Odds Are Good (6 page)

Her mother snorted. “The day we can afford a housekeeper, he or she takes on some of
my
work first.”

“Then who did this to me?” asked Jamie.

Her mother looked at her oddly. “You are the strangest child,” she said at last. “But thanks anyway.”

Before Jamie could reply, Mrs. Carhart turned and left. Jamie growled and stabbed a long metal tool through the little clay man she had been making. She knew what her mother was thinking. She was thinking that she, Jamie, had cleaned up the room but was too embarrassed to admit it. She was also thinking that if she pushed the issue Jamie would never do it again. Which meant that when Jamie claimed she had nothing to do with this . . . this
catastrophe
, her mother would simply think that she was playing an odd game, and the more she tried to convince her otherwise, the more Mrs. Carhart would be convinced that she was right in her assumption. Jamie groaned. It was hopeless.

Of course, the other possibility was that her mother was lying and really had hired someone to clean the room. Jamie considered the idea. “Unlikely,” she said out loud.

But what other explanation was there? Some demented prowler who broke into people's houses to clean rooms when no one was at home? Jamie glanced around nervously, then shook her head.

 

Dinner that night was interesting. Mrs. Carhart had clearly warned Mr. Carhart that he was not to make a big deal over the clean room for fear that Jamie would never do it again.

By the time the meal was over, Jamie wanted to scream.

By the time the night was over, she
did
scream. “I just want you to know that I am
not
responsible for this!” she bellowed, standing at the top of the stairs. “I had nothing to do with it!”

She heard her father chuckle.

Furious, she returned to her room, slamming the door behind her. When she undressed for bed she tore off her clothes and scattered them about the floor. Once she was in her nightgown she went to the door, opened it a crack, and yelled “Good night!”

Then she slammed it shut and climbed between the sheets.

 

When Jamie got home the next afternoon, yesterday's clothes (which she had studiously avoided touching that morning) had disappeared from her floor. Her clay-working tools were lined up in an orderly fashion on her desk. The bits of clay that she had left around had been gathered together and rolled into a ball.

The cat was curled up in the middle of her bed, sleeping peacefully.

“Did you do this?” she asked, looking at him suspiciously. She was perfectly aware of what a stupid question it was. On the other hand, when things got this weird, stupid questions began to make sense.

Mr. Bumpo blinked at her, but said nothing. She reached out to stroke him and realized that his fur, which normally had a number of tangles and knots, was perfectly groomed.

“This is creepy,” she said. “And I don't like it.” She tossed her backpack on the bed and began to search the room for some clue or sign as to who might have done this. Under her bed she found only that the rapidly breeding colony of dust bunnies had become extinct. She checked her closet next, where she saw something she had not laid eyes on in over three years: the floor. When she looked in her dresser she found that every item of clothing had been neatly folded. This was even worse than it had been the day before!

What she did not find was any sign of who had done this terrible thing to her.

She sat on the edge of her bed for a long time, stroking Mr. Bumpo and listening to him purr. Finally she decided to go back to her clay working. Remembering a sketch for a new project she had made during math class, she overturned her pack and emptied it on the bed. Out tumbled a mixture of books, crumpled papers, pens and pencils in various stages of usefulness, candy wrappers, rubber bands, sparkly rocks she had picked up on the way to and from school, three crayons stuck together with a piece of used chewing gum, and a moldy sandwich.

Jamie dug her way through the mound of stuff until she found the sketch. She carried it to her desk and smoothed it out, then picked up the ball of clay and began to work. After about half an hour she decided to go get a snack.

When she got up from her desk and turned around she let out a yelp of astonishment.

Her bed was perfectly clean! The mess she had dumped onto it had been organized and tidied into meek submission. The crumpled papers had vanished, the pencils were lined up in a tidy row, the crayons unstuck, the gum that held them together mysteriously gone. Even the backpack's straps had been neatly folded beneath it.

“What is going on here?” she cried.

The only answer was a yawn from Mr. Bumpo.

Goose bumps prickling over her arms, Jamie wondered if she should run for her life. But nothing about what was happening was threatening. It was just . . .
weird.

She stared at her bed for a while, then made a decision. Stomping over to it, she snatched up the neat piles and tossed them into the air. Mr. Bumpo yowled in alarm, bolted from the bed, and ran out of the room. Jamie stirred the mess around a bit more, rumpled the bedcovers for good measure, then went back to her desk and picked up her tools. She pretended to work. What she was really doing was trying to look over her shoulder while bending her neck as little as possible.

For several minutes nothing happened except that her neck got sore. In a way, she was glad nothing happened; part of her had been afraid of what she might see. Eventually the pain in her neck got to be too much, and she was forced to straighten her head. When she turned back she saw a brown blur out of the corner of her eye.

“Gotcha!” she cried, leaping to her feet.

But whatever it was had disappeared.

Jamie stood still for a moment, wondering what had happened.
Under the bed!
she thought suddenly.

Dropping to her knees, she crept to the bed and lifted the edge of the spread. All she saw was clean floor, and a ripple of movement at the other side of the spread. Whatever had been there had escaped.

“That little stinker is fast,” Jamie muttered, getting to her feet. She stared at the bed, which was still a mess, and made a decision. Leaving the room, she headed for the kitchen.

 

When Jamie returned to her room the bed had been remade and the things from her pack were in perfect order. This did not surprise her.

She went to the far side of the bed, the side from which whatever-it-was had disappeared. She opened the bottle of molasses she had taken from the kitchen, then poured a thick line of the sticky goo the length of the bed, about a foot from the edge. Replacing the lid, she once again messed up everything on top of the bed. Then she returned to her desk.

It wasn't long before she heard a tiny voice cry, “What have you done, what have you done?”

Turning, she saw a manlike creature about a foot-and-a-half tall. He was jumping up and down beside her bed. Covered with brown fur, he looked like a tiny, potbellied version of Bigfoot. The main differences were a long tail and a generally more human face.

“Wretched girl!” cried the creature, shaking a hazelnut-sized fist at her. “What's the matter wi' you?”

“What's the matter with
you?
” she replied. “Sneaking into a person's room and cleaning it up when you're not invited is perverted.”

“I was too invited,” snapped the creature. Sitting down, he flicked his tail out of the way and began licking molasses from the bottom of his right foot.

“What a liar you are!” said Jamie.

“What a Messy Carruthers you are!” replied the creature. “And you don't know everything, miss. I was sent here by one of your blood. That counts as invitation if she is close enough—which she is.”

Jamie scowled, then her eyes opened wide. “My grandmother!” she exclaimed. “
She
sent you, didn't she?”

“That she did, and I can see why, too. Really, this place is quite pathetic. I don't understand why you wouldn't welcome having someone clean it up. I should think you'd be grateful.”

“This is my room, and I liked it the way it was,” said Jamie.

This was not entirely true. Jamie did sometimes wish that the place was clean. But she felt that she couldn't admit that without losing the argument altogether. Besides, she mostly did like it her way; and she most certainly did
not
like having someone clean it without her permission. She felt as if she had been robbed or something. “What are you, anyway?” she asked, by way of changing the topic.

The creature rolled his eyes, as if he couldn't believe her stupidity. “I'm a brownie,” he said. “As any fool can plainly see.”

“Brownies don't exist.”

“Rude!” cried the creature. “Rude, rude, rude! Your grandmother warned me about that. ‘She's a rude girl,' she said. And she was right.”

“I think it was rude of my grandmother to talk about me like that in front of a complete stranger,” replied Jamie.

“I'm not a complete stranger. I've been the MacDougal family brownie for nearly three hundred years.”

“That shows what you know!” said Jamie. “I'm not a MacDougal, I'm a Carhart.”

“Aye, and what was your mother's name before she was married?”

“Chase,” said Jamie smugly.

“And her mother's name?”

Jamie's sense of certainty began to fade. “I don't have the slightest idea,” she said irritably.

“Rude, and irreverent as well! No sense of family, have you girl? Well I'll tell you what you should have known all along. Your grandmother's maiden name was MacDougal—Harriet Hortense MacDougal, to be precise.”

“What has that got to do with me?” asked Jamie.

“Everything,” said the brownie. Having finished licking the molasses from his feet, he scooted over to her desk. Moving so fast she barely had time to flinch, he climbed the desk leg and positioned himself in front of her, which made them face-to-face (though his face was barely the size of her fist). “The last of your family in the old country died last year, leaving me without a family to tend to. Your grandmother, bless her heart, came to close up the house. There she found me, moaning and mournful. ‘Why brownie,' she says (she being smart enough to know what I am, unlike some I could mention), ‘Why brownie, whatever is the matter with you?'

“‘My family is all gone,' I told her. ‘And now I've naught to care for, so I shall soon fade away.'

“Well, right off your grandmother says, ‘Oh, the family is not all gone. I've a daughter in the States, and
she
has a daughter who could more than use your services.”'

“Thanks, Gramma,” muttered Jamie.

“I wasn't much interested in coming to this barbarian wilderness,” said the brownie, ignoring the interruption. “But things being what they were, I didn't have much choice. So here I am, much to your good fortune.”

Jamie wondered for a moment why Gramma Hattie had sent the brownie to her instead of to her mother. It didn't take her long to figure out the answer. Jamie's mother would have been as happy to have someone clean her house as Jamie was annoyed by having her room invaded. Gramma Hattie would never have wanted to do anything that pleasant.

“What will it take to get you to leave me alone?” she asked.

The brownie began to laugh. “What a silly girl you are!” he cried. “You won't ever be alone again!”

Great
, thought Jamie, rolling her eyes. My
grandmother has sent me an eighteen-inch-high stalker.
Aloud, she asked, “Are you saying I don't have any choice in this?”

“It's a family matter,” replied the brownie. “No one gets to choose when it comes to things like that.”

“But I don't want you here!”

The brownie's lower lip began to quiver and his homely little face puckered into what Jamie's mother called “a booper.”

“You really don't want me?” he asked, sniffing just a bit.

Jamie felt her annoyance begin to melt, until she realized what the brownie was trying to do to her. (It wasn't hard to figure it out, since she tried the same thing on her parents often enough.) “Oh, stop it,” she snapped.

Instantly the brownie's expression changed. Crossing his arms, he sat down on her desk and said, “I'm staying, and that's final.”

“You're going, and I mean it,” replied Jamie. But she realized even as she said it that she had no way to make the threat stick. The smug look on the brownie's face told her that he was well aware of this.

Now what was she going to do? Totally frustrated, she said, “I'm going to tell my mother about you.” She hated talking like that; it made her feel like a little kid. But she couldn't think of anything else.

It didn't make any difference. “She won't believe you,” said the brownie, looking even smugger.

“Wouldn't you like to go to work for her?” pleaded Jamie. “She'd be more than happy to have you.”

The brownie looked wistful. “I would be delighted,” he replied. “But the oldest female in the family has assigned me to you. I have no choice in the matter.”

 

For a day or two Jamie thought she might be able to live with the situation—though with the brownie taking up residence in her closet she made it a point to do her dressing and undressing in the bathroom.

The worst thing was the way her mother smiled whenever she passed the room. Jamie ground her teeth, but said nothing.

By the third day she was getting used to having the room neat and clean. And though she hated to admit it, it was easier to get things done when she didn't have to spend half an hour looking for whatever she needed to start. But just when she was beginning to think that things might work out, the brownie did something unforgivable.

He began to nag.

“Can't you do anything for yourself?” he asked petulantly when she tossed her books on the bed one afternoon after she arrived home from school. “Am I expected to take care of
everything
around here?”