The Four-Story Mistake (9 page)

It tasted very good, too, though rather flat, later on when Rush had brought sugar and milk to mix with it. Oliver ate so much that his alert and responsive little stomach felt strange again, and he retired to the house.

Mona and Randy gathered up cups and spoons and went back to the house, too. But Rush left them and took a walk up into the woods. It was dusk, but the snow lent a strange radiance to the world. Flakes still fell, melting cold on his cheek, whispering with a feathery sound. There was no sound but their whisper, and his boots crunching softly. Isaac bounded at his heels with a white beard and ear-fringes.

“Just think,” Rush said, “almost a year ago I found you. And in a snowstorm like this.” He leaned down and patted Isaac, who looked up at him lovingly with one cold paw raised out of the snow.

“Let's go back,” Rush said. The woods were beautiful and mysterious; but suddenly he was cold; he longed for noise, and warmth and light. Isaac understood; he turned with a little yelp of joy and galloped beside his master down the hill toward the bright windows of the kitchen.

The next day, Sunday, was a great disappointment to them all. During the night, by some strange alchemy, the snow had turned to rain. The spruce trees looked dreary and uncomfortable, like monstrous, wet crows. Only Oliver took any pleasure in the morning, slopping about and digging in the dissolving snow. The rest of them did their chores, their homework, and snapped at each other. After dinner when they started a noisy game of dumb-crambo in the living room Father came out of the study and asked them to go up to the Office. “I can't even hear my typewriter,” he complained, “let alone my own thoughts!”

Silent and out of sorts they retired to the Office. By now it was pouring. What is worse than a rainy Sunday afternoon when you've eaten a heavy dinner?

Randy sat down at the piano. She played the piece that Rush had taught her. It was a simple air by Bach, and the oftener she played it the better she liked it. First she played it as if she were very happy, and then as if she were very sad. (It sounded wonderful when played sadly, so she did it several times.) She also made it into a dance; into a thunderstorm, a picnic on the first day of spring, a funeral march, and a witch's lament. It sounded beautiful to her in all its transformations, she never got tired of it, but after half an hour Mona looked up from her book and said, “If you play that tune one more time, Ran, I'm going to start screaming and I don't think I'll be able to stop!”

“Oh, all right, if you feel like that.” Randy folded her hands in her lap and sat very stiff on the piano bench. She hoped she looked deeply hurt, and stared coldly at the cutout pictures on the wall above the piano.

“Well, that's funny,” she exclaimed a moment later, standing up and peering closer at the wall.

“Hmmm?” Mona's voice came vaguely from the distant regions of Castle Blair.

“I said, well, that's very funny,” repeated Randy remembering to sound offended.

“What is?” Rush looked up languidly.

“Why, goodness! Come here, Rush! Look!”

“I don't see anything,” said Rush, standing beside her. “Just those same old pictures pasted up. I practically know them by heart.”

“No, no,” Randy was excited. “See how the paper's sort of broken along here?”

“It's just a crack between the boards,” Rush said.

“No, I don't think so,” Randy persisted. “Look how it goes: up to here, and then across to there, and then down again. And look, there's kind of a bulge on that side. Like a hinge!”

“Like a hinge,” repeated Rush, light dawning. “Creepers, Ran! Do you suppose it could be a door?”

“That's what I think,” agreed Randy, as solemn as an archaeologist who has discovered the relics of a lost primitive race.

“Come on, kids, help move the piano out so we can see.” But they didn't need to be asked; already they were pushing and tugging and the piano moved slowly outward, squealing on its casters.

“Where's your knife, Rush? Why don't you slit the paper along those cracks?” suggested Mona.

“No, let Randy,” said Rush honorably, unsheathing the wicked-looking blade of his scout knife. “After all, she discovered it.”

Rush was wonderful, Randy thought. Almost trembling with excitement she slit the ancient paper along the crack upward from the floor. But she wasn't tall enough to reach along the top.

“It's a door all right,” whispered Rush, as though an enemy lurked beyond the partition. “But it's nailed shut: I can feel the nailheads under the paper. Here, hand over the knife, Randy. I'm taller. I'll do the top.”

“Think how long it's been shut,” Mona said, awed. “The pictures on this part of the wall are the oldest in the Office; I've noticed that before. There's a date down here above this newspaper engraving that says 1875!”

“What do you think's behind the door, Mona?” said Oliver, looking a little worried.

“Ah, that's a question, Fatso,” Rush told him. “Maybe gold, maybe jewels, maybe a rattrap, maybe nothing.”

“Not—not anything alive?” Oliver looked relieved.

“After almost seventy years? Not likely.”

“Maybe a ghost,” said Randy ghoulishly. “Maybe a skeleton hanging from the rafters.”

“Mona?” Oliver's fat hand crept into hers.

“They're just joking, darling. Of course there's nothing like that.” But she didn't sound too sure herself.

“Funny there doesn't seem to be a trace of a latch or a handle of any kind,” said Rush, feeling along the right side of the door with his long, sensitive fingers. “But I
think
—hmmm—I think
maybe
if I dig a hole just here with the point of my knife I might—just possibly—yes! It is! Look, there's a keyhole!”

A keyhole!

“You look first, Randy,” Rush said nobly.

“I'm almost scared to,” Randy confessed. But then she knelt down and glued her eye to the keyhole while the others held their breaths.

“For heaven's sake!” she exclaimed.

“What do you see?” They all asked it at the same time.

“Are we ever dumb!” said Randy.

“Why, what do you see?” Oliver was dancing up and down with impatience.

“I see a window,” Randy replied slowly. “I can see the spruce branches beyond it.”

“What else?”

“Just floor and some wall: it's got blue-flowered wallpaper on it. But are we ever dumb!”

“I don't see why,” said Rush, gently but firmly pushing her out of the way so that he could get a good look himself.

“Well, because we
know
there are dormer windows all around the roof,” Randy explained. “Twelve of them there are: three on each side. You can walk around the house outdoors and count them if you want to. Now just look at the Office. How many windows do you see?”

“Seven,” said Mona. “I catch on. Three windows on the west wall; two apiece on the north and south. None at all on the east; just plain wall and pasted-up pictures.” She knocked on the wall. “And listen how hollow it sounds. Why didn't we ever notice!”

“Unobservant,” Rush told her. “And dumb, just like Randy says. Very, very dumb.”

“But not even Father noticed,” Mona said. “Not even Cuffy.”

“And you can't call
them
dumb!” Oliver was shocked at the mere idea.

“No, you certainly can't,” Rush agreed. Suddenly he stood up. “Listen, kids. I'm going to get a hammer and a pair of pliers: we've got to get this door open. Oliver, you go find the library paste. Mona and Randy, you'll have to patch the places I tear in the paper. This must be kept secret, do you understand?”

They all understood perfectly. There had never been any doubt in their minds about that.

“Because who knows what we'll find when we open it,” Rush continued darkly. “We
might
find a skeleton at that, or—or a torture chamber, or—”

“Or a ghost,” repeated Randy, as a chill ran over her scalp.

Oliver looked dubious.

“Ghosts!” scoffed Mona. “Honestly, Randy! And at your age.” Nevertheless, her cheeks were pink, her eyes shining with excitement.

“I move we take a vow of secrecy. A blood vow,” Rush said. “What do you think?”

“Oh, yes, a blood vow!” cried Randy, with a rapturous leap. “The only other blood vow we ever took was when we swore not to tell Cuffy or Father that we'd been exposed to whooping cough that time.”

“Well, they just would have worried, and anyway we never got it,” said Rush, as if that had justified the act. “Now, who has a pin?”

Mona had a safety pin in the ripped hem of her skirt. Providentially she hadn't mended it days ago when she was supposed to.

“But first it has to be sterilized,” she insisted from the depth of her first-aid wisdom. So they sterilized the pin in a match flame. Of course Mona knew that the whole performance was nonsense but there
was
something rather solemn about the way they pricked their thumbs and made a scarlet X on a piece of paper opposite their names.

Mona and Randy, and Rush, that is. Oliver was firm in declining to yield his blood to the enterprise, so finally they had to let him use red water color instead.

“Though it's not really legal and binding,” Rush warned him.

“I don't see why it matters,” Oliver maintained stoutly. “Just two different kinds of juice, that's all. You can't tell the difference on the paper.”

“But it's the principle of the thing,” Rush argued weakly. “Oh, well, nuts. I'm going down to get the pliers and hammer now, and we'll get to work.”

What an afternoon they had! It took ages to get the nails out; they were old and rusty, and had been in the wood so long they had almost become a part of it. Each one squeaked protestingly as Rush yanked it out.

In the middle of all this they heard Cuffy coming up the stairs and had to shove the piano back into place at once. There was a scuffle as Rush and Mona returned to their books, Oliver to his drawing, and Randy sat down on the floor and covered the nails and hammer with her skirt. Four scarlet faces confronted Cuffy as she heaved into view. “What mischief are
you
up to?” she inquired suspiciously, looking at them.

“Us? Nothing,” replied Randy. And a loud, nervous giggle escaped from her.

“We-e-e-l-l—” Cuffy was skeptical. Still the place looked no more upset than usual, and nobody seemed to be crying, so maybe it was all right. “I just came up to see if any of you would like to lick the bowl. I've just made a chocolate cake for supper and there's lots of frosting left over.”

What was the matter with them? They followed her so politely down the stairs, almost as if they were reluctant to come, instead of racing and bumping into one another, each in an attempt to get there first, as they had always done on similar occasions. And when they did get there they lapped up the chocolate fast as if they wanted to get it over with. Even Oliver failed to follow his customary procedure of licking his spoon so slowly that he could hold it up when everyone else had finished and say, “Look at all I've got left!” Yes, something was up, no doubt, but Cuffy was too busy to bother about it now. The children thanked her politely, if hastily, and lunged for the stairs, racing and bumping, each in an attempt to get there first. Cuffy sighed. That was more natural.

By four o'clock it was almost dark, but Rush wouldn't let anyone turn on the lights. Instead he went down to his room and got his flashlight and worked by the light of that. “This is much safer,” he told them. “Less revealing.” Randy secretly thought he just liked it better that way: it made the whole enterprise more dramatic. She didn't blame him; she liked it better that way herself.

“The Egyptians used to blow anthrax dust into the cracks of the royal tombs when they sealed them,” Rush recounted with relish. “Whoever broke them open was supposed to get the disease and die in agony a few days later.”

“What's anthrax?” said Randy. “It sounds like something Cuffy might use in the kitchen.”

“I trust not,” replied Rush, with the dignity demanded by the setting. “It's a very bad disease. Cows get it, I think. Well, anyway, inside the tombs they put a spell on all the gold and jewels and stuff, so that any robber or explorer or anybody who fooled around with them would meet a dire and dreadful fate. Even if it was thousands of years later.”

They were silent, thinking of the old tombs: each with its sarcophagus staring into the dark.

The sleety rain brushed the windows, the spruce branches sighed funereally in the wind, and the last nail came out of the door.

“There!” said Rush. He stood up, put the tip of the pliers into the keyhole and pulled gently. At first the door refused to budge, but after a moment or two it yielded gingerly. Rush only opened it a crack; then he handed the flashlight to Randy.

“Madam,” he said, “the honor is yours. You go in alone first.”

What? After all that talk about skeletons, and ghosts, and anthrax dust, and ancient Egyptian curses? Oh, no, Randy wasn't going through that doorway by herself.

“You come in with me, Rush,” she insisted. “Right beside me. And Mona and Oliver you stay close behind.”

“Okay, ready?” Rush opened the door and slowly, half fearfully they stepped into the secret chamber. The windows admitted only the frail, pearly glow of a wet twilight, and Rush flashed his light into the room. It was a long, narrow room, they saw: merely the sliced-off end of an attic, but it had five windows of its own and the walls and even the ceiling were covered with the pretty old-fashioned blue-flowered paper. Rush flashed the lamp more thoroughly about the room.

Who was that?

Randy screamed. Even Rush made a startled sound, and Mona and Oliver leaped back into the Office as though they had been shot. Randy was right on their heels.