Brave Warrior (4 page)

“Well,” Felix said, “it’s gibberish.”

“No, it’s not,” Maisie said, pointing to the top line. “Elm Medona? That’s not gibberish.”

“Okay,” Felix admitted. “But
Mamelon dee
is. And
Omland eem
.”

“I think it means something,” Maisie insisted.

“Lemonade m?”
Felix said.

Maisie lifted the folded dresses that filled the trunk to reveal the lavender silk lining beneath them.

“How about all of this then?” she asked him.

Felix peered inside.

Hundreds of similar phrases were written there, filling the entire inside of the trunk.

“Whose trunk was this?” Felix wondered.

Maisie shrugged.

“I think it’s a code or something,” she said.

Felix tried to make sense of any of it. After every few dozen, the person had written Elm Medona again, then more of the nonsensical phrases.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Why did they keep writing Elm Medona?”

“It reminds me of that day Great-Aunt Maisie made us try to crack the code for the Fabergé egg, remember?”

“Of course I remember.
Metaphoric kiwis
was an anagram for Maisie Pickworth,” Felix said.

They both looked up from the words they’d been staring at.

“Anagrams!” Maisie said, excited. Just as she had suspected all along! “These are anagrams for Elm Medona!”

“M
aybe we could ask Great-Uncle Thorne?” Felix said.

This was much later, after Maisie had dutifully read aloud each entry and they’d both decided that whoever had tried to crack the anagram had not succeeded. None of them made any sense or led to anything even remotely interesting or revelatory. They’d puzzled over the anagram themselves, each of them writing the words Elm Medona on a piece of paper and then rearranging the letters the entire time they ate dinner. The cook had left roasted chicken and French fries—Cook insisted they call them
frites
, which they both found ridiculous—for them, and they’d sat together in that enormous
Kitchen, nibbling and writing and thinking.

Maisie did not want to ask Great-Uncle Thorne. In fact, she didn’t want to involve him at all. Finding the writing in that trunk had been just the thing to bring Felix back into her orbit. He was finally paying attention to her again. Once they told someone else, she would become the third wheel again. And Maisie was sick of being the third wheel.

“I don’t know,” she said, dipping a fry into mayonnaise, which Cook approved of; apparently everyone in France dipped their
frites
in mayo. “I think we can solve this if we just stick to it.”

Felix looked doubtful.

“Maybe we’re missing something,” Maisie said.

“Obviously,” Felix said with a sigh.

He chewed the eraser of his pencil, an old habit that he’d mostly lost. It made Maisie feel nostalgic watching him. She remembered when all the pencils in his pencil box had gnawed bottoms. Their second-grade teacher, Miss Lupa, had put Tabasco on his pencils, and when their father found out, he’d gone to the school and demanded she be fired. Of course she wasn’t. But Maisie and Felix had enjoyed the drama of their burly father in his paint-splattered
clothes defending Felix’s right to chew his pencils.

“What are you smiling about?” Felix asked.

“Miss Lupa,” Maisie said.

“The pencils,” Felix said, nodding.

“Remember when Dad said, ‘Who’s named Lupa anyway? It means
wolf
!’”

Felix walked over to the giant stainless-steel refrigerator and peered inside.

“There’s chocolate pudding,” he reported.

“Yum,” Maisie said happily.

“Except, of course, Cook calls it
pot au chocolat
,” Felix said as he brought two ramekins of pudding and two spoons to the table.

“She has a French name for everything,” Maisie said.

“Great-Uncle Thorne does it, too,” she added. She took a taste of the thick chocolate pudding. “Mmmm,” she said. “Heavenly.”

“And Great-Aunt Maisie. The whole lot of them throw French words into everything they say.”

“Bon appétit!”
Maisie said, imitating the way Great-Aunt Maisie used to speak.

“À demain!”
Felix said with a giggle.

“Pourquoi!”
Maisie said.

“Mon dieu!”
Felix said.

Maisie looked at her brother.

“Elm Medona,” she said.

“That’s not French,” Felix said.

“Maybe,” Maisie said, studying the anagrams she’d written.

“What are you thinking?” Felix asked.

He looked down at his own anagrams. None of them made any sense.

“Wait a minute. Do you think Elm Medona is an anagram for a French word?” he asked suddenly.

“Well,” Maisie said, “it sure isn’t an anagram for an English one.”

Felix seemed to be concentrating really hard on something.

“What?” Maisie asked impatiently.

“I know you won’t want to do it,” he said.

“Spit it out already,” Maisie said.

“Avery Mason speaks fluent French,” Felix said. “She went to a French American school until last year.”

“No,” Maisie said.

“I told you that you wouldn’t want to do it. Even though she might be able to help us.”

“Well,” Maisie said, considering.

“All we have to do is have her look at the trunk.”

“Well,” Maisie said again.

“Or our lists,” Felix offered. “We could go to her house right now. It’ll take an hour, tops.”

When Maisie didn’t say anything, Felix said, “Or I could go by myself.”

“No!” Maisie said quickly.

She was not about to lose Felix again so soon after she’d gotten him back.

“I’ll go with you,” she said reluctantly, because what else could she say?

Despite their mother’s insistence that they never ask Charles the chauffeur to drive them anywhere, they had both readily decided that since their mother was out on a
date
with her
boyfriend
, they could do whatever they wanted. Maisie enjoyed pushing the button that beckoned Charles to the mansion. And she liked how quickly he responded, walking into the foyer already dressed in his black chauffeur uniform with his cap pulled low on his forehead.

“Miss Robbins?” he said, as cool and calm as if she beckoned him every day.

“We need to go somewhere,” Maisie said.

“Yes, Miss,” Charles answered.

Felix gave him the address, and in no time they were sitting in the backseat of the black limousine, cruising down Bellevue Avenue, grinning at each other.

Avery Mason lived in a big, sprawling house that sat on a long spit of land that stretched out into the ocean.

“Creepy,” Maisie pronounced when they arrived.

“Wait here for us, please,” Felix said as he got out of the limo.

“Yes, Master Robbins,” Charles said.

“He’s like a robot,” Felix whispered to Maisie on their way to the front door.

“He’s just a professional, that’s all,” Maisie said, as if she knew all there was to know about chauffeurs.

Avery opened the door before they even rang the bell.

“What’s this French emergency?” she asked, letting them inside.

Her house was the complete opposite of Elm Medona—modern, all glass and sharp angles, open spaces, and cathedral ceilings.

“We’re playing this…um…game,” Felix said. “And we need to find anagrams.”

“That’s when you reorder letters to make a new word or phrase,” Maisie explained.

Avery looked at her like she was a total moron. “I know what an anagram is,” Avery said, tossing her beautiful hair.

“But we think this one is in French,” Felix said. “And you are fluent in French.”

“Mais oui,”
Avery said perfectly.

She led them into a large room with one entire wall made of glass that overlooked the water. Waves crashed onto the rocks below and an almost full moon hung above them. All the furniture was white, which made Maisie uncomfortable, like she was going to get it dirty somehow.

Once they’d settled onto separate white chairs, Felix handed Avery their lists.

“The anagram is for Elm Medona?” Avery said.

Felix nodded.

“What kind of game is this?” Avery asked.

But she went to work right away, moving her lips as she read to herself.

“I can’t really find one,” she said after a long time.

Maisie sighed with disappointment.

“That’s okay,” Felix said. “Thanks for trying.”

“Anything for you, F,” Avery said.

F?
Maisie thought grumpily.

Felix grinned. “I appreciate it, A.”

“Oh, please,” Maisie muttered as the two of them giggled together.

Avery led them back to the front door, where she handed Felix the papers.

“You know what’s funny?” she said when they stepped outside. “One of the anagrams is
lame demon
.”

“I found that one,” Maisie said.

“Le diable boiteux,”
Avery said in perfectly accented French.

“What’s funny about a lame demon?” Felix asked.

“Well, not funny really, but curious. You know, it’s from that French book,” Avery said.

“We don’t know,” Maisie said. Here was Avery, bragging as usual. Standing there in her glass house with her beautiful hair and some kind of classical music playing in another room and the waves crashing dramatically like she lived on a movie set.

“
Paris Before Man
? By Pierre Boitard?” Avery was saying.

Felix shook his head and shrugged helplessly.

“It’s about time travel,” Avery said.

Felix and Maisie looked at each other.

In the background, like they really were in a movie, the music hit a crescendo.

“
Lame demon
,” Felix said softly.

“An anagram for Elm Medona,” Maisie said just as softly.

Just then, the lights in Avery’s house blinked once. Twice. Then they went out, leaving the three of them standing in total darkness. Avery gasped. But Maisie reached out into the black, found her brother’s hand, and squeezed it. To her great relief and delight, Felix squeezed back.

“Isn’t it weird that the lights went out
before
the storm arrived?” Maisie said as Charles drove them through the dark streets back to Elm Medona.

Felix squinted out at the blackness. He could not find a single light anywhere. It looked as if all of Newport had lost electricity. Rain pelted the windshield, and the wind blew so hard that he could actually feel it tugging on the limousine. Already branches had been ripped from trees and were being
tossed around in the streets.

“Lame demon,”
Maisie said, and rested her head back against the long seat.

Slowly they drove along Bellevue Avenue, each mansion as dark as the next. They looked like museums, Felix thought as he stared out the window. He supposed in a way they were museums of the Gilded Age. Of a long-ago time. A shiver ran through him as he thought of all the people who had built them and held parties and danced in the fancy ballrooms. Not many of them were still lived in.

The car turned up the long driveway to Elm Medona, which loomed ahead of them.

Felix blinked.

“Look,” he said, pointing out the window.

Maisie leaned over to see what he was pointing at.

Somewhere upstairs, one light shone. All around them, Newport was in darkness. In fact, Elm Medona was dark, too. Except one small light.

“Is that in Samuel Dormitorio?” Maisie asked.

In his mind’s eye, Felix pictured the layout of the second floor, imagining each room.

“No,” he said.

The limo was in the circular driveway now, its
tires splashing through puddles as it moved toward the entrance.

“Ariane’s Bedroom?” Maisie asked, craning her neck to better see.

“No, that’s on the other side,” Felix said.

They had stopped. Charles stepped out into the rain and opened the door for them to exit. He held an enormous black umbrella for them to step under, and Maisie and Felix huddled beneath it, running inside.

The staff had lit giant pillar candles everywhere. They flickered and sent long shadows across the floors and walls.