Billy and the Birdfrogs (8 page)

I went downstairs checking each room as I passed it; the schoolroom, the storeroom, the living room, and the kitchen. But nobody was home. It was strange and spooky to see everything just as we had left it, and to think that it wasn’t ours any more. The pot of spaghetti sauce was still sitting on the stove. I wondered if the sauce technically belonged to Mr. Jubber now.

While I was standing in the kitchen, I heard an awful sound. I heard the front door of the house open and footsteps come in.

Chapter 14

Mr. Jubber Tries to Think

The clock in our kitchen read 1:25. The thought flashed through my mind that I had made too much noise and somebody had called the police. I was in trouble now. They’d arrest me, and I’d get remediated and everything. I’d get sent to some horrible new family, a thousand times worse than the Whingles who weren’t bad people in their own way. I should have just stayed with them and behaved myself.

But then I heard a voice and knew that it wasn’t the police after all.

“Jubber!” the voice shouted. “What a life! I tell you! Great show, too. Wow. I love a good musical.” It was Mr. Earpicker. He started to sing, but his voice was so harsh that it sounded more like he was being killed. I couldn’t recognize the tune. “Darn nice of you to take me out! Expensive, those tickets.”

Any second, they might walk in the kitchen and see me. I couldn’t get back up the stairs, because the foot of the stairs was in full view of the front door. I felt panicked. I didn’t know what to do. Trembling, I reached out a hand and snatched open a cabinet that my grandmother usually kept pots in. There was a large empty space, because the biggest pot that she owned was on the stove full of sauce. I didn’t know if I could crawl into the cabinet without making a lot of noise banging against the other pots, but I had to try. I moved like lightning. It is amazing how fast and careful you can be when you have to. The only sound I made was a scraping sound when I pushed an iron skillet aside. I don’t think they heard me, because Mr. Earpicker was singing again. I closed the door after me the best I could, but I couldn’t close it all the way because there was no handle on the inside.

“Jubber,” Mr. Earpicker shouted. “Let’s celebrate your new house. Come on, let’s see if the old bat has a corkscrew. I bet she does. I bet she dipped into the bottle all day long. I bet she was drunk as a dragon. She was half dragon anyway, that nasty old bat. Ha!”

The footsteps came into the kitchen. The cabinet door was open about an inch and I could see out of the crack. I could see only the bottom half of Mr. Jubber, but Mr. Earpicker was so short that I could see almost all of him, up to his neck. He was carrying a bottle of red wine.

“Gotta be here somewhere,” he said, opening drawers and standing on his toes to look inside. I was terrified. What if he opened the cabinet I was hiding in?

“Got it!” he shouted suddenly, and I saw him twisting the corkscrew into the top of the wine bottle. “You get some glasses, Jubber. Let’s do this properly.”

Pretty soon they were sitting down at the kitchen table, drinking wine out of two juice glasses. Mr. Earpicker’s legs dangled over the edge of the chair. His feet didn’t reach the ground.

“You’re real quiet, Jubber,” Mr. Earpicker said. “That’s what I like about you. No back talk. I can’t stand back talk. That Pointy, she’s a caution! She talks back so much you’d think there was a mouth on the back of her head. Ha! Get it? On the back of her head! Oh my god, but she’s perfect. You gotta admit. The way she handles kids. Biff! Bam! Whack! And they don’t know what hit ’em. Ha! She’s great to have around, sometimes. Say, Jubber, how come you look so glum? We got the house, signed, sealed, delivered.”

Mr. Jubber put his glass down on the table and said, slowly, in a dull voice, “Well. . . . You see. . . . I keep thinking. . . .”

“Don’t,” Mr. Earpicker interrupted in his fast, high voice. “Thinking’s not good. You’re not good at it. Leave the thinking to me. Here, have some more wine. What’s the problem here? What were you thinking?”

“It’s just that, you know, it’s real nice, this house. But. . . .”

“It’s more than real nice! Location! Park nearby! Path nearby! Everything right here! Fancy stuff, Jubber. Worth selling your last house. Who needs a thirty-room mansion anyway? Better to liquidate and get the cash. Say, what’s the problem?”

“I can’t figure out,” Mr. Jubber continued slowly, “if it’s my house, then why is it in your name? Shouldn’t it be in my name?”

“Jubber, you lubber. Hey! Woah! Did you catch that? Oh my God! Hold the press! It rhymed! I’m a poet! This is amazing! Jubber, you lubber, I told you. It’s a tax thing. You gotta trust me. You see, Jubber, you’re rich. You’re real rich. You’re unbelievably rich. And naturally, you wanna be more rich. Me, I got brains. I know how to work it. So you give me your money, and you get richer. See? See? Simple as simple! Simple as pie in the sky! Simple as tic tac toe. You get it, don’t you?”

“I. . . . I guess so. . . .” Mr. Jubber raised his glass again. I couldn’t see his face. From where I was crouching, I could only see a little above the tabletop. He must have taken a huge gulp, though, because the glass was nearly empty when he put it back down.

Mr. Earpicker filled it up again right away. “I like you, Jubber. I really do. That’s why I’m going to all this trouble for you. You should thank me!”

“Well. . . . Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. Say, but did you see the look on the old bat’s face when the steam roller hit her? Did you see that? Did you?”

“Uh . . . no, I missed that.”

“Darn! Me too! I missed it! I wanted to see it! But it happened too fast. I turned around, and it was all done. Blam! Whang! The sidewalk looked exactly like that thing had driven over a couple of cans of tomato paste. Say, that was brilliant. You were brilliant. Sometimes you’re real smart. Telling her to stand right there and wait for you, when you knew those steam rollers were going to come charging around the corner like that!”

“But . . . I thought. . . . Didn’t
you
tell her?”

“Me? No! Jubber, I won’t take the credit here! It was your own brain wave. It was your own whopper of an idea.”

“I thought it was your idea—”

“Don’t be so modest, Jubber! Of course it was yours. I had nothing to do with it.”

I felt my face get hot, and I started to tremble. I wanted to come charging out of there and start kicking those two people, starting with Mr. Earpicker. Maybe I could grab a frying pan and hit him over the h
ead. But even though I really wanted to do some
thing, I realized that I had better not. It was better to stay hidden and see what else they said.

Mr. Earpicker twisted around in his seat, looking around the kitchen. “Look at that! The old bat, she sealed up the basement door! Say, Jubber, you think she’s got any skeletons down there? Ha! Ha!”

I didn’t know what to make of this comment. Did he mean real skeletons of extinct animals? If my grandmother was right, then Mr. Earpicker knew all about the hole in the basement. But he could just as well mean regular, human skeletons. He might just be making a nasty comment about my grandmother. It was hard to tell.

“Jubber,” he said, “Tomorrow we’ll look through the whole darn house and see what else she did to it. Tennis balls in the soup, turtles in the toilet, tigers in the tearoom, this is fun! This is a blast!”

He twisted around in his seat again and looked the opposite direction. “Say, Jubber, it’s real late. Look at the time. My god! Is that clock right? Did the old crackpot set her clock wrong? No! It really is! It’s almost two o’clock! I gotta go! I only meant to stay half a minute! Say, but it was great. Great housewarming. You throw a heck of a party. You’re my friend, right? Of course you are. You gotta trust me. Always trust me, Jubber. See you tomorrow.”

Mr. Earpicker leaped up and ran out of the kitchen. Mr. Jubber started to get up too, slowly, but Mr. Earpicker was already gone. The outside door slammed shut.

Mr. Jubber sat back down again and emptied the rest of the wine bottle into his glass. He sighed. “That man,” he said slowly. Then he took a long drink of wine. “Gives me a headache.”

Chapter 15

The Potato Peeler Gets Me Through

Mr. Jubber sat in the kitchen for a long time. I was afraid he might fall asleep at the table and I wouldn’t be able to break into the basement without waking him up. He drank the rest of the wine in his glass, and finished the rest of Mr. Earpicker’s glass too. Then he sat still for a while, breathing heavily and muttering to himself. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Finally he got up heavily and stumped out of the kitchen.

I knew all the sounds of this house. I knew exactly which room he was in and which floor he was on. I followed him with my ears as he stumped slowly up the staircase. When I was sure that he had reached the second floor, I crawled out of the cabinet and snuck to the foot of the stairs so I could listen to him better.

Then I remembered about the trap door to the attic. If he went up to the fourth floor, he would see that someone had broken into the house. He would see the missing board, and the open trap door, and he would see that the light in the attic was on. Then he would call the police, and I’d be caught. I clutched the staircase railing and listened intently as his footsteps went up, higher and higher.

“Please,” I thought, “please stop at the third floor.” But the footsteps continued up the staircase.

Suddenly the footsteps stopped. I knew he had reached the fourth-floor landing. He must have been staring at the break-in, because I didn’t hear any sound for a minute. Then I heard him mumble, “Earpicker’s right. She really was a loony.”

I heard him open my bedroom door and go in. Then I heard the sound of my bed squeaking. He had climbed into my bed! I crept up the staircase as quietly as I could, and as I neared the top floor I could hear him softly snoring. I braved looking in the door, and there he was, stretched out on my bed with his clothes and shoes still on, his great round face pointed up at the ceiling, and his eyes closed.

At first I felt mad. I didn’t like him in my bed. But then I decided he had done me the best possible favor by going to the top of the house, far away from where I would be working in the basement, and falling asleep.

I didn’t waste any more time on Mr. Jubber. I went right back downstairs to the kitchen and carefully checked the basement door. My grandmother had done a very thorough job welding it closed, and I couldn’t see how I was going to get it open. It looked hopeless. The door was metal, the edges were sealed, and the lock was completely blocked off by melted silver dollars. If I couldn’t get through the door, then I’d have to go through the wall next to the door. I’d have to carve a hole in the plaster.

I looked around the kitchen and gathered some tools together. If Mr. Jubber hadn’t been in my bedroom, I would have fetched my Swiss army knife. Instead, I hunted through the drawers of kitchen utensils. I wanted a small knife that was easy to hold and good for carving, and I found a potato peeler that seemed just right. I also gathered together a flashlight, a whole handful of extra batteries, a hard-boiled egg, some bread, a jar of peanut butter, a jar of jelly, a jelly knife, a bottle of water, and a lot of napkins. I didn’t know how long I might be down that hole exploring. It might take me into the next day, and I hadn’t eaten very much in a long time. I put all these things into a cloth bag that was hanging on the doorknob of the closet. Then I got to work on the wall next to the basement door.

First I stabbed the plaster with the potato peeler. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be, but on the third try the blade went right in. Then I started to pry and chip, opening up a hole. It was hard work. When the hole was big enough for a fist to get through, I could see that the wall was hollow, and that I would have to carve through another layer of plasterboard a few inches away. After a while I had the idea of filling a glass with water and pouring it on the plasterboard. When the plaster got soggy, it was easier to break apart. It only took fifteen minutes to get through the first layer, and about ten minutes to get through the second layer.

In the end I had a jagged hole at floor level that was just big enough for me to fit through. It looked like a giant mouse had chewed it.

I couldn’t see anything but darkness through the hole. When I shined in the flashlight, I could see the basement stairs sloping down, covered in dust and bits of plaster. I was excited, because I was looking at a part of my own house that I had never been in. I had never been allowed. I pushed in the bag of supplies, and then crawled in after it. I had to twist around carefully to get onto the stairs, because the hole in the wall didn’t line up with the steps. Once I was inside, I held the bag in one hand, the flashlight in the other, and went down the steps to the damp cement floor of the basement.

I shined the flashlight around the room. It looked like any old basement room. It had a washer and dryer against the wall, and some old furniture, and a rusty bicycle. Nothing looked unusual. I checked the floor carefully, but I didn’t see any tiny white footprints. I saw a movement and a flash out of the corner of my eye and almost dropped the flashlight in fright, but then I realized that there was a small window high up on the wall, and the headlights of a car had sparkled in the glass for a moment. The room was completely ordinary. There was no hole in the floor.