rouse her maternal unit.
I crawled from the top of the carton to the top of Hans and Roman’s giant, ebony, magic cof
fin. The top was slashed with painted-on lightning bolts. Nothing subtle about those guys.
Subtle. Now that’s what I had to be. Subtle like a panther, I thought, inching forward in total silence. Hey, I wasn’t doing too bad. Even Talbot, athletic and wiry as he was, couldn’t be quieter than I was being.
With growing confidence, I inched along the top of the magic coffin. I leaned forward, putting my weight on my hands, and pitched headfirst into darkness.
Oh, that sinking feeling.
With a smack! I hit bottom.
But, no—it wasn’t bottom, just a platform of some kind. Splintering noises, and I was falling again.
This time I landed on cushions, which would have been nice, except that the first body part to make contact was my much-damaged left shoulder. I let out a long howl of pain.
“That was helpful,” remarked Pantelli in a laryngitic voice. “By crashing through that upper layer, you’ve gained us some light.”
I raised one eyelid. The other was smushed into a cushion. Pantelli was right. From the very top, light was now dribbling down.
Across from me, Pantelli sat against a magic-coffin wall, calmly tucking back honey-roasted peanuts from a Gold-and-Blue snack bag.
He held out the bag to me. “Whenever Beanstalk, Freckles or some other conductor brings round the snack trays, I help myself to several of these at once,” he explained. “You never know when you might need an extra shot of protein.”
Conductors and snack trays…why did something flicker in my mind just then?
“That was a false bottom you cracked.” Pantelli gestured up at the platform just above, now sporting a jagged-edged hole. He shook his head, marveling. “Always the dramatic entrances with you, Di.”
Painfully I raised myself into a sitting position. I was wondering just how necessary to the rest of my life my left shoulder would be.
Wincing, I filled Pantelli in about finding Mrs. Chewbley— the new, definitely not improved Mrs. Chewbley. And about Nurse Ballantyne, a.k.a. the Whisperer, being close by.
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