The Mysterious Benedict Society (4 page)

After a certain amount of blubbering and wiping away tears, the children stacked their tests on top of Reynie’s and returned to their seats. In exhausted silence they waited as the pencil woman flipped through the tests. This took but a minute — she had only to look at the first question, after all. When she came to Reynie’s at the bottom of the stack, she ran through the pages, making checkmarks and nodding.

“Nice work,” Rhonda whispered from behind him. “You managed it on your own.” She seemed genuinely pleased that he hadn’t cheated, despite having encouraged him to do just that. She certainly was a strange one.

“I shall read now the names of those who passed the test,” announced the pencil woman. “If your name is called you will advance to the third stage of testing, so please remain seated and await further instructions. Those whose names are not called are free to go.”

Reynie’s ears perked up. There was a
third
stage?

The pencil woman cleared her throat, but this time she didn’t bother looking at the paper in front of her. “Reynard Muldoon!” she called out.

On her way out of the room, she added, “That is all.”

R
eynie, alone in the room now, was trying to make sense of what had happened. Why hadn’t Rhonda Kazembe’s name been called? Was it because she cheated? Did she have the wrong answers, after all? And where did she
get
those answers in the first place? It was all very mysterious, and not the least intriguing was Rhonda’s behavior when she was dismissed along with the others: “Well, best of luck, kid,” she’d chirped, playfully mussing his hair and scudding from the room in her cloud-dress, apparently not the slightest bit confused or disappointed that she hadn’t passed.

Reynie’s musings were interrupted by the pencil woman poking her head in through the doorway: “We’ve finally gotten rid of the other children, Reynard. Had to give them consolation doughnuts and hugs and whatnot. Only a few more minutes now to wait.” She was already withdrawing again when Reynie called after her.

“Excuse me! Miss, uh — Miss? I’m sorry, you never told us your name.”

“That’s fine, Reynard,” she said, stepping into the room. “You’ve nothing to be sorry for.” Reynie waited for her to give her name. Instead she simply wiped doughnut crumbs from her lips and said, “You had a question?”

“Oh, yes. May I please telephone Miss Perumal, my tutor? No one has any idea where I am. I’m afraid she’ll be worried.”

“Very good of you, Reynard, but don’t worry. We’ve already called Miss Perumal, so all is taken care of.” The pencil woman began once again to retreat.

“Miss? Excuse me, Miss?”

She stopped. “Yes, what is it now, Reynard?”

“Forgive me for asking this, Miss. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important, but… well, you wouldn’t happen to be lying to me, would you?”

“
Lying
to you?”

“I’m sorry to ask it. But, you know, you did tell Miss Perumal this morning that I could use your phone, and then later you told me there
was
no phone. So you see why I’m concerned. It’s just that I don’t want Miss Perumal to worry.”

The pencil woman seemed unperturbed. “That’s a perfectly reasonable question, Reynard. A perfectly reasonable question.” She gave him an approving nod and made as if to leave.

“Miss, but you didn’t answer my question!”

The woman scratched her head, and Reynie began to suspect that she was either a little daft or a little deaf. After a moment, however, she said, “I suppose you want the truth?”

“Yes, please!”

“The truth is I haven’t called Miss Perumal, but I will do so immediately. In fact, I was
about
to call her when you asked me if I had called her yet. Does this satisfy you?”

Reynie hardly knew what to say. He didn’t wish to offend the woman, but he could hardly trust her now, and it was more important to know that Miss Perumal’s mind was at ease. “I’m sorry, Miss, but may I please just call her myself? I’ll only take a minute.”

The pencil woman smiled. When she spoke this time her voice was quite gentle, and she looked Reynie in the eyes. “You are very good to be so concerned about Miss Perumal. What would you say if I told you that I
have
in fact called her already? No, don’t answer that. You won’t believe me. How about this? I’ll relay her message to you: ‘Do you see now that you didn’t need luck? I’m glad you wore matching socks.’ That is what she told me to tell you. Are you satisfied?”

Before Reynie could make up his mind how to answer, she slipped out of the room, leaving him to puzzle over her mystifying behavior. The message from Miss Perumal was obviously real, so why hadn’t she told him in the first place?

As he pondered this, he heard footsteps in the hall, followed by a timid knock at the half-open door. A young boy’s face appeared in the doorway. “Hello,” the boy said, adjusting his spectacles, “is this where I’m supposed to wait?” He spoke so softly that Reynie had to strain to hear him.

“I have no idea. It’s where
I’m
supposed to wait, though, so maybe it is. You’re welcome to join me, if you like. I’m Reynie Muldoon.”

“Oh,” the boy said uncertainly. “My name is Sticky Washington. I’m just wondering if this is the right place. The yellow lady told me to come down the hall and sit with someone named Reynard.”

“That’s me,” Reynie said. “People call me Reynie for short.” He put out his hand, and after a moment’s hesitation Sticky Washington came and shook it.

Sticky was a notably skinny boy (which Reynie suspected was how he got his nickname — he was thin as a stick) with light brown skin the very color of the tea that Miss Perumal made each morning. He had big, nervous eyes like a horse’s, and, for some odd reason, a perfectly smooth bald head. His tiny wire-rimmed spectacles gave him the distinguished look of a scholar. A fidgety scholar, though: He seemed quite shy, or at the very least anxious. Well, why shouldn’t he be anxious, if he’d been through what Reynie had been through today?

“Are you here for the third test?” Reynie asked.

Sticky nodded. “I’ve been waiting all day. I had to be here at nine o’clock this morning, and the test was over at ten. Since then I’ve just been sitting around in an empty room. Lucky I had a pear with me or I might have starved. I think all the other children got doughnuts. Why didn’t
we
get doughnuts?”

“I wondered the same thing. Were you the only one who passed, then?”

“The first test, no. A little girl passed it, too, but I haven’t seen her since yesterday. Maybe they told her to come at a different time — they’ve had tests here all day. Was there an extremely small girl in your group, about half our size?”

Reynie shook his head. He would have remembered anyone so tiny.

“Maybe she’s coming later. Anyway, as for the second test, yes: I was the only one who passed. Which surprised me because —” Sticky stopped himself with a glance at the doorway. He opened his mouth to continue, thought better of it, and at last pretended to notice something on the ceiling, as if he hadn’t been about to say anything at all. Obviously he had a secret. Reynie had a sudden suspicion what it was.

“Because there was a girl who cheated?”

Sticky’s eyes widened. “How did you know?”

“The same thing happened to me. I think it’s a trick of some kind. Tell me, this girl didn’t happen to drop her pencil on the way into the building, did she? Out on the plaza?”

“Yes! I couldn’t believe anybody would take such a chance. We were only allowed to bring one pencil, you know.”

“What did you do?”

“I tried to help her. A few other kids said they were sorry but they didn’t want to be late, and one boy even laughed. I felt awfully sorry for her, so I had her hold onto my feet and lower me down through the grate. She was strong as a bear and had no trouble doing it, and I’m so skinny I fit right through the bars. It was terrifying, though, I don’t mind admitting it, hanging upside down, scrabbling around in the dark. I think something even nibbled at my finger, but maybe I imagined it. I can get a little mixed up when I’m scared.”

“You were lucky to find her pencil,” Reynie observed. “It was pitch-black down in that drain.”

“Oh, no, I
didn’t
find it. But you know what she did? She hauled me back up through the grate and said, ‘Oh well, never mind. I have an extra one.’ And she pulled another pencil right out of her sleeve! Can you believe it? Why she would let me go down into that awful drain when she had an extra pencil, I can’t imagine. Then, to top it off, she offered me the answers to the test, to repay me for trying to help her. Apparently they didn’t do her any good, though. I’m glad I refused.”

“Me, too,” Reynie said. “I think refusing was part of the test. If we’d cheated, they would have known it, and I doubt either one of us would be here.”

From his shirt pocket Sticky took out a thin piece of cotton cloth and polished his spectacles with it. “If you’re right, it’s a little creepy that they’re tricking us like that.” He put the glasses back on and blinked his big, nervous eyes. “But I shouldn’t complain. They were very nice to let me continue to the third stage even though I missed a few questions. Very generous of them —”

“Wait a minute,” Reynie said. “How could you possibly have missed any? Did you circle the wrong letters by accident?”

Sticky seemed embarrassed. He shuffled his feet as he spoke. “Oh, well, I suppose the questions were easy for you, but for me they were rather difficult. Time ran out before I could answer the last three, so I had to just circle some answers and hope I’d get lucky. I didn’t, of course. But as I said, they were very forgiving.”

Reynie couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You mean you
knew
the answers to those questions?”

Sticky grew more dejected with Reynie’s every question. Tears brimmed in his eyes as he said, “Well, yes, I suppose I do look rather stupid, don’t I? I look like a person who doesn’t know any answers. I understand that.”

Reynie interrupted him. “No, no! I didn’t mean that! I meant that I’m surprised
anybody
knew the answers. One or two, maybe, but certainly not all of them.”

Sticky brightened, smiling shyly and straightening his back. “Oh! Well, yes, I suppose I do know a lot of things. That’s why people started calling me Sticky, because everything I read sticks in my head.”

“It’s perfectly amazing,” Reynie said. “You must read more than anybody I’ve ever met. But listen, once you figured out the test was a puzzle, why didn’t you just solve it that way? It would have saved time — you could have finished it.”

“A puzzle?”

“You didn’t notice that the answers were all right there in the test?”

“I
did
notice that a lot of information was repeated,” Sticky reflected, “but I didn’t really pay attention to it. I was concentrating too hard on getting the answers right. That question on colloidal suspensions really had me sweating, I can tell you, and as I said, when I’m anxious I can get mixed up.” After a pause, he sighed and added, “I tend to get anxious a lot.”

Reynie laughed. “Well, you didn’t know it was a puzzle, and I didn’t know any of the answers, but we’re both here now. We’d make a good team.”

“You think so?” said Sticky. He grinned. “Yes, I suppose we would.”

The boys waited there for some time, discussing the curiosities of the day. Sticky was more relaxed now, and soon the two of them grew comfortable together, joking and laughing like old friends. Sticky couldn’t stop giggling about Rhonda Kazembe’s crazy getup, and Reynie smiled until his face hurt when Sticky told him more about hanging upside down in the storm drain. (“My shoes started to slip off in her hands,” Sticky recounted, “and for a second I thought she was going to take them and leave me down there under the grate. I panicked and started wriggling like crazy — I think it was all she could do to pull me back up without dropping me!”)

Then Reynie told Sticky about the pencil woman’s sneakiness regarding the phone call to Miss Perumal.

Instead of laughing, as Reynie had expected, Sticky slipped back into his nervous behavior. He began polishing his spectacles again, even though he’d just done it minutes before. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Yes, I tried to call my parents, too. Same thing happened. But in the end it was fine. She called them. Nothing to worry about.”

Reynie nodded politely. He saw perfectly well that Sticky was trying to hide something. Maybe he hadn’t thought of calling his parents and felt guilty about it now? But Reynie decided not to press him on the matter — Sticky seemed uncomfortable enough as it was.

“So where do you live?” he asked, to change the subject.

This only made Sticky polish all the harder. Perhaps he simply disliked personal questions. “Well,” he began. He cleared his throat. “Well —”

Just then the door flew wide open, and a girl raced into the room carrying a bucket. She was extremely quick: One moment she was bursting through the door, golden-blond hair flying out behind her like a horse’s mane, and the next she was standing right beside them. Sticky leaped back in alarm.

“What’s the matter?” he cried.

“What’s the matter with you?” the girl replied calmly.

“Well… what were you running from?”

“From? I wasn’t running
from
anything. I was running
to
this room. Old Yellow Suit told me to come down here and wait with you two, so here I am. My name’s Kate Wetherall.”

Sticky was breathing hard and casting glances at the door, as if a lion might fly in next, so it fell to Reynie to introduce them. “I’m Reynie Muldoon and this is Sticky Washington,” he said, shaking her hand and immediately regretting it — her grip was so strong it was like getting his fingers caught in a drawer. (Sticky noticed Reynie’s pained expression and quickly thrust his own hands into his pockets.) Rubbing his tender knuckles, Reynie went on, “I think the question is why you were running instead of walking.”

“Why not? It’s faster. Now I’m here with you boys instead of trudging along the empty hallway, and it’s much better, isn’t it? You seem like nice fellows. So why do they call you Sticky?” She touched Sticky’s arm. “You don’t
feel
sticky.”