Chasing Secrets (3 page)

S
aturday morning I hear the snap of Papa's bags closing without me. I watch through my window as he hurries across to the barn, hunched forward in the foggy morning, a bag in each hand. A few minutes later, the buggy wheels squeak and Juliet's hooves
click, clack
on the cobblestone.

Great. I'm stuck here all day with nothing to do and no one to do it with.

For a second I wonder what the girls from Miss Barstow's are doing. Then I come to my senses and take out my journal. I like to write poems, just as my mama did. She wrote a poem about me when I was little. It's one of the few things I have from her.

I have a little girl named Lizzie,

So busy she makes me dizzy.

She thinks our pets are ill

And prescribes a doctor's pill.

Now our cat's in a drunken tizzy,

All because of our little Lizzie.

I'm glad Mama had a sense of humor, but I wonder what else she thought about me. Too tall? Too awkward? Too many freckles? Would she be happy that I can saddle my own horse and put together the loose bones in Papa's bone bag to create a skeleton by myself?

Papa says Mama let me do as I pleased more than Aunt Hortense thought she should. Funny how when Mama was alive, I never thought about her. She was like the back of my head—my parietal bone. Always a part of me. Now I wish I'd paid more attention to her.

After she died, Billy and I did everything together. We put on magic shows of tricks Jing taught us. I was his assistant. He tried to saw me in half for the neighbor kids. I had to stay rolled up in an apple crate while he sawed away. Other days, I sawed him. We won two sarsaparillas and a bag of butterscotch candy for that once. He taught me how to ride bareback, how to climb, and how to keep from hurting myself when I jump down from the loft. Now Billy is a grouch who won't even eat supper with us.

He's trying to earn money for a horseless carriage, and that's all he thinks about. I don't know why he wants a stinky old motorcar when he can have a horse.

I watch him test a bike he's repaired. He rides it across the cobblestones, then comes to a skidding halt to check
the brakes. He charges a nickel to change a bicycle tire. He will have to change an awful lot of tires to buy an automachine.

I take John Henry out of his stall and begin brushing him.

Billy hops off the bike and leans it against the barn door. “Don't make Aunt Hortense crazy,” he says. Last Thanksgiving, Aunt Hortense caught me riding Juliet in my overalls. She was so mad, you'd think I'd robbed a bank. Papa started taking me on his calls after that to get me out of Aunt Hortense's hair.

“I'm just grooming, not riding.”

He snorts. “I'm taking him anyway. Why are you here? I thought you'd taken my place as Papa's little helper.”

“Aunt Hortense pitched a fit, so Papa said I had to stay home. She thinks I'm going to catch something.”

Orange Tom skulks by. He has dirty pumpkin-colored fur, eyes the color of overripe pears, and a paw with an extra finger.

Billy goes into the tack room for the harness.

“Quit following me,” he barks.

“I'm not following you. I'm walking in the same direction.”

Billy lifts the collar over John Henry's head. He can harness John Henry to the wagon in his sleep. It's harder than it looks. I've tried.

I watch him load the bicycle he fixed into the back of the wagon, climb up, and pick up the lines.

“Where are you going?” I ask.

“Nowhere,” he snaps.

“Gosh, Billy, can't you at least tell me that?”

“Nope.”

In the house, I unlace my boots, slip them off, and slide in my stocking feet to Papa's library. I kneel on the rug to look at the bottom shelf of journals, searching for articles about interesting diseases. I dream of the day when the girls at Miss Barstow's come down with cholera and I'm the one who saves them.

I look up the plague. The antidotes are wild. Eat snake, wear camphor or dried toads in a locket, fill an amulet with arsenic, keep your farts in a jar, and take an ice water enema. I look up “enema.” “The injection of fluid into the rectum.” I can't wait to tell Aunt Hortense.

Jing has gone to market; tall, curly-haired Maggy whisks the cobwebs from the ceiling of Papa's library. “Miss Lizzie wishes she could go with Mr. Doctor,” Maggy mutters.

“I sure do,” I tell her. “What about you, Maggy? What do you wish?”

She doesn't answer. What does Maggy wish for? I have no idea.

There's got to be something better to do than watch Maggy dust. I take the journals up to my room and keep reading. Maybe if I know all about the plague, I can convince Aunt Hortense there's nothing to worry about.

Symptoms,
I write.
Fever, swelling in lymph nodes, black-and-blue marks, chills, headaches.

—

When the clock strikes four, Papa, Jing, and Billy are still gone. Papa is often out on calls for days at a time. I don't worry about him. Billy comes home late a lot of nights too. But Jing should be back by now.

I'm reading
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
yet again when I hear a noise up on the third floor, where the servants live. Maggy Doyle has a way of being everywhere at once, like a dust storm. Still, I thought she was downstairs.

“Maggy!” I yell.

Not a sound from up above.

Could Papa be back? I would have heard him in the barn. Must be Jing. I jump off the bed and head for the stairs.

Maggy appears in the hall. “Miss Lizzie?”

“Is Jing home?”

“No.”

Sometimes houses just creak. Maggy's curly head disappears down the stairway, and I go back to reading in my room. But there it is again—more like shuffling than creaking.

Rats? Mice?

Orange Tom usually takes care of them.

I tiptoe down the hall to the stairway that leads to the servants' floor. The stairs are narrow, dark, and steep, and the stairwell is stuffy.

The door at the top is closed. I turn the crystal handle, and the door swings open.

The third-floor hall looks like the second-floor hall, but there's no furniture, no pictures, and the rug is worn thin. Heat rises, so this floor should be warm, but the windows are wide open. In front of Maggy Doyle's closed door is a mat, as if this is the outside. Jing's door has a paper lantern hanging from the knob.

What if there's a burglar? What if he climbed in the window? With Billy and Papa gone, it's my responsibility to find out. Aunt Hortense wouldn't agree, but since when do I do what she says?

And then a girl whispers: “Lizzie.”

The hair on the back of my neck stands up straight. Who is this? I don't know the voice, but this girl knows my name.

I don't believe in ghosts. I watched Papa examine a dead person before. The dead are gone. They can't return.

“Lizzie.” It's coming from Jing's room.

“How do you know me?” My voice trembles.

The bevels in the crystal doorknob flicker in the sunlight as the knob turns, making a kaleidoscope pattern on the floor. The door swings open, and a boy stands before me.

M
y knees shake. I open my mouth to scream.

But wait…he's just a kid.

He's Chinese, with a square face and a sturdy build. He's a little shorter than me, with straight black hair. He wears a white shirt and a tie. Threads of color hang from his sleeve.

“Who are you?” I try to sound calm.

“I'm Jing's son.”

He's lying. “Jing doesn't have a son.”

“Yes, he does.”

“I would know if Jing had a son. He would have told me.”

The boy squints at me as if my answer pains him.

“What? He would have.”

He sighs. “You don't know anything,” he whispers.

“You can't talk to me that way.”

“I'm sorry,” he mumbles, though it doesn't seem like he means it.

The way he moves his lips and his eyebrows is shockingly like Jing. Could he be telling the truth? Is he Jing's son?

“What's your name?”

“Noah.”

“How old are you?”

“Twelve.”

“What are you doing in my house?”

“I live here.”

“Live
here
?”

“I do now. In here.”

I survey the room, which is clean and smells of almonds and cooked rice. A cot with a red silk quilt rests against one wall; a large dragon tapestry hangs from another. An unlit candle and blue-and-white ceramic bowls sit on a bookshelf full of books.

“Where do you sleep?”

Noah lifts up the quilt and pulls a white pad from under the bed. I go inside to see.

“I thought you were a girl,” I say.

“Well, I'm not,” he shoots back.

“Does anyone know you live here?”

He shakes his head.

Maggy's room is next door. “Not even Maggy?”

“No.”

“Why are you living here in secret?”

He sucks his lips in. “I'm not a servant,” he whispers.

I try to think if I have known any Chinese who are not servants. The vegetable peddler? The men who work at the cleaners?

“Do you go to school?”

He nods.

“The Chinese school?” I saw the Chinese school once. The kids wore silk skullcaps and silk trousers. He's not dressed that way.

“Yes.”

I kneel down and run my finger along the spines of one shelf of books.
The Brothers Karamazov, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Origin of Species.
Is Noah reading these?

“I also do piecework. Five cents a dozen.” He picks up a stack of buttonhole strips, which explains the colored threads hanging from his sleeve. They are needles with thread. “Baba doesn't want me to get used to waiting on people.”

“Who is Baba?”

“Jing.
‘Baba'
is ‘Papa' in Chinese.”

He gets to call Jing “Baba”? “Why doesn't he want you to wait on people?
He
waits on people.”

“Yes, but he says it makes you invisible.”

“Jing, invisible? Never!” I stare at him. “Are you crazy?”

His eyes go cross-eyed and he sticks his fingers into his mouth to stretch it out like a weird jack-o'-lantern. “Do I look crazy?”

I shake my head; I can't help smiling.

He bites at his lip. “Baba should be back by now.”

He's right. Going to market takes a few hours, not all day.

“Do you know where he is?” I ask.

“I'm afraid they caught him.”

“Caught him? Who? What are you talking about?”

“The police.”

I sit back on my heels. “Why would the police want Jing?”

“The quarantine.” He walks to the window and pulls the blind back just enough to peek out. “They want us all in Chinatown.”

“Jing lives here with us. Not in Chinatown. He always has.”

“That doesn't matter.”

“Of course it matters.”

“You know so little,” he whispers.

“I know
a lot
!”

“Miss Lizzie?” Maggy calls from the distant downstairs.

Noah takes a step closer. “Wait. Will you find out where he is?”

“Me? How am I going to—”

“Miss Lizzie!” Maggy opens and closes the doors on the second floor as if she thinks I might be hiding in a closet.

“And promise you won't tell anyone I'm here,” he pleads.

First he insults me. Now…Who is this kid anyway?

“They'll fire him if you do.”

Jing has worked for us since I was three. He has made every one of my birthday cakes for as long as I can remember. He bakes a surprise in each one—chocolate filling,
strawberries, licorice, peppermint candies. Each year I look forward to what he's baked inside. He makes me lemonade on hot days and hot cocoa on cold ones. He cuts me big slabs of bread warm from the oven and slathered with honey. Once, when I sprained my ankle, he read me all of
Sara Crewe, or What Happened at Miss Minchin's
while I sat with my leg propped up on pillows.

When I come home from Miss Barstow's, where I have sat by myself, worked by myself, read by myself, it's Jing who makes me laugh with his imitation of a market merchant trying to sell a pigeon as a goose, or the iceman's horse who has a crush on Juliet.

“No one will fire Jing.”

“They will.” Noah's whisper is strained.

“Never!” I say, but…Aunt Hortense and Uncle Karl own our house. They won't be happy about a boy who doesn't work for us living here in secret.

I nod. “I'll keep quiet…until Papa comes home.”