Emmy and the Home For Troubled Girls

by Lynne Jonell

  The girls didn’t seem to understand the squeaking coming from the cattails.

  “Put your tiller to starboard!” Emmy called, clear and strong.

  “But that will put us on the rocks!” cried a panicked voice from the boat.

  “No, you lubbers!” spluttered Marshall. “The wind’s pushing you backward, so the rudder works backward, too!”

  Emmy looked at Marshall, then away. “The wind’s pushing you backward,” she shouted through cupped hands. “So the rudder works backward, too.” She grinned privately. They didn’t have to know she was taking directions from a muskrat.

  “Huh!” grunted Marshall, turning his furry face toward Emmy.

  “Now what do I do?” cried the girl at the tiller. The sailboat was still moving toward the rocks, but it had begun to turn.

  Emmy glanced at the muskrats.

  “She needs to loosen that sheet a bit,” Marshall muttered. “When she feels the wind take hold of the sail, she’ll have to straighten out the tiller quick.”

  “Loosen that sheet a bit!” Emmy said confidently. “When you feel the wind take hold of the sail, straighten the tiller right away!”

  There was a flurry of action on the sailboat. And then, hesitatingly, the white sail puffed lightly out, the boat began to move away from the shore, and the girls on the boat cheered in relief.

  The one steering leaned toward her companion. “Isn’t that the new kid?”

  Sound carried surprisingly well across the water, Emmy realized as she recognized her former classmates. At the tiller was Kate, who always had a crowd around her at recess. Meg, near the mast, had sat in front of Emmy the whole year.

  “Her name’s Emmy,” Meg murmured.

  “She sure knows how to sail. Hey, Emmy!” Kate called. “Want to crew for me at the race tomorrow?”

  As the sailboat angled past the dock, Meg clasped her hands. “Please?” she implored. “Then I won’t have to. I’m a terrible sailor!”

  Emmy was dumbstruck. This was what she had been waiting for! If she became friends with Kate and Meg, she’d be invited to parties and sleepovers and go horseback-riding and biking and swimming and—

  “With an expert like you,” Kate added persuasively, “I might even win!”

  Emmy’s dream crashed like water on rock. She was no expert. Without a certain muskrat along for the ride, she would be so hopeless that Kate would hate her forever.

  The sailboat was slipping away from the dock. Emmy took in a breath. “I’m sorry,” she said wretchedly. “I can’t.”

  Peter Peebles came at last, but dinner was boring. The adults spoke about the sapphires that were on display at Grayson Lake Jewelers—“And why on earth they bothered to print that in the paper, I’ll never understand,” said Emmy’s mother—and the spicy scent of the small flowers called “pinks” that Mr. Peebles had brought in a vase. Then, more interestingly, they talked about the Home for Troubled Girls, which Peter said he had investigated with the police after Jane Barmy had tried to send Emmy there. “It was only a shoe shop,” he said. “Old Mr. B—I’ve known him for years, he’s actually Jane’s father—made this dollhouse he likes to call ‘The Home for Troubled Girls,’ and he thought it would be cute to put up a sign outside. It’s nothing, really.”

  “I wonder if the police will catch up with Miss Barmy,” mused Kathy Addison.

  Emmy thought they probably wouldn’t, unless the police had a description of Miss Barmy that included fur and a long tail.

  “It’s strange to think,” said Emmy’s father, “that Jane Barmy grew up in the caretaker’s cottage on this estate. Didn’t you know her, Peter?”

  “She was a friend,” said Peter, a little grimly. “That’s why I trusted her. We used to go sailing together—Jane and Cheswick and Priscilla—” He stopped abruptly.

  Emmy fidgeted in her seat and twisted a strand of hair around her finger.

  Mrs. Benson changed the subject smoothly. “And do you still sail, Peter? Emmy wants to learn someday, don’t you, dear?”

  Emmy nodded.

  Mr. Peebles smiled at her, the strained look leaving his face. “There’s a youth race tomorrow, and I’ll be on the signal boat. I invited my cousin’s oldest boy to come along, but he’s busy with a soccer tournament.”

  Emmy sat up alertly.

  “Would you be interested, Emmy? I could explain the race, and maybe you’ll see some kids you know.”

  “What a good idea!” said Emmy’s father.

  “Make sure you wear a life jacket,” said Emmy’s mother.

  There was a scurrying sort of noise, and something furry brushed against Emmy’s ankle beneath the table. She suppressed a shriek and lifted a corner of the tablecloth.

  “I’m coming, too,” said Raston Rat, grinning up at her. “I’ve always wanted to be a pirate.”

  Emmy swirled her fork in the raspberry sauce on her plate. It was hard to have much of an appetite when the warm, furry body of a rat was draped across her foot and a slender tail kept tickling her ankles.

  “Psst!”

  Emmy sighed inwardly, dropped her napkin, and ducked beneath the tablecloth. “What is it now?” she whispered, under cover of the clinking of silverware and the hum of grown-up conversation, which had gone back to boring.

  “Does G.I. Joe have a pirate hat?” the Rat asked.

  “I doubt it,” Emmy said coldly. “Now, will you please stop bothering me? I can’t keep on dropping things—they’ll get suspicious.”

  “I’ll need a gold earring,” Raston mused. “And a pirate flag.”

  Emmy sat rigidly upright. If she ignored him, maybe he would go away … A moment later, she nearly yelped aloud.

  “Are you all right, Emmy?” asked her father with concern.

  Emmy wanted to tell him the truth—that a rat had just run up her leg—but she gave up the idea as too complicated to explain.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Really.” As the adults began to talk again, she glowered down at the rodent.

  “Can you draw me a skull and crossbones?” Raston begged.

  At last the adults pushed back their chairs. At a nod from her mother, Emmy left the room to get Mr. Peebles’s coat. But, as was usual with grown-ups, they couldn’t seem to stop talking. Emmy sat on a bench against the wall and waited with her eyes half closed, listening to the voices in the next room.

  “I heard it from the detective. She did the same thing over and over again in different states. She’d get a position as a nanny in a wealthy household, and get some kind of influence over the parents.”

  “I still don’t understand how she did that with us,” said Kathy Addison, very low, as they moved into the hall.

  “Some kind of drug, maybe; but not one we’re familiar with. Anyway, in the end the story was always the same. The children would be sent off to some place that sounded all right—but they would never be heard from again.”

  Emmy sat very still. No one seemed to notice her on the bench.

  “Their parents must have been frantic, once the drug wore off,” Emmy’s father said.

  “They may have been,” said Peter Peebles quietly. “But they’re all dead now. And, one way or another, Miss Barmy ended up with a great deal of their money.”

  Emmy stood up and moved from the shadows against the wall. “What were their names?” she asked, holding out Mr. Peebles’s coat.

  The grown-ups looked at her in sudden silence. “Whose names?” asked Peter Peebles at last.

  “The little girls. What were their names?”

  Mr. Peebles took a long time getting on his coat. “Strangely enough, they were all girls.” The lawyer shut his eyes as if to concentrate. “Ana Stephans. Berit Torvaldsson. Lisa and Lee Milne—they’re twins. And Merry Pumpkin.”

  “Merry Pumpkin?”

  “Her last name was really Pumke, but she was only four, and apparently everyone called her Pumpkin …”

  Jim Addison cleared his throat. “Doesn’t anyone have an idea where
they are now?”

  “No,” said Peter Peebles.

  “No,” said Emmy firmly the next morning, pulling her swimsuit out of a drawer. “I know you want to be a pirate, but you can’t come with me.”

  Raston, who had found a plastic cutlass, tied a red kerchief around his head, and put on a black eyepatch with a rubber band, was aghast. “But that’s not fair!” he cried.

  “Listen, Ratty, I can’t. I won’t be able to hide you on the boat.”

  The Rat flipped up his eyepatch to glare at her. “Why not? Just put me in a pocket, like you always do.”

  Emmy held up her bathing suit. “Look. Do you see any pockets?”

  The Rat pursed his furred lips. “So wear a sweatshirt over it or something.”

  “They get clammy when they’re wet. All I’ve got is a windbreaker, and it’s too thin to disguise you … Here, leave my life jacket alone and listen to me. Why don’t you go back to Rodent City and spend time with Sissy?”

  “Maybe tomorrow,” said the Rat, jumping on the life jacket that Maggie had brought up that morning. “Are you sure you need all this padding? This jacket could float an elk.”

  Emmy sighed and went into her bathroom to put on her suit. Then she pulled her hair back and snapped an elastic band around it, making a ponytail just like Kate and Meg had worn the evening before. “Why don’t you play in the tree fort?” she called through the half-open door. “You and Sissy could be pirates together …”

  The Rat’s reply was indistinct. Emmy followed his voice into the playroom, where he was sniffing at a pile of Barbie clothes. “Who’s been in here?” he asked. “There’s a scent I can’t place.”

  Emmy shrugged. “No one, as far as I know. So—why don’t you play with your sister?”

  “She’s busy today. They’re training her as a messenger rat.”

  “Really?” Emmy was pleased. Cecilia, Raston’s twin, had been caged as long as he had, but while the Rat had been in a classroom where he had learned science, math, history, and more, Sissy had been stuck in a back room at the Antique Rat.

  At first glance, the Antique Rat had seemed to be just an old furniture store with an apartment on the upper story. But the back room had once held cage upon cage of rodents, each with its own special power, and each one extremely valuable. Cheswick Vole (formerly an assistant to the famous Professor of Rodentology, Dr. Maxwell Capybara) had shrunk the professor, stolen the rats, and used them to try to get rich. And now that Cheswick had turned into a rat himself and run away with Miss Barmy, Professor Capybara ran the shop and lived in the apartment above it.

  The professor was a brilliant rodentologist, and since he was full-sized again, he had gone back to his research. But even he couldn’t change the years Sissy had spent in a cage, with no opportunity to learn much of anything.

  “I didn’t know Sissy could read and write,” said Emmy.

  Raston straightened. “She can’t,” he admitted. “But she can repeat short messages, and … well, she deserves a chance just like anybody else, don’t you think?”

  “Of course,” Emmy said.

  “It’s not her fault that she’s uneducated. It’s not her fault that she hasn’t had my advantages. She’d like to be smooth and sophisticated, like me …”

  Emmy rolled her eyes.

  “I have an idea! Take me sailing! I’ll tell her about it and expand her horizons!”

  “You’re not coming,” Emmy said flatly, and went to brush her teeth. By the time she had clattered downstairs for breakfast, put on sunscreen, found her sandals, and run back up to get the life jacket she’d forgotten, the Rat had disappeared.

  Emmy shrugged. So maybe he’d taken her advice; or maybe he was hiding somewhere, sulking. Either way, she had one less rodent to worry about.

  To Emmy’s surprise, Thomas was sitting on the back step.

  “My mom said I could come here if I promised not to go up in the tree fort alone.” He lifted a hopeful face. “Would you play pirates with me?”

  Emmy shook her head with regret, wishing she didn’t have to go with Mr. Peebles. It would be bad enough to watch the other girls having fun sailing—but now that she had disappointed both Ratty and Thomas, she would feel guilty the whole time.

  Thomas trailed after her and sat on the wooden dock, swinging his pudgy legs. Emmy explained about the race, and was relieved to see that Thomas didn’t seem to mind too much.

  “This isn’t as boring as Joe’s soccer game,” he said, peering into the water beneath the dock. “There are minnows down there, and snails, and everything! I’ll just play here till you come back.”

  “Can you swim?”

  “I’m in Guppies,” Thomas said proudly. “Last week I ducked my head underwater before anyone else in the class.”

  Emmy sighed. Guppies was only the second class after Tadpoles, and four classes below Dolphins, which she had just passed. There was no way she could leave Thomas to play by the lakeshore with a clear conscience.

  Emmy trudged across the lawn to her back door. “Mrs. Brecksniff? Oh, Maggie. Would you please tell Mrs. Brecksniff that Joe’s little brother is here playing on the dock? I’m leaving when Mr. Peebles comes, so could someone watch him?”

  A blue-and-white boat was motoring up past the point. Emmy trotted back to the shore where she had left her life jacket and stopped to watch Thomas as he squatted by the rushes, collecting pebbles and snails. He looked up happily. “Did you know that every time you throw a rock in the water the minnows all swim away? And then they come back, and you can do it all over again?”

  “There goes my minnow pie for the second day in a row!” roared a hoarse voice, and a blunt, furry face popped out from between the cattails and snarled.

  “Now, Marshall,” came a placating voice from the rushes, “he’s just a child.”

  “He’s old enough to learn some manners!” bellowed Marshall, swimming at Thomas with his whiskers bristling.

  Everything seemed to happen at once. Thomas, delighted to find more rodents that he could understand, surged toward the muskrat. At the dock’s end, Peter Peebles was tying his boat to the cleats. And out of the corner of her eye, Emmy could see the sturdy figure of Mrs. Brecksniff hurrying toward them.

  Emmy grabbed Thomas by the collar and hauled him back onto the lawn. “Thank you, Mrs. Brecksniff!” she called, giving Thomas a shove in the right direction. She snatched up her life jacket and threw it on, struggling with the buckles. It seemed strangely lopsided, but she was in too big a hurry to adjust it. She sprinted to the end of the dock, jumped in the boat, and helped Mr. Peebles cast off. She waved at Thomas and Mrs. Brecksniff as the boat accelerated, and fell back in her seat with a gusty sigh. She had managed pretty well, considering everything.

  There was a squirming sensation in the front of her life jacket. Startled, Emmy looked down. A familiar gray head poked out from the armpit hole, and grinned.

  “See? I told you this life jacket didn’t need all that padding.”

  Emmy suppressed the urge to throw the Rat overboard and be done with it. “I suppose you think you’re clever,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “Well, yes, actually.” Raston turned back a flap of the life jacket’s outer covering to display neatly snipped stitches and a gnawed-out section of the buoyant padding. “See? I fit right inside. And if you ever want to take another rat with you—say, Sissy— I can just chew out a spot on the other side.”

  “And what if I fall in the lake?” Emmy said under cover of the boat’s motor. “With a life jacket full of holes?”

  “Oh, that,” said the Rat, waving a dismissive paw. “If worse comes to worst, you can always swim. And there’s certainly enough left to float Sissy and me.”

  “Oh well, if you and Sissy would be all right,” Emmy said gloomily, staring out at the lake whizzing by.

  It was true that the Rat had come up with the perfect camouflage. And Mr. Peebles was too busy driving the boat to notice anything happening behind his back. But
as they approached the yacht club, and Emmy saw the bright sails gliding smoothly past, she had a feeling of doom. It was a hopeless sort of feeling, as if everything that had already gone wrong would just keep on getting worse, no matter what she did.

  As it turned out, she was right.

  When Mr. Peebles tried to show her how to put up the signal flags, she ended up losing one overboard in the breeze.

  She blew the whistle at the wrong moment, and the whole fleet got confused.

  And when Kate and Meg came sailing past, they were so startled to see her that they bumped into another boat and had to turn three circles as a penalty. The breeze carried their comments over the water. “She could have crewed for me,” Kate said, and Meg added, “It’s not like she’s really needed on the signal boat.”

  To top it all off, Emmy was so distracted by Ratty (who kept saying “Arrr, me hearties,” and popping out to feel the breeze in his whiskers) that she missed half of Peter Peebles’s explanations; and then the other half didn’t make any sense.

  But the worst moment came at the race’s finish, when Ratty lost his head completely and leaped from his hiding place in her life jacket to the glossy white deck.

  “Put your backs into it, maties!” he cried, waving his cutlass as the boats passed the final buoy. “Shiver me timbers! Yo ho ho and a bottle of ru—”

  His voice cut off suddenly as the boat rocked on a wave. Emmy, who had already caught up her towel to muffle him, watched as if in slow motion as the Rat lost his balance and fell backward over the gunwale, his mouth open in a soundless shriek.

  There was a very small splash. Peter Peebles, absorbed in watching the end of the race, hadn’t noticed. The racers had eyes for nothing but the goal ahead. No one seemed to have seen the Rat go overboard—no one but Emmy.

  Emmy leaned over the gunwale. The Rat, his paws thrashing, looked up at her with panic in his eyes. He tried to speak, got a mouthful of water, and went under.

  Emmy sighed. Bleakly, resigned to her fate, she got up on the deck, leaned past the balance point with a convincing sort of lurch, and dropped in. She realized, one moment too late, that she was still holding her towel.