Little Lion (4 page)

“Okay,” their mother said, studying their faces. “Well, I need to get back to the office for a couple of hours and finish this deposition. How about we get pizza when I get home?”

“Great,” Maisie said again.

Their mother kissed them each good-bye on the top of their heads. Maisie and Felix stepped out of the laundry room to watch her walk through the kitchen and out the door. They waited until the door closed and they could no longer hear her heels against the floor.

Maisie grabbed the jelly jar from the shelf.

“Here it is!” she said triumphantly, holding the shard up for Felix to see. “Let's go!”

“Wait!” Felix said.

He went to the kitchen and checked the big bulletin board on the wall there. Beside the school lunch menu and a pizza delivery flyer under a yellow pushpin, he found the big preservation society calendar with the schedule for tours of Elm Medona marked in red. None were scheduled for that afternoon.

“Phew!” he said.

$  $  $  $  $

Felix and Maisie went back down the dumbwaiter, into the basement Kitchen, up the stairs that led to the Dining Room, and then out into the Grand Ballroom and up the Grand Staircase.

“Thank you,” Felix whispered as they ran past the photograph of Great-Aunt Maisie.

Then he paused.

“Maisie?” he said. “Maybe Great-Aunt Maisie's shard is somewhere in the house. Maybe it's in her old room. Or even in Thorne's.”

“What if it is?” Maisie said. “All we need is ours.”

Felix hesitated. “I know,” he said. “But she seemed so happy when she thought it was in that egg. Since we're already in here, couldn't we just poke around a little?”

“Well,” Maisie said, considering.

“Five minutes?” Felix offered.

“I guess it would make her happy if we did find it,” Maisie said, remembering how Clara Barton had told them to be kinder to Great-Aunt Maisie. Maisie sighed. “Five minutes.”

Maisie and Felix walked down the long hallway that led to what used to be the family's bedrooms. First they passed Ariane Pickworth's room. The walls were a Robin's Egg Blue, and the ceiling was painted with white fluffy clouds. From each corner of the ceiling, a fat cherub smiled down at them.

“So creepy that she died in there,” Felix said in a hushed voice.

He walked past the room quickly.

Beside Ariane's room was the nursery, a smaller room that still held two matching white cribs, two matching white rocking chairs, and two matching white chests of drawers. In fact, everything in that room was white.

Next came Thorne's bedroom.

“Should we poke around in there?” Felix asked. “I mean, if he took it, maybe he left it here.”

Maisie sighed.
Two
rooms? They would never get to The Treasure Chest. But then she pictured Great-Aunt Maisie and her delight at that egg and at sharing the anagram with them.

“Sure,” she said.

Great-Uncle Thorne's room had a jungle mural painted on the walls, the dark green leaves reaching upward onto the ceiling. A rug made out of a lion's skin, with the head still attached and the mouth opened in a silent roar, took up most of the floor. The blanket on the bed was made of dark brown animal fur.

“Ugh,” Maisie said, wrinkling her nose. “Who would ever sleep with all this dead animal stuff around them?”

Felix had already started to open drawers.

“Empty,” he said.

Maisie opened the closet and peeked under the bed.

“No one's been in these rooms in years,” she said. “Of course they've been emptied out.”

“We'll still check Great-Aunt Maisie's real fast?”

“Fine,” Maisie said impatiently.

She opened the door in the room that led to a bathroom with a claw-foot tub and a toilet with a big chain that had to be pulled for flushing. The towel racks had thick white towels on them, with the letters
TPP
monogrammed on some in dark red and
MAP
on the others in Robin's Egg Blue. Another door on the other side of the bathroom opened into Great-Aunt Maisie's room.

When Maisie and Felix walked in, they grew very quiet. It almost felt like being in church. Each item on the dresser—a heavy silver brush and comb and mirror—had the letters
MAP
engraved on them. One table held a dozen music boxes of different sizes and designs. Another had rows of dolls with real hair and creepy, realistic-looking faces staring back at them. The bed was so high that there was a little step stool to climb onto it. Under an elaborately embroidered canopy, the bed itself was stacked high with pillows.

“It looks like a little girl's room,” Maisie said softly.

Felix nodded.

“I don't know why I feel so sad all of a sudden,” Maisie said.

The walls here were a midnight blue, and the ceiling had constellations painted on it. Felix could identify the Big Dipper and Orion the Hunter.

“Look,” Maisie said. Her fingers traced white lines that ran along one wall. Above the lines were numbers.

Felix studied them carefully. “They're longitudes and latitudes,” he said finally.

“Four of them,” Maisie said.

“I wonder where they lead to?” Felix said, imagining the globe that sat in his classroom with lines of longitude and latitude circling it.

Maisie pointed to another set of numbers.

“Dates,” Felix said. Two of the dates were the same, and two were different and years older.

“Birthdays?” Maisie said.

“Great-Aunt Maisie's and Great-Uncle Thorne's?” Felix pointed to the two that were the same.

“We should go,” Maisie said, feeling suddenly as if she were trespassing.

“But the shard could be in one of those music boxes or . . . or anywhere.”

Maisie shook her head. “It's not,” she said.

Somehow, Felix knew she was right.

$  $  $  $  $

For the second time that day, Maisie pressed the spot on the wall that opened it to reveal the staircase. As Felix followed his sister up the secret staircase, he remembered his mantra.

“Home,” he whispered. “Home, home, home.”

In The Treasure Chest, Maisie scanned the desk for the blueprints to the Holland Tunnel.

“I'm sure I put them right here,” she said, lifting up the other items. She moved a porcupine quill, a compass, and a bouquet of dried flowers.

“We don't want those, anyway,” Felix said, even as he repeated
home, home, home
in his mind.

“Yes, we do!” Maisie said, pushing things aside roughly. “They'll get us back to New York, just blocks from home.”

With a sweep of her hand, a silver coin fell off the desk, landing with a loud
thunk
on the floor. The light bounced off it so that it practically glowed.

Felix bent to pick up the coin at the exact same time as Maisie did.

“Leave it alone,” Maisie said, cross.

But he didn't.

They both touched the silver coin, and the room filled with the smells of salt water, coconut, and something sweet. A wind rushed past Maisie and Felix, carrying the sounds of sails flapping and palm tree leaves fluttering.

In an instant, they were gone.

The Orphan Boy

Felix landed with a splash grasping his glasses tight to his face. He opened his eyes and saw that he was underwater. Not just any water, either. This water was so clear that he could see Maisie's legs thrashing, a school of bright-yellow fish swimming past, and the soft, sandy bottom way, way beneath him. He swam upward, kicking his legs hard until he reached the surface. When his head finally popped out of the water, he took a big deep breath and looked around. In the distance lay a white sand beach fringed with palm trees. But all around him, Felix saw nothing but beautiful turquoise water until Maisie appeared, sputtering and shaking the water from her hair, the coin pressed firmly in her fist.

“Over here!” Felix called, waving to her. He had certainly not expected this. Not at all. They were in the
ocean
!

Maisie looked about as angry as she could look. Felix watched her dive into the water and swim purposefully toward him. She was a good swimmer. And so was he. They had learned to swim when they were five at the Carmine Street Pool and had tied for first place in a relay race there when they were seven.

The sun shone bright and warm above them. Felix lay on his back and floated gently, gazing up at the clear, blue sky.

When Maisie reached him, she treaded water beside him.

“This,” she said, “is not New York.”

Felix smiled. “Nope,” he said.

“This is all your fault,” she said. “If you'd just let me find those blueprints, we wouldn't be in the middle of the ocean right now.”

“First of all, we're not in the middle of the ocean. The beach is right over there. And second of all, this is actually kind of nice.”

Maisie sighed. Clearly her brother was not going to be any help in figuring out where they'd landed. Or why. She took a breath, stretched out her arms, and began to swim.

“Hey! Where are you going?” Felix called after her.

“To shore!” Maisie yelled back. And then she kept on swimming.

As she neared the beach, the waves grew large enough to carry her forward. She caught one just right and it lifted her and brought her right to shore, depositing her in a sandy heap. Riding that wave felt familiar. When the family used to go to Cape May, Maisie and her father would bodysurf for hours. She liked tumbling in the water, then landing on the beach beside her father, laughing and spitting salt water. She liked how tired she'd get by the end of the afternoon, how they would collapse on the beach blanket and close their eyes, how the smells of suntan lotion and fried foods and salt surrounded her. Even lying still, Maisie would still feel like she was moving through the cold Atlantic Ocean.

Maisie stood.
This
water wasn't cold at all. In fact, it was as warm as bathwater. She looked at the sugar-white sand and the tall palm trees. Maybe they hadn't landed in the Atlantic Ocean, she realized. Maisie tried to picture a map of the United States. A whole bunch of states had palm trees and warm water. Like . . . Florida . . . and . . . definitely some other ones.
Maybe this
is the Atlantic Ocean, but way down south
, she thought, walking up to the beach, her feet sinking in the soft sand as she did.

The beach seemed to stretch forever, and Maisie couldn't see anyone else on it. A palm tree lay on its side as if it had been knocked over, but otherwise the beach was empty. Maisie sat on the trunk of the fallen tree and pondered their situation. An empty beach, somewhere tropical. Another thought hit her. Not only didn't she know
where
they'd landed, she also had no idea
when
they'd landed. For all she knew, this place was completely deserted. Or inhabited by angry natives. Nervous, she looked around for clues. But there was nothing but this long, white sand beach and the turquoise water and Felix goofing around in it, diving and splashing like they were in Cape May on vacation with their parents instead of stranded here.

Think
, Maisie told herself. Last time, they'd landed in that barn and Clara Barton had appeared immediately. Logically, someone would appear here, too, she decided. Any minute. Someone who needed the coin. That made her feel better. Maisie smiled, pleased with herself. They didn't have to do anything except wait right here. Any minute now, a person would walk up to them and things would start to make sense. She lifted her face toward the sun. Her mother would kill her for not using sunscreen, but Maisie had no choice. All she could do was hope her nose didn't get too red and her freckles didn't multiply too much.

Time passed this way. Maisie sat on the trunk of the palm tree, waiting. Felix played around in the water. The sun rose higher and the day grew hotter, until eventually Maisie began to worry and Felix got bored and came out of the ocean and up the beach to where his sister had started to pace.

“We've been here a long time,” she said.

“And I'm starving,” Felix said.

Maisie's stomach grumbled. “I thought for sure someone would show up.”

Felix stared off down the length of the beach. “It's pretty deserted,” he said finally.

“Do you think we're on a desert island?” Maisie asked.

Felix chewed on his bottom lip, which had started to get chapped from the salt and sun. “I don't know,” he concluded. Then he said, “I need lunch and ChapStick.”

“They don't have ChapStick on desert islands,” Maisie said miserably.

“They don't have food, either. Just coconuts and fish you have to catch with your bare hands,” Felix said, starting to get nervous.

“Well,” Maisie said, “there's only one thing we can do: explore.”

“What if it's dangerous out there? What if there's wild animals or headhunters or—”

“We can't just stay here like this forever. We'll starve.”

“Maisie?” Felix said softly. “Where do you think
here
is?”

She swallowed hard. “Maybe Florida?”

Felix nodded. “Florida wouldn't be so bad.”

Maisie hoped he didn't ask the next logical question.

But he did.

“
When
do you think it is?” he asked.

Their eyes met. Felix waited.

Then Maisie said, “I have absolutely no idea.”

Maisie and Felix began to walk. After some discussion on which direction would be best, they decided it didn't matter. Neither left nor right held any more promise than the other. They just started walking in the direction of the sun, which had reached straight overhead and now was to their right.

They walked for a very long time and still came upon nothing but more white sand, more palm trees, and more fallen trees. Neither of them spoke. What was there to say? They were hungry and both of them were more than a little afraid, even though the beach was beautiful and the weather warm and lovely, with just the right amount of breeze to keep them from getting too hot.

Eventually the beach curved and they saw in the near distance a harbor filled with boats.

“We're saved!” Felix said happily. Boats meant people and restaurants.

But seeing boats didn't make Maisie feel optimistic. Especially
those
boats. Oh, there were a lot of them, but each and every one was a sailboat. Large, with tall masts and weathered tan sails, these boats looked old. Really old. Like maybe a hundred years old. Or more.

“These look like the tall ships,” she said.

The tall ships had passed through New York Harbor a few years ago. Their parents had taken them down to Battery Park to watch them sail past. They'd had to listen to some boring guy give the history of tall ships. Some of them were modern and still used today. But the term originally referred to ships from long ago. Wooden sailing ships. Like the ones Maisie was looking at right then.

Relieved, Felix grinned. “We're at a tall ship festival?”

“I don't think it's a festival,” Maisie said.

They had reached the end of the sandy beach and had come to a wooden dock with a steep staircase leading up to the boats and the street.

“Careful,” Maisie said as they climbed the stairs. She pointed to where the wood had rotted and left gaping holes, the water shining through them.

The air stunk of fish and garbage and things rotting in the sun, and the noise level increased as they made their way up. Men shouted. Metal clanged. Sails flapped. Water smacked the dock.

It began to sink in with Felix that these tall ships were actual, working boats. Which meant they had gone back to a time when sailing ships carried cargo and traveled from harbor to harbor. But exactly when was that?

At the top of the stairs, Maisie and Felix stopped to take in the scene.

Men with bulging muscles pulled thick ropes and carried enormous crates both off of and onto ships. Other men gathered, bickering and shouting, pointing at this ship or that crate.

“At least they're speaking English,” Maisie whispered.

English, yes. Felix heard British accents and other accents—maybe German? Dutch?—that he didn't understand, but no one sounded American.

The street that bordered the harbor had many small, low buildings and the appearance of a town of sorts.

“Let's cross the street,” Maisie said.

As they made their way through the crowd, they saw black women squatting by the side of the road selling food from baskets. Pineapples cut into chunks, mangos, strips of coconut, fried fritters, and dried fish. Maisie and Felix paused, their mouths watering.

One of the women, dressed in a bright-yellow cotton dress with big, red flowers on it and a bandana wrapped around her head, motioned to them.

“My conch the freshest here, children,” she said.

Her basket held crisp fritters, glistening with oil.

“We don't have any money,” Maisie said, her stomach aching with hunger pangs.

“Too bad,” the woman said. She turned her attention to other people passing by.

“Conch fritters here,” she called to them.

Maisie and Felix lingered, the smell of her fritters mixing with that of ripe pineapple.

“Wait a minute,” Felix said. “We do have money.”

Maisie looked at him, confused. Then she broke into a grin.

“Ma'am,” she said to the woman. “Here.” She held out the heavy silver coin.

The woman took it and brought it close to her eyes. Then anger flashed across her face.

“What kind of fool you think I am?” she said. “This is a counterfeit dollar.” She tapped the coin with her finger. “1794?”

Maisie and Felix looked at each other.

The woman plopped the coin back in Maisie's hand. “Off with you,” she said, shaking her head. “1794. How am I going to use money from a year that hasn't even happened yet?”

“It's
earlier
than 1794?” Felix whispered to his sister.

“And she's not who we're looking for,” Maisie whispered back.

The woman, realizing they hadn't gone, studied their faces openly.

“You hungry children, yes?” she said gently.

They nodded.

The woman studied them. “All dressed in funny-looking clothes. And those funny-looking clothes all wet.”

Maisie returned the woman's gaze.

“So many hungry children since the hurricane,” she said, shaking her head sadly.

A hurricane! That explained why so many trees had been knocked down. Felix sighed, relieved they hadn't turned up a week earlier.

“Take my conch fritters, hungry children,” the woman said.

Maisie and Felix each took a warm fritter.

“Thank you,” Felix said.

The woman nodded, satisfied.

Maisie waited. Would something else happen?

But the woman seemed to have already forgotten them. She turned to three men who counted money and placed it in her hand, taking several fritters from her basket.

Disappointed, Maisie walked away.

The fritters tasted salty and delicious. It took three bites to finish them off. Felix licked his fingers while they continued on their way. People of all sizes and shapes and colors pressed together. Now the smell of sweat and animals mixed with all the other terrible smells. Felix covered his nose and mouth with his hand, breathing in the ocean smell on it. The fritter, which had tasted so good, turned sour in his stomach. Finally, they broke through the crowd and stood at the edge of the road, the harbor behind them and the row of buildings across the street.

“I thought someone would come up to us back there,” Maisie admitted. “When we landed in that barn, Clara showed up right away. But it seems like we're really on our own this time.”

Felix didn't want to believe that. “Someone will show up. You'll see,” he said, trying to convince himself as well as his sister.

“Let's just go into one of these stores and see if we can figure out where we are,” Maisie said.

“Good idea.”

He let her lead the way because he knew that would make her feel better. As they crossed the street, Felix noted that instead of cars, carriages lined one side of the dirt street, and here and there sat piles of horse poop, which added to the smell. There didn't seem to be any people, either, unlike the harbor that had been so crowded.