The Great Circus Train Robbery (9 page)

“Then I will.” Spence wheeled through the door and let it slam.

The slam gave her a headache and she caught her finger in the whirring needle. She stopped the machine—her fingertip was bleeding. There was blood on the fabric. She dropped it on the table and sucked her finger.

Alone now, she let the tears flow. Maybe she was too—
speculate
(if there was such a word)—was she?

17

SPENCE LOSES A BIKE AND GAINS A MONKEY

The monkey was perched on the back of a file cabinet when Spence went in. Its long skinny tail was wrapped twice around its feet. It had pulled off its scarlet ruff; it looked sad, like it missed Hackberry. Or had missed its meal.

“Here, Sweet Gum.” He tossed a peanut and the monkey swallowed it.

“Good shot,” a voice said, and he jumped. In a far corner of the room a caged green-and-red parrot glared at him. Now he had to feed a parrot if Hackberry didn’t come back. He poured the peanuts into a bowl and left them for the monkey. He found a tin of birdseed on a shelf and threw a handful into the cage. “Fool!” the parrot cried, “Out of my cage. Out I said!”

At least the monkey seemed glad to see him. It leapt from the file cabinet and onto his shoulder. When he tried to release its toes, it only gripped harder. He might as well check out the old trunk, he thought, while he was waiting for the monkey to unwind.

But when he pulled back the bedroom curtain, he found the trunk lid open, the contents spread on bed and floor. Someone had been here, he didn’t think Hackberry would leave such a mess. He sifted through photo albums, diaries, pieces of colorful costumes. Hackberry, it seemed, hadn’t always been fearful. He picked up an old high school yearbook; here was Hackberry fresh-faced and wide-eyed, smiling at the camera.
Always clowning around,
someone had written.
I’ll
ride on one of your trains any time,
another had scrawled in red ink.
Love you, sweet man,
a third scribbled beside his picture in large curlicue letters.

Was that his future wife? She loved him but something happened and she didn’t love him anymore? Nothing new, he guessed. Half his friends shuttled between two sets of parents. He felt suddenly lucky to have a full set; he wanted to be home with them this minute instead of hanging out in a smelly old school bus.

At the bottom of the trunk was an oblong box that read: BILLINGS BROTHERS CIRCUS DINING CAR. Whoa! But no car inside. Had someone stolen it? Hearing a noise outside, he jumped up. He didn’t want Hackberry to find him going through his things.

But it wasn’t Hackberry, it was the dwarf—riding off on his bike! The fellow’s plump legs were peddling away, the body moving up and down since he couldn’t sit on the seat and still move the pedals. “Hey!” Spence shouted out the window.

“Hey!” the parrot squawked.

“That’s my bike!” Spence shouted as he stumbled down the steps.

“Out of my cage and stay out!” the parrot screamed from the window.

But the dwarf only waved and sped on past the big tent and out of sight.

Now Spence had lost a baggage car
and
a
bicycle. What was happening to his orderly life? He just wanted to be home running his train or practicing his cello. He didn’t want to be in a circus compound with a monkey on his back. He didn’t want to go hunting down a man he felt responsible for since he was the last to see him. And no one else in the circus seemed worried. He’ll come back, they’d said, and they didn’t seem to care if he didn’t.

So he might as well look for the wife, she might at least take the monkey. The creature was still gripping his shoulder, and it hurt.

At the third door he approached for directions, a woman said: “Over there. In the blue Winnebago. But keep your distance or you might get a pie in your face—sour cherry, too.”

That wouldn’t be a bad thing, he thought. Dessert at home had been orange jell-O, and he hated orange jell-O. Not even a cookie, either—just because his mother was on a diet.

“Not here,” Mrs. Hackberry snapped when he inquired for her husband. “And I don’t want
that.”
She pointed a finger at the monkey. She slammed the door on Spence’s sneakered foot.

“He’s gone missing and somebody got in his trunk and took one of his rail cars,” Spence shouted.

The door popped open again. “What?”

“Let me in and I’ll explain.”

She stared down at him. She was close to six-feet-tall with a fuzzy little brown mustache, dangling gold earrings and eyes that penetrated him, head to toe. She was one of those people you had to tell the truth to or she might slice you open.

“All right. Come in then. But leave that stinking animal outside.”

The monkey clung harder, its furry brown face drooling into Spence’s neck. He wouldn’t mind leaving it outside, to tell the truth.

“Allow me,” said Mrs. Hackberry. She unwound the beast with her long, red-nailed fingers and tossed it outdoors. “Now what’s this about a trunk and a theft?” She sat him down in a straight-backed chair and brought out a pie. At first he worried she would throw it in his face, but then she cut a slice and served it on a napkin. It wasn’t sour cherry at all, but lemon meringue.

When he’d swallowed a couple of delectable bites, he described the mess in the school bus, the theft, his meeting with Hackberry, and the clown’s disappearance. “And then this man with a mustache and a black tie was watching on the other side of the ring and Hackberry seemed afraid of him.”

The woman’s face lit up like a display of fireworks. She sat down on the edge of a red-and-blue patchwork couch. “Did he have a hung belly? Dimple the size of an avocado pit in his chin? A blue spot in one of his brown eyes?”

“I only saw him from way across the ring. He was wearing a hat pulled over his eyes, so I couldn’t see the color. But he was tall.”

“How tall?”

The woman was leaning over him; he could smell sausage and sauerkraut (his mother served it once a week). “Six feet maybe, I couldn’t tell exactly. Anyway, Hackberry ran off and the man went, too, I don’t know where. Although...” Spence suddenly realized that the woman had been describing Mr. Boomer. Fireworks went off in his own chest.

“Well? Go on.”

The eyes were stabbing Spence with light. He blinked. It was like he was getting a shock treatment. He’d read about those things. They put electrodes on your head and made you tell everything you knew.

He told her about Juniper Boomer. About the photo of the boy looking after the departing train. About Boomer in his gazebo watching his circus train. About Mrs. Elwood seeing Boomer on the circus grounds after the clown disappeared. When he finished he felt like he’d been knocked off his bike and left to die on the ground.

Mrs. Hackberry dropped back into the couch; dust sprang up in her wake. “So that’s it. That’s it,” she murmured. “I knew it would come to that.”

“Come to what?” Spence asked but the woman didn’t say. She just looked upset.

“He was happy when we first met,” she told Spence. “But then he changed. It was that brother of his did it.”

“Brother?”

“Brother, I said, yes. Always squabbling they were. Juniper wanting what Hackberry had. Hackberry wanting what Juniper had. Then their daddy left. Just like that.” She clapped her palms together. It sounded like a thunder clap.

“The one in the photo? On the train?”

“I don’t know about that. But their daddy left.   When Juniper turned eighteen, he took off and never went back. Hackberry lived home while he attended community college, and then he joined the circus and met me.  We had twenty happy years. Until...”

“Until?” Spence asked, for she was sitting like a turtle on a rock with its head pulled into its shell.

She lifted her chin. “It was after Juniper came to visit one time that Hack began to change. Juniper stayed a whole month till he and Hack had a knock-down fight over something and Juniper left. Hack went downhill after that. It was like his brother’d given him a misery pill. Made him paranoid.”

“You don’t know why?”

“I said I didn’t, didn’t I?” She sounded peeved. “I’ve said enough, young man. I don’t know where he is. I’m in administration now—living alone—and it’s better that way, I guess. You know what it’s like to live with somebody always lurking about like he’s scared of his own shadow?”

Spence shook his head. He didn’t think he’d like to live with anybody like that. He was sorry for Mrs. Hackberry. She seemed kind of lonely without her husband.

“Now you take the rest of that pie and go. I don’t want it. Too sweet, I put too much sugar in it.  And take that fool monkey with you. I don’t want it hanging around here. It peed more than once on my couch. I had to have the cleaner come and I can’t afford that again.”

Getting up, Spence noticed the front part of a battered rail car poking out from under a table. He wondered if it might be the dining car missing from Hackberry’s trunk.

She saw him looking and yanked it out. “Hackberry’s, of course. Take it. I was going to sell it with some of the others, but it’s not worth the trouble.” It was a black Lionel engine, badly in need of repair.

“That dwarf took my bike,” he told Mrs. Hackberry Boomer—for that’s what her name was, he realized—thinking she might help get it back. But she groaned and said, “That was Chuckie. He’s a friend of Hack’s. Was—they’re always arguing. He might be the one got into Hack’s trunk. Now I’ve work to do.” She put a hand on his arm and propelled him out the door.

Sweet Gum jumped on his shoulder and reached in his pocket for peanuts. “One at a time,” he warned. At least the monkey seemed happy. Spence had had his fill of unhappy people. Now he had to walk the three miles home—with half a pie and a battered engine in his arms and a monkey on his back. It was Zoe, he told himself, who got him into this mess—just so she could zip up a fat clown and finish her mission and be a lieutenant in that stupid spy club.

“S’not fair,” he hissed through the teeth. “Not fair!” he shouted when the monkey spit bits of peanuts into the bare neck of his T-shirt.

18

BAD NEWS COMES IN THREES

“You’re kidding!” Zoe cried when Spence described the meeting with Hackberry’s wife. “So Boomer and Hackberry are brothers? Is that why Boomer moved here, you think?”

Spence shrugged. He lay back in the deck chair behind Zoe’s house and closed his eyes. It was getting dark and he was tired, he said, after the long walk with a rail car under his arm and a monkey on his back—he’d eaten the pie to lighten the load. Now the beast was hanging upside-down from an apple branch, munching on the apple Zoe tossed at him.

“What did Mrs. Hackberry say about the trunk and the missing train?” Zoe was feeling relaxed now that her mother had taken over Tulip’s costume.

“Not much. I suppose that’s what was in the trunk—not the dining car at all.” He pointed to the beat-up black engine. A waste of time and energy, he thought, to have carried it all this way. It needed a lot of work before it would run.

“Do you think she opened the trunk and took it?”

“Maybe,” he said, yawning. “She thought she might sell this one, she said. But who’d want it?”

“Maybe Boomer would.”

“Boomer?”

“Yes, Boomer. Who lives on the other side of your house. Have you forgotten?”

“I’m just tired,” he said, yawning again.

“Well, wake up. We don’t have much time left, you know. The first performance is day after tomorrow and Boomer’s on the prowl. They argued: him and his brother, you said, right?”

“I didn’t say. Mrs. Hackberry said.” Spence pulled a handful of peanuts out of his pocket and popped them in his mouth.

“Stop being so literal. So we have to find what they argued about. Something Boomer stole from his brother? Some family heirloom?”

“How’re we going to find out?” he said. “Boomer won’t tell us. You know that.”

“We have to get into his house again, I told you. Tomorrow.  When he goes out.  Or if he doesn’t, then when he’s in bed.”

“Good luck,” said Spence. “I’ll be in bed too.”

“We’ll find your red baggage car, I bet.” The monkey hopped down onto Zoe’s back and she shrieked. “Get him off me!” She was wearing a yellow cotton tee with two thin straps. “He’s digging in his claws!”

“Hey! Where’d that thing come from?” Kelby came trudging up from the orchard; he laughed to see the monkey clinging to Zoe.

“Lie down on your back,” her father said, coming up behind, “and it’ll leave. It won’t want to be squashed.”

Zoe lay down; the monkey squirmed out from under and leapt onto Spence’s back. Kelby giggled. “Which one’s the monkey?”

“Shut your mouth, Kelby,” Zoe said.

“By the way, Spence,” Kelby said, “your father called. Seems you went off without putting away your train and now the red advertising car is gone.”

“What?”

“Yup. Gone. Vanished. Bye-bye.” Kelby grinned.

“No-oo-oo!” Spence wheeled about, his face a thunderstorm. Then he turned and ran.

“Wait up, Spence.  We have to talk more!” Zoe shouted. But already Spence was disappearing through the row of poplar trees that divided their properties.  The monkey lifted a paw as if it had a whip and was riding him.

“Zoe?” her mother called, gritting her teeth.  “Come and cut up onions for tomorrow’s stew so I can keep
sewing.”

A rail car missing from Hackberry’s trunk and now two cars from Spence’s train. Bad news comes in threes, Zoe thought as she trudged inside to cut up onions for the stew. She grabbed a sharp knife and slashed: one—slash, two—slash, three—slash. Three onions, slashed to bits. So much for the coldhearted thief of the three rail cars!

Now her eyes were swimming with onion tears.

19

A BIKE THE COLOR OF THROW-UP

“That bicycle was a Christmas present from your mother and me,” Mr. Riley said for the third time, looking hurt, as if Spence had intentionally lost it. He and Spence were packing up the remaining rail cars to bring inside. “And now it’s gone, through your carelessness.”