Us and Uncle Fraud (6 page)

"Is it French?" I asked Mother.

But she shook her head. "No."

"Swedish, maybe?"

"I don't know," she said. "But it doesn't sound like it. It doesn't sound like any language I've ever heard."

Stephie wandered into the room, her basket filled to the top with eggs, some of them cracked. "I'm hungry," she announced.

"I'll fix some breakfast for everyone," Mother said.

The front door opened and Tom came in, hanging his jacket in the hall on his way to the kitchen.

"Look!" said Stephanie to Tom. "Look at all my eggs!"

"Nice," he said to her, admiringly, and she smiled with satisfaction. Tom picked up the front section of the newspaper.

"Some picture on page one," he said to Father, who nodded, pleased, and turned back to the first page so that they could admire the photograph together.

"
Ya tebya lyublyu
," I murmured to Marcus.

"
Ya tebya lyublyu
," Marcus murmured back solemnly. Somewhere in our house was a hidden treasure; and somewhere, in the secret words, my brother and I held the key to it.

We searched. How we searched, Marcus and I! We started in my room, Easter morning, since it had been where Claude slept and would have been the obvious place to hide something.

There was no sign that Claude had been there at all. His suitcase was gone; the little box was gone; and he had even removed the blue sheets from my bed and put them into the laundry hamper in the bathroom.

"Think, Louise," Marcus commanded. "It's your room. Where would you hide something?"

I shrugged. "I always hide stuff under the bed," I said. "But we looked there. Or under my clothes, in the bureau, but we looked there."

"And we looked in the closet," Marcus said. "Even in all the shoes."

"
Ya tebya lyublyu
," I repeated. "That first part sounds like 'the table.' Do you think it could mean 'the table' in some other language?"

"Maybe." We glanced around my room, but there were only two tables. The one beside my bed had only the small drawer where Claude had kept the Life Savers. We had looked in there. The other table, under a window, was where I did my homework. There were no hiding places in it.

I sighed. "It's not in this room," I said. "And it wouldn't be in the other bedrooms, because he hid it while everyone was asleep last night."

Marcus tested his ragged tooth with the tip of his tongue. "This house is full of tables," he pointed out. "Up in the attic and down in the basement and out in the shed—he could have gone there."

We looked through the window to the large, decrepit shed at the end of our driveway. Years ago, at the turn of the century, Mother said, a family probably had housed their cow or chickens there. They had stored wood there to heat the house in winter; now, of course, we had an oil furnace. Now the shed was dusty and cobwebbed and filled with junk. Marcus and I played in there, summers, fixing up forts and clubrooms, holding initiations, planning battles with the neighborhood kids. Each of us—even Tom—at some time or another, had been angered by some injustice and had run away, carrying a paper bag filled with food stolen from the refrigerator. We had ignored Mother's pleas to think twice, to be mature, to reach a compromise,
and we had run away—always to the shed, where we had huddled miserably until evening came, shadows lengthened, the air grew cold, and we could hear mice scuttling and rustling. Then we would come home, trudging back along the driveway with tear-stained faces, to apologize and be welcomed back.

We would have to search the shed.

"Anyway," Marcus said, "it might not mean 'table.'
Ya tebya lyublyu.
That last word could mean 'blue.' He could have hidden it in something blue."

"A blue table," I suggested.

"We don't
have
a blue table."

I smoothed Claude's note and we looked at the words again. "Maybe," I said, "it's like those games in the children's page of the paper where you have to rearrange the letters?"

"I hate those," Marcus groaned.

"I do, too," I acknowledged. "But still: Look at the letters. Do you see any words?"

Marcus looked. "Bubbly," he said, finally.

"There aren't enough Vs," I decided.

"Yeah, but he can't spell, remember? Maybe he didn't know there are supposed to be three Vs in 'bubbly.'"

"
Great
," I said angrily. "It's bad enough to have to figure out a code. But when the guy who made the code can't spell? That's just
great.
"

"Anyway," Marcus mused, "what would 'bubbly' mean?"

"Ginger ale," I suggested.

Marcus made a face. "No," he said. "That's dumb. I bet 'bubbly' would mean the river. Remember yesterday, how foamy and bubbly the river was? And Claude saw it, when we were over on the bank, behind the Leboffs' house."

"Well, now
you're
being dumb. How on earth could you hide something in the river? Anyway, he didn't want us to go back there. He said it was dangerous to prowl around the Leboffs' house, even outside."

We stared glumly at the note and finally I folded it up again and put it in the drawer of my little table.

"It has to be here at the house," Marcus said decisively. "You want to try the attic first or the shed?"

"The attic, I guess."

And so we went there.

"You two are absolutely filthy," Mother said when we came to dinner that evening. "What have you been doing? Look at your hands. Run up to the bathroom and
scrub.
"

We did, and left the bathroom a disaster, with the towels streaked and the sink ringed with dirt.

"We were in the attic," I explained to Mother. "We were looking for Claude's gift."

"Oh?" She smiled. "And did you find it?"

"No," Marcus said dejectedly.

"I don't mind that he hid it," I told her. "But it's not fair that he hid it so we can't
find
it."

"Well," Mother said mildly, "that's Claude. He likes to complicate things. And remember what he said in his note? All treasures are well hidden."

She began to serve the food. Dinner on Easter was always the same: ham and deviled eggs, their whites stained with dye.

Father helped himself to salad and passed it around. "That's Claude all right," he echoed Mother. "But has it occurred to you two pip-squeaks that perhaps there was never any gift at all?"

Tom grinned, and popped half an egg into his mouth.

"Of course it occurred to us," I said. "We're not dumb. But you weren't there yesterday when Claude told us about it. He was absolutely sincere; wasn't he, Marcus?"

Marcus nodded, his mouth full.

"He was absolutely sincere when he tried to peddle a thousand dollars worth of fraudulent oil stock to me, too," Father said, grinning.

Tom swallowed his egg with a gulp and said, "He just makes stuff up. I think he's crazy."

"He teases, Tom," Mother said. "Claude is a tease, that's all."

I peeled a strip of fat carefully from a slice of ham and put it on the side of my plate. It fascinated me that some people—Marcus, for example—
could eat fat. I couldn't even stand the feel of it in my mouth. "Was he teasing when he said he'd been at the edge of the Baltic Sea?"

"It's hard to know, Louise," Mother said. "Claude drifts around so much—he's been to all sorts of places. I think it's quite likely that he's been to the edge of the Baltic Sea. Probably it was true."

"Could he have been to Russia, even?"

"It's possible. As he says, he's a traveling man. And once he did bring me an embroidered blouse—remember that, Matt? A beautiful blouse, made somewhere in Eastern Europe. Maybe Russia. It was before you were born, Louise."

That seemed to confirm Claude's veracity. He had brought the jeweled eggs out of Russia years ago, when it was still a Technicolor land, and had saved them, waiting for just the right people to give them to. He'd been waiting for us to be born.

"Well," I said with satisfaction, "then I'm quite sure he wasn't lying about the gift. I just wish he hadn't hidden it so well. Did he hide your blouse when he brought it to you?"

Mother laughed. "No. He had it in his suitcase, wrapped in newspaper, and he whipped it out with a big flourish. He was so delighted with it. I was, too, of course."

The telephone rang. Father pushed his chair back and went to the hall to answer it; we could hear his voice as he talked, and then he came back with his coat on.

"I have to go down to the office, Hallie," he said. "Save me some of that ham."

"Matt! It's almost seven o'clock on a Sunday night! Won't it wait till morning?"

Tom was up, out of his chair. "Can I go with you?"

"Do you have homework, Thomas?" Mother asked.

Tom shook his head. "It's all done. Can I go, Father?"

"Come on. Hurry. We have a big story breaking. There was a robbery last night; they've just discovered it. The police are still there."

He and Tom were at the front door. I was filled with excitement; there had never been robberies in our town. Our big news always consisted of flood damage, failed crops, rabid dogs, or an author or politician making a speech at the college.

I ran to the hall, opened the door, and called after them as they headed to the car.

"Where was it, Father? Did someone rob the bank?"

He turned, hesitated, and then shrugged. No harm in telling me, I could sense him thinking, since it would be in the morning paper anyway. He called out hurriedly where the robbery had been.

"Tell your mother not to wait up for me," he added. "I'll be late."

I gulped, waved half-heartedly to Father, went back to the table, and poked at the slick, glistening
rims of fat on the edge of my plate. Mother and Marcus stared at me. Even Stephanie, in her high chair, looked at me curiously.

"Well?" Mother said after a moment. "What did Father say? We could hear you call to him from the front door."

Studiously I avoided looking at Marcus. Instead, I stared straight at Mother, my eyes as innocent as Stephie's. "Nothing much," I told her. "Someone robbed the Leboffs' house last night.

"What's for dessert?" I asked loudly. "I'm going to throw up if I eat any more Easter eggs."

Marcus and I cornered Kenny Stratton on the playground at recess. Kenny was an awkward, unpopular fifth-grader with a nervous twitch in one eyebrow, so that he lowered and raised it constantly, as if he were emphasizing the inane things he had to say. Marcus liked him, for some reason; he felt sorry for Kenny, whose mother had died years ago. The two Stratton children—Kenny and his older sister—kept house for their father in a shabby, two-family house at the edge of town. They both bragged about their father's association with the wealthy Leboff family; their bragging was undermined by the fact their clothes, hair, and hands were often in need of a good scrubbing.

Kenny had been boasting all morning, Marcus said, about his father's role in the discovery of the robbery at the Leboff's house. Mr. Stratton had made his usual six o'clock check of the mansion;
he had entered through the back door, using the key that hung in its hiding place. He had walked through the house, as he always did, checking the window locks. It was only when he got to the huge dining room that he felt something was wrong.

Kenny made a drama out of it again, telling it to Marcus and me one more time at the corner of the playground. He had told it so often this morning that he could build it now into a rehearsed tale, pausing for effect with his eyebrow jerking up and down like an undisciplined dancer.

"My father stood there in the dining room," Kenny said, "and he
knew
something was wrong." Pause. Twitch.

Kenny's eyes widened and he lowered his voice. "First he noticed that the big table—they call it the sideboard—was bare."

"It used to have all that silver stuff on it," Marcus said to me. "Remember?"

Kenny glared at him, irritated at the interruption. "The silver coffee service was gone," he went on. "So my dad started to open the drawers one by one." Pause.

"He messed up all the fingerprints, I bet," Marcus said, and Kenny glared at him again.

"And every bit of the silverware was gone. Two dozen knives, and two dozen forks, and two dozen spoons, and—"

Impatiently I interrupted him. "What did he do then? Did he call the police?"

"Of
course
he called the police," Kenny said. "For all he knew, the burglars might still have been there, hiding or something. He waited out by the back door—the police told him not to touch anything else—and they were there in seven minutes. My dad timed it."

We stood there silently, the three of us, under the maple tree at the corner of the playground. Nearby, our classmates were playing dodgeball, a cluster of them shrieking in the center of a circle while the ball thumped back and forth in pursuit. "You cheated, Charlie!" one of the girls shouted angrily, when she was hit on the leg.

"Poor sport, poor sport, poor sport," Charlie Clancy chanted as the outraged girl left the circle, rubbing her leg.

"What did the police do?" Marcus asked.

"They took inventory," Kenny said importantly, as if he knew what 'inventory' meant. "There was probably five thousand dollars worth of stuff taken."

"How did the burglars get in? Did they break a window or something?"

Kenny shook his head. "They found the key, where it was hidden. The police told my dad that the key should never have been left like that. But it wasn't my dad's fault. The Leboffs always left the key there. They
told
him to leave the key there." Kenny looked defensive on his father's behalf. "It wasn't my dad's fault," he said again.

I pictured Kenny's father, bald, skinny Mr. Stratton, sitting miserably in the police station, saying, "It wasn't my fault" again and again.

"Come around behind the tree," Marcus commanded ; and we moved into the shadow, where the kids playing dodgeball couldn't see or hear us.

"Did your father know that we knew about the key? Did you tell him that we'd gone into the house?" Marcus asked.