Spiderweb for Two - A Melendy Maze (8 page)

“Fair exchange is no robbery,” Randy said. “We have the key, but he's got a dollar and a half of ours.

“I think,” she said a little later, as they were riding home, “that I have just about a dollar and a half left in my bank. Maybe I'd just better give it to Cuffy as the change; you know, without saying anything.”

“Yes, and then she won't have to ask questions and be worried,” said Oliver piously. “I'll chip in fifteen cents; it's all I've got.”

When they coasted down the driveway to their house, the Four-Story Mistake, they could see the lighted windows shining. Randy sighed.

“It costs a lot to do the marketing,” she said.

The next day she and Oliver took great satisfaction in composing and sending a letter to Mr. Frederick. It said:

Dear Sir,

A dollar and a half seems exsorbitent for a clock key, does it not? But accept it please, and you may keep the change.

Yours sincerely,

The Robbers

A few days later Randy had a new idea about the clue. It came to her in the middle of her English History class at ten thirty in the morning, and struck her with such force that when Miss Kipkin asked her to name the originator of the Magna Carta she answered “Beethoven.”

She advanced her theory to Oliver that afternoon on their way home.

“I'm going straight up to the Office when we get back and look at the Victrola records,” she told him. “Beethoven
did
compose a piano concerto called the ‘Emperor,' you know. I've got it all figured out. The Emperor concerto book should be on one of the shelves, and the next record under it could be ‘The Dance of the Hours'—I'm sure we've still got it—and the next one
over
it could be one of the Caruso records—he died long ago and was the best singer in the world—or maybe one of Richard Tauber's. We've
got
all those, and I bet we'll find the clue among them, and if we do we'll
know
it's Rush who thought it up; he's always been the boss of the records!”

As she said this she thought of her eldest brother, industriously printing the names of musical compositions in ink on little strips of adhesive tape and sticking them onto the backs of the record albums. He had not cut the strips long enough and could not keep his printing small enough, so that on these labels Tchaikovsky was irreverently tagged as Tchai, and Beethoven appeared as Beet. Chopin, of course, was Chop, and Debussy became Deb. The compositions and performers were similarly abbreviated with the result that every symphony was a symp. and every orchestra an orc.

Oliver was deeply impressed with Randy's idea, and as soon as they got home they slammed their books down on the kitchen table and pounded up the two flights of stairs to the Office. This was a beloved room, the children's own, cluttered with all the evidence and litter of their hobbies, interests, tastes, talents, and works in progress. Rush's care-worn upright piano stood against one wall, Mona's masks and costumes hung on a row of pegs. Oliver's electric train and tracks sprawled across the floor; his pistols bristled from the shelves. Randy's paints and papers cluttered a table in one window and in another sat a row of weary dolls, all recently outgrown, of course, but never to be thrown away. Still another sill held jars of different sizes, and in these were twigs or earth each concealing a spun cocoon or buried chrysalis. These, too, were Oliver's. Low bookshelves lined the walls, and above them, even to the ceilings, were pasted yellowing strips from ancient newspapers and journals, put there years and years ago by other children in another family.…

“Beet. Quint. A,” read Randy, from the adhesive labels. “Beet. Symp. 3. Ero., Beet. Symp. 6. Pas., Schub. Trio E. Honestly, these records are in a mess. Schub shouldn't be in with Beet like that. The Beets should be alone together. Oh, here! Oh,
here
it is! Beet. Emp. Conc! But—oh, no. Oh, darn. The one below's an album of Bing Crosby and the one above it's ‘Peter and the Wolf'! Gee whiz. And it was such a good idea.”

“Heck,” said Oliver, also crestfallen.

“Well, I know what I'm going to do,” said Randy after a discouraged silence. “I'm going to write to Father tonight and ask him for a list of well-known emperors. It's the only thing.”

“Send it air mail,” said Oliver. “Now let's put on good old ‘Peter and the Wolf.' Last time I heard it was when I was seven years old on a day that was raining and I had a stomachache and Cuffy was away in Braxton.”

Father's letter in reply to Randy's came four days later. “Here they are,” said the letter. “But why?”

“Look,” said Randy. “They're all divided up in bundles: Roman emperors and then Byzantine; Holy Roman Empire ones and French (only two of them, of course), and then the Hapsburgs. No Chinese, though. He must have forgotten them.”

“Start with the Romans, they were the ones who thought it up,” said Oliver, methodical as always.

“All right. So first there's Augustus, then Tiberius; then come Caligula and Claudius and Nero and Galba and Otho and Vitellius and Vespasian and Titus—oh,
Titus
!” screamed Randy.

“Titus!” screamed Oliver.

The emperor's namesake was revealed, at last, as their dear fat neighbor, Mr. Jasper Titus, Oliver's favorite person.

“Well,
I
never knew there was an emperor named that,” said Oliver. “But I think you should have, Randy.”

“I think so, too. I learned about him once,” she admitted sheepishly. “I don't know how I could have forgotten.”

By this time, naturally, without even discussing it, they were putting on their jackets and soon were on their way to call on Mr. Titus.

“It's probably somewhere in that old-fashioned clock he's got in the hall; the grandfather one.”

“But that clock doesn't work,” Oliver objected. “It just stands there without doing anything, the hours don't even tell their names and go;
that
clock just always tells the world it's three fifteen.”

“Poetic license,” Randy said. “Maybe the very fact that it's stopped is what they mean about a voice being silenced long ago.”

“‘
Above,
a voice was silenced—'” quoted Oliver. “Whoever heard of a clock that had its machinery on top?”

“Anyway we can just look at it,” said Randy soothingly. “And he must have other clocks.”

They knew better than to approach Mr. Titus's front door; that one was never opened. The whole activity of his house centered about the kitchen and backyard: kittens played there, ducks quacked and gabbled, and one red rooster crowed and strutted with three stout wives to praise him. Chrysanthemums were blooming in their bed, top-heavy and bending, and the last blue morning-glories, since the day was grey, were still wide open.

“Come in, come in!” said Mr. Titus. He was wearing a blue-checked apron and had a spoon in his hand. “I was just mixing up a batch of cookies, and I need eaters for 'em. Think you can oblige?”

Randy and Oliver assured him that they would make every effort to accommodate him and stepped with pleasant anticipation into the kitchen; they knew the cookies would be delicious: the two consuming interests of Mr. Titus's life were fishing and cooking, for both of which he had great talent.

It was right that the kitchen should be the heart and soul of his house. It was a wonderful room with windows facing south, many large ornamental calendars on the wall, and a stove as big and black and polished as a concert grand piano. The oven door of this splendid object was modestly embossed with its name: Heart of Perfection. On the red oil cloth of the kitchen table there was always a tumbler full of flowers: nasturtiums or moss roses or petunias; anything the old man had happened to grab out of his tangled garden to stick in amongst the mint and chives and parsley that he kept there. Today there were some dark red raggedy chrysanthemums, picked too short, and a sprig of basil. Under the table the cat-basket was empty; before long Mr. Titus's cat, Battledore, would bring more kittens to it; her last ones had grown up and gone off to seek their fortunes. His dog, Hambone, lay beside the splendid stove, which crackled lustily as it devoured its coal fire. Hambone was really old, much older than Isaac, and instead of getting up when the children came in he lay where he was, looked at them, and whacked the floor with his tail.

“Him and me we feel the damp at our age,” said Mr. Titus. “Hard to get up, hard to lay down; harder to set. The joints, they get corroded, just like old pipes. But then I never hankered much after exercise. Have a seat, have a seat.”

Randy sat on the good old rocker with its flattened cushion and Oliver crouched on a footstool. Both of them had noted instantly that, though there was a clock on the shelf by the window, it was just an old-fashioned alarm clock, and above it hung the bird cage which housed Tibbet, the canary. He was yeeping away at the top of his lungs; goodness knows
his
voice was never silent except when he was sleeping, so it couldn't be that clock.… Pretty soon—after the cookies, perhaps—one of them would ask to examine the grandfather clock in the hall.

Mr. Titus sat at the table spooning cookie batter out of an old crockery bowl onto an old work-scarred cookie sheet. Everything about the place was old: owner, dog, stove, utensils. Tibbet was not young. Even the calendars were venerable, some going back as far as fifteen years. The current one was hung inside a cupboard door. “Don't like the picture on it,” Mr. Titus explained. “I like a calendar with a real nice scene on it; moonrise on the water, maybe, or an Indian in a canoe. These young women they got on 'em nowdays—all dressed up in bathing suits and cowboy outfits and all grinning—they don't appeal to me.”

“That's what I like about this place,” said Oliver frankly. “Everything in it is good and old. It makes you feel comfortable. I like oldness.”

“Everything's pretty antique all right,” agreed Mr. Titus. “I bought this cookie sheet in nineteen seventeen. This bowl, this same
bowl,
I used to lick the leavin's of the icin' out of when I was a boy no bigger'n Oliver. My Aunt Effie's bowl, it was.”

“In our house things don't last so long,” said Randy. “They break or wear out or the dogs chew them. They get bent or lost, and sometimes they turn up in queer places. We found the eggbeater, after searching for days, in with Oliver's chemical set.”

“I was doing an experiment,” Oliver explained. “I wanted to see what would happen if I beat an egg or two in with some iron sulphide, just for fun.”

“What happened was a smell,” said Randy. “Oliver lost interest in this experiment and let it stand there for a week, and pretty soon the smell began to put out feelers like an octopus, and they had such strength that they dragged us up the stairs to where they were coming from, and that's how we found the eggbeater.”

“Yes, but another time, Mr. Titus—this was neat—Cuffy couldn't find her umbrella anywhere. Nobody could find it,” Oliver said. “I did, finally. It was up in a tree, opened out nice and tied to a branch. Randy'd put it up over a robin's nest once when it was raining; she thought the mother robin would appreciate a roof. She didn't though; she and the father robin were insulted. They went away and built a new nest on Willy's windowsill.”

“That was when I was much, much younger,” said Randy.

“Year before last, it was,” said Oliver. “And, my, was Cuffy burned! Just as burned as she was about the eggbeater, and about the time she found the kitchen clock down by the pool—”

“That was when Rush was having the Turtle Derby; yes, and speaking of clocks, Mr. Titus,” Randy cut in, with what she considered great presence of mind, “that grandfather clock in the hall must be a real antique, isn't it? I'd like to look at it again—”

“It's old enough, I guess. Been in the family for generations. I let it run down years ago, though. The way it ticked, so slow and serious, why you could hear it all through the house at night. Made me nervous. Kept my conscience wakeful. So I just let 'er run down and slept much better after. Take this one, though,” Mr. Titus nodded his head in the direction of the old alarm clock under Tibbet's cage (the Melendys glanced at it perfunctorily). “This one sounds real businesslike and hearty. Had it twenty years. Keeps good time, but the bell don't work anymore. Gave up. Never could rouse me.… Well, what's the matter, Randy? You feeling all right?”

“‘Above, a voice was silenced long ago,'” quoted Randy, rising slowly to her feet in a sort of trance, like Lady Macbeth.

“‘Beneath, the hours tell their names and go,'” yelped Oliver, leaping up from the footstool and beating her to the clock.

Under the metal caplike bell on top of the clock was wedged the precious slip of blue, tightly folded and well-concealed.

“How in time did
that
get there?” demanded Mr. Titus. “Here, now, what
is
that?”

“Mr. Titus darling,” said Randy, “please forgive us if we can't tell you for a while; it's meant for us, part of a secret kind of game that we aren't allowed to talk about. Someone must have hidden it there when you weren't watching. Has any of our family been to see you besides us? Before they went away? Rush, for instance?”

“Why, Rush was here, sure, just before he left, and so was Mark and Mona, too. Cuffy she's been by two or three times, and some of your friends, besides; Daphne and David Addison, and Pearl and Peter Cotton. Willy visits pretty regular; but I haven't seen your daddy since the summer.”

“We haven't either,” said Randy, saddened temporarily; but the thought of the clue revived her spirits. “Well, please excuse us, now, but I'm afraid we must be going.”