Paint by Magic (15 page)

Mr. Riley was about fifty, older than my dad but built the same—like a football player. Big muscles from hefting around all that heavy ice. Looked like Mr. Riley didn't need to work out at a gym, because his work
was
the workout.

"What's the matter with him?" I asked the kids. "He looks all right."

"He's trying to woo Mama," Homer whispered to me. "And Betty hates him for it. I don't like him much, either."

"He's smarmy," added Elsie. "And he can't abide children. He doesn't like us."

"But he pretends to," muttered Betty. "To butter up Mama."

"The only good thing about him is his horse!" said Chester. "If he married Mama, we could ride Nellie every day." He ran to help Mr. Riley lug the ice up onto the porch.

"Mr. Riley doesn't really own Nellie," said Elsie. "She belongs to Mr. Mason, who owns the ice company. Mr. Riley is just one of his hired deliverymen. But Chester doesn't understand."

Betty frowned. "And he doesn't understand how it would be having Mr. Riley for our father. You can practically smell his dislike of us." She bit her lip.

"
Pee-yewww,
" said Elsie.

"Watch how he won't ever look at us," added Homer. "He just sort of
won't
see us. It's as if we're no more than ants to him. I bet if he and Mama got married, he'd try to ship us off to some boarding school or military academy before you could blink."

Mrs. Cotton was directing Mr. Riley into the kitchen with the block of ice. When he came out again, he accepted a glass of lemonade and stayed to chat with the grown-ups for a while. Homer was right—he didn't even look at us kids, and only barely glanced up and nodded when Mrs. Cotton introduced me to him as their special guest. He just sort of muttered hello to me, never once meeting my eye, but then turned a beaming smile on Joanna. Joanna seemed happy enough to see him, though, and Mrs. Cotton was chattering at him like he was the greatest guy in the world. Or maybe she was just glad to have ice.

At least he took time to sit and chat. I mean, at home in my own time, we never see the people who help us out or make deliveries or come to repair things. They come and do their jobs while we're at work and school ... and it's probably against their union policy to accept any food or drink. Mrs. White just lets them in and out, and they leave their bill on the kitchen counter.

Mr. Riley sat in one of the rocking chairs. He hitched his chair closer to Joanna's and talked mostly to her. "Lovely day, isn't it? Warm as summertime. Maybe you'd like to take a walk with me one evenin' this week, just around the town, stop for coffee at Maxwell's Café or perhaps the Walnut Inn?"

Joanna smiled at him. "Thank you," she said. "Either would be very nice."

Betty glowered at them both. Homer looked like he might start hissing and booing the way they did at old-time plays when the villain came onstage.

Mrs. Cotton looked up at all of us standing along the porch railing. "You children run off now and play," she said.

"Don't they go to school?" Mr. Riley asked her, frowning in our general direction. He could have asked
us
since we were practically right there in front of his nose. I could tell Betty and Homer didn't like being ignored. And they clearly had no intention of running off to play.

"It's Easter week," Joanna reminded him.

"Ah yes." He drank his lemonade and rocked back and forth. "When I was a lad, the swimming hole was the place to be during Easter week. All my pals would meet there. We had races; we had games. We would climb the nearest tree and drop down into the water from the highest branches—"

"Hey!" interrupted Chester. "Let's go to the swimming hole!"

Mr. Riley winked at Joanna, and I knew he'd been hoping to get us interested so we'd run off and swim and leave him in peace with Joanna. It looked like Betty had figured that out, too, because she snapped, "It will be freezing at the swimming hole! And Mr. Riley knows it."

"Betty," chided her mother, "mind your manners."

Homer's glowering look had softened at Mr. Riley's mention of the swimming hole, and now both Chester and Elsie were all over their mother.

"Hooray!" they cried. "We love the swimming hole! May we go?"

"Betty's right about its still being too cold now, I think," Joanna replied.

Mr. Riley inched his chair a bit closer to hers. "Ah, well, kids are hearty, aren't they? Now, my dear Joanna—ah, Mrs. Cotton—" He leaned closer, trying for a little privacy. "How about we set a date to take in a moving picture over at the cinedrome? I hear
Rin-Tin-Tin
is all the rage."

"Why, yes, Mr. Riley," said Joanna, with her sweet smile. "I would enjoy accompanying you to a moving picture. Thank you very kindly."

"It will be an honor," said Mr. Riley.

"I want to see
Rin-Tin-Tin,
too," Elsie announced, but Mr. Riley ignored her. He drained his lemonade glass.

"That hit the spot," he said, standing up and bowing slightly, first to Mrs. Cotton and then to Joanna. "Thank you kindly, Mrs. Cotton and Mrs. Cotton, but I'll need to be on my way again. Nellie's waiting—and so is the ice. The water may still be too cold for swimming, but this
is
a hot spell we're having, and no mistake about it. I've had to fill dozens of orders for extra ice just since Monday, when the temperature shot up."

"We'll see you again next week, Mr. Riley," said Mrs. Cotton. "If not before." She slanted a meaningful glance over at her daughter-in-law.

"Might have to be before then, ma'am, if this heat holds," Mr. Riley said, walking down the steps. "Last lady I delivered to said her block of ice lasted only three days. She came down this morning and found a gigantic puddle of water in the kitchen. Thought she'd sprung a leak somewhere—but it was only the ice block."

"I'll telephone you if we need another order," Joanna said.

"I'll be telephoning
you
this evening, to fix a date for
Rin-Tin-Tin,
" he reminded her. "And perhaps dinner beforehand? The Walnut Inn does a lovely meal—nicer, really, than Maxwell's."

Next to me Betty was gritting her teeth. "The Walnut Inn's a fancy plate with candlelight and, harp music," she muttered.

"He's getting goopy," whispered Homer. "What're we going to do?"

I watched thoughtfully as Mr. Riley jumped back up onto the high seat of his wagon and whistled to Nellie. As they set off down the street, he tipped his hat to Joanna and Mrs. Cotton. The ladies waved back at him.

"We have to save Mama," whispered Elsie.

"We have to save ourselves," replied Betty. "I don't want to go away to boarding school."

"We'll make a plan," agreed Homer. "Wanna help us save Mama, Connor?"

But I was barely listening to them. I was thinking about ice blocks melting into big puddles. Mr. Riley might not have looked at me for even two seconds, but he had just given me a wonderful idea—an idea I was rapidly forming into a plan for how to get into the studio and maybe save my
own
mama.

***

I wanted to look at that art book again, but it was up in Betty's bedroom, and she and Joanna had gone in there after lunch and closed the door. Joanna was fitting Betty for a new dress she'd been sewing on the black iron sewing machine in the dining room. So I spent the next hour of that hot day playing Snakes and Ladders with the other kids, on the shady porch. The game sort of grows on you. It helped that I kept winning. But then I got restless. It felt wrong to be sitting around when I needed to find out how Fitzgerald Cotton was capturing my mom. Not to mention that I still hadn't found any trace of the sketch that had brought me here. My mind was ticking along as I moved my piece around the game board. I was working on my plan.

If my plan worked I'd get into the studio that very night—and maybe be on my way home to Mom. But in the meantime it wouldn't hurt to see something of 1926 besides this porch and this game board.

"Hey, guys," I said to the kids. "How about that swimming hole?"

"Hay is for—oh, never mind." Betty stepped out onto the porch. "Mama's finished with me at last. Let's go upstairs." She looked at me. "And educate ourselves about art."

"I like the idea of the swimming hole," said Homer, "better than art!"

"You go ahead," Betty told him. "But Connor and I have some unfinished business." She gave me a look, eyebrows raised. "We need to have a little talk."

We do?
I thought uneasily. She was a pain, and I knew she was going to try to get me to tell her my whole life story—the true one. I wasn't ready for that. I did want to look at that art book—but I wanted to do it alone. "I vote we go swimming," I said, raising my eyebrows right back at Betty.

"But Mama says it's too cold," said Elsie.

"We don't have to swim if we don't want to," I pressed. "I just want to see it. It sounds cool."

Homer looked puzzled. "I don't see how it can
sound
cool," he said. "It might turn out to
be
cold, but how can it
sound
that way?"

"Forget about it, Homeboy," I said, standing up, "Come on."

Homer and I walked down the steps, and of course Chester and Elsie ran after us. After a minute, before we'd even reached the sidewalk, Betty joined us. "All right," she said. "We can talk about how to foil Mr. Riley."

"He didn't seem that bad," I said mildly, mostly to see her reaction.

"He is bad!" she snapped. "He wants to marry Mama! But I'm sure Mama doesn't love him. She just thinks that we need a father. Well, I say we don't—especially not a father who won't give us the time of day."

"If she married anybody, it really should be Uncle Fitzy," said Elsie. "That's the one I think she really loves. I mean, after Daddy, of course."

"He's too grumpy," said Chester.

"Yes, but married to Mama, he wouldn't be," said Homer loyally.

We passed four other houses, then reached the corner of Lemon Street—the corner where, in my time, the school bus picked me up every morning. We crossed East Main—the road Homer said led into the town—and headed down a dirt path off to the right. I was looking around for street signs, trying to orient myself.
Our
house was on Lemon Street, and Lemon Street bisected East Main, but East Main in
my
time was just a long stretch in a housing development, with streets named after fruits branching off it, each ending in a cul-de-sac. Each street had about twenty big houses on it, not all exactly alike, but very similar, built by the same developer. I looked around me now for Orange Street and Blueberry Drive and Almond Lane, but they weren't anywhere. The streets were quiet—hardly any traffic at all. No hum in the distance from the freeway, either.

Since this was my neighborhood, you'd think I'd recognize something. But so far I hadn't, except for Mount Diablo. Where Doug's house ought to be, there were just zillions of trees. In fact, there were big groves of lemon trees between all the houses on Lemon Street—and there were only about four or five houses, anyway, not the twenty or so that are crammed onto the street in my time. The houses on Lemon Street in 1926 all had big porches like the Cottons'. The street was paved, but then turned to this dirt track leading out of the lemon grove down to a stream.

Stream?
Doug and I would have killed for a stream so close to home. Maybe if there were a stream, it would be worth going out after school to play. But I remembered learning in school how lots of the streams in the Bay Area had been built right over with streets and sidewalks. The streams were still there, running through the hills, down to the bay, but nobody ever saw them.

Seemed a stupid thing to do to a stream, I thought, as we followed this burbling one along till it widened out into a pool. The swimming hole.

"Kids made this swimming hole years and years ago," Homer told me proudly. "Kids dammed it up and made this pool."

"They worked like beavers!" said Chester. "Look how they used mud and sandbags to build the walls."

"Beavers don't use sandbags," snorted Betty. "Or rocks, either."

"Well, they would if they could," Chester retorted. He stripped off his clothes right there in front of everybody, right down to his underpants, walked over to the edge of the pool, and dipped his foot in. "Freezing!" he said. "Mama was right!"

"Our daddy and Uncle Fitzy swam here when they were boys," Elsie told me. "Uncle Fitzy taught Daddy to swim."

The swimming hole was about half as big as the pool in Doug's backyard, and maybe just about as deep. The water wasn't turquoise and bubbly, cleaned weekly by the Tid-ee-Pool maintenance company. The water was clear enough, though, that you could see down through it to the muddy bottom and along the rock and sandbagged sides covered with ferns and water plants. It was unsupervised, unchlorinated, maybe unsafe—and it looked great to me. I stripped off my clothes, too, right down to my
Star Wars
underpants—and jumped in.

Homer shed his shirt but not his trousers, then joined us, screeching at the top of his lungs. After a few minutes so did both girls, though they kept their dresses on, and the full skirts floated around them like big jellyfish. We swam and splashed and ducked each other, shrieking like maniacs the whole time because the water really was so cold it made your bones ache.

I wished I'd brought my camera—or camcorder.
Fitzy should paint
this
instead of Mom,
I thought.
Capture
it
forever.

The kids started talking about how to stop their mom from dating Mr. Riley. "We have to sabotage their date to the cinedrome," said Betty. "It's obvious. A romantic dinner at the Walnut Inn will ruin everything. He could propose to her there, and then what?"

"Boarding school, here we come," said Homer.

"We can't let them eat there," agreed Chester.

"Maybe we should just kill him," Elsie suggested casually. "Like, with poison."

"
Elsie!
" The others looked shocked. They sent splashes of cold water into her face.

"You don't just go around killing people who are in your way," Betty chided her. "Not even Mr. Riley. We have to be more subtle than that."