The Kneebone Boy (3 page)

“He thinks she’s going to come back,” Lucia murmured.

Otto looked up from the robin, confused for a moment, then followed Lucia’s gaze out the window.

“Brenda will go to school tomorrow and tell everyone about the dinosaur bone,” Lucia continued airily, “and everyone will tell
her
about Mum. Then Brenda won’t ever step foot in this house again.”

Here is what happened to their mum. One day she was gone. Casper looked everywhere for her. The police looked everywhere for her. The police searched their house too, and they brought dogs to sniff through the garden, as
though Casper had done something fiendish, you understand. A crowd of neighbours stood outside, watching. In the end, the dogs found exactly nothing, but you can’t have dogs sniffing through your garden to find your missing mum without there being some serious damage to your family’s reputation. Mum was never found. Soon after that, Otto started wearing his scarf all the time.

Here is the part I hate to even mention, but since it figures into this story you’d better hear it now. An ugly rumor started going around. People whispered that Otto had strangled his mum with that very scarf in a fit of rage, and that Casper had buried his wife in the yard to cover for him. Otto had always been a strange, quiet boy. Strange, quiet boys are never popular in small towns. Kids in school started harassing Otto with questions about what he’d done to his mum and where her body was buried and did her ghost haunt him at night until, quite suddenly, Otto simply stopped talking. He’d never talked much to begin with, so it was just a stone’s throw to nothing at all. Still, that made things even worse, of course. Before long, all of Little Tunks acted as if the Hardscrabbles had the lurgies, which in case you don’t know is what kids say you have when they don’t want anything to do with you, as in “Ewww, don’t touch the Hardscrabbles, they have the lurgies!”

“Don’t you think we should warn Max?” Otto asked. “So he won’t get his hopes up about Brenda coming back?”

Lucia stared at her younger brother, who was now walking toward the huge oak tree by their house, which
he would certainly climb to sit on his usual rooftop perch by the chimney. His stride was bouncy and his eyes were lost in some imagined future that was clearly much brighter than the present.

“No. Let him believe what he wants to believe,” Lucia said. Her voice didn’t sound smirky this time. It sounded full of genuine pity. Which should make you like her even more.

In which Otto finds something interesting, Lucia listens to nothing at all, and more stuff happens

The little robin stayed wrapped in Otto’s scarf throughout dinner, perfectly motionless except for its tiny chest, which rose and fell with rapid breaths. Toward the end of dinner, though, the bird began to twitch. It lifted its head, then attempted to right itself, its claws scratching at the scarf to gain a grip.

“I think it’s coming round,” Otto said, gazing down at it.

Casper looked over at Otto through his thick round spectacles, then at Lucia.

“What did he say?” Casper asked her.

“He says it’s coming round,” Max interjected. He took every opportunity to show that he knew Otto’s language as well as Lucia did.

“What is?” Casper asked.

“A bird, Dad,” Lucia said. “Otto’s got a bird in his scarf.”

“Ah,” Casper said, and went back to his dinner. He saw so many odd things in his line of work that a bird in a scarf at dinner was fairly ordinary.

“Oh, poor thing,” Lucia said, watching while Otto carefully disentangled the pinny little claw from the scarf. “We should put it in a box. Just until we’re sure it’s fine.”

So off they went to search for a spare box. You always think there is an endless supply of spare boxes, but there never really is. The spare ones are nearly always smashed or else have a mouse corpse curled in the corner. There were no spare boxes to be found in the basement or in any of the closets and the poor little robin was beginning to really make a fuss.

“We might try Dad’s studio,” Otto suggested.

That hadn’t occurred to Lucia. Casper’s attic studio always seemed like its own separate flat that coincidentally happened to be attached to the top of their house. They opened the door at the far end of the upstairs hallway and climbed the steep, narrow stairs, right away smelling the nutty odor of linseed oil and, lurking behind that, the nostril-wincing sting of turpentine.

They didn’t often enter Casper’s studio when he was in there. The room wasn’t off-limits exactly; it was just that Casper acted differently while he was at work in his studio. He stared at his sketch pad when he spoke to his kids. His voice grew vague, and his eyes had a faraway cast. In the studio, Casper’s children felt slightly less substantial, as though they were one of Casper’s daydreams, that
might grow fuzzy around the edges and vanish without warning.

When Casper wasn’t in the studio, though, the children did like to come in to see the sketches hanging on the wall. They were the sketches that Casper brought home from his travels abroad—sketches of princesses and sultans, barons and kings, and an occasional knight (the actual paintings were left with his clients, of course, but Casper was able to take home the preliminary sketches).

In fairy tales, kings and princesses always look different from the everyday person. They’re better looking or taller or fatter or even uglier. You’d think that was just all nonsense in real life, since royals are just people like everyone else.

Except, they’re not.

They really do look different from the average person, even royalty who have been booted off the throne or have lost all their money. Casper’s sketches proved it.

The Duchess of Hildenhausen, for instance, was a thick-jawed, middle-aged woman with long blond ringlets that were spiked with tiny cornflowers. One of her huge blue eyes went the wrong way, so that she looked just like a doll that had been rattled about by an angry child. And there was Prince Wiri, who had ruled The Sister’s Islands in the South Pacific until his family was accused of witchcraft and they were exiled to Fiji. The black-haired Prince Wiri, dressed in a white military uniform crowded with epaulets, was an exceptionally handsome young man—as handsome as any movie star—but he would not smile or
even show a hint of happy in any of Casper’s sketches. Lucia enjoyed feeling sorry for him. Then there was the immensely fat Prince Andrei, whose family had once ruled a small principality south of Bulgaria. He had squinty eyes and a long, thin black beard, frayed on the ends. Perched on his shoulder was a black fox. Casper said that the fox was very clever and could bounce on a tiny trampoline that Prince Andrei had had built for him. Still, the fox didn’t like Casper and would occasionally leap off the prince’s shoulder to vomit on Casper’s shoe.

Ex-royals were more difficult than regular people too. Casper said this was because they were frustrated. A duchess who lives in a tiny four-storey walk-up with a leaky toilet will never be a happy duchess, he said. They snipped and snapped and did strange things. While painting the Duchess of Hildenhausen—the lady with the wonky eye—Casper was interrupted dozens of times while the duchess leapt up to throw boiled potatoes at a mouse that she swore had been harassing her for months.

Also, unlike regular people, royalty didn’t feel the need to pay their bills. Once in a great while they paid Casper what they said they were going to pay him. But more often than not Casper would come away with little more than partial payment, a box of expensive chocolates, and a promise of payment in full when their “affairs were settled” or “after the sale of a house in Spain.” Ex-royals, it turned out, were a pretty shifty lot.

So Casper supplemented his income by doing
illustrations for small kitchen appliance repair manuals and occasionally for the
Journal of British Hog Farming.

“Why don’t you just paint regular people, Dad?” Max had once asked him. “At least they’d pay their bill.”

“Probably,” Casper said. “But there is something extraordinary about the face of a person who has fallen from greatness. They remind me of angels tossed out of heaven who are now struggling to manage the coin-operated washing machine at the Scrubbly-Bubbly Laundromat.”

You must make allowances for artists like Casper. They get romantic ideas about things.

There were plenty of boxes in the studio crowded into the low corner of the attic, but they were all filled. Some contained bundles of old sketch pads and others had loose drawings and still others held copies of toaster repair manuals that Casper had illustrated or back issues of the
Journal of British Hog Farming
.

“Here,” Lucia said, picking out a small carton from the back and handing it to Otto. “This one’s not full yet. We could just shift some of the papers inside to another box and free it up.”

Otto put the box down and looked inside. “I think it’s just garbage in here. See, most of it’s crumpled.”

“Well, no wonder,” Lucia said, walking over to Casper’s dustbin. The dustbin was heaped up high with papers. Bits of pencil shavings were spilling off the top of the heap and had pooled around it on the floor. Lucia scooped up the shavings and tucked them in the corner of the
dustbin, then shoved the rubbish down with the heel of her hand.

“Honestly, this place is beginning to look as wild as the garden,” she said, lifting up the dustbin. “I’ll go empty this downstairs.”

And while she did, Otto found something interesting in the box of crumpled things.

This isn’t surprising. Otto was very good at finding things that were not meant to be found. He often found birds’ nests tucked in bushes. Once he found a litter of kittens that Esmeralda had stashed beneath a loose floorboard in the garden shed—two white ones and a little black one. Last year he found a bunch of love letters that Casper had written to their mum. They were shoved in the pocket of her dressing gown, which was shoved in the back of Casper’s closet, along with all her other clothes. The clothes still smelled of peppermint from the Such Fun Chewing Gum factory.

What
is
surprising, however, is that Otto didn’t tell Lucia he had found the interesting thing in the box. He usually told Lucia everything. By the time she returned he had tucked the interesting thing in his back pocket, and all Lucia saw was a robin standing upright in an empty carton and Otto looking slightly paler than usual.

(I hope you don’t think I’m teasing by not telling you what Otto found. I will, I promise. It’s just that there is a right time and place for everything, and 7:19 p.m. on a Thursday in Casper’s attic studio is simply not the right time and place.)

That night, Lucia lay in her bed, listening to nothing. The sound of nothing is the most ominous sound in the world. It’s the sound a cat makes a second before it lunges for a mouse and sinks its arrow-tippy teeth into the poor thing’s neck. The sound of nothing was also the sound that Casper made right before he was about to leave them.

Usually, Casper was a night owl. The darker it grew, the busier he became. He cooked at night, he painted at night. His children went to sleep to the lullaby of the radio that he played in his studio or his quick footsteps creaking through the house until the wee hours of morning. But right before Casper was to leave for a job, he slept. Perhaps it was anxiety that tired him out. Or excitement.

But he hadn’t mentioned a new job, Lucia thought. And he’d been away just two months before. Surely he wouldn’t make them stay with Mrs. Carnival again so soon?

To take her mind off the sound of nothing, Lucia did what she always did when she felt troubled. She stared at the Sultan of Juwi. She had strategically hung him above her dresser, directly across from her bed, so she could gaze at his face before she went to sleep and wake up to the sight of it in the morning. The white-robed sultan sat in the center of a fountain, on the head of a stone cherub that poured water out of a jug. The sultan held an egg in one hand and a silver demitasse in the other while he looked directly out at Lucia. She knew his face by heart: the creamy skin, the flat disk of cheekbone, the amused wide-set dark eyes that seemed to see all her worst qualities and
like her even more because of them. Perched on his head was a crown that looked like a large bejewelled mustard lid, and his white robe was cinched around the middle with a black sash. The left ear had a small hoop earring in it, and the right ear was a bit mangled looking. A mischievous half smile curled one side of his mouth. It was the smile of someone who has recently made a prank phone call. When Lucia told her father that, Casper nodded.