The Great Circus Train Robbery (14 page)

Spence’s face had turned as crimson as Hackberry’s nose. The color spread to his ears and travelled down his neck. The beautiful train Spence loved and Hackberry loved even more—was in Spence’s backyard! Could he give it up?

“Juniper has my train,”  the clown wailed, digging his fingernails into his palms.  “Oh yes, you can count on it! Though Chuckie got the passenger car back.  I saw it, I told you. But he rode off with it!”

“Where
were
you all this time?” Spence asked.

“You had us all worried,” Zoe said.

“Worried about me?” The clown seemed surprised. “Oh, I’ve been around. But what’s going on with my passenger car? Tell me!”

Spence looked at Zoe; she held a finger to her lips. It wasn’t yet time to give everything away. First the  brothers had to confront one another. Sooner or later, she thought, Hackberry’s going to look over and see the red passenger car in Boomer’s lap. And then they’ll connect with a wham-bang!

“Clowns ready!” a man called.

“I think you’re on,” Spence said, and handed Hackberry his basket of cars. Zoe went back to smooth out Tulip’s costume and hang the red hoop over her arm.

“I won’t let
her
take it away this time.” Tulip pointed at a clown in an orange polka-dot pinafore. The orange clown stuck out a pink tongue and Tulip stuck hers back. She shimmied in her sparkly new patchwork costume. Mrs. Elwood had sewn glitter onto the hem, neck and sleeve ends. The high-wire ladies raced back in, breathless and smiling, and the clowns surged forward with their balls and hoops, unicycles and tricycles.

“Wish me luck!” Tulip cried as she charged out among them.

“Help me!” cried Hackberry, and together, Spence and Zoe gave him a giant shove into the ring with his rail cars.

At first the show went as it did in rehearsal: clowns running into one another, falling down, helping each other up, then tripping and falling again. Hackberry set up his trains on a two-foot track: the engine ran into the caboose, the cars slid off the track. The crowd laughed and Tulip trotted over to have a look. The ruby ring swung on its pink ribbon and smacked Hackberry in the forehead. Hackberry squealed and grabbed the ring.

“No!” Tulip hollered and yanked back on the ribbon. Lulu yipped and growled. There was a tussle: the ribbon came loose and Hackberry had the ruby ring in his hands. He slipped it on his little finger.

“No-oo-o!” Tulip screeched, and chased him around the ring. Hackberry dashed for the exit, but Zoe and Spencer prodded and pushed him back in.

“Thief!” Tulip screamed at Hackberry. “It’s mine. My ruby ring. Mine!”

The crowd roared. They loved it. They thought the theft part of the act. Now Tulip, Lulu, and Hackberry were racing around to the far side where Boomer was sitting on the edge of his seat. Hackberry tripped on a hoop and flailed his arms. Tulip did a running tackle, knocked him flat on his back, and sat,
thump!
on his chest. The crowd shrieked—had she squashed him? But no, she scrambled up and ran to the center of the ring, flinging her arms high. She had the ring! Everyone cheered.

Hackberry struggled to his feet. He suddenly raced to the far side of the ring, dove into the second row and landed smack on the man with the fake mustache. He’d seen the red passenger car. He was trying to pull it away! And Boomer was resisting.

The female clowns hustled back through the bead curtain. “Got it!” Tulip said with a grin; her belly and breath heaved from the running and falling.

“It’s Hackberry’s ring,” Zoe told Tulip.“Remember? It was his mother’s.”

“Oh dearie me, oh goodness, I forgot. Oh well, I’ll give it back.” Tulip looked crushed, but Zoe couldn’t comfort her, not now. Not with a fight breaking out on the far side of the ring. Hackberry was yanking on the red car, and though he was smaller and thinner than his half brother, he was fiercer; he pulled the car, with Boomer attached, out into the ring. The crowd laughed—until Boomer struck Hackberry in the jaw and the clown lay sprawled on the sawdust floor. When he didn’t get up, the crowd shushed.

Then everything happened at once. A doctor jumped into the ring to take Hackberry’s pulse. A pair of brawny men dashed out to grab Boomer and haul him away.

“Police,” Zoe said. But she was talking to herself, for Spence was running past to stand over Hackberry. Then Tulip raced out to fling herself on the clown and thrust the ring at him. The onlookers oohed and Tulip blew kisses. Two men in blue overalls ran out a stretcher and carted Hackberry out of the ring while the crowd applauded. Near the exit, Hackberry held up the red rail car and they cheered again. A dog act dashed into the ring and the band kept playing and the show went on the way shows were supposed to do.

Beyond the tent, Hackberry awaited an ambulance. He had an arm around the passenger car; the ruby ring shone on his pinkie. Ms. Delores, Spence and Mr. Riley stood over him, murmuring and comforting. To Zoe’s surprise, the estranged wife came running up to weep over him and stroke his hair. She was wearing a red-and-pink flowered blouse, a red earring in one ear and a blue one in the other. “I never meant to sell that train,” Mrs. Hackberry moaned. “I was just jealous, that’s all—all those hours, Hack, you spent with your trains. But I—”

She started to say something more—then shrieked. The monkey had leapt on her shoulder and snatched off her red earring. “Beast!” she cried when Sweet Gum ran off with it.

“Where’d those cops go? We got proof!” Kelby and Butch came striding up, their faces were sticky balloons. “We got in Boomer’s cellar this morning. We found this.” Kelby held up a tiny metal figure that had sat in the red advertising car.

“Yeah,” said Butch. “It was Boomer took those cars.”

“Not both cars,” said Zoe.

“Oh, yeah?” Kelby stuck his pink cotton face into hers.

“Yeah. I mean, no. You’ll just have to wait.” For now Zoe had a notion who the baggage car thief was. But she had to wait for the final evidence.

And here it was—she hoped. Chuckie’s short stubby legs came peddling toward them on Spence’s bicycle. He squealed to a stop, the wheels churning up dirt and grass. His breath came quick and loud, like a small dragon’s breath (so she imagined). He wheeled the bike close to the stretcher.

“Hack,” he said in his chirpy voice, “that fellow grabbed it. He was your brother—said he’d give it back. Hey, you run into a train or something?”

“Sort of,” Hackberry said mournfully. “No thanks to you.” “Chuckie did help,” Spence said. “He tried, but then Boomer came along.” Between them, Zoe and Spence explained what had happened while Chuckie swiveled his head back and forth, from one to the next, like he was watching a ping-pong game. “But you can see Hackberry’s got the passenger car back,” Zoe said. “Only it’s not really his either, it belongs to…”

She stopped. The car belonged to Spence—legally, anyway, and he loved it. Now it was his decision to give it back or not. She saw her friend swallow and try to speak.

“Mrs. Hackberry sold the train,” Spence said, his voice like gravel, “and my grandfather bought it for my birthday. But now...” His lips moved, but no more words came out.

Hackberry was yanking on the roof of the passenger car; it wouldn’t budge. “Get me a screwdriver somebody, will you?”

“Excuse me,” Zoe said. “We’ve already found what you’re looking for. Show him, Spence.”

Spence pulled Mrs. Boomer’s handwritten will out of his pocket, along with the birth certificate, and handed both to the white-faced clown, who looked on speechless. “Your brother Juniper,” Spence said, “wanted them because he...well, he...” Spence was too emotional to go on. “Tell ’em, Zoe,” he whispered.

“Because he wanted what your mother left, all for himself,” Zoe explained, while Kelby and Butch listened, open-mouthed. “We found that in a letter she wrote.  He didn’t want an illegitimate brother getting it. He—”

“I wasn’t illegitimate!” Hackberry cried. “Juniper’s mother was my birth mother. She and my dad married right out of high school.” He held up the ring and squinted at the dates inside. His eyes grew misty. “But they divorced and Dad got custody and Mummy never got over losing Hackberry, even after she married Harrison Boomer. Then my dad died and she got me back. I guess that’s why she favored me. And that wasn’t right either, I always felt bad about it. Then one day...” He coughed and wiped his eyes. The purple eyeliner smeared into the white face paint.

“One day,” Zoe prompted.

“One day we had it out. Juniper came to visit. He said he owned that circus train Mummy had bought—other things, too. He said I was a Johnny-come-lately. That’s what he called me: a Johnny-come-lately who turned Mummy against him. And I never, ever…

“He never, no!” Mrs. Hackberry cried. “Hack was always good to Juniper.  He could never understand that jealousy. And he could never understand why
I
was jealous of
him
spending all that time with his trains and his research and writing.”

“His writing?” asked Zoe.

“Oh yes. He was writing a book, you didn’t know that? About steam trains. Trains, trains, trains!” Her hands pushed away an invisible train.

“But that’s what
I’m
trying to do!” cried Spence. “Not a book—just an essay for a contest, and Zoe’s helping me. So that’s what that
History Of
was on your nightstand! Can I borrow it to read—I mean what you’ve written so far? I’d really like that.”

“Would you read it? Oh, would you?” Hackberry cried, clasping his hands together as if he were praying. “I need a reader, I do! Read it, both of you, right away, and tell me what you think.”

“Wait a minute,” said Zoe, who didn’t need one more book on trains to read. But her protest was erased by the screech of an ambulance siren. People came pouring out of the first show and a loudspeaker drowned out all the other sounds to announce the second show coming up at six o’clock.

A pair of medics jumped out of the ambulance to take Hackberry’s pulse and slap a blood pressure cuff on his arm. He pushed the cuff away. “I don’t need a hospital. I’ve got a show to do.” He glanced at his watch. “In forty-three minutes. Got to warm up.”

He scurried through the tent flap with Spence and Zoe in his wake. The monkey leapt on Spence’s shoulder, the red earring flashing. Why, the monkey had pierced ears! Zoe laughed out loud. And there was Tulip backstage, struggling with her back zipper. “It won’t go all the way up,” she moaned. “Get me a safety pin, will you, Zoe?”

“We did it, partner!” Zoe cried when Tulip was zipped and pinned; she gave Spence a hug. “Now I get to be lieutenant in the spy club!”

“Hold on,” Spence said, pulling away, red-faced, but not really minding the hug, she thought. “We still don’t know for sure who stole my baggage car.”

“Yeah, Zoe,” said Kelby, who’d sneaked through the back tent flap. “You haven’t solved anything yet. So don’t think you’re a lieutenant.”

“I’ve solved a lot, Kelby! You heard us talking outside the tent. It was Spence and me found the advertising car Boomer buried.”

“I was the one said Boomer took it. The whole time
I
said he did and you wouldn’t listen.”

“Young man, I don’t think you belong here. Do you have a pass?” It was one of the tall crew men in blue overalls, frowning down on Kelby.

“Just looking for the rest room,” Kelby told the man. “It was Boomer took that baggage car, Zoe” he called on his way out. “And I’m gonna prove it.”

“You think he will?” Spence asked after Kelby left.

“Maybe. But I’ve an idea—like I said. I want to see Chuckie after the second show.”

“But Chuckie didn’t take it. He swore he didn’t and I believe him!”

“He knows who did, I bet. And I don’t think it was Boomer.”

28

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

“You can’t fool me, Chuckle.” Zoe held up a red earring. They were standing in front of the dwarf’s tent where she’d found him after the final show, leaning Spence’s bike against the back wheel of his yellow car. “The monkey was wearing it, wasn’t he, when he went into Spence’s yard to pick up the train? Sweet Gum found it near Spence’s tree house—it had come off his own furry ear. But a monkey wouldn’t know where to find the train unless somebody showed him. And that was you, right?”

“How would I know!” the dwarf cried. “It wasn’t me took that baggage car.”

“No, but you sent Sweet Gum in to get it. You knew he’d go for the color red. He went tripping back across the lawns with a little flashlight, picked it up, then you drove him back to the circus, right? It was Hackberry sent you? He paid you to do it?”

“No, not Hackberry! It was never Hackberry! He didn’t know who had the circus train. Don’t blame it on Hack. He’s my pal. I’d never let him pay me for a favor.”

Chuckie moved toward his tent, and she yanked him back. “But you’d let Mrs. Hackberry pay you.   This is her earring, right?”  She dangled it again, in front of the dwarf’s nose.  “The monkey’s wearing its mate—you saw him. How much did Mrs. Hackberry pay to get the rail car, Chuckie? And then the others, one by one? Enough to paint your tent fuchsia, right? And then Spence’s bicycle you stole? He could go to the police, you know.”

“No! No police! Anyway, today he gave me the bike to ride.”

“So where’s the baggage car now, Chuckie? I think Hackberry’d like to know.” Not to mention Spence, she thought.

Chuckie was quiet a minute; his tongue licked his pink upper lip. “She has it,” he said, “I took it to her. But it wasn’t worth it. I already
hate
the color I painted the tent.” He stamped his foot. “I wish I’d painted it yellow! Yellow’s a more cheerful color. I need good cheer in my life. Would you want to be a dwarf and have people stare at you all the time like you’re some—some animal?”

Tears popped into his big blue eyes, and she patted his shoulder. Then watched as he walked slowly back into his tent, his chin dropped to his chest.

It would take
guts, she thought, to be “on exhibit” like that. And he probably didn’t get paid much for his circus work. “Thanks,” she called to him, “thanks for riding around today with the passenger car. It helped a lot.”