Paint by Magic (16 page)

"Yeah," I agreed. "And prison would be a lot worse than boarding school, probably."

"I was just
joking,
" Elsie told us, rolling her eyes and shaking the water out of her hair. "But nobody else is thinking of anything!"

"I know—why don't we poison
ourselves
?" Chester suggested. "Then Mama will have to stay home to take care of us."

"Oh,
right,
" said Homer sarcastically. He sent a huge wave of freezing water over his brother's head.

But Betty was grinning. She reached out and ducked Homer. When he came up, sputtering, she said, "No, wait—Chester's brilliant. That's exactly what we'll do. Oh, not
really,
" she said when Homer opened his mouth to protest. "But we'll all get really ill—come down with something
dire
—just before she's going to leave with Mr. Riley."

I laughed at them, shaking my head. "Don't forget, your grandparents will be there, and your uncle," I reminded them. After all, Crystal and I have stayed home sick plenty of times with Ashleigh or Mrs. White—or once even with Gregorio, the old gardener who didn't speak two words of English—because our parents had to work or had tickets for the opera or something.

Betty, Homer, Elsie, and Chester all just stood gaping at me. "Well,
of course
Mama wouldn't go out if we were sick!" Elsie said. "What kind of mother would do
that
?"

I ducked under the water and swam to the other side of the pond.
Never mind.

Finally we traipsed back home. We were wet and muddy. Mrs. Cotton exclaimed that we'd all probably caught our deaths, but Joanna, who was sitting with her on the porch mending clothes with a dreamy sort of expression on her face, just sent us around to the back door to sluice off with buckets of fresh water before coming into the house. I thought maybe she was dreaming about her dates with Mr. Riley, and you could tell Betty was thinking the same thing. She stomped upstairs to change her clothes like each step had a nasty bug on it named Mr. Riley.
Stomp, squash! Stomp, squish!

Homer gave me a pair of knee-length pants—
britches,
he called them—that were too big for him. They were hand-me-downs from some neighbor, and he was supposed to grow into them sooner or later. A soft white cotton shirt that buttoned up the front came from the same guy, and so did the weird kneesocks that fit under the buttoned cuffs of the pants. Now I looked like Homer, without the glasses, but at least I was dry.

"You'll have to keep your own shoes, I'm afraid," Homer said regretfully.

"That's fine," I told him, relieved, though they sure looked silly with black-and-red diamond-patterned kneesocks. "Thanks a lot."

***

Meet me in my room to look at the book," Betty hissed when I came out of the boys' bedroom in my new "duds"—but just then Joanna called the girls to help with the mending. Betty stamped her feet and pouted, and I knew she was frustrated at being thwarted again, but there was nothing she could do about it. Crystal would have point-blank refused to attempt mending of any sort, but Betty was different that way. She fussed and fumed, but she obeyed her mother.

I wanted to sneak into the girls' room and get the art book to look at on my own, but Joanna set us boys to weeding in the backyard. At home I might have refused—not that I'd ever been told to weed anything, since we had old Gregorio. But here I didn't dare make a fuss. So I went out with them, and I learned how to tell a weed from a flower after Chester shrieked at me a couple times for pulling out the jasmine plants.

"So what sort of sickness are you going to come down with?" I asked Chester, trying to distract him from watching every weed I pulled. He was kneeling next to me on the grass, and he sat back on his heels to give my question serious consideration.

"Maybe scarlet fever," he said musingly. "I could paint a sort of rash on my belly and cheeks with red watercolors. I'm pretty good at painting, you know. Runs in the family."

"No, Chess, not scarlet fever," Homer objected from over by the geraniums. "Nothing too serious or Mama will call for the doctor. The doctor would know your rash was only paint in two seconds, and then we'd all be in really hot water."

I tugged at a prickly weed as they discussed the problem. They'd already had measles and chicken pox and mumps, so they couldn't come down with those again. And Betty had scarlet fever when she was a baby. Then they started talking about some little cousin of theirs who had died of some sickness called diphtheria.

I hadn't had any of those sicknesses, of course, because I'd been vaccinated against them. But maybe in 1926 there weren't any such things as immunizations.

They hadn't decided on a sickness by the time Joanna called us in for dinner. First, she showed me how to set the table. The girls came in from the porch with their pile of mended clothing, neatly folded. Then we all sat down together, just like the night before, and prayed that God would bless our mèal. Then we ate a delicious pie with chunks of chicken and vegetables and gravy inside a flaky crust. We told about the high points of our day.

I talked about sitting for my portrait—but I didn't give any details of the scene up in the studio. Homer and Chester told about the tree fort. Elsie held up a little pink striped dress she had made for one of her dolls. Betty asked her grandpa about their ancestor Lorenzo da Padova.

"Ah, yes," the old man said meditatively. "That would be on your gramma's side—her mother's father was born in Italy and emigrated to America, isn't that right, dear? Or your grandmother's father? Something like that."

"I don't really recall," said Mrs. Cotton. "But I do remember hearing that there was a well-known painter very long ago on some distant branch of our family tree. Ask your uncle Fitz about him, why don't you, Betty? He'll know much more than I do. He reveres all those old Italian fellows!"

"But some people thought Lorenzo was evil," pressed Betty. "Do you think he was?"

"Evil," mused Mr. Cotton. "That's a pretty heavy label to attach to anyone, seems to me. I don't know whether I believe in evil, dear child. Though some folks are
misguided,
that's for certain!"

"I think you're too kind, dear," said Mrs. Cotton. "
I
believe in evil," she told us. "It's the absence of good, that's what it is. It's war and hatred and immorality—and I'm sure all our ancestors had as much of that to guard against long ago as we do now. The important thing is to keep trying to improve ourselves. Not to let evil get the upper hand." She passed the big dish of pie around the table again. "Now come along, all of you. It Would be the very
worst
evil to waste a single bite of this lovely pie Joanna has made us!"

After dinner, while the girls cleared the table, Joanna glanced over at me. "Connor, dear? How about choosing a puzzle? We finished one just last week."

"It was a killer, that one was," said Mrs. Cotton, stacking up the dinner plates for Betty to carry to the kitchen. "Vicious amounts of sea and sky—all blue. Pick one with no blue, Connor."

I just sat there for a moment, uncertain what to do. I'd been planning to get to that art book at last, or at least to go off by myself somewhere and think about my plan for later that night. But Joanna was beckoning me over to the china closet. She tugged open the bottom door. There were stacks of puzzles inside on the shelves. "How about this one? The Presidential Garden." Joanna put the box on the table, and I saw it was a puzzle of a formal flower garden in front of the White House. Lots of flowers and trees and stuff, all in pinks and reds and yellows. Not a lot of blue. I was about to say I'd been to Washington, D.C., with my family two summers ago and had toured the White House ... but then I realized I didn't know who the president was in 1926, and I didn't even know if they let people have tours in this time.

I did know that people in this time didn't slope off on their own to watch TV or read or anything after a meal the way we did at home. They sat around together some more, talking and—so it seemed—doing jigsaw puzzles. "Looks good to me" was all I said. We went out onto the porch, where the others were gathered, and showed them the box.

Mrs. Cotton nodded. "That'll do nicely. That puzzle was a gift to Fitz when he was a boy. Only way we could get him to stop painting was to buy him puzzles! And even then he'd come down only for a while ... I think he's lived most of his life up in that studio of his." She pursed her lips and cast a glance at the ceiling as if she could see through to the attic, where Fitz was
still
hanging out. I wondered if he
ever
came downstairs.

Believe it or not, I nearly forgot about Fitzgerald Cotton and his art book once I started doing the puzzle. It was a hard one, and I planned to work on it only for a few minutes, just to make Mrs. Cotton and Joanna happy. But then it hooked me. Homer and Chester joined me, and so did Betty and Elsie when they had finished washing the dishes. We sat there all cozy, fitting the little pieces together and cheering when we finished a whole tree or flower bed. Aside from our cheering and the rustle of Mr. Cotton's newspaper, the porch was quiet. It really got to me—the near silence. The whole house was so quiet. No TV, no music, no phone. It was all very peaceful—almost as peaceful as the presidential garden looked in the puzzle taking shape under our hands.

We stayed out there until the dark deepened around us and Joanna announced it was time for bed. We said good night and went upstairs. I lay there in my narrow camp bed, hoping that Homer and Chess would drift off quickly. I could hear Elsie chattering to Betty in the other room, and Joanna's voice telling them to hush now and sleep. I wondered how long it would take before the adults came up to bed. There would be no late-night movie, keeping them up; and there would be no Internet chat groups. So maybe it wouldn't take long.

I awoke with a start—furious at myself for having drifted off—and the house was dark and silent. No hall light shone outside the bedroom door. There was no murmur of voices from downstairs. I peered over at the other beds. Homer and Chester were just dark humps in the shadows. I pushed back my sheets and slid out of bed.

Now was my chance.
Hang in there, Mom.
Time for plan
A.

Out into the hallway, down the creaky stairs. I hugged the wall the way spies do on TV. But this was a real-life adventure, and I was the star.

Into the front hallway. Through the dining room. Into the kitchen.

The night was warm and still. A slight breeze stirred the white net curtains at the open window over the sink. A sliver of moonlight lay across the kitchen table. There was the icebox, over in the corner. I unlatched the icebox door and swung it open. No little light came on inside the way it does in our fridge at home, but I could make out in the moonlight that the block of ice was still there in the bottom tray.

The night was warm, but not warm enough to melt the ice and flood the kitchen the way Mr. Riley had described.
No problemo.
My plan was about appearances—not reality.

I started opening cupboards, searching until I found a large iron pot. It took two hands to lift it up to the sink. Then I ran hot water into it, hoping the pipes wouldn't clank and wake anybody upstairs. It was really hard to lift the full pot out of the sink. Some water splashed out onto the floor—but that didn't matter. In another second there'd be a whole lot more.

I took a few steps with the heavy pot and then lowered it carefully to the floor in front of the icebox. I used a soup ladle to pour the hot water onto the block of ice. But it didn't melt as I thought it would. So I tipped the whole pot onto the ice.

Water gushed onto the floor, pooling under the icebox and running around the legs of the chairs at the kitchen table. I jumped back so I wouldn't get splashed. Was that how much water one of those giant blocks of ice would make? I wasn't sure. So I filled the pot once more and tipped it. If a person saw
this,
he would just throw a towel down over it. I mean, it wasn't exactly a flood or anything.

I hesitated, then filled the pot again. Another and another—I was on autopilot or something—until I suddenly noticed that the whole kitchen was swimming in about an inch of water. And still that huge block of ice wasn't melted.

But it really was a flood now—definitely more water than the ice block could have held. I grabbed a dish towel off the rail by the sink, and looked at it helplessly. I heard Crystal's scornful voice in my head:
You always go too far, Connor!

It was true this time, anyway. One towel would never work to sop up this mess. And the water was trickling across the kitchen linoleum, under the kitchen door, and into the dining room! I thought of the shiny wooden floor in there, and the pretty patterned rug, and what Mrs. Cotton would say if she knew what I had done. I winced and raced for the stairs. Then I stopped and made myself wade back through the kitchen—lifting the too-long legs of my pajamas (well, Mr. Cotton's pajamas) to keep them out of the water—and dried the pot I'd used and put it carefully away in the cupboard.

Finally, heart pounding, I thumped up the stairs, and up the next flight to the attic. I paused outside of Fitzgerald Cotton's studio. There was a faint light showing under the door.

I knocked.

There was no answer. I knocked again and tried the doorknob. It turned and the door swung open, and there was Fitzgerald Cotton, in moonlight, jerking out of sleep on the battered couch in the back of the room.

"What the devil—" he said in a fuzzy, sleep-filled voice. "Go away, boy—it's not time for painting. A man's got to sleep sometime!"

"Sorry," I said, panting from running up the stairs. "I didn't know who to tell—but then I saw your light was on. It's—there's a flood downstairs! I went down because I Was really hungry ... Thought I could get myself a piece of bread. And then I saw this huge flood in the kitchen! I think it's the icebox—the ice must have melted in this heat, just the way Mr. Riley said it did!"