The Tanglewood Terror (17 page)

Brian was already wearing some snow mocs that looked comfy but also girly, with a ruff of fleece around the ankle.

“You might as well be wearing the pink pom-pom socks,” I said. He ignored me.

I found a pair of plain brown boots that were probably lady boots too, but they fit okay. Mandy took a pair of waders that went up to her knees.

“Going fly-fishing?” I asked her.

“I think they’re stylin’,” she said.

“I want all those boots back,” the old woman said.

“Of course.”

The coffee kettle started gurgling, and the woman opened the cupboard. That was my chance to snoop, but all I saw were rows and rows of Maggie Dunne beef stew. The woman opened two and dumped them into a pot, then added a can or so of tap water.

“This is an old family recipe,” she said with a cackle. I wished she’d stop cackling. I was glad that she wasn’t bustling about adding pinches of this and that from mysterious jars, anyway—the stew was probably safe.

“So how did you get out of the Llewellan place?” she asked Mandy.

“The what place?” Brian asked around a mouthful of cracker. He’d been digging into a box of saltines.

“She means Alden,” said Mandy. “That’s who the mansion belonged to, way back when.”

Brian didn’t die on the spot, so I took a couple of crackers myself.

“I started as the Llewellans’ cook at the end of World War II and stayed on as the school cook after the place changed hands. They made me retire in the 1990s, so I must have been there almost forty years.”

“It’s more like
fifty
years,” said Mandy.

“Well, I never was good with numbers.” She got a bright blue flame going on the stove and stirred the stew a little. “Did you escape through the old sewer pipe?”

“How did you guess?” Mandy asked.

“Girls used to come and go through that thing all the time. They’d meet boys as far away as Portland and still get back before daybreak. I never told anyone. Figured it wasn’t my business to tell them anything if it wasn’t about the kitchen.”

She looked at the coffee kettle, saw it was still gurgling, and stirred the stew some more. “You picked a strange way to do it, though, walking through an old sewer with no shoes.”

“It wasn’t exactly planned,” Mandy explained.

The coffee and stew had the same thickness when she was done, but I gobbled up my bowl in less than a minute. It wasn’t great, but it was made of food, and that was good enough for me. I wondered if this was the sort of thing she made when she was a cook at that school, or if she got so sick of cooking she went for the easy stuff now.

“What’s that thing you were driving?” I asked her. “It’s cool.”

“It’s mostly a Royal Enfield quadricycle, but it’s got a
new motor from a 1955 Enfield Bullet. Plus a few other parts here and there. It gets me around.”

“It reminds me of
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
,” said Mandy.

“It’s the only wheels I have anymore,” the old woman said. “Thank heavens Sylvester left it for me.”

“Was that your husband?” Mandy asked.

“Nah, this old coot who lived here before I did. I bought it back in nineteen …” She screwed up her face. “Well, it was after Pa died and before the Llewellan place got turned into a school.”

Brian started yawning, and for a moment I worried that we’d all made a bad mistake—that the stew was laced with something after all, or maybe the coffee, and now we’d all three go to sleep and wake up in cages. But the woman had eaten the same stew and drunk the same coffee as we did, and besides that, I felt fine.

“Can you tell me where the, uh …,” Mandy started to ask. The woman nodded and pointed her to a door. “Through there and to the right.”

Brian pushed his bowl aside, propped his head up with his hand, and snoozed. Mandy was gone a long time. I wasn’t sure how long, exactly, but it felt long and I started to get worried again. The old woman bustled about like nothing was wrong, washing the dishes (I should have offered to do them, I realized—a weird thought in the middle of wondering whether she was trying to kill us all), then poured another cup of coffee.

“I have to wash up too,” I told her. I got up and went through another room that led to the bathroom. It was one
big room that looked like it was part living room, part office, part dining room, and part attic—it was the combination of a couch, a desk and shelves, an oval table, and dozens of boxes all over the place.

Mandy was looking with wide eyes at something.

“Hey.” I nudged her shoulder, and she pointed, her lips moving but not making a word. It was a built-in bookshelf crammed full of books. There were a few hardbacks, a lot of paperbacks, and a stack of magazines on the bottom shelf. They looked old.

I scanned the spines of the books and saw that every single one was by Max Bailey. I thumbed through the magazines, which had faded cover pictures of monsters or spaceships. They each had a list of authors on the cover, and Max Bailey’s name was always among them.

“All rare volumes and first editions,” Mandy said in a whisper. “Even the Max Bailey collection at the Portland library doesn’t have this much stuff.”

“Don’t take anything,” I whispered back.

“What?” She looked appalled that I would even suggest such a thing.

“Well, you do steal stuff sometimes,” I pointed out.

“Nothing like this,” she whispered back. “Nothing valuable.”

“Ah, you’ve found the books.” The woman came to the door. “I don’t even read that stuff. I think life is scary enough without making up ghosts and monsters.”

“Then why do you
have
them?” Mandy asked. “Did Sylvester leave these, too?”

“Nah, those were my pa’s.”

“This collection is worth a lot. Seriously. You could sell them. Or donate them to a library. Share them with the world.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t want them,” the woman said. “I said I didn’t
read
them.”

Mandy looked flustered, disappointed, and cross all at the same time.

“They were my pa’s,” the woman explained. “They mean a lot to me.”

“Wow, he must have been a really big Max Bailey fan,” said Mandy.

“Um, I think her father
was
Max Bailey,” I said.

“Oh!” Mandy turned and looked, and the woman nodded.

“He may have written scary stuff, but he was a good man,” she said.

“I know,” said Mandy hoarsely.

“Is your name Howard?” I asked her. The biography I’d read said Max Bailey had one child. I’d thought it was a mistake in the book when they said it was a daughter.

“Yep. Pa’s two favorite writer pals were both named Howard, so he had that name all picked out for his first son. When Ma died in childbirth, he didn’t know if there’d ever be another wife or a son in his life, so he named me Howard.”

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

“About my name or my ma?”

“Both, I guess.”

“Well, I didn’t even know Howard was a boy’s name until I was in school,” she said. “I’ll never forget how my first teacher hollered at me for being a sass, asking my real name again and again until I finally gave up and stormed out of the room. That set the tone for me all the way through school.” She laughed the way she did sometimes. It didn’t sound like a cackle to me anymore. It was more like a dry laugh.

“In case you couldn’t tell, I love your father’s work,” Mandy said. “Seriously. He’s amazing.”

“Thank you. I don’t think he expected folks to even know who he was this many years later, but I’m glad they do.”

“You have all the books but not any of his pictures,” I said. I liked the pictures better.

“I sold them off, over the years,” she said. “The school didn’t have much of a retirement program, so it was a lifesaver. Sold the last one for a good sum. Though I hear it’s worth ten times that now. I never could part with his books, though.”

“Do people pester you a lot?” Mandy asked. “Your father has … well, he has some crazy big fans.”

“Ah, they used to track me down,” said Howard. “Someone writing a biography, or hoping to dig up a long-lost manuscript. It’s been years since anyone did that, though. Maybe everyone thinks I’m dead—I don’t know.”

“Is there a long-lost manuscript?” Mandy asked hopefully.

“You know, he asked me to burn his manuscripts after he died. All the drafts and unfinished works.”

“I know he asked, but—did you go through with it?”

“No, I didn’t. I always told him he’d have to do it himself. I wouldn’t burn up anyone’s hard work, especially his.”

Mandy closed her eyes and wobbled a little bit. I thought she might actually faint.

“Before you ask, though,” Howard told her, “no, you can’t read it, and it’s not even because I won’t let you, although I wouldn’t anyway.”

“Huh?”

“I got to where I didn’t trust these fellows who were sniffing around, so I put everything in a safe about twenty-five years ago.” She counted out decades on her fingers. “Maybe it was thirty-five years ago. However long ago it was, I lost the combination somewhere in between then and now and haven’t been able to open it since. I can’t even blast it open, because I might burn the papers.”

“Did you set the combination yourself?” Mandy asked her. “Because if you did, maybe we can figure it out. Birthdays, lucky numbers …”

“I did set it myself, but I tried all of those a hundred times each. I don’t know what was on my mind. I have no head for numbers and never did.”

“Maybe we could help you remember,” Mandy said.

“Ha!” Howard laughed. “You think looking for a needle in a haystack is hard, try looking in this muddled brain of mine for numbers.”

“You would have picked something you’d remember,” said Mandy. “I mean, something you thought you’d remember.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve forgotten about half of what I remember,” said Howard.

I glanced at a clock on the wall. “I wish I could help, but Brian and I better go home.”

“Want to take the quad?” Howard asked. “I’m too tired to go on a drive, but if you bring it back first thing tomorrow, I suppose you can borrow it.”

“Seriously?” An hour ago I’d thought she was a witch, and here she’d given us all food and shoes and now was lending me her only wheels.

“You can’t take it,” Mandy whispered. “Don’t. It’s too much.”

“You seemed to like it,” said Howard. “You might as well give it a spin.” She took me outside to show me how to start the quad.

I had a hard time at first, pumping the clutch and revving the motor at the right time. Finally a few puffs of heavy black smoke came out and the motor sputtered to life. The clutch, throttle, and brake were all pedals, and it took me a while to get used to them and remember which was which. I lurched in circles around the yard until I got the hang of it.

“I have to go get my brother,” I said. I’d left him sleeping at the kitchen table.

“You know, I always felt bad about the haunted house,” she told me as we walked back to the house. “I didn’t realize how young you were. I never meant to set you off.”

“You remember that?”

“I got kicked out of the haunted house for it,” she said. “So yeah, I remember.”

“Wow. I’m sorry too, then. I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.”

“They said I was too scary for kids,” she said. “Can you believe that? I mean, don’t they try to make the house scary?”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “Well, maybe scaring people too well runs in your family?”

“Maybe so. I hope this makes up for scaring the tarnation out of you.”

“Way more,” I said.

Brian was waking up. He made a big noisy yawn and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “Do we get to go back on the thing?”

“Yep.”

“Awesome.”

“You can stay here for a while,” Howard told Mandy. “I won’t tell on you. I never liked the way that school pushed girls around.”

“That’s really nice,” said Mandy. “Thanks.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“Maybe you can rummage around in my brain tomorrow and find that combination,” Howard told her. “If you don’t mind the dust and cobwebs.”

We found the trail back to Tanglewood, the mushroom light growing brighter and brighter as we got closer. The quad only went about eight miles an hour, and the steering was easy—you used handlebars like you would with a bike. It was fun once we got used to bouncing around.