Angel of the Battlefield (6 page)

“Exactly,” Felix said. With that, he walked into his room and firmly closed the door.

Maisie leaned into the door and whispered, “Felix.”

“No,” he said.

“Just one more time?”

“No,” he said again.

She fingered the shard in her pocket. “What if I told you I know something? Something practically magical?”

“Forget it, Maisie. I know that you don't know anything magical. I know you're just trying to get me to open this door and agree to go back into that haunted room.”

Maisie sighed, good and loud so Felix would definitely hear her. “Fine then,” she said. “I won't show you what I have in my pocket or tell you how that vase is magical or something.”

She waited.

The door opened slowly.

“What do you have in your pocket?” Felix asked her suspiciously.

Maisie reached in and took the shard from her pocket. She opened her hand and held it up for Felix to see.

“You took part of that expensive vase?” he asked, his eyes wide. “I can't believe you.”

“Remember how the lady said the maintenance people must have swept up all the pieces?”

Felix nodded.

“Well, the vase in The Treasure Chest is missing a piece. A piece exactly this size and shape.”

Felix considered what she said. “You mean they glued the thing back together?”

“Oh, please,” Maisie said, exasperated. “That fast? No, you dope. The vase put itself back together somehow.”

“Really?” Felix said. “That's what you think happened? And you think
I'm
the dope here?”

“I'm telling you. Something magical happened. That vase in there is the same one that broke.”

“Well there's one more reason I'm staying away from that room. Vases break and get put back together all by themselves. People fly. And who knows what else.” He turned and began to go back into his room.

“Wait!” Maisie said. “There's something else.”

Despite his better judgment, Felix paused.

“There's another missing piece in the vase,” Maisie said.

“I guess the magic didn't work so great,”
Felix said.

“Really? I think someone else has a piece.”

They stared at each other.

“One more time,” Felix said, taking a big breath. “We'll go back tomorrow morning, and that's it.”

Maisie smiled. “One more time,” she repeated.

This time she went into her room and closed the door, leaving Felix standing there wondering who had that other piece and how in the world his sister had talked him into doing the very thing he had promised he would not do.

Great-Aunt Maisie

Maisie woke up late the next morning, ready to get Felix and go directly back into the mansion while their mother went off to her first day at work. Instead she found their mother sitting at the kitchen table wearing her ratty, peach, terry-cloth robe and doing the
New York Times
crossword puzzle.

“What are you doing home?” Maisie said, surprised.

“Nice to see you, too,” her mother said. She narrowed her eyes at Maisie. “Are you two up to something?”

“Yeah. We're watching
Escape from Alcatraz
to get some ideas.”

“Funny, Maisie,” her mother said, sighing. She held up a mixing bowl. “Crepes?” she said.

“Sure,” Maisie mumbled.

Her mother went to the stove and began preparing the batter and the pan.

“So, do you have the
whole
day off?” Maisie asked.

“I've got to take care of a few things for Great-Aunt Maisie,” she said. “Once I start working, it's going to be hard to run all of her errands for her. They let me get my office organized yesterday and deal with Great-Aunt Maisie today. That way I can hit the ground running on Wednesday as a lawyer at Fishbaum and Fishbaum! I was hoping to start on Thursday when you two start school, but I didn't want to push my luck.”

Maisie sighed. How could she wait twenty-four whole hours to go back in The Treasure Chest? She had hardly slept at all last night, her mind racing with possibilities. Would they actually be able to fly? And if they did, would they be able to fly out of Elm Medona, maybe all the way back to Bethune Street? Thinking about it now made Maisie tingle with anticipation.

Until her mother said, “I thought we'd go visit Great-Aunt Maisie after breakfast.”

“Great,” Maisie said flatly.

“Now, now. Without her, I don't know what we would have done.”

“Stayed in New York, maybe? Where we belong?” Maisie said. There was almost nothing worse than visiting Great-Aunt Maisie in the nursing home.

“Stop dwelling on the past,” her mother said.

Thankfully, Felix came into the kitchen before their mother started her lecture about how lucky they all were to be there.

When he saw their mother at the stove mixing batter, Felix felt relieved. He hadn't slept well last night, worrying over all the terrifying things that might happen when they went back in The Treasure Chest. Hadn't he smelled gunpowder in there? Hadn't he heard gunshots? And when he remembered the feeling of his toes scraping the floor, then lifting just enough to have no floor at all beneath him, he shuddered.

“She's got the
whole
day off,” Maisie said to him. “They're letting her start
tomorrow
.”

“Really? That's great,” Felix said, unable to hide his enthusiasm.

Their mother kissed him on the top of his head. “I'm glad someone around here thinks so,” she said.

He dipped a finger in the batter for a taste and managed to get some before she swatted him away.

“Mmmm,” he said, licking his finger. “Crepes.”

“Nutella?” their mother asked. “Or lemon?”

“Nutella,” Maisie said, flopping onto one of the chairs at the table.

“Lemon,” Felix said, sitting at the other end.

Their eyes met across the red, enamel tabletop, and he shrugged.

“Tomorrow's another day,” he said.

A few moments later, their mother slid crepes in front of Felix and Maisie.

Maisie glared at her brother. “Tomorrow it is,” she said.

The nursing home where Great-Aunt Maisie lived was called Island Retirement Center. It had a view of the bay from the big dining room and the family room, but the bedrooms where the residents spent most of their time were small and square and looked out on the parking lot. Great-Aunt Maisie's room was painted a cheerful yellow color, and she had a vase full of peonies—her favorite flower—but the room still felt depressing. The smell of cafeteria food and rubbing alcohol lingered everywhere, and the sight of all those old people sitting in wheelchairs made Felix and Maisie sad.

Today, with the low gray clouds and haze, the place looked even worse. To distract herself from how grim it was in there, Maisie counted how many people passed them using walkers, how many sat in the hall in their wheelchairs, and how many walked by on their own. The wheelchairs won. By a lot.

In fact, Great-Aunt Maisie was sitting in a wheelchair, dressed in a red Chanel suit with the Chanel Red lipstick she always insisted the nurse put on her. Maisie hated the way the lipstick bled into the lines around her great-aunt's mouth and that she got all dressed up like that just to sit in her room all day.

In first grade, they had to make dolls with dried-apple faces. They used yarn for the dolls' hair and got to fashion clothes for them out of scraps of fabric and ribbon, but those withered apple faces still looked sad no matter how cheerfully they were dressed. Great-Aunt Maisie kind of reminded Maisie of those apple dolls, which made her feel bad for her.

When she told Felix that, he said she was being mean. “She's old, and she had a stroke,” Felix said. “She can't help it.” That was the other thing that made Maisie squirm: Half of Great-Aunt Maisie's face pulled way to the left from the stroke, and when she tried to talk, it came out all garbled.

“Be nice,” her mother whispered to Maisie as they walked over to Great-Aunt Maisie's good side.

Felix kissed the old woman on her good cheek, but Maisie hung back.

“How's the house treating you?” Great-Aunt Maisie asked, except, of course, it didn't exactly sound like that.

“The house is fine,” their mother said loudly, enunciating each word.

Felix started to move away, but Great-Aunt Maisie grabbed his arm.

“How do you like the house?” she asked him, her blue eyes penetrating his.

Something about the way she looked at him made Felix think she knew what they had done. He glanced over at Maisie, but she was pretending to look at the orchids so she didn't have to look at Great-Aunt Maisie.

“It's great,” Felix said.

“Have you been downstairs?”

“Downstairs?” he asked. How could she know?

“They had a lovely tour,” their mother said.

“Have you been downstairs?” Great-Aunt Maisie asked him again, her eyes never wavering.

“Uh. Yeah,” Felix said. He wished Maisie would pay attention, help him out here. She was a good liar when she needed to be.

Great-Aunt Maisie smiled crookedly. “Yes?” she said.

“They had a very good tour,” their mother said again, louder this time, even though Great-Aunt Maisie wasn't at all deaf. “Why don't we go to the dining room and have some lunch?”

“Good idea,” Maisie said, relieved to get out of the room. She would eat a grilled cheese sandwich and one of those little ice creams that came in a plastic container with its own wooden spoon and be home in no time.

But Great-Aunt Maisie still held on to Felix's arm. “Elm Medona,” she said, and it was the clearest thing he'd heard her say since she had the stroke. She nodded at him. “Elm Medona.”

“I'm afraid poor Great-Aunt Maisie is declining,” their mother said in the car after lunch. “She couldn't understand anything today.”

Felix disagreed. He thought she was trying to tell him something. But what? Elm Medona. He wrote it with his finger on the leg of his jeans. Why had she repeated it like that? And how had she figured out that they'd gone into the house on their own? She'd grown up there, so it made sense that she knew about whatever happened in The Treasure Chest.

“Earth to Felix,” Maisie was saying. “Now Mom wants to take us shopping for school stuff.”

Felix groaned.

“Poor Great-Aunt Maisie,” their mother said again, pointing the car toward Warwick and the shopping mall there. “Well, at least she had a very interesting life.”

Felix caught Maisie's eye, but she had no idea that Great-Aunt Maisie had been trying to tell him something.
Elm Medona,
he thought. He'd always assumed it was just a particular type of elm tree.

“What does it mean?” he asked his mother. “Elm Medona?”

His mother shrugged. “I have no idea.”

Maisie looked up, interested. “Why do you want to know all of a sudden?” she asked suspiciously.

Felix looked out the car window. “Just curious,” he said.

The next morning, as soon as their mother left for work, Maisie walked into Felix's room.

“Come on, get up,” she said. “We're alone at last.”

“I've been thinking about it,” he said, already sitting up with a yellow legal pad on his knees. “We have to wait until tonight.”

“Give me a break,” Maisie said. “Your delay tactics are not going to work. I've been waiting forever already.”

Felix shook his head. “No, I promised I'd go back one more time, and I will. But we have to do everything exactly the same, or nothing will happen.”

“All we need to do is go in there before the first tour starts, and—”

“And?” Felix asked.

“I don't know. But I can't wait to find out.”

Felix handed her the pad. “I wrote down everything we did that night so that we can do it the same way.”

Maisie barely looked at what he'd written. “The first tour is at ten. That gives us almost an hour.”

“I'm telling you, we have to do it at night.” He pointed to number two on his list.

“Have I ever misled you?” Maisie said. She pointed her finger at him. “Don't answer that.”

He knew his sister well enough to know that she wouldn't believe him until her plan failed. So he followed her out of the apartment and down the stairs.

“Here's my surprise,” she told him as they stood in front of the door on the first landing. “I didn't lock the door when we left the other night. So we can walk right down the stairs.”

“Number three,” Felix said. “The dumbwaiter.”

“Oh, please.”

Maisie opened the door. “Ta-da!” she said, and then bounded into the Dining Room.