Spiderweb for Two - A Melendy Maze (5 page)

Randy took a deep sniff from the coffee canister which she had forgotten about during the story.

“What I can't see is why you never told us this before,” said Oliver.

“Modesty, I bet, that's why,” said Randy. “Because she saved that boy's life. Isn't that why, Cuffy?”

“Oh, I don't know. Just never thought of it I guess.”

“Certainly not. It was modesty,” said Randy, convinced. “Some people are that way; if it was me I'd boast. But you still haven't explained that pin.”

“Or about the guy's curls,” said Oliver. “Did you get them cut for him?”

“Course I did,” said Cuffy. “Nothing to it. A day or two later I took him berrying with me; and it just so happened that I knew of a good burdock patch, and I collected a fine bunch of burrs and did a job of hairdressing on Francis, paying special attention to the bangs. ‘Now, France,' I says (because that's what we'd took to calling him), ‘don't you tell no lies, but just try not to say exactly
how
you got these burrs in your hair.' He handled it pretty good. ‘Why, Mama,' he says, ‘you never
saw
so many burrs, and I just got all messed up in 'em. I had to get down so low under a barbwire fence.' (That was true, too, only the fence wasn't right near the burrs.) ‘I don't know what I'da done if it hadn't been for Evangeline.' (No one called me Cuffy then, naturally.) ‘She's saved my life twice, she has.' Well, I admit that none of that was real lies, but it wasn't the honest truth, either, and it wasn't very honorable of us.” Cuffy looked searchingly at her audience.

“Okay, Cuffy dear,” said Randy. “We understand the moral. But what about the pin?”

“So naturally Francis had to have his hair cut short. I'd done a real thorough burr-matting job; his mama, Mrs. Wellgrove, had tears in her eyes all the time Papa was shearing him. ‘My baby is gone,' she kept moaning. ‘My little prince is gone forever.' I'm sure it was partly that word ‘forever' that made Francis grin the way he did, pleased as Punch. And when the curls was laying on the floor around the chair and Papa finished up the job, there wasn't nothing of the prince about Francis: he was just a redheaded, snub-nosed boy, nine years old and no nonsense about it.… So then the pin. It was a pin of Mrs. Wellgrove's and she thought the world of it, always wore it; but the morning that Papa got us off that island and Francis told her how I'd saved his life (course he exaggerated it a lot) she unpinned it from her collar right then and there, took Mr. Wellgrove's photo out of it, and fastened it onto my dress. ‘Think of us when you wear this,' she says, ‘and how we're always grateful to you.'… She was a real emotional impulsive lady. Mr. Wellgrove, now, he was different. He come up to get his family in September, and he was a big, jolly man with a dark red face, a prosperous brewer. His mustache was yellow, I remember, and he brought presents to us all, wonderful presents: a music box for me, I know, with a bird on top, and a Made-in-Germany doll with gold hair and eyes that closed, and he took me aside and told me how he was real pleased that I'd saved his son's life and all, but just equally pleased about the fate of them curls (Francis must have told him), and Mrs. Wellgrove, she gave me the little photo of her son, and this, too. Look.”

Cuffy pried up the tiny oval glass and then the child's picture beneath; under that, pressed against the gold, was a round ringlet like a coil of fine red copper wire.

“His? Francis Wellgrove's? After all these years?” It looked so young, so living still, as if it had been clipped an hour ago from some child's curly head.

“Yes, his,” said Cuffy. “My sister Marcella, she saw him in Milwaukee ten, eleven years ago and—wouldn't you know it?—he was bald as a doorknob, she told me. Rich and bald, but he'd turned out to be a real nice man, she said.”

“What happened to his sister Ethel, did she get better?” Randy wanted to know.

“Oh, Ethel! Why she grew up and went to Europe and married a real live prince. Eyetalian. I always knew how much that must please her mama who had a high opinion of princes from the way she talked.… Oh, we heard from 'em for years, the whole family, and Francis always sent me birthday presents. He was a nice little boy after his hair got cut and even before it, I realize now. Yes, they were lovely people and that was a lovely, lovely summer.”

Cuffy sighed and yawned. She snapped the brooch shut and put it back, haphazard, where it belonged.

“All right, now,” she said, getting to her feet. “It's late! Good gracious, look how late it is! I'm going to start supper right away, and I need space. Whatever you're looking for don't look for it in
here.
In half an hour, Randy, you can set the table. And someone please let the dogs out.”

Randy and Oliver let themselves out, too, watching the dogs hurtling around the lawn, ears flying.

“It's funny how you can know a person all your life,” said Oliver, “and still there's secrets to find out.”

“It's half nice and half horrid,” agreed Randy. “But I suppose it keeps things interesting. Doesn't it?” she asked a little doubtfully.

“Hmm. I wonder if
Willy's
got any secrets we don't know about,” said Oliver in another tone entirely, and they went off to find him.

Willy Sloper had his own apartment over the stable. Long ago, in New York, he had been the Melendys' furnace man. When they had moved to the country, naturally, they had asked him to come along, for the whole family loved him, and he could do anything: plumbing, carpentry, house-painting, and even—as he had proved since they had lived here—farming, landscaping, animal husbandry, and gardening. He also knew how to cook, whittle, and play the recorder.

They found him in the stable, grooming Lorna Doone, the brown horse. Jess and Damon, the team of work horses had been loaned out indefinitely to Mr. Addison, a farmer friend.

“What'll we do?” whispered Randy. “We can't just go and start searching him, very well.”

“I'll fix it,” said Oliver and went right up to Willy and asked him, politely, of course, to show them everything that was in his pockets.

“We have a reason for this, Willy,” Randy assured him anxiously. “It's not just, you know, frivolity.”

“Cops after me again?” asked Willy good-naturedly, and emptied out his pockets and showed them what he had: a dollar bill and thirty-seven cents; a pair of pliers, a monkey wrench, three pencils, a handkerchief, a cough drop, a small can of machine oil, a comb with five teeth missing, a pack of cards, and a watch. No clue.

“May I please examine the inside of your cap, Willy?” asked Oliver; but that revealed nothing either.

“Have you noticed any writing about your person lately?” inquired Randy. The question sounded very peculiar even as she asked it, and she did not wonder that Willy burst out laughing.

“No, not just lately,” he said. “The only writing about my person that I know of is that tattoo-piece I got on my left arm, and that's been there for thirty years, and all it says is Mabel.”

“No, we know about that one, of course,” said Oliver. “Well, thanks just the same, Willy. Sorry to trouble you.”

He and Randy returned to the house, perplexed and curious.

*   *   *

About two weeks later, when all hope of finding the clue had been abandoned, or at least suspended, Randy decided to give Isaac a bath; the flea situation had reached its usual autumnal pitch, and she had bought a bar of soap that smelled as if it would kill anything. She ran water into the laundry tub, put on her raincoat and rolled up the sleeves, located Isaac cowering under the bottom shelf of the linen closet (he always seemed able to distinguish the sound of water being run for his bath from the sound of water being run for any other purpose) and carried him trembling and faintly growling down to the kitchen. She unfastened his collar and laid it on the drainboard (Cuffy was not there to stop her) and deposited Isaac in the warm water. All the time that she was scrubbing and he was groaning, she was aware of an idea in her mind that she was too busy to examine. She scrubbed and soaped and rinsed, and in his saturated state Isaac was revealed as a much smaller, less important-looking dog than when he was dry and fluffy. (Perhaps that was one of the reasons for his horror of baths.) The air positively pulsed with the odor of strong disinfectant as whole flea communities gave up the ghost and a large lake of spilled water widened on the floor. After the final rinsing Randy lifted her shuddering victim from the tub, wrapped him warmly in an old towel, and murmured words of praise and consolation. Holding him in her lap she started to dry him, and as she did so the idea which had lurked behind her thoughts sprang forward vividly.
Isaac's collar!
There it lay on the drainboard, a loop of worn red leather with its small brass license plate and the dangling metal capsule that contained his name and address. Randy sprang to her feet, the towel fell to the floor and Isaac, released, flew from the kitchen, scattering showers, to dry himself in his own way, on the living-room rug. Randy's fingers trembled as she unscrewed the capsule. Within it, as she had suddenly foreseen, was a tiny roll of blue paper.

“Oliver! Oliver!” she shouted, nobly refusing to read what was written on it until her brother could read it too.

“What do you want?” shouted Oliver from the Office, two flights up. “I'm busy. I'm trying to make gold with my chemical set.”

Since Cuffy was not at home Randy could shout the news at the top of her lungs.

“The clue! The clue! I found it. Hurry!”

Oliver got down the first flight of stairs partly by falling, and down the second by way of the bannister, and was at her side almost before she had stopped shouting.

“The collar!” he exclaimed. “‘Call me and I will come'… Holy cow. We should have thought of Isaac first thing! Read it out, Randy, I can't read script very good.”

Randy read the clue aloud:

“Named for a jewel, named for a bird,

    
Asleep for threescore years and ten,

    
First find my resting place, and then,

Stepping toward sunrise, find the third

    
Strange clue that marks the secret way

    
To rare reward and a fair summer day.”

CHAPTER III

The Resting Place

Named for a jewel, named for a bird,

    
Asleep for threescore years and ten,

    
First find my resting place, and then,

Stepping toward sunrise, find the third

    
Strange clue that marks the secret way

    
To rare reward and a fair summer day.

“A summer day!” exclaimed Oliver. “Gosh! Does that mean we're never going to get to the end of this thing till summer? Why it's only just begun to be October now!”

“I know,” said Randy slowly. “But I wonder—I think it's been invented, this game or search or whatever it is, by somebody who understands the way we feel with all the others gone; someone who wants to give us something pleasant to think about instead of just groaning around the house and missing them all the time. I'm glad it's going to last a long time.”

“I guess I am too, kind of. But what can it be, do you think? And who could have thought it up? I don't think Cuffy could write poetry like that, and I'm pretty sure Willy couldn't either.”

“If it wasn't for the way the things are said, I'd believe it was Rush,” said Randy. “Or it
could
be Father. But he's been away so long this time I don't see how he could have planted the clues. Mona might have written the poems, I suppose, but it's not her handwriting and it doesn't look faked; it looks sort of easy and dashed-off, as if it was written in a hurry by someone who'd written that way for years and years; someone very grown-up.”

“Yes, but what about this clue, now,” said Oliver, anxious to take up the scent again. “‘Named for a jewel, named for a bird.' What could
that
mean, for cat's sake?”

“Threescore years and ten, too. That's seventy years.
Asleep
for that long, it must mean somebody dead.”

“I've heard that toads can sleep an awful long time,” offered Oliver hopefully.

“No, it's somebody dead, I'm sure, and that means a cemetery, I should think. That must be it; a gravestone somewhere, and a certain name.”

“There's a graveyard in Carthage, and another one—a big one—in Braxton, and there's others around, too. I s'pose we'll have to search them all. But what could the name be? Jewel and bird. I don't get it.”

“Well, it could be a name like Pearl-uh-Stork, for instance,” said Randy, without much conviction. “Or Opal Owl. Something like that.”