Jackie's Jokes (5 page)

"Yes. Yes, you did," Jackie said. "But that's not what I'm calling about. I was wondering, could you tell me, please: what are taxes?"

"Taxis?" Pete sounded surprised, then continued before Jackie could correct him. "Why, taxis are vehicles that people sometimes pay to take them places."

Rebecca rolled her eyes. Truthfully, we all did. It was so rare for Pete to let us down.

"No," Jackie corrected, "not
taxis.
I said
taxes,
as in, um,
Tax Day.
Do you know what taxes and Tax Day are?"

"Oh!" Pete said with a loud groan. We swear, we could almost hear him hitting himself in the head over his own previous stupidity. "Taxes and Tax Day! Now I get it!" He paused. "Except that I don't, not really. Although some people say taxes are one big practical joke played on adults. So, what do you want to know about taxes and Tax Day?"

"Well, it's like this," Jackie said. "What if a person, or
persons,
doesn't or don't pay her or their taxes by, um, Tax Day? Is that a very bad thing?"

"Huh," Pete said. For once, he sounded stumped. "Well, I don't know. You see, I've always paid all my taxes on time, so it's very hard for me to say."

"
Try,
"Jackie said, using her new forceful tone.

"Well," Pete said, "I suppose I have read about tax cheats. But those are usually wealthy people."

Eight girls gulped in fear. Our parents were wealthy people!

"And what happens to those wealthy tax cheats?" Jackie asked.

"From what I can tell," Pete said, "they have to pay a lot of extra money in fines, or someone comes and takes away some of their stuff as payment, or, sometimes, they even wind up in jail."

"Jail?" Petal shrieked. "But I can't wind up there! I don't want to be a poor orphan in—"

Rebecca would have clapped her hand over Petal's mouth, but Georgia beat her to it.

"Who's that shouting?" Pete asked.

"Shouting?" Jackie asked with a nervous laugh. "Oh, it's just the TV set. Durinda's watching some cooking show and the, um,
French chef
is very loud."

"I see," Pete said, starting to sound suspicious. It was probably because of the word
French.
One day, we were really going to have to come up with something other than France or the French to get us out of tight places. "But what I don't see," he went on, "is why you're suddenly interested in—"

"What are taxes for, Mr. Pete?" Jackie cut him off. "And why do people have to pay them?"

"Why, taxes are used for all sorts of things people need. They're used to keep all the roads paved so that there aren't big holes that could hurt people if their cars hit them."

"Safety," Zinnia said, and Petal nodded. "Safety is important."

"And bridges too," Pete said. "No one wants a bridge to be weak."

"Is that it?" Jackie asked.

"Oh no," Pete said. "There's lots of other things as well. Why, the police, the fire departments—all depend on taxes."

"Those are important things too," Durinda said. "If you have a kitchen fire, you want someone to call who will come and help you."

"And government," Pete said.

"I'm not sure we care about that," Jackie said. "Anything else?"

"Schools," Pete said.

"But that's
insane!
"Marcia, who was rarely outraged by anything, was outraged. "We already pay a huge price to go to the Whistle Stop! We shouldn't have to pay for other schools too!"

"I'll bet it's that usury thing I once told you about," Annie said knowingly, "all over again."

"Hullo?" Pete said. "How many of you am I talking to now?"

"All eight," Jackie admitted with a sigh. "The French cooking show ended, and we're all here now."

"Good," Pete said, "because now maybe you lot can tell me something."

"Yes?" Jackie said.

"Why, Jackie? Why do you all want to know about taxes and Tax Day?"

Instead of answering, Jackie asked, "What's a CPA?"

"It stands for certified public accountant," Pete said immediately, restoring our faith in his brain. "A CPA is a special kind of accountant, and accountants handle filing people's taxes for them. Why do you ask?"

Jackie took a deep breath, big enough for all of us. "Because Daddy's accountant was e-mailing him and we didn't know it and now he's left a million messages on our machine and it's all about the same thing. He says Daddy must bring him his files and, I don't know, whatever else he needs, and then Daddy needs to pay his taxes on time ... or else."

"Oh dear," Pete said, and then he let out a low whistle. "This can't be good."

CHAPTER FIVE

"This is really bad then, isn't it?" Jackie asked.

"Well, yes," Pete said. "I don't think there's a person in the world who wants the Tax Man after him or her."

The Tax Man.
That sounded even more ominous to us than the Wicket, or even the Monster with a Thousand Heads, which was usually Petal's biggest nightmare.

"So what do we do?" Jackie asked.

"We all need to remain calm," Pete said.

Easy for him to say. He wasn't the one who needed to keep Petal from spinning herself off into outer space. At that moment, that was a job for Annie, Durinda, Georgia, Marcia, Rebecca, and Zinnia. Really, right then it was taking all six of them.

"First," Pete said, "you need to locate your parents' tax info, and then you need to make an appointment to see this CPA person and take it all to him."

"That sounds rather involved," Jackie said. "You know, we are all just still seven years old."

"When has that ever stopped you lot from doing anything?" Pete said with a laugh.

That laugh did a lot to lift our spirits. So long as someone could still make jokes, we could tell ourselves that the world wasn't really as scary a place as it seemed.

"Now then," Pete said, his voice turning all businesslike. "I know your dad pretty well. You know, I am the man who works on his cars. And I can tell you this: Robert Huit is a very organized man."

Huh. And here we always thought that the most organized person in our house was Mommy. She was the scientist, after all.

"I'll bet anything," Pete said, "that your dad's just like me."

"But Daddy would never be caught dead wearing a navy blue T-shirt," Zinnia said, but she said it softly so Pete wouldn't hear. Zinnia never liked to offend anybody, except maybe Rebecca. And Georgia.

"And if Daddy did wear a navy blue T-shirt," Georgia said, not bothering to keep her voice low, "he'd find a way to make it look stylish."

Thankfully, if Pete had heard what some of us were saying, he either didn't care or was ignoring it.

"What I mean," Pete said, "is that your dad no doubt has a nice, neat file somewhere, probably marked Taxes with maybe even the year on it—in this case, you'd be looking for last year's file, 2007—in which he stores all his information."

"And where do you think I'd find such a file?" Jackie asked.

"Two places come to mind," Pete said. "Either in a regular file cabinet or in a file stored in a computer."

We didn't like going near the computer. One, Mommy didn't particularly like them, which we now thought for the first time was kind of odd, given her profession; and two, technology tended to scare us—there was just so much that could go wrong with it!

"I think we'll start with the regular files first," Jackie said.

"Good choice. Okay then," Pete said. "You've got your assignment. Ring me back as soon as you find what you're looking for, and we'll take it from there."

"But don't you have work you have to do?" Jackie asked. "You know, cars to fix?"

"Course I do," Pete said then added, "but nothing's more important than you lot."

Pete may have been a man in a navy blue T-shirt, but he was the best man in a navy blue T-shirt in the entire world.

***

"Sometimes," Annie said, "I wonder if we rely on Pete too much. I think maybe we shouldn't."

"Why's that?" Marcia asked.

"You don't think Pete's
evil,
do you?" Petal said with a gulp.

"Of course he's not," Durinda said sharply, in a tone she almost never used with Petal. "He's a mechanic and he's our friend."

"I just mean," Annie said, "that I don't think it's good for us to rely on any one person too much. We need to learn to stand on our own two feet."

"Sixteen feet, you mean," Marcia corrected. Good math was very important to Marcia.

"Annie may be right," Jackie said, "and one day we'll have to stand on our own. But that day isn't this day, and now we'd better hunt for the file."

So that's what we did.

The only problem was, the file we were looking for was nowhere to be found. We looked in every file cabinet in the house, we looked in those kitchen cabinets we hardly ever used, we even asked robot Betty if she knew where the tax file might be hiding itself. But if Betty knew anything, she wasn't talking.

By the time we finished tossing the place, our home was a shambles.

"Great," Durinda said. "We're no better off than we were before. In fact, we're worse off, since someone will now have to clean this place and I have an awful feeling about who that someone will be."

"There's only one thing for it," Jackie said decisively. "We'll need to get in that computer."

So we all proceeded with dragging feet to the computer in Mommy's private study. Even though Pete had suspected Daddy was organized, Mommy was the only one who had a computer in the house.

We stared at that technology beast, unwilling to draw close to it.

"Well, Annie," Rebecca said, "aren't you going to take charge? You usually like doing that."

"Oh no," Annie said. "Not this time. Why, Jackie's done so well with taking control of this whole tax problem, I think she should be the one."

Without even taking the deep breath that any of us would have taken before starting, Jackie strode to Mommy's desk and sat in Mommy's chair.

Then she hit the power button on the computer, and the dark screen turned a brilliant shade of red.

That made us jump. The computers at school glowed an eerie blue when they were turned on. Leave it to Mommy to march to her own drummer.

"Okay," Jackie said. "It looks like we need to know the password to get in to see the files. What would such a password be?"

"Usually," Marcia said, "people select words that are important to them."

"Right," Annie said. "It's easier to remember that way. But you don't want it to be
too
easy, because then others will be able to guess it."

"How about Daddy's name?" Durinda suggested. "He's important to Mommy."

Jackie tried typing in
Robert,
but it didn't work.

One strange thing we noticed as Jackie typed: her fingers flew over the keys in a blur. This was odd, because whenever we had to type on the computers at school, we'd all been hunt-and-peck kinds of typists.

"What about trying our names?" Georgia suggested. "I should think we're as important to Mommy as Daddy is."

That didn't work either. Not when Jackie tried the names individually, not when she strung them all together in one long word.

"What about
avocado?
"Petal suggested.

We ignored her.

"What about
Huit?
"Rebecca suggested.

No luck.

"These are all too easy and obvious," Annie said.

"Except for
avocado
," Marcia pointed out.

"Which is exactly why it could very well be—" Petal started to say, but she got cut off.

"I know!" Zinnia's eyes were lit up with excitement."
Eights!
I'll bet anything the password is
Eights!
"

Only it wasn't.

We were all puzzled, not to mention out of ideas.

But then Jackie's eyes lit up even brighter than Zinnia's, and she pressed one single key rapidly several times.

"What are you
doing?
"Annie asked.

She didn't have to wait for an answer, however, because—
poof!
—we were suddenly in.

"What password did you use?" Marcia asked, always curious. In truth, we were all curious.

"I simply hit the number eight eight times," Jackie said with a smile. "That's us numerically: we're eight Eights."

Once we were in, it was no problem finding the right file. There it was: Taxes 2007.

"Open it up," Annie said.

"Print it all out," Marcia said.

So that's what Jackie did.

"Okay, now close the computer down quick," Petal said, "before something tragic happens to us."

"Not so fast," Jackie said. "I've been thinking lately. Ever since New Year's Eve, we've mostly discovered things—powers, gifts, who's evil and who's not—by events happening to us. Don't you think it's time we took a more active role in finding out what's going on?"

"How do you propose we do
that?
"Rebecca demanded.

"By looking around in Mommy's computer," Jackie said with a twinkle in her eye.

"Oh no!" Petal cried. "That will bring disaster down upon our heads!"