Weave a Circle Round

by Kari Maaren

  Mel said, somewhat unnecessarily, “You have a lot of chairs.”

  “Hurrah,” said Josiah. “She’s been at it again. Cuerva Lachance!”

  “Yes?” said Cuerva Lachance, who was standing behind the piano. Freddy had to look twice to make sure. She could have sworn there had been no one there a second ago.

  “You have to stop with the chairs,” said Josiah, sounding exasperated. “What do you want them all for?”

  Cuerva Lachance peered innocently out from beneath her hat. “I needed somewhere to sit.”

  Josiah said, “You have somewhere to sit. The whole world has somewhere to sit.”

  “That makes me happy,” said Cuerva Lachance. “Do you play the piano, curly-haired one?”

  Freddy said, “I did once.” It had been a long time ago. The lessons had stopped shortly after her parents’ separation.

  “I do,” said Mel, who had taught herself. “Is that a Steinway?”

  “It’s possible,” said Cuerva Lachance. “I haven’t asked it. It’s grateful when I play it, though it doesn’t like the climate here.”

  “I bet you have fun up in the tower,” said Mel.

  Freddy saw Josiah’s eyebrows shoot up in what looked like alarm. He mouthed, Don’t mention the tower! Mel wasn’t looking at him, and anyway, it was too late. Cuerva Lachance tilted her head. “What tower where?”

  “Upstairs,” said Mel. “There’s a door through to it. Didn’t you know—?”

  “I have to roll marbles down an inclined plane,” said Josiah loudly. “Come and watch.”

  He climbed over three chairs and a footstool and disappeared into the kitchen. “Ooh,” said Cuerva Lachance, “Josie’s doing schoolwork. Odds are good he’ll set something on fire.”

  The kitchen was as cluttered as the living room. There were chairs here, too, but only ten or so; most of the space was taken up by the spider plants. They occupied every surface, and a few were hanging from ceiling hooks. Freddy had always liked spider plants because of the long, snaking trailers with the little baby plants at the ends of them, but this was a bit much even for her. Josiah was irritably clearing spider plants off the kitchen table and dumping them onto the floor. “Cuerva Lachance strikes again,” he said. “Honestly, why do we need more than one of these things?”

  “I like them,” said Cuerva Lachance. “They’re scrappy.”

  “It wasn’t like this on Friday, was it?” Mel whispered to Freddy, who glanced at her, puzzled. She hadn’t known Mel had been over here on Friday. She also wasn’t sure why Mel was talking as if Freddy had been over here on Friday, too.

  Mel said more loudly, “Do most private investigators have houses like this?”

  “No. I’m unique,” said Cuerva Lachance. “Besides, my current case is frustrating, and I need something to distract me.” Josiah snorted.

  “What’s your case?” said Mel. Freddy figured she had been wanting to ask that question for nearly a week.

  “Missing persons,” said Cuerva Lachance. “Not very interesting, but there’s not much information to go on. I know the basic location of the person I’m looking for. I just need proof of identity. It’s a waiting game at the moment. Would anyone like a scone? The grocery store down the street does these tiny little sugar scones with blueberries in.”

  “You shouldn’t be talking about the bloody case,” snarled Josiah, who had taken a marble and was rolling it down various inclined planes for no apparent reason. “Especially not with them.”

  “Why not us? Are we in it?” asked Mel hopefully.

  “Josiah doesn’t like mixing business with neighbours,” said Cuerva Lachance. “I would say ‘mixing business with pleasure,’ but Josiah doesn’t find anything pleasurable. Who beat him up, incidentally?”

  “Don’t tell her,” said Josiah.

  “Various people,” said Freddy. “I think you should be measuring the slopes and keeping track of how far the marble rolls.”

  “I’ve done this before,” said Josiah. “Thousands and thousands of times before. Why can’t science teachers think up some new experiments?”

  “Well, why don’t you?” said Freddy. “Ms. Treadwell said you could do whatever you wanted.”

  “Make the marble roll uphill,” said Cuerva Lachance. “Do you remember the last time you did that?”

  Josiah looked up, his forehead wrinkling into a glower. “You did it.”

  “No,” said Cuerva Lachance, “I’m sure it was you.”

  “You know perfectly well it couldn’t have been me,” snapped Josiah. “Ducklings, could you distract her, please?”

  “Sure.” Mel pulled a small notebook out of her pocket. Freddy recognised it as one Mel sometimes used to keep track of details when she was gaming with Roland and his friends. Mel flipped open the notebook, retrieved a pencil from her other pocket, and began to write. “The Case of the House on Grosvenor Street,” she announced.

  “Oh, a case!” said Cuerva Lachance with apparent sincerity. “I like cases. What’s in this one?”

  “Two people buy and move into an empty house,” said Mel, scribbling busily. “They claim not to be related—”

  “No, they don’t,” said Cuerva Lachance.

  “Yes, they do,” said Josiah. “She’s not my mother.”

  “That doesn’t mean we’re not related, Josie, dear,” said Cuerva Lachance.

  “I refuse to be related to you,” said Josiah.

  “They claim not to be mother and son,” amended Mel. “One of them crashes into a tree she thinks is a driveway and is constantly being distracted by shiny objects. She says she’s a private investigator, but mostly, she collects chairs.”

  “I do my private investigating privately,” said Cuerva Lachance.

  “The other one says he’s rolled thousands of marbles down inclined planes, but he clearly has no idea what the experiment is for.”

  “It’s for driving off the ever-encroaching boredom,” said Josiah.

  “Subject One has lived in her new house for a week but hasn’t noticed the most interesting room in it. Subject Two knows something about the other people living in the house as well—”

  Josiah shot upright, marbles squirting from under his fingers and spinning across the table and onto the floor. “What are you talking about, Harriet the Spy?” he barked.

  “Subject Two exhibits suspicious behaviour when confronted with evidence of his wrongdoing,” said Mel.

  Freddy wasn’t sure if Mel was being reckless, brilliant, or incredibly rude. But Cuerva Lachance didn’t seem to mind, and though Josiah did, he minded everything. “I heard you talking to people upstairs the day you moved in,” said Freddy.

  “And someone’s up there right now,” said Mel. “Something keeps going thud.”

  They all looked up. Freddy hadn’t noticed anything going thud, but now that she was paying attention, she could hear something. A moment later, water started to run upstairs. “She’s right,” she said. “Who else is living here?”

  “None of your ever-loving beeswax,” Josiah snarled against a muffled background of thumping, splashing, and what sounded like angry and amused voices from upstairs.

  “So there is someone,” said Mel, making a note.

  Josiah rolled his eyes, massaged his brow with his index finger, and said in long-suffering tones, “I solemnly swear there is no one in this house who isn’t standing in this kitchen right now.”

  “I’m sitting in this kitchen,” said Cuerva Lachance, who was making use of one of her chairs.

  “Who isn’t standing or sitting in this kitchen right now,” said Josiah. “Satisfied?”

  “No,” said Mel. “How are you doing that with the marble, by the way?”

  All eyes turned to the table. Freddy had to look away almost immediately. She found that she was groping in her pocket for her key. She wasn’t sure why, as she didn’t feel like crying. She felt more like backing out of the room and going to hide under her bed. A marble was rolling slowly up the roof
of the doll’s house. Freddy couldn’t watch because she knew it wasn’t possible.

  “Cuerva Lachance,” said Josiah, not quite under his breath.

  “What? Yes? Where?” said Cuerva Lachance. She jumped to her feet and turned around in a full circle, narrowly missing knocking three or four spider plants onto the floor.

  Josiah said, “Cut it out.”

  “Cut what out?” asked Cuerva Lachance. Freddy forced herself to look back at the little roof. The marble was sitting in the middle of the table, perfectly still.

  I imagined it, thought Freddy. She must have. Josiah and Cuerva Lachance had said something before about marbles rolling uphill, and her brain had taken the conversation and made her see things that weren’t there.

  But the house seemed less friendly, and less funny, than it had just before. Freddy’s eyes slid to Mel. Her sister was gazing thoughtfully at the marble, her little notebook forgotten.

  Someone knocked at the kitchen door, hard. Everybody but Cuerva Lachance jumped. Cuerva Lachance said, “I love mysterious visitors,” and opened the door.

  Roland was hulking on the doorstep, his scowl rivalling Josiah’s. “We need you, Mel,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Uh.” Mel was still looking at the marble.

  “Hello, big awkward one,” said Cuerva Lachance, beaming. “Would you like a small, delicious blueberry scone?”

  “No, thank you,” said Roland stiffly. “You guys have to come home now. Your mum says.”

  Freddy opened her mouth to say she knew their mum wasn’t home, then paused. She didn’t think she minded having a reason to leave.

  “That’s too bad,” said Cuerva Lachance as Mel and Freddy silently followed Roland out the door. “I do hope you come again. Neighbours intrigue me, and they can sit on my chairs. Josie, you’re in danger of putting your foot in a plant. Why are you?” The closing door cut off any retort Josiah might have made.

  Roland let them get all the way out into the lane and through into their own backyard before he let them have it. Freddy and Mel both stepped back as he rounded on them. Roland dwarfed them both, but Freddy had never really found him scary until this moment. “Stay away from there,” he said. “We don’t even know them. What were you thinking?”

  “Josiah’s in all my classes,” said Freddy. “We were doing homework.” It wasn’t strictly true, but agreeing with Roland was impossible.

  “You didn’t mind them before,” said Mel, signing along to the words. “Did something happen?”

  “No,” said Roland. “Yes. I’ve … seen Josiah at school. He does things … he—just stay away from him, all right?”

  Freddy said, “Stop telling me what to do. Why do you even care?”

  “I don’t care about you,” said Roland with such contempt that Freddy took another step back. “I care about Mel. She follows you around.”

  “She can if she wants to.” Freddy could feel the anger trying to choke her into silence again, but Roland had no right to tell Mel what to do.

  “Excuse me,” said Mel. “I’m standing right here.”

  “Just … leave that house alone. I’ll make you if I have to.” He shoved past them both and slammed his way into the house. Freddy heard something fall over inside.

  Freddy looked at Mel. “What was that all about?”

  “Not so elementary, my dear Duchamp,” said Mel, making another note in her notebook.

  * * *

  Freddy had a strange dream that night. She hardly ever remembered her dreams; she had the vague sense that a lot of them involved nonsensical adventures in which she was running away from something huge and scary, but by morning, they had almost always slipped away. This one she did remember afterwards. She thought it was because of the way she woke up from it.

  In the way of dreams, everything that happened seemed perfectly reasonable. She was in the house on Grosvenor Street with Mel again, but this time, Roland was with them, too. She knew it was the house on Grosvenor Street, though it had grown. The living room had expanded to the size of a cathedral. She, Mel, and Roland stood together in the middle of it, surrounded by chairs. The chairs weren’t jumbled about in heaps, as they had been today. Someone had arranged them in rows that went around in widening circles, all of them facing the space where Freddy and the others stood. There was no one in them.

  “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you Bob?” said Josiah from behind Freddy. She turned. He was wearing a little black bowler hat, which he took off and handed to her. Mel made a note in her notebook.

  “This isn’t right. There isn’t any pie,” said Roland viciously.

  “Freddy’s got the pie,” said Josiah. “She just hasn’t seen it yet. There are four and twenty ducklings baked in it.”

  “Blackbirds,” said Cuerva Lachance, though it was hard to say where she was. Mel nodded and added, “Black birds,” spacing out the syllables so it was clear she was saying two separate words.

  “You have to tell her about the pie,” Roland was explaining when Cuerva Lachance floated into view, riding a grand piano that was spinning through the air above the chairs. She was crouched on top, leaning over towards the keyboard and playing the piano upside down. The first note shook the room. It seemed eminently logical to Freddy that the piano should sound like a pipe organ.

  “Could I revive within me her symphony and song,” said Roland, who wasn’t deaf in the dream.

  As Freddy stood in the gigantic living room, the chairs whirled into fragments and danced away into the familiar walls of her bedroom, solid and shadowy in the dim light from the street outside. I was dreaming, she thought, and then, I haven’t stopped yet. She could still hear the organ music, less clearly than she had a moment before, but clearly enough. It was muffled by the walls. Faintly, she could feel the room vibrating. A door slammed, and Jordan said, “What the hell…?” and Freddy knew she was awake. It was happening again. It had never happened in the middle of the night before, but considering their new neighbours, it wasn’t all that surprising. Cuerva Lachance had discovered the tower room at last.

  Freddy joined Jordan and Mum as they stormed along the hallway and down the stairs, sucking Mel into their wake. As always, Freddy felt vaguely disoriented to see her mum and stepfather. It was the way she always felt in the spring when the sun came properly out from behind the clouds for the first time in months, and Freddy found herself thinking, Right … that’s what it looks like. Mum and Jordan weren’t really home all that often. Freddy couldn’t remember the last time they had all eaten dinner together. Usually, she, Roland, and Mel made themselves spaghetti or chicken and rice or cold-cut sandwiches, then ate in their rooms or in front of the TV in the basement.

  Roland was the last to join the parade. His room was a small one at the back of the house, and even though he wouldn’t have been able to hear the music, Freddy suspected his room was shaking much more noticeably than hers was. The bass notes of the organ made the house shiver; Freddy could hear the windows creaking ominously. Roland rubbed his eyes and signed something to Mel. Freddy turned away before she could accidentally read the signs.

  Outside, the music was much louder, and it became louder still as Jordan led them all out the back gate. Freddy glanced down the lane and saw lights going on in nearby houses.

  “Tower,” shouted Mel, pointing. Freddy could hardly hear her. There was a light in the window of the miniature tower attached to the house on Grosvenor Street. Through this window, and out through the walls of the tower itself, rolled the sort of organ music that Freddy associated with misshapen geniuses lurking beneath the Paris Opera House and fixating on innocent young sopranos. As she listened, the melody switched to what would have counted as light jazz if it hadn’t been played on an organ the size of a bus.

  It was the one thing that made the house on Grosvenor Street truly odd. The house had been built around a pipe organ rescued from a derelict movie theatre. The tower housed the conso
le and the pipes. Freddy thought it had been a neat idea, but it would have been a neater one if the house had been built in the middle of a forest. The organ was the right volume for a theatre, but it was the wrong volume for a suburban neighbourhood.

  Jordan was pounding on the kitchen door of the house on Grosvenor Street. Freddy wished him luck. She thought he would need it to make anyone inside the house hear a mere angry knocking. The music was abruptly supplemented by an incredible wailing sound that swooped enthusiastically up and down the scale.

  “She’s found the siren,” Freddy screamed, and Mel nodded.

  Over the course of the next several minutes, Cuerva Lachance sampled all the organ’s sound effects, then went back to the music, though not without the occasional squawk, hoot, or drumbeat. Freddy knew it was Cuerva Lachance. The organ was being played by someone without an attention span, and the music changed styles every thirty seconds or so. Jordan had his cell phone out now. From what Freddy could hear, he was trying to talk to the police. Freddy thought he should have walked a good ways down the lane first. She caught snatches of the conversation: “… playing the organ! At three in the … no, I said organ … not right … a right to our sleep … I said Grosvenor … no, with a G … I am not drunk! Listen…”

  Freddy wasn’t sure how much longer the music went on. When it finally howled its way to a stop, Jordan, who had given up on the call to the police some time before, began to pound on the door again. It was opened shortly afterwards by Cuerva Lachance herself.

  She looked wide awake and not at all surprised to see them. “There’s a pipe organ in my house!” she said to Freddy, exactly as if they were continuing a conversation that had paused ten seconds ago.

  Jordan said, “We know there’s a pipe organ in your house! That doesn’t mean you have to play it at three in the morning!”