Aunt Maria (11 page)

“There seems to be an alert out,” Chris said. “I wonder if Aunt Maria knows what you found. Oh, Lord! Here comes Mr. Phelps now. Let's go down on the sand and wait for some peace.”

Mad Mr. Phelps strode past us swinging his walking stick. “Morning, Christian,” he said, taking no notice of me.

“Morning,” Chris said, rather grudgingly over his shoulder, as he scrambled down on to the beach. The tide was out a long way. Chris ran toward the sea, floundering and crunching in the banks of pebbles, and then sprinting on the flat brown sand beyond, setting spurts of water flying. When I caught him up, he was sitting on a rock watching the waves roll seaweed about, panting. He was awfully pleased with himself. “Good,” he said. “Phelps knows I found something at last.”

“How does he?” I said. “Why should he? Besides,
I
found my story, not you.”

“Throw stones,” said Chris. “Look casual. We mustn't look as if we're talking about anything important.”

I threw stones. It was too cold in the wind not to keep moving about. But I was annoyed at Chris for being so pleased and mysterious. “Tell me,” I said, “or I may throw stones at you.”

“He says, ‘Good morning,'” Chris said. “I say, ‘Morning,' if I've got something. If I say, ‘
Good
morning,' it means I've got
it
. We arranged it the day Miss Phelps fell down.”

“What's
it
?” I said. “What's it all about?”

“The thing the ghost is looking for, of course,” said Chris. “He needs it. It contains most of Antony Green's power, and Mr. Phelps is the last one left now. He's got a right to it. He was Antony Green's second in command before they did for Antony Green.”

“
Who
did for Antony Green?” I said.

“The same people who did for Dad. Obviously,” Chris said. He began to ramble along the sand, throwing stones into the sea. The wind was nothing like as strong as it had been that first day, but it was still hard to hear him. I thought he said, “Mrs. Urs,” as he went.

I ran after him. “Mr. Phelps is awfully mad,” I said.

“I knew you wouldn't understand,” Chris said. “Being female puts you automatically on the other side.”

That really annoyed me. “No, it doesn't. I'm neutral like Miss Phelps,” I said. “And I want to know. Or are you being mysterious about nothing?”

We went rambling and wrangling along beside the waves until our feet were crusty with wet sand. Chris kept squirting out bits of explanation, the way he had talked about the ghost, in jerks. I think he was scared
and
ashamed of thinking some of the things he was thinking, too. He rather thought Mr. Phelps was mad. “He's a fitness freak,” he said. “He does judo as well as that sword stuff. When he comes along the front, he's coming back from swimming. In all weathers. He says it's the way he stays above the common herd.” Worse than Dad.

“Yes, but,” I said, “what has my story in the garden shed to do with Mr. Phelps and Antony Green and the ghost?”

“It proves Dad did see Aunt Maria, probably. Right?” said Chris. “Now Dad is a native of Cranbury, remember. He'd know the whole story of Antony Green, and he'd know what the ghost was looking for. Suppose he came and stayed with Aunt Maria. Lavinia would be in the room you and Mum have, so Dad would have the room I'm in, wouldn't he?”

“So it
is
Dad's ghost!” I cried out.

“No, it isn't, you fool!” said Chris. And he went running away on top of his own reflection shining down in the wet sand. I couldn't make him stop for ages. But at last he stood still and said unfairly, “Have you calmed down? Right. Then suppose Dad saw the ghost and looked for what it was looking for and found it. What would he do then? It's valuable, remember, and he wouldn't want Aunt Maria to know he'd found it.”

We stood facing one another on top of our reflections, with the wind clapping our anoraks. Chris looked deadly serious. It was the way Mr. Phelps looked holding his sword.
He's
mad now! I thought. I said, “He'd hide it in that place in the car where I put my story. But he had to take my story out to make room for it and hide that. Chris, what happened then?”

“Somebody found out,” Chris said. He went running off again, calling over his shoulder, “Did our car fall off the cliff? Did it? Whee!”

I stood there. I thought,
I'm
mad, too. That blue car. I ran after Chris. “Chris! I met the car again outside the drugstore. Let's go and buy flea powder.”

“Let's,” said Chris. “I can pick the back lock. I got good at it.”

But we didn't find the car, not outside the drugstore or anywhere else we looked. It's just dawned on me where we
should
have looked—in the station car park where we saw it first. We'd better look there tomorrow—though I still think everyone's mad.

W
e found the car. I don't know how to write about all this. It's so strange. I had to go upstairs and write it while Aunt Maria waits for the Mrs. Urs to come calling. Mum has gone out. She said it was only fair, after she let me and Chris go off two mornings running. So I have left Chris being talked to by Aunt Maria. It's quite a risk. I know he'll say something again. I'll go down and pretend to get out the cake when I hear the row start. But I just have to get this down.

The flea powder makes me sneeze, but it seems to have worked. Today Chris insisted he needed me to go out with him again. He had thought of the station car park, too.

Aunt Maria made her low reproachful noise. “I see so few people these days. Are you sure Naomi isn't avoiding me, Betty, dear?”

“Of course not,” said Mum inventively. “I've asked Mig to choose me some new wool at the handicraft shop. I can't trust Chris with colors.”

“Yes, that
is
woman's work,” Aunt Maria agreed. “Dear little Naomi. A little woman.”

So I had to tote a bag of pea green fluffy wool all round Chris's devious route to the station. First we went along the seafront. There was only Hester Bailey and dog today.

“Her small obnoxious cur,” Chris called it. Because there was only Hester Bailey, he would have it that the Mrs. Urs had decided we didn't realize what finding my story meant. I still think that is imagination, about the Mrs. Urs, but I humored Chris. And then Mr. Phelps came striding toward us, tweaking his walking stick smartly and bending into the wind. Chris said, “
Good
morning.”

Mr. Phelps almost missed his step. For a moment I thought he was going to fall over his stick. It faltered in midtweak. But he made it into a nod at me somehow, though he was staring into distance over my head. He has fanatical eyes, as bad as Elaine, the same gray as the sky is today, like two fanatical holes in his head. Then he strode on without a word.

“Chris!” I whispered. “We haven't found the car yet!”

“Yes, but I know it's there,” Chris said. My private feeling suddenly was that the car was bound to be hidden in a locked garage somewhere, but I humored Chris again and we went round and round Cranbury until we got to the vegetable plots I had run through that day we saw the clones and the zombies. We got in by a stile and went up beside the hedge until we could see the roofs of the cars in the car park. Chris made us both sit down, out of sight from the station, to spy out the land. Of course we couldn't see anything from there. We had to get over the fence again and dodge about among the cars, bent over so that the porter in boots wouldn't see us. I felt very silly. I kept wondering why I was so nervous when we weren't doing anything wrong. I jumped when a pebble clanged off my foot onto a car, and expected the porter to come charging out shouting, “Hey, you!”

We never saw him. But we saw the car in the middle of the second row along, between two much shinier, newer ones. We sat down on the gravel beside it, out of sight, in a sort of canyon of car smelling of petrol and tire.

“It
is
ours, surely,” whispered Chris. “That rusty place like a map of Australia.”

“It's got a new door the other side,” I whispered.

“Makes sense,” Chris whispered. “It wouldn't unlock and Dad kicked it half to blazes. Come on. I'm going to get it open.” He went crawling off to the back of it. I lugged the knitting wool after him and squatted watching while he dug away at the hatchback lock with his penknife. I think it was the tensest few minutes either of us had known. Chris was a strange patchy white color by the time the lock gave a tinny
sprung
! and he pulled up the hatch door. That whining sound, with a small
boing
from one side, was so familiar. I knew it was our car just from that noise. I think Chris did, too. He certainly knew the moment he looked inside. He was holding the door down so that it didn't bob up above the car roof, and his face suddenly flooded dark red. He said, “Oh, God. It is our car. That toffee's still stuck to the carpet.” His voice was all on one note.

I looked in. My heart began hitting my throat when I saw the toffee. It had my teethmarks in it and it was all blue hairs from the trunk carpet. But it was the smell most of all. There was no sea smell and no rust smell. Just our dirty-old-car smell. I could tell Chris had come over queer because of that smell.

“It's all right,” I said. “I'll get it.”

I dumped the knitting wool beside the toffee and crawled in, over the backseat where Chris and I had fought since we were tiny, over the egg stain across the hump in the floor, to squeeze between the two grave-stonelike front seats. There was Zenobia Bailey's perfume there on top of the car smell. I took deep breaths like somebody suffocating and reached in under the dashboard to the hiding place. The thing in there felt like a cigar box. By that time I felt as if I was running out of air. I just grabbed it and backed out in a rush.

“Put it in with the wool, and let's go!” Chris hissed at me.

So I jammed the box or whatever in the bag among the pea green wool and backed away. Chris put down the door with the firm thump that usually locked it again. Then we ran. Bent over and gasping, we ran and ran. It was like my mad rush after we saw the clones, only in the opposite direction and trying to hide all the time. I ran out of breath completely when we got to the cow field.

“Where are we going?” I said with what felt like my last gasp. We were behind a hawthorn bush covered with enough bright green buds to hide us.

“That—mound by the—orphanage,” panted Chris. “Mr. Phelps is going to meet us there at twelve. He said—the time was important.”

“Why
there
?” I said.

“Because of Antony Green,” said Chris, and he set off running again.

It was only quarter to twelve when we got to the mound. We went up one of its little muddy paths and sat down to wait at the top. We were in the middle of a lot of these whippy bushes with big pale buds, hidden from the orphanage, where it was all quiet and windless, in a sort of chilly bush.

“Let's have a look at it,” said Chris.

I took the thing out. It was a flattish box, but it wasn't a cigar box. Whatever it was made of wasn't wood, or metal, and it was too warm to be plastic, though it sounded like plastic when I tapped it with my fingernail. Maybe it was bone. It was carved all over in patterns, swirly interlacing pictures that were colored in every shade of green you could ever imagine—gray green, faded yellow green, bright dragon green, all greens, right through to sad dark green that was nearly black. It was wonderful. We sat staring at it. It almost made sense, as if the green pictures were meant to tell you something. I almost knew what, too.

That was when the clones turned up. We looked up to find orphanage kids standing silently all around us, staring at the box as well.

“Pretty,” said the one nearest, when she saw I had seen her.

They gave me quite a shock. They had come so quietly, and they looked so much alike, even close up, in spite of all being different colors and shapes of children, and they didn't move or jig about the way ordinary kids do. Chris muttered things angrily. I don't blame him. They were irritating, standing gooping like that.

“What are you going to do with it?” said another one.