Love Among the Walnuts (17 page)

"Let's wait," Bentley said. "Just in case."

Then Bentley, Sandy, Sunnie, Mr. Moreland, and Captain Lester stood at the foot of the sleepers' beds, waiting.

Nothing happened. They stood waiting for twenty minutes more, and still nothing happened.

By this time Attila appeared to be fully recovered, running under the beds, frolicking with Louie, clucking, and pecking at the flowers on the carpet as if nothing had ever been wrong with her.

Sunnie, Sandy, Mr. Moreland, Captain Lester, and Bentley pulled chairs up around the beds to wait as the minutes became hours. One by one the other inmates, Opal, and Dr. Waldemar came in from outside and joined them in the sickroom.

Sunnie sat by Mousey's bed holding her hand and talking to her in a low voice. "Please wake up. I've looked forward for so long to getting to know you. I bet you've got some good stories you could tell me, and I could tell you a lot about whales and gemstones and seventeenth-century architecture, and a little bit about financial planning. Oh, please wake up."

As Sunnie spoke, Mousey's eyelids fluttered open. "Fleur," she murmured in a smooth and mellifluous voice. "Fleur LaRoche, my dear old friend. What are you doing here?"

Sunnie stared at her. "Fleur LaRoche? How did you know about her?"

"Don't you remember?" Mousey asked, sitting up. "It was a long time ago, but don't you remember
Social Service?
"

Sandy couldn't contain himself. He forgot everything his parents had taught him about not interrupting a conversation and grabbed his mother in his arms. "Mousey! How do you feel? What's happened to your voice?"

"I feel just fine, dear," she said. "What are you so excited about?" She looked around her. "Where am I?" she asked, beginning to look frightened. "What's wrong with Horatio? And Flossie? Who are all these people?"

Just then Horatio and Flossie opened their eyes and sat up.

Bentley burst into tears
again
and threw himself across Flossie's lap while all the inmates cheered and whistled and stomped their feet on the floor. Louie and Attila hid under Mousey's bed.

Horatio took one look around and scrunched down into his bed, pulling the covers over his head. Flossie sat up, clutching the blankets under her chin with one hand and stroking the sobbing Bentley with the other while she gazed around her with eyes as big as dinner plates.

It was past suppertime before all the explanations had been made and before the sleepers—now wakers—learned what had happened while they slept. Opal ran between the sickroom—now the wellroom—and the kitchen, trying to get dinner started and be in on all the excitement, too. Finally she gave up, sat down on the floor next to Flossie's bed, and said, "The heck with it. We'll send out for pizza. I haven't had a day off in years."

The pizza came eventually and it was as cold as Bart's and Bernie's hearts when it arrived, for it was a long way to Jupiter. But Opal warmed it up again, and the wakers put on their bathrobes and slippers and came downstairs to eat in the dining room with everyone else.

During dinner Mousey said to Sunnie, "I can see now you aren't my old friend Fleur LaRoche, but you sound just like her, and there is a little something in your face that reminds me of her."

"Dear Mousey," Sunnie said. "How could you know? Fleur LaRoche was my mother. That was her stage name. Her real name was Iris Stone. She used to reminisce so much about her happy days on the stage with her friends. I've often wondered if you were the Mousey she remembered so fondly—after all, how many Mouseys do you meet in a lifetime?—but I couldn't ask you, of course. Oh, I could have asked you, but you couldn't have answered. That was the real problem. Anyway, I hoped it was you. My poor mother has passed on now, but I still have her scrapbooks. I hope you and I will have a chance to look at them sometime."

"That would be lovely, Sunnie. I look forward to it. When I was asleep I dreamed of a blond angel talking to me, but I never thought I'd actually get to meet her."

"Oh, I must apologize to you for something I said while you were asleep. Remember how I promised you a steak and a hug when you woke up? Now you're awake, and what you got was pizza and no hug. I don't usually do that, not keep a promise. I think promises are very important and I take them seriously. I just didn't know when you were going to wake up, and it's hard to plan for a steak dinner when things go the way they did this afternoon. How about steak for dinner tomorrow night?"

"Steak tomorrow will be fine," Mousey said. "But I'd like the hug right now."

And she got it.

Something had been bothering Sandy ever since Mousey had uttered her first words. "Mousey," he said as soon as he could get a word in edgewise, what with all the explanations and introductions. "Have you noticed how different your voice is since you woke up?"

"Why, you're right. I must have forgotten what I sounded like before. Do you suppose all my vocal cords needed was a nice long rest to work right?"

"I don't know," Sandy said, "but I can't get used to the way you sound. Like a completely different person."

"Maybe I am different now," Mousey said. "Something like this has to have an effect on one, don't you think?"

"I don't care what you sound like," Horatio said. "You're still my beautiful Mousey, and I couldn't love you any more than I do at this moment, when we've been returned to each other."

"Oh, Horatio," Mousey said, "you know I feel exactly the same way about you. I'm positive it was a comfort to me while I was asleep to know that you were right there beside me."

Opal got up abruptly from the table, taking a couple of empty pizza boxes with her out to the kitchen.

Mr. Moreland got up, too, and followed her.

"Well, now we've got only one more problem to solve," Boom-Boom said. "Bart and Bernie."

"I'm sure we'll find a way," Sunnie said, though for once she didn't sound as convincingly optimistic as she usually did. Bart and Bernie, for all their lumpishness and stolidity, had turned out to be tenacious adversaries.

Bentley and Flossie decided to go back to Eclipse for the night. Bentley wanted to be alone with her while his galloping emotions settled down, and Flossie was having similar sentiments. Besides, all her clothes were at Eclipse and she was tired, she said, of wearing pajamas.

But Mousey and Horatio were having such a good time with their new friends that they decided to spend one more night at Walnut Manor, and they insisted that Sandy stay on with them.

When Bentley and Flossie got ready to leave, promising to bring changes of clothes for Horatio, Mousey, and Sandy first thing the next morning, Opal and Mr. Moreland came out of the kitchen to say good-bye. They both had odd looks on their faces, looks that were completely new to both of them.

"Why do you look so funny?" Boom-Boom asked them.

"You think I look funny?" Opal asked.

"Not like that," Boom-Boom said hastily. "I mean, you just look different. A way I've never seen you look. Mr. Moreland, too."

"Shall we tell them, Opal?" Mr. Moreland asked her.

Amazingly, she blushed, lowered her eyes, arid nodded.

"Opal and I are going to get married," Mr. Moreland announced.

There was the same kind of silence there'd been the day Captain Lester spoke for the first time.

"Well ... schnauzer!" Captain Lester finally said. He grabbed Mr. Moreland's hand and shook it heartily. "Congratulations, Whit. I think you've found yourself a bride who can keep you in line."

Mr. Moreland laughed uproariously, a way no one had ever heard him laugh before, which showed how happy he was. "I think you're right about that, Captain. I've always liked a spirited woman—just never found one with
enough
spirit. Until now. When I saw the way Horatio and Mousey looked at each other at dinner, it made me think. Then I looked up and saw Opal carrying those pizza boxes and realized ... well, I wasn't totally out of my mind that day I pinched her." What could be seen of his cheeks around his beard were as flushed as Opal's.

Captain Lester kissed Opal in a brotherly way, and by then everybody else had recovered sufficiently from their surprise to offer their own best wishes. Sandy felt a curious ache in his heart as he shook Mr. Moreland's hand and hugged Opal.

"The wedding will be here, at Walnut Manor, as soon as we've got the details worked out," Mr. Moreland said. "And we want you
all
to be our attendants. It would be impossible to decide who should be the best man or the maid of honor."

Bentley and Flossie ran to the Daimler, raced to Eclipse for some champagne, and brought it back to Walnut Manor for a toast before they all staggered off, exhausted from a day full of so much tension and emotion, to their beds.

***

Sandy had thought he would sleep like a bear in hibernation, but he woke up suddenly in the middle of the night, eyes wide and alert. For a moment he was disoriented, until he realized that he was sleeping at Walnut Manor in the bed that had been Flossie's and not in his own bed at Eclipse. The clock on the bedside table said 3:03. He could hear Horatio and Mousey nearby, breathing deeply in their sleep, and he sent a grateful prayer of thanks to Bentley for assuring that they would wake from
this
night's sleep.

He was sure something had awakened him, but he didn't know what it was. The house was silent. There was no movement in the room. Raising up on his elbow, he saw that Louie and Attila were curled cozily together in the dishpan, sound asleep.

But something was tickling his nose. Something familiar, something he could almost identify. It was ... it was ... smoke! And smoke meant—

He leaped from his bed into his slippers and grabbed his robe. "Fire!" he yelled, shaking Horatio and then Mousey. "Fire! Wake up!"

As Horatio and Mousey sat up groggily, Sandy ran to the small adjoining bedroom that was Sunnie's. He couldn't help himself, he had to stop for just a millisecond to look at her as she slept, her halo of blond hair spread on the pillow, her face so sweet and peaceful in repose.

But this was an emergency and there was no time for admiring the woman he ... never mind what he felt about her. He had to wake her up.

"Sunnie," he said urgently but softly, not wanting to scare her. It hadn't bothered him at all to shake his parents suddenly awake, but this was different somehow. "Sunnie," he said a little louder, and she opened her eyes.

"Hi," she said sleepily, looking directly into his eyes in the same way she had just before the sleepers awakened. "What is it?"

"I think the house is on fire," he said gently.

She sat straight up, her nurse's training at responding to emergencies coming immediately to the fore. "We've got to wake everybody up," she said, getting out of bed.

Sandy turned his head while Sunnie put on her robe.

"Do you think it's another of Bart and Bernie's plots?" she asked, hurrying out of the room behind him.

"I wouldn't be surprised in the least," he said, picking up the dishpan with Attila and Louie in it. "You call the fire department in Jupiter while I wake everyone and get them out of here."

A few minutes later all the inmates were gathered in the driveway in front of Walnut Manor, helplessly watching flames shoot from the roof. They hugged themselves and each other and shivered, not entirely from the cold.

Boom-Boom sucked his thumb and, with tears rolling down his face, clutched Sunnie's robe. Captain Lester held Louie under one arm and Attila under the other, and murmured comforting words to them as he watched the flames. Everett went from person to person telling them, "'Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.' Horace. 65 to 8
B.C.
"

"I could give Horace an argument on that one," Mr. Moreland said, huddling with Opal for warmth.

It seemed a long time before the fire engines arrived, but once they did, the firefighters were able to extinguish the blaze quickly. And what did they find, as they searched over the house to make sure all the hot spots were out, but Bart and Bernie, crouched on the last unburned section of the roof.

The fire chief hauled them down, scorched and waterlogged. When the fire chief got to the bottom of the ladder, holding each of them by the scruff of his sopping overcoat, he asked, "Does anybody know who these guys are?"

Bart and Bernie took one look at Horatio and Mousey, who were looking back at them with equal amazement, and Bernie keeled over in a dead faint into the muddy and flowerless flower bed. Bart jerked his overcoat out of the fire chief's grip and started running down the driveway toward the road. A quick-thinking firefighter turned a high-pressure hose on him and knocked him flat.

It took a while for the fire chief to understand who Bart and Bernie were, what with everyone talking at once trying to tell him all the awful things the two had done. But when he understood what they were probably doing on the roof, he locked both Bart and Bernie in his car. Then he used the phone in one of the fire trucks to call the police.

"Stupidest arsonists I ever saw," he said. "They climbed up a ladder next to the chimney—wanted to make it look as if a spark from the fireplace had started the fire, I suppose—but the first thing that caught fire was the top of their ladder. Then they were stuck on the roof—too cowardly to jump and too stupid to climb down the trellis on the other side."

Bart pressed his fat face against the window of the fire chief's car and shouted, "Trellis? There was a trellis? We're victims of circumstantial evidence! We were looking for shooting stars! This is the clearest night of the year! We had nothing to do with any fire!"

The police arrived and spent almost an hour trying to get statements about Bart and Bernie from all the residents of Walnut Manor. Aside from the fact that everybody except Eddy wanted to talk at the same time, the stories seemed simply too preposterous to be believed: poisoned birthday cake and a comatose chicken; Pensa-Cola canisters full of disappearing gas and attempts to freeze a houseful of people. There was also something about games of Investment, whatever that was, and snow people and
The Wind in the Willows.
At the same time a muscular young man kept trying to lift up one end of a fire engine. Finally the police threw up their hands and said they'd come back the next day when everyone was more rested and their lips weren't blue with cold. They promised to keep Bart and Bernie locked up until a clear story and some reasonable charges emerged.