She thought about the cellar, a place so musty that her father had decided against using it for storage. Which was fine with Lucy, who didn’t like dark, dank cellars. She would just as soon exhaust all other possibilities first.
That left the kitchen, which was the only room whose closets and cupboards she and her father hadn’t explored completely during all their unpacking. It seemed an unlikely hiding place. It was too ordinary — not as mysterious as the attic or the cellar. But perhaps that was something in its favor. After all, if Oscar’s goal had been to hide something, he might very well have chosen a place where no one would think to look.
She headed for the back stairs that led from the storeroom on the second floor to the kitchen below. She was halfway down the stairs when she stopped.
She could hear her parents talking. In fact, because the door at the bottom opened right into the kitchen, she could hear every word they said. Just at this moment, they weren’t talking about anything much. Her mother was complaining that she didn’t have time to eat right now. She was too busy working on something that somebody in Boston wanted yesterday and was upset that he wouldn’t get until next week. And there was something else that somebody in New York wanted tomorrow and was upset that he wouldn’t get until Friday. Lucy’s father made sympathetic noises, and her mother added that it was all just one big headache, and she wished people would figure out that work took time.
Although their conversation might have seemed perfectly normal to the casual observer, Lucy knew from the tone of her mother’s voice that it wasn’t going to end up that way. It was going to end up as a fight. And a fight always meant that the day was going to be ruined.
Maybe she could distract them from the treacherous conversation just long enough to head off the inevitable argument. She hesitated, wondering whether she was already too late or whether she ought to come bounding into the kitchen with some exciting piece of news.
But she couldn’t think of anything particularly exciting, and the thought of trying to make something up was tiring somehow. She moved silently back upstairs.
She drifted into the hallway, not sure what to do or where to go. She didn’t much feel like searching anymore. Finally, she went down the front stairs. She stood at the door of the music parlor, trying to pretend that she was Lavonne. She pretended that Ma was standing there, playing her violin for everyone.
As far as pretending went, it wasn’t very successful. It bordered on wishing and it made Lucy feel rather lonely, so she turned away and opened the front door to go outside.
Something brushed past her leg — Walter. He gamboled down the length of the porch and slipped into the lilac bushes at the far end.
“Hey!” Lucy followed him around the side of the house, reaching the backyard just as Walter disappeared inside the smokehouse.
“Walter?” she said into the dark patch of the open door. She stepped into the smokehouse and opened the other door to let in more light.
Walter was perched on the rowboat, watching her. Lucy climbed into the rowboat. She pretended she was Oscar, getting ready to shove off from land. She picked up the oars and fitted them into the oarlocks. “Did you have your book of story ideas with you, Oscar?” she murmured as she pretended to row through dark, black waters.
And it was then that she noticed something — right under Walter’s tail.
The sides of the boat came to a point at the front of the boat. The bow, Lucy reminded herself. Not that she knew much about boats, but she had figured out bow and stern and port and starboard from books and movies. Walter was sitting on a triangular piece of wood nailed across the bow. Beneath this piece of wood was a rectangular piece of wood that was shoved vertically into the space formed by the triangular piece of wood and the sides and floor of the boat. When Lucy knocked on the rectangular piece of wood, she heard a hollow noise.
“A secret compartment!” she whispered. She kicked at the wood, causing Walter to shoot out of the boat and through the open door of the smokehouse.
When she kicked at the wood again, it fell inward. She pulled it aside, feeling eagerly inside the dark space behind it.
There was nothing there. She felt again and again just to make certain until at last she scraped her finger on a splinter of wood. Tears of pain and frustration blurred her vision.
A scratching noise overhead made her look up. She saw Walter’s eyes peering out of a hole in the wooden ceiling of the smokehouse.
“How did you get up there?” Lucy wiped her eyes, feeling oddly grateful to Walter for distracting her. She balanced herself on the starboard side of the boat, grabbed one side of the hole, and stood on tiptoe.
There was a hole in a corner of the roof where some shingles had fallen off. Some animal — a squirrel perhaps — had gnawed away part of the board underneath, leaving just enough room for Walter to squeeze from the roof into the tiny attic of the smokehouse.
Lucy could barely make out a lump sitting next to Walter. A dead animal! was her first thought. Then she chided herself for being stupid. After all, a dead animal would smell terribly, and Walter wouldn’t be sitting so calmly next to it. She reached out and brushed her hand against the lump. It was made of a coarse material.
When she tugged at the lump, it was lighter than she expected. She lost her balance and tumbled backward into the boat with the lump on top of her.
Lucy knew what the lump was now. It was a burlap bag. She turned it this way and that, feeling through the cloth, searching for an opening, feeling the interesting shapes inside. These fell out all of a sudden: a rope, a tin can, an ancient-looking stub of a pencil, and a large rubbery cloth. The last turned out to be a dirty gray slicker — the kind of coat that a person would wear on a boat in bad weather, Lucy thought. She shook it, feeling in its pockets until she found what she was looking for. Her hand closed around its cool leather cover and she pulled it out.
The book was much older than Oscar’s composition books. Lucy wondered where he had found it. There was no title on the cover, which was embossed with an intricate design of interwoven branches and flowers.
She opened the book and turned it so that light from the doorway fell across the ornate lettering on the first page.
Lucy felt the smallest of thrills, like a feather brushing over her neck. What a wonderful poem, she thought. It made her want to turn the page.
When she did, she saw that the next four pages were filled with cramped, old-fashioned writing. There were four paragraphs, the first written in faded black ink, in a foreign language Lucy didn’t recognize. She wondered whether Oscar had written it. The handwriting didn’t look anything like what she had seen in his journals.
The next paragraphs were written in pencil, and Lucy was sure that Oscar had written them. Could he have used the pencil in the burlap bag? Lucy picked it up and held it in her hand as she began to read:
There was once a country ruled by a king and queen who loved different things. The king loved cats and the queen loved birds. And just as cats and birds never get along, so it was that the king and queen never got along. And everyone in the country suffered as a result. In short, it was not a very pretty situation.
How strange, Lucy thought, that the same story her father used to tell her was here in Oscar’s book. Then again, Oscar had written in his journal that Lavonne liked his stories. Perhaps he had told this one to her before his disappearance. I bet Aunt Lavonne told the story to my dad, thought Lucy.
There was a soft thud beside her. It was Walter jumping down from the ceiling. Lucy went on reading.
Once upon a time, there was a ship of orphans. Excepting the captain, all the crew from the first mate down to the cabin boy were orphans. These children were bound to their captain, who stomped about the deck from morning till night, ordering them about and making their lives hard. For the most part, the crew were accepting of their lot, climbing the rigging like pirates, shouting gaily to each other as they swabbed the deck, and generally loving the life of the sea. But
one of them, a young girl with long, tangled curls, dreamed of other things — of lords and ladies, of kings and queens. She dreamed of escape.
It was a bit frustrating, thought Lucy, to read only the beginning of a story. A picture came into your mind, an expectation of things to come, and then nothing. She read on:
Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in a farmhouse high on a hill in the middle of nowhere. Below the hill lay endless fields of corn and more corn, divided by long, dull roads that went on forever before they came to anywhere that was somewhere. The boy liked to imagine that his house was surrounded by the sea and that he could sail forth from his home to find adventure. Such thoughts seemed no more than a dream to him. Then one night, as he sat alone in his room, he had a feeling that something strange had happened outside. When he went to look, he saw that his dream had come true. His house on the hill was surrounded by a great black sea. And in the moonlight, he saw a little boat waiting for him on the shore.
“Oh!” Lucy breathed in sharply. She could imagine Oscar floating in the rowboat in the middle of the sea, wrapped up for warmth in the rain slicker, watching the sun rise. The Book of Story Beginnings was open on his knee, and the pencil was scribbling down what had just happened to him. “Maybe Oscar told Lavonne the first story idea, but I bet he never told her this one,” Lucy told Walter. “He did take The Book of Story Beginnings with him after all. Only it came back with the boat.”
But if that were true, how had the book and the rain slicker and everything else ended up in the space above the smokehouse ceiling? And most of all, what had happened to Oscar?
Lucy wondered about the first paragraph in The Book of Story Beginnings — the paragraph written in a foreign language. Could it yield some sort of clue? She thought of her father, who knew Greek, Latin, and German. If you gave him a dictionary and enough time, he could maneuver his way through almost any language.
She stuffed the raincoat and the rope back in the bag and left them in the boat. Taking the book and the pencil, she moved to the door. Her eyes blinked in the bright sunlight as she headed for the house.
As Lucy crossed the yard, she could hear her mother’s voice through the open window. By the time she reached the screen porch door, she could hear her father’s voice as well, softer than her mother’s, less strident, but still tense and almost as terrible. Her prediction had come true: her parents were arguing.
She stepped into a space between the house and a gooseberry bush to listen.
“Shel, I never said it was okay for you to just stop working,” her mother was saying. “All I said was that if that’s what you wanted to do, I couldn’t stop you.”
“A little time off, Jean. That’s all I ask.”
“And what are we supposed to do if you can’t find a job?”
“I’ll find a job, Jean.”
“I’m just trying to get the bills paid, Shel. Meanwhile, you’re up there playing around in the attic, trying to turn lead into gold.”
“Come on, Jean! That isn’t fair.”
Why was it, Lucy wondered, that whenever her parents argued, they used each other’s names over and over again?
Her father was saying something else — she couldn’t tell what. When he was really angry, his voice always got very quiet. Then, suddenly, the door from the kitchen to the screen porch flew open. The screen porch door banged open as well. Lucy shrank back into the prickly branches of the gooseberry bush as her father strode past, down the walk and around the house. She heard the car door open and slam, the engine sputter to life, and the wheels spin on the gravel drive. It was odd, she thought, how even the car sounded mad.
She heard her mother bang a pot in the kitchen sink. She heard a choked sob. Then the sound of crying grew faint as her mother left the room.
Lucy waited, then pulled herself free from the gooseberry bush. Its thorns scratched her, leaving ruby stripes on her arms. She walked around the house to the front porch and sat down on the top step. Walter came near and pushed against her back, then sprang away when she tried to pet him. And because the warmth of a purring cat sitting next to her was just what she needed right then, Lucy’s eyes filled with tears.
“If I could wish . . .” she whispered, wiping her eyes with her hands. “What would I wish?” It was something she had said to herself since she was small.
She wished her mother would stop worrying about money. She wished her father could turn lead into gold. Looking down, she saw The Book of Story Beginnings in her lap. She opened it to the first blank page. Then, using the pencil she had found in the burlap bag, she began to write: Once upon a time, there was a girl whose father was . . . She almost wrote an alchemist, then changed her mind.
Once upon a time, there was a girl whose father was a magician.
Lucy leaned her head over the book, watching the pencil twitch expectantly in her hand, almost as if it were waiting for another sentence to propel it across the page. What should she write next? Perhaps she should describe the magician’s extraordinary powers.
Just then, however, something perfectly ordinary happened. Uncle Byron came up the driveway in his pickup truck. “Hello, Lucy,” he called.
She leaned forward to hide The Book of Story Beginnings, even though Uncle Byron was not the sort of person who would care about what she was writing in a book, even if he noticed that she was writing something.
“I’m going down to the barn to load cattle onto some trucks, Lucy. Want to come watch?”
“All right.” Lucy wasn’t sure how to say no.
“Why don’t you let your mom and dad know where you’re going.”
“My dad’s not here. Just a second, and I’ll tell my mom.” Lucy opened the front door and hurried up the stairs. She ran to her room and shoved The Book of Story Beginnings in the first place that occurred to her: under the afghan at the foot of her bed.
“Mom!”
Her mother poked her head out of the bathroom. Her eyes were red from crying, Lucy noticed.
“Mom, I’m going with Uncle Byron to watch him load cattle.”
“All right.” Her mother looked surprised, then almost pleased. “Do you want some lunch before you go?”
“Uncle Byron’s waiting ouside.” Lucy was already halfway downstairs. “I’m fine!” she called back.
Lucy spent the afternoon watching her uncle and two farm hands force great, lumbering steers onto trucks headed for a slaughterhouse. When the men were finished, Uncle Byron invited Lucy over for supper. “We’ll give your folks a call to let them know where you are,” he said.
During supper, Lucy waited for a lull in the conversation, then said, “Uncle Byron, I was wondering about something I found in the smokehouse.”
“The smokehouse! You mean that boat, eh?”
“No, not the boat. I found a bag.”
“A bag?” Uncle Byron took a sip of his iced tea.
“What was in it, dear?” asked Aunt Helen.
“Well, just some old things, really. A raincoat, a tin can, a rope — nothing much.”
Uncle Byron frowned. “That sounds like that junk they found in the boat.”
Lucy’s heartbeat quickened. “You mean they found it after Oscar disappeared?”
“That’s right,” said Uncle Byron. “My dad told me his pa found some things stowed in the front of the boat. You didn’t find them there, did you?”
“No. They were in a space above the smokehouse ceiling.”
“Well, I’ll be!” said Uncle Byron. “I guess somebody must have put them up there.”
“Did Aunt Lavonne know about the things? Did she ever see them?” Lucy asked.
“I couldn’t say, Lucy. I just assumed that junk got thrown away years ago.”
I bet Aunt Lavonne didn’t see them, thought Lucy. I bet she never even knew about The Book of Story Beginnings.
Had she found a clue at last? Lucy couldn’t wait to talk to her father.
After supper, when Uncle Byron drove her back to The Bri
ck, Lucy could see a light on in the attic. Her father was home. She waved goodbye to her uncle and hurried inside.
Her mother stopped her at the top of the stairs. “How did you like loading cattle?”
“Fine! Is Dad in the attic?”
“Yes — but before you go another step, you need a bath.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“Lucy, you smell like a barn.”
“Mom, please!”
“And as near as I can tell, you didn’t get to bed last night until the wee hours of the morning. I know you too well, Lucy Lavonne Martin. If you go up to the attic now, you’ll be there for hours. Bath first — and wash your hair. Then you can say good night to your father.”
Lucy took the world’s fastest bath. Even so, by the time it was over, the sky outside was getting dark. She pulled on her nightgown. She checked beneath the afghan on her bed. The Book of Story Beginnings was still there.
“Comb your hair!” called her mother.
Lucy groaned, then began the laborious process of untangling her long, wet hair. She heard her mother go downstairs, and then it was quiet.
It was so quiet that Lucy didn’t really hear the soft, sighing sound at first. And when she did hear it, she didn’t understand what it was. She stood there listening, wondering whether the sound came from somewhere inside the house. It was only when she attached the sound to a memory — the memory of the ocean at Rockport one summer, of waves brushing against the shore — that she ran to her window.
And there it was: a great sea surrounding the house, the water lit with a reddish glow from the sun sinking beneath the waves. Lucy could see the shadows of the waves, smaller in the distance, then much larger as they splashed against the front lawn.
“Dad,” she whispered.
The ladderlike stairs to the attic were in a closet near Oscar’s old room. “Dad!” Lucy called as she entered the closet.
He didn’t answer, but she could hear him humming as he worked. She began climbing the stairs. She was so excited that she slipped as she scrambled up the last few steps. She pulled herself through the trapdoor in the attic floor.
The Book of Story Beginnings Page 4
