Marcia's Madness (7 page)

"But it is!" Marcia sounded excited and not at all like she was bothered by a headache. "If I really concentrate my energies on just one spot in the Big City, I
can
block everything else out!"

Zinnia went over to Minx, bent down, and whispered in the cat's ear.

We saw Minx shrug her kitty shoulders as if to say
Why not? I've already tried everything else.
Then she squinted her kitty eyes, and a moment later, we swear, it was like a peaceful smile came over her face.

"One of these days," Georgia said to Zinnia, "I may just start believing you
can
do what you've been claiming all along."

"Don't worry," Rebecca said to Georgia. "If that day ever comes, I'll hit you over the head and knock some sense back into you."

"I think I've got it!" Marcia sounded even more excited now.

"What are you seeing?" Jackie asked.

"I'm seeing a woman in an apartment in the Big City," Marcia said. "She's in her kitchen, and she's making liver and onions!"

"Eeeuw." Petal shuddered. "Can't you turn the world into one thin dime somewhere more pleasant?"

"I know where Marcia should focus her vision," Annie said.

"Where?" We all turned to Annie.

Annie went to stand behind Marcia. Then, placing her hands on either side of Marcia's face, she gently turned Marcia's head toward a particular direction.

"Try," Annie said to Marcia, "to see through this wall of our house and through the wall of our neighbor's house so you can tell us what's going on there."

Oh.

It was so perfect, it was beyond perfect.

Ever since the Wicket's return from her wild-goose chase in Beijing, we'd wanted to learn what she was up to. And now, perhaps, we would find out.

Marcia squinted her eyes at the wall.

"Concentrate, Marcia! Concentrate!" we all urged her.

"I can't," she said, "when you're all shouting at me so!"

We did our best to keep quiet, no one making a peep, except maybe Petal.

"I can see her! I can see her!" Marcia was excited again now.

But a moment later, excitement turned to terror.

"Oh no!" Marcia said, moving away from the wall.

"What is it? What is it?" we cried.

"The Wicket." Marcia gulped. "I just saw her. She was writing a note to Social Services. She said she was sure the eight little girls next door to her were living alone, without parental supervision." Marcia gulped again before adding:

"And she invited them to come investigate!"

SEVEN

"Cor, the Wicket's evil!" Georgia said, a mix of horror and admiration in her eyes.

"What does
cor
mean?" Zinnia asked.

"It's a British word," Jackie said. "It means something like 'gosh wow!'"

"Are we British, then?" Petal asked. "I have been curious about that."

"We might as well be," Rebecca said, "to hear Annie do her Daddy impersonation."

"If we're not," Durinda said, "I've been thinking of converting." She shrugged when we all looked at her. "It seems like it'd be fun."

"I'll tell you what's not fun," Annie said. "The Wicket turning us in to Social Services."

"Well," Marcia said, "at least I saw the Wicket
writing
to Social Services, not e-mailing or telephoning, so it should take her letter a few days to get there. And then who knows how many more days it will take them to respond? You know, bureaucratic red tape."

"Yes," Annie said, "but once they do respond, they'll probably send someone out right away to investigate and they'll discover that there are no adults living in our home. And then we'll all be split up, sent to live in different houses."

"Can't you just put on the Daddy disguise?" Zinnia suggested to Annie, but Annie just shook her head.

"What about you?" Petal said, her lip quivering as she addressed Marcia. "You
like
wearing the Daddy disguise now."

But Marcia shook her head too.

"That won't work," Annie said, "no matter who wears the disguise. The thing is, it may work when we're driving the car or when we're out in public. But it won't work at fooling anyone in our own home. For one thing, whoever comes to investigate will count the heads of those Eights not wearing the Daddy disguise and come up with only seven. Then the jig'll be up."

"Then what
will
work?" Rebecca demanded.

We looked at Annie. We looked at Marcia.

But neither had an answer.

***

Monday we couldn't wait to get the school day over with.

Yes, yes, we did pay attention to the Mr. McG whenever we were in the classroom—that man! He was so obsessed with actually trying to teach us. And we maybe even learned a new thing or two, but we were still desperate to be done. We needed to get home so we could figure out what to do about the Wicket and Social Services.

"Cor blimey!" Georgia said to the bus driver on the way home. "Can't you drive this thing any faster, my good man?"

"No, I can't." The bus driver glared at Georgia in the rearview mirror. "It wouldn't be safe."

We all glared back at him but it did us no good. On that day, all the bounces on the little yellow bus were frustratingly slow bounces.

***

Once again, we couldn't find Marcia.

Arriving home, we'd tossed our backpacks aside and raced through the snack that Durinda prepared for us with Jackie's help. Annie had said that for once we could put off doing our homework until later in the evening because we had more urgent matters than math and English to deal with at the moment: we needed to save ourselves. And to do that, we needed to brainstorm a plan.

So that's what we were doing. We were in the drawing room brainstorming a strategy to save our civilization as we knew it when we realized that one of our number was missing.

"Do you think she's gone out driving again?" Georgia wondered.

"Perhaps this time she's gone for a joy ride," Rebecca said. "I know that's what I'd do if I could drive."

"What's a joy ride?" Petal asked.

"It's exactly what it sounds like," Jackie said.

"Oh!" Petal looked pleasantly surprised. "It's so nice when words mean exactly what they sound like."

"Jackie," Zinnia said, "do you think maybe you should race up to the tower room to see if Annie's Daddy disguise is missing again?"

Jackie took off.

"Oh no! Did someone say 'missing'?" Petal's pleasure had turned to distress. "First Mommy and Daddy went missing. Now Marcia's gone too. Do you think we're slowly being picked off, one by one, by aliens who are transporting us in their spaceship to a distant planet where they will study us to see why we are the way we are?"

Rebecca studied Petal for a long moment before speaking. "I must say, that's a very creative, if unusually long, delusion you're nursing today."

"I don't know what that means!" Petal said. "But what if I'm next? What if the aliens are taking me next?"

"You're not next," Rebecca said, growing bored.

"Well, technically, she is," Durinda said. "I mean, for getting her power and her gift. June is the next month."

"But I don't want to get my power and my gift next!" Petal said. "That's worse than being abducted by aliens!"

"Oh, bother." Georgia rolled her eyes.

And then Jackie was back, and she wasn't even out of breath.

"The Daddy disguise is where it should be," Jackie informed us. "And even though no one asked me to, I checked the garage. The Hummer hasn't been moved and the engine is still cool."

"My, you're getting slow," Rebecca said. "It took you all that time just to run up to the tower room, back down to the garage, and then here? And you used to be faster than a train!"

"I hate to say, Jackie," Zinnia said gently, "but that is kind of slow. For you, I mean."

"Well," Jackie said, not looking the slightest bit bothered by the insults, whether they were intentional or unintentional, "after checking the first two places, I did check every other room in the house, figuring she had to be here somewhere."

We thought about that—how many rooms there were in our house and how long it would take to thoroughly check all of them—and we realized that Jackie hadn't lost any speed at all. Well, not much.

"And?" Annie asked.

"And I found her," Jackie said. "She's in the basement."

"Not the basement!" Petal was horrified. To her, going into the basement was even worse than getting abducted by aliens.

"Yes, the basement. She's got on Mommy's old lab coat." Jackie paused. "And I think she's inventing something."

***

Seven of us crept down the basement stairs, hoping to find out what Marcia was up to.

Despite Petal's fears, our basement was a rather nice place, certainly when compared with the Wicket's evil one. Our basement was where our scientist mother had created all of her greatest inventions.

Or at least the ones we knew about.

Unlike the Wicket's basement, with its coldness and its barbed-wire fence around her wretched desk, our basement was warm and inviting. It even had orange shag wall-to-wall carpeting and a purple beanbag chair in the corner.

Funny, we thought, looking around and wondering why we never spent much time down there. It really wasn't such a bad place. There was hardly a spider in sight!

But then something else, bigger than a spider, came into sight.

There, behind Mommy's inventor's table, stood Marcia.

Marcia had on Mommy's lab coat, just like Jackie had informed us, but on Marcia, the hem of it fell somewhere around her ankles. Marcia also wore protective goggles over her eyes, and she was laughing—rather maniacally, it appeared to us—as she mixed potions in a test tube. Beside her on the lab table were scattered wires and gears, all sorts of metal bits and pieces, plus an astonishing array of tools.

"You look like a mad scientist," Rebecca said.

"Thank you," Marcia said. She didn't glance up from her work, although she did look pleased, even if some of us suspected that Rebecca had
not
meant that as a compliment.

"Um, if you don't mind us asking," Annie said, "what are you doing?"

"I'm returning to our roots," Marcia said, measuring a little bit of this, stirring a little bit of that, and then pouring it all into a beaker and watching the liquid turn bright blue. "Mommy's an inventor-slash-scientist, so I'm simply following in her footsteps: coming up with an invention to save the day."

"But what is it?" Zinnia asked.

"It's a
device.
" And now we could tell Marcia was concentrating very hard as her fingers flew among the scattered wires and gears, all sorts of metal bits and pieces, and the astonishing array of tools.

"We can see that," Georgia said. "But what sort of device?"

Marcia's hands were flying so fast-attaching this, twisting that, screwing on the other thing—her fingers might have been Jackie running!