Angel of the Battlefield (7 page)

“This is
so
not going to work,” Felix muttered. The sound of a vacuum cleaner made him stop walking. “Listen,” he said.

Maisie paused. “It's just the cleaners. There was a big fund-raiser here last night.”

She made her way through the Dining Room, still set for dinner, and into the Grand Ballroom. Tiptoeing across the marble floor, she didn't bother to glance at the fancy rooms she passed as she approached the Grand Staircase. But Felix did. He glimpsed the gold trim and ornate moldings in the Ladies' Drawing Room, the medieval tapestries and imported fireplaces in the Cigar Room, the chandelier made in Belgium hanging in Ariane Pickworth's study. He couldn't explain it, but it was as if everything in the house was watching them.

Maisie sprinted up the Grand Staircase, but Felix stopped along the way to stare at the photograph of Great-Aunt Maisie with Great-Uncle Thorne at its edge.
What did they know?
he wondered, and as he thought it, a shiver crept up his arms.

Slowly, he climbed the rest of the stairs, feeling with each step he took that the very house was alive.

In the hallway, Maisie waited for him, pacing. Just like the Woman in Pink had done, she touched the fancy wall, and it opened noiselessly, revealing the hidden staircase.
Would the magic of seeing that staircase appear like that ever fade?
Felix thought as he gasped again.

When she reached The Treasure Chest, Maisie unhooked the rope and held it up for Felix to enter.

“No, no,” he said. “You should go in first, do exactly what you did the other night, and then I'll come in.”

“Time is passing here, bro,” Maisie said impatiently.

“Fine,” he said, and walked in.

Maisie went right to the desk and picked up the scroll. She closed her eyes and waited.

Felix stared at her. “We did something to make it start up,” he said. “Or we did lots of things.”

She opened her eyes. “All I remember is that it smelled like fireworks, there were loud popping sounds, and then the next thing I knew, I was lifted off the floor.” She held the scroll out to him. “Here. You hold it.”

Felix pulled it away from her.

Nothing.

“Actually,” he said, “it was unrolled.”

Carefully, he unrolled the paper, revealing the list of names in neat rows, written in ink that had long since faded, the letters all curlicues and loops and swirls.

He closed his eyes. The vacuum cleaner grew louder.

“Nothing,” he said. “It's not the paper. It's . . . I don't know, maybe it's something we said. Like an incantation.”

Maisie stamped her foot. “Come on, ghost or whatever you are,” she said.

“I think the cleaners are getting closer,” Felix said. “We better get out of here.”

“Phinneas Pickworth, are you listening?” she said.

Nothing.

Maybe Felix was right. Maybe they had to recreate that night exactly. The sound of the vacuum grew louder. Maisie sighed.

“Okay,” she said reluctantly. “Where's your list?”

Even though she thought it was ridiculous, Maisie did everything Felix told her to later that night after Mom went to sleep. She put on the exact clothes she'd worn that night—her flannel pajama bottoms and Mets fleece vest—even though the cold snap they'd had that night was gone and the heat had come back. Felix found his faded madras shorts under his bed and the yellow T-shirt thrown over a chair. After Felix went down in the dumbwaiter, Maisie waited the exact amount of time she'd waited the other night, then she got in the dumbwaiter herself.

As the dumbwaiter made its way down slowly, Maisie's stomach flitted with excitement. When she was younger, she always threw up before her birthday party or right when she had to give a class presentation. “You're ruled by your gut,” her father liked to say. Thinking of him made her sad. She tried to picture him in Doha, a city she'd only seen on Google Earth, with its crescent-shaped bay and tall skyscrapers. But she couldn't imagine him so far away in such an exotic place. To Maisie, he was always walking across Bleecker Street toward home.

The dumbwaiter reached the bottom, and Maisie climbed out.

“You lead the way,” Felix said softly. “Like last time.”

By the slump of his sister's shoulders, he could tell she was feeling sad.

“I miss him, too,” Felix called after her.

She turned around. “I know,” she said.

She started to walk again but stopped. “Sometimes I pretend he's just out for the day, you know. That any minute he'll walk in the door . . .”

Felix, choked up at the idea of seeing their father like that, could only nod.

Maisie squeezed her brother's hand. “Maybe that's it. Maybe you go in that room and make a wish, and it comes true.”

“That would be nice,” Felix said, even though he knew better.

This time, he followed her across the marble floor of the Grand Ballroom and up the Grand Staircase, letting Maisie have the lead like she had that first time. He paused at that photograph of Great-Aunt Maisie as a little girl. Then he called Maisie's name, just like he did that night, and she called back, “In here.”

Felix climbed the hidden stairway, and when he got to The Treasure Chest, Maisie had the list in her hand. So far, they had recreated everything perfectly.

He walked into the room. “What is that?” he asked, pleased that he'd written out a script and made them each memorize it. He couldn't remember exactly how everything had happened that night, but he thought he was pretty close.

“A list of some kind,” Maisie said.

“Like a shopping list?”

She didn't answer him, and he smiled.
Perfect
, he thought.

Maisie handed him the list. Her stomach was churning so much that she thought she really might throw up.

Felix took the list and held his breath.

Nothing.

They waited for a long time.

“What are we forgetting?” Felix finally said.

Maisie tried to remember. She'd had the list in her hands, and she was reading it, wondering who all the people on it were. And Felix asked her if it was a shopping list. They'd talked about the fact that the names were arranged by state, too. Or was that after they heard their mother drive up?

“I don't know,” she said.

“Maybe it was something special about that night,” Felix said. “Like maybe it was a full moon or an eclipse or something like that.”

Maisie sighed. That sounded like a real possibility. Full moons made all sorts of things happen.

“That means we'd have to wait a whole month before we can come back,” she said.

“Or longer if it's a lunar eclipse or planets lining up a certain way,” Felix added, trying not to sound relieved.

Maisie looked so upset that he added, “But it's probably the moon. I mean, that even affects tides and stuff, right?”

“We finally have something to look forward to again,” Maisie said, trying not to cry, “and it gets snatched away, just like everything else.”

“No, Maisie,” Felix said, putting his arm around her, “we'll figure it out. I mean, you will, anyway. You're like a genius in science and stuff.” He didn't know what he would do if his sister actually started to cry. Maisie never cried.

“It's so unfair!” she said, squirming away from him. Her eyes flared with anger now. “Why did our stupid parents have to get divorced? Why did we have to move to stupid Rhode Island? Why did we get stuck living in servants' quarters?”

Her anger actually made Felix feel better. This was the Maisie he was used to.

“And now we can't even fly or whatever it was we almost did!”

Felix burst out laughing. “Yeah,” he said. “We can't even fly.”

She glared at him. “Oh! Shut up!” she yelled, which made him laugh even harder.

Maisie moved toward the door. “You wait,” she said, spinning around and pointing at him. “I'm going to figure this out, and I might not even take you with me next time.”

Before he could protest, she was out the door and down the stairs.

“And if you don't come right now, I'm closing you in there for the night!” she yelled.

Felix ran out of there as fast as he could. She was just mad enough to actually do it.

Landing

“I didn't give you the paper!” Maisie whispered, shaking Felix hard. “You tried to grab it from me.”

“What are you talking about?” he muttered, rolling away from her.

“Wake up!” she said. “We have to go back and do it all over again. Except this time you have to grab the paper from me.”

Felix managed to get one eye open. The clock on his nightstand glowed 2:08. He groaned.

“Remember? I didn't want you to have it. I was reading the names, and you grabbed it from me.”

“That's right,” Felix said, remembering.

“Come on,” Maisie ordered. “Get up.”

He knew he didn't have a choice. He climbed out of bed and followed his sister into the dark hallway.

Maisie paused at their mother's bedroom door. Ever since the divorce, she slept with the television on, and Maisie could hear Jerry Seinfeld's voice and then canned laughter coming from in there. But nothing else. On tiptoes, she kept going. In the kitchen, their dinner plates still sat on the table, the orange sauce from their mac and cheese all hard and crusty now. Another thing that started after the divorce. Their parents used to always clean up after dinner, singing show tunes together as they washed and dried and swept.
They had seemed like two people in love,
she thought.

With a sigh, she opened the door to the dumbwaiter and watched as Felix climbed inside for the second time that night.

“Bon voyage,” she said as she closed it.

But Felix stopped her from closing the door the whole way.

“No matter what happens in there,” he said, “we're not doing this again, right?”

“Right,” Maisie said.

“I want you to promise me,” Felix said.

“Okay, okay. I promise.”

“No matter what happens,” he insisted. “Even if we somehow land in Dad's living room or . . . or . . . I don't know, back on Bethune Street.”

“I said I promise.”

He studied his sister's determined face.

“I mean,” he said carefully, “what if we woke up or whatever, and we were in our old bedroom and Mom and Dad were in the kitchen singing—”

“Is that what you think?” Maisie said. “We're going to go back in time?”

“No,” Felix said carefully. “I don't know what to think.”

Maisie closed the door, pressed the white button, and watched her brother disappear.

In the quiet, dark kitchen that smelled faintly of mac and cheese, Maisie pressed her forehead against the door of the dumbwaiter. Somehow, getting back into The Treasure Chest and maybe flying again—flying off somewhere, even!—had become the most important thing in the world to her. Ever since her parents had sat them down at that diner back in New York and told them they were getting divorced, nothing seemed to matter to Maisie. Even standing here right now, she could still remember how the French fry in her mouth grew cold and how her stomach jumped at the news.
I think I'm going to throw up
, she had said, pushing her way out of the booth where she sat knee to knee with Felix. She hadn't made it to the bathroom, throwing up instead right in the middle of the restaurant.

Soon afterward, the diner closed down, her father moved to Qatar, and she and Felix were in a U-Haul heading north with their mother. Until they stood together in The Treasure Chest with the smell of sulfur and all the noisy banging and popping, getting literally swept off their feet, Maisie had wondered if she would ever care about anything again. Now she did. The Treasure Chest, she believed, would change everything.

The dumbwaiter made its noisy landing below her, and Maisie called it back up. When it arrived, she closed the door fast, managing to press the button again to send herself downward just in time. As she inched down, she closed her eyes and whispered, “Please work this time, please work this time, please work this time,” until she, too, landed in the dark, cavernous kitchen.

Once again Maisie emerged, and Felix pretended to be startled. True, she had thought his insistence on exactly reenacting what they'd done that first time was a bit extreme. In fact, Felix's imagination always seemed a bit extreme to Maisie. But maybe this time he was right. It was worth trying it his way. She had to. She was desperate.

Maisie did everything perfectly. As she waited for Felix to catch up to her in The Treasure Chest, she unrolled the scroll and glanced at all those names. She couldn't help wondering what had happened to all of the men. The paragraph on the top left corner looked like a letter of some kind. But before she could read it, Felix arrived. Maisie's stomach rolled nervously.

“What is that?” he asked.

“A list of some kind,” Maisie said.

“Like a shopping list?”

He grabbed it, tugging it from her hands.

And then, it started.

“Maisie?” she heard Felix say, but his voice sounded small and funny.

That smell of gunpowder filled the room, and then they felt themselves being lifted. But this time, nothing stopped them from rising higher and higher and actually being carried away, almost the way it feels in the brief moment before a roller coaster drops you from its highest hill. A warm wind whipped around them. It smelled of everything good: cinnamon and Christmas trees and salty ocean air; fresh lemons and hot chocolate and a flower garden. It smelled like home.

They held their breaths.

Maisie cracked her eyes open enough to see the startled look on her brother's face. He had his eyes opened wide, and his mouth was formed into an O. His hair stood straight up in the wind, and his arms waved about, trying to find balance.

She somersaulted, the taste of mac and cheese rising in her throat. Then they dropped. For a nanosecond there was nothing. No smells. No sounds. No motion.

Then they landed. Hard.

Maisie blinked and looked around. She was in the middle of a barn. It was daylight. She smelled animals and hay and earth. A cow mooed.

“Felix?”

“I think I broke my arm,” Felix said. He was lying across the barn floor from her.

Outside, she saw green pastures, leafy trees, and off in the distance, rooftops. She walked to her brother, the paper still in her hand.

A shadow fell across them. A girl wearing a bonnet, a long, brown dress, and a white apron stood frowning at them.

“Pardon me?” she said softly.

Felix and Maisie glanced at each other, then up at the girl. She looked to be about their age, small and serious.

She cleared her throat and stepped closer to them.

“Well,” the girl said, “what have we here?”

“Um,” Felix said. But he could not think of anything else to say. He rubbed the sore place on his arm and winced.

The girl waited.

Maisie peered at her. Except for the old-fashioned clothing, she looked completely ordinary. She did not look like she belonged in Doha, Maisie decided. So whatever had happened to them did not bring them where she most wanted to go. Second most, she wanted to be back in New York City. A cow mooed again. She definitely wasn't in New York City, either.

“Where are we?” Maisie asked. She wondered if the shard she'd tucked in her pocket was still there. She reached inside the pocket of her fleece, and her fingers touched the smooth, hard porcelain. Finding it there comforted her, even though this girl was awkwardly staring at her.

“All of this land belongs to Captain Stephen Barton,” the girl said with the slightest hint of a lisp. “My father.”

The name meant absolutely nothing to Maisie. When she met Felix's eyes, he shrugged.

Maisie swallowed hard. “I'm Maisie Robbins,” she said. “And this is my brother, Felix.”

The girl studied them carefully. Then she held out her hand.

“Clara Barton,” she said. “Pleased to meet you. Now can you tell me what you're doing in my barn?”