The boy laughed. “Who else?”
Bertie glanced around. Here on the racetrack, with kids all around him and parents off in the distance, he could easily be one of them. An image of the wooden boy flashed through his mind. He cleared his throat. “I shouldn’t,” he said, his voice coming out firmer this time. “I need to go look for . . . a toy.”
“It will only take a minute,” the boy prodded. “Can’t your toy wait one minute?”
Bertie looked longingly at the finish line, where a tall, skinny boy had just swept in for a win. “I guess it could,” he gave in.
“All right!” the boy cheered. “Last one to the finish line is a rotten egg! I’m Chris,” he added.
Bertie gave him a tentative smile. “Bertie.”
Chris smiled back. “Get ready to lose, Bertie.”
“I wouldn’t count on it. I don’t rot easily,” Bertie shot back. He blinked. Had that really just come out of his mouth?
Next to him, Chris was laughing. “I don’t know,” he said, waving a hand in front of his nose. “I think I smell something already.”
“Then it must be coming from you,” Bertie replied cheerfully.
“We’ll see about that. On three?”
Bertie nodded, planting his feet on the pedals. There was no motor in this car, only your feet to propel you forward.
“One,” Chris counted. “Two. THREE!”
And they were off, Bertie pedaling as fast his legs would take him. Beads of sweat sprouted on his forehead and his breath tightened in his chest, but he just pedaled harder. Next to him Chris let out a holler, so he tried it too, throwing back his head with a “Whooooo!” It felt so good exploding out of him—no one to shush him or punish him—that he found himself doing it once more. “Whooooo!” He was inching ahead of Chris now, pedaling furiously. He was going to win. He could feel it.
That’s when he saw it out of the corner of his vision: a wooden dollhouse, swinging through the air.
Bertie looked over sharply, his throat constricting. A young boy in a bright green sweater was swinging the dollhouse between his hands. Even from a distance, Bertie could tell it looked almost exactly like the one he’d found abandoned on the circus grounds—the one his wooden boy had come from. Up ahead, Chris reached the finish line with a shout of “Bertie rots!” but Bertie barely heard him. He had to find out where the boy had gotten that dollhouse.
“Got to go,” he said hastily. He took off before Chris could respond. He practically raced over to the little boy. “Where did you get that house?” he asked breathlessly.
“This?” The boy held up the dollhouse. It had a copper-colored roof and red shutters. “It was in some room upstairs.” He twisted around. “Hey, Mom!” he bellowed. “Where did we get this?”
A woman in a pink sweater even brighter than the boy’s green one walked over. She was carrying a carved wooden airplane. It had a globe painted on its side, with the word “worldwide” emblazoned beneath it. Bertie’s eyes widened when he saw the wooden figurine sitting in the pilot’s seat. It was a red-haired wooden boy—just like his. “It was in the Fine Woods room,” she said. “On the third floor. So was this airplane.” She smiled at Bertie, revealing a silver cap on one of her back teeth. “Aren’t they like little pieces of artwork?”
Bertie probably would have agreed if he had been there, but he was already halfway to the stairs.
A Pockmarked Thought
Rigby stared at the bucket of paint. The bucket of paint stared back at Rigby. “I shouldn’t,” he said. He took a step backward, his eyes still on the bucket. The blue paint shimmered and winked inside, like a pool of tears. “But look at that color . . .” He took a step forward. “No!” He took a step back. “Though . . .” He took a step forward again.
Rigby glanced over at Susan’s sleeping form on the bed. “Maybe just a tiny bit . . .” Quickly he thrust a paw into the bucket. His tail began to thump as the paint coated his fur. He glanced over at Susan. Still sleeping. “Just a tiny bit more . . .”
He dipped his paw further into the bucket. Then he pulled it out and gave it a good shake. Specks of paint flung onto the wall, landing in a crooked spiral. Rigby cocked his head, studying the shape. “Once more,” he said.
And then he was dipping and flinging, dipping and flinging, his tail thumping wildly as a design took shape before him.
• • •
Susan opened her eyes. A familiar ceiling swam into view—the same spider web of cracks she’d woken up to every morning for nine and a half years. She sat up abruptly, remembering. She was home.
Rigby stood at the foot of her bed, staring up at her. His tail wagged furiously as she climbed to the floor. “What in the world did you do?” she murmured as she took in his paint-stained paws. Rigby’s tail wagged even faster, drumming out a beat against the floor. Rising gracefully onto all fours, he trotted over to the far wall.
Susan’s jaw dropped. There on the wall was a painting of some sort: thick dots of paint splattered in a wild, textured pattern. At first glance it looked haphazard, messy even. But the longer she looked at it, the more her eyes went loose around the corners, and suddenly an image began to emerge. The vague outlines of four animals: a dog, a rabbit, a bear, and a hairy-nosed wombat.
“Did you do this, Rigby?” Susan breathed.
Rigby’s tail beat faster than ever.
Susan crouched down, taking his face in her hands. “Do you have any idea what this looks like, buddy?”
Rigby looked her right in the eye and let out an indignant bark, as if to say, obviously.
Susan laughed as she stood up, stretching her arms over her head. The silence of the house seemed to yawn around her. “They’re still not here, are they, Rigby?” she asked softly. Rigby’s tail stopped wagging as he looked up at her with wide, mournful eyes. Susan couldn’t help but smile as he let out a soft whine. Sometimes she could swear that dog understood her.
Rigby followed her as she headed into the hallway. Sunlight poured in through the windows, washing the floors in light. She used to love to curl up at the top of the steps, where the pool of sunlight was always the warmest. My little kitten, her mom called her. Susan swallowed hard, refusing to let a single tear find its way into her eyes. She had no time for wallowing. Her parents didn’t just vanish into thin air. No one did. They had to be somewhere; she just had to find them.
“What do you think, Rigby?” she asked, trying to break up the silence. “Could they be visiting Aunt Monica?” The last time Susan’s parents could afford to visit her aunt was during a crop bonanza back when Susan was six. “Maybe they finally went again,” Susan mused aloud. Rigby cocked his head as he followed her down the stairs. “I know, it doesn’t sound right to me either,” she said with a sigh.
As Susan walked into the living room, a thought crept into her mind. It was an ugly thought, pockmarked and misshapen, the kind of thought that festered slowly, waiting for just the right moment to lash out.
What if something was wrong?
She staggered backward so fast she slammed into a wall, sending shivers of pain down her spine. The full weight of it hit her all at once: her parents were really gone, she had no idea where they were. They could be hurt, in trouble . . . or worse. She felt cold all over, the way she used to when she was twirling on her rope at the circus, the wind a tunnel around her. Goosebumps lifted on her arms and tears pricked at her eyes against her will. She sagged onto the floor and buried her head in her hands.
Not a minute later, something soft and warm pressed against her leg. She peeked through her fingers. Rigby was leaning against her, his worried eyes looking out at her through thick tufts of fur. He began to lick her hand, slowly at first, then more urgently, like he was on a mission. The tiniest of half-smiles broke through her tears.
“I’m glad you’re here, Rigby,” she said, pulling him onto her lap. He responded with a massive, slobbery lick on her cheek. Leaning her head back against the wall, she scratched absently at Rig
by’s back. “Maybe everything’s fine,” she said softly. “Maybe they had a simple, logical reason for leaving. Which means there has to be a simple, logical answer around here somewhere. Some kind of clue as to where they went . . .”
She wiped away her tears and stood back up. She felt more determined than ever. If her parents were findable, she would find them. But as she began to root around downstairs, looking for some kind of clue, her stomach let out a hungry grumble. Down by her feet, Rigby’s let out one to match.
“We should find some breakfast, huh?” she said to Rigby. She went into the kitchen, pulling open the cabinets and eying her parents’ array of canned foods. “Let’s see, we’ve got canned beets and canned oatmeal and canned spaghetti—”
Rigby interrupted with a loud bark.
“What?” She glanced over her shoulder at him. “You don’t want cold spaghetti for breakfast, do you?”
Rigby barked again, his tail thumping against a cracked floor tile.
“Okay . . .” With a shrug, Susan grabbed the can out of the cupboard. “Cold spaghetti it is.” She’d just dumped it into a bowl for Rigby when something caught her eye behind the table. A newspaper had been abandoned on the floor. It lay open, face up, almost as if it had slipped out of someone’s hands mid-reading. Susan kept her eyes on it as she handed Rigby his spaghetti. If there was one thing her parents believed in, it was cleanliness: a place for everything, and everything in its place. A newspaper on the floor was definitely not in its place.
She picked the paper up. It was stiff in her hands, barely read. At the circus, she would have been thrilled to find an abandoned newspaper, would already be imagining a thousand different scenes to paint on its pages. But painting was the last thing on her mind as she stared down at the article the paper was open to—the last article her parents must have read.
THE END OF AN ERA, the headline blared. And underneath: THE MOST MAGNIFICENT TRAVELING CIRCUS SHUTTERS ITS DOORS!
Susan put a hand on the counter, steadying herself. She could barely breathe as she skimmed through the article.
After a fire blazed through the Big Top last week during the Most Magnificent Traveling Circus’s one-ring show, the century-old circus was forced to park its caravans for good. “It was just horrific,” Mary Toddle, the owner of the renowned Toddle’s Toy Emporium was quoted as saying. “Twice I took my daughter to the Most Magnificent Circus, and twice we saw fire and chaos instead of magic and wonders! Mark my words: This circus is done for!”
It turns out Mrs. Toddle was right. Although the proprietor of the circus, Claude Magnificence, was unable to be reached for comment, signs have been tacked up on every one of his caravans, announcing an auction of all supplies this Saturday in the town of Truburg.
The article continued with a description of the circus’s final fiery performance, but Susan had stopped reading. Because something had suddenly dawned on her. She collapsed in a chair at the table, relief rushing through her. It all made sense now: the half-drunk mug on the kitchen counter, the blanket strewn across the couch, that feeling of hastiness throughout the house, as if her parents had left in a rush. It was because they had.
Her parents had gone to Truburg. They’d gone to find her.
Suspicious Behavior
A checkerboard of glossy red shelves filled the Fine Woods room. Each and every shelf was overflowing with wooden toys: wooden turtles you could pull on a string, wooden nutcrackers whose jaws snapped loudly, wooden motorcars whose wheels spun around and around. In the center of the room, the shelves were wider and taller than the others. Crammed onto them, covering every inch of space, were the wooden dollhouses. Bertie couldn’t help but touch them, run his fingers over the grainy bricks and painted shutters and tiny windows. He lifted the top off one house, peering into it. There was a family living inside: three identical brown-eyed girls, two parents, one dog, and a little boy.
Bertie pulled out the boy. It looked exactly like the one he’d found: painted wisps of red hair escaping from beneath a wooden baseball cap, a smattering of freckles covering his nose and bright blue eyes so much like Bertie’s own. The only difference was the outfit. This one was painted into khakis and a spotless white shirt, a striped tie painted around his neck. Bertie wrapped the boy in his palm as he peeked into the next house. This one held a smaller family, just a dad and a son. Bertie pulled the son out. Again, the same boy looked back at him, wearing a green T-shirt and shorts this time.
He looked in the next house, and the next, and the next still. In every one, the members of the families looked different and the setup of the rooms varied, but the boy inside was exactly the same. Red hair, blue eyes, dark freckles; there wasn’t a single house without him. Soon Bertie had a whole stack of the wooden boys in his hands, their outfits the only thing that set them apart.
“You’re not allowed to just buy the wooden boys, you know,” a girl said behind him.
Bertie’s first thought was Susan.
But of course the voice was all wrong, higher-pitched and whinier than Susan’s. Bertie spun around to find himself facing a girl his age. She was wearing a poufy purple dress and had a headful of brown curls. Her curls sprung wildly every which way, boinging into her face and against her shoulders, making it look like a living creature had taken residence on her head. She wore a pinched expression, as if she was trying very hard not to go to the bathroom. She seemed vaguely familiar to Bertie, though he had no idea why. He didn’t have friends who wore poufy dresses. In fact, until Susan, he didn’t have any friends at all. Maybe he’d served her at the circus once; he could never keep track of the hundreds of kids grabbing for cola at every single show. “I was just looking at them,” he said defensively.
“I don’t know.” The girl crossed her arms against her chest. “You could be conducting what my dad calls suspicious behavior.”
Bertie glared at the girl. She held her head up absurdly high, as if she were balancing an invisible crown up there. The smug look on her face was enough to make Bertie want to scream.
“Whatever you say, your highness,” he muttered under his breath. He dropped the wooden boys back into their homes. He would wait to look at them until she left, he decided.
“No, no, no,” the girl said, her voice rising shrilly. “You’re putting them in all wrong!” She grabbed the remaining figurines out of his hand. With an exasperated sigh, she began placing them back inside the houses in the exact order he’d found them.
“How do you know where they go?” he asked.
“I know everything about this place,” she said impatiently as she swapped two wooden boys into their correct houses. “I’m Chrysa—” She stopped short, her hand lingering over a blue cottage. “Chryssy,” she finished slowly. “Yes . . . Chryssy. And I, uh, live near here, so I visit a lot.” She looked up at Bertie with a snooty expression. “I’m kind of like a Toddle’s Toy Emporium expert.”
“Oh, really? Then how many floating globes are inside the hollow tree?” He’d counted them earlier today, when he’d slipped back into the tree for a moment alone.
“Forty-three,” Chryssy replied easily.
Bertie took a step back in surprise. “That’s right.”
Chryssy rolled her eyes. “Of course it is. What I bet you don’t know is that there’s a secret door in the back of that landing.”
“There is not,” Bertie argued. He’d slept on that landing last night, and he hadn’t noticed a single door.
“Is too.” Chryssy tossed her hair, making her curls bounce wildly through the air. “If you knock three times in the back right corner, a door will open up. There’s a slide behind it that leads all the way down to the candy room.”
“How do you know that?” Bertie demanded.
“I told you, I visit a lot.” She looked down, suddenly very focused on her sparkly purple shoes. “I wasn’t kidding that I know everything about this place. Like, did you know that everything in this room is made right here at Toddle’s Toy Emporium? In fact, f
ifty-three percent of all Toddle’s Toys are made in Toddle’s own Development Center. That’s over half,” she added pointedly.
“I know what fifty-three percent means,” Bertie said testily. This girl was getting on his last nerve. She was acting like she owned the place. But . . . if what she said was true, that meant someone in this very building had carved the wooden boys. “Where?” he asked suddenly. “If you know so much about this place, then where are these wooden houses made?”
Chryssy picked at her nails, looking bored. “Development Room 33Z. But shoppers aren’t allowed there. My—I mean Mr. and Mrs. Toddle keep those rooms locked up tight.”
“So you’re saying there’s no way for me to know if you’re telling the truth? That sounds like a pretty convenient excuse to me.” Bertie turned to leave. He’d had enough of this girl and her holier-than-thou attitude.
“Wait!” Chryssy grabbed his arm. She had a surprisingly strong grip for such a prissy-looking girl. “If you really want to see the woodshop, I’ll take you there.” She looked furtively around, lowering her voice. “But we’re going to have to be really sneaky.” She pursed her lips, making her face look more pinched than ever. “Do you think you’ll be able to handle that?”
Bertie wanted to shake her off, tell her to find someone else to talk to like a little kid. But knowing the woodshop was within reach was giving him a scratchy, itchy feeling. He had to know more about those wooden figurines. He threw back his shoulders, meeting her fierce gaze. “Just call me Sneaky Boy,” he said.
Plan Rescue Princess
“Freeze!” Smalls hissed. He and Wombat were attempting to work their way toward the boxes of hot air balloons, but it was slow going. Every time a person walked by, they had to freeze in place, pretending to be stuffed animals.
“I’m going to get the stuffed lizard,” a lanky girl said. She tossed her little brother a smug look as she headed straight toward Smalls.
A Valiant Quest for the Misfit Menagerie Page 12
