Spiderweb for Two - A Melendy Maze (12 page)

“Whassa matter?”

“Listen, I know where the clue is! I had to let you know right away, too, of course, because that's only fair. You know Father's statue of the Chinese goddess Kwan Yin? The one that's in his study, always, by the typewriter?
She's
got the clue, Oliver! She's the Chinese goddess of mercy, and that's what compassion means; it means pity or mercy! Peace is the jewel and
compassion
is the wand I hold. See? Do you get it? And it says she's old, too, and the Kwan Yin is: Father says she was made in the Ming dynasty, and that was hundreds of years ago. Are you listening?”

“Uh-huh,” said Oliver.

“Well, why aren't you excited? Come on, get up! We'll go down to the study now and find the clue. Hurry.”

“I'm coming,” said Oliver, and with that he lay down again abruptly, sound asleep.

“Oh, dear; oh, all right,” sighed Randy. She had done her best, but temptation was strong; she knew she could never wait until the morning, and that she must go investigating by herself.

Stepping carefully over Isaac she started down the stairs. Heavens, how they creaked. Some positively groaned. Deep in the house—no doubt in the kitchen—John Doe heard the stealthy progress and barked his special nighttime bark: stern and gruff, an imitation of a mastiff's.

“Shut up, John Doe,” hissed Randy, and he stopped.

It was terribly dark in the hall, black, but she did not dare snap the lights on. Moonlight faintly illuminated the living room, but not enough; it looked strange. The furniture seemed so unfriendly. She was glad to get to the door of Father's study and threw it open eagerly. Moonlight filled the little room; Father would allow no shades or curtains at the window. It was so much his room—it smelled, still, of his pipe tobacco—that Randy felt a wave of homesickness for him.

There stood the desk at which he spent so many hours, and on it the blunt typewriter buttoned into its raincoat. There was the rack of pipes, and the row of reference books, but where was the little statue that belonged beside them: the bland, graceful goddess who seemed always to be wafting forward from her cloudy pedestal? She was not there.…

Randy turned on the light and looked everywhere, under the desk and behind the furniture, but Kwan Yin who, as long as she could remember, had stood there on the desk was nowhere to be found. Had she been stolen? Or risen from her cloud and flown away? At that hour, in the silent house, it was easy to be superstitious.

Deeply disappointed, Randy turned out the light and plunged recklessly into the dark living room. There was nothing for it but to go back to boring bed and boring sleep with the clue and its guardian still at large. Randy's eyes were blinded from the lighted room she had just left, but she stepped swiftly, her hands out in front of her, sure that she knew the way. What she did not know was that Willy Sloper who for weeks had been touching up the woodwork in the house had, that very afternoon while she was sleeping, arrived at the pantry and painted all the shelves, first being careful to stack the Melendy glass and china on a table in the hall just beyond the pantry door. “Be outa the way there,” he'd told Cuffy. “The kids don't use that door much, and if I left this stuff stacked in the kitchen, they'd walk into it sure.”

Randy walked into it now. Swerving uncertainly in the blackness, she struck it hard, instantly releasing such a shattering pandemonium as never had been heard before even in that lively house. Dishes dashed to the floor and broke; teacups bowled across the rug, coming to smash against the baseboards; the dogs barked madly. Speechless with shock Randy stood where she was among the ruins, watching the upstairs hall light blare on and Cuffy come running down the stairs with her grey pigtail flying and an andiron brandished in one hand. Seeing Randy she stopped abruptly in mid-descent.

“You!” she cried. “Just you? I thought it was a thief or a whole lot of thieves! What in the
world
are you doing? Oh, heavenly day, look at the Spode teacups! Look at the Worcester platter! Oh, my soul and body! What—
how
—did you do it?”

“Just whanged into it in the dark,” said Randy sadly. “Just didn't know it was there. Nobody told me.”

“And so what were you doing down here in the dark with a cold at this time of night in the winter practically when you're supposed to be in bed and sound asleep without telling me?” demanded Cuffy incoherently and indignantly. “Walking in your sleep, were you? You never did before.”

Randy was tempted to let Cuffy believe this was the case. It would have made everything so much simpler; but she had never really lied to Cuffy and could not do it now.

“I came downstairs to look at Father's Kwan Yin statue. She's not there, though. Oh, Cuffy, I feel so awful about the dishes and cups, and I loved that platter, too. I'll only keep ten cents out of my allowance every week and you can buy some new ones.” Randy was half in tears.

“Precious few Spode teacups your allowance would buy. It'd take all your allowances from now till your wedding day—why, child, your laryngitis is gone. You talked real normal just now! That's something anyways.”

“Scared right out of me,” said Randy.

“More likely the dosing I've been giving you. Now run and get the broom and pan; no use crying over what's been done.”

They clinked and rattled among the rubble for a long time. “Well, anyways you missed the Wedgwood teapot,” said Cuffy, with some satisfaction.

“And every single Woolworth plate,” added Randy bitterly.

“Never mind. It's done with, it's over. But why in time were you down here looking at a piece of statuary, and
what
did you say about its not being there? Why, I'm certain—I'm
sure
I saw it there last week—”

“'Tisn't there now,” said Randy.

“Funny. Well, I'll find it tomorrow. Come to bed now, it's late. I'll bring you some warm milk.”

But on the next day the Kwan Yin still was missing. “I just can't understand it,” Cuffy kept saying. She was a fine housekeeper—or as fine a one as it is possible to be in a household beset by children and dogs—and it worried her terribly not to be able to find the figure or remember when she had seen it last. “Mr. Melendy thinks the world of that piece of statuary,” she said.

Oliver slept late and no one woke him as it was Sunday. He came down at nine fifteen, hungry as a wolf, and indulged in a waffle orgy. Randy sat beside him to keep him company, though she herself was waffle-logged by that time.

“I just can't understand it,” muttered Cuffy, wandering through the room in an aimless fashion quite unlike her. “I just can't understand it.”

“What's she talking about?” inquired Oliver foggily through waffle.

“Sh-h. I haven't had a chance to tell you. I didn't get it; the statue's gone.”

“What statue?”

“The Kwan Yin, silly. It's just vanished.”

Oliver chewed steadily. “I know where it is.”

“You know—you mean you
knew
last night that it wasn't in the study?”

“Why, sure. I knew it wasn't two days ago.”

“And you didn't tell me so?
Honestly,
Oliver!”

“Why should I tell you? You never asked me.”

“Don't you remember me coming into your room last night and telling you I knew where to find the next clue?”

“Course I don't.”

“I
thought
you acted awfully dumb. You weren't even awake, for heaven's sake! Well, where
is
it?”

“I don't think I ought to tell you,” said Oliver exasperatingly. “I sort of said I wouldn't.”

“Oliver Melendy! Are you
still
asleep? The clue is somewhere about the Kwan Yin, and we have to find it. I told you so last night, but you weren't even awake! You've got syrup on your forehead.”

“Yipes, what are we waiting for!” cried Oliver, leaping up as though stung by a bee. “We'll do the dishes later,” he shouted to Cuffy and made for the door.

Randy followed him, jog-trotting along the drive.

“Where are we going, though?”

“Wait and see.”

She was surprised when he led her to the stable. They went in, spoke cordially but absently to Lorna Doone, their brown horse, and climbed up the narrow stairway beyond the stalls.

“What can this have to do with Willy?” wondered Randy, for Willy Sloper lived very cozily in the little apartment above the stable, surrounded by pieces of machinery under repair, seed catalogues, poultry journals and detective stories, and seemed worlds away from any thought of Chinese goddesses. His radio, tuned up good and loud, the way he liked it, made his front door quiver in its frame.

“Harriet—I hardly know how to tell you—Gerald has been arrested,” roared a mighty female voice within the radio.

“Oh, Myrtle, Myrtle!” cried an answering giantess in tones of horror. “I KNOW he's innocent!” Her ensuing gasps and sobs shook the whole stable, sounding exactly, thought Randy, like feeding time at the hippopotamus tank.

Oliver was interested. “What do you suppose Gerald did?” he asked. “Let's just listen and find out.”

“I'm more interested in the clue,” said Randy firmly, and knocked on Willy's door. The giantess was cut short in the midst of her titanic grief and Willy opened the door.

“Well, hello there! Come on in, come in!”

His living room was cozy; warm and cluttered, with a pot-bellied stove crackling busily and a coffeepot always on top of it. John Doe was gnawing a bone on the floor, and on the table, smiling remotely above the glue and plastic wood and harness, stood the little figure of Kwan Yin.

“I had to let her know you had that, Willy,” said Oliver, pointing. “I just
had
to. I didn't tell her why, though,” he added virtuously.

“Why, that's okay, Oliver,” Willy said. “I'd'a told her myself. It was only Cuffy I was kinda, as you might say, avoiding. Wasn't nothing to it, Randy, nothing real bad. Last week, remember, I put a coat of paint on the bookshelves in your Daddy's study. First, of course, I took out all the books and stood 'em up in stacks, some on the desk, some on the floor. Then I got up on m' ladder to paint the real high top shelves first and somehow or other comin' down my heel swung out and caught one o' them stacks on the desk and it collapsed over onto the next one and
that
collapsed over onto this Chinese Canyon or whatever you call her, and doggone if she didn't just lurch off the dang desk and fall down. I felt like I could cry. I know how your Daddy values that Canyon. But when I got to her she wasn't so bad busted as I was afraid; just a little piece chipped off her crown, and the tip of her pinky finger. I thought well I don't hafta worry Cuffy none about this, I'll just spirit her over to my place and patch her together. So that's what I done, and lookin' at her now, honest, would either you kids think she'd ever been broke, even a little bit?”

“Perfect, Willy, she's perfect,” Randy assured him. “And while you were mending her, Willy, did you find anything on her? A little piece of paper, maybe? Blue? With writing on it?”

“What
is
all this about looking for writing on people?” asked Willy, justifiably curious. “Writing on
me,
writing on this Chinese lady; you think we should have information printed on us, or something? Name and age, married or single? Something like that?”

Randy was too worried to be amused.

“No, but Willy,
didn't
you find a piece of blue paper on her? She hasn't got it now, that's sure.”

“With writing on it?” persisted Oliver.

“No, I sure didn't—oh say, now, wait a minute—why, I do remember I saw something. Yes, when I picked her up off the floor, I saw a paper with some handwriting on it. Let's see, though. What did I do with it?”

“Oh, Willy, what did you?” they begged.

“Seems like I—I
know
I didn't throw it away—but I was pretty upset at the time and I—yes,
I
know, I just stuck the note-like or whatever it was into the nearest book.”

“What book?” they cried in unison.

“Golly, kids, doggoned if I can remember. Might have been a brown book, or was it red?
Might
have been green.

“Oh, Willy,
can't
you remember?”

Honestly troubled, he closed his eyes, frowning and striving to recall the book.

“Just can't,” he said at last. “Is it awful important?”

“Well, we think so,” Randy said. “The Secretary of State wouldn't, or the President, but—”

“Don't you feel bad, Willy,” Oliver said.

“We'll find it,” Randy assured him. “We'll just go back and look in all the books.”

“I feel real bad about it,” Willy said. “That was a clumsy day for me. If Cuffy's worried about this here statue, you better tell her I got it. I'll bring it over later and confess all.”

As they went down the narrow steps Willy's radio sprang into life once more. Another troubled giantess voiced her distress.

“Oh, Janice, Janice,
why
did you forge the check?”

*   *   *

The search was begun again that afternoon. It was a weary business: Father's bookshelves lined the wall. Deciding to do the thing thoroughly Randy and Oliver borrowed Willy's ladder; Randy sitting on top of it and examining the books on the two upper shelves, and Oliver sitting two rungs below her working his way along the middle section. Every now and then, when their reaching limit was achieved, they both crawled down the ladder, moved it forward, and crawled up again. Luckily, there was little in the books themselves to delay the search; nothing to glance at and linger over or wish to read aloud from books with such titles as:
An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations,
or
Income Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior.
Almost all the books had names like that, and none of them seemed a fitting sanctuary for anything so frivolous as a rhymed clue on pale blue stationery.