Love Among the Walnuts (16 page)

"Captain Lester?" Boom-Boom said. "Oh, I get it! If you say it fast it
does
sound like 'cat molester.' Well, gee whiz, I don't see what the fuss was all about."

Mr. Van Dyke looked abashed. "It does seem silly now. But I must have been more ... distressed when I arrived than I realized. The way all of us were."

"But aren't anymore," Sandy said. "Except for poor Eddy. I can't say I've really seen any improvement in him. But that's what my plan is all about. You know, Mr. Moreland, how you said nobody would listen to us because we're all a bunch of nuts—or incompetent, in my case. Well, I don't think we are anymore. So last night I called our family doctor, Dr. Malcolm, and asked him to come out to Walnut Manor with a colleague of his to examine all of us and certify us as sound in mind and body.
Then
we can bring our charges against the board and no one can dispute us. At least, not on those grounds." He paused and then went on. "And just because I'm so sure we're really all right, last night I faxed all the incriminating papers to the Senior Partner among all of Horatio's lawyers."

He waited, breathless, for someone to tell him his plan was poppycock.

"Wiener schnitzel!" Mr. Moreland cried. "That's genius! Then what?"

"Well, I have another idea, too," Sandy said. "You'd better tell me if it will work."

Just then they heard Sunnie yelling from upstairs, "Louie's missing! Is he anywhere near Mr. Van Dyke?"

Boom-Boom ran across the hall to the foot of the stairs and yelled up, "He's in his lap. And he's fine. Mr. Van Dyke isn't a cat molester after all. He's just Captain Lester."

"I don't know what that means," Sunnie called down, "but I'm sure somebody will explain it to me eventually." She paused. "Is everything all right down there?"

"We're fine," Boom-Boom yelled. "Sandy has an idea. I can't keep yelling up the stairs, it hurts my throat. We'll tell you later."

"All right," Sunnie said, and those two words sounded so lonely and disappointed and left out that everyone in the library got up in one movement (except for Dr. Waldemar who had to be awakened and Eddy who had to be carried) and went upstairs to the sickroom.

There, Sandy explained his idea again—the one that Mr. Moreland had said was genius—and hoped he didn't look as proud and flattered as he felt. And then he explained his other idea.

Mr. Moreland was at a loss for words. He had already used up
genius
on the previous idea, and this one was so much better that he didn't know
what
to call it Sunnie got her thesaurus out, and Mr. Moreland finally decided on
original, creative,
and
inventive.

Sandy was thrilled by this praise, and even more thrilled that Mr. Moreland and Captain Lester thought his second idea would work like a charm. But what he was waiting for was Sunnie's response. She said she loved the idea better than anything she had ever heard, but she still didn't look directly at him. Sandy wished he didn't care as much as he did.

"We've still got a couple of problems," Opal said, bringing everyone down to earth with a thump. "One, Bart and Bernie are still trying to kill us, and two, our sleepers are still asleep. No matter how terrific Sandy's ideas are, they won't change those things."

For the rest of the day, the inmates seesawed between elation about Sandy's ideas and deep discouragement about Opal's. It gave them an inkling of what it must have felt like to be Boom-Boom as he changed back and forth from child to adult.

Bentley told them at dinnertime that he was getting close to a cure he thought had promise, and he told them he had analyzed the Pensa-Cola canister and had found no traces of Pensa-Cola syrup. In fact, no traces of anything. So the canister had either been delivered pristinely empty, which was unlikely, or it had contained something so volatile and evaporative, the way cyanosulfidioxinethonoxide was, that it had been
left
pristinely empty when the gas was gone.

After a subdued dinner and a chapter of
Treasure Island,
they all went to bed. They needed a good night's sleep to be fresh for tomorrow, when Dr. Malcolm and his colleague Dr. Trinidad, the brilliant, world-famous psychiatrist, were coming to examine them.

There is no more dependable way to ensure a restless night than to convince oneself that a good night's sleep is absolutely essential. Consequently, by the next morning, they were all gritty eyed and crabby from insufficient sleep.

Dr. Malcolm and Dr. Trinidad, a regal dark-skinned woman with a melodic foreign accent, arrived right after breakfast and set to work.

It took them all day, but they finally got everyone examined, and promised to deliver the results of all the tests in two days. That day was also when the meeting with Horatio's lawyers was scheduled, to get started on Sandy's second idea, as well as to decide what to do about the board of directors.

Sandy invited the doctors to stay for dinner, but they declined. Dr. Malcolm whispered to Sandy as he left, "I've never spent a whole day with worse-tempered people. Are they always so peevish?"

"Just Opal. She's worse lately because she's quit smoking. But the rest of us were all so nervous, we couldn't sleep last night and it's made us grouchy. I hope it won't influence our tests."

"If grouchiness were an illness, there wouldn't be a soul on the streets; we'd all be in hospitals," Dr. Malcolm assured him. "But I hope you understand if we don't want to stay for dinner."

"Of course," Sandy said. "I can't say I'm looking forward to it myself."

It was a good thing Dr. Malcolm and Dr. Trinidad hadn't stayed for dinner: It was awful. Boom-Boom spilled his milk, and burst into tears when Opal scolded him more severely than was necessary. When Mr. Moreland told her so, she told him to mind his own business,
if
he could remember what it was. When Captain Lester came to Mr. Moreland's defense, Opal said she liked it better when he couldn't talk. Graham, Virgil, and Lyle were smart enough to keep their mouths shut, but their faces were rebellious and stormy. Everett muttered to himself.

Sandy wished he were upstairs in the peaceful sickroom with Sunnie and his parents. He wished he were at Eclipse with Bentley, who was so hard at work on his cure that he'd decided to skip dinner. He wished he were anyplace but where he was, and he began to wonder if his second idea was such a good one after all.

The next morning, after a night in which they all slept as if they'd been hit in the head with a club, they were their old selves again. Opal apologized to Mr. Moreland by saying she knew he remembered enough of his own business to mind it, and to Captain Lester by telling him that she was glad he could talk again and that eventually he might say something she wanted to listen to. To Boom-Boom she simply said she was sorry.

Sandy's sleep had been disturbed at Eclipse by the sounds of Bentley prowling through the house. As far as Sandy knew, Bentley had been up most of the night, though when Sandy was ready to go to Walnut Manor, he found Bentley sprawled on the floor of the laboratory, sound asleep.

Sandy bicycled to Walnut Manor, leaving the Daimler for Bentley in case he woke up in time for lunch.

But lunchtime came and went with no Bentley. He'd never stayed away from Walnut Manor and Flossie for so long, and Sandy began to worry.

The other inmates, Opal, and Dr. Waldemar headed outside for exercise, leaving Sandy, Mr. Moreland, and Captain Lester at the card table working on their plans, and Eddy lying by the fireplace.

The front door burst open so violently, it hit the wall and bounced closed again.

Sandy, Mr. Moreland, and Captain Lester jumped to their feet. Captain Lester grabbed the fireplace poker and Sandy grabbed the ash shovel. Mr. Moreland was left with only the little hearth broom for protection.

The door opened more slowly this time, and Bentley came through it holding a jar filled with a black substance. Bentley's hair and clothes were disheveled, he had bags under his eyes, and his shoelaces were untied.

Relieved, Sandy, Mr. Moreland, and Captain Lester put down their weapons. "What happened to you, man?" Mr. Moreland asked. "You look a wreck."

"I feel a wreck," Bentley said. There was a wild light in his eyes, and Sandy wondered if all the work and the worry of the past months had driven him over the edge. "But I've got something"—he waved the jar—"that I think, I hope, might do it."

Sandy wanted to fed hopeful, the way he had with each of Bentley's other cures, but he had been disappointed too many times.

"That stuff looks horrible," Sandy said. "Are you sure it's safe to give to the sleepers?"

"I took some myself," Bentley said. "As you can see, what it's done is make me more alert."

Sandy wasn't sure that's how he'd have described Bentley's condition. Mr. Moreland and Captain Lester looked unconvinced, as well.

"Maybe you'd like some lunch first," Sandy suggested. "Sit down and rest a while."

"No!" Bentley almost screamed. "I must try this immediately. Immediately!"

Sandy sometimes felt frantic and furious at the lack of a cure. He sometimes wanted to yell and curse about it. But he never got the way Bentley was today.

Bendey ran across, the hallway and started up the stairs, stumbling on his untied shoelaces. With Sandy, Mr. Moreland, and Captain Lester right behind him, he ran to the sickroom and threw open the door, startling Sunnie so much that she dropped her book on seventeenth-century architecture.

"What's wrong?" she said, jumping to her feet. "Is it Bart and Bernie?"

"No," Sandy said, "it's Bentley."

"I
know
that's Bentley," Sunnie said crossly. "I meant, are you all upset because of Bart and Bernie."

Sandy was speechless. He'd never heard Sunnie sound cross, not in all the time he'd known her. It made sense that she should be sometimes. Everybody was. But it was such a shock to see Sunnie—who'd always lived up to her name—acting like Opal, that Sandy didn't know what to say.

While he stood there staring at her, he realized that she was staring back at him. He felt a little dizzy and strange as he looked, at last, into her big blue eyes. He forgot there was anything else in the room to look at. Something was happening, something that felt the way the air does before lightning strikes, when the hair on your arms and on your head lifts and there's a fizzy energy all around you. He didn't know what it was or what would happen next. All he knew was he couldn't look away, and neither, apparently, could she.

While they stood, eyes locked, Bentley filled an eyedropper with the viscous black stuff and forced it into Attila's beak. Mr. Moreland and Captain Lester wrung their hands and frowned and looked uncomfortably at each other. While they both knew that sometimes extremely important events were totally beyond their control, and that sometimes the best course of action was simply to stand aside and do nothing, they didn't really believe it.

Bentley massaged Attila's throat to get her to swallow, and she grimaced in her sleep. She still wore the sweater Opal had knitted for her. She looked pretty mangy, though her feathers were growing back in.

"Must taste about as bad as it looks," Captain Lester said uneasily.

Bentley had just laid Attila back down on her bed of towels when they heard a rusty sound, like the hinges of an old gate opening.

Bentley bent over the dishpan, listening. "It's Attila!" he exclaimed. "She's making a sound."

"She made one before," Mr. Moreland reminded him. "Hiccups."

The rusty sound continued.

"That's how my throat felt," Captain Lester said, "when I started talking again. Rusty and scratchy."

The rusty sound changed into a faint but recognizable cluck.

A second after the sound of the cluck, Louie came tearing into the room from Captain Lester's chair in the library. He climbed up Bentley as if he were a telephone pole and jumped from his shoulder into the dishpan, where he began licking Attila's face. Attila's eyes opened.

Bentley burst into tears for the second time in a week; for the second time since he was a little boy.

Mr. Moreland and Captain Lester looked at each other, openmouthed. "I'll be double dampened," Mr. Moreland said reverently.

"Me, too," Captain Lester agreed.

"Hey, Sandy," Mr. Moreland said, passing his hand between Sandy and Sunnie, who both had missed everything happening with Attila because they were still staring into each other's eyes. "Pay attention."

Sandy blinked as if he were waking up from a beautiful and complicated dream. "What?" he asked.

"Look at Attila."

Sandy looked. "Oh, my gosh. She's awake!" He put his arms around Bentley as he wept, and patted him on the back. "You did it, Bentley, you did it. I'm sorry I ever doubted you."

"I didn't know you were doubting me," Bentley sobbed. "I thought I was doing enough doubting for all of us."

Sandy kept patting Bentley's back. "So what are you waiting for? Give it to Horatio and Mousey and Flossie."

"I'm afraid," Bentley cried. "Just because it works on a chicken doesn't mean it'll work on people. What if it has a bad effect? I could never forgive myself."

"Just give them the amount you gave yourself. It didn't hurt you. It just made you more, more..."

"I know. More everything. Maybe you're right. Maybe I could." He straightened up and searched for his handkerchief.

Before he could find it, Sunnie handed him hers, already wet with her own tears. "Go ahead, Bentley," Sunnie said. "What is life without risks? How could our sleepers be worse off than they already are?"

"Oh, they could be," Bentley said, blowing his nose loudly.

"Oh, that," Sunnie conceded. "Well, sure, they could die. But maybe that would be preferable to the way they are now. It would be to me."

"If it doesn't work on humans..." Bentley said, sniffing, "at least we know we have a, drug that brings chickens out of comas."

Bentley anxiously prepared three more doses of the ugly black stuff and gave them to Horatio, Mousey, and Flossie.

"Should we call the others in?" Sandy asked. "Just in case?".