Mister Max: The Book of Lost Things: Mister Max 1

by Cynthia Voigt

  He was concentrating so hard on strokes and shading that the ringing of the bell startled him. His head jerked around and this made his hand draw a long black line right across the whole sheet of paper, from top to bottom, from left to right, from thick to thin.

  The picture was ruined.

  If Max had been a swearing person he would have sworn. But he wasn’t, so he didn’t, and besides, since April 18 he had a different idea about what might be worth swearing at. He just groaned softly in exasperation and turned around, paintbrush in hand, ready for long-eared Madame Olenka to be once again at his gate.

  Instead, he saw a man in a dark suit and a tall black hat. The man’s high, stiff collar shone white in the sunlight, and with him he had a girl, younger than Max, perhaps nine or ten. Her brown corkscrew curls were neatly organized, her honey-colored eyes looked hopefully up at the man, and a little smile rested lightly on her mouth, ready to fly away.

  Before Max could say or do anything, the man had opened the gate for himself and, herding the girl along in front of him, came down the path. His polished shoes crunched on the gravel. The girl hurried to keep a step ahead. “Would this be Five Thieves Alley?” the man asked, brisk and businesslike.

  “Yes?” Max asked, as if to say And if it is?

  “Would you, then, be Mister Max?”

  “Ye-e-es,” Max said, drawing the word out, as if to say And if I am?

  “Would you be that same Mister Max who was so helpful in finding Humphrey Henderson?”

  It began to make sense. Max wondered if this was the mother’s husband, and Angel-Humphrey’s father, and if the girl was then his sister. He hoped not, because these two looked too smug for the warmhearted woman with her bright red hat and her eager ways and her little boy with his adventuring attitudes. “Yes,” Max said, and this time added, “Although it was more a matter of finding her. Humphrey had already found me.”

  “Irrelevant,” the man announced. Max decided he must be a lawyer or someone important in the government, with that quick, decisive manner. The man looked closely at Max. “She said this Mister Max person had odd eyes.”

  Max could be decisive, too. He stood a little taller and asked, “Would you be a friend of Mrs. Henderson?”

  The man shook his head impatiently. “Not to speak of, although I do know him, the husband, slightly. He’s in banking, so of course we have some dealings, but we’re not what you’d call friends.” After saying that he fell silent, as if he might have given away too much.

  Max had never practiced law or worked in the government, but he had appeared on stage. As if he were the Miser, full of self-importance and money, safe in his large leather chair behind a big wooden desk, he asked, “Would there be a reason why you are here?”

  The girl tugged on the man’s dark sleeve. “Papa? Tell him what Brenny told Mama.”

  “I’m taking care of this,” he snapped, and she looked down at her feet, which were shod in laced leather shoes, the same deep green color as her velvet coat and the ribbon in her hair. The man said, “I’m offering you a job, Mister Max. I presume you are some sort of detective, and I want to hire you to find …” His voice faded as he tried to decide how to put his request.

  Max waited, as relaxed as if people were always stopping by to interrupt his painting and ask him to do things they didn’t know how to say.

  “My daughter has lost her dog,” the man said at last. “I want you to find it. What do you charge?”

  Calculating as fast as he could, Max tried to figure out what he could ask without raising suspicions. Too low a sum would be just as suspicious as too high a figure, he knew. Because he was busy thinking, he didn’t answer.

  The man misunderstood his failure to respond and asked impatiently, “Is it that you want to know how we heard of you, before you’ll agree to undertake the work?”

  “Yes,” Max said, although he already knew that. He needed the time to calculate: Angel-Humphrey’s mother had paid him fifty without batting an eye. So fifty was a good number, but should he ask fifty per day? Fifty per job? Fifty when the job ended? His mind sorted the options while his face waited to hear what the man said. Maybe he should ask for a hundred, he thought, seeing how richly dressed the girl was and the diamond tie pin in the man’s cravat.

  The man said, “I’ve never heard of you, and nobody I asked has heard of you, either. You must be a beginner in the detective business.”

  Max nodded. Was he a detective? Did beginners have to charge less? How much less was enough less?

  “Papa!” The girl stamped her foot. She turned to Max. “Our parlor maid, Brenny, has a sister who works for the Baroness Barthold. You know her, don’t you? Everybody knows about the Baroness. She’s the old witch who lives all alone in that castle on The Lakeview, halfway up to the Royal Promontory. It’s as big as a palace, Brenny says. The one with a stone fence so high you can’t see over it? She’s very rich and very important; you have to know who she is.”

  Max did.

  “Martha—but that’s not really her name, it’s just what the Baroness calls her—told Brenny, who told us, that when Mrs. Henderson was paying a call on the Baroness she told her about how you found Humphrey, so when I lost my dog, Mama asked Papa to ask Mrs. Henderson about you, and he did. She said— What did she say, Papa?”

  “She said she gave you fifty,” the man said to Max with a stern look. “She didn’t say you were an artist,” he added, and did not need to say that for him this was not a recommendation.

  “I’m a little bit of everything,” Max answered. He had made up his mind and spoke with all the confidence of the Miser with bags of gold piled up safe in the cellar. “I’ll take the case, twenty-five paid now, plus another twenty-five if—and only if—I succeed in finding the dog.”

  “Done,” said the man. He reached into his jacket pocket to take out his wallet.

  Max put the bills in his pocket and turned his attention to the girl. “Now,” he said, all business, “what’s your name, Miss?”

  “Clarissa,” she answered quickly, and waited—with a little nervous licking of her lips, as if he were a teacher, testing her, and she didn’t want him to find out that she hadn’t studied. He wondered what she was trying to keep hidden from him.

  “What kind of dog is it, Miss Clarissa? What color, what breed? What’s the dog’s name?”

  “Her name is Princess Jonquilletta of the Windy Isles, because she’s gold and white and expensive and because—”

  The father broke in. “It’s a golden retriever. My daughter had to have a golden retriever, nothing else would do, nothing smaller, nothing that didn’t shed. Nothing”—with a sharp glance at Max—“more intelligent and trainable. Just this one breed, just this exact dog. And now she’s lost it.”

  Max ignored the interruption. “That’s a long name. What do you call her for short?”

  “Princess Jonquilletta—but she doesn’t obey, but then she doesn’t have to because she’s always on a leash on account of she won’t come when she’s called.” She looked up at her father. “It wasn’t my fault. I told you, I tied her up. Somebody must have untied her. I didn’t lose her.” The girl looked up at Max to say, “I didn’t really lose her. I didn’t forget her or anything like that. I know exactly where she was.”

  “Where was that, Miss?” Max asked, because that would be the place to start his search.

  “At the Hilliard School, over near the University.”

  “Do you know the school?” the father asked, and Max did. It wasn’t that far from Joachim’s house. The father informed him, “Hilliard is the best money can buy.”

  Clarissa explained, “Dogs can’t come to school. But there’s a fence just across the street from the play yard where we tie our dogs and cats while they wait for us. Princess Jonquilletta of the Windy Isles is the most beautiful pet of all.”

  “She should be, the money we pay to have her washed and brushed,” the father grumbled.

  “Everybody says,” Cla
rissa assured Max.

  Max concentrated on being a detective, looking for clues. “I gather that the dog hasn’t come home?”

  “Not yet,” Clarissa told him. “Not by this morning, so it’s been two nights. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t, was it, Papa?”

  “My daughter is very upset about this.”

  She didn’t look so upset to Max, but maybe she was pretending, or being brave, or keeping her hopes up. Just because she didn’t look sad and anxious didn’t mean she wasn’t. Max knew about not letting everybody see just how you were feeling. Although, Angel-Humphrey’s mother had looked sad, and anxious, and a little terrified, too.

  “When can you get to work on this?” the father asked.

  “A lost animal?” Max answered, as if he were speaking from experience.

  “Or stolen. The dog is quite valuable,” the father said.

  “With a lost animal, it’s better to start immediately, of course. Today is Sunday, and you lost the dog when, Miss? Friday?”

  “I told you, I didn’t lose her. I think somebody at my school, somebody jealous, took her.”

  “She’s been gone over thirty-six hours,” Max reminded them. “Have you searched for her? Have the police searched?” He didn’t know what he should do if there were police involved. Given his present situation, he didn’t want the police anywhere near him, and he didn’t want to go anywhere near the police. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to pretend he was a detective.

  “Police? Of course not. We’re talking about a dog,” the father snapped.

  “I thought she’d come home,” Clarissa said. “Like before.”

  “I knew better,” her father said.

  “She’s been lost before?” Max asked.

  “Only twice, and never for all night,” Clarissa answered hastily. “And it wasn’t my fault. She pulled the leash out of my hand, for a cat once and once for a bird. A chicken, actually. She’s strong.” Her eyes got a little wider, and her mouth quivered a little, and she said, “Can you find my dog for me, Mister Max? Please? I’m very sad without my pet, so can’t you please, please, please? Find Princess Jonquilletta of the Windy Isles and bring her back home?”

  “This is the address,” the father said, reaching inside his jacket to pull out a flat silver case, from which he took a business card.

  “I’ll do what I can,” Max told the girl as he put the card in his pocket. “I’ll do my best.”

  Whatever that might be, he thought.

  It wasn’t until they had disappeared from view that he realized, like the sun breaking through clouds, This is a job! and he realized also that, whether he succeeded in finding the dog or not, with this twenty-five added to what was left of Mrs. Henderson’s fifty, he had enough to get through the next two weeks at least. By that time he might well know something—mightn’t he?—about his parents’ whereabouts. Then he thought it again, A job! and set to work.

  Max had changed out of his painting gear into something more appropriate for finding a lost dog and was washing his lunch dishes, his back to the door, when he heard Ari come in the kitchen door, home from dishwashing for an afternoon of study. “Who the devil are you? What are you doing here?” Ari demanded. “Where’s Mister?”

  Max turned around. He wore a train conductor’s flat-topped, stiff-brimmed hat from Trouble on the Tracks and the private’s jacket from A Soldier’s Sweetheart, which had no medals or gold stripes sewn onto it. This struck him as a good uniform for a dogcatcher. The butterfly net from The Lepidopterist’s Revenge leaned against the counter at his side, and he wore one of his mother’s aprons so as not to get his costume wet.

  “You heard me,” Ari said, stepping around the table, his hands clenched into fists. “Where is Mister?”

  Max turned back to the sink to hide his grin.

  Ari spun him around by a shoulder, glared threateningly into Max’s face, then recognized him. “Oh,” he said. “It’s you.”

  “It is,” Max agreed. He turned off the water and reached back to untie the apron, which he lifted over his head and hung on a hook beside the sink. “I’m a dogcatcher.”

  Ari had stepped back. Now he studied his young landlord, shaking his head, and asked, “Exactly what are you up to, Mister Max?”

  “Also, actually? My name is just Max,” Max told him. “Mister Max is just—it’s the name I’m using.”

  Ari’s head switched from slow shaking to slow nodding. “All right,” he said thoughtfully. “Just Max. Makes more sense. Any last name?”

  That Max wasn’t going to say. He shrugged.

  “All right,” Ari said. “Then why a dogcatcher?”

  “To catch a dog.” Max was enjoying mystifying Ari, but he didn’t want to upset his tutor, so he explained, “It’s a job.”

  “It’s a job. I see. All right. A job doing what?”

  “Dogcatching,” Max repeated patiently. “So, if you’ll tell Grammie, in case I’m late for dinner? Tell her, even if I have to miss dinner I’ll stop in to see her when I get home, so she doesn’t have to worry about me. I hope to be on time, but … Do you think she’d save me a plate if I’m late?”

  “I’ll tell her. I don’t know what she’ll say, though. I’ll be there, too,” Ari said, perhaps a promise or maybe a threat, “because I wouldn’t mind hearing the explanation of this—this dogcatchering.”

  The Lost Dog

  • ACT I •

  The Hilliard School had once been the home of a wealthy jeweler whose diamonds had been revealed to be paste imitations, so his three penniless daughters had to turn their fine home into a school, and their fine educations into classroom lessons, in order to put food into their mouths. The spreading lawns were now playgrounds and playing fields, the elegant painted bedrooms held desks and chairs and chalkboards, the grand salons had been chopped up into offices, and the great dining room was now filled with tables that seated only eight or ten, where students and teachers practiced table manners and polite conversation during lunches prepared for them in the large kitchens. The school fees were high enough that the students came only from the wealthier families of the city. There were no scholarship students at Hilliard, no deserving poor; it was not, its faculty pointed out, a university, to accept every applicant. Not that the students at Hilliard were allowed to be lazy or uneducated; a boy or girl who did not, or could not, do the work of his or her classes was asked to stay home, perhaps with a tutor or governess. “It is a privilege to be here,” the teachers told their classes, and the students told one another, and the administration told its faculty. “You are the lucky ones.”

  When Max rode up on his bicycle, the butterfly net held at his side while his free hand steered clumsily, the great iron gates were locked, the grounds and buildings unpeopled. Max dismounted across the street from the gates and stood at the fence to which he thought Princess Jonquilletta of the Windy Isles must have been tied. He looked up the street and then back down it.

  To the right, the wide avenue passed in front of the arched brick entrance to the University before it became a busy commercial street of the New Town. To the left, it narrowed to a single paved roadway that ran between walls, some lower and some higher, some red brick, some gray or golden stone, some stiff pikes of wrought iron. The walls protected the privacy of homes belonging to the wealthy people who inhabited this quarter of the city. If he were a dog, Max thought, and if he were running loose, where would he go? He would have his nose to the ground, exploring, going … into a busy city street? or toward the lawns and gardens hidden behind the walls? Max had played many parts in Starling theatrical productions, and he could guess what might anger a Russian cavalryman and even what Puss in Boots might say to a king, but he had never played a dog, and certainly not a dog who had been saddled with the name of Princess Jonquilletta of the Windy Isles. Who knew what such a dog would think, if a dog could think at all?

  He couldn’t know, but he guessed that the smell of grass and trees would attract a dog more than the smell of
horse dung and carriage oil, so he turned left, away from the University and down along the quiet street.

  The first entrance posts he came to towered over a brick wall no higher than his waist. He left his bicycle against the wall and, carrying the net, walked along a brick driveway that curved up a low hill at the crest of which stood a brick mansion with wide green lawns stretching away along curving slopes. Stone pillars lined a curved central section, like a row of footmen, while two long wings rose up, three stories high, and a dozen chimneys reached into the sky. The mansion stood on its hilltop as if it were a palace. Not one of the huge, important palaces nobody can imagine being a home, of course, but one of the smaller palaces, where a royal family could go for quiet, more private, times together.

  Max stepped between two of the pillars and walked up slate steps to the wide oak doorway. Its brass shone with polishing, and a fat bell knob gleamed in the afternoon sunlight. He pulled it.

  There was no sound from within, not even a distant ringing. Max waited, and after a few minutes—as if there were a great distance to be crossed—the door swung open.

  A man blocked the entry. Tall, stiff, silver-haired, and solemn, he wore a long-tailed morning coat and white gloves. He did not invite Max to step inside. “Yes,” he said, and it was not a question. There was a lot of No in that Yes, most clearly a No Entry.

  “I’m the dogcatcher,” Max began, but he got no further.

  “Trade goes around to the side,” said the man—the butler, Max guessed—who then stepped back and closed the door.

  Max thought about pulling the bell again and making a pest of himself, because he didn’t like being talked to in that way—or, rather, he didn’t like not being talked to in that way. Also, he didn’t like having a door shut in his face. He was a city official, practically, and that was no way to treat a city official. However, because he was, after all, only the dogcatcher, he retreated to where the bricks turned into a gravel driveway that led to stables and outbuildings and a yard where an automobile was being polished by a uniformed chauffeur and a row of shining carriages could be seen through the open stable doors. A short path led him to the back entryway, which was a much less important, smaller, painted door, and which opened immediately. This time it was a woman who blocked the entrance, as tall for a woman as the butler had been for a man, and even less welcoming. The apron that covered her black dress was stained with chocolate and dusted with flour. “What is it,” she said, but before Max could answer she decided that she already knew. “We don’t need any nets, thank you, nor brushes nor anything else you’re hoping to hawk here.”