Jewel of the East

by Ann Hood

  “Oh no!” she shrieked.

  Felix came up behind her.

  Right on the place they had to press for the wall to slide open hung one of those giant wreaths, decorated with gold ribbons and pinecones.

  Maisie stared at the wreath in disbelief.

  “Well,” she said finally, reaching up for it, “we’ll just have to take this gauche thing down.”

  Felix, knowing better than to argue with her, took hold of the bottom of the wreath as Maisie grabbed the side.

  “Lift it on three,” Maisie said. “One… two…”

  Felix leaned his shoulder into the wall beneath the wreath for extra heft, ready to lift.

  A voice cut through the air.

  “What in the world do you two think you’re doing?”

  Without letting go, Maisie and Felix both turned their heads toward the voice.

  The Blond Woman stood at the top of the stairs. She was dressed like a Christmas tree herself, in forest-green pants, a green turtleneck, and a red sweater tied loosely around her shoulders. Her hands were on her broad hips, and her beady eyes were narrowed menacingly.

  “Don’t. Move,” the Blond Woman said.

  Then she pulled a walkie-talkie from her pocket, lifted it to her mouth, and said, “Security! We have a break-in!”

  “Do I even dare ask what you two were thinking when you broke in to Elm Medona?” Maisie and Felix’s mother said.

  Maisie just folded her arms over her chest and stared back at her defiantly.

  But Felix said, “We just wanted to see the decorations.”

  “We’re invited to the VIP Christmas party on the ninth,” their mother said. “You could have seen them then. Now look at the mess you’ve made.”

  Maisie and Felix looked. A team of security guards crowded into what used to be Phinneas’s wife Ariane Pickworth’s room—the very room she died in shortly after giving birth to Great-Aunt Maisie and her twin brother, Thorne. The creepiest room in the house, Felix thought, despite its powder-blue walls and the ceiling painted like a sky with puffy, white clouds seemingly floating across it. It was near the scene of the crime, so the Blond Woman had hustled them inside to wait. First the security guards arrived, then four Newport policemen, then a man from the local preservation society, and finally their mother. The man was tall and balding with a big gut pressing against his purple fleece jacket. He looked annoyed; their mother looked really angry.

  “How did you even get in?” the man from the local preservation society asked them. “I mean, it’s impossible.” The tip of his bulbous nose was sunburned, which was odd for November.

  “We…,” Felix began. “Uh…”

  Maisie broke into a grin. “We used the dumbwaiter,” she said. No way was she going to reveal that they knew about the key on the first-floor landing. “First I put Felix in it and sent him down, then I followed.”

  Felix nodded enthusiastically.

  “What did I tell you about playing in elevators?” their mother screeched. “Especially ancient ones! Especially something that isn’t even meant for human transportation!”

  Her face looked weary. And why shouldn’t it? Felix thought. She worked a million hours a week and took care of them all by herself. Plus, she ran errands for Great-Aunt Maisie, who got more demanding the better she felt.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” Felix said softly. He was sorry, too.

  Even Maisie felt bad now. Their mother had smudges of mascara under her eyes, the hem on her navy-blue wool skirt was coming down in the back, and a small run crept from her heel toward her calf as if even her clothes were weary.

  The Blond Woman hovered above Maisie and Felix now, her face all contorted and her beady eyes wild.

  “I want to press charges,” she said. She pointed at them. “I knew you two were troublemakers. I just knew it.”

  “Surely we can come to some appropriate punishment that’s less extreme,” their mother said. “They are only twelve years old, after all—”

  The Blond Woman reeled around to face their mother. “Do you know how many valuable items are in this mansion? Do you have any idea?”

  “But they haven’t taken anything,” their mother said.

  “If we let them off the hook for this, who knows what they’ll do next! Set the place on fire? Paint the walls? Throw a party?”

  “We didn’t touch anything,” Maisie said.

  The Blond Woman’s thin eyebrows shot upward. “You were attempting to remove a wreath,” she said.

  The man from the preservation society cleared his throat. “I think we can just deactivate the dumbwaiters and give the kids a stern warning that if they even place one toe in here, we’ll have to discuss terminating the agreement with the family about those living quarters upstairs.”

  “Now wait a minute,” their mother said, worry washing over her face. “It’s my understanding that my aunt allows you to use this place in exchange for one dollar a year as long as she—”

  “Exactly,” the man said. “As long as she lives in the servants’ quarters. Last I heard, she wasn’t living there.”

  The Blond Woman smiled, victorious.

  “Now,” the man said, “if you don’t mind, I’m going to go home. My wife is waiting for me. I want to go home and get to bed.” He turned a hard gaze on Maisie and Felix. “And I suggest you do the same.”

  They stood up from the gold, brocade chair they’d been squeezed onto.

  “See?” the Blond Woman said, pointing her chubby finger. “They got dirt on the fainting couch.”

  Everyone except the policemen leaned forward to inspect it.

  “No, no,” the man from the preservation society said finally. “I believe that’s an old stain. A Pickworth stain.”

  Relieved, Maisie and Felix started toward the door with their mother. But the man stopped them.

  “Mrs.…,” he began.

  “Ms.,” their mother clarified. “Robbins.”

  “I trust you won’t leave the children unsupervised again?” he said.

  She swallowed hard. “Of course not,” she said softly.

  With that, she placed a hand on each of their shoulders and steered them past the man from the local preservation society, the Blond Woman, the two policemen, and the team of security guards, then out of Ariane Pickworth’s bedroom, into the hall, and down the Grand Staircase, not letting go of them for even a second.

  Thanksgiving Day was gray and drizzly, the dreariest Thanksgiving Maisie and Felix could remember. Instead of waking to the smell of a turkey roasting in the oven and finding their father peeling sweet potatoes and their mother trimming green beans, they woke up to silence and the aroma of coffee that had been made several hours earlier. Maisie padded down the hall to the kitchen, where a note lay on the table: PICKING UP CHAMPAGNE, CHESTNUTS, AND NIÇOISE OLIVES FOR GREAT-AUNT MAISIE. BE READY TO LEAVE AT 11:30. AND DON’T BUDGE!!!!!!!!!

  Maisie sighed. She wasn’t even sure what Niçoise olives were. She just knew that Great-Aunt Maisie demanded the most unusual things, all the time. Even on Thanksgiving day. Maisie sat at the table, miserable. When Felix appeared fifteen minutes later, she pushed the note toward him.

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” he said hopefully.

  “Unhappy is more like it,” Maisie said.

  Just then the phone rang, and Felix answered it, glad to have someone—anyone—to talk to other than his sister.

  As clear as if he were in the next room, their father’s voice boomed, “Happy Thanksgiving, Felix!”

  “Dad!” Felix shrieked.

  “Is the turkey in the oven? Your mother always underestimates how long it takes to roast a turkey,” their father said wistfully.

  “Uh… actually…,” Felix said.

  Their father chuckled. “She doesn’t have it in yet, does she?”

  “Well, no,” Felix said. “We’re having lunch with Aunt Maisie. At the Island Retirement Center.”

  “That sounds depressing,” their father said. “Can the o
ld bird even eat?”

  “Oh, she’s doing much better, Dad,” Felix said. “She walks with a walker now and bosses everyone around.”

  There was silence, then their father said, “That’s impossible.”

  “Maybe it’s a miracle?” Felix said. “A medical miracle.” He had a pit in his stomach as he said it, afraid that he knew exactly what was bringing Great-Aunt Maisie back to health.

  “Maybe,” their father said.

  By now, Maisie was practically jumping on the table to get Felix to hand her the phone.

  “Maisie wants to say hi,” Felix started to say, but his sister managed to grab the phone from him before he finished.

  “Daddy!” Maisie said. “It’s raining out, and Mom’s not even home because she had to go and get all this gourmet stuff for Great-Aunt Maisie because the food at the assisted living place isn’t good enough for her, and we have to eat with all those old sick people, and you’re halfway around the world and—”

  “Whoa, sweetie,” their father said. “It can’t be all bad.”

  “But it is,” Maisie said.

  The kitchen door opened, and their mother came in, her arms full of groceries.

  “This is the worst Thanksgiving ever!” Maisie said.

  Their mother’s face seemed to crumple in on itself. She slowly put the bags on the counter and, with her back turned away from Maisie and Felix, began to unpack them.

  Felix glowered at Maisie, but she just tossed her unruly hair, stretched the cord of the phone as far as she could, and disappeared with it around the corner.

  “Do you think it’s the worst Thanksgiving ever?” their mother asked Felix without turning toward him.

  “Of course not,” Felix lied.

  The dining room at the Island Retirement Center was decorated festively, with straw cornucopias filled with plastic vegetables on each table, burnt-orange tablecloths and napkins, and a big papier-mâché turkey wearing a pilgrim’s hat hanging from the main lighting fixture.

  Great-Aunt Maisie believed in arriving late and making a grand entrance. So she made them all wait in her room until they would be exactly fifteen minutes late. She and their mother had a glass of champagne and some Niçoise olives, Great-Aunt Maisie freshened up her Chanel Red lipstick, and then they finally made their way to the dining room.

  En route, Great-Aunt Maisie whispered in Felix’s ear, “Where has your latest adventure taken the two of you?”

  She was moving slower than last time he saw her, so he had a chance to explain without his mother, who was ahead of them by quite a bit, hearing him.

  “The preservation society came in and decorated Elm Medona,” he told Great-Aunt Maisie.

  She rolled her eyes. “I bet it looks just dreadful.”

  “No, it’s really fancy,” Felix said. “But they put a wreath right over the wall with the staircase.”

  Great-Aunt Maisie came to a stop, her hands gripping the sides of her walker so hard they trembled.

  “So take the wreath down. That isn’t very difficult to figure out, is it?” she said.

  “We tried,” Felix began.

  She slapped the walker, hard. “Tried? You mean you couldn’t get it down?”

  “I mean we got caught,” Felix said.

  Their mother had stopped to wait for them, and Maisie, who had stormed ahead of her, stopped, too, her eyes on Felix and their great-aunt.

  “So try again,” Great-Aunt Maisie hissed at him.

  “We can’t,” Felix whispered. “They said that if we even set foot in there they’ll kick us out.”

  “What? Who said that?”

  “The preservation society,” Felix told her.

  “Is he slowing you down?” their mother said to Great-Aunt Maisie as she hurried to help her along.

  “Oh, get out of my way,” Great-Aunt Maisie said, pushing past their mother and then Maisie.

  “Oh dear,” their mother said. “She’s in a foul mood.”

  The turkey was dry. The mashed potatoes were lumpy. The gravy wasn’t hot. And they only served cranberries from a can. Maisie ate only the green bean casserole. Great-Aunt Maisie drank too much champagne. Felix ate some white meat but without any gravy. And their mother ate nothing at all until the pumpkin pie was served.

  “This is the worst Thanksgiving I’ve had since 1922,” Great-Aunt Maisie said.

  “I am sorry,” their mother said. “Maybe we should have had it at home.”

  “Humph,” Great-Aunt Maisie said.

  A woman in a bright-orange suit stood at a podium at the front of the room and spoke into the microphone.

  “For those of you who don’t know me,” she said, “my name is Abby Bain, and I’m in charge of special events here at the Island Retirement Center.”

  There was a smattering of applause. Great-Aunt Maisie muttered, “Oh please,” under her breath.

  “I don’t want to keep you any longer,” Abby Bain said, “but I wanted you to know that the centerpieces are yours to keep. And to be fair, they go to the youngest person at the table.”

  Maisie and their mother both turned to Felix.

  “Ha,” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “So you’re younger than your sister?”

  “Well,” Felix said, “by seven minutes.”

  Great-Aunt Maisie shook her head sadly. “Just like Thorne and me,” she said.

  “And one final thing,” Abby Bain announced. “When you made your reservations for today, we put your names in this bowl, and one of you will be able to take this big tom turkey with you.” She pointed to the papier-mâché one wearing the pilgrim hat.

  “This is ridiculous,” Great-Aunt Maisie said.

  “The lucky winner,” Abby Bain said, digging into a big fishbowl and pulling out a name, “is Maisie Pickworth. Where are you, dear?”

  Their mother waved to Abby Bain. “She’s right here!”

  Great-Aunt Maisie frowned at their mother and at the people smiling at her for winning and at Abby Bain, who was already cutting the turkey down from the light fixture.

  Then Great-Aunt Maisie’s face softened. She looked at Felix and smiled. “Seven minutes younger,” she said. “Just like Thorne and me.”

  He nodded.

  “He has my shard from the Ming vase,” she said.

  “Maybe?” Felix said.

  “Not maybe,” Great-Aunt Maisie said.

  The last time they time traveled, they learned that they needed to have a shard from a particular priceless vase with them in order to do it. Great-Aunt Maisie’s piece, which she kept hidden in a Fabergé egg, was missing. She believed Thorne had stolen it.

  Abby Bain was grinning as she walked toward them holding the turkey. Their mother jumped up to meet her as she approached.

  “So if you can’t get into The Treasure Chest yourselves, the solution is simple,” Great-Aunt Maisie said softly. She got to her feet and opened her arms for her prize. “Find Thorne. Get my shard back. And I’ll just do it myself.” Great-Aunt Maisie was grinning, too. “The preservation society can’t keep me out of Elm Medona, can they?”

  Abby Bain deposited the giant papier-mâché turkey into Great-Aunt Maisie’s outstretched arms.

  “Isn’t he darling?” Great-Aunt Maisie said.

  Slowly, she stepped away from her walker, just enough to dip into a stiff but elegant curtsy. As she rose, she turned her icy stare to Maisie and Felix and mouthed one word: Thorne.

  For Felix, it was a relief to stay out of The Treasure Chest. While Maisie schemed and plotted ways to get back into Elm Medona, Felix put time travel and Great-Aunt Maisie’s orders to either do it again or find her long-lost brother, Thorne, far from his mind. Instead, he practiced for the upcoming spelling bee, went to the Jane Pickens Theater on Saturday afternoons with kids from his class, decided to run for student council, and spent his free time daydreaming about Lily Goldberg.

  Lily Goldberg sat one person down and across from him in school, the perfect position for him to study her unnoticed. She was
the smartest person in the class. And, Felix thought, the prettiest girl. Her dark hair was cut short like a pixie’s, and she wore funny dresses from the vintage store with patterns of things like teapots or flamingos on them. Sometimes he got a faint whiff of mothballs from her. Lily was adopted from Hunan, China, when she was a year old. He knew this because she gave a report on it with a slide show of her adoptive parents in China picking her up. Felix loved the pictures of baby Lily, dressed in a purple snowsuit, staring at the camera all perplexed. He loved, too, that she still stared out at the world looking perplexed.

  Felix had made a good friend at school. His name was Jim Duncan, and more and more Felix found himself going off after school with him. Jim Duncan liked going down to the docks and looking at all the sailboats, too. The only difference was that Jim knew a lot about sailing and could tell Felix stories about who owned which boats and which races they’d been in. His own father had done the Newport to Bermuda race six times, and Jim told Felix stories about storms and squalls his father had sailed in. Jim liked to read, too, and on cold afternoons they went to the Coffee Grinder on Bannister’s Wharf and drank hot chocolate, looked out at the boats, and discussed the books they were reading. Jim Duncan liked postapocalyptic stories and Felix liked old novels, but it was fun to trade back and forth and to talk about them.

  Of course all of this made Maisie extremely jealous. Once Felix invited her along, but all she did was scowl and complain that the scones tasted stale. Later, at home, she’d accused him of liking Jim Duncan more than he liked her.

  “That’s silly,” Felix said. “You’re my sister.”

  But Maisie stayed upset with him all night and the next day, too.

  To keep Maisie happy that week after Thanksgiving, Felix told Jim he had to go straight home after school. He spent the afternoons with Maisie playing Rummikub and listening to her latest schemes for breaking into The Treasure Chest or finding Great-Uncle Thorne.

  By the end of the week, he was forgiven.

  The student council elections were on December 8, and Felix went to school early to put up posters. He had worked on them most of the night before, writing “FORWARD WITH FELIX” in fat bubble letters on light-blue poster boards. The hallways were still dim when he arrived at Anne Hutchinson Elementary School. The early morning light cast a golden tone on the empty school that made Felix feel warm and happy. Mr. Hamilton, the custodian, must have just polished the floors because of the sharp smell of lemons and the high shine on the old wood. Humming softly to himself, Felix took the roll of tape from his pocket and began to hang the posters on the walls between classrooms.