The Kneebone Boy (14 page)

“Have you been in that tower all day?” Lucia asked Haddie, her voice sounding gaggish from the peanut-marshmallow sludge that was clinging to the roof of her mouth.

“If I say yes, will you want to know why?” Haddie replied.

“Probably.”

Haddie lifted the baseball cap off her head. There was a pink impression low on her forehead where the cap’s adjustable strap had bit into her skin. She slapped the cap back on her head, bill forward, and rubbed her knuckles across the bottom of her chin, considering things.

“What do people
usually
do in a siege tower?” Haddie said finally.

“They watch the enemy for signs of weakness as the army prepares to storm the castle.” Max answered this so
promptly it was as though he’d been waiting forever for someone to ask that very question.

“Give that man a Pixy Stix,” Haddie said.

“A what?” Lucia asked.

“Hold on.” She left then returned a moment later with a handful of colorful straws, one of which she threw at Max like a dart. He caught it in midair. That impressed Haddie and she tossed him another, just to see if he could do it again. He fumbled that one.

“So are you going to storm Kneebone Castle?” Lucia asked.

“Me? Oh, no. I’m just the brains of this operation. I’ll have my brave knights storm the castle for me.”

“But you don’t have any brave knights,” Max pointed out.

“A small glitch. Not to worry,” Haddie replied.

“So who’s the enemy?” Lucia asked as Max tore open one end of the straw, poured a blue powder in his hand, and smelled it. Chester walked across the table to sniff at it too, took a small lick, and sneezed.

“The enemy lives in Kneebone Castle, of course,” Haddie said, her voice taking on the tongue-rolling ye-and-thee-and-thou tone. “The scurvy fiend shall feel the wind of my arrows graze his cheek before the moon wanes full.”

“The moon
waxes
full,” Max corrected.

“Wanes.”

“Waxes.”

“Do you know what happened to Galileo when he said that the earth rotates around the sun?” Haddie asked him sternly.

“He was put under house arrest for the rest of his life,” Max said with perfect certainty.

“Really?” Haddie raised her eyebrows. “I just thought no one ever talked to him again.”

“What did he do to you? The enemy, I mean,” Lucia asked.

Haddie eyed her warily. She popped the last bit of sandwich in her mouth, then scraped a glob of marshmallow cream off her thumb with her teeth. “I’ll tell you when I know you better.”

“But we’ll only be here for a few days,” Lucia protested.

“I’m a fast learner,” Haddie said.

“Was it really dreadful?” Lucia pursued. She sniffed out a noble quest, with revenge at the center, and that was a subject worth pursuing.

“Let’s put it this way,” said Haddie. “I left an air-conditioned apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with a take-out Japanese noodle shop on the corner to come to Snoring-by-the-Sea for the summer.” Haddie looked around at the Hardscrabbles who were staring blankly at her.
“So, yes, it was really dreadful.”

And her face was now pinched into an expression that left them in no doubt that it really was.

Max finished licking the blue stuff off his hand. He stared at the blue stain on his palm for a minute and then
said, “Lucia thinks our mum is dead. I say she’s not.” He looked up at Haddie. “Who do you say is right?”

For an instant Haddie looked gravely alarmed. It was just an instant before the look vanished.

“What does your father say?” she asked, her voice pointedly nonchalant.

“He says she’s gone missing,” Max told her. “He says he’s quite sure we’ll find her someday, but in the meantime we need to carry on with our lives.”

“Carry on with your lives? Oh, good one, Casper!” Haddie snorted, then said, “Sorry. That just popped out.”

“Well, I think he’s right,” Lucia said staunchly. “We
should
carry on with our lives.”

“Of course you should,” Haddie said without any sincerity at all.

“Were you very close with her? What was she like?” Max asked Haddie. His voice was so keen it was nearly breathless.

“Tess and I . . .” Haddie took a deep breath and let it out. “We were like sisters.” She said no more, lost in her own thoughts. But then she realized that all the Hardscrabbles were staring at her, eagerly waiting, so she told them this:

“We lived down the road from each other, you know, back in the States, when we were kids. Tess was three years older but she was an only child so she settled for hanging around with me. She was . . .” She shook her head and her eyes drifted to the corner of the room, just as though Tess Hardscrabble were standing there listening.
“Wherever Tess was, something interesting would happen. I think it was because she wasn’t afraid of anything, so the World just said, ‘All right, kid, what do you think of this?’ and ‘Well, if that was fun, how about
this
?’ Just like it was trying to impress her.

“The two of us used to talk all the time about what we were going to do with our lives. We had so many plans! We were going to explore live volcanoes and train elephants in Indonesia and live with the Inuit for a year and eat whale blubber, and oh, I can’t remember all the things we were going to do. People should have all their big adventures while they’re still under the age of fourteen. If you don’t, you start to lose your passion for big adventures. It just begins to fade away bit by bit and then you forget you ever wanted adventures in the first place . . . it’s criminal the way that happens.” She tore open a Pixy Stix and poured the green powder onto her plate, then drew in it with her pinky. The Hardscrabbles watched snakes and dancing figures and elephants appear on the plate.

“Then, one summer,” Haddie said, “Tess moved to England with her parents and everything interesting in the World went with her. I saw her years later, but by then it was too late. She was already . . .” Haddie studied the pictures on the plate.

“Already what?” Max asked.

Lucia could have kicked him. If he had just stayed quiet, Lucia was certain that Haddie would have kept on talking. Instead Haddie looked up at them, her eyes finally stopping on Otto.

“Well,
you
must remember your mother, Otto,” Haddie said. “You were old enough.”

Lucia and Max turned to Otto. He glared at Haddie and then lowered his chin, as though he were suddenly walking into a strong wind. Lucia watched his hands to see what he would say, but he had tucked them beneath his scarf.

“He doesn’t remember her at all,” Lucia finally answered for him.

“Really? How weird,” Haddie said, still watching Otto with interest. “Are you sure she’s not lurking somewhere”—Haddie reached across the table and touched the middle of Otto’s forehead with her finger—“somewhere in there?”

Otto drew back sharply.

“Well, enough lollygagging.” Haddie stood up and turned her baseball cap wrong side round again. “Off with ye! Go search for the secret passageway, like normal kids.”

“Is there really one?” Lucia asked.

“It said so in the ad, but I suspect they were lying. I haven’t been able to find it. If you can’t find it either, it will officially be a scam and I can ask for a partial refund. So don’t search too hard.” She stood up and tossed the rest of the Pixy Stix to Max. “I’m off to the siege tower again. If you chew on it, you’ll get a sugar clog.” This last part was said to Max, who was watching Haddie strangely again while chewing on the end of the Pixy Stix contemplatively.

“She’s off her trolley,” Otto said when she was gone.

“Maybe,” Max said, working a clog of coagulated sugar
out of the Pixy Stix. “But haven’t you noticed something else about her?”

And then they were right back at the conversation they’d started in the dungeon and had never finished.

“What?” Lucia asked.

Max tapped the Pixy Stix against his hand. “Well . . . haven’t you noticed that she looks an awful lot like someone?”

“Tell us already!” Lucia grabbed the Pixy Stix out of his hand.

“Haven’t you noticed that she looks exactly like Otto?” Max said, grabbing the Pixy Stix back.

Once it was said, Lucia realized that it was perfectly true. Looking at Otto, Lucia instantly saw the lines of Haddie’s face sketched within his own. The pointed cheekbones, the wide upper lip that was thicker than the lower, the high forehead.

“How funny,” she murmured.

Otto, however, did not find it funny. Not at all. Even Chester raised his head as though he could feel a tensing-up in Otto’s muscles.

“So we look alike,” Otto said. “She
is
our aunt, after all.”

“Great-aunt,” Max corrected. “If you believe her story.”

“You don’t?” Lucia asked him, surprised.

“No.”

There was a space of silence.

“Who is she then?” Lucia asked.

“I’m not sure,” Max said. “But I think she may be Mum.”

It was amazing how a person who was so clever about most things could also be so silly about others, thought Lucia. She looked at Otto and rolled her eyes, then waited for him to roll his back at her. But he didn’t.

Lucia turned back to Max and said, “Why would she call herself Haddie Piggit instead of Tess Hardscrabble then?”

“Haddie Piggit
is
Mum’s name,” Max said. “Theresa Haddie Piggit-Campbell. Tess for short, Haddie for middle and Piggit-Campbell is her maiden name. It says so right on our birth certificates.”

“Haddie is probably a family name,” Otto said.

“And anyway, why would she have signed the letter to Dad ‘your loving aunt-in-law, Haddie Piggit’?” Lucia asked.

“Maybe it was a code. In case one of us saw the letter. Maybe she’s been writing to him all along, for years and years.”

“Ridiculous!” Otto said so vehemently that he startled Chester, who jumped out of his arms.

“It is, you know,” Lucia said. “Ridiculous, I mean. Mum is gone, Max. Gone as in dead, most likely. She’s not coming back. I don’t know why you can’t accept that.
We
do.” She looked over to Otto for agreement but he wasn’t looking at her.

“How did Haddie introduce herself to you?” Max asked Lucia suddenly.

“I don’t remember. Why?” Lucia replied.

“Think,” Max urged.

So she did. So much had happened yesterday that it
was hard to pull out one piece and remember it exactly. She thought back to the conversation she’d had in Haddie’s bedroom.

“She didn’t introduce herself,” Lucia said finally. “I asked her if she were Great-aunt Haddie and she said she was.”

“There!” Max jabbed a triumphant finger at her.

“There, what?”

“You told her who you thought she was, and she just agreed,” Max explained.

“Maybe she’s a total stranger then,” Otto suggested.

That sent a little chill through them until Lucia remembered:

“No, she knew my name without my telling her. She even pronounced it right. And she knew which one of you was which.”

“She’s not Mum!” Otto said, his hands moving angrily. He grabbed Chester up off the floor and stalked out of the room.

They were quiet for a moment out of pure astonishment.

“Why is he so angry?” Max asked.

“It’s hard to explain,” Lucia said.

And it was. Very. Because she had no idea.

In which there are no vampires or ghosts but you’ll like this chapter anyway

They found Otto sitting on his bed in the dungeon. Chester was curled in Otto’s lap, but Otto wouldn’t pet him. He wouldn’t get up either, not even when Lucia and Max said they were going to explore the castle folly for the secret passageway. Not even when Lucia demanded that he get up.

This annoyed Lucia greatly. “Fine! Stay here and act like a giant dope,” she said.

But Max sat down on the bed beside him, which made the rat come out of the ceiling and scuttle across the floor. Chester looked at it but didn’t even bother to get up. You can fool a cat only so many times.

“Come on, old man,” Max said gently, putting his arm around Otto. “We’ll do some exploring and maybe find
something for your collection. There’s bound to be some weird bugs or something like that.”

But Otto wouldn’t even look at Max. He raised his knees so fast that Chester tumbled out of his lap. He crossed his arms on top of his knees and laid the side of his face against his arm. There he sat, in a gloomy funk, and he looked so much like a real prisoner in a real dungeon waiting for his execution that Lucia laughed, which was probably wrong of her. In any case, it didn’t help matters. He wouldn’t budge.

In the end, Lucia and Max went exploring without him. They travelled through hallways that twisted and turned and made them fear they were hopelessly lost until they realized they had passed the same big china jug that was used as an umbrella stand five times. They tried every stairway. One whirled tightly, up and up, until they were sure it would lead them to one of the towers, only to find that the stairwell ended disappointingly at a stone wall. Other stairwells opened into small, strangely shaped rooms—octagonal or hexagonal—with moth-eaten tapestries on the walls and wormy wooden cupboards whose drawers contained exactly nothing at all, except for a bee spray in one. Max and Lucia used the spray can to tap at the walls, listening for the hollow sound of a secret passageway. All the while they looked, they thought about Haddie and about their mum, and wondered.