Under Copp's Hill

by Katherine Ayres

  Carmela stormed from the kitchen and marched out into the hall. A door slammed, and Innie was sure she saw the kitchen wall shake. She shivered.

  Teresa spoke softly. “They can’t blame you this time, Innie. You haven’t been anywhere near the settlement house since Thursday.” She stopped to take a deep breath. “Could Matela be right? Could it be a ghost? A mazik?” Teresa’s cheeks had gone pale.

  Innie swallowed. “I don’t know, Teresa. But you’re right about one thing. This time, I don’t have anything to do with the trouble. That’s a nice change, isn’t it?”

  All afternoon and during supper, the new thefts nagged at Innie. She wanted to help those ladies find out who was stealing. So after supper she went upstairs again and pushed open the door to her cousins’ room. Carmela was using some more of her precious lamp oil. She’d taken possession of the bed again, filling every inch with books and papers. Teresa sat on a chair in the corner, reading a book from the settlement house.

  As Innie walked in, Carmela looked up and scowled. “Go away, Innie. Can’t you see I’m studying?”

  “But I have an idea.” Innie stepped closer to the bed. “I think I know how somebody might get into the settlement house and steal things.”

  “Stay out of it, Innie. The ladies are taking care of it,” Carmela said. “The last thing we need is you getting in the middle of all this.”

  But I’m already in the middle of it, Innie thought. She opened her mouth to protest, but Carmela cut her off.

  “Look, you. I have to learn the three branches of government tonight if I’m ever gonna be American. So go away.”

  Go away. Like I don’t belong here, not even a little, Innie fumed. Sometimes Carmela made her so mad. “I’m already an American, so there.”

  “Sure, you’re a big shot. Innocenza Maria Moretti. That sounds real American to me. A regular Yankee.” Carmela poked Innie’s arm. “Look at you. Long dark hair, little gold earrings. You’re born here, but you’re still Italian. You’ll always be Italian.”

  Innie’s hands flew to her hair—she couldn’t do much about that. But one thing she could fix. With trembling fingers, she opened the gold hoops at her ears and slipped them out. “There. Not so Italian now.”

  “Innie, don’t,” Teresa said. “Put your earrings back in.”

  “No. Why should I? I want to look American, and American girls don’t wear earrings.” She stuck the gold hoops into her pocket.

  Carmela sighed. “Put them back in, Innie. Your mother, she’s the one who pierced your ears. Wear the earrings for her.”

  “I don’t even remember my mother. And wherever she is, she sure doesn’t care about earrings anymore.” Innie turned and slammed out of the room before Carmela or Teresa could say a word. She ran smack into Zia Rachela.

  “I see Carmela’s temper is still smoking,” her aunt said. She led Innie into the kitchen and nudged her into a chair. “She studies too hard, that one. Don’t let her take it out on you.” She gave Innie’s shoulder a squeeze.

  Innie leaned her elbow on the table and rested her chin in her hand. It felt nice to sit in the warm kitchen with Zia Rachela. “Carmela, she’s always bossing us around. I’m not even her sister and she tells me what to do.”

  Her aunt laughed. “Ah, the oldest daughter. My sister was like that too. But Carmela will relax soon, when the citizen hearing is over.”

  “Is the hearing soon?” Innie had the feeling she should stay miles away from Carmela until it was over.

  “Soon enough. She wants very much to make a citizen. That, even I can understand.” A soft, sad look crossed her face.

  “What do you mean, Zia Rachela?”

  “In Italy, I belonged. Here I am a stranger. If Carmela makes a citizen, then she will belong to America. She will feel right here.”

  “And you don’t?” How can that be? Innie wondered. Zia Rachela is the heart and soul of her family. If she doesn’t belong here, nobody does.

  Zia Rachela shrugged. “Mostly I feel fine. Here in the North End, with Italians all around, I might as well still be living in the village. But sometimes, around the Yankees, I feel so foreign. I wish …”

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing, bambina.” She smoothed Innie’s hair with a gentle hand.

  Zia Rachela made wishes too? Her aunt wanted things she didn’t have? Innie would never have guessed such a thing. Her own biggest wish tonight was that things would go well at the settlement house from now on. That there’d be no more stealing and no more trouble.

  But on Wednesday afternoon as the library club meeting began, Miss Guerrier sat stiff in her chair and looked at the girls without smiling. “I have an unfortunate announcement. Last week a silver teapot and a crate of food were taken from the settlement house. Then some pottery and a shawl disappeared. Now food has been taken from the club kitchen.” Miss Guerrier looked around the room, and her gaze came to rest on Innie.

  Innie tried to breathe, but her lungs felt stiff. She pinched the blue cloth of her dress. Surely the lady knew that Innie had been nowhere near the settlement house for almost a week.

  “Girls, please. We need your cooperation. Because the settlement house is a place for girls, we are quite careful about who is allowed to enter the building. As far as we can determine, we have had no strangers coming and going. That means the person responsible for the missing items may, in fact, be a member of one of the library clubs.”

  A shocked silence followed Miss Guerrier’s words. Innie couldn’t help scanning the faces of the girls closest to her. She felt eyes on her own face as well and knew that every girl in the room was asking herself the same question. Who? Who could it be?

  Miss Guerrier cleared her throat. “One moment, and then we’ll return to Tom Canty and the Prince of Wales. If any of you have information, if you see or hear anything that pertains to the missing items, please speak to Miss Brown or me in private. Thank you.”

  As Miss Guerrier opened the book and began to read aloud, Innie caught sight of Maria and Stella from her class at school. They were staring at her as if they thought she was guilty and they’d love to tattle to Miss Guerrier just as they tattled to the teachers.

  Innie turned her face away from Maria and Stella and tried to concentrate on Miss Guerrier’s voice. Soon the words of the story carried her away to long-ago England.

  At borrowing time, Innie scanned Miss Alcott’s books and selected a new one. No more sneaking extra books, she decided. She was glad she’d brought both of last week’s books to return. She’d finished them both by hiding them between her schoolbooks and reading when the teacher wasn’t looking. Quickly, she slipped Little Men back onto the shelf where it belonged.

  After book borrowing and singing, Miss Guerrier gathered the girls together. “We have some work to do, and I’m hoping you’ll enjoy helping. Follow me, please.”

  Innie let her hand slide along the smooth banister, remembering her ride, as they climbed the long staircase. The string of girls trooped past the third floor, all the way up to the top floor, where the ladies had their apartment. But Miss Guerrier told the girls to keep climbing.

  “Ah, here we are. Step carefully, please.” She opened a skinny door and led the way out onto a flat, sunny wooden terrace that covered the whole roof. A breeze caught Innie’s hair.

  This roof was twice as big as theirs at home, Innie thought. She admired the brick walls built partway up the sides, which made the terrace feel like an outdoor room. She darted forward and checked the views. The settlement house sat at the very top of the hill, so she could see the big buildings of Boston on her right. On her left, the harbor stretched out, with Cambridge and Charlestown beyond. It’s so beautiful, I’d move my bed up here if I lived in such a house, she thought.

  Miss Guerrier was wearing a large apron, and from the pockets she pulled out several brown sacks. “You’ll notice that the Monday and Tuesday girls have been busy,” she began. “They’ve hauled up soil and filled our planting boxes.�
� She pointed toward rows of long, narrow wooden boxes along each side of the roof. “Your job will be the planting. If you’ll arrange yourselves into small groups, I’ll hand out the seeds.”

  Innie, Teresa, and Matela stood close together.

  “Sweet peas for you?” Miss Guerrier asked politely.

  “What is this, please?” Matela asked.

  Miss Guerrier handed her a white envelope. “They’re flowers. You’ll need to plant them there, in the north corner, where we’ve strung up the strings, for they love to climb.” After Miss Guerrier had given out all her seeds, she bustled from group to group with advice.

  “This planting on the roof, it’s a good idea,” Matela said. “I will tell Mama and Papà.”

  Innie smiled. “Nonna grows vegetables in window boxes and on our roof too. She says American tomatoes don’t taste like Italian tomatoes, so she grows her own. Beans, lettuce, lots of vegetables. Flowers too. But I don’t think she has sweet peas.”

  “My family, too, can make a garden in boxes,” Matela said. “Mama will love it. My papa, he buys his eggs from a farmer. We can ask the farmer for dirt.”

  Innie felt a grin break out across her face. “And, Teresa, we can surprise Nonna. We can plant those sweet peas.”

  “I’ll ask Miss Guerrier where to get the seeds,” Teresa volunteered. She brushed off her dirty fingers and hurried across the roof.

  Curious, Innie turned to Matela. “How come you buy eggs from a farmer, instead of from a shop or the market?”

  “My papa, he is the shop for our people. He buys eggs from the farmer and sells to the neighbors. Good eggs, only the freshest. And I help. Every night my brothers and me, we candle the day’s eggs and set them into boxes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Matela raised her fingers as if holding an egg, then brought the pretend egg close and peered at it. “A candle behind the egg, it shines light through. So we see spots. Eggs with spots, we can’t use.”

  “I don’t understand,” Innie said.

  Matela chewed her bottom lip. “Spots … How to explain? Some eggs will grow into chickens, some will not. We Jews eat only the eggs which will not.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “When you crack an egg, do you ever see a blood spot—a little speck of red?”

  Innie nodded. “Nonna scoops it out with a spoon.”

  Matela shook her head. “We can’t do that. To obey Jewish food laws, we must throw away the whole egg. So my brothers and me, we candle the eggs first to make sure they are pure. Even so, the women must look closely when they cook.”

  “What are Jewish food laws?” Innie had never heard of such a thing.

  “Rules. What we may eat and what we may not. You are Christian. Do you not have rules?”

  “I guess.” Innie thought for a moment. “No meat on Fridays. Special strict rules during Lent.”

  “For us, Passover is strict. Not so different, then.”

  Innie shook her head. Worrying about spots in eggs still seemed odd. She wouldn’t say it aloud, but being Jewish seemed about as different from being Catholic as a person could get.

  Teresa returned, holding tight to the envelope that had held the sweet pea seeds. “Miss Guerrier wrote down where to buy the seeds. Do you think Papà will give us the money?”

  “He will if you ask him,” Innie said. “He never says no to you.”

  Matela smiled. “Papas. They’re always soft for their daughters.”

  Innie turned away. Talk like that made her eyes burn. She blinked hard. Maybe Catholic or Jewish wasn’t the big difference after all; maybe it was girls with fathers and girls without.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE MARGARET MUG

  On Thursday, Innie and Teresa waited after school for Matela. Together they climbed Salem Street, trudging through another damp April afternoon.

  “You think that sun’s mad with us?” Matela asked. “Gray everywhere. Makes me grumpy.”

  “You know what makes me grumpy?” Innie said. She ran her fingertips along the cold, rough bricks of a building. “Somebody is causing trouble at the settlement house. It’s not right. We’ve got to do something.”

  “What, scare away the mazik?” Matela knocked on her head with one hand. “I’m thinking and thinking, but I don’t know how.”

  “I’m going to do more than clean today,” Innie said. “I’ll poke into every corner. Miss Brown found the missing food crate down in the basement. We might find something too.”

  “Good idea,” Matela agreed. “The ladies will think we’re the best cleaners.”

  Innie nodded. “But instead we’ll be the best snoopers.”

  “No dark corners for me,” Teresa said. “I’ll snoop in the shop.”

  At the settlement house, the shop shelves had grown more crowded with newly finished pottery. Cleaning took longer than it had the week before, and the girls examined each plate, bowl, and cup on the chance that the missing set might have just been misplaced.

  “Could this be the baby set that’s missing?” Matela asked, holding up a small, cream-colored mug. “It has rabbits like your sister painted.”

  Innie stepped closer and examined the bowl and plate. Little blue rabbits danced along the edges, but the name painted in fancy letters on the dishes was Barbara, not Margaret. “This Barbara, she’s really lucky,” Innie said. “Imagine, somebody having enough money they could buy a fancy dish for a tiny little girl.”

  “Look here,” Teresa said. She opened what looked like a small notebook. “Here’s a list of what’s been sold, right next to the money box. A blue vase. A big green plate. A whole batch of dishes.”

  As Innie swept the floor, she found crates stacked under the tables. She set her broom aside and opened the crates, but they only held old newspapers, probably used for wrapping up dishes that customers wanted to carry home.

  As hard as they looked, the girls could find nothing in the shop that seemed out of place. Downstairs in the basement, they swept up the drying room first. Again they found nothing suspicious.

  In the kiln room, Innie checked the old door in the corner. It looked just as it had the last time—dirty, splintery, and shut tight.

  “Come on, Innie, move that broom. Matela and I are doing all the sweeping,” Teresa complained. “It’s so dirty over here by the kiln. Looks like our kitchen floor after my brothers finish eating.”

  “What do you mean?” Innie joined her cousin beside the kiln and stooped to study the floor. “Stop sweeping for a minute.”

  Matela joined them. “What is it?”

  Innie picked up the dustpan. “Sweep the dirt in here, Teresa. We’ll take it to better light.”

  The three girls crowded under the bare electric bulb, studying the contents of the dustpan. Innie stirred it lightly with one finger, finding pale crumbs and broken walnut shells amid the bits of clay and ordinary dirt. She picked up a crumb and pinched it between her fingers. “This looks like those nice cookies Miss Guerrier gave us,” she said. “And there were walnuts missing from that crate.”

  “How do these things come here?” Matela poked at the walnut shells.

  “That’s easy. The thief was here. He cracked nuts. He carried cookies down from the kitchen and ate them. But who is he?”

  “Yes,” Matela began. “That’s the hard part—who? Do we tell Miss Guerrier what we find here?”

  “Not yet. Let’s sweep some more. See if we find anything else.” Innie swept carefully all around the old door. Matela checked the pottery shelves while Teresa swept the side near the kiln.

  “Find more crumbs or shells?” Innie asked. “I didn’t.”

  “Not me,” Matela said.

  “They just seemed to be here, by the kiln,” Teresa said.

  After putting away the brooms and dustpans, Innie walked once more around the kiln room, peering into every shadowy corner and running her fingers along each shelf. There were no more crumbs or shells, and nothing else out of the ordinary.


  Matela and Teresa walked ahead of her into the shadowy hallway and started up the stairs. Innie put her hand on the railing to follow, then stopped. There’s one place we didn’t check, she thought. Under the stairs.

  She moved alongside the stairway. Above, she could hear the scrape of the girls’ feet as they climbed the steps.

  “Innie?” Matela asked. “You coming?”

  “Go on. I’ll just be a minute,” Innie said. She ducked under the stairway. Cobwebs stuck to her fingers as she felt along the wood that held up the steps. Her foot nudged something. Swallowing hard, she bent and brushed the floor, hoping there were no mice. Her fingers bumped into a wooden block that supported a post. Wood. All she’d kicked was a piece of wood. Above, she heard the door shut with a squeak and a click.

  Innie pulled back her hand and wiped it on her skirt. She squinted, trying to see farther into the shadows. What was that, over there on the floor to the left? She reached out and felt a cool, round shape, something with a handle. Could it be a silver teapot? No, it was only a piece of pottery, a small mug. Part of the missing baby set? I knew I’d find something, she thought, smiling. She felt around for a plate and bowl but found only dust and cobwebs.

  Clutching the mug in one hand, she pounded up the steps two at a time. At the top, she flung open the door and held the mug out. “Teresa, Matela, look what I’ve got!”

  But the face that stared back at Innie didn’t belong to her cousin or her friend. Neither did the voice.

  “Yes. Look what you’ve got.”

  Miss Brown was staring at her with a frown on her face and a pair of blue eyes so icy, they made the raw wind off the harbor feel like a summer breeze.

  Innie took a step backward, but her foot found air. If only those rickety stairs would swallow her up, she thought, but they wouldn’t. So she squared her shoulders and stepped forward toward Miss Brown and a big pile of trouble.

  Minutes later Innie was sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by three angry faces. On one side of her sat Miss Brown, on the other, Miss Guerrier. At the end of the table, Carmela sat so stiff, Innie wasn’t sure her cousin was even breathing. The Margaret mug sat in the middle of the table, blue rabbits dancing on pale, creamy pottery. Innie had never felt less like dancing in her life.