Spiderweb for Two - A Melendy Maze (3 page)

“I can't keep my mind on anything, can you?” said Randy, as they trudged up the two flights of stairs. “All I can do is hate the weather.”

“It just better clear up quick,” said Oliver threateningly. “The week's about over.”

They killed what was left of the afternoon by playing a game of Parcheesi which never reached an end; they were each playing with two sets of men, and as the game was constantly interrupted by trips to the window to look at the weather (which showed them nothing but bad news), they never could be sure whose turn it was to play and spent a great deal of the afternoon in argument.

Several times during the night Randy got out of bed to look out the window: the sky was ominously dark without a spark of stars; but when she woke up, she knew, even before her eyes were open, that the morning was fair.

She and Oliver were not at their best in school that day: every time a cloud darkened the classroom Randy forgot the answer to any question she was asked, and Oliver misspelled his own name twice.

But at last school was over. Willy Sloper called for them in the old station wagon Mrs. Oliphant had given them long ago, which was always elegantly called the Motor—and the sun stayed out.

“Randy,” said Oliver suddenly, shouting above the spasmodic burst of the exhaust and the merry clatter of loose windows, “Randy! What if it isn't the spruce tree after all?”

Randy looked at him fiercely. “Of course it is. It has to be!” she said; but apparently she was not so certain as she sounded, for in a minute she added, “What if it's not a tree at all? Maybe it's the steeple of a church.”

They were so quiet after that that Willy turned to look at them.

“You kids okay?” he asked.

“Well, yes and no,” said Randy.

“We've got worries,” Oliver explained.

“Anything I could do to help?”

“We're sworn to secrecy,” Randy said darkly. “Or we'd have asked you to help us days ago.”

They continued in silence (except, of course, for the wild coughing pandemonium of the Motor) and when they got home, they had the greatest trouble evading Cuffy, who seemed to have a lot of ideas about things she thought they ought to do, and wished to know, pressingly, why they needed to take two of her big cooking spoons out of the kitchen.

“Oh, just for something,” said Oliver airily. “Just for something we have to do.”

“We'll bring them right back, Cuffy dear,” said Randy, smiling brilliantly; then they danced out of the kitchen, ran out of doors, doubled back around the house and crept up on the spruce trees.

Just in time, too. The hour was exactly four; and they saw at once that the shadows of the two trees lay long and pointed, in peaks; one just a little longer than the other.

As they began to dig up the grass and earth, Oliver had another gloomy thought. “Maybe spoons won't be the thing to dig with,” he said. “It might be buried deep: six feet deep, or nine, or ten. Maybe we need a spade.”

“Maybe we need a steam shovel,” said Randy. “Oliver, you're a pessimist.”

They went on digging: struck something, shrieked with excitement, found that it was a stone, went on digging. Randy's spoon struck something else.

“It's it! It's it!” she screamed joyfully, and she and Oliver together uncovered a small tin box, somewhat rusted.

“Wouldn't call it gold,” said Oliver; but when they opened it they found, wrapped in a piece of paper, a walnut made of golden metal, and this also was a little box. Inside it was a folded piece of paper—the same blue paper on which the first clue had been written.

Her fingers clumsy with excitement, Randy smoothed out the paper on her knee and read aloud the message it contained:

“Call and I will be close to you,

    
As I am close to that kind heart

    
Which loves you well, though knowing not the part

It plays in bringing you the second clue.”

Oliver and Randy looked at each other.

“Call what?” said Oliver.

“Call who?” said Randy. “You can't just
call.
”

“Well, let's see.… It says something about a kind heart that loves us well.”

“Of course that's Cuffy,” said Randy.

“But it could be Father, you know. Or maybe it could be Willy.”

“I don't think they mean Father,” Randy said. “Because it says call and I'll be close to you, and Father's about fifteen hundred miles away in Minneapolis, so it doesn't make any sense.”

“I don't know, though. He could fly. If we called him by telephone and said we needed him, I mean. Then he'd be close to us.”

“I don't think they'd advise anything so expensive, do you? Jeepers, I hope they wouldn't. We'd better try the kind hearts around here first.”

CHAPTER II

A Loving Heart

Call and I will be close to you,

    
As I am close to that kind heart

    
Which loves you well, though knowing not the part

It plays in bringing you the second clue.

Cuffy had snatched a few moments for herself. She was sitting in the kitchen rocker reading an article on water-color painting. She did not know why she was reading it, she had never painted a water color in her life and had no wish to do so, either, but she found it soothing to read about, for some reason. Too soothing, finally. The rocking chair chirped and thudded, chirped and thudded, slowly and more slowly, until at last it stopped. Cuffy's head rested against the back of her chair, her mouth fell open, and gentle sounds of sleep issued from it to mingle with the other peaceful sounds made by the marching clock, and the occasional thumping of John Doe's hind leg as he scratched away at his own personal fleas. (Isaac, of course, was upstairs in Rush's armchair, scratching away at his.)

Cuffy did not hear Randy and Oliver as they tiptoed in and stood before her.

“She looks nice, doesn't she?” whispered Randy. “Peaceful and nice. I hardly ever saw Cuffy asleep in my whole life before.”

“She's a beautiful woman,” said Oliver seriously. He meant it, too. For though Cuffy was elderly and stout and wore bifocal glasses and false teeth, there was that in the way she was and the way she spoke that caused him to think of her as beautiful.

“Where could it be, do you think? In her pocket?” said Randy. “She always has a lot of things in her pockets.”

“She doesn't know she's got it, remember,” whispered Oliver.

They stood staring at her speculatively. John Doe got up reluctantly from under the kitchen table and came over to them slowly, pretending to be a very old tired dog, and sniffed at their shoes. It was a wasted effort; the shoes carried just the usual outdoor smells: grass, leaves, earth, nothing new. He went back to his place and lay down, letting his bones thump with boredom. The clock trudged on.

“Should we wake her up?” whispered Oliver.

“No, let her sleep. We'll come back later.”

But at that moment the big, glossy magazine slid the last of the way down Cuffy's sloping lap and crashed onto the floor. Cuffy's mouth closed with a snap, her eyes flew open, and she found herself confronted by two staring children.

“Well, what's the matter?” demanded Cuffy uneasily, sitting up. “Did I talk in my sleep, or what?”

“No, we were just watching you,” said Oliver.

Nobody likes to be watched while he sleeps, it seems an invasion of his privacy. Cuffy did not care for it any more than the next one.

“Well, if a person can't just drop off without drawing a crowd, it's too bad,” she remarked, in some annoyance.

“We thought you looked nice. Oliver said you looked beautiful,” Randy told her. Cuffy scoffed at that, but it made her feel better all the same, and she was rather pleased, too, when Oliver, big boy though he was, climbed into her lap. The chair resumed its rocking, and Cuffy began to sing:

“Mr. Froggy he did ride, and a-hum

    
Mr. Froggy he did ride,

    
Sword and pistol by his side,

And a-hum and a-hum and a-hum.

He rode till he came to a big white hall …

“Remember when I used to sing you that?” asked Cuffy tenderly. “Every night while you was teething; you wouldn't stand for any other song only just that one, and—here! Oliver. What are you looking for in my pockets?”

“I'm frisking you, Cuff,” said Oliver gleefully, and opened his hand to show what he had found: two elastic bands, a little nest of string, a wad of name tapes saying Rush Melendy, and a soda mint tablet.

“Well, of all the—Randy! What in the world! You too?”

Randy, having frisked the other pocket, displayed a handkerchief, a couple of hairpins, a leaf of rose geranium, and a folded paper. She opened it eagerly.

“Hooray! There's writing on it!”

“Read it! Read it!” yelled Oliver.

“Tell Willy fix pipe Mr. M's bath,” read Randy. “Tell tack upstairs carpet
down.
Oliver Milk of Mag? 1 doz. oranges. 10 lbs. pots. Clorox. Fleasoap. Write Coral.”

“Maybe there's something
to
it,” suggested Oliver guardedly. “A riddle kind of hidden away. Code, or something.”

“If you ask me it's you two who're talking in riddles,” said Cuffy indignantly. “And it's downright rude to rifle folk's pockets and read their private lists like that. Downright rude.”

“Aw, we're sorry, Cuff,” said Oliver. “We had to do it. It's like a—like an order, sort of, only we can't explain.”

“We're just looking for something,” Randy said.

“Looking for
what,
in heaven's name?”

“We don't even know.”

“Don't
know?
Don't know what you're
looking
for?”

“That's all we can tell you, Cuffy,” said Randy. “We're sworn to secrecy.”

“The amount of mystery you young ones can cook up, the amount of secrets—” said Cuffy. “All you children seem to thrive on secrets; seem to need 'em like you need vitamins in the diet. All right, if you can't tell me what you're after, there's no way I can help you, is there now? So get off my lap, Oliver. I've got things to do.”

“No, wait a minute, Cuffy,” said Oliver. “This pin you always wear—I never saw you
not
wear it—was it a locket once, by any chance? Does it open?”

Cuffy looked down at the old cameo brooch at the neck of her dress. It was set in a frame of gold and carved on it was the profile of a Greek lady wearing grapes in her hair and a dove on her shoulder. The Melendy children knew the brooch by heart, knew every grape and every tendril, every feather on the dove; but no one had ever thought before that it might be a locket.

“It's funny none of you ever asked me that before,” said Cuffy, fumbling at the catch and unfastening the pin. “Because yes, Oliver, it was a locket once; see here's the hinge, and look, it opens still, like this.”

The cameo flew open like a tiny oval door, but instead of a folded slip of blue writing paper the children, disappointed at first, saw the faded photograph of a child: a small, serious face framed in a mass of long curling hair.

“Who is that girl?” demanded Oliver, somewhat indignantly. “You never showed me that before!”

Cuffy smiled teasingly. “Other folks have secrets too, you know.”

“No, but honestly, Cuffy, who is it?” wheedled Randy.

“I'll tell you,” said Cuffy. “Don't know why I never have told anyone; I kind of kept it to myself all this long, long time. Oliver, fetch my mending basket, will you? And Randy if you could find my glasses…”

Randy and Oliver felt surprised, a little put out, that Cuffy had
any
secrets they didn't know about. They had been so certain they knew everything about her: all about her family, the farm she'd been raised on, her school days (even the names of her favorite teachers), the man she would have married if he hadn't been killed, the man she finally did marry and live with happily for thirty years (Eustace W. Cuthbert-Stanley) until his death, and about their house in Massachusetts, and any number of other things.… It came as a shock that all these years the long-nosed cameo lady had been concealing something from them. But they—all the Melendys—had more than their normal share of curiosity; they burned for answers always. Having located and brought both mending basket and spectacles, Oliver lay down on the linoleum beside John Doe, and Randy sat up on the kitchen counter with the coffee canister in her lap. From time to time she opened it and drew in its fragrance with long, loud pleasurable sniffs.

“Okay, go on, tell,” commanded Oliver.

“Just wait, now, wai—t, till I get my needle threaded.… The blame eye keeps jumping away from me. There now, caughtcha!” Cuffy drew the long thread through, located a burst heel in one of Oliver's socks and began her story.