Marcia squinted her eyes at the wall.
"Concentrate, Marcia! Concentrate!" we all urged her.
"I can't," she said, "when you're all shouting at me so!"
We did our best to keep quiet, no one making a peep, except maybe Petal.
"I can see her! I can see her!" Marcia was excited again now.
But a moment later, excitement turned to terror.
"Oh no!" Marcia said, moving away from the wall.
"What is it? What is it?" we cried.
"The Wicket." Marcia gulped. "I just saw her. She was writing a note to Social Services. She said she was sure the eight little girls next door to her were living alone, without parental supervision." Marcia gulped again before adding:
"And she invited them to come investigate!"
SEVEN
"Cor, the Wicket's evil!" Georgia said, a mix of horror and admiration in her eyes.
"What does cor mean?" Zinnia asked.
"It's a British word," Jackie said. "It means something like 'gosh wow!'"
"Are we British, then?" Petal asked. "I have been curious about that."
"We might as well be," Rebecca said, "to hear Annie do her Daddy impersonation."
"If we're not," Durinda said, "I've been thinking of converting." She shrugged when we all looked at her. "It seems like it'd be fun."
"I'll tell you what's not fun," Annie said. "The Wicket turning us in to Social Services."
"Well," Marcia said, "at least I saw the Wicket writing to Social Services, not e-mailing or telephoning, so it should take her letter a few days to get there. And then who knows how many more days it will take them to respond? You know, bureaucratic red tape."
"Yes," Annie said, "but once they do respond, they'll probably send someone out right away to investigate and they'll discover that there are no adults living in our home. And then we'll all be split up, sent to live in different houses."
"Can't you just put on the Daddy disguise?" Zinnia suggested to Annie, but Annie just shook her head.
"What about you?" Petal said, her lip quivering as she addressed Marcia. "You like wearing the Daddy disguise now."
But Marcia shook her head too.
"That won't work," Annie said, "no matter who wears the disguise. The thing is, it may work when we're driving the car or when we're out in public. But it won't work at fooling anyone in our own home. For one thing, whoever comes to investigate will count the heads of those Eights not wearing the Daddy disguise and come up with only seven. Then the jig'll be up."
"Then what will work?" Rebecca demanded.
We looked at Annie. We looked at Marcia.
But neither had an answer.
***
Monday we couldn't wait to get the school day over with.
Yes, yes, we did pay attention to the Mr. McG whenever we were in the classroom—that man! He was so obsessed with actually trying to teach us. And we maybe even learned a new thing or two, but we were still desperate to be done. We needed to get home so we could figure out what to do about the Wicket and Social Services.
"Cor blimey!" Georgia said to the bus driver on the way home. "Can't you drive this thing any faster, my good man?"
"No, I can't." The bus driver glared at Georgia in the rearview mirror. "It wouldn't be safe."
We all glared back at him but it did us no good. On that day, all the bounces on the little yellow bus were frustratingly slow bounces.
***
Once again, we couldn't find Marcia.
Arriving home, we'd tossed our backpacks aside and raced through the snack that Durinda prepared for us with Jackie's help. Annie had said that for once we could put off doing our homework until later in the evening because we had more urgent matters than math and English to deal with at the moment: we needed to save ourselves. And to do that, we needed to brainstorm a plan.
So that's what we were doing. We were in the drawing room brainstorming a strategy to save our civilization as we knew it when we realized that one of our number was missing.
"Do you think she's gone out driving again?" Georgia wondered.
"Perhaps this time she's gone for a joy ride," Rebecca said. "I know that's what I'd do if I could drive."
"What's a joy ride?" Petal asked.
"It's exactly what it sounds like," Jackie said.
"Oh!" Petal looked pleasantly surprised. "It's so nice when words mean exactly what they sound like."
"Jackie," Zinnia said, "do you think maybe you should race up to the tower room to see if Annie's Daddy disguise is missing again?"
Jackie took off.
"Oh no! Did someone say 'missing'?" Petal's pleasure had turned to distress. "First Mommy and Daddy went missing. Now Marcia's gone too. Do you think we're slowly being picked off, one by one, by aliens who are transporting us in their spaceship to a distant planet where they will study us to see why we are the way we are?"
Rebecca studied Petal for a long moment before speaking. "I must say, that's a very creative, if unusually long, delusion you're nursing today."
"I don't know what that means!" Petal said. "But what if I'm next? What if the aliens are taking me next?"
"You're not next," Rebecca said, growing bored.
"Well, technically, she is," Durinda said. "I mean, for getting her power and her gift. June is the next month."
"But I don't want to get my power and my gift next!" Petal said. "That's worse than being abducted by aliens!"
"Oh, bother." Georgia rolled her eyes.
And then Jackie was back, and she wasn't even out of breath.
"The Daddy disguise is where it should be," Jackie informed us. "And even though no one asked me to, I checked the garage. The Hummer hasn't been moved and the engine is still cool."
"My, you're getting slow," Rebecca said. "It took you all that time just to run up to the tower room, back down to the garage, and then here? And you used to be faster than a train!"
"I hate to say, Jackie," Zinnia said gently, "but that is kind of slow. For you, I mean."
"Well," Jackie said, not looking the slightest bit bothered by the insults, whether they were intentional or unintentional, "after checking the first two places, I did check every other room in the house, figuring she had to be here somewhere."
We thought about that—how many rooms there were in our house and how long it would take to thoroughly check all of them—and we realized that Jackie hadn't lost any speed at all. Well, not much.
"And?" Annie asked.
"And I found her," Jackie said. "She's in the basement."
"Not the basement!" Petal was horrified. To her, going into the basement was even worse than getting abducted by aliens.
"Yes, the basement. She's got on Mommy's old lab coat." Jackie paused. "And I think she's inventing something."
***
Seven of us crept down the basement stairs, hoping to find out what Marcia was up to.
Despite Petal's fears, our basement was a rather nice place, certainly when compared with the Wicket's evil one. Our basement was where our scientist mother had created all of her greatest inventions.
Or at least the ones we knew about.
Unlike the Wicket's basement, with its coldness and its barbed-wire fence around her wretched desk, our basement was warm and inviting. It even had orange shag wall-to-wall carpeting and a purple beanbag chair in the corner.
Funny, we thought, looking around and wondering why we never spent much time down there. It really wasn't such a bad place. There was hardly a spider in sight!
But then something else, bigger than a spider, came into sight.
There, behind Mommy's inventor's table, stood Marcia.
Marcia had on Mommy's lab coat, just like Jackie had informed us, but on Marcia, the hem of it fell somewhere around her ankles. Marcia also wore protective goggles over her eyes, and she was laughing—rather maniacally, it appeared to us—as she mixed potions in a test tube. Beside her on the lab table were scattered wires and gears, all sort
s of metal bits and pieces, plus an astonishing array of tools.
"You look like a mad scientist," Rebecca said.
"Thank you," Marcia said. She didn't glance up from her work, although she did look pleased, even if some of us suspected that Rebecca had not meant that as a compliment.
"Um, if you don't mind us asking," Annie said, "what are you doing?"
"I'm returning to our roots," Marcia said, measuring a little bit of this, stirring a little bit of that, and then pouring it all into a beaker and watching the liquid turn bright blue. "Mommy's an inventor-slash-scientist, so I'm simply following in her footsteps: coming up with an invention to save the day."
"But what is it?" Zinnia asked.
"It's a device." And now we could tell Marcia was concentrating very hard as her fingers flew among the scattered wires and gears, all sorts of metal bits and pieces, and the astonishing array of tools.
"We can see that," Georgia said. "But what sort of device?"
Marcia's hands were flying so fast-attaching this, twisting that, screwing on the other thing—her fingers might have been Jackie running!
"There!" Marcia stood back, pleased: somehow she'd managed to take every scattered item from the table and attach them all together to make one piece. Well, except for the beaker full of blue liquid. A moment later, Marcia looked up. She must have forgotten we were there until she'd sensed seven sets of eyes gazing back and forth from her to her invention.
"Oh, sorry," she said, looking embarrassed. "As I was about to say, my invention will save—"
"But aren't you going to add that blue stuff?" Petal interrupted. "It always gets me nervous when people make something from a kit and find pieces left over. Don't you think everything is there for a reason?"
"Oh." Marcia blushed. Then she shocked us by raising the beaker to her lips and taking a long slug right from it.
"You don't need that for your invention?" Zinnia asked.
"I hope you didn't just drink poison!" Petal gasped.
"Nope." Marcia wiped her blue mouth on her sleeve. "It's just my Kool-Aid for while I'm working." She passed the beaker around. "Anyone want some?"
Seven heads shook.
"Getting back to your invention and its purpose?" Annie prompted.
"Oh, right!" Marcia set down the beaker and picked up the device to demonstrate it. "Well, it's like this—you do this thing, that thing, and the other—like so. And then sound will come out of it. I found a video of Mommy and Daddy's wedding, then I took their recorded voices off that, inserted the sounds into this, and then somehow programmed the thing so we can speak into it over here but whatever we say will come out in the drawing room or the living room sounding exactly like Mommy or Daddy."
"That sounds ... involved," Rebecca said, for once too stunned to be snide. She was that in awe of Marcia's intelligence. We all were. This really did seem like rocket science to us!
"But who will talk into it?" Annie asked. "And won't the Social Services person notice if there are only seven of us in the room? Remember, that was a problem with the idea of one of us wearing the Daddy disguise."
"Oh, that." Marcia pooh-poohed her concerns. "When anyone asks, we always say that one of our parents is in the bathroom with a tummy virus and the other is in France. Well, this time we'll say they both have tummy viruses and that it might be contagious, which is why they can only talk but not be seen. Then we'll each take turns excusing ourselves, go to the other room where the device will be hidden, and impersonate Mommy and Daddy through the device. And voilà!" Marcia wiped one hand against the other. "Problem solved!"
Well, it didn't sound quite that easy, but since we didn't have anything better, or even anything else...
"Let's try it!" we cried. Seven of us raced up to the drawing room as Marcia gathered together her device and her beaker of Kool-Aid.
Once we were all in the drawing room, there was some argument over who should be the first to talk into the device. At last it was agreed that Marcia should be. She'd invented the thing, after all.
So she went to the other room and Annie impersonated a Social Services type of person grilling us with questions, but all we heard back, first in Mommy's voice and then in Daddy's, was:
"Garble, garble, garble."
"Why isn't this working?" we heard Marcia cry in frustration from the other room. Then, after a heavy sigh: "I guess it's back to the drawing board."
"Oh, does that mean Marcia's invention doesn't work?" Petal wanted to know. "I thought garble, garble, garble was the sound of her drinking more Kool-Aid."
***
But the drawing board yielded no better results on Tuesday; nor did the results improve on Wednesday.
And then Thursday came.
Since Marcia was now in charge, after Georgia collected the mail from the mailbox, she delivered it to Marcia instead of Annie.
"What's this?" Marcia said. There was just one long envelope. "Not another bill already!"
"Why don't you use your x-ray vision and find out?" Georgia suggested.
"Or quicker yet," Rebecca said, "look at the return address."
"Oh no!" Marcia held it up so we all could see.
In the upper left-hand corner, it said Social Services.
"They don't seem very social to me," Zinnia said.
"You'd better open it," Annie said, "so we know exactly what we're up against."
Marcia slit open the envelope and read.
Dear Blah-blah-blah,
This is to inform you that a complaint has been made against your household. Someone will be out to investigate shortly.
Signed,
Blah-blah-blah
"I wonder how shortly is shortly?" Petal asked, looking around fearfully as though we might all be abducted to another planet any second.
"The Wicket just wrote her letter on Sunday," Jackie said.
"And this is only Thursday," Durinda said. "Yet already," Georgia said, "we're hearing from Social Services."
"Who knew," Marcia said, "that the postal service could be so efficient?"
EIGHT
"I'll tell you one thing," Annie said.
We all turned to her.
"Shortly means shortly," Annie said, "even if we don't exactly know what shortly means to Social Services. We have to think quickly and come up with a new plan. We can no longer afford to wait for new inventions to decide to work properly. Why, look how long it's taken with robot Betty—and she's still not right!"
"So what should our plan be?" Georgia asked.
Six heads swung toward Marcia.
After all, she had wanted to be in charge.
Marcia looked at the device she'd invented. At various times since Monday, she'd taken half the gears and things out of it and reinserted them in different orders, but it still wasn't working. All she could get out of it was garble, garble, garble.
She shrugged, looking as sorry as a person could. "I got nothing."
As if watching a tennis game, six heads swung back toward Annie.
"I think," Annie said, "that what we need to do is call on Old Reliable."
"Old Reliable!" Rebecca snorted. "That sounds like the name of a horse!"
"No," Annie said. "Old Reliable is our mechanic."
***
Some people when faced with trouble call in an expert. Other people when faced with trouble call in the Marines. But whenever we'd been faced with trouble, at least since our parents' disappearance back on New Year's Eve, we'd called in Pete the mechanic, from Pete's Repairs and Auto Wrecking.
Well, it worked for us.
"Hullo, Eights!" Pete said when we opened the front door that night.
For once, he wasn't arriving alone. At his side was Mrs. Pete. Nor was he arriving empty-handed, or armed only with his mechanic tools, although he had those, just in case. Rather, he and Mrs. Pete stood between two suitcases.
We invited Pete and Mrs. Pete in.
"Pete's told me about this place," Mrs. Pete said, her eyes wide wi
th wonder as she looked around the front room, taking in the furniture, plus Daddy Sparky and Mommy Sally. "But mere words don't do it justice," she added as the flying watering can swooped down low, causing her to duck.
"I'll show you around," Durinda offered.
"I wish you would," Mrs. Pete said, going off with her and Jackie.
"Thank you for coming right away when we called," Annie said to Pete.
"Don't I always?" he said. It was the kind of thing that could have sounded smug or put-upon coming from anyone else, but from him it was merely a happy observation of fact.
"We wish we could tell you how long we'll need you," Georgia said.
"We hate to inconvenience you in any way," Rebecca added.
When it came to Pete, even Georgia and Rebecca didn't like to risk offending him. He was our golden goose, although we'd never seen him lay any eggs.
"Not to worry," Pete said in his easygoing way. "Emergencies take however long they take. You can't set a clock by them. So don't you worry, because I'm not worried."
"Lucky you," Petal said. "I'm worrying enough for all of us."
"What about Old Felix?" Zinnia asked, referring to Pete's cat. "You didn't leave him home alone, did you?"
"I could have," Pete said. "He's very self-sufficient. But no—whoops!—I forgot I brought him along."
Pete pulled his navy T-shirt away from his body and out popped the cat from underneath it.
Funny, you'd think a person would remember having brought a cat with him if that cat was under his shirt. Even funnier, we hadn't noticed Pete had a cat under there!
He really was an amazing man.
"Now, off with you." Pete gave Old Felix a gentle shove in the direction of the cat room, which was like our drawing room, only for cats. "Don't flirt too much with all the girl cats."
Just then Mrs. Pete returned with Durinda and Jackie.
"Oh!" she said to Pete as she clapped her hands together. "You should see the room they have for us to sleep in!"
"It's our parents' room," Annie said.
"You're too important to put in just a guest room," Zinnia said.
Marcia's Madness Page 5
