Love Among the Walnuts (12 page)

Boom-Boom grabbed a handful of Sunnie's sweater and sucked hard on his thumb. Virgil and Lyle shook their heads in perfect three-quarter time. Graham went to stand by the window and look out onto the white landscape. Everett seemed to be rifling his mind for an appropriate quotation, but nothing surfaced.

"Sure," Mr. Moreland said, breaking the silence. "I'd be delighted to get out of here."

At those words, Dr. Waldemar gathered himself together and said, "I'm sure there's something in our bylaws or in our rules of operation or whatever it's called about inmates leaving the premises. Especially without permission.'"

Opal, whose usual crusty behavior hadn't been improved by her having quit smoking, snapped, "I give 'em permission. Attempted murder by freezing doesn't happen every day. There must be a provision for extraordinary circumstances. If this doesn't qualify, I don't know what would. Go on, all of you."

Boom-Boom continued sucking, and Virgil and Lyle continued shaking their heads, and Graham continued looking out the windows; but Everett and Mr. Moreland and Mr. Van Dyke stood up and buttoned their coats.

"Wait," Dr. Waldemar protested feebly. "I don't think..."

"So don't start now," Opal said gruffly. "Let 'em go. It can get pretty boring hanging out here all the time. I've noticed that, even if you haven't."

"You want to come, too?" Sandy asked Opal.

Neither Sandy nor Sunnie missed the changing expressions on Opal's face. First there was apprehension that equaled Virgil's and Lyle's. Then consideration, anticipation, rejection, and finally, world-class grouchiness. "I can't," Opal said. "I have to take care of the place."

"I can do it," Sunnie said. "At least until morning. Go ahead, Opal. You've earned it if anybody has."

"Well...," she said, badly tempted and fighting her qualms and her conscience.

Mr. Moreland came up to her, buttoned the coat she hadn't taken off all day, and, grasping her by the shoulders, pointed her toward the door. "Let's go," he said. "You can't stop to consider in the middle of a jailbreak."

"Is that what we're doing?" Opal asked, sounding uncertain for the first time in anyone's memory.

"Isn't that what it feels like?" Mr. Moreland asked.

"'Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.' Harry Emerson Fosdick," Everett said.

"Harry Emerson
Fosdick?
" Mr. Moreland asked as they went out the door. "I'm starting to think you make these things up."

After they left, Sunnie sent everyone else off to get ready for bed. When they were gone and she had the first quiet moment she'd had all day, she tried to remember if she had actually seen Louie sitting in L. Barlow Van Dyke the cat molester's lap last night or if she had just imagined it.

Sunnie was serving a cereal-and-muffin breakfast in the sickroom the next morning when she heard a loud commotion downstairs.

"Graham," she said, "go see what's going on." When Graham looked at her, uncertain and a little frightened, she added, "Boom-Boom, you go with him. I'm sure the two of you together will be perfectly capable of finding out what's happening."

Boom-Boom took his thumb out of his mouth and said proudly, in his grown-up voice, "Come along, Graham. We must look out for Sunnie and our sleepers." He hesitated briefly in the doorway, and his thumb headed for his mouth. But then he squared his shoulders and went off down the hall, with Graham two steps behind him.

Sunnie stood in the doorway of the sickroom listening. She heard shouting from downstairs, and she recognized Sandy's voice and Mr. Moreland's and Opal's. She didn't recognize the other voices. The noise went on for quite a while until suddenly the front door slammed with a crash that shook the entire building. Then there was total silence for a moment before she heard the pounding of a lot of feet running up the stairs.

She closed the sickroom door, locked it, and stood with her back braced against it. If that was Bart and Bernie on the way upstairs, they'd have to get past her before they could get to her sleepers, or to Eddy, or Virgil and Lyle, or Dr. Waldemar.

Pounding on the door shook her so hard her teeth rattled, but she continued to lean against the door panels as Virgil, Lyle, and Dr. Waldemar cowered together.

"Sunnie, it's me, Sandy. Open up."

With relief, Sunnie unlocked the door and was almost knocked down as Sandy, Bentley, Mr. Moreland, Mr. Van Dyke, Opal, Everett, Graham, and Boom-Boom rushed into the room, all talking at once.

"Stop!" she screamed over the clamor. "I can't hear anything you're saying."

"Quite right," Bentley said, smoothing his overcoat lapels. "Sandy, you tell."

Everyone crowded around Sunnie and Sandy, who stood facing each other in the crush.

"As I drove up Old Country Road from Eclipse, I saw a car coming from the other direction. It turned into Walnut Manor just ahead of me. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when Bart and Bernie got out of it, but I was. But that was nothing compared to how surprised they were when I got out of the Daimler, and then Bentley, Opal, Mr. Moreland, Mr. Van Dyke, and Everett did, too. They looked as if they were seeing ghosts, which is probably what they were
hoping
to see inside. Opal lit right into them and ordered them off the property."

"She's just crabby because she hasn't had a cigarette in a few weeks," Mr. Moreland said. "Crabbier than usual, I mean."

Opal stuck her elbow into Mr. Moreland's stomach and said, "Three weeks, six days, eleven hours, and fourteen minutes."

Sandy continued. "They said they were going to report Bentley and me for kidnapping inmates or encouraging a breakout or something equally felonious, and that we'd be locked up so fast it would make our heads swim and we'd never have a chance to spend all Horatio's money. As if that's what we wanted to do."

"We'll just say nothing ever happened," Mr. Moreland said. "There's no evidence to substantiate their accusations."

"But isn't that lying?" Sandy asked. He'd never told a lie, though he knew what they were.

"Certainly not," Mr. Moreland answered indignantly. "Nobody was kidnapped and there was no breakout. In court, all you have to do is answer the questions they ask you, yes or no. Don't elaborate or you'll get yourself in trouble."

"Your uncles are getting desperate," Sunnie said, sounding worried.

"They're desperate and
dumb,"
Opal said. "A dangerous combination. I think we'd better be prepared for something really drastic next time."

They all knew there would be a next time.

In order to distract them all from worrying, Sunnie got the inmates to assemble Christmas presents for one another, and Opal began complicated preparations for a Christmas Eve feast. Everyone had an opinion as to what should be served. Boom-Boom wanted roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and chocolate-chip cookies. Mr. Moreland wanted champagne and caviar. Dr. Waldemar wanted sauerbraten and marzipan. Virgil and Lyle wanted meat loaf and mashed potatoes. Everett wanted madeleines because Proust liked them. Mr. Van Dyke and Eddy wouldn't say what they wanted, and Graham wanted it all.

So Opal decided to make it all, but only if everyone would help her. Bentley ordered the supplies from the fanciest grocery in Jupiter, and for many days in advance, when the inmates weren't keeping secrets from each other about their presents, they were in the kitchen helping Opal chop and stir and cook and freeze things. Graham was one of Opal's most ardent helpers, and he always came out of the kitchen a little fatter than when he went in.

Finally Sunnie felt she had to take him in hand. "Graham," she said, "each time you go into the kitchen, I want you to lift everything in the dining room on the way in and on the way out. You can make that your Christmas present to me."

"That's a strange present," he said. "Why would you want that?"

"Never mind. I just do. Will you give it to me?"

"I guess so. Does that mean every fork and spoon, one at a time?"

"Only if you can't figure out a more efficient way to do it."

"Oh," he said, and she could almost hear the wheels turn inside his head. "So if I can lift the whole table, I've also lifted everything that's on it?"

"Why, what a smart idea," Sunnie told him. "That would make it much faster, wouldn't it?"

Graham rose to the challenge. The first time he tried it, crouching underneath the table and straining upward with it resting on his back, he could barely get the table legs off the ground. He was so fat that just getting underneath the table in the first place represented a considerable amount of exercise. He couldn't lift the sideboard all at once, so he had to take the drawers out, lift them individually, and then try to get the sideboard up. Lifting the chairs was a snap.

Soon, he could pile two or three chairs together and lift them at once. Then he could put a couple of chairs on top of the table and lift them together. Then he could put all the chairs on the table. Then he could lift the sideboard with the drawers out. Then, with the drawers in.

He barely noticed that it was becoming easier for him to get beneath the table. But he did notice, finally, that his belt wasn't on the last hole anymore. And that his shirts, while still tight around the shoulders, were flapping at the waist.

"Look, Sunnie!" he said, running across her in the dining room on the morning of Christmas Eve. "Look at my belt! What happened?"

"You've been getting a lot of exercise," she said. "And staying out of the kitchen while you did it. Less food and more exercise makes you lose weight. It isn't magic. You did it all by yourself. Aren't you proud? And there's no reason why you can't keep on doing what you've been doing—you can lift the library stuff and the bedroom stuff, as well as the dining room stuff, you know. You'll be able to wear a bathing suit when the pool gets filled in the summer. You can leave here."

Graham had looked ecstatic until Sunnie mentioned leaving Walnut Manor. Then the expression on his face approached panic. "If I get thin, do I
have
to leave?" His eyes darted in the direction of the kitchen.

"Don't you want to go home?"

"Would
you
want to go back to two people who were so embarrassed by the way you looked that they hid you? And then never came to see you or even sent a card?"

"You've got a point," Sunnie had to admit. "Well, the way I see it, you can stay here as long as you like. Nobody can
make
you leave."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm positive," she said, even though she wasn't. She couldn't see the harm in giving Graham hope and encouragement. Those were things everybody needed, and Graham had had far less of them than he was entitled to.

"When you said I should lift everything in the dining room, did you mean
everything?"
he asked her.

"Sure," she said.

So he picked her up and carried her into the library, where he set her down in a chair and then lifted her
and
the chair.

That night they gathered in a dining room transformed by candlelight and Christmas decorations.

Boom-Boom was so entranced, he couldn't eat. Mr. Moreland grumbled about not being able to see his food, but it didn't matter because he wouldn't be able to remember what he'd eaten anyway. Everett kept saying, "God bless us, every one," while Dr. Waldemar speculated whether using candles every night would significantly reduce the electricity bill.

Bentley and Sandy remembered happy Christmases at Eclipse, and neither could tell if the shine in the other's eyes came from tears or from candle glow.

Sandy thought Sunnie looked like an angel, with the candlelight reflecting off her white uniform and silvery hair. If Mousey and Horatio and Flossie and Attila were with them around the table, it would have been the most perfect Christmas of Sandy's life.

They toasted each other with wine that Bentley had brought from Eclipse's cellars, scornfully leaving behind, in the darkest corner, the inferior bottle of port Bart and Bernie had brought last fall.

Everett raised his glass and said, " True friendship is like sound health, the value of it is seldom known until it be lost.' Charles Caleb Colton. 1780 to 1832."

"I know how much I value all of you," Sunnie said. "And I don't have to lose you to know that. I hope I never have to know what it feels like to be without your friendship."

None of the inmates had ever had such words addressed to them, and Sunnie's declaration took them by such surprise that they were speechless. Ditto for Dr. Waldemar and Opal. There were sounds of swallowing and throat clearing and even a sniff or two before Opal said, in the softest, friendliest voice anyone had ever heard her use, "Have some seconds before the feast gets cold."

After dinner they all went up to the sickroom to watch as Bentley administered another of his experiments to Attila. His last experiment had turned her feathers blue, but the color had finally worn off. He felt that she was ready for another try.

They all held their breaths as he squeezed an eye-dropperful of something sticky and purple into her beak. Attila hiccuped. It was the first sound any of the sleepers had made in months. Could it mean she was waking up? Wouldn't that be the best Christmas present ever?

After they had stood around her dishpan listening to her hiccup for an hour, they had to conclude that her
hies
did not mean she was waking up. All they meant was that she had the hiccups. Bentley was so disappointed, he almost wept. Not only hadn't he found a cure for the comas, but what he had developed wouldn't be useful in any way. Who would buy a concoction that induced hiccups in chickens?

Glumly, Sandy and Bentley returned to Eclipse, and Opal and Sunnie saw everyone else off to bed.

The next morning in the library—with a blazing fire, a Christmas tree, and a view through the French doors of the snow-covered stone porch and garden beyond—it was possible to believe that Santa Claus actually had paid Walnut Manor a visit. For the first time ever, there were presents under the tree besides the boxes of candy that Dr. Waldemar always gave everyone. Sunnie gave books, Everett gave beautifully hand-lettered quotations, and Virgil and Lyle gave Couch Potato membership patches. Graham had spent hours in the unheated barn, with the cow and chickens for company, making keepsake boxes with parquetry lids. Mr. Van Dyke had ordered mugs with each person's name. No one knew where Opal had found the time to knit them each a pair of mittens, and everyone was surprised at the cashmere mufflers Mr. Moreland had had delivered from the city for them all. With his white beard, he almost looked like Santa as he passed out the packages. "So we can build a whole metropolis of snow people without getting sore throats," he said gruffly.