A Long Line of Cakes

by Deborah Wiles

  6.Frances Schotz almost fainted with relief. Her assistant, Melba Jane Latham, fanned her with a handkerchief until Frances was herself again. This, after Frances screamed at the Cake boys (and girl) about the canine mayhem. She did seem to become absolutely serene later.

  7.Emerging from under the table just after Pip was Leo Meyer Lemon Cake! This reporter had to leave her barber chair to witness this emerging—both emergings—in their entirety, and to poll the eyewitnesses for local color.

  8.The cake was delicious, it must be admitted.

  9.The pretzels were not touched, my blueberry congealed salad was the best of the Jell-O salads (would have won a prize), and in the end there were no leftovers. Except pretzels. Which, many noted, were spirited away by Ferrell Ishee when he took his terrorizing tot home for her nap.

  10.Conclusion: The Cake Family, new to this town, may be exquisite bakers, but there is more, shall we say, nefariousness to them than meets the eye. Tête-à-têtes with Misanthrope Watkins. Clandestine meetings between Parting Schotz and Leo Cake under the party table. Not to mention feral beasts crashing soirees and the general unhappiness suddenly pervading the Pine View and Jerome Fountainbleu. It must be concluded by any astute observer that the Cakes are becoming liabilities in this town.

  (Aside): I have been informed that I would have more space to report if I would cease sending in so many special reports and cease being so long-winded (the nerve!). “Be brief!” said Mr. Johnson. “Brief!”

  What about Freedom of the Press? Freedom of Expression! I have so many expressions! And I do need more room. Readers! Write in!

  Yours faithfully as I

  uncover the mystery, PT

  The girls held back a moment, and then Ruby, calmer now, took a step into the woods and Emma followed. One thing about Ben Cake, thought Ruby: He certainly was not mundane.

  “Wait up!” Ruby called to Ben. She trod gingerly in her flip-flops over pinecones and pine straw and fallen twigs and branches and holes where squirrels hid their nuts, until she saw a path ahead, which was where Ben waited for Ruby and Emma.

  “Paths are good,” Emma said to no one, brushing pine straw from her shirt.

  It was instantly cooler in the woods. The breeze that came with the darkening clouds helped Ruby think better.

  “I know where we are,” she said. “This is the way to the ball fields.” She cocked her thumb to the right. “And this—this is the way to House’s house.”

  “Yep,” said Ben. “And it’s also the way to another house before you get to House’s, one that has a garden. It’s just … well … overgrown.”

  Ruby swallowed. She knew which one. “Norwood Boyd’s?”

  “I don’t know whose it is,” said Ben. “It’s abandoned.”

  “That’s because it’s haunted,” Ruby informed him.

  “I like the idea of putting the garden near the ball fields,” said Emma in a decisive voice. “Especially if there are ghosts in these woods.”

  However, as she walked farther into the trees, all thoughts of danger or ghosts left her and instead a feeling of welcome began to grow in her heart. She paid attention to it. She recognized it.

  Emma, Ruby, and Ben walked on the woods path through dappled light and birdsong. It was as quiet as a church, suddenly, their footfalls muffled by pine needles on the dirt path, their breathing shallow and soft. The smell of pine was clean and strong, and in spite of the earlier hostilities, their spirits lifted. A stiff breeze began to rattle through the trees and Emma looked up to watch the treetops dance.

  “There are huge iron gates around the front of the house,” said Ben. “Farther down, along the road. This is the quickest way to get there, from the back.”

  “Kids on the road run past the house without stopping,” said Ruby. “ ‘Mean Man Boyd,’ they called Mr. Norwood. That blockhead Cleebo called him ‘Baby-Eater Boyd.’ ”

  “Really?” said Ben.

  Emma shivered. But she didn’t want to go back. She was a practical thinker, yes, but this welcoming ­feeling … it was almost spoken. Whose words? Where were they coming from?

  “Yep,” said Ruby. She enjoyed having someone new to tell the story to. “Norwood Boyd died in that house not long ago.”

  “Really!” said Ben.

  “Really,” said Ruby. “House told us so. He told the whole All-Stars team. And Miss Mattie told us the truth of it, too, after the game.”

  Emma realized there were no markers of any kind to tell them where they were. No house, no road. Just a woods path. She slowed her pace and let Ben and Ruby get ahead of her, to let the wonder of this woods seep into her. Then she hurried and caught up with her companions. It would not do to get lost out here now.

  They rounded a curve, came into a clearing, and there it was: a huge, rambling two-story house with gables and a turret making up a third floor, like something out of a fairy tale or a myth, like Sinbad or Rose Red or Hansel and Gretel.

  Menacing, thought Ruby. She’d always thought that.

  But Emma was of a different mind. She stumbled over a root and Ben helped her up. She couldn’t keep her eyes off the house. It was a house built for generations of Cakes, and she knew it. Scheherazade, Ethelinda, Theopholus, Marvella, even Lucky Pete would have wanted to live here and never leave, if only they could have found it.

  Emma, Ben, and Ruby walked all the way around the tall iron fence in a wide berth as the path led them to a long, pebbled driveway that ran from the dirt road up to the gates. Now they could see the house from the front.

  It was badly in need of paint, with crooked shutters, a collapsing front porch, and massive, ornately carved iron gates at the end of the driveway. The gates had been recently covered in kudzu, from the looks of it—vines were chopped and scattered all around the wide-open gates.

  “I don’t want to go in there,” said Ruby.

  “The garden’s on the side, over there,” Ben said. “I stumbled over the garden fence last week when I was coming home in the dark and got turned around.”

  “Nope,” said Ruby. “This will not do.”

  But Emma was enchanted.

  “This will do just fine,” said Emma Lane Cake.

  The house wasn’t haunted, not at all. It was lonely—Emma could feel it. Whatever had happened here, it had happened lovingly. And now the house was empty. It was waiting for someone. It was waiting for her. It was welcoming her, calling to her. It had been the house all along.

  A fat crow called from a high pine tree. Emma walked through Norwood Boyd’s imposing gates all by herself, eyes wide and heart bursting. She left Ruby and Ben staring after her.

  “It’s perfect,” Emma whispered. “Perfect.”

  “What are you doing?” Ruby called to her.

  “I’m coming home,” Emma said, too soft for Ruby to hear. With each step she took toward the house, tiny grasshoppers leaped out of her way and the stubbly dry grass—such as it was—crunched underfoot.

  This is my house, thought Emma. It had been waiting for her for such a long time, and finally Emma had come.

  “This is private property!” yelled Ruby.

  “Yes,” said Emma, still in that small voice. “Mine.”

  Ruby turned to Ben. “Do something!”

  Ben shrugged. “I’m gonna visit the garden. In the daylight. I’ve been hired to create something permanent. Wanna come?”

  He followed his sister through the gates.

  There was a garden; this was true. And it was in a spot where trees had been cleared long ago. It was a big garden, too. It had once been neat and fenced with pretty white pickets, tall and straight. Now the fence had missing ­pickets and leaning pickets and pickets the color of stained teeth.

  The long garden rows, once straight, were now choked with weeds. Chickweed, pokeweed, dockweed, creeping thistle, buttercups, oxeye daisies, clover, and giant dandelions grew every which way along with a few slender volunteer trees. Tall and short and fat and skinny and thorny and smooth, all of them w
aved hello in the gusting wind.

  No one had done any gardening here in years, but it hadn’t been decades. It was a salvageable garden.

  The air was thick with the scent of rain, but no one was paying attention to a thing as mundane as weather. The whorling wind was a welcome relief from the scorching temperatures of the past weeks.

  “How did you even know this was a garden once upon a time?” asked Ruby, incredulous.

  “House told me,” said Ben. “Could your chickens do their thing here?”

  “Sure, they could,” said Ruby. “And it’s already fenced.” Now that she was on the other side of the iron gates, and now that nothing spooky had happened to her, she was feeling more sure of Miss Mattie’s and House’s stories and less sure of the many haunted, monster stories the Aurora County kids had made up about this house over the years. Still, it looked dreary, and more than a little scary.

  But not to Emma. While Ruby and Ben contemplated the garden, Emma was captured by the sight of the silver maple trees—there were eight of them, like eight Cakes, surrounding the house, majestically tall and lush and full. Just like the tree outside the Cake Café. It could not be a coincidence.

  The trees surrounded the house like benevolent caretakers. They shaded the porches and kissed the highest points of the roof in the wind. They invited Emma to climb out of the turret window and onto their graceful branches.

  She placed her hand gently on the tree closest to her and felt its warm, rough pulse under her fingertips. What was happening here? Ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thump went her heart. All’s well.

  There was a wide, welcoming yard with bristly old grass and patches of moss front and back. Emma began to look for a way to get up onto the front porch—the stairs were missing—and was surprised by a snuffling and then a sneeze that came from the giant honeysuckle bush by the corner of the porch. She got on her hands and knees and saw that there was a cavernous hole inside the honeysuckle, and in that hole was … a dog.

  “Eudora Welty!” Emma cried. Instead of pulling the dog out, she instinctively got into the hole in the bush with the old dog. Eudora sneezed once again and then licked Emma’s hand with her short pug tongue. Emma scratched Eudora behind the ears and asked, “What are you doing here?”

  “YouDoggie!” called a girl’s voice. “I know you’re here!”

  Seconds later, Emma and Honey found themselves eye-to-eye inside the honeysuckle bush cave.

  “Hey!” shouted Honey.

  “Hey!” shouted Emma.

  “Hey!” shouted Gordon right behind Honey.

  Eudora sneezed.

  “Hey!” shouted House. He waved at Ben and Ruby. “What are y’all doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?!” asked Ruby. The first grumbles of thunder rolled over the woods.

  “All that party commotion scared Eudora,” said House, with no blame in his voice, “and she ran away from the party. We knew she’d come here—she always does—so we came to get her on our way home.”

  A sprinkling of rain began to fall as the wind swooped, the temperature dropped, and the downdraft came in.

  “Storm!” yelled Ruby just as the loudest clap of thunder they’d ever heard—it must have been directly over them—split the sky with its snap, like a whip, and filled the air with the smell of silver.

  Emma, Honey, and Gordon leaped from the honeysuckle bush like they’d been shot out of a cannon. Eudora Welty yelped and plastered herself to the back of the bush. Emma ran back inside the bush, scooped the dog under her belly, and struggled back out with her. “C’mon, Gordon! C’mon, Honey!”

  She ran smack into House coming to get his dog and they twirled around as if square-dancing with a petrified pooch. House lost his baseball cap. He held out his sore arm in its sling and tried not to let Emma or Eudora hit it. It took some fancy footwork.

  “Here!” said Emma. House took his squirming dog under his good arm as the sky opened and rain came down in sheets. Emma snatched up House’s cap and scooped up Gordon, who was shrieking. She grabbed Honey by the hand and raced behind House, who was yelling, “This way!” as everyone bounded for the back of Norwood Boyd’s house, scrambled up the back-porch steps, and stood at the back door, hearts pounding, pulses racing, eyes searching one another for what’s next?

  “Open it!” squealed Honey.

  “Open it!” House called to Ben, indicating that his one good arm was full of dog and his other wasn’t able to turn the doorknob.

  The rain roared in their ears as they crowded like frenzied cattle into the back kitchen. Gordon sobbed into Emma’s chest.

  “It’s okay,” said House. “We’re safe in here. Safe.”

  The kitchen stretched the entire width of the back of the house. It was lined with windows on all three sides. Emma noticed the long counters and the tiny flowered tiles on the floor and the beams in the ceiling, the deep sink, the big old stove. It was family size, not industrial size, and it was perfect. I could make hot dogs here, thought Emma. Baked beans. Cole slaw. Applesauce. And not one cake. Well, maybe just one cake at a time, like normal people do.

  “There’s no electricity now,” said House, “but I know where the flashlights are, if we need them.”

  He put down his dog and Honey embraced her, which made Gordon feel more at ease. He slipped out of Emma’s arms and wiped his eyes with his hands. His tutu was crushed.

  “YouDoggie,” he said.

  Emma handed House his baseball cap. He took it with a nod and a “Thanks.” Emma nodded back.

  Ruby blinked in the dim light and turned around as she looked, trying to take it all in.

  “This way,” said House. He pulled on his baseball cap. “I know this place.”

  “So you’ve said before,” said Ruby. Her voice was the tiniest bit shaky as she followed House through the kitchen and down the wide hallway in the middle of the house. There was a love seat against the wall here, and a bureau there, and still the hallway seemed cavernous.

  You could ride bikes in this hallway, thought Emma. You could have picnics. Make forts.

  Spacious rooms opened on either side of the hallway as they walked—a pantry, a dining room, a study, a bedroom. At the end of the hall near the front door was another bedroom to the left and a living room to the right.

  The parlor, thought Emma. Of course there would be a parlor.

  It was paneled in a dark wood with bookcases lining the farthest wall.

  There were substantial pieces of old furniture with names the children could not have known: a credenza, a steamer trunk, a camelback blanket chest. There were hanging tapestries, ginger and apothecary jars, jade trees, porcelain elephants, stone Buddhas, and books on the shelves, art on the walls, as well as an ornate Oriental carpet under their feet.

  Emma kept her thoughts to herself. She stepped softly, she breathed softly, she thought softly. Her heart beat softly. Swish-swish, swish-swish, swish-swish. She kept her eyes wide open.

  Eudora settled herself on a corner of the thick Oriental carpet near the great front windows and next to a long, carved table filled with games: clay marbles, metal jacks, etched checkers and a checkerboard, cards of all kinds, painted tops, elaborate mah-jongg tiles, and more. Honey and Gordon took off their shoes, shed their tutus, and chose some dominoes to play with on the wooden floor closest to the window light.

  House pulled up the long, wooden blinds at the great front windows. Even with the rain pouring, there was plenty of white storm light from outside to illuminate the room and outline the contours of the life that had belonged to Norwood Boyd, age eighty-eight, philanthropist, philosopher, and maker of mystery.

  “Good garden of peas,” Ruby said.

  “Whoa,” said Ben.

  Emma smiled. It was perfect.

  SPECIAL-special edition compiled and reported by Phoebe “Scoop” Tolbert

  I will be brief. I HAVE BREAKING NEWS.

  As I was leaving the soiree for Dr. Dan this afternoon, right as the deluge of rain cam
e upon us, I heard talk—I cannot reveal my sources, but we were all damp, and there went my hair—of a REVOLT about to take place at the Cake Café.

  Customers will boycott the Grand Opening of the Cake Café (and Bakery) next week “or so” after reports from … an unnamed source … claiming that the pies at the Pine View (now made by the Cakes) are—suddenly—purposely not as good as Misanthrope Watkins’s pies, and are in fact baked to be worse than Misanthrope’s pies—on purpose!—in order to drive business AWAY from the Pine View and TO the Cake Café!

  This reporter is so shocked by this news that she must go lie down with a cold cloth over her forehead. We’ve got Trouble! Right here in Halleluia! Right here in our perfect little town. Where’s my fan?

  Excuse me while I recuperate after filing this report. PT

  (SEE? BRIEF.)

  They were seated comfortably—or as comfortably as they were going to get—on Norwood Boyd’s old furniture. The couches and chairs had been covered in sheets, so House, one-handed, had pulled the sheets off, with Ben and Emma’s help, and piled them in a spot near a red Chinese wedding chest.

  “Sunshine Laundry, send us your sheets!” joked House, and Ruby couldn’t believe it. She’d known House Jackson her entire life and had never heard him even try to be funny.

  “Under new management,” she rejoined. “Can’t be beat!”

  The laughter dispelled the collective strangeness and everybody found a seat. The sky had opened wide and the rain came down and down. It had been so thickly hot for so long; the humid summer air could not hold on to one more drop of moisture.

  Dominoes clacked at the end of the room near the grand window, where Gordon and Honey worked in companionable silence, building a dotted house of their own. They were sleepy. Eudora Welty snored.

  “I can’t believe I’m sitting in this house,” Ruby murmured. And then, when no one else spoke, Ruby added, “We’re in for a good soaker. I hope the roof doesn’t leak.”