by Richard Peck
I applied pressure, and a small drawer sprang open. The old wood popped, and Alexander jumped. “Looky here,” I whispered. “This is where the Professor dropped Miss Dabney’s papa’s watch. Then he jammed it shut, right in front of the public, though nobody noticed.” The little drawer would spring open and shut at a touch. Alexander like to wear the gadget out, fooling with it.
I crept around the cabinet, to find there was no back on it. The bottom of the cabinet was heaped high with various items. The only light came from some gauzy stuff glowing with phosphorescent paint. It looked like Sybil’s costume. In this dull gleam I made out sticks of incense and candle ends and a box of kitchen matches, which I reached for to cast more light on the subject.
Alexander had come around to hover behind me. Just as my hand closed on the matchbox, the pile of glowing gauze came alive and twitched. A terrible voice whined, “ ’Ere! Take your ’ands orf me, you narsty old b—”
Alexander’s high whistling shriek drowned all other sounds. Fear riveted him to the floor. Otherwise I’d have been left alone to face the talking gauze. The matchbox fell on my shoe, and the gauze thrashed around and rose up.
I kept my wits about me, but barely. Presently Little Sybil and me were eye-to-eye. There was blood in hers. It could only be Sybil, and she was earthly to a fault. I’d roused her from a deep sleep, for she blinked. Her forehead glowed with a dab of phosphorescent paint from her drapings. Her hair was the color of old snow. She looked bruised in the blue light, except for a black wet mouth. As she blinked slack-jawed at me, I saw she was snaggle-toothed. There was something of an old woman about her, but she was so scrawny and shapeless she couldn’t have been older than twelve.
“Oooo might you be when you’re at ’ome?” she inquired in her hollow voice. But it was too late to scare me, and she knew it.
Alexander’s hushed voice came from over my shoulder, “O Lord in Heaven, I will be a good boy if only—”
“I’m Blossom Culp,” I said, “and this hero behind me is Alexander Armsworth. We represent the law in Bluff City.”
Sybil swept down for the matchbox, and struck a light to a candle nub. “Come orf it,” she remarked in her odd accent. The letter h seemed to be missing from her vocabulary. “I’ve seen the law in my time, and you don’t look nuffing like it.”
“Be that as it may,” I replied, “it’s in your best interests to cooperate. If word gets out that you’re human, the law won’t be far behind. They’ll have you in school before you know it.” Sybil and me were nose-to-nose with only the candle flame between us.
“School!” said she, scandalized. “I never set foot in a school. You won’t get me there! Besides, I’m sixteen.”
“Eleven.”
“Fifteen,” she said, “nearly.”
“Twelve.”
“Mind your own business,” she said.
“And what if I was to say they’d arrested your Professor Regis, found a certain gold watch on him, and locked him up?” I inquired.
“I’d call you a liar,” spat Sybil. “Because the old b—”
“I got to be going now,” Alexander said.
“—never was arrested in his life,” finished Sybil. “With that ’oneyed tongue ’e can talk ’imself out of any tight place. Why, they found a pearl necklace, a silver cigar box, and forty-two dollars in cash on ’im in Vandalia, and ’e walked away from them. Nobody’ll testify against ’im in court.”
“And just where do you come in to all this?” I asked, seeing she was talkative.
“I don’t,” she said. “I sleep in this ’ere cabinet, and the Perfessor and I, we never ride in the same coach on the railway. Nobody can finger me, for I’m the Spirit Sybil. Nobody ’as laid a ’and on me during a seance, I’m that quick. Otherwise, I’m nowhere to be seen. We travel at night. I ain’t seen daylight in two years.”
“You look it,” I remarked.
“You’re no American Beauty Rose yourself,” Sybil commented.
There’s nothing like swapping insults to clear the air. I couldn’t approve of her shady calling, but she had spunk, and I like that.
“Well, look here, Sybil, this is no life for a young kid such as yourself. You’re in no better situation than a mole.” Sybil blinked. In a way she was a mortal version of Minerva. Nobody ever had occasion to give her a good talking to. “Just how do you live? When all this comes to light, it’ll go better for you if you look like an innocent party—anyhow not quite the crook you are.”
I thought she’d sulk, but she said, “Crikey! If you aren’t the worst Nosy Parker I ever come up against! Orl right, if you must know, you must. Welcome to my ’appy ’ome.” She managed to step out of all the gauze drapings and planted a bare foot on the floor. Alexander retreated a couple of steps. But he’d quit praying and was listening.
Sybil fixed the candle in a handy bracket on the cabinet wall. “ ’Ere I sleep,” she said, pointing to a pile of rags on the cabinet floor I wouldn’t put a dog down on. “And just there’s my supper.” She pointed out an empty can of pork and beans lodged in the corner. “There’s the you-know-wot.” She waved a hand at a china chamber pot. It looked to me like she slept with her head in the beans and her feet in the chamber pot. It was close quarters in that cabinet and anything but clean. There was a water jug, but no soap.
She warmed to the task of showing us around her narrow world. There was a flue in the top where the incense smoke rose up, and peepholes on various levels in the front doors. Sybil could scan the crowd out front well before she made her entrance. The whole cabinet was as busy as a Chinese puzzle and as clever. The entire contraption came apart for shipping.
There were other drawers and loose panels fitted to the inside, but Sybil passed over these. Only persuasion made her admit that the secret drawer on the front was where the Professor stashed items lifted from the clients. She showed us how she could gather this swag from the inside. What happened to the loot then she didn’t say.
Oh, they had their routine all worked out. It was hard not to admire it. Alexander did.
But I needed to know more if I was to break up this act, which I meant to do, before the Professor and her caused more mischief. Sybil need be no match for me; she had no more supernatural powers than a hand-fed calf. Still, I had unanswered questions.
She was reluctant to give away all her trade secrets. So I appealed to her pride. There would be time later for threats outright. “Well, Sybil,” says I, “I only hope this Professor Regis pays you a good wage. Looks to me like without you he don’t have much of an act.”
“Not ’arf,” she replied, which I took to be agreement.
I could tell from the way she thrust her chin out that the Professor didn’t pay her a thin dime. But I’d planted that seed and moved on. “I was in the audience yesterday myself,” I said, “sitting next to a certain lady, well known in the community.”
“The old party in the orful ’at,” Sybil shot back. “The one that took a dive at the end.”
“That’s her. And it looked to me like you didn’t pick her out of the crowd by chance.”
Sybil smirked.
“Looked to me like she was a sitting duck for you and the Professor.”
“That’s right,” Sybil preened.
“Did you know who she was ahead of time?”
“Didn’t need to, did I?” said Sybil, swollen with pride. “There’s one like ’er at every seance and usually several. Sticks out like a sore thumb, even wivout the ’at. There’s always some old maid ’ankering after ’er dear departed old dad. I seen ’er through the peep’ole before I manifested.”
“But you took your time getting around to her.”
“I’m that subtle,” Sybil explained.
“And you knew she was an old—an unmarried lady.”
“That’s right. Reached down and touched ’er left ’and, where the wedding ring wasn’t.”
“And then you signaled across the room to the Professor.”
&nbs
p; “That’s it. I ’old up one finger for yes, two for no. The Perfessor’s brown-eyed. Blue-eyed people ’ave night blindness, but the Perfessor’s got eyes like a barn owl.”
“It’s true about brown-eyed people seeing better in the dark,” Alexander put in. “Champ Ferguson, he’s brown-eyed, and we always depend on him when we’re out at night.”
I waited through this interruption and then said, “What makes you so sure she had some valuable object on her person, Sybil?”
“In this business,” she said, “you can tell what people are worth in a glance.” She gave me an up-and-down look. “And these old maids, they always carry around some keepsake or other. We take in cash money too. There’s several ways of working things.”
How true, I thought to myself.
“Well, that about tells the tale,” I said carefully, “except for that nonsense about the table-rapping.”
“That’s the Perfessor’s own invention, and ’e’s that vain of it. There’s a clapper under the table, and it works on a black thread running to the Perfessor’s knee. Then at the end of the seance, ’e walks away from the table. The thread breaks, and Bob’s your uncle!”
It was time to wind this up while Sybil was still halfway agreeable. She was the shifty type that could turn on you at any time. Still, for reasons of my own I needed to know a few personal things about her.
“Say, Sybil. You talk funny. Are you foreign?”
“What’s that to you?”
I waited her out while she gave me a fishy-eyed look.
“Maybe I am, since you arsk,” she said, shiftier than before. “My old mum, she as much as sold me to the Perfessor. I grew up in the Bermondsey Road—fast.”
“Where’s that?” asked Alexander. “St. Louis?”
“It’s London, you chump,” Sybil growled at him.
“London, England?” said Alexander, amazed.
“The same. Where else? And the Perfessor says I ’ave to do everything ’e says because I’m an illegal alien, the old b—”
“Then it’s true he’s astonished the Crowned Heads of Europe?” I asked.
“Crowned ’Eads! Don’t make me larf! ’E never played north of Battersea Funfare the best day ’e lived. ’E worked for ’alfpennies in England and ’ad to come back to this ignorant country, where people will believe anything, they’re that gullible!”
By then I’d had enough of Sybil. It’d be more trouble than it was worth to get out of her where the Professor hid all the stolen items. I figured what he picked up in one town he sold in the next. Anything left over was likely tucked away in the hidy-holes of the cabinet. He wouldn’t carry it on himself. I knew enough to play Sybil’s role at the Professor’s last seance. But first I had to get rid of Sybil.
“Well, it’s your life,” says I, beginning mild. “But while the Professor is snug in his fine room down at the Cornhusker Hotel with a hot dinner in him, you eat straight from the can and sleep on rags in the dark.”
“It’s a ’ard life,” Sybil agreed.
“And it’s like to get harder for you. As I said, Alexander Armsworth and me, we represent the law in Bluff City. And they’ll have you up on several counts. Being an illegal alien’s a good start. Fraud and larceny is a couple more. Maybe nobody’ll testify against the Professor out of shame at being bilked. But that won’t keep the County Court from putting you away.”
“Away?” muttered Sybil.
“In the Reformatory for Wayward Girls. You’re a prize candidate if ever one was. They’ll lock you up, throw away the key, and not look for it again till you’re twenty-one.”
“Crikey!” said Sybil, shrinking.
“There’s just one way out for you.” By then I had her eating out of my hand. Alexander too. He can never see a minute ahead. “You got any money?”
“I know where some is.” Sybil’s eyes slewed over to the cabinet wall.
“Take what cash you can find and leave everything else, including them . . . drapings. Clear out before daybreak. It’s your only chance. Otherwise you’ll be looking through bars with a number round your neck.”
“Crikey,” breathed Sybil again. “Wot if the Perfessor catches me? ’E’ll ’ave me ’ead.”
“Another good reason for getting an early start,” said I.
“I don’t know,” whined Sybil.
“Run for your life. There’s a milk train through here at five o’clock.”
Then Alexander and me were gone, leaving the Spirit Sybil ankle-deep in her cabinet and lost in thought.
For a wonder, Alexander got Miss Dabney’s Pope-Detroit started. I will say he steered it better than its owner. There was gray light in the east as we rolled along Fairview Avenue. Alexander was bright as a button over his new-found skill at steering. He was very brave on the subject of Sybil too, since I’d done all the negotiating and he hadn’t been totally unmanned by fear.
Still, he thought of complaints. “Lookit here,” he said, taking a curb close, “it’s nearly daylight. How am I going to keep awake at school? Miss Spaulding, she’ll snatch me baldheaded if I doze.”
“There’ll be no school for me and you today, Alexander,” I explained. “We have a day’s work getting ready for the Professor’s last seance in Bluff City.”
“Leave me out of whatever you’ve got in mind,” he warned.
“You’re already in it. It wouldn’t do if word got out you’d spent a long night with me instead of at home in bed, where your folks think you are.”
“Common blackmail, Blossom,” he complained. “You know no other way.”
“And another thing. Since your brother-in-law, Lowell Seaforth, is a newspaper reporter, it’s up to you to get him to attend the seance. We’ll want news coverage on this and plenty of it. I have no doubt Seaforth is always looking for a good story. And if he’s anything like most cub reporters, he never knows where to find one. Have him there. It’s as big a story as he’s liable to stumble on around these parts.”
“I don’t see how there’ll be a seance at all, without Sybil,” Alexander said.
“Crikey!” said I in a hollow, foreign voice. “There’ll be a Sybil there, orl right.”
10
I WAS EVERYWHERE at once that next day, except at school. Not knowing when Professor Regis would turn up at the Odd Fellows Hall, I had to be there with time to spare, stowed away in the cabinet and already tricked out as Sybil. This part of the plan seemed foolproof because the Professor is a drinking man. And a drinking man is rarely alert early in the day.
Alexander’s job was to hang out near the Cornhusker Hotel saloon. When Professor Regis issued forth, Alexander was to locate me posthaste. My first stop was at Miss Dabney’s. Here I expected the worst. I’d left her raving and then knocked out by hot milk. I feared for her mind, but I reckoned without her grit.
She greeted me at the door, very grave. Her long face was stretched to record length. She looked like one suddenly sobered. A tragic heroine—Lady Macbeth or some such.
School days and hooky are nothing to her. Expecting I’d shortly be at her side, she’d laid out a breakfast in the parlor. There were hot English scones and herb tea. After I’d eaten my fill under her gaze, she intoned, “Well, Blossom, Bluff City has called me an eccentric old fool for many a long and weary year. Yesterday I fulfilled their fondest notions.”
I shifted uncomfortably. The hall clock struck, and we both thought of her papa’s missing pocket watch. “And a fine example I am to a young and impressionable girl such as yourself,” she rambled on. “What could have come over me to be bamboozled by a transparent faker? I am mortified to my soul. I felt myself being drawn under the dastard’s influence and was powerless in his grip. And the very idea of dear Papa speaking to me in that awful, shrill voice: ‘Oiuwwww, Gertrude, my little love, art . . . thou . . . happy?’ indeed!”
“Your sensibilities was being played on,” I consoled. “The Professor and that Sybil knew you was faithful in your heart to your departed papa, and thei
r whole low scheme depended on it.”
“How true. My idiotic sentimentality clouded my judgment. I was nothing more than a—a—”
“Sitting duck,” I said, and Miss Dabney agreed.
“You are a kindly and understanding child, Blossom.” (Here I fidgeted under the weight of Miss Dabney’s charity.) “But I daresay the seance room was full of gossips who will forget their own foolishness in remembering mine. I am nothing but a half-crazed, feather-headed . . . old . . . maid.” The tears zigzagged down her face.
“Don’t call yourself names,” I said in a small voice. “We are a couple of . . . unmarried ladies. And we have to stick together.”
“Oh, Blossom,” she moaned, and the tears flowed freely, some of them mine.
But it was not a time to give way. “We’re not without our defenses,” I piped up. Then I put Miss Dabney in the picture. I told her all about the nighttime raid Alexander and me made on the Odd Fellows Hall. I made it clear that Sybil was mightily mortal, though I left out about her being English. If Miss Dabney learned that, she might falter, but Sybil was not the sort of English that Miss Dabney held in high regard. Sybil was more chamber pot than Rockingham tea cup.
When I’d outlined my plan for the afternoon’s seance, Miss Dabney’s spirits revived. She needed no urging to play a small role in discrediting the Professor. “We will strike a great blow against this spiritualist quack!” she announced, and pounded her sofa cushions. Still, when I told her to leave off her usual hat so she’d pass unrecognized, she thought I was being overcautious.
We talked well into the afternoon before a pebble hit the parlor window. This was Alexander’s sign that the Professor was heading to the scene of his daily crime. Chauffeured by Miss Dabney at the Pope-Detroit’s top speed, I made it to the seance room with minutes to spare.
When I slunk into the back of the cabinet, I grinned in the gloom to find Sybil’s evil-smelling nest empty and deserted. There was just time to explore every secret compartment and make a pile of the contraband I found. Not a nickel in ready money remained, but there was an accumulation of items from previous hauls. I slid back a final panel, and Miss Dabney’s papa’s watch and fob dropped into my hand.
