Tea Cups & Tiger Claws (18 page)

And the motor had buttons, a red one and a green one.

He looked at the buttons, at the elevator shaft overhead, at the odd cable. It didn’t make sense. He decided to be brave. With great caution, he lifted one leg over a steel crossbeam, and then the other. Nothing strange but everything strange; who ever heard of a basement without junk? He ducked under a bundle of wires that fed into a nearby electrical panel, and then around a motor. Even mentioning the basement made Miss Railer look like she might blow a gasket. He squeezed between the two sets of giant cables, adding more grease to his clothes, and stood before the buttons. She didn’t care about him. Maybe he needed to look a little closer at the things she did care about.

He pushed the green button.

The motor slowly turned the metal wheel which reeled in the strange cable. After a few seconds a loud grinding sound, like giant rocks grinding together, filled his ears. He looked across the basement, at the wall through which the cable ran, and saw it shaking. Then the grinding noise turned into a deafening rumble and the floor shook violently. He thought about pushing the red button to make it stop. Instead he plugged his ears and watched. Then it moved! The shaking wall, a section about the size of a large door, slowly moved toward him. One foot, two feet, three feet it slid, or rolled, or something. Then it suddenly stopped and all became quiet, except for the furnace, which now seemed like nothing but a whisper.

He
’d done it. He’d found a secret door. He was a good spy.

Time to investigate.
He turned to go out of the shaft the way he’d come in but then a metal arm attached to one of the pulleys slammed loudly to the ground by his foot. He jumped and screamed and knew what it meant. The quiet whine quickly grew to an ear-piercing screech as the motor gained speed and the elevator car raced downward—straight toward his head. He looked at the racing cables. Too risky; if he got snagged by one of the cables he’d be shredded, or decapitated, or something worse. He looked at the height of the motors. The car had to stop before it smashed into them. If he crouched lower than the motors, then maybe it wouldn’t smash into him either. He grabbed his knees and turned himself into a ball. Through the whining roar he heard the rattling elevator car rush his way. Suddenly a great whoosh of wind whipped through his hair. And then silence. He opened his eyes, looked up, and saw the bottom of the elevator not more than a foot from his head.

He q
uickly crawled between the pulleys, around the motor, over the steel crossbeam, and rested in a heap outside the shaft. And then the elevator door slid open and a pair of shiny black shoes jumped onto the ground.

Ernest stood up and saw
Horrick staring at him. That meant bad news because Horrick didn’t let anyone look at his face…except when he got mad and lost his temper. The light from inside the elevator shone eerily and made him look especially creepy. A shiver went down Ernest’s spine.

“You
ain’t even a real relation, boy. Not one ounce of flesh and blood and the boss lady don’t care one bit if you get a thrashin’. And you’re gonna know it real good when I’m done with you.”

“She cares about workers who drink on the job though…I think,” said Ernest.

Horrick stared like a snake. Then he turned to look at the electrical panel and Ernest took the opportunity to slowly back away. No matter what happened, he had to know what hid behind the secret door.

H
e rushed to the opening in the wall, but another block of concrete, about half as tall as the door, partially blocked the way. Then he noticed that it had steps, four going up and four going back down the other side. It was clearly part of the mechanism that opened the secret door but also a path to whatever the secret door hid. Not quite ready to climb the steps, to follow the path, he leaned over the block and shined the flashlight into the opening. He saw a concrete passage, like a tunnel but with straight walls about five feet high, which led down into the earth. It didn’t have any steps but wasn’t so steep that it couldn’t be walked. At the bottom of the tunnel he saw another room. Neato.

The sound of the closing elevator door
snapped Ernest back to attention. Clank, whiz, the elevator sped away, leaving him alone with Horrick, who had something in his hand. Just then the furnace shut off and everything went black. Ernest turned on the flashlight and saw Horrick pointing a long metal rod at him.

“You get away from there boy. It don’t pay to stick your
nose where it don’t belong.”

Ernest
slid to his right, away from the secret opening, and away from Horrick too.

“And quit shining that light at me!”
said Horrick, as he swung the rod at Ernest.

Ernest heard the hiss of the rod
as it just missed his face. He pointed the flashlight at the ground, backed away some more, and watched as Horrick turned around and reached into the electrical panel. A ceiling light turned on. He then took the rod and jabbed it into the elevator shaft by the motor which controlled the secret door. He jabbed a few times before hitting the red button. The motor began letting out cable and, with a mean sounding rumble, the giant block with the steps rolled back down the steep passage. Ernest then heard a clinking noise and saw four heavy chains that attached the giant block to the secret door. As gravity pulled the block down the tunnel, the chains lifted off the ground, snapped tight, and pulled the secret door back into place as well. It was the most keeno, neato thing he’d ever seen.

“What’s down there,
Mr. Horrick?”

“It
’s the old sewer system. That’s all it is.” He took a step toward Ernest. With his back to the wall, Ernest had no place to go, so he stepped to the right, toward the stairway, which he saw out of the corner of his eye.

“But it ain’t a bad place to hide a body ‘cause nobody knows about it but me,” said
Horrick. A little smile crept across his scarred mouth and he again moved closer. When Ernest tried to slide to the right, Horrick Jammed the metal rod into the wall and blocked his way. Ernest eyed the gargoyle with one eye and the path to the stairs with the other.

“And that’s where I’m gonna
throw your dead body if you breathe a word of what you seen down here.”

Ernest knocked
away the rod and made a dash for the stairs.

“You remember that
, boy, and keep your mouth shut, ‘cause nobody will miss you when I throw you down the sewer, not the boss lady, not nobody!”

Sarah liked everything about Sunny Slope Manor. She liked the private ballet lessons in the ballroom from Madame Toussaint, a real live ballerina, and the private tennis and swimming lessons. She liked the way Mr. Perkins, the butler, made the dining room table look perfect, like a painting. And the way Nanny Sally, Veronica’s nanny, said funny Irish words under her breath. She liked the way Aunt Judith turned everything into a party and the way Uncle Bill said, “And how’s my little Sarah today?” And she liked the freedom. Freedom from rules, from chores, from bedtime, from sadness. Freedom from Mother.

When
Sarah had a problem or a hurt of any kind, nobody beat Mom. A single downcast gaze, and she came to the rescue. That’s what she lived for, but she lived too much for it. Instead of taking the bad with the good, like a normal person, she took the bad like a soldier in the Lord’s army and looked suspiciously at the good, certain that it had to be bad also. Aunt Judith didn’t act like that. She liked good times. And when bad times came along she just told someone to make them go away. And then she had a cocktail. Sometimes Sarah wondered why the two sisters couldn’t be just a little bit more alike and then they’d have been practically perfect. Until that happened, Sarah naturally chose the most fun possible. That meant spending as much time at the manor as she and Aunt Judith could finagle, and Aunt Judith knew all about finagling.

O
f all the nice things at Sunny Slope Manor, the thing Sarah liked most, more than the lessons or fancy dinners, even more than the horses, or the collection of stray dogs that Aunt Judith let her keep at the stable, was her cousin Veronica. With Veronica, it felt like Sarah had a real sister instead of just the picture of a dead one on the wall.

Dead sisters have clothes hanging in closet
s, including red velvet dresses they got for their third birthday but never got to wear. They have toys in toy chests and pretty tricycles hanging in garages. They have bronzed baby shoes displayed in cabinets and snipped locks of silky brown hair wrapped in pink ribbon. They have bedrooms that get vacuumed and dusted and locked up tight until their sad mothers come back a week later to do it all over again. But dead sisters don’t ever play with you or tell you secrets or hold your hand. Sarah knew all about it, she had one named Katherine, and the most Sarah ever got was a place on the couch next to her mother, giant photo album draped across their laps, where she looked at pictures of Katherine and listened to stories about her sad little life. And waited for Mom to start crying. In her own small way, Sarah had experienced all the pain of losing a sister but very little of the joy of actually knowing her.

Then came Veronica and that changed.

Before Veronica turned two weeks old, Sarah had made herself official babysitter-in-training, even though she hadn’t yet turned five years old herself. Maybe she wouldn’t have dreamed of such a lofty position if Aunt Judith had hired someone to take care of Veronica on Nanny Sally’s days off. But she hadn’t. Instead, when that first day off rolled around, Aunt Judith called Mom and told her she had to come up to the manor that instant because Veronica wouldn’t stop crying. When Mom asked if she’d fed the baby or changed her diaper, Aunt Judith started yelling and screaming over the phone. Of course Mom went to the rescue, and so did Sarah. Then Aunt Judith talked Mom into babysitting two days a week at the manor and that’s how it all started.

Over the weeks and months that followed,
Sarah eagerly watched her mother and learned how to take care of baby Veronica. She learned how to hold her when she took the bottle, how to hold her when she got fussy, and the secret way to hold her when she wouldn’t stop crying no matter what anybody tried. She learned how to test the heated milk on her wrist, and the bath water on her elbow. She wanted to learn how to pin the diaper but Mom said she wasn’t old enough for that. She said that about a lot of things but Sarah just kept bugging her. After a while she got to do most everything while mom watched nervously.

And in return
Veronica saved her best toothless smiles for Sarah. Maybe that was because Sarah did something for Veronica that the others didn’t: she played with her like a kid. Mom and Nanny Sally knew how to bathe a baby. Sarah knew how to do it like a five year old, splashy and fun. Mom and Nanny Sally put Veronica in the playpen and surrounded her with stuffed animals. Sarah climbed right in with her and made the animals dance and sing and sometimes go crazy. It didn’t take long for Veronica to choose her favorite person in the world. And Sarah felt the same right back.

Almost from the beginning, when
Sarah could barely see over the top of Veronica’s stroller, right up to the time when they started drifting apart, the two girls had a place they liked better than any other, a secret place that belonged only to them: the playhouses at Toomington Hall. Aunt Judith had turned Toomington Hall into Sunny Slope Manor’s guest house—after the duchess died—and had connected the two properties with a long driveway, and a beautiful garden path that ran along the stream and passed right by the playhouses. At first Sarah just liked pushing the stroller down the path, with her mother by her side of course, but when Veronica got a little older they started playing there for real. Eventually the stroller stopped carrying Veronica and started carrying dolls and tea sets and picnic baskets. And dozens of other items that the girls claimed for their houses, including Rufus, Aunt Judith’s Yorkshire terrier, whenever they could get away with sneaking him out of the house. Mom even relaxed a little and let the girls play there on their own—after Aunt Judith installed telephones in the playhouses so Mom could keep tabs on things.

The
signs above the front porches got new names painted on them. One playhouse had Sarah’s name, the other had Veronica’s, and the girls took turns hosting tea parties and luncheons and all manner of pretend soirees. The third playhouse didn’t have a name but Sarah told Veronica all about the name that used to be on it. That’s how Veronica first learned about Aunt Dorthea, only she wasn’t allowed to call her that in front of her mother, or to even talk about her.

Sarah
didn’t mind the age difference between her and Veronica. She had a sister, almost, and that’s all that mattered.

Later on
, after Veronica started getting jealous of the attention that her mother paid to Sarah, and after other sad things happened, Sarah often looked back on those days at the manor and wished she could have them back. For eight years, right up to her thirteenth birthday, it had been a perfect world spinning right there in the palm of her hand and she hadn’t even known it. The manor came into her own back then because in many ways the people came into their own. Uncle Bill, who didn’t act snobby or mean, rubbed off on Aunt Judith. He made her less lofty, like a real person, and sometimes even thoughtful. For a while she became more than just a rich lady in a mansion. And, for her part, Aunt Judith, who lived like a whirlwind more than ever in those days, rubbed off on Mom, sometimes catching her up, turning her perpetual rain cloud if not into rainbows and blue skies then at least into pleasant summer showers. And Mom, the one who took less so that others might have more, the one who chose lowliness so that others might feel elevated, rubbed off on everyone, though nobody ever bothered to notice. Including Sarah.

In some ways it seemed that the end of those wonderful days came about slowly, over months and years, marked by the increasing severity of Veronica’s
jealous moods and bad behavior. In another way it seemed like the end came suddenly, in a second, on the day Uncle Bill died of a heart attack. In reality, it was a combination of both.

Aunt Judith liked to spoil her daughter and her daughter liked to throw temper tantrums.
That’s just the way things worked. The sun shined, the grass grew, and spoiled Veronica threw tantrums. Uncle Bill pleaded with Aunt Judith about it all the time, but she just waved her hand and laughed, or blamed Nanny Sally. Nobody believed that for a second. If anything, Nanny Sally deserved a medal. With flaming red hair fallen around her blotchy face and a white hanky always at hand to dab the perspiration from her forehead, Nanny Sally chased Veronica all over kingdom come. She had the legs of an athlete to prove it. Besides, if Nanny Sally so much as slapped a wrist, Veronica went crying to Aunt Judith and Nanny Sally got in trouble. Mom helped, as best she could, by trying to talk sense with Aunt Judith and by trying to be firm with Veronica, but she was no match for them. That left Sarah. Veronica looked up to Sarah, like any little sister looks up to a big sister, and that helped a little. Sarah also knew how to reason with Veronica better than anyone, and how to distract her. And when those things didn’t work, Sarah picked up her toys and said she didn’t want to play anymore. That simple threat worked for the longest time, until Veronica started school and got a glimpse of the power of her name. When she saw how the other kids, and even the grownups, at Tisdale Academy all but bowed down to her, she didn’t see why everyone shouldn’t do the same, including Cousin Sarah. But Cousin Sarah, almost a teenager by then, didn’t feel like bowing down to anyone.

That
brought eight year old Veronica back to Uncle Bill, her father, the only person left who cared enough, and had strength enough, to pull back the reins when they needed to be pulled back. And he did too. Sarah often saw Veronica stomping around with a red face and bloodshot eyes after one of her failed tantrums. And when Sarah didn’t see the results of Uncle Bill’s firm hand, she heard them—and so did everyone else—as Veronica’s powerful lungs filled the manor with shrieks and screams that sounded like the worst kind of monkey fight. Uncle Bill stood up to Veronica while Sarah and her mom and Nanny Sally secretly cheered in the background. It did everybody good, especially Veronica, whether she knew it or not.

If Uncle Bill had lived just a few years longer,
long enough to see Veronica through the worst part of being Veronica, Sarah knew that things could’ve turned out so much better. But he didn’t. He died just before Veronica’s eleventh birthday. Aunt Judith then began a slow and steady retreat to the liquor cabinet in the first floor sitting room. This left Veronica free to run through Nanny Sally’s flimsy boundaries and, eventually, into the exciting world that lay beyond the stale air of Sunny Slope Manor and the boring ways of Prospect Park.