Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms (16 page)
April dragged a bin across, climbed on it, grasped the neck of his sweatshirt and pulled. Stuart barely had time to cry out before belly-flopping into a bush. From inside, he heard the crash of the ladder, which he must have kicked over as he fell. April helped haul him to his feet, and then sprinted.
Stuart headed after her, but nearly fell three times in the first hundred yards. “Can’t balance. Got to undo my hands,” he gasped. He knelt down in the gap between two parked cars and tried to tug his fingers apart.
“Let me see,” said April, stopping and crouching beside him. She gave his hands a wrench and he yelled out.
“What are you trying to do, break my fingers?”
“I can’t understand it,” she said. “There’s a shiny metal tube, and you’ve got a finger in both ends. Just pull.”
“I’m pulling.”
“Pull harder.”
“I can’t. It hurts. It—” And then he stopped talking as he heard a noise and saw a light.
Not footsteps, but a siren and the screech of brakes.
Not a flashlight, but the spinning blue lamp of a police car.
“Get under here!” hissed April, crawling beneath the parked van next to them. Stuart wriggled after her, like a caterpillar. From his new viewpoint, his chin an inch or so above the road, he could see the tires of the police car, the door opening, the feet of a policeman getting out. There was a momentary pause, and then another pair of feet, clad in smart high heels, appeared in view.
“Good evening, Officer,” came Jeannie’s voice.
“Oh, hello, Miss Carr. I didn’t expect to see you here.” The policeman sounded both surprised and rather respectful. It was as if Jeannie were someone quite important. “We got a call from a local resident who spotted lights in the museum,” said the policeman.
“As did I,” Jeannie lied. “I was about to call you. I think some vandals must have forced their way in.”
“They had trouble yesterday too,” said the policeman. “A small boy smashed up the Victorian farm room.”
“Shocking,” said Jeannie, sounding shocked. “My student Clifford’s gone to investigate—shall we join him?”
The two sets of feet disappeared from view.
“We should get out of here,” whispered April.
“I still can’t move my fingers, they’re trapped, they’re …”
In a trap
, thought Stuart. A Fiendish Finger Trap—and what was it that Leonora had said?
The more you try to free yourself, the firmer you stick.
… Instead of pulling he pushed, and instantly the grip loosened. He eased his fingers out, one at a time. “Okay, let’s go,” he said.
They ran, trying to keep to the side streets, silent apart from their sneakers slapping on the sidewalk. They’d almost reached Beech Road, when April suddenly snorted.
“What’s the matter?” asked Stuart, breathless.
She slowed to a stop, doubled over, and snorted again.
“Is it asthma?” asked Stuart.
April shook her head, and he suddenly realized that she was laughing helplessly. “I just can’t stop thinking about that blacksmith,” she said between snorts. “Waving a hammer at Jeannie. That
was
Jeannie, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Stuart, glancing around anxiously. The street was empty.
“She just looked like—”April pulled a mad face, and then let out a sort of neigh of laughter.
“
Shhh!
” said Stuart.
“Sorry.” She crouched down and took some deep breaths.
“It’s serious,” said Stuart.
“I know.” She looked up at him and made a face again, and he heard himself begin cackling like a nutcase.
It was a minute or two before he managed to speak again. “She took the clues,” he said.
“What were they?”
“Well, the first one was a little tin with glue, sandpaper, and a rubber patch inside.”
“Did it say anything on the tin?”
“
Top Marks Tire Repair Kit
.”
“Well, that’s completely obvious,” said April, standing up again, snapping back to her usual organizing self. “When people get top marks they get ten out of ten, don’t they? So if the first number of the safe combination is twelve—a dozen toffees in every bag—then the second must be ten. So what’s the third?”
“I don’t know. A little card came out of the try-your-strength machine, but Jeannie wouldn’t let me read it. And then she fell over Clifford and dropped it somewhere.”
“So the card might still be in the museum,” said April keenly. “We can go and look tomorrow morning. Or, rather, I can go and look, because they’ll throw you out if they see you. And if it isn’t there, then we can still have a go at the safe. There’s only one missing number now, so there’s a maximum of twenty-nine combinations we’d have to try and it wouldn’t take long to do that.
“Now, your great-uncle’s house is being demolished on Monday, so it’ll have to be before then. How about tomorrow afternoon? Or evening? Or early Sunday morning? Of course, we’ll have to make sure that we’re not followed again, but I’ve just had a really good idea about that. Do you want to hear it?”
Stuart felt exhausted. Didn’t she ever stop bossing people around? “Not right this second,” he said a bit grumpily. “Tomorrow will do. We’ve got the whole weekend.”
“Oh.” She looked disappointed. “Okay. It is pretty late, I suppose. We ought to be getting home.”
They jogged back to where they’d hidden the kitchen stool and quickly scaled the six fences between the alleyway and Stuart’s backyard.
“Okay,” said Stuart. “Bye, then.” He had almost reached the back door when two things occurred to him. The first was that his parents would be expecting him to come in by the
front
door, and the second was that April had invented the plan, got him into the museum, saved him from Jeannie, and then got him safely out again.
“April!” he called.
“Yes?”
“Thanks.”
“That’s all right.”
“And, April?”
“Yes?”
“My mom and dad will be expecting me in by the front door.”
“Just tell them you climbed over our back fence for fun,” said April.
“Oh. Okay.” She really was irritatingly clever.
He let himself into the house, shouted “hello” to his parents, and then opened the fridge and started to eat everything that wasn’t either raw or made of vegetables.
It wasn’t until he was lying in bed that he started to think about the clues again. Something kept nagging away at the back of his mind, something about the toffee machine. Or was it about the bingo hall? Or was it about that old lady who’d been dressed entirely in blue? If only someone would stop saying, “Stuart, wake up,” in his ear, then he’d be able to remember what it was.
“Stuart, wake up!” said the voice again.
He opened his eyes. Light was creeping around the edge of the curtains and his mother was standing beside his bed, fully dressed.
His father’s head appeared over her shoulder. “Dawn salutations to our esteemed offspring!” he said. His father had a hat on. The straw hat that he only ever wore on vacation.
“What’s happening?” asked Stuart.
His mother sat on the edge of the bed and ruffled his hair. “We’ve not spent much time as a family lately,” she said, “and I’m sorry. I think it’s been pretty miserable for you, moving to a new town and not knowing anybody. You’ve not been your old self. So we thought we should have a long weekend away and do something lovely together. I spent all yesterday arranging it as a surprise.”
“A long weekend?” repeated Stuart, struggling to understand. “So you mean we won’t get back to Beeton until …?”
“Monday lunchtime,” said his mother. “So get dressed, have a quick breakfast, and we’re off! The taxi comes in half an hour.”
“By noon we shall be breathing West Country air,” added his father unhelpfully.
They closed the door and left Stuart sitting open-mouthed.
The house
, he thought.
Great-Uncle Tony’s house is going to be knocked down on Monday morning.
Stuart got dressed so fast that he put his T-shirt on inside out, and then he galloped down the stairs and opened the front door. He ran onto the sidewalk barefoot and looked up at April’s house. Every curtain was closed. He picked up a pebble to throw at the window and then hesitated. What if he woke up the wrong triplet?
He dashed back into the house, grabbed some paper, and then for a moment he hesitated with the pen in his hand. This had been
his
adventure,
his
great-uncle,
his
clues,
his
inheritance. Could he really bear to hand it over to someone else? And then he thought of Leonora, who had been waiting for fifty years to find out what had happened to her sister. And he wrote:
DEAR APRIL,
TERRIBLE NEWS. MY PARENTS
TOOK ME AWAY FOR THE
WEEKEND, WON’T BE BACK TILL
MONDAY LUNCH TIME. CAN YOU
OPEN THE SAFE, PLEASE?
GOOD LUCK.
STUART
He put the note in an envelope marked
April
and slid it through the mail slot in her front door.
And then he went on vacation.
When other people’s parents said they were going to spend a family weekend doing “something lovely,” they usually meant they were going to the beach, or to Alton Towers, or to Disneyland. Stuart’s parents’ idea of “something lovely” was a camping weekend in Wiltshire, in which the days were spent going on very long hikes carrying knapsacks full of egg sandwiches, and the evenings meant lying in a tent listening to the radio, or squinting at books by flashlight. The walks were largely educational.
“An Iron Age fort,” said Stuart’s mother delightedly, as yet another vague, grass-covered lump came into view. “And the map shows there’s a neolithic tomb only a couple of miles away. That’ll be exciting, won’t it?”
“Mmm,” said Stuart, who was spending most of the time tensely wondering how April was getting on. Though, as he kept reminding himself, if anyone was capable of getting into a condemned house and opening a locked safe, it was April. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more certain he was that she’d succeed. He couldn’t imagine that she’d ever failed at
anything
.