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

by Cynthia Voigt

  Max came right to the point. “Do you want to keep the dog?”

  Joachim turned to look at him and asked, “What are you doing here? Again. Are you going to turn into a pest?”

  Max stuck to his point. “Do you want this dog for your own?”

  “I take it, then, you’ve chosen which law to overrule?”

  Max took a deep, patient breath. “My question is, do you want to keep the dog?”

  “Sunny?”

  At the sound of her name, the dog rose to her feet and trotted over to where the painter was sitting. She lowered her haunches and sat there, looking up at him, wagging her tail hopefully. Joachim stared back at her, not happily.

  “I guess. If I have to.”

  “You don’t have to,” Max said. “Do you want to?”

  “Then yes, if you must know,” Joachim snapped. “I do. Is there anything else?”

  “I’ll need to borrow her for an hour or so on Sunday,” Max told him, and left abruptly, knowing that what his teacher really wanted to do right then was not hear a brilliant plan but to get back to work.

  Max, too, had work to get back to, even if he didn’t know its name. He returned home—relieved to find that no new breaking-and-entering had taken place, not that he really expected another attack so soon after yesterday’s. He found his mother’s best stationery in the little writing desk in the parlor and took some to the kitchen. There he wrote a brief note, asking Clarissa’s father to bring his daughter to 5 Thieves Alley on Sunday at half past twelve. The investigation is complete, he wrote, and signed himself Mister Max.

  He wished he had a profession to put under the signature to make it look more official. But what would it be? Detective? Detective-at-large? Private Investigator? Nothing seemed right, so he just slid the folded paper into its envelope and copied the address from the business card Clarissa’s father had presented to him.

  Then he wrote another note on another sheet of paper. This one was more difficult to find the right words for. Honored Baroness, he wrote, and then stopped to think. He could ask her to call at the same time he was scheduled for a math tutorial and let the old woman and Ari confront one another. That was certainly a scene he would enjoy watching. But he couldn’t be sure she would accept his invitation, and besides, she was so very proud that any audience to the reunion would cause her to become the Wronged Baroness, wrapped up in her righteousness and her dignity. Proud people made things hard on themselves, Max reflected, and with that in mind he wrote, How often are we given second chances? This note he didn’t sign. He didn’t think it would be very difficult to persuade Ari to deliver it to the Baroness, especially since he could assure his tutor that in the matter of the Cellini Spoon, his Martha was known to be innocent.

  Those two letters written and one slipped into a nearby mailbox, Max returned to the house and waited for three o’clock, congratulating himself on how well prepared he was, for the lesson and for the next steps in these two cases.

  In part he was right. His geometric proofs were flawless, and after the lesson he had the note ready to give Ari, asking him to present it to the Baroness “in person.” But he was not prepared for his tutor’s rising from the table, cheeks red, eyes flashing, looking entirely too much like one of his unpleasant military ancestors.

  “What do you know?” Ari demanded, his shoulders high and stiff. “You don’t know anything. If she hired you to hunt me down …” He couldn’t finish that furious thought.

  “No. Wait. Listen.” Max stood up, to face Ari across the kitchen table. “She has no idea where you are. She asked me to— Ari? I found it! I did, the spoon, the Cellini Spoon. It had fallen behind the sink in the kitchen. That’s where it’s been all these years. She knows she was wrong.”

  Ari froze. Then his shoulders relaxed and curiosity shone in his dark eyes. “You found it? Really? How did you do that? I looked everywhere, including the kitchen.”

  “By accident, really. Sit down. Can I get you some water? I didn’t know …” There was much Max hadn’t understood about Ari, but he did know that Ari could walk out of the house and disappear. He waited.

  Ari sat. Max brought him a glass of water and took the chair opposite to explain what he’d worked out. “I know who you are, the great-nephew. Or I think that’s who you are.”

  Ari nodded, but his face was stiff and expressionless, a bad portrait.

  “The Baroness has the spoon,” Max said, and then added, “so you don’t have to save up money any longer, you don’t have to have all those jobs, you can go back to being just a university student. You can even”—he made himself admit this—“go back to live in the castle. She hired me to find the spoon, but she didn’t expect me to be able to do it. She really believed it had been stolen and sold. But I think, too, you might be right about her. Maybe she really did hire me to find you if I could.”

  “It looks like you could,” Ari said with one of his sad smiles. “But it’s too late.”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “No, I mean … it’s my own fault. I should have stood up for her. My Martha. I knew she’d never do anything like that, and I never doubted her, not for an instant, but I didn’t say anything. I failed to protect her. I was looking for words when she—the Baroness, I mean—started carrying on, about how Martha had stolen me then stolen the spoon for revenge on the Baroness, and it was all so … Ugly, it was just ugly, what she was saying, and Martha was kind and gentle, she would never have— I’d never seen my great-aunt like that before, so cruel, so shrieking. I was stunned. All of the ugliness in the room choked me, I couldn’t— But Martha thought I believed it, and I don’t blame her, what else could she think? The way I stood there with my mouth just flapping and not defending her. She was weeping, Max. My heart broke for her. By the time I found words, my great-aunt—she’s terrible, a terrible woman—had already sent my Martha out of the room. And Martha had seen how weak I was, spineless, just like my great-aunt always said, and she never wanted to see me again.” He buried his face in his hands. “She was thrown out, with no references, no recourse.” He looked up at Max to add, “I would have followed her but I was sure I could find the spoon and rub that old woman’s face in the truth.” His voice became muffled. “I didn’t even know Martha’s name, and anyway she was finished with me. And I don’t blame her. I’m as bad as all the other Bartholds after all. What I did was even more terrible than what the Baroness did.” He lowered his hands, looked Max in the eye, and corrected himself. “What I didn’t do.”

  Max could see why Ari felt that way, and actually, he agreed. What Ari had done was weak, even cruel, and it didn’t matter if it wasn’t what he meant to do or wanted to do. “So you won’t deliver this note?” he asked.

  “I can’t forgive her.”

  Max thought, and then he asked, “Wouldn’t you like the chance to ask Martha’s forgiveness?”

  “How can I find her after all these years? She’s probably married and a mother. If I hadn’t been such a blind fool, she’d be married to me and the mother of my children, but instead I stomped all over her heart.”

  “But if you could?”

  “Of course I would!” Ari snapped.

  “Then the castle is the best place to begin looking, and you might also think of how the Baroness would feel if you went to see her. Not to forgive her,” he added hastily. “But not to be lost to her.”

  “She’ll accuse me of being after her fortune, and the title.”

  “I’d guess she knows you better now.”

  Ari sat silent.

  Max waited.

  Finally, “Not today,” Ari said.

  Grammie handed him the postcard when he and Ari were sitting at her table that evening. She held it out to him without a word and then pretended it was nothing special, while Max—heart racing—studied the photograph on the front.

  This was a black-and-white picture of an ocean liner on an empty sea, the long hull a dark charcoal gray, the water a rough rocky gray, the
sky the clear gray of old ashes but the clouds so white that you knew the sun was shining. He wondered if that was his parents’ ship. He wondered what the ship would look like if they could take photographs in color. Before he could turn it over, Ari was saying, “I suppose he told you who I am.”

  “Nobody has told me anything,” Grammie said. “Who are you, then? If you’re not who I think you are.”

  “Let’s eat first,” Ari said. “And I’ve been thinking. Max?”

  Max looked up.

  “You’re right, I can quit the night clerk job at least. But do I have to move out?”

  “No,” Max said, relieved. “You don’t. I was afraid you’d want to,” Max admitted as he turned the postcard over.

  It was addressed in his father’s unmistakable thick black lines and loops.

  “Why do you have this and not me?” he asked his grandmother.

  “They sent it to the Queensbridge City Librarian. If you notice.”

  Max looked down and noticed. He looked up again. “What does it say?” He didn’t dare to read.

  Grammie stared at him, her eyes bright and her expression serious.

  Max made himself look at the message.

  The great bard WS says it best: “The rich oft underestimate beauty’s lasting embrace,” he read, and looked up again, confused. “That’s not really Shakespeare.”

  Grammie shrugged. She had no answers.

  Well, our dear Arabella has riches and beauty both now, the card said. After that, however, his father wrote something that actually sounded like him: The adventure is under way!

  There was no signature, not even initials.

  “That father of yours would rather sound mysterious than make sense,” Grammie grumbled, taking the postcard from Max.

  Max reclaimed it and read it again. “Do you think he was drugged?”

  “He sounds like his normal self at the end,” Grammie pointed out.

  “Where is it postmarked?” Ari asked.

  They passed the card back and forth between them as if different pairs of eyes might be able to puzzle it out, but all they could be sure of was that the postmark ended with an A.

  “It’s as if someone blurred it with a finger,” Max said.

  “India? America?” Grammie suggested. “China, Australia, Argentina?”

  “Panama, Kenya,” Ari added unhelpfully. “Tanganyika, Malta, Bermuda.”

  “Do you think it was smudged on purpose?” Max asked.

  “He’s right,” Ari said. “It could have been done on purpose. I didn’t think of that.”

  “That’s why he’s the detective,” Grammie agreed proudly.

  “I’m not a detective,” Max said. It seemed to him that was all he was saying these days.

  “They didn’t say where they are,” Grammie complained. “I don’t know why they wrote at all.”

  Max had an idea about that. “To let you know, if I wasn’t here, that I might be in trouble,” he guessed. “Or maybe to let me know, if I was here, which I am, that they’re safe.” He was beginning to suspect that he knew, with this talk of riches, what the Long-ears were expecting to find somewhere near one of the tables where his father sat to eat, but he had more immediate concerns. “Who do you think blotted the postmark? My father? Or someone else? It would have to be someone in a post office, wouldn’t it?”

  “I didn’t think of all that,” Grammie said. “That’s why he’s such a good detective,” she announced proudly to Ari.

  “I’m not—”

  “He certainly is,” Ari agreed, and smiled, if not merrily at least without the shadow of sadness. “And he does his homework, too.”

  In which Pia has her uses

  That night, dreams stalked Max. Tall, dark-cloaked, long-eared men chased after him, and he ran through all the secret places he knew in the theater, but with their long ears to the ground they kept following, always closer, never quite close enough to grab him if he could force his legs to keep running.

  Max woke in darkness, heart pounding. He hadn’t checked on the theater in days. What if something was wrong there, a fire, rats, squatters …? When he slept again, in his dreams he was the hunter and his parents the quarry in some familiar but unknown city, the kind of place nightmares construct, where tall buildings crowd the sides of half-remembered roadways down which we wander, searching.

  It was the postcard, he realized, waking with relief into morning light. That postcard made him feel both a little better—to know they had come safely to land, to know they had been able to send it to him—and at the same time much more anxious. Misquoted Shakespeare? What was he supposed to make of that? As he got out of bed, however, something about those dreams made him remember that he might know what the Long-ears wanted.

  His father’s fortune. That is, his father’s alleged fortune. They must have heard William Starling’s claims about a fortune and thought he was speaking literally. Max could picture the scene, some restaurant or pub, his father flushed with the pride of a successful performance, one during which the audience gasped and wept and roared in anger at the satisfyingly right times and to a satisfying degree. His eyes aglow, with a sweep of his arm his father would have said to whoever was listening, “Fortune? My personal fortune? I break my fast each morning in its company!” Meaning, Max knew, his wife, his son, and the tall bookcases where he kept scripts. His drama-loving father liked to proclaim his favorite lines over and over, whether they came from his own head or from a play. Probably, the Long-ears had heard him and taken William Starling’s theatrics for the truth. It was a Long-ear, probably, who had delivered that message to the Harbormaster. Hadn’t the clerk said something about his ears?

  Sometimes Max wished his father wasn’t the kind of grandiloquent man he was. And where would this fortune have come from? Theatrical people didn’t make fortunes, and neither William nor Mary Starling came from a family that had a fortune to bequeath. But the Long-ears wouldn’t know this.

  That morning, Max and Ari breakfasted in companionable silence. Ari probably wanted to be left to his own thoughts and decisions, Max thought. But before he went out the back door to ride off to the University, Ari turned around to say, with a thoroughly mischievous smile of a kind Max had never before seen on his tutor’s face, “You know, Max, I was thinking. Now that you’ve found that wretched spoon? I have so much saved, I might just quit both of my jobs.” He was gone before Max could say anything.

  So some good had come from the finding of the Cellini Spoon; one life, at least, had been improved. It was Max’s life that hadn’t, and he couldn’t help but think of that.

  Yes, a postcard had arrived, and yes, it did make him feel less abandoned. For about an hour. After that, questions began all over again, prickly questions that stung and scraped at him, burned him like a patch of nettles. Where had the postcard been mailed? Someplace not much more than a week distant by steamship, that was all he knew; after that it was all guesswork. Had his parents debarked? Or had they gone on, and if so, gone on where, and gone on by land or by sea? What was their ultimate destination? What was happening? And what was he supposed to do? Just wait for another disturbing communication? But what else could he do but wait? And how many jobs could Mister Max hope to be offered? Not many, probably. He had already been lucky, he knew, and how long would his luck hold? Not long, probably.

  Max buried his face in his hands, and a feeling like a wet black cloud wrapped itself around him. If he’d been a weeper, now would have been the time for tears, tears of worry and frustration, of anger, of fear and loneliness. But he wasn’t, so he rubbed at his eyes, hard, and decided that he’d put away the breakfast things first, and then do the dining room, and maybe find his father’s fortune, too, ha ha. Putting things back in order would at least be something to do, a distraction. That morning, Max badly needed distracting.

  The kitchen took almost no time to tidy, and after finishing there Max went to the dining room. With only empty hooks on its bare walls and only the to
p two shelves of the bookcase full, with posters and books scattered on the tabletop and chair seats and even in clumsy piles on the floor, the dining room looked like the half-finished set of one of the Company’s productions. Looking around, thinking about the Long-ears, Max couldn’t help considering possible hiding places for a treasure. He agreed with the Long-ears about one thing: Any possible fortune would be hidden in a room with a table at which people sat down for breakfast. Even if it came to nothing, a careful search would put the room to rights. Also, a treasure hunt would carry him even further away from the thoughts that had disturbed his sleep.

  Their intruder hadn’t gotten up to the top bookcase shelves before Ari interrupted him, so Max decided to start there, with the long line of Shakespeare’s plays in individual volumes. He reached for All’s Well That Ends Well.

  He had gotten as far as Hamlet, lifting down each volume, feeling its weight, checking its binding for mended places, fanning gently through its pages to see if anything fell out, and then replacing it on the shelf, when he heard the bell ring on the front gate. He climbed down from his ladder but had gotten no farther than the front hall when the door opened and Pia entered. “I didn’t say come in,” he greeted her.

  Instead of her school uniform, she wore a blue flowered dress and sandals. She was carrying a white box tied with a scarlet ribbon, and her braid shone in the sunlight that followed her in through the open door. “Good morning to you, too, Merry Sunshine. Is there an apron I can put on? I’m here to help clean up. Don’t you remember?”

  In fact, Max had hoped that she wouldn’t remember.

  “What kind of an assistant would I be if I left the hardest, most boring work to you?” she asked.

  “Pia, you know perfectly—”

  “Have you had breakfast? Because I haven’t. I had to sneak out of the house before breakfast or they would have noticed I was going out and either told me not to or sent me in the automobile, and you don’t want anyone involved in your private life, isn’t that right? I got enough of Gabrielle’s croissants for all of us, if Ari’s here.” She headed into the kitchen, saying over her shoulder, “Do you want a glass of milk or some tea?”