Small Persons With Wings (6 page)

“We'll have to do better than that,” Dad said, all jovial.

“Especially if we know what's good for us. Parvi are uppity. Although if there's only one there's not much she can do to us.”

Do to us?
I didn't want to know.

Mom got out the chicken pie, and Dad put half a teaspoon of it on a doll-sized plate he found in the cupboard. He grabbed one of the half-inch-tall bottles that were up there too.

“I wondered what those were for,” I said.

“Oh, I knew exactly what they were for,” Mom said. “I didn't think we'd need them so soon.”

Dad mixed sugar and water in a salad dressing cruet and dripped a few drops into the tiny bottle. “It ain't nectar, but it's close enough. Better for her than bourbon, anyway.” He shook his head. “Ogier. Sheesh.”

When he came back up from the pub, he was grinning the way he does when my mom tells him off with extra dang-its. “We've got a tartar this time. Called me a warm dolt.”

I sank into my chair, exhausted. I wasn't even sure I could eat. “Are you going to tell me about the curse?”

“Legacy,” Dad said. “Lineage.”

The tale he told me then was like nothing I'd ever expected to come out of my dad's mouth.

Apparently we're descended from this guy Archbishop Turpin, one of the Twelve Peers of Charlemagne, the King of the Franks. “Franks” is what the French were called before they were French. The peers were Charlemagne's favorite knights.

“I don't know that much detail,” Dad said, shoveling chicken pie into his mouth and talking anyway, which Mom wouldn't let me do in a million years. “Ogier and my mother never told me anything. But we had Parvi when I was a kid, and I picked up some stuff. A long time ago, 775 to be exact, Archbishop Turpin met a bunch of little people calling themselves the Parvi Pennati.”

“Elbows off the table, Mellie,” Mom said. “Parvi, by the way, is a diminutive—that's a shortened, sort of affectionate version of a longer name, in this case
parvi homines
, meaning ‘small persons.'
Pennati
, of course, means ‘with wings.' ”

“Right.” Dad swallowed his mouthful. “Anyway, Parvi like to live underground, but they'd been rousted out of their home by . . . I think it was a mole or something, I don't remember. So the Parvi offered Turpin a small moonstone—that's a kind of gem—in exchange for sanctuary. The moonstone enables you to see the truth, so nobody can lie to you. You can drink an elixir made out of it, and that does the same thing.”

“Making the Turpin family the scourge of used car salesmen everywhere,” Mom said.

Dad ignored her. “Anyway, Turpin took the stone, had it set in a ring so he could wear it. He pledged himself and his descendants to provide a home to the Parvi, individually or as a group, any time they needed one. The pledge is called the Obligatio Turpinorum, the Duty of the Turpins.”

I couldn't believe this. We had a thousand-year-old pact with a bunch of fairies. We believed in magic moonstones. And my dad was sitting there eating chicken pie and saying “I guess” and “probably” as if nothing was all that critical.

“Uh, Dad, where is this moonstone?” (He shrugged. Great.) “Did you ever see it? What does it look like?” (Another shrug.) “And why couldn't the Parvi make themselves another hole and move into that? I mean, they're fairies, right? They can do magic, right?”

“Don't call them fairies.” Mom sounded furtive. “They hate that.” She fingered her earlobe, wincing, and saw me notice. “It's nothing, sweetie. A touch of frostbite.”

I had a flash of memory: Fidius, hands curled into claws.
“Fairies! Figments!”

“You ask good questions, Mel,” Dad said. “All I know is that we have to take them in when they ask. I've gathered over the years that their magic is all about making things look good, and it fades if they're away from home for too long. That's why our little lady is so messy. Parvi like to live well, but they can't fend for themselves at all.”

He swallowed three rapid bites of chicken pie. “Last I knew, Ogier did have the moonstone, being the official head of the family. There's supposed to be a parent-child chat sometime before the head of the family dies, telling the new owners the full history of the Obligatio and where to find the moonstone if they need it. As you know, Grand-père and I didn't spend a lot of time together in recent years.”

“You let that happen?” I said. “You knew we could be infested with fairies . . . I mean, Small Persons with Wings, and you let Grand-père die all by himself in this pigsty without explaining anything?” I threw down my fork and burst into tears.

“Bed,” Mom said. “Tomorrow's another day.” She was in Model Mom mode, which drives you up a wall but you can't argue with it.

I'm not saying she was wrong. I did go to bed, in a sleeping bag on an air mattress because the moldy bed in my new room had been chucked out in the backyard. But first I took my little china guy out of my backpack and set him on the windowsill. I fell asleep looking at him silhouetted against the light from the street, wondering where Fidius was now and if he'd ever forgiven me for wanting to take him to kindergarten with me.

In spite of everything I slept right through the night. And when I woke up in the morning it was, in fact, another day. I went down to the kitchen, where my parents were eating cereal.

“So these fairies . . . I mean, Parvi . . . how long do they stay usually?” I asked, getting myself a bowl. Fidius had been with us four years, I figured.

Dad shrugged. Didn't he know anything? “However long they need to, I guess. When they're by themselves it means they've left the Domus, and not for a happy reason.”

“Domus?” I said.

“Latin for ‘home
.
' Five hundred or more Small Persons with Wings, living together under the ground somewhere near the Turpins. There'll be one right here in the neighborhood.”

He said this in his “Fascinating Facts from the World of Nature” voice. As if we were discussing penguins in Antarctica instead of an alternate universe in the cellar.

“So are we going to look for the moonstone?” I asked. “Any idea what it looks like?”

Guess what. He shrugged.

I WAS GETTING DURINDANA'S BREAKFAST READY when somebody rapped on the downstairs door and started up the stairs before we'd even thought about inviting them up. I hid the tiny sugar water bottle and bowl of cereal in the cupboard.

Mom tightened the belt on her bathrobe. “Guess we have to lock that door,” she muttered.

Dad stepped into the reception area. “Hello?”

“Who's that?” said a deep voice.

“Who's asking?” Dad sounded pleasant and jokey, but his voice had an edge.

The footsteps kept coming up the stairs. “Where's Mr. Turpin?”

“I'm Mr. Turpin. I ask again, who are you?”

“You must be the son.” A tall, square guy in a police uniform pushed past Dad into the kitchen. He had a belly like rolling foothills, but he looked so big and strong Mom and I instinctively backed up. Dad got between us and the guy, but he still made me nervous.

I circled around him, intending to hover in the doorway to the reception area in case I needed to phone for help. I almost bumped into someone already there—the boy from the day before. Close up, he was so coated with freckles that he looked even scrawnier, and he had these weird bluish gray eyes with a thick black rim around the iris. He had one foot on the threshold, one on the floor behind him, as if he too wanted a head start to book it out of there.

“Perhaps I'm not being clear,” Dad said to the policeman. “Who are you?” The boy turned so red his freckles disappeared, and he gave me this sad half grin.
He's pathetic
. I felt braver.

The big man stuck out his hand for Dad to shake but didn't smile or anything. “Wright, Burgess Wright. Police chief. Live next door. My boy here saw you arrive yesterday. We were curious what was going on.”

Dad shook the hand but didn't smile either. “Can we help you with something?”

“Guess we shouldn't have barged up like this,” Chief Wright said.

Dad smiled in a polite way that meant he agreed. His chin was jutting out.

“Sit down for some coffee, Chief Wright.” Mom isn't usually the family diplomat, but Chief Wright was awfully big. She smiled at the freckled kid. “And can I get you something?”

The kid opened his mouth, but his dad spoke first. “My boy, Timothy Oliver. Timmo, we call him, except I call him Spaceshot. He doesn't need anything.” The kid sketched me a
Parents, what can you do?
shrug.

“I'd take a cup of coffee, if you've got it made.” Chief Wright didn't sit down; he thrust his head forward like a turtle and peered at Dad. “Your name's Roland, right?”

“Roly. This is my wife, Nick. Our daughter, Mellie.”

“You two must be the same age.” Chief Wright looked at me, jerked his head at his son.

“I'm going into the eighth grade,” Timmo said to me while Mom bustled around getting Chief Wright's coffee, and Dad stood there with his chin out.

“Me too.”
With any luck, we'll be in different classes.

“Cool. We got Mrs. Anderson next year.”

“She's nice,” Timmo said. “She's really fat.”

My face got hot. I fought an urge to stretch my T-shirt down over my hips. “What's that supposed to mean?”

He shrugged. “She must weigh two hundred and fifty pounds.”

“Yeah? So?”

The weird eyes widened as he sized up my mom and me and realized what he'd said. “Sorry. I mean, your mom's not fat. You either. Okay, you're not skinny. But, geez, you're not—”

“My mother has grandeur,” I said. “And I . . .”
I what? Aced Science Fair?

“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, sure.”

“Just because we're not emaciated—”

“Yeah, I said yeah. Sure.”

We watched Mom try to persuade Chief Wright to sit down. He wouldn't, just stood in the middle of the floor taking up too much room. Mom was not actually looking all that grand at the moment. Her hair was dirty and she had a gimongo bleach stain on her bathrobe.

Timmo leaned in and whispered, “The heavier you are, the better it is for your bones.”

I had nothing to say to this kid.

“Really,” he whispered. “Astronauts lose bone calcium being weightless in space. The more weight your bones carry, the better.”

“Spaceshot,” Timmo's dad said. “Can it, will ya? I can't hear myself think.”

I pushed off from the doorjamb and edged around Chief Wright to stand next to Mom.

Chief Wright sipped his coffee and smacked his lips. “Nice for Mr. Turpin to have some visitors. Where is he, by the way?”

We all stared at him.

“Well,” Mom said, then changed her mind.

“Huh,” Dad said.

“He's dead,” I said.

Chief Wright froze, coffee to lips, then lowered his mug with extreme care. “Dead? When did that happen?”

“In April,” Dad said. “Two months ago. April twentieth.”

Chief Wright glanced at his son. “I thought you said there were lights on out back.” He gave Dad a
Kids, what can you do?
look. “Timmo's room has a bay window in back and he sits in it with his telescope, stargazing like a spaceshot.”

That's
what Timmo's eyes reminded me of—in the Hubble Telescope book at school, a blue-gray swirling galaxy with a black rim.
Spaceshot
, I thought.

“And there was that lady, Dad,” Timmo said. “I told you about the weird lady.” His dad gave a rhinoceros sigh, so Timmo addressed himself to my dad. “I saw this blond lady and some guy come out and the door locked behind them and she started whamming on it, all ticked off. She had these high, high heels and she almost fell off the doorstep. And then she . . .” He glanced at his father's face and shut up.

“Nobody I've ever seen around,” Chief Wright said to Dad. “Never heard of this blond lady except from Spaceshot here.” Timmo got interested in his sneakers.

“But . . . who could she be?” I asked. Timmo looked up.
I'm not on your side, kid. I'm only curious.

“I said, I've never seen anyone like that around. Before or since.” Chief Wright squinted into his coffee like Benny trying to fart. We waited for him to say how sorry he was that Grand-père was dead. “How did Mr. Turpin die?” he asked instead.

“Heart attack,” Dad said.

“Awful quiet heart attack. Something like that happens in a town this size, people usually hear about it. Nobody called an ambulance?”

“I guess not. He probably was alone.”

“That's an unattended death. You're supposed to call in the coroner for an unattended death, do an autopsy.”

“Sorry,” Dad said, although he clearly wasn't. “We didn't know.”

“You seem to have heard about it quick enough. Who told you?”

“His lawyer called.”

“Who's the lawyer?”

Dad went pinkish around the neck and jowls. “I beg your pardon, but this is your business . . . how?”

“Somebody dies mysteriously, it becomes my business. Nobody called an ambulance, nobody knows who found the body, nobody saw it leave the house. Pretty suspicious, wouldn't you say?”