The Moonlit Mind (Novella): A Tale of Suspense (11 page)

In the library, after ascertaining that no one lurks among the maze of stacks, he snatches up the telephone handset to call the fire department. No dial tone. He repeatedly depresses the plungers, but the line remains dead.

He doesn’t need to go room to room, trying other phones. He knows they will all be useless to him.

Clarette, Giles, and members of the staff have cell phones. But Crispin would have to be invisible to slip among them and steal one.

Before coming to Theron Hall, they didn’t have computers. But they never use those here, Mr. Mordred has not taught them, and Crispin doesn’t know how to send an email.

From a library shelf, he snares a book, another boy’s-adventure novel. He doesn’t intend to read it, only to use it as a prop.

Pretending to be immersed in the story, he wanders the house, apparently reading as he walks, pausing here and there to sit, hoping that when he is seen, he will not appear to be engaged in a desperate search.

After an hour and a half, Crispin has ventured everywhere that he is able, without discovering any hint of Harley’s whereabouts. He has even dared to enter his parents’ suite to search it.

Other than the basement room behind the steel door, the only places inaccessible to him are the servants’ quarters on the ground floor and Jardena’s suite on the third. If he thought Jardena might be out shopping, he would risk entering her domain, but in light of the approaching celebration, the matriarch is almost certainly at home. Preparing.

He suspects that Harley isn’t in Jardena’s suite or locked in one of the servants’ rooms. His perception in recent days that Theron Hall is bigger than it appears to be, that it’s continuously growing larger, now serves as a basis for a new conviction that the house contains secret passageways and hidden rooms that he must somehow find if he is to rescue his brother.

At six o’clock, he is in the children’s dining room, as they expect him to be, pretending to read his novel at the table, when Arula enters with the serving cart.

“I don’t know where Harley is,” Crispin says. “Probably playing something somewhere. He’s always losing track of time.”

“Oh, I guess no one told you,” Arula says, as she sets his plate before him. “The poor thing had a toothache. Your mother has taken him to the dentist.”

“Do dentists work this late?”

“For a child of a man as important and admired as Mr. Gregorio, people are willing to make all kinds of exceptions.”

After Arula leaves, Crispin stares for a while at his food: two chili-cheese dogs and french fries. He will never eat another bite of anything prepared in Theron Hall.

Anticipating a visit from Nanny Sayo, Crispin conceals an entire chili hot dog and a torn-off piece of the other one, plus a handful of fries, in a drawer of the sideboard, between folded tablecloths. He returns to his seat and wipes his messy hand on his napkin.

Soon Nanny appears. She is already dressed for bed in black silk pajamas and a red silk robe.

He is holding the prop book in his right hand, pretending to have paused in his eating, riveted by the tale.

“Sweetie, you’ll get sick eating so fast.”

“I’m starved, and it’s really good,” he says, hoping that she isn’t suspicious.

She pulls out the chair next to his, turns it sideways, and sits facing him. “What’s the book about?”

Eyes riveted to the page, he says, “Pirates.”

“Exciting, huh?”

“Yeah. Sword fights and stuff.”

She lays her right hand on his right arm. “I love a good story. And you read so well for a boy your age. Maybe we could snuggle in bed together, under the covers, just the two of us, and you could read to me. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

She has never been under the covers with him. He does not know if she means this, why she suggests it, what he should say.

He meets her eyes, which are large and black and pretty. Her stare is so sharp that he half believes she can cut through any lie he tells and see the truth he’s hiding.

Nevertheless, he says, “That would be cool. But maybe you could read to me. I’m kind of sleepy.”

“Are you, sweetie?” she asks. “So early?”

He stifles a phony yawn. “Yeah. I’m really bushed.”

“I’m sure you are,” Nanny Sayo says as she glances at his plate. She meets his eyes again, her right hand now tenderly massaging his arm. “Maybe you can read to me tomorrow night. Nanny’s tired, too.”

She’s lying. Crispin’s surprised at how obvious her lie is to him. He is not sleepwalking anymore. He’s alert. She isn’t tired at all. She’s excited and barely able to contain her excitement.

Over two months have passed since July 26, the night they took Mirabell down to the basement. They’re eager to have Harley. And they think they will have Crispin, too, in just five days, on the feast of Saint Francis.

Nanny Sayo scootches in her seat a little, perhaps not aware of what she’s doing, like a small girl eager to leave the table.

“Tomorrow night, I’ll read to you,” Crispin says. “I’ll read you to sleep.”

“That will be nice,” Nanny says. “Won’t that be nice?”

“Sure. Really nice.” And then, without knowing what he means by it yet aware that it is the right suggestion to make, he says, “Just the two of us, and we don’t have to tell anybody.”

Her stare seems to drill right through him and out the back of his head. At last she whispers, “That’s right, sweetie. We don’t have to tell anyone.”

“All right,” he says.

She leans forward, her face inches from his. “Give Nanny a good-night kiss.”

Although he has always before kissed her on the cheek, he knows intuitively what he must do to ensure her trust. He leans forward and clumsily kisses her full on the mouth.

“Sleep tight, little man,” she whispers.

“You too.”

After Nanny Sayo has been gone for a few minutes, Crispin dumps the rest of his dinner into the sideboard, between the folded linens.

In his room, one of the maids has turned down his bed earlier than usual.

With spare blankets, he tries to shape the body of a sleeping boy. He stuffs one of his pajama tops with a rolled towel to fill out an arm of it, and he arranges things so only the arm lies outside the covers, the hand apparently under his pillow. The head of this fake boy is beneath the covers, as well, but Crispin often burrows when he sleeps, and she will have seen him like this before.

He places the pirate novel on his nightstand and dials down the lamp to its dimmest setting.

In the dark closet, leaving the door ajar an inch, Crispin waits impatiently for forty minutes before Nanny Sayo returns. She goes to his bedside and gazes down on what she thinks is her little man.

Unlike the night of July 26, she does not pay a lengthy visit, tarries perhaps half a minute, not long enough to wonder that this sleeping boy is breathing too shallowly to be heard. When she leaves, she hurries in a silken rustle and closes the door less quietly than usual, convinced that his dinner has undone him.

After waiting a few minutes, he cautiously leaves his room. The second-floor hallway is deserted. The stillness that has settled on the house reminds him of the ominous hush on that terrible night in July.

The time is only 7:42. On that other night, the night of Saints Anne and Joachim, Theron Hall was not this quiet until nine-thirty. Maybe this feast will begin early.

Certain that Nanny Sayo’s eagerness is shared by all the rest of them, that something bad might happen to Harley sooner than anticipated, Crispin makes no effort to be stealthy. He races along the hallway to the central stairs, which servants and children are never supposed to use.

Between the second and the ground floors, two staircases sweep down the walls of a round foyer, forming a kind of harp when you look at them from below. He takes the nearest, descending two steps at a time, and dashes across the marble-floored entry to the front door.

He intends to run into the street, flag down vehicles, bring traffic to a stop, look for a police cruiser. He’ll tell them that terrorists have broken into Theron Hall and taken everyone hostage, his parents and brother and the entire staff. Terrorists with guns, and they’ve taken everyone to the basement. Crispin will make so much commotion that the police will have to send in a SWAT team like
they always do on TV, and when that starts to happen, nobody will dare do anything to Harley. They won’t dare.

When he yanks open the front door, he discovers a uniformed policeman standing on the doorstep, not facing Crispin as if about to ring the bell, but facing the street as if guarding the house. He is a big man, and when he turns to the boy, he’s got a billy club in one hand. His face is broad and hard and, in the stoop light, red with anger.

“You should be in bed, piglet.”

Crispin lets go of the door, backs away as it swings shut. The policeman can be seen in silhouette through the beveled and lightly frosted glass in the top half of the door, but he does not attempt to come inside.

Crispin’s heart is knocking hard against his breastbone, as if it wants to break out of him.

He sprints through the house, into the deserted kitchen. This should be a busy place right now, because dinner is always served to Clarette and Giles promptly at eight o’clock. Nothing simmers on the stove, and the ovens are off.

A cop stands also on the back doorstep. In fact, it seems to be the same officer or his twin, facing the door this time, billy club in his right hand, rapping it menacingly into the open palm of his left.

“I have my assignment, piglet. You’ll find me at every door you open.”

Sunday, the fourth of December, on the evening of Crispin’s thirteenth birthday …

Snow fell through the previous night and all morning, but in the afternoon the storm relented.

They sit across from each other in the same booth in Eleanor’s, though this time Harley lies on Amity’s bench, his head in her lap. Dinner is done, and the dog is dozing.

She sings the birthday song softly, sweetly. It’s corny, but he doesn’t stop her. Her singing voice is lovely.

After the song, she says, “Tell me again about the cards.”

“I told you the first time I was here. There’s not much to it, really.”

“I want to understand better.”

“There’s no understanding it.”

“Try me.”

Her face is lovely in the candlelight. There is nothing of Nanny Sayo in this girl and never could be. Nothing of Clarette, either, or of Proserpina.

Crispin taps the deck, which lies on the table, in its box. “The shop sold magic tricks and games. The old man, the owner, said dogs were welcome.”

“This was the night of the day you first met the dog.”

“Yeah. I hadn’t named him yet. After I bought the cards, me and Harley sneaked down to the shop’s basement to stay the night.”

“The owner didn’t know you were down there.”

“Nope. He closed us in when he closed the shop.”

“Why did you buy the cards?”

“I don’t know. It just seemed …”

“What?”

“Something I needed to do. That was my second day on the run, so the feast of the archangels … that was still so fresh with me. Middle of the night, I woke up from a bad dream about my brother, woke up saying his name. That’s when I named the dog Harley. When and why.”

The sleeping dog snores softly in Amity’s lap.

“That’s when you opened the deck the first time,” she presses, for she knows this story well.

“We had a light down there in the storeroom. The cards were something to do, to take my mind off … whatever. It was a brand-new pack. I know it had to be new because I broke the seal, stripped off the cellophane.”

He opens the box now, removes the cards, but leaves them stacked facedown.

“I shuffled them,” he remembers, “I don’t know … maybe five or six times. I was nine, the only card game I could play was five-hundred rummy, but I couldn’t even do that because I didn’t have anyone to play with but the dog.”

“So you just dealt two hands faceup, so you could play against yourself.”

“Stupid kid idea, playing against yourself. Anyway, the first four cards I deal are the sixes.”

The memory still disturbs him, and he pauses.

She can read him better than anyone has. She gives him time, but then nudges with three words: “Four moldy sixes.”

“A brand-new deck, but the sixes are dirty, creased, and moldy.”

“Like the sixes on the warehouse floor.”

“Exactly like. There were other cards scattered on the warehouse floor when the dog led me in there to the dead junkie and his money, but the sixes were all together, faceup.”

“All together when you went in.”

“Yeah. But when we came out, only one six was on the floor. All the other cards seemed to be scattered where they had been, but three of the sixes were missing.”

“Someone took them.”

“No one was there. And who would want some moldy old cards?”

In the basement storeroom of the magic-and-game shop, he had sat staring at the filthy cards for a long time, afraid to touch them.

“What I finally did was go through the rest of the deck to make sure there wasn’t a completely different set of sixes, clean ones, but there wasn’t.”

“And none of the other cards were dirty or creased, or moldy.”

“None,” he confirms. “I just didn’t want to touch those four, like there was a curse on them or something. But Harley kept sniffing them and looking at me. So I decided if they didn’t scare him, they shouldn’t scare me.”

Harley sighs and shudders, still asleep but evidently dreaming of something that pleases him.

“I put the moldy sixes on top of the deck and reached for the box to stow them away. But Harley slaps one paw down hard on the box before I can pick it up.”

“Good old Harley.”

“He gives me this stare that seems to say,
What are you doing, boy? You’re not done with this yet
.”

“The hairs were up on the back of your neck.”

“They were,” Crispin agrees, “but in a kind of good way. I don’t know what the dog wants me to do, so I shuffle several times and deal out four cards again.”

“The four sixes, but not the moldy ones.”