The Bell Bandit (3 page)

Evan straightened up. He'd been following Pete and his mother through the whole house, fascinated by the things that Pete described—the inner workings of the house, like it was an animal that lived and breathed. "Yeah," he said. "I know how to take care of a fire. I've been to sleep-away camp."

"Good," said Pete. "That's your job, then." He turned back to Mrs. Treski. "Do you want me to bring over a couple of space heaters for upstairs? I live just a mile up the road." But Mrs. Treski said no thanks, they'd be fine with the stove.

"Probably for the best," he said, nodding. "You'd blow a fuse for sure."

Evan followed Pete out to his truck, even though the snow was coming down harder now. Before climbing in, Pete said, "Are you the man of the family?"

Evan shrugged. "I guess so." His mom didn't really go for that "man of the family" thing. And even though Evan's dad had been gone for more than two years, Evan still didn't think of himself that way. He tried to help his mom as much as he could, but he was only ten.

"Okay, then," said Pete. "You'll help me tomorrow. Right?"

"Sure," said Evan. And all of a sudden, he wasn't so desperate to leave Grandma's house and go back home.

The plan had been to go get Grandma in the morning. She was getting discharged from the hospital first thing, which meant she could finally come home. Mrs. Treski decided they would stay through New Year's Day to make sure Grandma was settled. Jessie couldn't wait for Grandma to walk in the door. Maybe then things would go back to normal.

But the plan had to change, thanks to the storm. Overnight the snow had turned the whole world into a scene from the book that Jessie was reading—
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
—all winter white and silent. The driveway had disappeared under the heavy, fresh snow, and the local news reported that road conditions were "challenging." On top of that, the battery in the car was dead (because Jessie had left one of the interior lights on overnight), and it was going to be a while before the guy from AAA could come out to the house. Apparently, a lot of people were having car trouble because of the weather.

Jessie spent part of the morning curled up in front of the wood stove reading her book and eating from the box of store-bought powdered doughnuts that Pete had brought with him. Pete and Evan were down in the basement now, checking out the furnace. There was a lot of banging, and every once in a while she heard them laughing. Jessie didn't get it. What was so funny about a broken furnace?

After that, Jessie climbed the stairs to see what her mother was doing. She found Mrs. Treski in the room with the hole in the floor, going through boxes of papers that had gotten wet after the fire. She was looking for Grandma's homeowner's insurance policy. The woven rug with swirls of maroon and deepest blue was pulled back and folded over on itself, revealing the bare wooden floor beneath it.

"Ruined," said Mrs. Treski, as she worked her way through the box. "I don't think any of this can be saved." But she kept plucking through the papers.

Jessie started to wander over to the built-in bookcase that ran along one wall of the room. Grandma had bookcases in every room in the house, each one stuffed to overflowing, but the books in her office were the ones that were most important to her.

"Jessie, stop," said Mrs. Treski. "I'm not sure I got all the glass off the floor."

"I'm wearing shoes. I'll be careful," said Jessie, walking delicately across the floor. "Are Grandma's books ruined, too?"

"Some, probably. I hope not her favorites."

"They're all her favorites," said Jessie, staring at the bookcase.

These books were like old friends to Jessie. She'd known them since she was old enough to crawl into her grandmother's lap and sit patiently while Grandma turned the pages. Books on birds, books on meditation, books on string instruments and baseball and antique quilts. Aesop's fables and Greek mythology. She looked quickly for her favorite and found it exactly where she had left it the last time she visited.

It was called
The Big Book of Bells,
and it was more than one hundred years old. Jessie loved this book for a lot of reasons: the red tooled leather cover with gold lettering on the spine, the thick pages that made a whispery sound when you turned them, the photographs of men in bowler hats and ladies in long skirts. But mostly Jessie loved this book because it had a photograph of Grandma's bell in it, the very same bell that hung on Lovell's Hill.

Jessie tipped the book off the shelf and into her hand, relieved to see that it wasn't wet or burned. She carried it downstairs, settled herself on the couch, and turned first to the photo of Grandma's bell, feeling proud that it was so famous and important that it appeared in a book. Then she turned to the diagram that showed all the different parts of a bell.

The parts were named for parts of the human body, and most of them went in the order you would expect: the crown, the shoulder, the waist, the hip. But then came the lip! That always made Jessie laugh, to think of having lips on your hips.

She was still poring over the book two hours later, reading about the largest bell in the world, which was in Russia, when the guy from AAA showed up and told Mrs. Treski that she needed an entirely new battery—which he didn't have on his truck. She would have to wait until later this afternoon when he could come back.

"No, no!" said Mrs. Treski. "You don't understand. I have to go pick up my mother this morning. She's getting discharged from the hospital." Then she explained how her mother had put the kettle on the stove but accidentally turned on the wrong burner and then forgotten all about it and gone for a long walk, and when she came back from her walk, she found her house on fire and tried to rush inside, but the fire department blocked her way, and she fell and broke her wrist.

The AAA guy listened very quietly and even nodded his head as if he was agreeing with her, but then he said what he'd already said. "I'm sorry, but I can't get back out this way until the afternoon. Probably after four." Mrs. Treski threw up her hands and said something under her breath, then she went back upstairs to continue sorting through Grandma's papers.

Jessie closed the book and went in the kitchen to try to convince Evan to go play in the snow with her. Evan was so wrapped up in helping Pete—they were tearing out the old wood from the wall—that she could hardly get him to even listen to her.

When Mrs. Treski finally drove off in the Subaru to get Grandma at the hospital, the afternoon sun was just beginning to draw long shadows on the blue-white snow. Jessie decided it was time to go visit Grandma's bell on the hill. She strapped a pair of snowshoes on her feet and headed outside.

The woods around the house were magical in any season, but especially in the wintertime. Two feet of fresh snow had fallen overnight. Jessie tried to imagine Mr. Tumnus, the faun in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
peeking out from behind a tree, his slender umbrella held in his hand. She wondered how fauns balanced on their two goat feet. It must be hard! She was pretty sure she would fall over, if she were half-human, half-goat.

She had reached the edge of the first woods and had come out into the clearing that was at the foot of a small hill. If she climbed over this hill and the next, she would come to Lovell's Hill with the bell at the top. But first she wanted to see if the tepee was still standing.

The summer before last, Jessie and Evan had built a tepee deep in the woods. First, they had found a dead tree trunk that stood about ten feet tall with all of its branches rotted away. Then they scoured the ground for deadwood branches that were at least eight feet long and mostly straight. Evan hauled the heavy branches back to the tree trunk. Sometimes he had to drag them a quarter of a mile over the bumpy floor of the woods. It was Jessie's job to snap off the spindly twigs that grew off the dead branches so that they were as straight and smooth as poles.

When they had a dozen straight branches, Evan and Jessie leaned them up against the trunk of the tree so that they made a circle all the way around. They covered the poles with fresh pine branches, using the stiff twine that Grandma kept in the barn to lash the branches to the poles. Over the opening, they hung a waterproof tarp that could be pulled aside like a door.

Before they had started building, Evan had made a diagram of the tepee. Jessie still had that drawing hanging on her bedroom wall back home.

It took them two whole weeks to finish the tepee, but when they were done, they brought Grandma to see it and told her she could use it anytime she wanted. Evan had said, "This tepee will last a hundred years," and Grandma had agreed. Since then, she told Jessie that she often checked in on the tepee when she was out walking in the woods, just to make sure it was still in good shape. It was a nice place to rest, she said.

Jessie skirted the foot of the hills until she found the Lightning Tree that marked the way. Years ago the tree had been struck by lightning, leaving it scarred and black. Jessie and Evan always used it as a marker; its one remaining stub of a branch pointed to the tepee.

Following the direction of the branch, Jessie plunged into the woods. There was still plenty of light, even though it was late afternoon, and after a couple of minutes, Jessie could see the tepee ahead, just where it was supposed to be. She snowshoed over to it, walked once all the way around to check for holes, and then climbed inside and sat on the dry dirt floor.

Jessie loved the tepee. It made her feel safe and warm and hidden away from the world. She lay on her back and stared up at the branches over her head.
This will never change,
she thought with satisfaction. She stayed inside for a few minutes, then crawled out of the tepee and snowshoed back to the foot of the first small hill.

But when she began to climb the hill, she saw that she wasn't alone. A boy was cross-country skiing toward her, his head down, goggles strapped to his face. It took Jessie a minute to realize that the boy didn't see her. He was headed straight for her, and he was picking up speed as he came down the hill.

"Hey!" she shouted. She lifted her big floppy snowshoes awkwardly and tried to back up into the woods. But the tail of one of the shoes stepped on the tail of the other one, and she ended up falling over backwards. "Hey!" she shouted again, as the boy
shooshed
straight toward her.

"Whoa!" he said, sliding to a snowplow stop. "You don't see that every day."

"What?" asked Jessie.

"My name's Maxwell. Who are you?" He made a funny move, shuffling his right foot forward and leaning his weight on it, and then stepping back onto his left. It almost looked like a dance move, except that he was on skis.

"I'm Jessie. You practically ran me over!"

"But I didn't!" he said, doing the dance move again. "That's 'cause I'm smart!" He made a funny noise that was like a steam engine puffing on a track.

"I wouldn't exactly call it smart," said Jessie, struggling to her feet. "But at least you didn't kill me."

She snowshoed her way past Maxwell and started to trudge up the hill that he'd just skied down.

"Where are you going?"

"That way," said Jessie, pointing up the hill.

"Can I come?"

"I don't care," said Jessie. She didn't say it angrily. It was just the honest truth.

Jessie noticed that Maxwell liked to talk. A lot.

On the way up the hill, she learned that Maxwell lived in the house closest to Grandma's and that his family had just moved in before the school year started. He spent a lot of time at Grandma's house. In fact, it had been Maxwell who discovered the house on fire after Grandma had left her stove on and then gone out for a walk. He'd run home to tell his mother, and she was the one who called the fire department.

"You don't see that every day!" said Maxwell, after describing what the fire had looked like.

Jessie looked at him. There was something funny about this kid.

They had crossed the first hill and the second, and now they were at the bottom of Lovell's Hill, the highest of the little hills on this part of Grandma's property. In five minutes Jessie would reach the top and be able to see the wooden crossbeam and the bell. The crossbeam was made out of two heavy oak beams that were joined in the shape of an upside-down L. When Jessie was younger, she would ask Evan to lift her up so that she could hang on the end of the top beam and swing her legs back and forth, pretending that she was a second bell, ringing. Now that she was older, the crossbeam was only a little taller than she was, so she didn't need anyone to lift her up.