Penny Dreadful (9 page)

“How about this,” Delia said, turning to Dirk. “Why don’t we just put our bags in the upstairs apartment for now, and then drive into town for an early dinner? While we’re there we can find Donsky and Donsky, Esquires. I’m sure
they
can explain all of this.”

“Sounds fine to me,” said Dirk. “I’m starving. Though I didn’t see much in the way of fine dining downtown.”

Luella, her eyes fixed firmly on Penelope, piped up.
“
You
might like the fried chicken at the Junction Lunch.”

“Thanks,” said Penelope, whose mouth appeared to be working at last. “I love fried chicken. It’s my favorite.” (Which was true at that very minute, though it never had been before.)

Luella smiled brightly and added, “Hey! Mine too! I wonder what else we have in common.”

Penelope stared at her feet happily. All things considered, this was going well.

As they all trooped up the stairs to the second floor of the main house, Penelope whispered to Luella, “Don’t tell my mom, but I think you’re right about my name. Penelope Grey sounds like someone who wears a fox fur with a face.”

“Exactly!” said Luella loudly. Then she confided, “If you want to know the truth,
I
changed
my
name when I was five. There were already too many Emilys in my kindergarten class. Me, an
Emily
!” Then Luella turned and stomped down the stairs.

S
ETTLING AND
U
NSETTLING

T
he first thing Penelope noticed about the apartment, after setting down her little suitcase in the big open living room beyond the door, was that it felt like a tree house. High up and full of windows, it looked out onto a sea of green willow trees and out over the thick lush landscape and the mountains beyond. But this was no ordinary tree house! It was a tree house furnished with faded Persian carpets and Chinese screens, leather ottomans and dusty copper tables, Navaho beaded slippers hung on doorknobs, and huge Greek-looking statues serving as coatracks. And everywhere—covering every wall—were posters and pictures from places all over the world, in languages Penelope couldn’t even identify.

The Chinese screens were cracked and the carpets were threadbare, the leather was dried and the copper was tarnished, but none of that mattered in the least. It
was the most interesting place Penelope had ever seen. She moved slowly around the big open living room, examining and touching each object. She was so absorbed that she barely registered her mother’s voice a few feet away, bemoaning each crack, each chip, the missing crystals in a chandelier. Penelope’s fingers grazed every surface, and she wondered how on earth all of these things had gotten here.

After a while Delia and Dirk moved on to another room, and Penelope found herself sitting on the floor beside a wooden crate. The side of the crate was stamped with the word
PEACHES
, but inside it were stacks of magazines and pamphlets so old that they crumbled at Penelope’s touch. Still, she couldn’t resist them. Gingerly she pulled a pile from the crate and laid them in her lap for a closer look. They weren’t just old, they were ancient!
Black Bess
, one was called.
Varney the Vampire
, read another. According to the dates on each magazine, they were more than a century old! This place was almost like a museum.

Penelope opened one up as gently as possible. When she did, she found that it was nearly unreadable, eaten by moths and mice and many years.
That’s too bad
, she
thought, closing the magazine again to gaze at the picture on the front.

Just then Dirk came back into the room. “What have we here?” he asked, crouching down beside Penelope and peering over her shoulder.

“Just some magazines I found,” said Penelope. “They’re neat. They’re old.”

“Well, would you look at that!” exclaimed Dirk. “Real honest-to-gosh penny dreadfuls! I’ve never actually seen one before.”

“Penny dreadfuls?” asked Penelope.

“Sure,” said Dirk. “That’s what you call magazines like this. They’re, like, the very first comic books. Cheap old action stories. Chock-full of excitement and mystery. Thrills on every page, though not exactly what you’d call great literature. But they’re neat, aren’t they?”

Penelope looked at the crumbling magazine in her lap and thought about that.
Full of excitement and mystery
sounded awfully nice to her. “They really are,” she said.

Dirk stood up again. “Too bad these are in such bad shape. Or they might be worth a
pretty penny
. Ha! Get it?”

Penelope groaned at the terrible joke. Then she set the magazines back in the crate and stood up herself, brushing the bits of crumbled paper from her lap.
“Penny,” she murmured, liking the word on her tongue. “
Penny,
” she repeated. “I wonder—”

“Wonder what, kiddo?” asked Dirk.

“I wonder if I could be Penny from now on, instead of Penelope. Like a nickname. Do you think Mother would mind?”

Dirk thought about this a second before he said, “You know, I don’t see why not. We’ve got a new start here, a new town, a new life. Might as well try on a new name, eh?”

Penny nodded happily.

“Heck, maybe I’ll change my name too—to Varney!” He bared his teeth and hissed at Penny.

Penny laughed. “Don’t be silly, Daddy.”

Then she mouthed the name to herself, testing it out. “Penny,” she said. “Penny, Penny, Penny.” She turned to Dirk and waved. “Hey there, my name’s
Penny
. Nice to meet you!”

“Well, hello there, Penny!” said Dirk, waving back.

Penny laughed. The name felt easy. It was light and fun and cheerful and—right.

Then her father shot her a concerned glance. “Say,” he added, “you aren’t doing this just because that Luella girl made you feel bad about being a Penelope, are you? I’d hate to think that. It’s a perfectly fine name, you know—”

“No,” said Penelope, who was already feeling rather
like a Penny. “No, she gave me the idea, but really—I
want
to do this. I really do.”

“In that case, I think it’s a fine idea,
Penny.
” Dirk whispered with a wink, “To tell you the truth,
I
wanted to name you Harold. Shows what
I
know.”

Penny giggled and rolled her eyes.

“Now what?” she asked her father.

“I don’t know, Penny,” said Dirk. “I guess we go inform your mother of this big decision, and then hopefully we can
eat
something. Fried chicken sounds great right about now, don’t you think?”

Penny did.

“Then let’s see if we can pry your mother out of the linen closet. Delia!” he called, striding from the room.

A few minutes later the Greys were all piling into Dijon and heading back down the gravel drive and out to the winding road, in search of nourishment.

Luckily, the fried chicken at the Junction Lunch was every bit as good as Luella had said it would be. Better still, they soon discovered that in a town the size of Thrush Junction, a café waitress can be a very reliable source of family history, local lore, gossip, and community goings-on. The Greys were licking their greasy fingers and gorging themselves when their friendly waitress pulled up a chair and joined them for lunch.

“I’m Kay!” she said, setting down her own sandwich. “And since we’re the only ones here, I thought I’d be neighborly and join you for lunch.” She took a big slurp of her soda. “What brings you folks through Thrush Junction? We don’t see many tourists, if you want to know the truth.”

“Oh, we’re not tourists,” said Delia. “We’re—new. We’ve inherited an old house here and—”

“Well, I’ll
be,
” said Kay, smacking the table joyfully. “You must be the new Dewberry folks! I’m so glad to meet you. I was friends with your aunt Betty.”

Delia smiled hesitantly. “Yes—yes. I guess that
is
who we are. The
Dewberry folks
. Only we aren’t called Dewberry. I’m Delia Grey, and this is my husband, Dirk.…”

Dirk waved a chicken leg in the air. His mouth was full.

“And who’re you?” Kay asked Penelope directly.

“I’m Penny,” said Penny, smiling a little nervously. “Penny Grey.” Delia seemed barely to notice.

“So glad you’re here,” said Kay. “Truly a delight. How’re you all settling in?”

“Well,” said Delia, “we’re a little baffled, if you want to know the truth. We thought we were inheriting a house, but the house seems to be full of people already. It’s rather an odd situation.”

“Oh,
that
!” laughed Kay. “Let me give you the skinny.”

So while the Greys finished their lunch, the waitress explained matter-of-factly that while Delia had indeed inherited the house, she had also inherited a number of tenants.

“Tenants?” asked Delia.

“Well, maybe
tenants
isn’t quite the right word,” considered Kay. “Usually tenants pay rent. Right?”

“I think that’s the way it works,” said Dirk through a mouthful of homemade cinnamon applesauce. “Why wouldn’t these people pay rent?”

Kay laughed. “Well, see,” she said, “Old Betty—your aunt—”

“Great-great-aunt,” sighed Delia, “though I never met her.”

“Crying shame,” said Kay. “She was a neat old gal. Always in the middle of everything here in Thrush Junction. She was a mover and a shaker, Betty was. Always busy. She ran off to see the world when she was a young thing, before I was born. But in her later years she was more of a homebody. Town mayor when I was small. Then she raised llamas, but she never had kids. Said she liked borrowing them from other people, but liked returning them even better.”

Dirk laughed.

“That was fine, of course,” continued Kay. “Only, while she was gone on her adventures, the rest of the Dewberry clan moved away, off to other parts. Betty got really lonely after your uncle Fred died, with no other kin to speak of. She just rattled around in that big house, talking to herself and her llamas. Eventually she invited Betty Jones to move to town and into her basement apartment. They’d been friends long before, years back.”

“That’s a charitable thing to do,” said Delia, nodding in an understanding way, “to take in an old friend.”

“Not sure Betty saw it as a particularly charitable thing,” Kay said. “I think she’d have called it friendship, plain and simple. Not to mention that Down-Betty more than earned her keep, working the garden and helping with the meals. But even after that your aunt was still lonely, so she invited the Gulsons—Abigail and Rich, and later on they had Beatrice and Luella—to take over the first floor. She moved into the upstairs and gave them the bigger space. Said they needed room for a studio. They both paint, the Gulsons. Art when they can, and houses when they have to. Interesting folks. You’ll like having them as neighbors, though Rich is away right now, I think. Working on some kind of a big mural somewhere. One of them
always
seems to be out of town!
Being an artist isn’t as easy as you might imagine. But Luella is almost always around.”

“Yes, we met Luella,” said Delia.

“Spirited gal,” added Kay with a wink.

“
I’ll
say,” said Dirk.

“So
then
what happened?” asked Penny.

“Oh, not much. Betty was finally satisfied. She liked it well enough, having them all there, but she was running out of room. Then, after a few years, Down-Betty Jones moved out of the basement and built herself the Grape Shed—that’s what she calls her little purple house—and that gave your aunt an idea.

“From then on she just offered a place to anyone who wanted to come live with her—said they could build on like Down-Betty had done. And people came and gave her company for all her various schemes and adventures—her treasure hunting and her llama raising and her beer brewing.”

“Treasure hunting?” asked Penny with interest.

“Beer brewing?” asked Dirk in much the same tone.

Kay didn’t seem to have heard either of them. “For the last decade or so all these different sorts of folks have just come and gone as they’ve needed to and helped out in whatever way they could, bartering work for a place to stay. Which is often how things work here in Thrush
Junction. People do what they can and share what they have.”