Durinda's Dangers (8 page)

"Come on!" Durinda whispered to all of us with a gesture of her hand.

We hurried to the front stoop and followed Durinda, all of us careful not to touch the Wicket as we slithered around her frozen body and into her home.

The Wicket's and the Petes' homes may both have been small on the outside, but that's all they shared in common. Inside, they were far different. Where the Petes' house had smelled like love and all things wonderful, this place smelled like fruitcake, like all the person who lived in it ever did was make wretched fruitcakes.

And everything about the place was crooked.

The bare floors, without a comforting rug in sight, were slanted. The walls, painted an ugly mud color, came at you at odd angles. Even the pictures on the walls weren't hung straight.

"Come on," Annie said urgently. "We don't have time to stand around here all day just looking!"

"But isn't it fascinating?" Marcia observed.

"I've never been in an evil person's home before," Petal said.

"It is kind of nice," Rebecca added.

"I don't know about nice," Annie said, "although I'll agree it is fascinating in a purely scientific sort of way."

"But we'd better start searching," Durinda finished for Annie, Annie having been distracted like the rest of us by sheer fascination. "We have no idea how long the Wicket will remain frozen in the doorway, and we have a job to do!"

"Where shall we look first?" Jackie asked.

"If the Wicket had a cat," Zinnia said, "I could ask it to tell me where the best place might be."

We ignored her.

"Mommy has her private study," Durinda said, "for doing important things."

"I suspect an evil person might have such a place too," Georgia suggested.

"Only she'd have it in some ugly place," Rebecca added with glee.

"Then we should check the basement," Petal said, fear in her eyes. Petal had a great fear of basements, for that was where all the spiders tended to gather.

But even Petal didn't want to be left upstairs alone with the frozen Wicket, so she followed us as we located the basement door and began our descent down the long and rickety wooden staircase.

We were lucky to have Annie leading us because she kept a cool head about her. It was Annie who noticed that the sixth and seventh steps were missing and cautioned us to be careful as we jumped down from the fifth to the eighth.

"She probably keeps them like that on purpose to trick intruders into breaking their nosy little legs," Rebecca said, as if she would know.

"The sixth and seventh steps," Marcia said. "Six and seven make thirteen, considered by some to be an unlucky number. Do you think it might be symbolic of something?"

"I don't think the Wicket thinks that deeply about things," Jackie said.

At last we were at the bottom of the stairs.

It felt as though it'd taken us forever to get there, but we'd had to be careful in case the Wicket had removed any more steps.

We only had the light from the open doorway at the top of the stairs to guide us, and it was rather dark down there. But then Annie found a cord hanging from the middle of the ceiling and pulled on it. Suddenly, a naked light bulb exposed the room, giving it an eerie yellow glow.

And there before us, looking not at all like Mommy's beautiful workspace, was the Wicket's desk.

It was gray metal, the color of a gun, and all around it was a barbed-wire fence.

It was a good thing we had never listened when Carl the talking refrigerator encouraged us to eat more, for now we were all skinny enough to snake our way through those nasty wires without getting scratched.

"How do you think the human toadstool gets through all of this?" Marcia wondered. "The Wicket's not skinny like we are."

"Her legs aren't long enough to go over it," Jackie said.

"And she can't fit under it," Zinnia added.

"Maybe she knows bad magic," Petal suggested, "and can just make it all disappear whenever she wants to?"

It was a puzzle.

We shrugged and then focused our attention on the more pressing matters at hand.

And there, right on the Wicket's desk, was her diary.

We knew this because the crooked handwritten letters on the front of the book said
My Diary.

"Hurry!" Petal said. "I fear our time is running out ... and I swear I can hear things crawling around down here!"

"Should we steal it?" Rebecca suggested.

'"Fraid not," Annie said. "As soon as the Wicket comes to and finds it missing, she'll know where to look."

"Too bad," Zinnia said. "It would have made a nice souvenir, almost like a present."

"Read it quickly then!" Petal urged Annie, ignoring Zinnia.

"If the entries are dated," Marcia suggested, "maybe you should go straight to the date when she broke into our home."

We had to admit: it was an excellent suggestion.

So that's what Annie did, flipping straight to the correct date in January.

T
ONIGHT
I
BROKE INTO THE
E
IGHTS' HOME AND SEARCHED
L
UCY
H
UIT'S OFFICE.
O
NE OF HER STUPID CHILDREN
—I
CAN NEVER REMEMBER WHICH ONE IS WHICH—HAD LET SLIP THAT SHE WAS WORKING ON SOMETHING TOP SECRET.
E
VERYONE KNOWS ABOUT
L
UCY
H
UIT'S EXPERIMENTS INTO UNLOCKING THE KEY TO ETERNAL LIFE.
I WANT TO LIVE FOREVER! B
UT, ALAS AND ALACK, ALL MY BRILLIANT SCHEMES WERE FRUSTRATED.
T
HE FOLDER WAS EMPTY.
P
ERHAPS ONE OF OUR ENEMIES GOT THERE FIRST?

That was the end of that particular entry.

Annie read us a few more, but they were all the same: the Wicket raving about the empty folder, going on and on about the frustration of it all and "enemies." She really did sound like she might be nuts.

"The Wicket really wants to live forever," Annie said.

"What an awful thought," Jackie said with a shudder, "the idea of the Wicket living forever."

"We'd better get out of here," Durinda reminded us.

Then we placed the book back where we found it, lining up the edges with where they'd been; snaked out through the barbed wire; raced up the stairs—careful to stretch over the missing sixth and seventh steps—and slithered back around the still-frozen Wicket.

Then we ran all the way home.

CHAPTER NINE

What did it all mean?

We wondered.

"Why would the Top Secret folder have been empty before the Wicket even got to it?" Marcia wanted to know. "It doesn't make any sense."

"The Wicket's diary mentioned 'enemies,'" Petal said. "Maybe some other even eviler person snuck in here before she did and cleared out the folder first?"

"But that doesn't make sense either," Marcia said.

"Marcia's right," Jackie said. "The Wicket was watching the house so closely. She knew when we'd be out and she tampered with our car. Surely she would have noticed if someone else were nosing around our house too."

"Top Secret folder that should contain important papers but doesn't, new enemies who may or may not be lurking in the bushes." Zinnia grabbed the sides of her own head. "I feel like my head is going to explode!"

"All that means," Rebecca said, "is that you're not handling all this very well."

"But it doesn't tell us what anything else means," Georgia said.

"Maybe everything just means it's time for me to make dinner now?" Durinda said. "At least Carl is working properly again."

"I'll tell you what it all means," Annie said triumphantly. "It means our mother was—
is
—a bleeding genius!"

"'Bleeding'?" Marcia questioned. "Isn't that a British term? Are you sure we're not? British, I mean."

Annie ignored her.

"What I mean is," Annie said, "just think about it. If Mommy was working on something top secret involving people living forever, she was no doubt smart enough to know that other people, maybe even evil people, would do anything in their power to learn what that secret was. So what did she do? She left an
empty
Top Secret folder
on purpose,
to throw people off the track!"

We were in awe.

Mommy really
was
a genius.

"You're right," Durinda said, breaking our stunned silence. "Mommy's brain should be in the Smithsonian."

"But then," Marcia said, "if everything Annie says is right, then the Wicket isn't any real threat to us. She doesn't know anything, so how could she be? Besides which, if she had any idea where Mommy and Daddy had gone off to, she'd be chasing them because she'd still want to steal Mommy's secret to life. She doesn't know anything!"

"Yea!" Petal said. "We don't have to be afraid of the Wicket anymore!"

"Yea!" Zinnia added. "The Wicket doesn't know any more about anything than we do!"

"I don't care if the Wicket
doesn't
really have any information," Annie said. "You know how her type is: she'll keep messing with our lives and getting in the way. I say we get rid of her."

"You mean kill her?" Rebecca asked.

"She does give me the creeps," Petal said, exchanging her cheers for shudders. "All that barbed wire. People who booby-trap their homes are
not
to be trusted."

"No, not
kill
her," Annie said. "But I do think we should get her out of the way for as long as possible. And I know just how to do it."

***

It had long since turned dark when we approached the Wicket's house again. In the intervening hours, we'd changed out of our school uniforms, eaten a hot meal, and made a run in the Hummer to the supermarket. At the supermarket, it took us a while to find the item we wanted, but now we were armed with exactly what we needed.

This time, instead of hiding while Durinda knocked, we all stood on the Wicket's stoop as a unit. Durinda was at the center, with Annie.

"Yes?" The Wicket answered the door. She eyed Durinda suspiciously. "Didn't you already visit me once recently?"

"Here." Durinda held out our offering before the Wicket could say anything more along those lines.

"What's that?" the Wicket said.

"Don't you recognize it?" Durinda held the heavy dish out farther. "It's a fruitcake. You kindly brought one to us the last time you visited, and we thought we should return the favor."

"Oh, yes," Rebecca said. "We definitely wanted to return it."

We hoped the Wicket didn't notice when Annie kicked Rebecca.

"It's the same fruitcake I gave you?" the Wicket asked.

"Of course not," Annie said, visibly miffed. "We don't believe in re-gifting."

"Of course we know it isn't as nice as yours was," Jackie said, "because we had to buy ours in a store."

"But we hoped you would think," Zinnia said, "that it's the gesture that counts."

At last, the Wicket took the fruitcake from Durinda.

Thank heavens, we thought. Another minute and Durinda would have dropped the heavy thing.

"Aren't you going to invite us in?" Durinda said. "We were hoping to enjoy some of that fruitcake with you."

"You know," Zinnia piped up, "we are neighbors."

"I suppose so," the Wicket said. "I'm not used to sharing my fruitcake." She guarded the dish jealously.

"Of course not," Annie said, as we all slithered past the Wicket and crossed the threshold. "We only want tiny slices. And if you don't want to, you don't even have to give us that."

"My," Georgia said as we all gazed around at the slanted floors without a comforting rug in sight, the ugly mud-colored walls that came at you at odd angles, and the crooked pictures on the walls as though we were seeing it for the first time, "what a lovely home you have here."

"We wish our home were more like this," Rebecca said.

"Fruitcake always makes me so thirsty," Jackie said. "Do you think you might bring us something to drink when you serve us ours?"

"You expect liquid refreshments too?" the Wicket demanded.

Eight heads nodded politely while inside we were thinking her very selfish not to offer us something to drink on her own when we'd gone and bought her such a fine fruitcake.

"What would you like to drink then?" the Wicket asked. "Coffee?"

"No, not
coffee,
" Rebecca said. "We don't drink
coffee.
"

"Of course we don't," Georgia said. "Haven't you noticed we're children?"

"Actually, I do drink coffee," Annie said, "you know, being the oldest. But I think water will be fine for all of us. We wouldn't want to put you out."

"No, we wouldn't want that," Jackie said.

"I'm not even sure if I have eight glasses," the Wicket grumbled under her breath as she headed off toward the kitchen, fruitcake gripped tightly in hand.

If there's one thing we have learned, it's that you shouldn't mutter or grumble under your breath when the people you are mumbling or grumbling about can hear you.

With the Wicket in the next room, we were able to spring into action.

Or, you could say, we were able to spring into talking.