Secret of the Mask (4 page)

“Is that why she threw that old mask away?” asked Benny, turning the wheelchair around and around in circles.

“Mask? What mask?”

Benny told her about the mask in the box.

“I’m sure I had something of the sort at one time or another, but with everything packed away, there’s nothing to jog my memory,” said Grandma Belle.

She took off her eyeglasses, wiping them slowly with a tissue. “If it’s the mask I’m thinking of, it’s one of the ones my father gave me when I was a little girl. He gave me lots of things he had found in the Arizona desert when he was a boy. That’s where he grew up, you see. He and his friends came across the most interesting things—rattlesnake skeletons and animal skulls, kachina dolls and pots made from desert clay.”

“Do you still have them?” asked Benny.

“They’re all around here somewhere, I imagine. My father never could bear to get rid of any of his things. Nor could I. But these past few years it’s become hard for me to care for everything. Hard to wheel my chair around this house with all my things lying around. I have managed to give a few things away to friends, but I could never part with all of it.”

She lay back on the pillows. “Nurse Rumple is at the grocery store just now,” she said, “but I’ll be sure to ask her about the mask the moment she returns. I certainly hope she hasn’t mixed my precious things in with the garbage. And you must promise to come visit again soon.”

“We will,” said the children. And they left Grandma Belle to her morning nap.

As they began to walk home, a Best Movers truck rumbled past them.
Wash me
was written in the dust on the side. “That’s the same van that stopped and asked us for directions,” said Henry. “The driver said he was looking for 332 Locust. But Grandma Belle isn’t moving.”

“And he said he was going to drive to Minnesota,” said Jessie. “So why is he still here in Greenfield?”

“I’ll bet he’s not a mover at all,” said Benny. “I’ll bet he’s a thief who just drives around, looking for people to rob.”

Henry whistled softly. “No one would suspect a moving truck driver taking things out of a house.”

“Do you think he robbed us?” asked Violet.

“Come on,” said Henry, “let’s follow him.” The four young detectives pedaled their hardest, trying to keep the truck in view. A few blocks later, it pulled up to a house on Locust. The children stopped their bikes across the street and quickly hid behind a parked car, watching the driver climb out of the truck to ring the doorbell. After a while, he rang again. When there was no answer, he walked around to the back.

“He’s seeing if anyone’s home,” Jessie said. A minute later, the front door opened. “Oh!” She gasped as the driver walked out of the house carrying a TV set. “He must have broken into the back!”

The man put the TV in his truck, then went back in the house. “Let’s get the police,” said Violet.

“Hold on,” Henry said, watching as the man wheeled out a large chair and a computer, then went back inside. “I’m going to take a quick look inside his truck. If he left the keys, I can grab them so he can’t drive away.”

Henry’s heart thumped like a drum as he raced across the street. He had to hurry before the driver saw him. Quickly, he climbed up on the truck’s running board. Next to the driver’s seat was a map of Greenfield and a pair of broken eyeglasses. One lens was missing, and the other was badly cracked. Henry saw a clipboard on the driver’s seat with a work order for a moving job on Locust. As he read the piece of paper, he started to smile. He jumped off the truck and ran back across the street. “I think I know what hap—”

“Hey!” shouted the driver, barreling out of the house towards them, “Hey!”

“Oh, no,” cried Benny. “Let’s get out of here!”

“It’s all right,” said Henry.

“But—”

The driver rushed up and squinted at them. “Aren’t you the lemonade kids?” He broke into a wide smile. “Best danged lemonade I ever tasted. Told my wife about it. She said I should ask for your recipe.”

Benny stepped forward to speak. “Why did you tell us you were moving Grandma Belle?”

“Grandma who?”

Henry put his hands on Benny’s shoulders. “It’s all right.” He turned to the driver. “When you stopped at our house that day to ask us directions, you thought you were looking for 332 Locust, didn’t you?”

“Yup.”

“But you were really looking for …” Henry pointed to the numbers on the house across the street, “882.”

The man nodded. “Broke my specs the other day.” He looked embarrassed. “Sat on ’em by mistake. I can drive okay without glasses, but when I try reading things up close like that work order, everything’s a little blurry. Those eights sure looked like threes to me. I was a whole five blocks off.”

Violet jotted down her recipe, which was one can of frozen lemonade and three cans of water mixed with the juice of a fresh-squeezed lemon. “And my secret trick,” she said, “is to make extra lemonade a day ahead of time and freeze it in ice cube trays. Using lemonade ice cubes keeps lemonade from getting watery.”

“Thanks,” said the driver, tucking the recipe into his pocket. “Well, better get back to work.”

The children climbed on their bikes. “I’m hungry,” said Benny.

Henry checked his watch. It was eleven-thirty. “I guess we might as well eat before we go to the library.”

“All right!” said Benny, pedaling faster than everyone all the way to the Greenfield Diner.

As they wheeled their bikes into the diner’s bike rack, an orange pickup truck came speeding down the street. “Isn’t that the same—” Jessie began, just as the truck squealed around in a U-turn.

“He is one very bad driver,” said Henry. The truck screeched to a stop behind a bright red car parked in front of Ye Olde Antique Shoppe. “He nearly hit that car!”

A woman with long red hair ran out of the shop and started yelling at the driver. “She sure looks angry,” said Violet. “Maybe that’s her car he nearly hit.”

Benny stared. “I think that’s Grandma Belle’s nurse.”

“Are you sure?”

He looked hard, trying to remember. “She’s the woman I saw put the mask in the garbage can. I remember her long red hair.”

The angry woman’s voice grew louder. A few of her words drifted across the street. “… do you mean … you can’t … find it? … has to be …”

“Benny’s right,” said Henry, locking his bike. “The car she just got out of is the same car we saw in front of Grandma Belle’s.”

Jessie pursed her lips. “But Grandma Belle said her nurse was at the grocery store. That’s all the way across town.”

“Maybe she likes antiques,” said Violet, who very much loved old things.

“…where else …” came the woman’s voice, “… could it. … Find it!”

“It sounds like they know each other,” said Jessie. Suddenly, the woman climbed into the little red car and sped away.

The driver of the orange truck squealed another U-turn. The broken swing set and bikes in the back of the truck nearly flew out.

Inside the diner, the children found a table near the big front window and gave the waitress their orders—chicken fingers for Violet, a hamburger for Henry, grilled cheese for Jessie, and a hot dog for Benny. Waiting for food to come was always the hardest part.

The smell of hamburgers sizzling on the grill made the children’s stomachs growl. Benny moved the ketchup bottle in front of him so he’d be ready to squirt ketchup on his plate the second his food came. Usually they played games of tic-tac-toe or dot-to-dot to take their minds off how hungry they were. But today, Henry opened a paper napkin and took out a pencil.

“What are you doing?” Jessie asked.

“Trying to figure out who could have stolen Benny’s mask and taken the Crispy Crackers can full of money.” Henry knew that making lists helped him think. On the top of the napkin he wrote: SUSPECTS.

The others crowded around, watching. Under SUSPECTS, Henry wrote:

Driver of orange truck

In alley behind Grandma Belle’s the day we found the mask.

In our alley the night we cleaned the garage.

At our yard sale.

In town with Grandma Belle’s nurse.

“What about the lady with the floppy hat and big sunglasses?” asked Benny. “Jessie said she was looking through the shelves in the garage. That’s where I hid my mask. Maybe she saw it and decided to come back later to steal it so she wouldn’t have to pay for it.” Henry wrote:

Lady in floppy hat

At yard sale both days.

Only wanted to buy old things.

Jessie saw her going through boxes in the garage.

“Anyone else?” Henry asked.

“What about the man at the library?” asked Violet. “The one with the silver bracelet? I thought I saw a kachina mask on his computer screen. And the next day he came to our yard sale asking if we had any Hopi things for sale.”

Henry added:

Man with braid

At library—looking at Hopi masks?

At yard sale—wanted Hopi things.

“What about the nurse?” asked Henry. “She could have accidentally thrown the mask away, but what if it wasn’t an accident? What if she was trying to steal it?”

“She isn’t where she told Grandma Belle she would be,” added Jessie.

“And we just saw her talking to the man in the orange truck,” said Violet.

Henry scribbled:

Grandma Belle’s nurse

Accidentally threw away mask?

Seen with the man in the orange truck.

“We have a lot of questions with no answers,” said Henry, as their food arrived.

“Maybe we should go back to the library and find out more about these masks,” said Jessie. “If someone wants our mask bad enough to steal it, it has to be worth something.”

And with that the children turned all their attention to eating.

After lunch, they rode to the library. A large poster on the library door said:

Intertribal Powwow

Saturday–Sunday—Pleasant Valley Park.

Native American dancing, singing, drumming, crafts, food.

Everyone welcome.

“What’s a powwow?” asked Benny. “It’s a big gathering of Native Americans,” Violet explained. “Like a big party where there’s music and dancing and storytelling.”

“And cake?”

“Well, maybe not cake, But there are many other treats served. I read about powwows in one of my
Prairie Girls
books,
Katrina and the Kachina Doll.
Katrina was invited to a powwow. She learned to make jewelry out of porcupine quills and to stitch moccasins out of buffalo hide.”

Violet sat at a computer and typed in “kachina masks.” Henry found a Hopi kachina book with the photographs of masks.

“This web site has old kachina masks for sale,” said Violet. “All of the antique masks are sold for …” Her eyes grew wide as she stared at the screen.

“What?” said Jessie. “Sold for what?”

“For thousands of dollars!” Violet scrolled down the screen until she came to a mask that looked like theirs. She read quietly a moment before printing the page she was reading.

“That’s why someone wanted my mask so much!” said Benny.

“Grandma Belle said her father lived in Arizona,” Jessie said. “She said he dug up things like this when he was a boy. The mask that we found is probably one of the things that he dug out of the desert.”

“Was Grandma Belle’s father a thief?” Benny asked. “Would he have taken some-thing that didn’t belong to him?

“I don’t know Benny,” said Jessie.

Violet grabbed a stack of paper off the printer while Henry went to check out the books he found. “I found a few articles about stolen kachinas being sold on the Internet. We should show them to Grandma Belle. Maybe the pictures of the mask will help jog her memory.”

As they walked out of the library, they passed the man with the braid reading at a table. He hunched over his books. Jessie peered over his shoulder, then poked Violet and pointed. The man was reading books about kachinas and Hopis. Did he steal their mask? Was he looking through the books to find out if it was valuable?

The children rang the bell but no one answered. They knocked on the door. Still nothing.

“Grandma Belle can’t go out with a broken hip,” said Violet.

Benny peered through the window. “Her wheelchair’s gone! I left it right there in the corner.”

“Maybe she was feeling better,” said Jessie, “and her grandson took her for a walk.”

“Maybe they’re sitting in the yard,” said Henry.

The children ran around back, but the only thing they found in the yard was a group of small birds chirping along the walk.

“Look,” said Benny. The birds were feasting on pieces of popcorn. The children followed the trail along the walk out to the alley to the trash. They quickly opened the trash cans. Two were empty, but a white box stuck out of the third. “Another one!” said Benny.

Henry lifted it out and tore it open. Popcorn spilled out. Inside was a red, white, and blue mask with two horns on the top. The wood was old and cracked, and the feathers sticking out of the top smelled musty.