Among the Barons sc-4

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  CHAPTER 18

  The chauffeur saved him. He came in just then carrying the luggage, and Luke simply followed him. Up the stairs, down a long, stately hail. Up more stairs, just a half flight, into an entirely different wing of the house. Finally, when Luke was sure he’d walked more than a mile, the chauffeur deposited Luke’s luggage and Smits’s luggage in adjoining rooms.

  Luke hesitated in the doorway of what must have been Lee’s room. He looked back at Smits and Oscar, who were still lingering in the hall.

  “Just leave me alone!” Smits snarled. “I’m home now! I’m safe! Okay?”

  “You think there is not danger here?” Oscar replied. “You think I believe that you are not dangerous here?”

  Luke slipped into Lee’s room, hoping the other two hadn’t noticed him listening. And then, staring, he forgot everything else.

  The whole rest of the house was luxurious and elegant beyond belief But Lee’s room was the first place that looked fun. At one end of the room four couches were clustered around a large-screen TV An entire video arcade lurked in a nearby alcove. Another alcove looked like a sporting goods store: Skis, golf clubs, hockey sticks, tennis rackets, and entire barrels of footballs, baseballs, and basketballs were arranged artfully in every corner. A third alcove held a set of drums and three guitars.

  “You play?” the chauffeur asked. Luke had totally forgotten about him. But he was staring longingly at the guitars.

  “Some,” Luke lied, figuring that the real Lee must have. He hoped the chauffeur wouldn’t ask for a demonstration.

  But the chauffeur only nodded and bowed, and walked out.

  Luke wandered around the room for a while, feeling lost. He looked into drawers of neatly folded clothes. He pulled out a pair of pants and held them up against his own waist. The pant legs ended about the same place as the pants he was actually wearing, but he wasn’t sure what that proved. Had the real Lee been about the same height as Luke, or had the Grants secretly found out what size clothes Luke wore, and stocked the room accordingly?

  Luke was really looking for something personal — some proof that a real boy had lived here. Initials carved in the bed frame, maybe, or an old drawing of an airplane that Mrs. Grant (or the nanny?) had deemed too special to be thrown out. Luke would even have settled for some signs of wear on the basketballs. But everything looked new and unused. If this had truly been the real Lee’s room, he’d passed through this place without leaving behind so much as a smudge on the wall.

  Or all signs of his presence had been erased.

  Luke shivered at that thought Suddenly spooked, he went next door to Smits’s room, which was every bit as expansive as Lee’s.

  Smits was sprawled across the bed, staring up at the ceiling. Oscar was nowhere in sight.

  “Smits, can you tell me…” Luke began.

  Smits shook his head and put his finger over his lips. He pointed over to an open door, where Luke could see a figure in a black dress bent over a porcelain sink. A maid was cleaning the bathroom.

  “Oh, yeah, it’s great to be home,” Smits said. “Home, where even the walls have ears.~~

  “I just wondered if you wanted to go down with me and get a snack,” Luke finished lamely.

  The maid came out of the bathroom.

  “Now, don’t you boys be ruining your appetites,” she scolded. “The cooks have been working all day on a fancy welcome — home dinner for you.”

  Nothing could have ruined Luke’s appetite. Breakfast back at Hendricks School had been heartier than usual, but that had been hours ago. Still, if Smits didn’t go with him, he wasn’t sure he could find the kitchen. And without Smits he wouldn’t have the nerve to rummage through it, looking for food.

  “I’m not hungry anyway,” Smits said.

  Luke’s stomach growled. He tried to ignore it. “Want to go outside and play, then? Shoot some hoops or something?”

  “Nah,” Smits said. “Outside the trees have ears.”

  There were gardeners, Luke guessed. He supposed that Smits was trying to warn him. He supposed that he ought to be grateful.

  But what Luke really wanted to do was punch Smits right smack in the nose. It was almost as bad as if Smits really were his brother.

  CHAPTER 19

  The rest of the day felt interminable. Luke wandered aimlessly around the house and grounds for several hours. He didn’t encounter either of Smits’s parents again, but there seemed to be a servant around every corner. And they all seemed to know everything about him — or, at least, about the person he was supposed to be.

  “Have you brought up those grades in mathematics, Master Lee?” a man Luke guessed was a butler asked him in the front hallway.

  “I tuned up the engine on your motor scooter, sir,” a mechanic in a grease-covered uniform told him out beside the garage, which looked large enough to hold a boat — and probably did, come to think of it.

  As the grandfather clock by the front door chimed seven, a housekeeper scolded him, “There you are! Why aren’t you washed up and dressed for dinner?”

  “I…,“ Luke protested. He scrambled toward what he thought was the dining room. He remembered seeing a vast wooden table in one of these rooms — now, where was it?

  Mostly by luck Luke arrived in the proper room. Mr. and Mrs. Grant were seated at opposite ends of the huge table. Two chairs were arranged between them. Smits sat in one of those chairs. Luke dashed toward the other one.

  ‘And where is your tuxedo, young man?” Mrs. Grant asked.

  “Um…,” Luke said. He noticed that both Smits and Mr. Grant were in formal black suits, with pure white shirts underneath and black bows tied crisply around their necks.

  “We didn’t dress for dinner at school,” Smits volunteered. “Lee probably forgot all about it.”

  “Indeed,” Mrs. Grant sniffed. “Well, we shan’t have you forgetting here. Go and change this instant”.

  Luke considered himself quite fortunate to be able to find his way back to his room, find a suit — a tuxedo? — in his closet, and scramble into it. He was flimbling with the tie, wondering how angry the Grants would be if he just forgot about it — versus how angry they’d be if he kept them waiting any longer — when Oscar silently stepped into the room and adeptly twisted the tie into shape. He straightened the sleeves of Luke’s coat, shoved a stray lock of hair off Luke’s forehead, and pushed him out the door without saying a single word.

  Back in the dining room Mrs. Grant purred, “Now, that’s better. That’s the son I like to see.” Then she, Mr.

  Grant, and Smits began spooning up soup that had gone cold. The dinner passed in a blur. Luke ate heartily of the soup, thinking it was a shame that that was all there was. So he was pleasantly surprised when a plateful of greens arrived next. But the courses that came after that were foods he had no hope of identifying. Once, he suspected he was eating white lumps of rice under some type of gravy But Luke was pretty certain that the gravy wasn’t made from pork fat, which was the only kind he’d ever eaten before.

  He supposed the food was good — delicious, even — but it was hard to enjoy it sitting with a sullen Smits and Smits’s icy parents. And an army of servants constantly came in and out, whisking dishes away as soon as any of them were finished. By the ninth course Luke was aware of a strange sensation in his stomach: He was too full.

  “Psst, Lee,” Smits finally whispered from across the table. “You don’t have to eat it all.”

  Luke noticed that the others were barely touching their food, letting the servants take away plates missing only a bite or two.

  “Oh,” Luke said. He wondered what happened to the extra food. Did the servants eat it? Was it thrown away?

  No one would be able to tell from the Grants’ dining habits that there’d been famines and starvation barely fifteen years earlier, that food was still rationed across the land. Luke had a feeling that the Grants hadn’t paid any attention to the famines at all.

  Except for Smits’s qui
ck whisper, there was no chatter at the table, no questions from the parents, like, “How’s school going?” or “When do you suppose they’ll have the wiring fixed at Hendricks?” For all the notice Mr. and Mrs. Grant gave Smits and Luke, you’d almost have thought the boys were still away at school.

  The Grants didn’t even speak to the servants who brought and removed the food. For all the notice they gave to the servants, Luke wondered if they thought that the food appeared and disappeared by magic.

  Finally, finally, the servants brought ice cream, which Luke was sure had to be the last course. In spite of his now aching stomach, he ate all of his ice cream, down to the last drop. Ice cream had been such a treat back home. He’d had it only once or twice in his life.

  “Lee,” Mrs. Grant hissed. “Gentlemen do not gobble.”

  Red faced, Luke dropped his spoon. It clattered on the floor, spinning off threads of melted ice cream across the polished marble.

  “May I be excused?” Smits asked in the silence that followed.

  Mrs. Grant nodded.

  Luke watched a servant swoop out of nowhere, grab up the spoon, and wipe away the ice cream in a flash. He gathered his nerve to speak.

  “May I be excused, too?” he asked.

  “I suppose,” Mrs. Grant said.

  Heavyhearted, Luke found his way back to Lee’s room.

  He threw himself across the bed, fighting waves of nausea. He’d hated Hendricks School at first, too, but the Grants’ house seemed much, much worse. And yet Smits had seemed to be trying to help him. And Oscar had appeared at just the right moment to help him with that tie.

  Why? Why did either of them care what happened to Luke?

  CHAPTER 20

  Luke was sound asleep, and had been for hours, when someone began shaking his shoulder.

  “Lee. Get up,” a voice whispered.

  Luke opened his eyes to complete darkness. It was the middle of the night, he thought. He’d fallen asleep without changing his clothes, so the knot of the bow tie dug uncomfortably into his neck. He’d been dreaming, he realized, about nooses.

  "Wha who are you?” he said, fighting a sense of total disorientation.

  “Shh!” A hand clapped instantly over Luke’s mouth. He’d accidentally spoken out loud. “Don’t make another noise. So help me, I’ll…” A tiny penlight switched on in the darkness. “I’m your… father. See?”

  Mr. Grant held the tiny light below his chin, illuminating his face. But the effect was ghoulish, creating eerie shadows around his eyes. Luke felt like he was looking into a Halloween mask.

  “Now, come with me,” Mr. Grant whispered.

  Timidly Luke slipped first one foot, then the other, out of bed. He had a flash of memory — this was like all those nights he’d been awakened by Oscar, summoned by Smits. And he’d always gone. What if he’d disobeyed? What if, just once, he’d stamped his foot and announced, “You know what? I’m not Lee, and I’m not going to pretend anymore. Leave me alone. Let me go back to sleep.”

  But he couldn’t have done that any of the other times, and he couldn’t do it now.

  Silently, fighting a rising sense of dread, Luke walked alongside Mr. Grant. They went out of his room, down the hall, down the stairs. Luke might have suspected Mr. Grant of purposely leading him in circles, trying to confuse him. But the house was so much like a maze, even in bright daylight, that Luke figured Mr. Grant was truly taking the most direct route to wherever he was going.

  Finally Mr. Grant stood before a closed door on the first level. Luke wasn’t entirely sure, but he thought that he’d attempted to open this door earlier in the day, when he’d been exploring. The door had been locked then. But now Mr. Grant looked around cautiously, opened the door effortlessly, and motioned Luke inside. A few seconds later Mr. Grant stepped in behind him and shut the door.

  “Have you activated the system?” a woman's voice asked in the darkness.

  “Three, two, one… all set,” Mr. Grant said.

  Lights came on then. They were standing in an office. A massive mahogany desk stood in the center of the room, and bookshelves lined the walls. Mrs. Grant was sitting in a stiff chair in front of the desk, but she quickly stood up and walked toward Luke and Mr. Grant.

  “Finally,” she said.

  Luke tensed, afraid that she was going to hug him again. But she only took him by the shoulders, held him at arm’s length, and squinted thoughtfully at him.

  “Braces, of course,” she said. ‘And perhaps some hair dye…”

  “Maybe contacts,” Mr. Grant said.

  “Do you think anyone would really notice his eyes? They’re not that different,” Mrs. Grant said. “Having him fitted for contacts, that’d be another person we’d have to pay off—”

  “Of course. You’re right,” Mr. Grant said.

  Luke felt like he was an object they were considering buying. Neither of them had looked him square in the eye yet or addressed him directly. Didn’t they think he would have any say in the matters of braces, hair dye, or contacts?

  No. Of course not.

  Finally Mrs. Grant stepped back and said, ‘Well, I think it will work. I think we ought to try it.”

  “Nothing to lose, eh?” Mr. Grant said.

  Luke struggled to find his voice. “What do you want from me?” he demanded.

  Mrs. Grant looked back at him, very solemnly, and announced, “We want you to die.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Luke jerked back and made a panicky grab for the door. But the doorknob had vanished somehow.

  “Oh, very nice, Sarinia,” Mr. Grant said. “Now you’ve terrified him. She doesn’t mean for real,” he told Luke. “We just want to stage your death so — well, it’s a long story”

  “Tell me,” Luke said through gritted teeth.

  Mr. Grant frowned at Mrs. Grant.

  “This isn’t the way to get started,” he said. “You’ll have to forgive us. We’re still a Little… grief stricken. It’s been very hard for us today, dealing with another boy pretending to be…..

  Luke looked around frantically. It was the middle of the night, and for once there were no servants in sight Still, his heart began pounding with fear at the thought that someone might have heard Mr. Grant say that Luke wasn’t Lee.

  “It’s all right,” Mr. Grant said soothingly “This is a soundproof, secure room. We can speak openly here.”

  “Have a seat,” Mrs. Grant offered, turning a chair toward Luke. “We’ll explain.”

  Luke was thinking that a soundproof, secure room would be a great place to kill someone. But what could he do? He sat down.

  Mr. and Mrs. Grant sat down, too, in chairs opposite his. Mrs. Grant leaned forward.

  “Our son Lee was a wonderful boy” she began in a sad voice. “Everything a parent could want. He was good at sports, musically gifted, a top student.. “ She paused to dab at her eyes. “But he was a bit, urn, idealistic.”

  “He was a troublemaker,” Mr. Grant said harshly. “Stubborn as a rock. From the day he was born, he thought he could run the world.”

  Luke tried to make those two descriptions fit together. So Lee had been a peffect, gifted, stubborn troublemaker.

  “Like father, like son. Right, dear?” Mrs. Grant purred.

  ‘Aah.. “ Mr. Grant waved her question away “When he died, he was, urn, breaking the law ever so slightly” Mr. Grant continued. “He was — well, there’s no need for you to know the whole story. But suffice it to say that it would have been a bit difficult for us to explain the circumstances of his death.”

  If Luke had only been a little braver, he might have asked, “Did the Government really kill him?” But Mrs. Grant had already taken over the conversation.

  ‘And when he died, as you can imagine, we were distraught,” Mrs. Grant added. “Simply overcome.”

  She sniffed daintily and Let Mr. Grant continue the explanation.

  “So when our friend George Talbot approached us with a possible solution, a way to
make it Look as though Lee hadn’t died — and, by the way to help you — we surely couldn’t be faulted for taking advantage of that opportunity Could we?” Mr. Grant asked.

  He sounded as though he truly expected Luke to answer. Like he wanted to know what Luke thought

  “Urn, no,” Luke said. “And believe me, I was happy to…” It didn’t seem right to say he was happy when they were talking about their son dying. “I mean, I’m very grateful that you made the decision you did.”

  “Right. And you’ve had, what — five, six months now of using Lee’s name?” Mr. Grant asked.

  “Five months, three weeks, and two days,” Mrs. Grant said faintly.

  Luke could only nod. Lee’s mother knew exactly how long it had been since Lee died. Somehow that made Lee seem real, as much as if Luke had found pictures Lee had drawn, letters he had written, initials he had carved in his room.

  Luke had liked it better before, when Lee Grant was only a name to him, a name he could hate if he wanted to.

  “So here’s the thing,” Mr. Grant said, ignoring his wife. “We’ve given you these past several months of freedom. So we’re just asking a small favor in return. Smits — our other son, Smits — has had quite a few problems accepting his brother’s death. We asked him to keep the news secret, but—”

  “Maybe it was too much to expect. Maybe it was too much to expect of anyone,” Mrs. Grant said, aLmost to herself.

  Luke could tell which one of them had decided to hide Lee’s death.

  “We hired a bodyguard for him,” Mr. Grant continued. ‘We let him go meet you. We thought that might help somehow. But he’s only getting worse.”

  Luke wondered how the Grants could know that. Had Oscar told them about Smits setting the fire? Had Smits confided in his parents?

  Luke couldn’t imagine Smits telling Mr. and Mrs. Grant anything personal at all.

  “So we came up with an alternate plan,” Mr. Grant said. “We thought we’d have some parties, show you off very publicly as Lee, and then—”