"
I’m Manica-bibble Bunnyfluff!"
the man-sized, blue rabbit on the screen laughed.
"And today, we’re gonna teach Woody-Goody Wilson a lesson in sharing the carrot cake!
" Manicabibble looked both ways, as if to make sure the parents weren’t listening. The eyes on the rabbit suit rolled in two different directions. "
And,
" he whispered,
"we’re also gonna teach him what happens to big fat tattle-tellers too!
"
"Uh-oh," Bran said. "That doesn’t sound good…"
"Hush!" Balder demanded.
The
Bean Bag Show
budget must have been cut recently. Manica-bibble’s ears were tied above his head due to a split zipper. Some of the other alligators and buzzards were missing eyes, some were on crutches, and others had holes in their suits that revealed the dingy men underneath. It looked more like a hobo show than a
Bean Bag Show
.
Bran just continued to dust the shelves. Friday was cleaning day. Balder had one chore, once a week: wiping a baseboard in his closet. Still, he refused to do it, though Mabel was adamant. In the end, Bran had to take Balder’s hand, hold the rag in it, and move his hand for him, with Balder screaming the whole time. The instant his chore was done, Balder shot back in front of the television, like a magnetic pull between them that science had yet to discover.
"Perhaps you could watch it in your room," Bran suggested. "I
am
trying to work in here."
"Silence, serf!" Balder commanded. "
That
one’s too small."
"Quiet down, both of you," Mabel hissed, rushing into the room in a new outfit. This time it was a scarlet gown with tight white gloves that were so long, they enveloped her hands, elbows, and shoulders, just like sleeves. She also had a fur hat with a plastic ruby and three feathers poking out so high, they scraped the ceiling when she scurried from one side of the room to the next. She stuffed the end of a nose-spray bottle in one nostril.
"I’m off to get my ears candled, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me," she announced, as if anyone would have wanted to. She sprayed once in one nostril and twice in the other before continuing. "My alternative medicine practitioner informed me that this town is full of mites, and the only way to get them out is to have one’s ears candled."
She pointed across the room. "And be sure to clean the corners out good. The
Fitness Witness
magazine says that’s where spores hide and breed, sometimes to the size of cats."
Pansy looked up. Mabel eyed her suspiciously and opened her mouth to speak again, but was cut off by a loud clicking noise coming from down the hall.
"The spores!" she gasped. "They’re coming to eat us!" She leapt behind the sofa.
"No." Bran shook his head. "That’s just Rosie, working on another article for the newspaper."
"Oh, oh…" Mabel said, fanning herself with a peacock feather. She broke open a quick-pack of smelling salts under her nose. "You go tell that awful cousin of mine she should be cleaning, not writing! About to drive me into an allergic reaction with all that tapping!"
She went into a sneezing fit and tripped her way toward the medicine cabinet. Bran pushed the rag along some picture frames and thought hard about the paper Mr. Swinehic had found.
It’s just a coincidence,
he told himself.
Just another paper like mine. There are probably thousands just like it…
But it was too unusual for him to be entirely convinced it was all by chance. The handwriting matched. It seemed that the piece of paper, the burglar, and the strange things the burglar had said on the roof were all connected, but Bran couldn’t put the pieces together in the right order. He heard Rosie go on typing and decided to see what she was up to. The typewriter was rusty and made lots of noise when she typed in bold, like she always did for her articles. She was at her desk next to the door, with glasses on her nose and papers all around. Her room had yellow walls and white trim that looked like sunshine, matching the beams of glowing rays streaming in from the window behind her bed. She looked up when Bran walked in.
"Oh, Bran!" she said excitedly. "You won’t believe the wonderful idea I had!"
"What is it?" Bran asked.
She turned a big box of papers in her lap. "After our conversation at breakfast this morning," she said, "I have decided to write an article about the Givvyng Tree and why gnomes aren’t allowed." A gleam came into her eyes. "This time, it’s going under Rosie Cheeks, my very own pen name!"
"Sounds great," Bran said. "I’m sure it’ll make it this time."
"I hope so," Rosie said, getting back to typing some notes from the newspaper clippings.
"Once I’ve got my toe in the door," Rosie said, typing, "I’m headed off in the right direction for a full job and—" She looked up. "—maybe even
syndication!
"
She laughed and got back to work. She had written about thirty articles for the
Daily Duncelander,
but they hadn’t taken any of them, always telling her the same thing: she needed to spice up her stories with rumors and fictitious references to dead witnesses, like they did with their reports, and then her stories might make it somewhere around the crossword puzzles. But Rosie refused to do it. Nothing could stop her when her mind was set, and even after thirty rejections she was still working harder than ever.
"In my research," she said, pulling out a clipping, "gnomes are
always
small, and they
always
wear conical, red hats."
"Nothing like Sewey’s burglar," Bran observed.
"Maybe," Rosie said, reading. "It says here that when our founder Droselmeyer Dunce first wrestled this land from barbarians, he stumbled upon the Givvyng Tree at the top of Givvyng Hill, and on it was carved the words ‘no gnomes.’ Believing it was divine inspiration, he settled the land and made those very words the first law of the city of Dunce."
"So someone had just carved ‘no gnomes’ on the tree for no reason," Bran said, grinning.
"Actually," she said, scanning the page, "it says here that some claim the words simply read ‘hog homes,’ but the tops of the h’s are worn off, making them
appear
to be letter n’s. But most Duncelander historians strongly disagree and hold to Droselmeyer’s story."
Bran laughed. Rosie thought it was funny as well. "It also says here that Droselmeyer, according to legend, was murdered by what he suspected to be two gnome mages, and as he lay dying,
he crawled all the way to Givvyng Park and carved the words ‘no mages’ below the words ‘no gnomes.’"
Bran thought on that a moment. "He crawled all the way to the park, when he was
dying?
"
"I know, it’s very convoluted," Rosie said. "I can’t get a clear history of Dunce anywhere."
Bran shook his head. Almost everyone in Dunce believed such nonsense. In Dunce, Bran wasn’t even supposed to have an opinion on gnomes or mages until he was eighteen or else he might have to pay a fine, but that still didn’t keep him from thinking about it. He had a feeling the real reason Duncelanders didn’t like gnomes was because there were plenty who were more successful, more popular, and held higher political offices than they did, outside of Dunce.
"I’ve kept all the photos and newspaper clippings the Wilomases throw away for years now." Rosie said. She dug her hand in the box and pulled something out.
"Here’s one of Sewey’s first job." She held it out. In it, a much younger Sewey was dressed up in a white suit and hat. His arms were crossed very grumpily. Not much had changed.
"Before banker school, he stuck the labels that said ‘Warning: May contain traces of peanuts’ on the peanut butter jars." Rosie said. She reached for a stack of papers on her desk.
"I’ve got a picture of the last Biannual Wilomas Family Reunion somewhere. Sewey and all the other Wilomases sit at the long table, and me and the rest of the Tuttles sit at the side."
"Why’s that?" Bran asked. Rosie just shrugged.
"The Tuttles have served the Wilomases for years and are of no blood relation," she said simply. "That’s just the way it’s been. It would be scandalous for a Tuttle to attend the reunion at a Wilomas table. After we’re through cooking and waiting on them, then we sit down to eat."
Rosie finally found the photo. It showed rows of Wilomases and their relations, in formal attire, sitting at tables on a grassy hill. At the end was Great-Grandmother Wilomas, a faraway speck in the distance. Behind her towered the gigantic Castle Wilomas. There was a hole cut out of the head of the man sitting next to Sewey. Bran knew who it belonged to. It was Sewey’s only sibling, his younger brother, Bartley, who Sewey loathed beyond words, refused to see, and whose face he had removed from all photos in the house after Bartley inherited their parents’ fortune, and Sewey inherited a jar of dill pickles.
"So you’ve always been servants?" Bran asked, finally spotting Rosie holding a tray of steaming food in the photo. Rosie thought for a moment.
"For a long time, at least," she finally said. "Mabel was a Hatfield before she married into the Wilomases. By coincidence she was distantly related to me, a Tuttle. When she married Sewey, it tied the Hatfields to the Wilomases, and us Tuttles to both. I’ve got another picture here—"
She reached for a stack of papers on the end of her desk, but the moment she did there was a sudden pounding on the floor, as Mabel began to beat the ceiling below with a broom.
"Out you spores, all of you!" Mabel commanded.
At her sudden outburst, Rosie jumped, and accidentally sent a whole pile of papers into the air. Bran dove to catch them, but it was too late—all of them flew over the carpet in different directions.
"Oh, bother," Rosie said, bending down to gather them up. "Now they’re all out of order!"
"I’ll help." Bran reached down to scoop up a stack of the loose sheets.
"Oh, no, Bran, that’s much too kind!" Rosie said, but Bran went on gathering them up. "No, I insist!" she added, her hands rushing as she grabbed at the papers on the floor.
Bran blinked and tried to help, but the moment his hand touched a sheet she whisked it out of his grasp. "Are you sure you don’t need any help?" he asked.
"No, none at all!" she burst, rushing about. "Why don’t you… go dust Baldretta’s bedroom?"
"I already did," Bran replied, confused at how she was acting. She didn’t say any more but quickly stuffed all the papers into a drawer in her desk, drawing out a small key and locking it. She spun around to put her back to it and opened her mouth as if she was about to speak, but apparently lost what she was going to say. Instead of trying to remember it, she rushed from the room, leaving Bran very puzzled.
He sat there for a moment on the floor. He had never seen her that way in his life. Suddenly, his eye caught on something: an opened envelope that had fallen under the bed and out of view, close to his leg. Every muscle in his body froze at once. He took a glance out Rosie’s open door. No one was there.
Very slowly, he reached for it. He felt it touch his fingertips and slid it closer to him, glancing down at it, not even daring to pick it up from the floor.
The envelope had been opened and was empty. However, there was writing in the center of the envelope, but no address—a script, but definitely not Rosie’s. It was stronger, bolder, with thin swirls, and it read:
To Rosie Tuttle
From your Beloved B
Bran took a deep breath. The handwriting was exactly the same as what had been on the card with the mysterious roses.
So she does know who it is…
he thought with disbelief.
She’s getting letters from him!
He looked toward the door. She was gone. He looked at the envelope one last time, then shoved it far under the bed and left as quickly as he could, hoping he could just forget about it altogether.
Chapter 7
Sewey Wilomas Versus the Oncoming Train
By the evening, sewey forgot all about searching for the gnome, though he did tell everyone what had happened on the road. As usual, he embellished the small details into bigger ones, and because of it no one believed anything he said.
"So a black van chased you to work," Bran said doubtfully, "and then grew wings and flew off into the sunrise?"
"Yes, that’s what I said!" Sewey insisted, and Bran didn’t bother to press the subject. Sewey’s description of the black van amused him though, and later, while cleaning Sewey’s office, Bran took a pencil to one of the notepads. Sewey had caught him and was not at all pleased to see the black van again, complete with wings and an evil grin. Mabel wasn’t thrilled either, because Bran had taken the liberty of adding a band of spores with gnashing teeth to the back seats, which frightened her so much she spent the rest of the day camped in the closet, moaning horrors.
"You, sir," Sewey scolded, "are lucky to have been caught before you added red caps to those spore-shaped gnomes, or else you’d be hitchhiking to court to pay your indecency fine."
It made Bran feel much better—as if now that he was laughing about it, the burglar wasn’t a threat anymore. His thoughts shifted to the envelope in Rosie’s room, and he puzzled over every Mr. B. in town, though none of them seemed to fit. In his boredom he sketched out a large letter B, adding sharp flames to its shape as if he could melt away all memory of the man who was writing to Rosie. He knew he would find the rest of the letters soon enough.
Sunday morning rolled about, and the house was abuzz again as everyone rushed to get ready for the Bolton Road Weekly Picnic. They all had to go or else the neighbors would talk about them behind their backs, as if the Wilomases didn’t have enough gossip going around already.
"Ohhh," Mabel was moaning. "The Pig-pollens must be high today."
"But the weather’s beautiful!" Rosie replied, flipping pancakes. "Go take some nose spray."
"Already did," Mabel sniffled. "A whole super-pack of Christine’s Antihistamines." She crossed her arms. "In fact, I took all my medicines, and I still feel the same as I did last night. As if they aren’t doing a bloody thing…"