Grammie understood this. She went off right away, leaving Max alone with his ideas, plans, hopes, and possible solutions. Although he had no idea what to do about Pia and didn’t dare think about his parents, he no longer felt so helpless, so trapped in a nightmare.
The Lost Dog
• ACT III •
A mild Sunday morning followed the rainy night. Even in the old city, the air shone fresh and clean. As the first church bells rang out, Max set off on foot for Joachim’s house. It was a good morning for a long walk. Windows and doors were propped open to catch the breeze, so voices and cooking smells floated along the winding streets. On the broad boulevards of the New Town, couples and families and solitary strollers had come out to celebrate the morning in a variety of ways, some to worship, some to picnic, some to wander about aimlessly.
As he expected, Max found Joachim in his garden, glasses on his nose, painting one of his perfect flowers—a single butter-yellow tulip cradled between two long, curving green leaves. “I need Sunny,” Max told his teacher.
Joachim didn’t take his eyes from his canvas. “She’s already eaten. She’d like a walk.”
“I’m taking her to my house,” Max answered. He held out the leash he had taken down from its hook by the door.
“When will you have her back?” Joachim asked inattentively.
Max hesitated. “That, I can’t say.”
Then Joachim did turn his head, to take a long, long look at Max. At last, “All right,” he said, and called the dog. “Sunny? You do what Max says. Whatever that turns out to be,” he added in a voice full of foreboding.
The dog approached, tail wagging.
“Max is the detective,” Joachim told her. “He knows what’s what.”
“Not a detective,” Max objected as usual, and he was pleased to be able to offer, “a solutioneer.”
“Solutioneer?” Joachim put down his brush. “Like puppeteer?”
Max nodded, subduing his smile of victory at having surprised his teacher and, if the twitching of Joachim’s mouth was any indication, amused him. “Solutioneer,” Joachim said again, and gave in to good humor to the extent of a short barking sound that caused Sunny to prick up her ears and wag her tail even faster. “Then go get to work solutioneering. You’ve figured this problem out, haven’t you?”
“It might not work,” Max admitted.
Joachim had already turned back to his painting. “The way you did mine,” he concluded.
When Clarissa and her father arrived at midday dressed in Sunday finery, they found Mister Max in his front yard sporting a red beret and a baggy blue shirt, slender paintbrush in hand as he stood before the long-legged easel, behind which was a rather odd, narrow glass box filled—most peculiarly—with what looked like dirt.
A dog, a large golden retriever, had been tied to the low fence with a rope. As the father and daughter approached, the dog—apparently bored by her long wait for something … anything … anything at all to happen—jumped up, barking eagerly, leaping at them, long tail frantically wagging. Until the rope pulled her up short, onto her hind legs.
Clarissa took shelter behind her father, who hesitated. Max looked up from his easel. “She’s just being friendly,” he called to them.
The girl hovered behind as the father opened the gate—narrowly, narrowly—and they squeezed through.
The dog was desperate. Her tail wagged wildly. She lurched at the man, who shoved her aside with his knee, and then she nosed behind him to jump up on the girl.
That day Clarissa wore a yellow dress, embroidered along its hem and high neck and narrow wrists with bright red flowers and bright green leaves, with matching flowers on her yellow shoes and twined around the crown of her yellow straw bonnet. When the dog jumped up on her, she gave a little scream and pushed it away, but the skirt already had long brown streaks on it, because Sunny had worked off some of her energy digging in the flower patch by the fence while Max painted and waited, his pet store purchase set out in the grass behind his easel as if he wanted to keep it hidden.
“Down, Princess Jonquilletta of the Windy Isles!” cried Clarissa, and the dog jumped up on her again. She stepped back. “Down! Sit! Play dead!” The dog paid no attention to the order and lunged again and again, pulling at the end of her rope, hoping that she could get loose to play with this lively, shrieking person. “Daddy! Help!”
“You, sir!” the father called. “You! Mister Max!”
Max put his brush in a jar of water and wiped his hands on his shirt.
Clarissa fled across the lawn toward him.
Sunny barked twice, then sat down again, resigned to boredom.
“You summoned us,” the father announced, approaching Max at a dignified pace. “I have luncheon guests waiting.”
“Yes,” Max agreed, keeping an eye on Clarissa as he stepped forward, hand outstretched. Seeing that she was making her stealthy way to his easel he said over his shoulder, “That’s private, Miss.”
As he expected, the girl pretended not to have heard.
“Is this the dog?” the father asked.
“That would be my question to you.” Max wanted to stick to the exact truth. “She was running loose in the New Town. She answered the description.”
The dog was sitting back on her haunches at the end of her tether, panting, her tongue hanging out of her mouth, her tail brushing back and forth across the grass of the lawn and the dirt of the garden, her dark eyes fixed hopefully on Max. The father studied her.
“She’s not wearing a collar. Ours had an expensive collar, set with semiprecious stones. She’s quite dirty. Ours was never dirty. Ours didn’t jump up like that, or bark. Ours was quiet and well-behaved.”
Max said nothing.
“Clarissa?” her father asked. “What do you think? Is this your dog?”
Clarissa had arrived at the easel and was staring at the picture on it. She turned her head to call the dog by name, her voice high, as if she were speaking baby talk. “Princess Jonquilletta of the Windy Isles!”
Sunny didn’t turn her eyes from Max.
“Who was responsible for feeding your dog?” Max asked.
“That would have been the maid Brenny or, if Brenny was occupied with some other duty, the cook.”
Max nodded solemnly.
“We’re a very busy family,” the man said.
“Come see this, Papa,” Clarissa called. “It’s a painting.”
The father went to join her at the easel. Max followed, murmuring, “Private, I said. Private.”
The father looked at Max’s unfinished—and now that it had started to dry, unfinishable—watercolor. “It’s just sky. With clouds. Are you going to put the birds in after?”
“Not—”
“There has to be something going on in a painting,” the father instructed him. “Something to engage the viewer. I know a good deal about art. I’m pretty well-known at several of the galleries, and I’ve earned a reputation in the New Town as something of a connoisseur. This painting will never sell.”
Max didn’t argue.
“As a subject, there is nothing so commonplace as the sky. It’s everywhere. It’s absolutely ordinary. Who wants a picture of that?”
Clarissa had moved on. She bent over the ant farm, then crouched to get a better view. She tapped with her finger at the side of the dirt-filled, narrow glass box. “What is this?”
“That’s mine,” Max said quickly.
“But what is it? I’ve never seen anything like it. Is it a terrarium?”
“Your little girl is awfully nosy,” Max said to the father.
He sprang to her defense. “Curiosity is a valuable quality in a growing mind,” he announced. “As everybody knows. Is there some secret about this … whatever?”
“You’re here about the dog,” Max reminded them.
“That isn’t my dog,” Clarissa announced with absolute finality. “You can’t make me take it.”
“You heard her,” the father
said.
“Where can I get one of these?” Clarissa asked, still staring into the glass. “There are little tunnels, see, Papa?”
“This is the only one in the city,” Max could tell her truthfully, since that is what the pet store owner had told him yesterday. “Got the thing last summer, thought it would be a novelty and sell like hotcakes. Or, to be precise, a hotcake. But nobody wanted it. Are you sure you do? It’s been in the store for months and I have to tell you, it’s pretty boring. But if you’re sure? I’ll be glad to take your money and I’ll give you a good price, too.”
Max told Clarissa, “It’s a formicarium. An ant farm.”
“It is really strange,” Clarissa said. “Have you ever seen one before, Papa? A formicarium,” she murmured, practicing the word.
“What do you do with them?” the father asked Max.
“You look at them,” Max said. “Like a painting, except there’s always something going on in there. You study them and learn. Ants are a good example to us all,” he declared. “As everybody knows.”
Clarissa reached out a finger to touch the glass. “I wish I could have one.” She sounded sad, as if she were a poor, hungry girl looking at a plate of sandwiches that was about to be carried out for somebody else to enjoy.
“What do you feed them?” the father asked Max.
“Honey water,” Max answered, as he had himself been instructed. “Plus a little piece of fish every now and then. For protein.”
“Ah, protein,” said the father, to show that he understood nutrition. “Yes. They aren’t any trouble, are they?” He looked over at the dog. Their dog had been a great deal of trouble.
“Doesn’t look like it, does it?” said Max. If you don’t want to tell the truth, which in this case would have been I don’t know, you can always answer a question with an echoing question.
The father said to Clarissa, “I guess nobody at your school has a—what did you call it?—formicarium?”
“I’d be the only one.” She stood up and looked hopefully right into his eyes.
He smiled, reaching down to touch her cheek. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, my little princess?”
“He says there aren’t any others, not in the whole city.”
“There are other cities,” her father said. “It’s your vacation week, so your mother could take you down to Porthaven on Wednesday. She’s free on Wednesdays. You two girls can take the train, have a day’s shopping.”
“But I want it now.” Clarissa’s eyes filled with tears.
“Sometimes,” her father told her, older and wiser than his little girl, “we have to wait for the things we want.”
“That’s the truth,” Max agreed, irritating Clarissa.
She looked from one to the other of them. At the gate the dog barked, as if to remind them of her presence, and anger crossed the girl’s face, swift and light as a cloud blowing across the sky. She stood on her tiptoes to say, in a whisper too loud not to be overheard, “He said he’d find Princess Jonquilletta of the Windy Isles for me. He said.”
The father looked at Max, then back to his daughter. “He didn’t promise.”
“He said,” she insisted, and a tear or two spilled onto a cheek.
Max told the exact truth. “It’s not that I didn’t try.”
“You can’t say that you succeeded,” the father told him.
Max could have, but he didn’t. If things turned out the way he planned, he would only have succeeded in a secret, unacknowledged way. But that way happened also to be the best solution he could think of. He said, “I don’t expect you to pay the second half of the fee.”
The father laughed, a little scornful, the way successful people can be. “I’d hope not, although you can’t tell me you couldn’t use the money. You can’t be making much of a living, not with those paintings, and I don’t imagine there’s much business coming in for a detective. An unknown detective. With only the one reference, because I can’t give you one, can I?”
Max shrugged.
“Tell you what, though. I’ll buy that ant farm from you, for the twenty-five you’d have gotten for the dog if you’d found her.”
Max hesitated, as if he had to think about that.
“You have to,” Clarissa scolded him. “You owe me.”
“And I’ll throw in another ten, since you won’t be able to replace it,” the father added. “That’s my best offer. Take it or leave it.”
“I guess I’ll take it,” Max said, in just the voice the formerly rich and now terribly poor man used when he was offered only a third of the original price for his last remaining silver fork in A Miser Made Miserable.
“And you’ll have to get rid of that,” the father said. He pointed to the dog.
Pleased to be noticed at last, the dog jumped up, barking eagerly and happily.
“It’s not going to be easy,” the father predicted with satisfaction, a man who liked getting more than what he paid for in a deal.
Puffed out with proud and happy energy at the success of his plan, Max rode—fast—through the winding streets of the old city with Sunny running beside him on her leash, at last getting the exercise she had longed for all the long morning. Max couldn’t stop smiling. Everything had turned out just the way he had hoped, and planned, and worked for. Everything had turned out for the best: The dog had a good home; Joachim, by means of the dog, had a new vision of what his art might be, and that caused him to go out for glasses and thus discover that he wasn’t dying of some blinding brain disease; Clarissa had a pet she could show off but not neglect; and Max had money in his pocket. The lives of his teacher and the dog were both better. Even Clarissa’s life was improved, since it couldn’t be good for a person to misuse a helpless creature. This solutioneering felt like something he had always been meant to do. He was using his best abilities and finding out how good they were. And he was being paid for doing it. He was truly independent.
Max felt as if at any moment he would spread his arms and fly, up into the air, up among the clouds. That feeling made him laugh out loud, which made a woman passing by with her two young children look up in alarm, which made him laugh again. He pedaled as fast as he could. Sunny ran easily beside him.
Max was bursting with ideas.
He left Sunny with Joachim and rode—even faster along the wide boulevards—across the New Town and out to 111 The Lakeview, slowing down only a little at the long, steep approach. Pia’s home might not have been as large as the Baroness’s castle, but it was a very grand edifice nonetheless, with an arched gateway, a gatehouse, and a paved drive leading to a cobbled courtyard that fronted the perfectly rectangular three-story mansion. The glimpse of foyer Max caught before a tall, broad butler blocked his view had shining marble floors in black and white squares like a chessboard. Still wearing his red beret and painting shirt, Max was breathing heavily from the speed of his ride, and the liveried man looked mistrustfully at him. “Yes?”
Max asked if Pia was at home.
“Is Miss Bendiff expecting you?”
“Probably not,” Max said with an inappropriate laugh.
The man looked again carefully, to make up his mind. “Wait here if you would, Sir.”
Max spoke quickly, to slip his words through as the big door swung closed. “Tell her it’s the Solutioneer.”
That evening Max and Ari ate alone. Grammie had been invited to have dinner with friends at a restaurant and go on to a concert, but she had left a pot of chicken stew simmering on her stove and a platter of biscuits on her kitchen table, along with a bowl of chopped kale for Max to sauté and a lemon sponge cake for dessert. In honor of his independence, Max decided to carry dinner over to his own house. He wanted to be the host at his own dining room table.
Ari didn’t even ask the cause of this perhaps rebellious behavior. He just sat at the table in the dining room, which Max had set with two places. Neither did he comment on the way the room had been cleaned up, posters rehung, books and scripts replaced i
n neat rows on their shelves. He touched the swelling on his head only occasionally.
Max poured them each a tall glass of cider and served the two plates. They ate without speaking for several minutes before Ari, with a shake of the head as if to clear his brain, broke the silence. “You look like the cat that swallowed the canary.”
“Are there feathers on my face?” Max joked.
“I guess you should be pleased with yourself,” Ari said, not laughing. But he was smiling and a smile suited his handsome features. “I’ve quit both of my jobs,” he announced.
“That’s good news,” Max said, and then, seeing Ari’s expression, “Isn’t it?”
Ari nodded as he took another bite of Grammie’s chicken stew. “It’s very good news. Now I can sign myself up for more courses at the University, and I’ll be able to complete my degree in a year’s time. By the start of next summer I’ll finally be a graduate, and I can tell you, it’s been a long wait for that accomplishment.” He picked up a biscuit, split and buttered it, and ate it with pleasure, all without taking his eyes off Max’s face. He was waiting.
Max waited right back at him.
At last, with a sheepish smile, Ari admitted, “I did go and see her. I took her that note. I did it this afternoon.”
Max put down his fork. “The Baroness.”
“My great-aunt, yes.”
Max waited. Ari waited. Finally, “And—?” Max prompted.
“Oh. Well. She apologized, and rather nicely—nicely for her, that is—about the way she had treated me. And she did admit that she’d misjudged Martha. Then she started in telling me what to do. You know: move back, see a tailor, study economics so I can manage the estate I’ll inherit, buy myself a horse and carriage and even one of those new automobiles, start going out with the right kind of people to meet the right kind of girl. Because I’m going to be Baron Barthold,” Ari said, and it was an apology.
Mister Max: The Book of Lost Things: Mister Max 1 Page 22
