The Bell Bandit (5 page)

 

T
HE
J
ONES
T
ROY
B
ELL
F
OUNDRY
C
OMPANY
,
T
ROY,
N.Y. 1884.
I
SOUND THE
A
LARM
TO KEEP THE
P
EACE
.

 

The letters were as tall as her thumb.

"That's when the bell was cast." Jessie's grandma nodded. "That's when the bell was hung."

"How did they hang it?" asked Jessie. "It must weigh a thousand pounds!"

"Oh, no," said Grandma, scratching her earlobe, which is what she did when she concentrated. "It doesn't weigh that much. Maybe a hundred pounds. Two men could hang that bell easily. One time, years and years ago, the bell needed to be cleaned, so I lifted it off the hooks and dragged it back to the house on a sledge all by myself. Of course, it's a lot easier to take a bell down than it is to hang it up."

"You took the bell down?" asked Jessie. "When?"

"Oh, years ago. A long time ago. Just after your grandfather died. I was still young and strong back then. Not like now." Grandma turned a puzzle piece around in her hand, seeing if it would fit, but then put it back with the others on the table.

"Grandma?" Jessie asked in a near whisper. "Did you take the bell down—sometime this year?"

Grandma laughed. "What a thing! No, I couldn't take that bell down anymore. That old bell is still up there on Lovell's Hill. Always will be." She had stopped working on the puzzle and was using her good hand to rub her shoulder as if it ached.

"Maybe you wanted to sell it?" asked Jessie, thinking of the appraisal letter.

"No, Jessie. I would never sell the New Year's Eve bell."

"Maybe you ... forgot."

"I didn't forget, Jessie," said Grandma, shaking her head.

"But you could have—"

"No!" Her grandmother dropped her hand to the table so that it made a sharp rapping sound. "Now stop, Jessie! The bell is on the hill. It's always been there, and it always will be there. So, enough."

"Okay, Grandma," said Jessie, but inside she wondered if maybe her grandmother's forgetfulness was a clue to the mystery of the missing bell.

They worked on the puzzle for another minute in silence, and then Jessie heard a strange thud on the front door. When she got up to investigate, she found Maxwell standing in front of the house with skis on his feet and ski poles in one hand. In his other hand, he had a snowball, and Jessie noticed the
splot
of white on the front door where he had already thrown one.

"You're home," said Maxwell.

"Uh-huh," said Jessie. They stared at each other for a minute, Maxwell rocking back and forth on his skis, Jessie with her arms crossed in front of her.

"It's not polite to ask someone to invite you in," said Maxwell.

"Why not?" asked Jessie.

"I don't know," said Maxwell. "It's just a rule my mother taught me."

"It doesn't make sense," said Jessie. "How's the person supposed to know you want to get invited in if you don't ask?" She wondered why they were talking about this. It was a strange topic for Maxwell to bring up out of the blue.

Maxwell nodded his head. "But it's a rule," he said.

"Maxwell!" Jessie's grandma had come to the open door. "Do you want to come inside?"

"Uh-huh!" he said, using his pole to unsnap his boots from his skis. Jessie followed her grandma back into the house with Maxwell right behind.

"It's a good thing you're here," said Grandma. "I need to go lie down for a few minutes, and Jessie needs a puzzle partner. Want to take over?" she asked, pointing to the dining room table.

Maxwell didn't even answer. He just walked over to the table and sat down in the chair that Grandma had left empty.

"Prepare to be amazed," Grandma said to Jessie, and then she headed up the stairs.

When Jessie sat in her seat, Maxwell had already fit together three pieces. But they weren't pieces of the outside frame of the puzzle. They were pieces that belonged in the vast, empty middle—the part of the puzzle Jessie hadn't even tried to solve yet.

And he kept finding more. He fit another piece onto the three he'd already joined. And then another. His eyes roamed quickly over the pieces, and he moved his hands over them, too, his fingers snapping and wiggling as he thought about which piece to pick up next. Sometimes he made a mistake—a near miss—but just as often he got the right piece on the first try.
Snap.
The piece fit in perfectly, and then Maxwell started to look for the next one.

"How do you do that?" asked Jessie. She was really good at jigsaw puzzles, the best in the family, the best of anyone she knew. But she couldn't start
in the middle
of a thousand-piece puzzle, especially one that was a picture of nothing but jellybeans.

"I'm smart," said Maxwell, continuing to add pieces.
Snap. Snap.

"Well, I'm smart, too, but I can't do that," she said. She tried to concentrate on the frame she was building, but Maxwell's movements were so annoying, she couldn't keep her mind on what she was doing.

"Jellybeans," said Maxwell, snapping his fingers and looking at the pieces.

"Yeah, jellybeans," said Jessie, absent-mindedly. "Grandma calls me Jessie Bean."

"Why?" asked Maxwell.

"It's a nickname."

"I hate nicknames," Maxwell said loudly. "Nicknames are mean."

Jessie looked up, surprised. She'd always thought the same thing but had never heard anyone say it before. "Yeah, I hate nicknames, too! I wish everyone would just call people by their real names. Right?"

"Right," said Maxwell, snapping another piece in place. He pointed at the cluster of puzzle pieces he had fit together. "You don't see that every day."

"What?" asked Jessie, looking at the pieces.

"Oklahoma," said Maxwell. And sure enough, Jessie could see that the pieces made a shape that looked like Oklahoma.

Jessie watched as Maxwell added piece after piece to the puzzle. She was starting to get annoyed. At this rate, she wasn't going to get to do any of her own puzzle. "You know what?" she said. "I like to do puzzles all by myself, without any help." This wasn't true, but it was no fun doing a puzzle with someone who could finish the whole thing before you even got a corner done. It was like someone giving you the answer to a math problem before you even started. "Let's do something else. What do you want to do?"

"
Get Smart!
" said Maxwell.

"What?"

"The best TV show ever made.
Get Smart.
Six seasons, 1965 to 1970, one hundred and thirty-eight episodes produced in all." Maxwell walked over to the TV cabinet and opened the lower cupboard. Inside, Grandma had a few DVDs, mostly babyish movies that Jessie and Evan didn't watch anymore. But Maxwell pulled out a boxed set that Jessie had never seen before.
Get Smart
was the title, and there was a picture of a man in a suit and a tie looking very surprised.

"Season one, the pilot episode," said Maxwell. He popped the DVD in the player, and they both sat down on the couch to watch. The title of the first episode was "Mr. Big."

It was a funny show. Jessie laughed and laughed. There was this dopey secret agent who worked for a super-secret government agency called CONTROL. The agent's name was Maxwell Smart, but his code name was Agent 86.

"I get it," she said, turning to Maxwell. "That's why you say you're smart all the time. Maxwell Smart! It's a joke!"

Maxwell bobbed his head up and down. "Yep! My name is Maxwell, and I'm smart. That's what Mrs. Joyce always says! She says, 'You're smart, Max well.' It's a joke!"

Maxwell Smart was a no-nonsense secret agent. He liked to take charge, and he was always confident he would catch the criminal in the end. Some people might think he was kind of bossy, but Jessie thought he was great.

There was another secret agent—a dark-haired woman named Agent 99—and a dog named K-13. Together, they got to use all kinds of great gadgets, like bino-specs and an inflato-coat and a shoe phone. Jessie especially loved the bino-specs.

"We should do that," she said at the end of the first episode. "We should be like spies and have a stakeout and figure out who stole the bell. We could solve the crime, just like Maxwell Smart and Agent 99."

"Okay," said Maxwell. "Let's do that."

"No, I mean for real," said Jessie. "Real secret agents, not just pretend."

"Okay," said Maxwell. "Let's do that."

"Really?" said Jessie. She was surprised that Maxwell agreed with her right away. She figured it would take a while to convince a sixth-grader to go along with her plan. After all, she was only a fourth-grader, and a pretty young one, at that.

"We have to think of something fast," she said. "New Year's Eve is the day after tomorrow."

"It's like a puzzle," said Maxwell.

"You're right. It's like a puzzle, and I'm good at puzzles."

"Me, too," said Maxwell. "I'm smart."

Evan didn't want to stop. He and Pete were fixing the holes in the roof. Pete was outside, up on the extension ladder, ripping up shingles and tossing them through the hole to Evan. Evan was inside, crouching under the sloping ceiling so that he could catch the shingles as they fell and heave them into the garbage barrel. He also had to hand Pete whatever tools he needed.

So when Mrs. Treski appeared in the doorway of Grandma's office/construction site and asked Evan if he would please take Grandma for a walk, he made a face and said, "Can't Jessie do it?"

Evan, kneeling under the hole, looked up and caught sight of Pete's face looking right back at him. Pete didn't need to say a word. He just shook his head once, and Evan knew that was that.

"Yeah, okay, Mom," said Evan. He stood up and wiped the grit from the knees of his pants. "I'll be back in a few minutes," he hollered up to Pete.

"I'll be here," Pete called down. "Same as before. Take good care of your grandma, Big E."

Evan followed his mother, scowling. "Why can't Grandma take a walk by herself?" Grandma was a nut about walking. She took long walks by herself every day. Sometimes she'd walk five miles, circling her property, which covered a hundred acres at the foot of Black Bear Mountain.

"Evan, please," said his mother in the voice she used that meant there would be no more discussion.

Evan walked into the mudroom just off the kitchen. Grandma was looping her new purple scarf around her neck, the one that Jessie had knit for her for Christmas. Her injured arm was tucked inside her bulky winter coat, which was zipped closed over it.

"Hey, Grandma," said Evan.

"Something tells me you don't feel like going for a walk right now," said Grandma. Evan bent over his boots, tugging them onto his feet and hiding his face. Was it that obvious? The memory of what his grandmother had said to him two days ago in the kitchen flickered in his brain, but then he remembered his mother's explanation.
She's not herself, Evan.

"No, I want to go," he said, knowing that it was okay to fudge the truth when you didn't want to hurt someone's feelings. "It's just that I was helping Pete, and he kind of needs me right now."

"Pete's a good boy," said Grandma.

"Boy!" said Evan. "He's a grown man."

"Not to me, he's not. Everyone looks young to me!" Grandma used her mouth to hold a mitten still while she wriggled her good hand into it. "Ready?"

"Ready," said Evan. Grandma opened the back door and was just about to step out, when Evan's mother called from upstairs. Evan tromped up to the second floor, feeling hot and puffy in his heavy ski coat and boots.

"Evan," said his mother, "try to make it a short walk, okay? Grandma thinks she's back to her old self, but I don't want her getting too tired. And try to hold on to her good arm, if she'll let you. Or at least keep close to her, so if she trips you can grab her before she falls. Okay?"

Evan didn't like the sound of any of this, but he nodded his head. He wasn't used to taking care of his grandma. She had always taken such good care of him and Jessie.

"And, Evan, one more thing," said his mother. "Don't let her go near the bell. Okay? I don't want her ... Just keep her away from that hill, okay?"

Afternoon shadows came early to Grandma's woods because the sun set behind the mountain. Evan was surprised that the blue-gray light of late afternoon was already painting the snow. He turned to walk up the long, plowed driveway toward the main road—that would be a good half-mile walk— but Grandma said she wanted to walk a different way, through the woods. She set out on the path that headed for the foot of Black Bear Mountain. There were footprints in the snow along this path and the steady slicing marks of skis, so Evan knew that Jessie and Maxwell had already come this way today.

Evan talked about the repair work that he and Pete were doing, especially the thrilling part about ripping out the old scorched studs in the wall and putting in new ones. It had been tricky, because the wall they were working on was a load-bearing wall, which meant it was holding up a lot of the weight of the second story. If they took out too many studs at once, the whole house could collapse. Evan thought it was like playing Jenga—the game where you build a tower of blocks, then try to pull out each block without causing the tower to fall.