The Great Circus Train Robbery (6 page)

“Three balls, not four yet,” said Zoe before Spencer could open his mouth to object. With Spence coming, she’d decided to leave her juggling balls at home. “But I thought you might be able to use someone to take tickets, or maybe help zip people up when they change costumes.” The zipping had only just occurred to her. The thought of being part of the backstage excitement sent pebbles skipping down her spine.

“We-ell, I’m sure
I
could use some backstage help. My favorite costume is a bit, well, tight, shall we say? And the wardrobe woman is always busy with the aerial girls.” She shrugged. “It’s all those chocolate-coated almonds I’ve been eating—though good for my health, you know—those antioxidants? What would you expect as payment, hon?”

“I’d never ask to be paid!” Zoe cried. “I just want to volunteer. Do you really need help? I’m a good zipper. I zip my mom up in the back whenever she wears her black silk dress to a party.”

“Is that so? And I’ve even trouble with side zippers. So if you don’t mind volunteering, I’d love to have your help. To tell the truth, I was getting worried about making changes since I gained the last thirty pounds. I mean, I’ve started on a diet, but it takes, well, time, hon, you know.”

She glanced at her aunt for confirmation. Ms. Delores rolled her eyes and reached for a chocolate-coated almond out of a blue porcelain dish. She offered the plate to Spence and of course he took two.

“Now thich young man,” said Ms. Delores with her mouth full and crunching, “ish a train buff. He’s researching a paper for a contest on the history of steam trains.”

“Is that so?” Tulip said. “My goodness. What fun!   Why, then you’ve got to meet Hackberry, one of our clowns. Hackberry’s a train lover, too. He’s worked here ever so long—he uses trains in his act. Now  how about a Piña Colada? I make a special one—without alcohol, of course, for you sweet things.” Tulip looked like an indulgent grandmother, although she couldn’t be more than thirty—well maybe forty, Zoe allowed. “The usual?” Tulip asked her aunt, with a wink.

“Oh, I think not, dear, no I’ll be driving these children home,” said Ms. Delores.

They each had a non-alcohol Piña Colada with lots of pineapple juice and several more chocolate-coated almonds, and then Ms. Delores said it was time to go. She was sure the Elwoods and Rileys would expect the young people home.

“Well,  I’m good for another five hours,” Tulip cried. “Night’s my creative time, oh yes!  That’s why if I mess up at all, it’s in the afternoon shows when my blood sugar’s low. Nights, I don’t need that painted smile.  My whole body grins and dances!”  She did a quick soft shoe shuffle; her eyes lit up into green pea pods.

“Well, you’re an artist, dear,” said Ms. Delores. “Ordinary folks like me have to get to bed. Now can you tell this young lady when to meet you next? Where to go, all that? She’ll need some kind of pass, won’t she?”

“Can’t tell you exactly, can I? But I’ll call you. We’ve two shows each day, Saturday and Sunday. At three and again at six. And you, young man, I suppose you’d like to help, too?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Spencer, to Zoe’s surprise. “But I don’t zip or juggle.”

Tulip tossed her head, laughing. Her front teeth looked like a double row of piano keys.

“And I’d like to meet that clown who has the trains,” Spence said.

“Of course! Maybe he could use some help. It’s a chaos backstage, you can’t imagine.” She laughed her belly laugh again and ushered the three visitors out the door and down the narrow trailer steps. She slipped a pile of almonds into Spence’s pocket and gave him a fat wink.

“How do
you
rate?” Zoe asked, and he winked back. She held her hand out after they’d climbed into the back seat of Ms. Delores’ blue Honda. “Share,” she said. “Remember who got you here.”

“Too late,” he said, and grinned at her through chocolate teeth.

Ms. Delores dropped them off in front of Zoe’s house. “I’ll be in touch,” she said. “But how will your parents feel about your helping out?”

“Oh they won’t mind.” Though Zoe wasn’t sure about Spence’s mother. Mrs. Riley had graduated from some fancy music school—music was her whole world. She would never tolerate the honky-tonk circus tunes. Already, circus people struck Zoe as being, well, different. They broke rules. She herself rather liked that, but she suspected that Mrs. Riley wouldn’t.

Ms. Delores was just driving off when Miss Gertie came trotting up. She was waving her arms in excitement. “I’m so glad to see you! I spotted you getting out of the car. I just remembered what else it was I’d seen that night.”

11

ZOE HAS A PLAN

“An animal, I thought at first,” said Miss Gertie. “But then I thought, well, goodness, how could an animal carry a light? So my next thought was…” She hesitated a moment as though she might have forgotten what her next thought was. Zoe held her breath. “A child,” Gertie said finally, “yes, I thought, it’s a child. It was so low to the ground, you see. But what would a child be doing out so late at night? Unless it’s one of those poor homeless ones. A child looking for a train to play with!” she finished triumphantly.

“But if it’s homeless,” said Zoe, “how would it get a track to run the train on? And why the baggage car? Why not that jazzy red-white-and-blue engine?”

“Yeah,” Spence chimed in. “Why take my baggage car right out of the middle of the train?”

Miss Gertie looked blank. “I can’t imagine, dear. Really I can’t. I can only tell you what I thought I saw. It was after midnight, you know. Though I was wearing my glasses. I always put them on when I get up. I’m terribly nearsighted, have been ever since fourth grade. It was one day, you see, when I couldn’t see the blackboard and—”

“Gertie?” Mrs. Riley came running out with an empty soup pot to return to the sisters. “Come on in. I’m rehearsing Beethoven’s Ninth for a recital. Can I try it out on you?”

“Oh, mercy,” said Miss Gertie, “Mercy, I…”

“Miss Gertie has invited Spence and me back to her house,” Zoe interrupted, coming to Gertie’s rescue. The Bagley sisters, she knew, were lovers of swing and blues, not heavy, thundering Beethoven.

“Yes, indeed,” said Miss Gertie, looking relieved. “For hot chocolate. You, too, Elizabeth. If you can break away.”

Mrs. Riley declined—with regrets. The recital, she said, took “hours and hours of practice. And you, young man, have to practice your cello.” She handed the pot to Miss Gertie and headed a reluctant Spence toward the door.

“I’ll find out,” Zoe mouthed, and pointed at Miss Gertie’s retreating back.

“Can you remember anything else?” Zoe asked Miss Gertie when she was settled in the Bagley kitchen with its yellow-and-green-flowered wallpaper, white ruffled curtains, and ceiling hung with dried garlic and basil and a dozen other herbs.

“A short creature with a light is all I can tell you, dear. It was coming from the back of the Riley home and running on down the road. But it does sound like a clue, doesn’t it?”

“With something in its arms? A red baggage car?”

“Something, I think, yes. But I couldn’t tell you what. It was too dark, even with the creature’s light.”

The thought of a homeless child had appeal for Zoe. She wouldn’t feel so bad about the stolen baggage car if the thief was a child who could love and appreciate it.

“But why would that child take that particular car?” Miss Maud asked, as Zoe herself had asked.

“Because it’s red?” Miss Gertie suggested. “The color red is so magical, don’t you think, Maud? It’s the color of fire and royalty and—”

“Blood?” offered Miss Maud, who always had a mystery novel beside her living room chair.

Zoe shuddered. Blood made her think of Mr.  Boomer’s basement. But it couldn’t have been Juniper Boomer who stole the baggage car. He wasn’t short at all—unless of course he was walking on his knees. That was possible, though hard. The more she thought about Boomer on his knees, the more she convinced herself that he was the thief. And that he was the child in that photo: waving at the train that stole away his father and turned little Juniper into an orphan. An orphan who planned revenge. Revenge on—who? What? Someone on the train who hated his father, was abducting him?

And Juniper Boomer was planning to kill that kidnapper and bury him in the basement?

She looked up at the two sisters, who were calmly sipping chocolate, their faces shining like twin moons. “Yes, it might’ve been Boomer,” she said, and she described all the awful possibilities.

“Oh,” Miss Gertie cried. “How clever of you to think of all that! Isn’t she clever, Maud?”

“Very clever indeed,” said Maud. “She was always at the top of the class when I taught her in Branbury Elementary, weren’t you, dear.”

Zoe looked down modestly.  She recalled a few math tests she’d flubbed, but there was no point reminding Miss Maud of that.  She’d gotten by with her father’s help.  “But we have to keep our suspicions a secret, please,” she begged, taking a last sip of hot chocolate.

“A secret, oh absolutely,” Miss Gertie said.

“Absolutely,” Miss Maud repeated, and giggled. “Just among the three of us.”

The phone rang. It was her mother, Zoe figured from the conversation. “It was our fault,” Miss Gertie was saying, “we enticed her over here for hot chocolate. School hasn’t started yet, has it?” Miss Gertie listened to Zoe’s mother a moment, then made a face. “Oh, yes, chores. We all have to do them, don’t we? And you’re working so hard, Sally, in that French school.”

It was the right thing to say. Zoe’s mother loved a sympathetic ear. She loved to tell how hard it was to speak French all summer and do papers and read thick novels en français, and still come home to cook dinner.

“Squash leek soup for you!” Miss Gertie cried. “We’ll send over a gallon with Zoe—you can thaw it for tomorrow’s supper.”

Her mother disliked leeks, Zoe knew, but she carried it home anyway and stuck it in their freezer where it might sit for all eternity behind the frozen broccoli and the brussels sprouts that everyone despised. Then she told her mother she was going to volunteer at the circus and her mother frowned, but her father, who’d just come in from the apple barn, said, “Good for you, kid! I always wanted to run away with the circus when I was your age. I mean, we don’t want Zoe running off, do we, Sally? So we’ll let her volunteer, get it out of her system?”

“You don’t know Zoe’s system,” her mother said. “Things get trapped in her head. She gets a bone and you can’t take it away from her.”

Her father won; her mother’s mind was on a French paper due the next day. “Besides, Mr. Elwood said, “Ms. Delores will be there, right Zoe? And I might go to one of the performances myself. How about it, Kelby?” he hollered into the woodstove pipe that stuck up through the kitchen ceiling and into the hall opposite Kelby’s room. “You and I will take in the Saturday matinee? See those clowns Zoe’s been talking about?”

“See her make a fool of herself?” Kelby’s voice echoed down through the pipe.

“We’ll all go,” Mr. Elwood said. “You, me, and your mother. We’ll munch some of those cotton candy monsters that stick to your nose and drip down the front of your shirt.”

And that settled it. Her mother loved cotton candy. There was no moaning about one more French paper.

Afterward, Zoe called Spence on the upstairs phone to tell him what Miss Gertie had said and to outline her plan for the next morning.

“But I can’t do that! And you know
he
won’t,” Spence said. “We can never make
that
happen!”

“We can,” Zoe said. “We have to. We’ve no time to lose. You don’t want a dead body on your hands, do you?”

THURSDAY

12

A SURPRISE VISIT

Zoe was heading for Spence’s place to carry out her plan. It was a glorious morning: sun glazing the apples a glossy red and the distant mountains a delicate lavender. Her father was on a ladder grafting a Northern Spy twig onto a tree full of Cortlands and then a branch of Red Delicious. It was like a family from three cultures, he teased.

“Or like Siamese triplets attached at the elbow,” Mr. Elwood said, amused at the thought, “and we’d all have to learn to get along.”

“I don’t think so,” said Zoe, put off by the thought of Kelby, forever stuck to her elbow.

“Take some of those drops to your clown lady, why don’t you?” he said. Ms. Delores had called; in a half hour she’d drive them to a rehearsal, where Spence was to meet the train clown.

“Thanks. But I have to get going—got an appointment with Spence.”

“An appointment, is it? You’re a busy young lady.”

“Who’s a lady?” she said, echoing her feminist mother, who refused to wear lipstick but still peered in the mirror quite a lot to tease her hair into place. She crammed a dozen dropped greenings, good for pie or applesauce, into a bag, and ran through the row of poplar trees that divided their land from the Rileys’.

She stopped short—in shock. There stood Boomer in the underbrush at the far edge of the Rileys’ property, gazing at the train as it wound around the track. Spence popped up from behind a bush and nudged her. “Don’t stare. He’s been there six minutes already.”

“Good work,” she whispered.  For this had been the plan. To lure Boomer over to the gazebo, observe his expression, and ask a few casual questions. Then try to get him to let her and Spence into his house.

“Dad called to invite him over,” Spence said. “But Boomer said he had work to do.”

“Dirty work.”

“Maybe. Anyway, he’s here.”

“I’ll go speak to him then.”

“No—wait. I’ve got an idea.” Spence sauntered over to the gazebo and placed a small twig on the track. The engine rushed toward the twig—and fell on its side. The coal car struck the twig and it, too, collapsed onto the wooden floor. “Oh, noooo-ooo,” Spence cried, pretending panic. He pressed the off switch and banged his head on the floor boards.

“You’re overdoing it,” Zoe whispered, but of course he couldn’t hear.

“You can’t treat a train like that!” Boomer hollered. He stomped toward Spence in his shiny black boots. “It’s an antique. You got to keep the track clean.” He was limping; he was dragging his left leg. Had he banged up his knee when he came to steal the baggage car?