The Book of Secrets

by Cynthia Voigt

  Grammie began the picnic by pouring him a mug of lemonade from a big thermos. (“I want to hear everything, step by step, blow by blow, inch by inch. You’ll need to keep your throat moistened.”) Then she unwrapped two thick meat sandwiches for him, plus a much thinner one for herself. (“I need to practice eating less. Maybe I’ll try gruel, to save wear on my teeth, to save wear on my purse.”) Lastly, she set out two bright, plump oranges and a plate of chocolate walnut cookies, telling him, “They’re not Gabrielle’s, but you used to think mine were pretty good.”

  “I still do,” said Max, taking one and eating it in two bites.

  While he ate his way through the sandwiches, Max made his report, giving Grammie all the details she could hope for, from the sound of Kip’s feet pounding down the hallway to Colly’s farewell thanks, and including Ari’s surprisingly good performance as the merciless Baron Barthold. Grammie was paying such close attention to his story that she seemed to forget the sandwich waiting on the bench beside her.

  At the end, she was silent for a long while. Then, “You did well, Max,” she said. “You did really well.”

  He nodded and felt his cheeks grow warm and kept his eyes on the orange peel he was stripping away. Why should praise for something he was proud of make him feel embarrassed? he wondered. Still, he had the urge to change the subject, so he asked her, “What do you mean, gruel? Why would you want to eat that?”

  “I wouldn’t want to,” Grammie assured him. “Although I might have to.”

  “I know what gruel is,” Max told her. “It’s watery porridge. It can’t be very tasty.”

  “Not tasty at all,” Grammie agreed. “Or so I understand. I haven’t sunk to gruel yet, in my life,” she promised him. She looked beyond him to the library building, where it stood behind its guard of tall oaks.

  “What is going on, Grammie?” Max asked. He already knew but he thought that it was better for her to tell him her secret than for him to reveal that he had found it out.

  His grandmother took a deep breath and looked straight at him, her eyes brave and blue behind round glasses. “They want to retire me,” she said. “The Mayor and the Council, they think I’m too old, now, and there’s a younger person they want to hire who is—I can’t deny that he’s more qualified to be head of the new kind of library system than I am, and I won’t deny that the new system is a good one. But it means I have to retire and I don’t know how I’ll earn my living.” She took off her glasses and rubbed at her eyes. “I’m sorry, Max.” She picked up her sandwich, only to put it down untasted.

  “It could be that you don’t have to retire,” he told her, immediately explaining, “I can tell the Mayor. He’s going to be feeling awfully grateful to Mister Max right now.”

  “He should be,” she said.

  “I could ask him to keep you on,” Max offered. “For my payment. I’d like to do that.”

  Grammie smiled, just a little lifting at the corners of her mouth. “If that isn’t … You’re … It’s very kind to think of doing that, Max, and I’m grateful, don’t think I’m not grateful, but—”

  “You’re a good librarian,” he said.

  “I know I am, but they’re right. I am getting older. I’m not in touch like this younger man is. Also, I don’t have university degrees; I’m not so well educated. I’m just well read. And there are parts of the collection I haven’t built up, I do know that, because I don’t know enough. And—I can tell you this, you’ll understand—I’m not so sure I really want the job anymore, except for earning a living. I certainly don’t want it if they don’t want me,” she announced, with a hint of her old spirit.

  Max knew he should tell her. There was, really, no reason not to. In fact, there were at least two good reasons in favor of telling his grandmother that he’d found his father’s fortune, which both of them had thought was just one of William Starling’s colorful and boastful extravagances. The first reason was that it would ease her mind and free her from worry. The second was that right off, when they knew his parents had disappeared that April morning, Grammie had assured him that she would take care of him, and never mentioned the sacrifices she would have to make to stretch her salary to cover a second person, when it barely covered her. Of course he ought to tell her.

  But Max didn’t want to give up the secret. Having that secret gave his independence the kind of support that the thick stone pilings gave to the bridge that carried carriages and motorcars and pedestrians over the river.

  But he had to tell her. He knew that, and besides, he still had one secret left, didn’t he? Because he wasn’t going to tell his grandmother about the buttons and add to her fears and worries. Not that the buttons were anything he wanted to have for a secret—but Max guessed you didn’t choose the secrets you were given. They just landed on you, boom!—or in the case of the buttons, which were pretty small, they landed on you tick tick. Max smiled to himself, and said, “Grammie? I don’t want you to get all bossy at me about this, and you have to promise not to ask any questions …” He waited for her response.

  She was puzzled, and told him with a teasing smile, “You have my word.”

  “Because I found the fortune.”

  Her face was blank. With surprise? With failure to take in the meaning of his words?

  “My father’s fortune. It actually exists. I actually found it, and—there’s a lot of it, enough so neither of us has to worry. If I can’t earn enough by myself, I mean, because I’d rather earn my own living, and yours, too, by myself. If you lose your job, I mean.”

  “It’s real? You found it? Where?”

  “In the frame for Arabella.” Max told her this because she should know, just in case.

  “And it’s real? How much is there?”

  “You promised you wouldn’t ask questions,” he reminded her, so she answered her inquiries herself:

  “I guess you wouldn’t say it was enough if it wasn’t.” She looked back at the library building again. Max also looked at the library, but he studied the way the leaves on the oaks broke the sky up into blue fragments, to give Grammie time for this news to sink in.

  She picked up her sandwich and ate it, still thinking over what she’d been told. Once, she chuckled to herself. “Banker Hermann engaged to Arabella,” she said, and chuckled again. “He told us that, in the note he left for you, didn’t he? It was a clue. That father of yours …” Grammie finished the sandwich and, after a couple of cookies, she started to peel the orange.

  Max was glad he’d told her.

  Then, of course, because she was Grammie and couldn’t help herself, she said, “Just one more question? Will you answer just one more?”

  “Maybe.” He grinned.

  “How did you figure it out?”

  Max had to laugh when he thought about that, and then he admitted, “It was something Pia said, plus something in that note he left, and then the idea just … came to me.”

  “She is certainly useful, that girl. Isn’t she?” Grammie poured them each more lemonade, and waited for whatever else Max might have to say, because from the look in his eyes she guessed there was more. Max had brought his sketch pad with the letter from the King of Andesia and the postcard tucked safely into it. He spread them out on the bench between them.

  “I want you to listen—really listen. Listen,” Max urged, and took a deep breath. Slowly, pronouncing each word clearly, he read the letter out loud.

  Grammie concentrated on listening.

  When he finished, “Again,” she said, like a little child. She was staring blindly into the grass at her feet, concentrating on his father’s words. He started again, but after the first words, “I was pleased to receive your letter, trapped—” she interrupted him.

  “That’s one.”

  He read on and she kept count. She only discovered four of the six, but that was enough to convince her, and she didn’t have the advantage of a small, dark room to help her pay the closest possible attention. At the end, she looked at Max.
“Trapped,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “He’s offering information about how to get there, too. Is he suggesting that the Starling Company make a tour in Andesia? When he puts guests in the same sentence as entertaining?”

  “I didn’t think of that. But right after, he says not safe, so he can’t be. Can he?”

  “Obviously, he doesn’t want us to rush blindly in. He’s definitely saying it’s dangerous. You know, it could be that he’s advising us not to try to go.”

  Max considered telling his grandmother that there was no us in this, that they were his parents, his problem to solve. But that could be settled when he had determined on a plan. There was no need to quarrel right now about that. For now, he quarreled about his father’s meaning.

  “If you look at what he says, though—and it makes no sense, really no sense, what they say about—”

  “Oh good, you’re still here.” It was Pia’s voice, and Pia was hurrying up to them. They’d been so intent on what they were doing, they hadn’t even noticed her approach. “What’s that?” she asked, reaching out for the letter. “A new case?”

  “Job,” Max muttered, snatching it away and folding it closed. Grammie slipped the postcard under his sketch pad.

  “What’s the big secret?” Pia demanded. She looked at their faces. “You don’t want me here,” she announced, correctly. “Why don’t you want me? What’re you hiding?” Now she was glaring down at them, her dark eyebrows drawn together.

  Pia wore a summer dress. It had tiny white spots on a blue background, which goes by the name of dotted swiss. Her white-blond hair was out of its usual braids and hung loose down her back, held off her face by a blue hair band. She wore white socks, folded down to make a cuff, and white sandals. She didn’t look happy.

  “Don’t you look nice,” Grammie remarked.

  “Don’t change the subject,” Pia answered, “and no, I don’t think I do. I look like a stupid doll dressed up to be taken to lunch with her mother and some other mother and her icky daughter. Can I have a cookie?” she asked, reaching out.

  “Won’t that spoil your lunch?” Grammie asked, with a quick glance at Max that asked for advice, but Max was busy thinking of how to get rid of Pia.

  “It’ll be some fancy cold soup and chicken salad with grapes and nuts in it and only one tiny roll for each person,” Pia said. “And my mother will be all fluttery and flattering and she won’t even notice that all they want is to get a favor from my father. Nowadays, it’s always about the restaurant, and what night the royal family will be dining there, but she thinks she can make them into friends. I don’t want to go,” Pia concluded unhappily.

  Finally, there was something safe for Max to say. “Where’s your mother now?”

  “Looking at a magazine. I told her I needed some books to read. She said—you know what she said?—that I have to leave them in the motorcar when we get to Clarissa’s house.” She waited for Max and Grammie to respond to both of those appalling pieces of information. When neither did, she went on. “And she bought herself a brand-new R Zilla hat for the occasion and she can’t get into the motorcar with it on her head.” Pia laughed at that memory.

  Grammie said, “It’s only lunch. It won’t last long.”

  “But I’ll hate every minute. I don’t know why she didn’t take my sister instead, except that they pretended that Clarissa wants to show me her ant farm. Formicarium, we’re supposed to call it, and that’s the excuse for inviting us but nobody believes it. And everybody likes my sister and my sister likes everybody liking her, she’s a much better guest, so I don’t see why, do you?”

  They shook their heads.

  Pia stood waiting, the half-eaten cookie in her hand.

  Waiting for what? Max wondered.

  “I could run away, when we get back to the car. I could come back here and meet up with you,” Pia offered. “And help out with whatever it is.”

  “Wouldn’t your mother be angry?” Grammie asked gently.

  Pia explained, “She’s going to be angry anyway because I’ll talk too loudly and say the wrong things and once they’ve learned that my father isn’t telling anyone, not even the chef and Gabrielle, when the royal family is coming, they’ll just be waiting for us to leave, anyway. And that’ll make her angry, too, but she’ll decide it was something I did. So I could run away.”

  There was only one way to stop Pia. “No,” Max said.

  “No what?” she asked.

  “No helping on this job,” he said. “I don’t need your help.”

  “So it is a case. I knew it. Why can’t I help?”

  “It’s private.”

  “I’m your assistant. You said. I helped with Madame Olenka; you said I did a good job. I helped this morning. You should let me help now.”

  “Not on this one, Pia,” Max repeated.

  She glared at him, and then she glared at Grammie, too, and dropped what was left of the cookie down onto the ground. “Then I guess I’m not interested in being your assistant anymore, if you feel that way,” she said, and she stomped off.

  At the door back into the library, she turned to call to him, “You’ll be sorry.”

  Max doubted it.

  “And if you think anybody would mistake you for a little boy, you’re kidding yourself,” she called back.

  But Grammie asked Max, “Don’t you want to catch up with her and—maybe, apologize?”

  “For what? She’s the one butting in where she isn’t wanted. She owes me an apology.”

  Grammie sighed. “I know, but …” She sighed again. “You’re two of a kind, cut from the same cloth, peas in a pod, the both of you.” But she was already uncovering the postcard and Max was unfolding the letter, and for both of them Pia had already been sent to a back corner of the stage, a minor actor in a scene where Max and Grammie had the leading parts.

  Max pointed out the “Help! Help!” message and Grammie had to agree with him. “They definitely want us to do something. But what can we do?”

  “I should go there,” Max said.

  Grammie looked at him, but didn’t speak. She kept looking at him.

  Max started pacing up and down the path. He felt that he should be home packing, now that he knew what he should do, and if it was winter in Andesia he’d need … but Grammie just kept looking at him. She had no expression on her face.

  Max sat down. “You think I shouldn’t go without a plan,” he told her.

  She looked at him.

  “You think I shouldn’t go without a good plan,” he said. “Because it’s dangerous.”

  “Yes,” Grammie said. “We need a plan.”

  “I need to think,” Max said. He was feeling a little desperate now and he could feel his brain starting to skitter around, like some drop of water dancing on a hot griddle. He was the Solutioneer, he reminded himself. This was his business; he was good at thinking up ways to solve problems.

  But this problem was about his parents, and that was different, the way yesterday’s problem of being locked into the bathroom of an empty theater had been different. He was better at setting about solving other people’s problems than his own, Max thought, and that made him smile. Not that he thought it was amusing, not a bit of it. This was an ironic smile, the kind more often found on grown-up faces.

  Well, Max was certainly more grown-up than he’d been just a few weeks ago. He stared at his shoes and concentrated his thoughts. “The reason I noticed the Helps?” he said to Grammie. “It’s because what he was saying didn’t make sense. What I’m thinking now is: neither did a lot of what he said in the postcard.”

  They reread the postcard silently, attentively. Then Grammie read out loud, “The rich oft underestimate beauty’s lasting embrace?” She turned it into a question.

  Max pointed at the words and read off, “T-R-O-U-B-L-E. And it’s not Shakespeare.”

  “No it isn’t,” Grammie agreed thoughtfully. “Although it is WS, our WS, who certainly thinks he can b
e called Great.”

  “So the postcard is a warning,” Max concluded, “and a reminder about the fortune and how to find it.”

  “Which you have,” Grammie said.

  “And now he wants help, because they’re trapped.”

  Grammie looked full into her grandson’s face to ask, “But how can we help, Max?”

  The Water Rat Jobs

  • ACT II •

  SCENE 2

  Max put his bill—for five hundred!—into the mail that afternoon, and wondered if he was being greedy. Actually, he knew he was being greedy; what he really wondered was if he was being too greedy. He’d see what happened and, meanwhile, the afternoon mail brought two requests for the Solutioneer’s help, so even when he had addressed Carlo Coyne’s problem he could be sure of having something to keep him busy. He and his grandmother each had their assignment. Grammie was gathering information about traveling to Andesia and he was working on his list of possible reasons for a boy—or a young man, or a middle-aged detective, or a minor city official, or anything else he needed to be—to show up at the King of Andesia’s palace door.

  Grammie was thinking about that, too, but they had agreed it was too soon for talking. They needed to think, first. They sat together on Grammie’s back steps at the end of that long June day, reading their letters and the newspaper, and not mentioning what was foremost in both of their minds.

  “I won’t be doing that,” Max announced as he crumpled up a letter from a Hilliard School student who wanted Mister Max to stop his little brother from following him everywhere and ruining all of his games with his friends. “Doesn’t he know how lucky he is to have a brother?”

  Grammie looked up. “I thought you liked being an only child.”

  “I do,” Max said, because he did. “But I’d like to be an only child who has a brother.”

  Grammie humphed, and returned to her reading of the Positions Vacant notices.