Fabulous Creature (9 page)

“I don’t mean short. I mean small things happen. But it makes you understand how they didn’t seem small to the people in the story.”

Charlotte had said something not too different when they’d argued about Austen. He was trying to remember just what it was, when something ran up his right leg. For an awful moment he thought it was a rat, a book carton stowaway from someone’s attic. But it turned out to be a chipmunk. When it got to his lap, it grabbed the top of a pocket and tugged with tiny long-fingered paws.

“His name is Tad,” Griffin said. “He just wants to see if you brought him anything. I usually keep sunflower seeds in my pockets.”

The chipmunk sniffed in James’ pocket, made a scolding noise and skittered across books to run up Griffin’s braid as if it were a rope ladder. Perched on her shoulder, chattering impudently, flicking his striped tail, he seemed to be running on sixteen cylinders-bursting with too much life and energy for such a small chassis.

He’s incredible,” James said. “How did you get him to be so tame. I’ve tried to tame chipmunks and I’ve gotten a couple of them to come to within a few feet of me, but that’s as far as it goes.”

“I got him when he was just a tiny baby,” Griffin said. “I’d been watching his mother, and I was pretty sure she had babies in a hole in a log. And then one day, right while I was watching, a hawk got her. It was terrible. There wasn’t anything I could do except to get the babies out and see if I could help them, but they were pretty young, and two of them died. Tad was the only one that made it. He thinks I’m his mother.” She reached into the pocket of her smock, took out some sunflower seeds and held her arm straight out in front of her. The chipmunk ran around the back of her neck to her other shoulder and then out her arm. When he got to her hand, he began stuffing seeds into his cheeks with both hands. With his cheeks bulging like a bad case of mumps, he ran back to her shoulder, down her braid and away across the room. “He’s probably headed for my closet,” Griffin said. “He’s been storing up for winter in the toe of one of my shoes.”

“Griffin. Can I get up now? I’m feeling a lot better.” Woody came into the room followed by Laurel. He was wearing striped pajamas and his tousled hair had that faintly green tone that blond hair gets when it needs to be shampooed. “I want to talk to the prince, too.”

“Woodrow Everett Westmoreland. You go right back to bed. You still have a fever.” Griffin got up quickly, put her hand on Woody’s forehead and then started leading him back down the hall. “Come on,” she said. “Laurel can stay in your room and talk to you for a while if she doesn’t get too close.”

“Can the prince come talk to me, too? I want the prince to come talk to me.” Twisting around so that he was walking backwards as Griffin tugged him along, Woody stared at James, his slate-blue eyes glittering with fever and self-pity. “I’ve been sick, Prince,” he said. “And I’m awful bored. Being sick is awful boring.”

So they all wound up sitting around in beanbag chairs and on a canopied wicker couch that hung from the ceiling in Woody’s bedroom. The room, like the rest of the house, was fantastic. The bed hung from the ceiling, too, and it could be raised up during the day to make more play space. One set of controls was in the head of the bed so you could even make it go up and down while you were lying in it. Around the walls were built-in desks, bookcases, toy shelves and an enormous model train table. Very expensive looking toys were scattered everywhere. At first glance, you might wonder how a kid could be bored in a place like that, but after a while you began to understand. The place was boring. There was something deadening about all that slick, shiny, automated junk, most of which did all kinds of complicated things if you pushed a button or pulled a switch. The toys did it all. They rolled, walked, crashed, fought, beeped and talked. There was nothing left for a kid to do but lie there and watch. No wonder Woody was anxious to talk to somebody.

At first they talked about something that had been going on just before Woody got sick, something Woody called “helping the warfs.” Sitting in the center of his tousled bed with his hair standing on end and his cheeks glowing feverishly, Woody went on at great length about some poor losers, mysteriously known as warfs. The warfs, it seemed, lived in some caves along the river bank and they’d been having a lot of trouble with a gang of goblins. The goblins had stolen the warfs’ food supplies, and the warfs were about to starve when Grif found out about it. So she and Woody and Laurel had started helping by providing the warfs with food and anti-goblin magic and other necessities.

James caught Griffin’s eye and grinned, but her answering smile was wide-eyed and earnest, without the slightest admission that she’d been putting anything over on the kids, and without any indication that she was asking him to back up her story. But he decided to, anyway.

“That’s the way it goes everytime—with warfs and goblins,” he told Woody. “I’ve never known it to fail. You know—goblins ninety-nine, warfs zero.”

“Not warfs,” Laurel said. “Dwarfs. Woody just calls them warfs since his top teeth came out. But what they are are
dwarfs
like in Snow White.” Laurel said
dwarfs
very distinctly, by pushing out her lower lip and curling the upper one up on one side.

“Sure,” James said. “That’s what I said—dwarfs. I never met a bunch of dwarfs yet who knew how to get the best of goblins. The thing with dwarfs is, they just aren’t organized. What you ought to do is start a dwarfs’ union. Start an organized protest. Picket lines, sit-down strikes, that sort of thing. That would take care of those goblins. I mean, what are they going to do when the goblin parking lot is full of limp dwarfs.”

Griffin didn’t smile, at least not with her mouth. Laurel and Woody gazed at James with undisguised admiration. When they looked at Griffin, she nodded solemnly. “I’ll tell them,” she said. “I’ll tell the dwarfs what the prince said. It might help.”

After that the conversation got really far out, all about enchantments and curses and talking animals and haunted forests. It wasn’t too long before Woody began to run down. His eyes drooped, and he seemed about to keel over. When Griffin suggested he lie down and rest, he didn’t argue. On their way back to the living room James asked, “How come he’s Woody Westmoreland? Isn’t he your brother?”

There was a difference in the tone of Griffin’s voice as she answered. “He’s my half-brother. We had different fathers. Our mother is Alexandra Griffith. That is, she was until she married my father.” They’d reached the living room, and Griffin stopped to pick up a pair of blue jeans. She wadded them into a ball, clutched them against her chest and looked down at them instead of at James as she asked, “Have you heard of Alexandra Griffith?”

The definite difference in her face aroused his curiosity. “No,” he said, watching her closely. “I don’t think so. Why? Should I have?”

She shrugged. “I just thought you might.”

Still wondering about the tight look around her eyes and mouth, he probed further. “But your name is Donahue?”

“Yes. My father was Kevin Donahue. He got killed in an accident, and after that my mother married Woodrow Everett Westmoreland the Second. Woody is the third.”

“I’m sorry. About your father.”

She shrugged again. “It was a long time ago. I can barely remember him. She was still looking down; and without being able to see her eyes, it was impossible to tell whether the tension in her face and voice was sorrow or anger or something else.

“Where are your parents now?” he asked, hoping to make her look up.

“In Reno. They go to Reno a lot when we’re staying at The Camp. They have some friends there, and Wes, that’s my stepfather, likes to gamble.”

“Does he work there? In Reno?”

“No. He doesn’t work anywhere, really. At least not very much. He has to go to San Francisco sometimes to see about money. His lawyer and stockbroker and people like that. But he doesn’t really work.”

“Do they know about Woody?”

At last she looked up. “What about Woody?” she said sharply.

“Do they know he’s sick? It seems to me they’d like to be here until he gets to feeling better.”

She turned away. “Oh that. That’s all right. They knew he was sick. He gets tonsillitis all the time, and he always gets better after a few days. Usually we have a live-in who takes care of us when they go away, but the last one left and they couldn’t get anyone new in time. But it’s all right. Woody hates most of them. He’d rather just have me take care of him.”

She walked to the glass wall and stood staring out, still clutching the wadded-up blue jeans, like a kid with a security blanket. James followed her, still trying to think of something to say that might change her mood. But the difference was still there, and it felt defensive now, suspicious, as if she were holding back, shutting him out as a person not to be trusted. Her surprisingly immediate acceptance of him as friend and fellow pipe dreamer was just as suddenly gone, and the more he tried to get it back by showing that he was interested and sympathetic, the more distant she seemed to become.

Suddenly, without more than a moment’s consideration of the consequences, he found himself saying, “Hey. Would you like to see something really amazing? I found this secret valley…” He’d barely gotten started when he was sorry, when he knew it might be an awful mistake; but by then it was too late to stop. She was looking at him again, and her odd, oblong eyes were back to their normal high voltage.

“There’s a deer,” he said. “Not an ordinary deer—”

But just then Laurel came running down the hall. James shook his head. “Later,” he said, but the die was cast, and before he left he’d told her all about the deer and promised to take her to see him.

That night, while he was helping Charlotte clean up the kitchen, he was thinking about it, about what he had done and about Griffin, herself—and the strange way she reacted to any mention of her parents.

“Have you ever heard of anybody named Alexandra Griffith?” he asked.

“Griffith?” Charlotte said. “Alexandra? Oh yes, of course. The Griffith heiress. I haven’t heard much about her lately but back ten or fifteen years ago she was constantly in the public eye—newspapers, magazines, television.”

“Why? What did she do?”

Charlotte, who could be very critical of people whose foibles she didn’t approve of, curled her lip. “Nothing,” she said. “As far as I can remember, not a damn thing. Except to have been born rich and beautiful, and extraordinarily uninhibited. She was just a debutante who went around doing shocking things and making scandalous statements to the press—mostly to get attention, no doubt. Then she got married. Ran off and married some playboy daredevil—raced cars and airplanes—something like that. For a while after that they were both in the news, but then there was an accident. If I remember correctly, the husband was killed and she just barely lived through it.”

“Was his name Donahue?”

“I think it was, now that you mention it. How did you happen to hear about them? It all happened years ago.”

“Well, Alexandra Griffith lives at The Camp. Only she’s married to someone else. Her name is Westmoreland now.”

“Really?” Charlotte seemed to be quite impressed. “Did you hear that, William? That Griffith girl, well, woman now, is living—”

William, who was reading a book at the kitchen table, put a finger on his place and looked up, but you could tell by his unfocused eyes that he wasn’t really hearing. “Never mind, darling,” Charlotte said, “I’ll tell you later.”

She went back to the dishpan then, and James finished drying the pots and pans. But later, when he was on his way to his room, he made a sudden detour into the sunporch that William was using for a study and flipped open the dogeared
Webster’s Unabridged.
Back in his own room he made a notation on a three-by-five card from his da Vinci file. “Griffin,” he wrote, “also Griffon or Gryphon. A fabulous creature half-lion and half-eagle.” After a moment he added, “Half daring debutante and half dead daredevil. Given to telling fantastic lies with great sincerity and the truth as if it were a dangerous secret.” Then he filed the card under G.

A
CCORDING TO FIONA
, the Jarretts had returned. “That’s right,” Fiona said. “They’re back all right. They all popped in here just at closing time last night. Ethel, that’s their cook, wasn’t due back from Reno until this morning, and poor Mrs. Jarrett was just too exhausted to make dinner.” Fiona sighed and rolled her eyes in not too convincing sympathy. “Jogs for two hours without turning a hair, she does, but just let her catch a glimpse of a frying pan and she’s as weak as a cat. So here they came just as I was trying to clean up and get home—all five of them. Jacky was in top form. Spilled his milk and had a go at the front window with his golf ball.”

“Don’t tell me he missed,” James said.

“Not really. His mum grabbed his arm just in time.”

“And what happened then? Didn’t she take it away from him?”

“Take it away? Not likely. All she did was buy him two ice cream cones—one for each hand.” Fiona shook her head grimly, but then suddenly she almost grinned. “Wish he had broken it. I wouldn’t half-mind seeing the major and that Hank Jarrett having a real row.”

James laughed. “Boggles the mind,” he said. “I can see it all now. A kind of Snack Bar Armageddon.”

Fiona actually chuckled. While she was still chuckling, James was out the door and poised in front of the phone booth. He squared his shoulders, breathed deeply several times and dialed Jarrett’s number. Jill Jarrett answered the phone.

“Oh yes, James. Yes, of course, I remember you. The tall boy—brown hair.”

“That’s right. Mrs. Jarrett, I was wondering if…do you suppose I could speak to Diane?”

There was a slight pause. “Why yes, James. I should think so. Let me see if Di is available at the moment.”

Then Diane’s voice: high-pitched—very female-exciting. “Jamesy. We’re back. Did you miss me?”

“All the time,” James said, trying to keep his voice light and teasing the way she always did—so that you never knew if she meant it or not. “I’ve been pining away. Down to a shadow of my former robust one hundred and forty pounds.”