Zeuglodon (6 page)

A couple of days after the kidnapping we were eating cold spaghetti and meat sauce sandwiches for breakfast, sitting at the kitchen table. Uncle Hedge had taken his sandwich out to the radio shed where he was trying to get through to other members of the Guild of St. George, especially Basil Peach, who can be difficult to find if he can be found at all. Uncle Hedge was in a dither to find him, but it would turn out that somebody else would find Uncle Hedge first.

Brendan spread extra butter on the outside of his bread, leaving room along the edge so that his fingers wouldn’t get smeary. “What I’m wondering about,” he said between bites, “is Peckworthy.” He gestured with his fork and squinted up his eyes like he does when he wants you to think he has secret knowledge.

“Half a penny for your thoughts,” Perry said to him. “The other half we’ll give to the elves. Perkins, fetch a penny and the kitchen shears.”

“I mean, what’s Peckworthy’s
real
game?” Brendan said, ignoring him.

“We know what her game is,” I said. “We heard her say what it was. Now it’s the end of the week, and she’s still here with her notebook. That’s what I’m worried about. What if today’s the day that she comes for us?”

“
If
that’s her game,” Brendan observed.

“What else is she doing with her notebook,” Perry asked, “drawing pictures of birds?”

“Okay, then tell me who she was waiting for at the Skunk Train that night when the Creeper broke into the museum.”

“
Us
. She followed us,” I told him. “We’ve seen her car other times. She’s not trying to hide.”

“What if she wasn’t following anyone?” Brendan said. “What if she was
waiting
for someone?”

I started making another sandwich, because I’m always hungry around cold spaghetti sandwiches. You put a lot of butter on the bread and an inch of yesterday’s spaghetti, right out of the fridge. It’s good hot, too, but the spaghetti gets slippery with the butter and slides out of the sandwich, so cold works better, although it’s goopy. “You’re saying that she’s in league with the Creeper?” I asked.

Brendan nodded very slowly and ponderously. “
The getaway car
,” he said. “There’s
always
a getaway car.”

“The Creeper can’t drive himself around?” Perry asked. “Why would he need Frau Peckworthy to drive him? She didn’t drive him down to the bluffs that day he tried to snatch you. He had his own car, remember?”

“Of course,” Brendan said. “But how did the Creeper know that’s where we were going? I’ll tell you why. Peckworthy called him and told him we were on the way. That’s what she was doing in the neighborhood. She was a scout for the Creeper.”

“Creeper, the game’s afoot!” Perry said in a Peckworthy-like voice. “Sounds like arrant madness. Methinks you’ve lent your sanity to the apes.”

“We’ve
got
to find out what’s in the notebook,” Brendan said. “We’ll lay in wait for her. We have to.”

“I think you mean
lie
in wait,” Perry told him.

“I know what I mean,” Brendan said. “Don’t always be telling me what I mean.”

“Uncle Hedge told us not to give Ms Peckworthy any more things to write about,” I said, “so no one’s going to do any lying in wait.”

Brendan shrugged and smiled, but before we could argue, the kitchen door opened and Uncle Hedge walked in, looking like a man in a hurry. “Pack your bags,” he said. “We haven’t a moment to lose.”

The message had come in over the Smithfield on the sub-lunar frequency, which sometimes picks up radio talk from ships at sea. You can hear them yammering away in Russian or Australian or some other language. That’s just what had happened. Uncle Hedge got a call from a ship nearly four thousand miles away, although it wasn’t a Russian or an Australian. It was Dr. Hilario Frosticos himself, aboard his submarine, calling with a ransom demand.

He wanted the missing pages from the Peach notebook, he said. And he wanted the Mermaid’s key. He would trade them for Lala, straight across. He had no use for the little girl, only for the maps and the key, but he was getting impatient. “This time you’ll come to
me
, Hedgepeth,” he said, and then told him that he would make the swap far out in the North Atlantic, where there would be no clever tricks. At the sign of clever tricks he would disappear like a ghost and Lala would find herself in deep water. “Literally,” he said, and that was the end of the message.

Of course we didn’t have the key. Lala had the key, but that made no difference at all. It wasn’t something that Uncle Hedge would reveal to Frosticos. That would have to come out in the wash, Uncle Hedge told us.

That morning was a holiday for students, what’s called an “in-service” day—the only day of the year when teachers have school and students don’t. We went to school anyway, except not to go to class, but to talk to our teachers and to the Principal, Mr. Diggler. Next week was spring break, you see, but we couldn’t be sure just when we’d return from our voyage. (Of course we couldn’t say why we were going.) Mr. Collier, my science teacher, said that I should put together a photographic diary of interesting scientific things that I saw during our sea voyage, and for my English class I had to write about it, which is part of what you’re reading now. Perry had to work on his lexicon of significant words. Brendan had a two-page list of assignments that was mostly make-up for things he hadn’t finished but should have, so he was dismal as we walked down to Mr. Diggler’s office to get his approval.

We opened the door to Student Services, and who should we see walking out of the Principal’s office but Ms Henrietta Peckworthy herself, looking considerably pickled. She gave us a decisive look, like she had our number, and nodded slowly at us before passing on. It was the second worst moment in my life. Everything changed in the instant I saw her, like in movies where someone looks up and Death is standing there wearing a black robe and hood, reaching out to touch you.

Mr. Diggler came out of his office then, and Uncle Hedge shook his hand. Mr. Diggler asked after Mr. Vegeley, and Uncle Hedge said that Mr. Vegeley was as hearty as an alligator, and Mr. Diggler said that he was happy to hear it. Mr. Diggler is a short man, thin and nervous and slow and newt-like. Sometimes unworthy students frighten him very badly by sneaking up behind him and exploding inflated lunch sacks, which causes him to leap into the air and shout. I’ve never done this, although other people I won’t mention have done it and have always managed to run away before Mr. Diggler recovered his wits and turned around to catch the culprit.

“If my eyes don’t deceive me,” Uncle Hedge said to Mr. Diggler, “that was Ms Henrietta Peckworthy.”

“Yes, it was,” Mr. Diggler agreed. “She’s a tenacious woman. Very tenacious. She won’t be put off. This is her third visit to the school.”

“She gets her fair share of worms,” Uncle Hedge said.

“Worms?” Mr. Diggler asked, blinking his eyes slowly, which brought out his newt-likeness.

“He means she’s the early bird,” Perry said helpfully.

“That’s the truth,” Mr. Diggler said. “I’m afraid she means trouble, too.” He glanced at us, as if he was worried about us overhearing.

“You can speak plainly,” Uncle Hedge told him. “Ms Peckworthy isn’t anyone’s secret.”

“She had drawn up…papers of some sort,” Mr. Diggler said, “which only had to be certified somehow by social services, and…” He noticed then that there was a woman’s handbag lying on a chair. The office window looked out onto the parking lot, and we could see Ms Peckworthy still sitting in her car. Then the car door swung open, and she climbed out again.

“Someone run it on out to her,” Uncle Hedge said.

Perry started to pick up the handbag, but Brendan said, “I’ll do it,” and he pushed Perry aside, snatched up the bag, and went out through the door running. After a moment—a long moment—we saw him crossing the parking lot. Ms Peckworthy poked her head forward like a surprised pigeon when she saw him rushing at her, but then she must have seen her handbag, because she stepped forward and took it from Brendan, and the excitement was over.

When Brendan came back in there was something in his face that made me wonder, although it wasn’t until later, when we got home and were getting ready to go to the airport, that he pulled Ms Peckworthy’s notebook out from under his sweater. He looked triumphant. He hadn’t had to lie in wait for her at all, but had taken the notebook right out of her handbag before he got to the parking lot. I reminded him that we had voted against stealing the notebook, and that I had been against it from the start, and that stealing it was wrong.

“Dry up, Perkins,” Brendan told me unpleasantly. “If you don’t like it, don’t look at it.” He decided not to let Perry look at it either. He said he was going down to the sea cave that very moment to look at it himself, and to burn it. A half hour later, when he returned, he wouldn’t tell Perry or me what actually
was
in the notebook, but said he would die with the secret safe in his head, even if he was tortured, and so I said the sooner the better, although later I felt bad about saying it. I also felt bad, in a small way, that I very much wanted to know what was in the notebook, and also that part of me was
glad
that Brendan had stolen it and burned it.

As you can imagine, we were in a sweat to leave for the airport because of what Mr. Diggler had said about the papers. Time was passing like a tortoise or a sloth, both of which are slow, and so we spent it up in the attic, watching through the gable window for Ms Peckworthy’s car to turn up into the neighborhood. The notebook might be a heap of ashes now, but we still weren’t easy about it, because Perry pointed out that the notebook wasn’t really evidence of anything, but only a record of the evidence. Brendan said that she would never take him alive, and that he had an escape route down the bluffs to his “hideout,” by which he meant the lighthouse. He thought that the unlocked window was a secret that only he knew about. Our suitcases already lay in the trunk of the Zeuglodon along with the Mermaid in her box, and I was itching to be in the back seat watching the scenery fly past.

Uncle Hedge came home at last, laden with supplies for the long flight ahead, and so we hurried back down to the livingroom. He carried the missing maps from the Peach journals along with the rest. They were bound up in a lead box that he had dipped in wax in case they had to be thrown overboard to sink into the ocean if we were betrayed. Uncle Hedge had cleverly hidden a radio locater inside the box so that they could be found again. We locked up the house and set out, Hasbro included, and drove on down to the airport at Little River, carrying doughnuts and cocoa in a thermos and a basket lunch, because you really can’t eat airplane food and be happy about it. There was no sign of Ms Peckworthy, and that was the best part of all, but I knew that I wouldn’t stop being nervous about her until we were in the air. One thing we found out at the airport was that Lala Peach had booked a flight into San Francisco the very morning that she stole the key and ran for it, although of course she never got a chance to use the ticket. From San Francisco she was booked into Manchester, England. She hadn’t come out to “visit” at all. Just like the Creeper, she had come out merely to steal the key. She had been better than the Creeper at stealing it, although not so good at getting away.

It was a beautiful sunny day, with just a few floating clouds, and the salty ocean wind smelling like freedom when we walked out onto the tarmac toward the plane.
The Creeper’s car was gone, and the parking lot of the airport was nearly deserted except for the Zeuglodon, which Mr. Vegeley would pick up later in the day, and then drive it home and lock it in the garage. In no time at all we found ourselves taxiing down the runway, picking up speed, and finally angling up into the air, the buildings below dwindling in size.

I had just settled back in my seat when Perry said, “There she comes! The worthy Ms Peck!” He was pointing out the window toward the ground, so we crowded around to look. Sure enough, Ms Peckworthy’s red car, looking like a toy car now, was just then pulling into the airport parking lot. For one bad moment I thought that she would still be able to stop us—that the pilot would put on the brakes, or whatever you put on when you’re flying, and we would fall into her clutches after all. But that didn’t happen. Ms Peckworthy got out of her car, tiny as a bug, and stood there looking up at us as until we disappeared into a cloud. When we came out into blue sky again, she was lost behind us, and there was nothing but the tree-covered mountains of the Coast Range below and the shimmering ocean away on the right.