Libby on Wednesday (19 page)

She was laughing when she said that last part, but I didn’t think it was all that funny. Then she shrugged and said, “But now I think maybe she isn’t such a phony after all
.”

I told Tierney that I thought so too. That is, I never did really think Wendy was a phony, or bubble-headed either. It seemed to me that it was more a kind of ignorance—about different kinds of ideas and other kinds of people, too. Like in her stories when she wrote very well—but only about boring subjects. It was like she always had it so easy—being born extraordinarily talented and beautiful in a rather ordinary family, she just never realized there were people with real
problems. And when you come right down to it, people without any real problems are pretty uninteresting to write about
.

    On Monday Alex came to the McCall House again to visit Gillian and Cordelia. At least that’s what he said. And he certainly spent most of the time talking to them. But just before he went home, he did ask Libby if he could go look at the Treehouse again.

“Why?” Libby asked.

“Because it is such an absolutely unreal place,” he said. “I want to see it again when all those other people aren’t around. You know, muscle-bound types like Tierney and G.G. I want to see if I can climb up to the other rooms.”

So they went out to the Treehouse, and at first Alex just sat in the main room looking around the way he’d done in the big house. Then, after he’d raved for a while about what an unbelievable place it was, he climbed up to the other rooms. It wasn’t easy for him, and sometimes he had to sit down on a stair and scoot up backward, but he didn’t want any help and he finally made it to the highest room and back.

When he came down to the main room again, he asked Libby why she hadn’t told him about the Treehouse when he was there the first time.

“Because it was a secret,” she told him. “I didn’t intend to show it to anybody, ever. But then I kind of let Tierney and Wendy find out about it and I had to show it to them. I didn’t want to, but I had to.”

“Yeah, I can see it all now,” Alex said. “Saying no to those two wouldn’t have been easy. They’re both pretty
used to getting their own way, I think. Like, Tierney just plain throws her weight around, and Wendy does it with a sugar coating, but the results are pretty much the same.”

Libby sighed, “I know. And then, when G.G. turned up, I
really
didn’t want to have the meeting up here, but it was too late by then.”

Alex nodded. “Yeah. I hear you,” he said. “Gary Greene is not the kind of guy—” He stopped there and it was quite a while before he went on. “—You know what? I’m not so sure anymore just what kind of guy old G.G. is. I mean, just when he’s been doing his public-enemy-number-one bit, it’s like he loses his grip and suddenly there’s this almost-human person. I mean, this person looking at you like, ‘Help, let me out of here.’ ”

Libby opened her mouth in amazement, closed it, and finally just nodded—because Alex had said almost exactly what she’d been thinking without ever quite putting it into words. But later she told Alex that she really agreed with him. That she sometimes felt there was something hidden and mysterious about G.G. But by then Alex seemed to have changed his mind. “Sure,” he said. “Old G.G. is pretty mysterious, all right. Like, the mystery is, how did anyone get to be so mean in just thirteen years?”

    On the next Wednesday afternoon everyone except G.G. rode the Westwind bus to the McCall House again, but this time G.G. told them ahead of time that he would be coming later.

“I have something I have to do first,” he’d told Libby
and Wendy, who were waiting for the others in front of the school—in the pouring rain. Libby was sharing Wendy’s umbrella, and G.G., in a large yellow slicker, was just getting ready to get on his bicycle. At first he was definitely in one of his better moods.

“It won’t take long,” he said. “Then I’ll catch the next bus or else ride my bike again. Just leave the gate unlocked and I’ll be there as soon as I can. Okay?”

Libby said okay even though Wendy punched her and rolled her eyes in a “do we have to?” expression. But then something made G.G. angry—maybe he caught Wendy’s look—and his usual dangerous grin returned.

“Or not,” he said. “You can lock me out if you want to. Climbing that broken-down fence wouldn’t be any problem. And now that I know where it is, I can visit your super-secret Treehouse anytime I want to. Maybe make a little late-night visit sometime. Bring a few tools and do a little remodeling, maybe.”

Trying to ignore the lump that thudded into the pit of her stomach, Libby answered as calmly as she could. “We won’t lock you out. Just come on in the gate and around to the Treehouse.”

He stared at her for a moment, his grin gradually changing back from evil to almost human, before he jumped on his bicycle and tore off through the rain, splashing water all over several pedestrians and almost running over a passing dachshund. Libby and Wendy stared at each other, shaking their heads.

Alex and Tierney appeared a minute later, and they all started off together. It was a spring-storm day, not terribly
cold but extremely windy, and they arrived at the McCall House wet and windblown and chilly. Once inside the fence, Libby immediately headed toward the Treehouse path, but the others hung back, staring up from under their umbrellas at the rainswept stone walls. She knew what they were thinking. It was McCall House weather, the kind of wild, gray day that turned the house into the setting for some ancient tale of mystery, a dark castle looming against a cloudy sky.

“Come on. Let’s go,” she was urging them, when Gillian appeared in the doorway. Elliott, it seemed, had come home early and was in the kitchen baking gingerbread. Libby tried to say they didn’t have time, but no one listened, and a few minutes later the four of them were sitting around the kitchen table drinking hot chocolate and eating huge slabs of fresh gingerbread, while Elliott asked questions about the FFW and everyone’s work-in-progress.

It was the first time that any of them had met Elliott, and Libby hadn’t really been sorry they’d missed him. Even though he was such a great person, she’d been sure that they’d think he was just one more weird difference, another thing that didn’t fit into the usual pattern and therefore one more thing to poke fun at. But now, watching them telling Elliott—through mouthfuls of gingerbread—about the stories they were working on, she began to relax. She could tell they liked him.

And watching Elliott talking—to Tierney now—his gray eyes under the exclamation-mark eyebrows, level and intent, she wondered what she’d been worried about.

Elliott was in the pantry putting away the remaining
gingerbread, and Gillian had gone back up to her studio, when the phone rang, and went on ringing.

Libby hated to let phones ring unanswered. Christopher said her mad dashes to the telephone were because she was afraid of missing a call from her fairy godmother, but of course that wasn’t really the reason. Perhaps it was a matter of not wanting to miss something, however—not wanting to miss knowing who was calling and why and what kind of news they might have. Which, of course, was all just a part of her writer’s curiosity. But this time, sitting there at the kitchen table with the rest of the FFW, she forced herself to wait—for someone else to answer it.

Of course Christopher often ignored telephones, and in her studio with the music playing, Gillian might not hear it. But it wasn’t until Elliott stuck his head out of the pantry and asked Libby to get the phone that she remembered that Cordelia was away, visiting in San Francisco. As she leaped to her feet and dashed out of the room, Libby heard people laughing and Tierney yelling, “Go for it, Mighty Mouse,” but she kept going and picked up the phone on what must have been the ninth or tenth ring.

At first no one answered her breathless “Hello, McCall residence,” but then a whispering voice said something she couldn’t quite catch.

“What?” she said. “Could you speak louder? I can’t hear you.”

There was a pause, and then the voice came again, still whispering, but this time loud enough for her to hear. “It’s me. G.G. I just wanted to tell you I won’t be there. I can’t get away. I mean, I—”

Then suddenly there was the sound of yelling—a deep
voice shouting something about the telephone, and someone, perhaps G.G., shouting, “No. Don’t. I wasn’t calling them. I wasn’t—no. Don’t. Please!”

There were other sounds then, thuds and crashes and a deafening clatter as if the phone had crashed to the floor. And then the line went dead.

   18

“Hello! Hello! G.G. What happened, G.G.?” Libby almost shouted, but there was no answer. At last she slowly put the phone back in its cradle—and stood staring at it, willing G.G. to call back and explain everything. But the phone remained silent and after a while she gave up on waiting for it to ring and began to search for possible explanations of what she had heard. But the search was hampered by a kind of resistance that made her mind keep skidding away from some of the possibilities.

At last she shook her head hard and said, “No. It was probably just that his dad was yelling about something and he dropped the phone. That’s all it was.” Nodding briskly—as if she were sure she had arrived at the right answer—she started back toward the kitchen. But partway through the Great Hall she began to hear an echo, an echo of shouting, and of G.G.’s pleading voice, and by the time she reached the kitchen, the words “No. Don’t. Please” were throbbing through her mind like electrical pulses.

Alex and Tierney and Wendy were still sitting at the
table, but as Libby entered the room they turned to look at her and immediately stopped talking and laughing. “What is it?” Tierney said. “What’s the matter?”

“I’m not sure,” Libby said in a quavering voice. “It was G.G. I think something’s happened to G.G. Where’s Elliott? I think I’d better tell Elliott.”

“He left,” Alex said. “Just a minute ago. He told us to tell you he’d forgotten something he had to do at the store. He’d said he’d be back in an hour or so.”

“Oh, no!” Libby said, and without waiting to explain, she dashed out of the room, through the service porch, and out into the drive—just in time to see Elliott’s Toyota disappearing down Westwind.

Back again in the kitchen, she suddenly felt angry—angry at Elliott for running off without telling her and at all of them, sitting there at the table as if it wasn’t their problem and they didn’t intend to do anything about it.

So she told them exactly what she’d heard, how G.G. had whispered that he couldn’t come and then how he had screamed, “No. Don’t. Please,” before the noises started and the phone went dead. “We’ve got to go,” she said then. “We have to go help him.”

She started out to the hallway and they followed, but when she started putting on her raincoat, they all just stood there staring at her as if they couldn’t decide what to do.

“Aren’t you going to tell your grandmother?” Wendy asked.

Libby nodded and started for the stairs, but then she came back. “I don’t think I will. There’s no other car, so she couldn’t take us, and if she decides to go with us, it will take forever. It would take her ages to get ready. And she
won’t miss us. If she comes back downstairs, she’ll just think we’re in the Treehouse.”

“Okay,” Alex said, “but don’t you think we ought to call someone first?” Alex said finally, “Like maybe the police.”

Tierney shook her head. “I don’t think we should call the police. I mean, what if nothing really bad was happening? Nothing bad enough to call the police about, anyway. I’ll bet if we call the police, we’ll just get G.G. in more trouble, and ourselves too.”

It was Wendy who finally asked if anyone knew where G.G. lived, and when Alex said he did, she nodded and picked up her coat. “Well, come on, then,” she said. “Let’s get going.” That settled it. No one argued anymore, as if having someone as proper and respectable as Wendy suggest it made it a safe and reasonable thing to do. Without any more discussion they all got into their coats and slickers and started out the door.

The rain had stopped for the time being, but the sky was still dark, and the wind was howling through Morrison, tossing treetops and sailing bits of debris on invisible currents. Pushing against the wind on their way to the bus stop, no one even tried to talk, and in the packed rush-hour bus, there was no opportunity. And when, squeezed in between two very tall adults, Libby tried to discuss it with herself, her interior dialogue got nowhere. Or at least not to any useful decisions or conclusions. Questions about what they might find when they got to G.G.’s and what they might do about it got only the same useless answer: “We just have to see if he’s all right.” The same words were still
spinning pointlessly through her head when she heard Alex calling to her, “Next stop. Get off at the next stop.”

It was an old Morrison neighborhood, with large, well-built houses, many of them in an imitation Spanish-hacienda style. The one Alex led them to had thickly stuccoed walls, a red tiled roof, and wrought-iron bars over the windows. The yard had once been carefully landscaped with clusters of cactus plants, stone benches beside graveled paths, and in the center of a large circle of lawn, an enormous terra cotta fountain. But the lawn was ragged and weed-grown, and the house looked weather-stained and neglected, with the windows draped or shuttered against the light.