The Atomic Weight of Secrets or The Arrival of the Mysterious Men in Black

by Eden Unger Bowditch

  But it was not until Jasper, Lucy, and Faye had already left that the carriage, after making one more tour around the block, that the carriage finally stopped in front of One Oak. The driver took Wallace’s bags and walked them to the door, handing them to Daisy, who greeted him with a giant smile on her face. Wallace clung tightly to his bundle.

  “Well, my darling boy, you must be hungry, mustn’t you?” said Daisy, smiling a smile almost like Miss Brett’s.

  “Hello, Daisy,” Wallace said.

  Before he could ask, she said, “I’m sorry, darling. He’s not here today.”

  “I didn’t think so, but, well, you know, I had hoped.” Wallace looked down at his feet.

  “But there is a letter...”

  LETTERS FROM NO ONE

  OR

  WHAT HAPPENED IN THE MEADOW

  Each child had received a similar note. All said, basically, the same thing:

  Dearest Wonderful Child(ren),

  We (I) miss you so very much and we were (I was) so excited thinking we (I) would see you this weekend. Unfortunately, things require that we (I) stay here a bit longer. We (I) hope to get home by Saturday afternoon. Or possibly Sunday morning. Perhaps late morning. Or evening. Or perhaps the following weekend.

  In any case, we (I) will do our (my) best to see you.

  Our (my) everlasting love,

  Father (and Mother)

  Wallace, upon reading the letter from his father, again reached his hand into his empty pocket and, in that giant oyster of despair, felt a tiny grain of relief that his father had the lucky coin and, therefore, something that belonged to Wallace. He felt a surge of joy to know that his father had taken the time to write, and that he would be home soon. Or probably soon. Or, at least, home sometime.

  However, once Wallace had settled in, eaten, and really scrutinized the letter, he realized that, unless his father had gone to a finishing school these many weeks, he had not, in fact, written this letter with his own hand. Wallace’s father was left-handed, and wrote in a kind of chicken scratch, on a slight angle to the page. This letter was written in perfect script—no scratch, no slant. Could his father have dictated the letter? Did Wallace believe that?

  Wallace’s face burned with embarrassment for having felt so excited.

  Faye did not have to read much of her letter to throw it onto the floor in disgust. Then she picked it up again and threw it down with even more force. Once was not enough. She wanted to keep throwing it as hard as she could.

  Noah, too, tossed his aside. He was not furious like Faye or hopeful like Wallace—he just saw it as some silly way to make him believe his father planned a return. But his father had never before used the phrase “everlasting love.” This was not his father’s writing.

  Lucy and Jasper were no different. They knew their mother’s voice, her writing, and her language, and they knew instantly and without a doubt that this letter was not from her. And their father simply did not write letters at all.

  “Do they think we’re idiots?” Faye asked soon after, standing with the others in the meadow. “Leaving us generic notes clearly mass-produced for our benefit?” She took her crumpled letter and threw it at a tree. “What a load of hogwash. If my father wrote this, he would have called me his little marmelo. This is not from him. It proves they have him captive. If he was able to write, why didn’t he just write to me? If our parents were not held hostage, they’d have the freedom to write, to visit, to take us with them. My father is in trouble, and we’ve got to find him. We’ve got to find all of them. If you can’t see that these notes aren’t even in our parents’ handwriting, they aren’t even—”

  “We know that, Faye,” Jasper said. “We all know that. You think we can’t tell these notes didn’t come from our parents or that—”

  “Not right away. Wallace didn’t even—”

  “Leave him alone,” Jasper said.

  “But you don’t understand—”

  “What? Don’t understand? What does that mean, ‘You don’t understand’?” Jasper’s voice cracked. “No matter how different we are from each other—no matter if we even like each other—there are things we certainly share. Things that no one else shares but us. How dare you put yourself on a pedestal of understanding! Of course we bleeding understand.” Jasper’s face was red. How could she accuse them of not understanding?

  Faye opened her mouth. Then shut it. Then opened it again.

  “I... I didn’t mean... I mean, I know... well, you know.” Faye couldn’t say it. For the first time, Jasper seemed truly to be angry with her. He hadn’t let her rant and rave—he had told her off. She didn’t know how she felt about it, but she did know he was right. Of course, they bleeding understood.

  Wallace stood back as Jasper and Noah attached the wings to the cockseat. Noah’s engine weighed more than they had hoped, but calculations confirmed it was still within the desired weight, and with twelve horsepower, there was no question this was the engine they needed. Once they found that the balance was right with the engineless model, powered by a twisted rubber band and Jasper’s propeller, Noah would work on the placement of the engine for the real prototype—the child-size, but not doll-size, version of their flying machine.

  All the while, Faye could feel the chill coming from Jasper. Somehow, she was aware of his detachment. She could feel something and she didn’t like it. She didn’t like him being cross with her. Her emotions flipped back and forth from being furious with him for his anger to being hurt that, after all the times she had been awful to him, he’d suddenly decided to shut her out. She had always trusted he’d never turn his back on her.

  “Look, Jasper,” she said, “the way I feel is—”

  “I don’t care how you feel, Faye,” Jasper said coolly. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “What does that mean?” Faye felt herself flush, her cheeks burning.

  “For you, it only matters what you feel. You don’t care what anyone else feels.” Jasper looked right into those frosty green eyes and, with all the strength he could muster, said, “You don’t need anyone else to care, Faye, because you spend so much time caring for no one but you. I’ve got other people’s feelings that concern me now.” And he turned away.

  She didn’t want it to happen, but tears threatened to fall like tiny wet soldiers ready for battle. She feared the worst, turning away so no one would see her soldiers march down her cheeks.

  FAYE TAKES HER SEAT

  OR

  WALLACE FINDS THE MISSING WORD

  The following weekend, in the meadow, the children were ready to launch a properly weighted, rubber band-and-propeller-powered paperboard aeroplane model. It was about the size of a very large blackbird with a slightly wider wingspan.

  To simulate a real pilot, they used one of Lucy’s porcelain dolls, balanced with a sandbag, so that it properly compensated for the weight of a real person and the weight of the engine relative to the weight of the aeroplane. Faye could not help but silently bemoan the fact that she was too big to be the test pilot herself.

  “Is it fine with the rest of you if I set it off?” she asked politely. Jasper finally nodded when the others agreed.

  “Thank you,” Faye said, her eyes coming to rest on Jasper. He offered her a nod and, perhaps, she hoped, the tiniest of smiles.

  Faye knew she had to watch what she said and try to be more considerate. In the middle of all the excitement of trying to fly the model aeroplane, it would be quite a challenge. Taking a deep breath, she reminded herself that launching it was the closest thing to actually being on the craft and being the pilot.

  Because it needed to be launched from a reasonable height, Faye climbed the elm tree in the middle of the meadow and stood on a thick, firm branch. She drew back her arm, her finger holding down the rubber band to keep it from unwinding.

  Lucy leaned over to Jasper. “She’ll have to watch out for them,” she said.

  Then, in a sharp rush, Faye drew in her breath and nearly fell
off the branch. There she froze, arm in the air.

  “What is it?” said Jasper, worried she was about to fall.

  “It’s them!” she cried.

  “Them?” The others looked around the meadow, but no one was there.

  “It’s them, them, patrolling the streets. We can’t launch this. What if they see it?”

  The children looked, but they couldn’t see the street. The trees and the houses blocked the view.

  “Patrolling in the daytime? How could we not know?” Jasper asked.

  Lucy raised her hand. “I knew.”

  “We’ve never left the meadow,” Wallace said.

  “We never needed to,” said Lucy. “We get lovely treats and the meadow is jolly good fun.”

  “How did you know, Lucy?” asked Jasper.

  “Because I saw them and I counted when I was in my bedroom,” Lucy explained. “My room is at the front of the house, upstairs, and I can see the street. When we spent the day in our rooms, when we were cross with Rosie for telling us the man in the tall velvet hat was Mummy and Daddy, I saw the black carriages and bicycles and riders riding down the road. It’s all right, though,” she added quickly. “It’s not like at night. It’s more like Fridays at the farm when they hardly patrol at all. Or Sundays here. During the day, they only pass every nine and a half minutes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” asked Jasper, surprised by all the information his sister had kept to herself.

  “Tell you what?” Lucy asked, equally surprised.

  “That there were patrols in the daytime!”

  “Why?” she said, eyebrows raised. “Was it important?”

  Jasper opened his mouth to answer, but couldn’t. So he looked up at Faye and asked, “What do we do?”

  Faye was still silent, still poised with her rather tired arm, frozen in the air.

  “What is it, Faye?” Jasper watched her up there. She seemed petrified. “Faye?”

  Faye looked down and smiled. “It’s been ninety seconds and they still haven’t passed. I think we need to wait until they pass again. Then we’ll know how long between patrols.”

  “But Lucy said it was every nine and a half minutes,” Jasper said.

  “Yes, well...” Faye considered her words. “Let’s be sure, shall we? It’s only a few minutes to be sure it is always nine and a half minutes.”

  They waited. And waited. And waited.

  Nine and a half minutes after the carriage passed, another black carriage driven by what appeared to be a black banana circled the block, then drove off to a wider patrol farther away.

  Partially hidden by the trees, Faye looked around and, taking aim with her outstretched arm, launched the aeroplane.

  As it flew from her hand, five faces shined in the speckled sunlight twinkling through the trees. They watched for what felt like long, long minutes as the tiny model aeroplane and its porcelain doll pilot soared through the air, flying on its own power.

  The craft stayed aloft for twenty-eight seconds before crashing, nose first, into the willow in Wallace’s backyard.

  “Twenty-eight seconds!” Faye shouted from her perch. “Twenty-eight marvelous seconds! That’s wonderful!” She practically danced down, from branch to branch to ground.

  “But we’d all be dead if we were on board,” said Wallace, pushing his glasses upon the bridge of his nose as he retrieved the model from the willow branches. It was fairly crumpled.

  “Perhaps Wallace is right,” said Noah, picking up the head of the doll that had rolled away from the wreckage. “‘Wonderful’ might not be the most appropriate word.”

  Wallace tossed him the rest of the doll he’d salvaged from the wreck.

  “My dolly!” Lucy exclaimed.

  “Sorry, Lucy,” Noah said, handing her the doll and its severed head, “but it’s all in the name of science.”

  Lucy took the pieces in her arms and hugged them.

  “I’ll fix your dolly, Lucy,” Jasper said. “We’ve got glue in the nursery. She’ll be as good as new, and you can put her in the hospital bed next to the dollhouse.” He quickly received a hug from Lucy.

  “We need more room to fly, to really fly our prototype,” said Faye. “This was fine for a doll, but for our engine-powered aeroplane, we’ll need running space. If we only had more room—”

  “It wasn’t just the room,” said Wallace.

  “What do you mean?” Faye turned to Wallace.

  “We need to have something that allows for—”

  “What is it?” said Faye. “What are we missing? We’re so close!”

  Suddenly, Lucy jumped up, knocking Wallace over, pencil and paper still in his hands, her broken doll falling to the ground.

  “I know what went wrong!” Lucy cried with mounting excitement. “I know what it is! I know it, I know it, I know it!” She was skipping around in circles.

  “What is it, Lucy?!” shouted Faye. “Will you stop whirling like a dervish and tell us?!”

  “It’s the tail!” she cried, picking up the folder and waving the papers in the air. “It’s the whatsit! It’s the thing, the moving thing, the thing that—”

  “The tail?” said Jasper, Wallace, Noah, and Faye together.

  “It has a tail, Lucy,” said Wallace, “or have you—”

  “Forgotten?” Noah said, glancing at Wallace.

  “I just don’t know the word for it,” Lucy said. “Funny, that. I know what it is but I don’t know what it calls itself.”

  “The tail? The parts of the tail?” asked Wallace.

  “But it’s not the right tail, of course,” said Lucy. “The tail must be able to wiggle along with the wings.”

  “I know the word!” cried Wallace. “I know the word, Lucy. I know what she means!” Wallace seemed stunned by his own lack of observation. “It a rudder! We’re missing a rudder.”

  “Like a rudder on a boat,” Jasper said, realizing exactly what Wallace meant, “to help it steer.”

  “A rudder! It’s called a rudder!” cried Lucy.

  “We have to be able to steer the craft,” Noah said.

  “Of course, we can’t just give it lift,” said Faye. “We have to control the lift and the loft.”

  “Lift and loft!” cried Lucy, laughing and clapping her hands. “Lift and loft!” And she whirled again to the chant of “lift and loft.”

  “I hate it when she acts her age,” Faye said, but she smiled just the same.

  “Not only that,” said Jasper, looking at the drawings, “but we have to control and coordinate the up-and-down movement—you know, the pitch. Also, the roll of the wings—when one wing goes up or down against the other—and the movement of the nose from side to side.”

  “That’s called the yaw,” said Noah.

  “Yes, the yaw!” shouted Lucy, who whirled some more, chanting, “Yes, the yaw,” much to Faye’s bemusement. In fact, Faye was in love with Lucy and her brilliant discovery. This would surely make it all happen.

  “And then,” said Faye, “with propelled air and an engine to drive it, we’d have total control of the driving.” She looked up to the sky. “We’d be able to fly.”

  The children brimmed with plans and secrets and what felt like pure magic. But they also knew that, like their homes, the farm was under constant surveillance. Casually, Faye asked Miss Brett if she knew about patrols.

  “Well,” Miss Brett said, thinking hard about the question, “on Fridays, I have noticed a patrol, if that’s what you call it, but only in the morning, then none until the drivers come to fetch you for the weekend. I always just assumed it was a carriage checking to see that all was well, as when they came for the honey. Or perhaps just a carriage coming from a different direction.” She shrugged. “I never really thought about it. As for the weekends, I’ve never seen anyone patrolling. Come to think of it, I rarely see anyone, and certainly no one when you are away for the weekend.”

  Miss Brett did most of her gardening and outdoor work over the weekend, so she would
have seen the men in black patrolling if they did.

  That confirmed it: It was the children, and the children alone, they were guarding. This made launching the aeroplane—a manned, wooden, real aeroplane—right out in the field a dangerous thing to do during the school week.

  Back at the schoolhouse, the children spent most of Sunday afternoon and Monday timing the carriages’ tours around the farm. During the day, it seemed, they were not as diligent—they passed any given spot once every eleven minutes. If they were careful, the children would be able to launch the plane and hide it again before the men in black could catch them in the act.

  The birdwatcher seemed to be on no specific schedule, although by luck he never ran into the patrolling men in black. He appeared to be following some bird that moved around a lot, with no apparent pattern, and he was away whenever the patrol came by the farm. On Fridays, he missed the sporadic patrols entirely. The children wondered what might happen to the poor funny man if the men in black found him there.

  “He could be our ticket out of here,” Faye said.

  “What do you mean?” asked Wallace, nervously.

  “With all our packages, how else can we get away from the farm without being caught? We’ll have to move so slowly that we’ll be caught red-handed out in the middle of a field.”

  That’s how they came to decide that their only hope for a quick, clean departure from the farm was in the back of the birdwatcher’s truck. It was, after all, the only vehicle that did not belong to the men in black.

  In the schoolyard, with bramble and blankets they had collected to help hide what they were actually doing, the children had been putting together the flying machine. This one would be large enough for a child, even a large child, or a fair-sized young woman, perhaps, laying face-down in the center. It had wings that spanned twelve feet. Adjustments were made to Faye’s calculations when Noah found a problem with the way she had attached the wings and the tail-controlling mechanism. Lucy reminded everyone that several of Lilienthal’s gliders had lift problems because of control.