The Trespassers (11 page)

“Well, maybe you’ll be in my class then,” Neely said. It was an interesting thought. She wondered what the other kids would make of him. He would not, she decided, be a big hit. Not if he kept on ego-tripping about his rich and famous family and other embarrassing things like that.

“Well, I guess I’d better go,” he said finally. And then to Neely’s surprise, “Why don’t you come too? Up to Halcyon House, I mean.”

“Well, I don’t think we could right now,” Neely said. “We’re going to be having dinner in an hour or two.”

“Oh.” Curtis looked disappointed. “Well, come tomorrow then. Okay? Come up tomorrow.”

It was Grub who said okay first. Poking Neely, who was still speechless with surprise, Grub said, “Okay. Huh, Neely? We can come tomorrow. Can’t we?”

Neely said she guessed they could.

T
HERE WERE A COUPLE OF REASONS WHY NEELY DIDN’T
really want to go back to Halcyon House. The most important one concerned the nursery, and it felt, she had to admit, a lot like jealousy. Somehow it really hurt to think about what Curtis probably had been doing to the nursery.

Especially to the dollhouse. Not that he was apt to have actually played with it, but she wouldn’t put it past him to ruin things just for the fun of it. She pictured the lovely cherrywood chairs and tables with missing legs, and perhaps even the beautiful doll family with broken heads and torn clothing. She hated even to imagine it.

The other reason was that going back to Halcyon House under the circumstances just might be a little risky. Of course, Curtis had lied to his father before, to protect her and Grub, but what if he got mad at them, or just changed his mind? What if he got them up there and then told his father that he’d been lying and that Grub and Neely were actually trespassers?

On the other side of the argument there was the fact that Grub definitely wanted to go. There was no doubt about that. Ever since Saturday he’d been, if not in a full fledged gloom-and-doom attack, not very far from it. He’d been spending a lot of time in his room since then, reading or staring out the window. When Neely asked him he always said he was okay, or that he was just sad because it was August. August always made Grub sad because September came next and the start of school. But this time Grub’s depression wasn’t just the usual beginning-of-school blues, because right after Curtis showed up and invited them back to Halcyon he suddenly became a lot more like his normal self.

Neely tried to warn him that it wouldn’t be the same. “The nursery is his now, and he can do anything he wants to with all the stuff in there,” she told him.

“I know,” Grub said. “I know that. I just want to...go there again.”

“Well, okay,” she said. “We’ll go. But remember, it’s going to be very different now.”

The first big difference was that they were able to enter the estate grounds by way of the grand front gate. Curtis had said it would be unlocked and it was. And the next one was that Lion didn’t come running to meet them.

“Let’s go look in his doghouse.” Grub’s face was puckered with worry. “Maybe he’s just asleep.”

Neely was afraid there was more to it man that. Lion had never been too sound asleep to come to meet them before. But she agreed to go look. It felt funny walking right past Reuben’s house on a Thursday. Neely almost expected him to burst out through the front door shouting at them, but he apparently wasn’t at home. Lion was however. When they got to his doghouse, there he was all right, lying at the end of a long chain. When he saw Grub he went into such convulsions of joy he almost tied himself in knots. Grub and Lion were still climbing all over each other when a voice said, “I knew it. I knew that poor animal was harmless if you treated him right.”

It turned out to be Carmen, the old woman who had been Curtis’s father’s nursemaid, and was now, according to Curtis, the family’s cook and housekeeper. She had seen them, she said, from the kitchen window and had come out to say hello. Carmen was short and sturdy, and gloomy in a cheerful sort of way, as if she thought everything was pretty bad but she was too used to it to let it get her down.

“Guess you’re the Bradford children,” she said to Neely as she led the way into the huge old kitchen. “Curtis said you’d be coming to play today but I didn’t know whether to believe him. You can’t always tell with Curtis. Come on in. Real nice to have company in this lonely old ruin. Terrible old wreck of a place. Not like it used to be, I can tell you.”

That was intriguing—the “used to be.” The thought of talking to someone who knew so much about the way Halcyon used to be fascinated Neely. She had several questions in mind, but to her surprise Grub asked one first—several actually. Stepping in front of Neely he asked, “Why is Lion tied up? Did he do something bad? Can I untie him?”

Carmen put her hands on her hips and stood for a moment staring down at Grub while her grumpy frown gradually got mixed up with a halfway smile. “No,” she said, “he didn’t do anything bad that I know of, but I don’t think you’d better untie him. He’s just tied up because Curtis and his father are afraid of dogs.”

She studied Grub’s face for a moment more before she said, “He’s only tied up during the daytime, dearie. Mr. Hutchinson lets Reuben turn him loose as soon as it gets dark.”

“But—” Grub was beginning when Curtis suddenly appeared in the kitchen door.

“Hi,” he said, “you’re late. Come on. Let’s go upstairs.”

As they were leaving the room Carmen called after them, “Don’t forget to introduce your friends to your mother, Curtis. You promised you would. She’s in the game room.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. He changed directions and headed for the front of the house. In the entry hall he stopped and said, “Wait till you meet my mom. She’s really something.”

“Something?” Neely asked.

“Yeah. Like glamorous and beautiful. And young. Like, she looks a hell of a lot younger than your mom, for instance.”

“Well, she probably is younger,” Neely said. “My parents had another family that were almost grown up before they got around to Grub and me.” She started to explain about Aaron and Julie and Lucie, but Curtis didn’t seem interested. Instead he just went on about his mother.

“She was working in Hollywood when she met my dad,” he said. “She was thinking about being in the movies. She could have been if she’d wanted to. She was about to get discovered when she met my dad.”

When they got to the game room Curtis’s mother was sitting at one of the card tables smoking a cigarette and playing solitaire. She was wearing a purple velvet robe with silver embroidery, her hair was so blond it was almost white and she had on a lot of makeup. She looked young all right, and glamorous maybe, but not exactly what Neely would call beautiful.

“Well, would you look at this,” she said when she looked up from her cards and saw them. “Here you are, just like Curtis said you’d be. The new little girlfriend and her brother. Come over here and let me look at you.”

The way she rolled her eyes and smiled when she said “girlfriend” made it obvious she was making a big mushy deal out of it. Which was pretty ridiculous, but it didn’t bother Neely all that much. She’d met adults before who thought it was pretty funny to make comments like that about kids.

When kids made unfunny jokes Neely tended to handle it with a very long, very cool stare, but with adults she usually pretended she hadn’t heard. That’s what she did this time. Going over to the card table, she put out her hand. “Good morning, Mrs. Hutchinson,” she said. “I’m glad to meet you. My name is Cornelia Bradford and this is my brother, Gregory.”

“My, how poised and polite,” Mrs. Hutchinson said. “Curtis, you could certainly take lessons from this young lady. And, oh my. Look at this.”

Curtis’s mother was staring at Grub. Neely had a sinking feeling she knew what was going to happen—Mrs. Hutchinson was about to start making a fuss over how gorgeous Grub was.

“Oh my,” Mrs. Hutchinson said again. “What a handsome child. What a heartbreaker. My dear,” she said to Neely, “have your parents looked into getting an agent for this child? They should, you know. He is simply outrageous.”

Neely knew Grub was hating it. His eyes said so.

“Mrs. Hutchinson,” she said firmly. “Please don’t fuss over Grub. He doesn’t like it.” She turned to Curtis to say something like “Let’s go”—and wound up not saying anything. Something in his face made her forget what she’d meant to say. It wasn’t till later, when she’d had time to think, that she figured it out. Actually it wasn’t too hard to understand why homely old Curtis had been looking so angry.

N
EELY WAS CURIOUS. ON THE WAY UPSTAIRS SHE GLANCED
at Curtis once or twice. His eyes were squinted and his lower lip was jutting out. When Neely said, “Your mom is pretty glamorous all right,” he only shrugged and made a snorting noise.

A minute later he said, “
She
thinks she is anyway.” He was breathing deeply. “The Hutchinsons don’t think so though. They think she’s cheap. That’s what my cousins say. They say nobody wanted my dad to marry her.”

Neely didn’t answer. She didn’t know what to say—and besides, they turned the corner just about then and there was Curtis’s father coming through a door at the end of the hall. He was dressed this time in a shirt and khaki pants but the same ratty old bathrobe was still draped around his shoulders. When Neely started toward him to say hello, he turned and went back through the same door.

Neely looked at Curtis questioningly but he only shrugged and said, “He doesn’t like to talk to people when he’s working on his book. Writers are that way.”

“Oh yeah, I guess so,” Neely said. “My dad knows some writers. Some of them are pretty strange at times. What is your dad’s book going to be about?”

“Survival, mostly,” Curtis said. “It’s mostly about survival. You know. About how to go build a fortress in the mountains and protect yourself when a war comes or a revolution. My dad’s always been real interested in survival.”

Neely might have asked some more questions about the survival book, but they’d reached the nursery by then and there were other things to think about.

While Curtis was unlocking the door she hung back—bracing herself for how bad things might be inside. As Grub ran into the room eagerly, practically vibrating with excitement, she followed slowly—and almost froze in amazement. It looked exactly the same. Nothing had been changed in any way. The circus and battleground were just as Grub had left them, and the toy soldier who had been chosen for the role of kidnapper still lay in front of the window of the dollhouse right where Grub had dropped it.

“Hasn’t anybody been here?” she finally managed to ask. “Since we were here, I mean?”

Curtis looked uncomfortable—and then tried to cover it with his phony supercool act. “Naw. I just didn’t feel like it. I had too much else to do.”

“You haven’t been back here at all...since Saturday?” Neely asked.

“Sure I have. I came in and got the key—and your lunches, didn’t I?” Curtis said.

“And you locked it back up. Why did you lock it back up?”

“Carmen told me to. And besides, why should I want to come in here? I don’t play with this kind of kid stuff.”

So Neely’s worries about what Curtis had been doing in the nursery had apparently been unnecessary because Curtis “didn’t play with kid stuff.” At least that’s what he said. But when Neely suggested that maybe he’d like to go somewhere else to play he quickly said no. And before very long he seemed to be having a great time making the toy soldiers have an extremely bloody battle. Grub played with him for a while and then went back to the circus game and, Neely noticed, to his invisible playmate. And while Grub played and whispered, Curtis went on mowing down whole regiments of soldiers.

Neely had been fooling around with the dollhouse—making up stuff about the kidnapping in between thinking about other things—when suddenly she realized what had happened. Or what hadn’t happened—and why. Curtis had simply been afraid. He’d been afraid to be alone in the nursery. She was pretty sure she was right, but she decided to check it out.

Neely put the mother doll back on the bed where she’d been weeping for her kidnapped child, took pity on her and produced her baby from where he’d been hidden by the kidnappers and put him back in his mother’s arms, then got up and went over to the battlefield and sat down beside Curtis.

When Curtis looked up from firing off a line of cannons she said, “Did you get a chance to talk to Carmen about Monica?”

Curtis’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Yeah,” he said. “I talked to her. Why?”

“I don’t know. Just curious, I guess. What did she say?”

Curtis looked at Neely through narrowed eyes. But then his desire to be the one who knew something important obviously got the better of his suspicious nature. Putting down a cannon, he turned around, grinning in a strange, almost gloating way. “Well,” he said, “at first she said it had all happened a long time before she was ever here and it was all just talk, but
then
”—he paused for dramatic effect—“then she said that nobody knew for sure...
but
the Monica kid was probably murdered.”

Neely gasped. She’d been wanting something mysterious and exciting, but not something as bad as that. It was too unbelievably awful. She was still staring at Curtis in speechless surprise when she became vaguely aware that Grub was standing behind her. “Murdered?” she finally managed to ask. “How? Who murdered her?”

Curtis looked up at Grub and then at Neely, obviously pleased at the effect his story was having. “Well, see,” he said, settling into the telling, “this old woman told Carmen that all the servants were
told
Monica died of some kind of disease, but it had really been, like, an accident. What really happened was that she’d fallen out of a window.
And
, she also said that some of the servants thought it hadn’t just been an accident...like maybe she was pushed, or something.”

For a long moment Neely was silent, her mind racing. She heard Grub whisper something under his breath, but before she could ask him what he’d said, Curtis went on, “Carmen said this one old servant who’d been Monica’s nanny said that some of the other kids had pushed her because they hated her.”