Pish Posh (3 page)

Now, as the roller-coaster car climbed the first hill, Clara decided to try to scream. She held her cotton candy firmly in one hand, and at the moment the car began to fly down the hill, she opened her mouth and tested a small scream. It sounded like a toy poodle whose paw had been stepped on. She tried it again on the second hill. She opened her mouth wider, took a deep breath, and pushed. This time a real scream did come out, but it sounded horrible—like someone who had just discovered a dead body in their closet. And that brought her mind right back to Dr. Piff and his mystery, so she pushed the button in the front of the car. The car slowed down and came to a halt at the bottom of the ride.

The State Fair Room was no good, she decided, and she continued down the hallway to find another diversion. Over the years, her parents had consulted child experts to discover what children enjoyed. Then they had built the rooms accordingly. They reasoned that when Clara grew up and was attending a cocktail party where people were reminiscing about their childhoods, she could speak with authority on the thrill of the roller coaster and the taste of cotton candy. That way no one would think that she had had an odd, abnormal childhood, but she wouldn't have to go to actual amusement parks where there were all sorts of undesirable people wandering about.

A few doors down Clara paused to peer into the Day at the Beach Room. The second she opened the door, a warm burst of salty ocean air assailed her nose. She slipped her shoes off and stepped inside, her bare feet sinking into the thick, pale sand. Beneath a giant beach umbrella was a giant beach towel splashed with giant pink and yellow flowers. Beside it was a cooler, which the cook replenished every day with Spam sandwiches (even though Clara never ate them). At the edge of the sand was “the ocean.” It was a stretch of salt water, large enough to swim laps across and scarily deep at some points. A sound track played the caw-cawing of gulls and the occasional mother calling out to her child, “Don't go in too deep, Martha!” “Robbie, come let Mommy put some lotion on your back!” A special machine created waves, which were realistically large when the tide came in. In fact, the waves were crashing down very hard on the beach at the moment—too hard to swim in. Clara dipped her feet into the frothy edge. The water felt delightful against her toes, and she wondered what the real ocean looked like. She had never seen it. In fact, she had no memories of ever having been anywhere outside of Manhattan. Her father had promised to take her back to France one day, to visit her
grand-mere,
but the Frankofiles were always far too busy with the restaurant to travel.

A large wave splashed down hard in front of her and splattered her dress. Clara disapproved. Backing up, she frowningly examined the wet spot on her dress, and then left the Day at the Beach Room altogether.

She passed by the other rooms—the Haunted House Room, the Bumper Cars Room, the Giant Dollhouse Room, the Pie-Eating-Contest Room. Finally she came to a door at the very end of the corridor. The moment she saw it, she knew that it was exactly the room she was looking for. She opened the door. Inside was a single, solitary tree. It had been dug up from an ancient stretch of woods in Yungaburra, Australia, and transported to the Frankofiles' apartment. It had a massive trunk, and it was so tall that a special ceiling had been constructed, at the top of which was a gray-tinted plastic dome. This was the Tree Climbing Room.

Clara smiled. She loved that tree—perhaps because it lived alone in this room, strong and majestic and needing no one.

On the wall was a small hook that held a pair of overalls and a straw hat. According to the child experts, this was the fashion that simple country children wore when they climbed trees. Clara took off her dress and shoes and put on the overalls, then the hat, which she tied under her chin with its green ribbon.

There was a thick, nubby stump near the base of the tree on which to place your foot and boost yourself up to grasp the lowest branch. All along the length of the tree were thick branches spaced perfectly for a climbing child. Barefoot, Clara shimmied up the giant tree easily. She was not a child who was afraid of heights, and in fact, if she had been brought up in the country, she would have made a magnificent tree climber.

When she came close to the ceiling, Clara reached out and pressed a yellow button on the control panel set into the wall. Above her head, the plastic dome made a
clotch
sound. The dome began to separate in the center, the two sides pulling back and disappearing into the wall, laying bare the dark city sky.

Immediately, Clara could feel the breeze against her skin and smell the delightful semi-stinky city air (not stinky in a nasty way, but in the way the scalp of someone you're fond of smells). She climbed faster until she reached the very top, and then she nestled into a branch with a smooth crook in it. The tree was taller than the apartment building's roof, and her head was surrounded by the brilliant night stars.

Way down below, New York City shimmered with lights-store signs, streetlamps, traffic lights. It was as though the entire city stubbornly rebelled against the night, refusing to be blotted out by the darkness. Clara watched the starry, ceaseless movement of headlights from the cars and buses and taxis gliding through the streets. In the distance she could see an oblong, coal-black strip, which was Central Park. From this height, all the loud street noise was reduced to a smothered drone, except for the piercing wail of police sirens in the distance.

The warm breeze pushed at the brim of her straw hat and brushed delightfully against her bare feet. She wondered if country children felt like this all the time, and for a moment she experienced a pang of envy. But then she reminded herself that country children would not have a tree from Yungaburra, Australia, nor a bird's-eye view of New York City.

The sirens, which were faint at first, had grown louder. Now she could see the police cars weaving in and out of traffic, until they finally stopped right in front of her building. She strained her eyes to see what was happening on the street below. The police officers had gotten out of their cars, and a woman ran up to them and started gesturing wildly. Suddenly all the policemen looked up.

Are they looking at
me?
Clara wondered. Because, indeed, they were looking right up toward the top of Clara's building. Other people on the street stopped and were pointing up in her direction.

They probably think I'm going to jump, Clara thought. How idiotic of them!

Then, out of the corner of her eye, Clara saw something moving along the roof of her building, below her. At first all she could make out was a patch of darkness. Was it a trick of light? But as she watched it, she began to make out a human form—slim and agile. It was moving around the edge of the roof, looking, it seemed, for a way down.

O
n the street below, an officer with a bullhorn shouted, “Listen up! There are fourteen police officers down here, and there's one of YOU! Those are not good odds!”

The figure on the roof stopped momentarily, then ran to the little service entrance that stood in one corner of the roof and pulled at the door. It was locked, but the person yanked and shoved on it for some minutes anyway.

Clara watched with great interest and surprisingly little fear. If you want to know the truth, Clara had a secret craving for danger, which was very unbecoming for such an elegant girl. But there are some things that one can't help. Her favorite movies always involved car chases along steep, winding cliffs and fistfights on the wings of airplanes.

Suddenly, the figure turned and looked at Clara's tree. The person walked toward it slowly; it would have been easy, at the distance of a few feet, to think that it was simply a tree planted on top of the roof, rather than one growing through the roof. In fact, the figure nearly toppled into the opening around the tree, which would have produced a very nasty fall into the Tree Climbing Room.

From Clara's vantage point, several feet above the roof, she saw the figure reach up and try to grab at a branch. The problem was that the hole in the roof was rather wide, and the branches were just out of the person's reach. The person jumped several times in the air but still could not reach any of the branches.

The voice in the bullhorn boomed: “Give yourself up! You are completely surrounded!” And that sounded so exactly like something out of a movie (in fact, it was: the officer with the bullhorn also liked action movies and had been waiting fifteen years for the chance to say those very words) that Clara actually laughed. It was just a small laugh—a snort, actually. But it was loud enough for the figure on the roof to hear.

“Is someone up there?” the person asked. It took Clara a minute to answer, not because she was afraid, but because she was shocked: the person's voice was that of a girl.

“Yes,” Clara replied.

The girl hesitated for a minute, then stepped back and looked up. “Okay, I see you now.” Her voice had a scratchy sound to it, which Clara found interesting. “What do you say you push that branch down a bit, just a few inches?”

Clara looked at the branch she was pointing to. She waited a minute, considering. More police sirens could be heard now, and when Clara glanced down at the street, it looked as if the entire precinct had come out for the event.

“Please, hey?” the girl said, and now her voice was tinged with panic. Clara climbed down a bit, and with her bare foot she pressed the branch down. The girl grabbed it and, with surprising nimbleness, swung herself up into the tree. Close now, Clara could get a better look at her. She looked about Clara's age, maybe a little older. She was tall and gangly with a flat face, which was damp with perspiration, and brown hair that reached just below her ears. She was hauling a fat backpack.

Clara could hear footsteps, lots of them, trampling up the stairs of the service entrance. Hurriedly, she scrambled a ways down the tree, past the girl, until she could reach the control panel on the wall. She punched the button and heard the
clotch
sound. The tinted-plastic dome stretched back over the top of the tree above them, smoothing itself out like one of those plastic rain bonnets that old ladies wear.

“Cripes! That's a first!” the girl said as she watched the dome snap shut over them, and Clara felt strangely pleased that she had impressed the girl.

The next moment they heard footsteps running on the roof and many voices all at once.

“Can they see us through the dome?” the girl whispered.

“I don't think so, ” Clara whispered back. But just in case, the girls stayed perfectly still. Clara felt her heart pounding so hard in her chest that it actually hurt. Soon the footsteps retreated and it grew silent.

“I think they're gone,” the girl said, and she climbed down to a branch beside Clara's. “My name is Annabelle.” She stuck out her hand.

“What were you doing on the roof?” Clara said without extending her own hand.

“When someone tells you their name, it's generally the custom to tell them
your
name back. ”

“You look familiar, ” Clara said in an accusatory way.

“Yeah? Well, I have that kind of face. ”

“No,” Clara persisted. “I'm good with faces. I don't mix them up. I've met you before. What school do you go to?”

“What school
haven't
I gone to?” And as Annabelle began naming all the schools she had attended, it turned out that she had been to the Huxley Academy just a few months before, which was the very school that Clara attended.

“Why have you gone to so many schools?” Clara asked.

“I have a tendency to get suspended,” she said, shrugging. “It drives my father insane. He's a genius himself, and he can't accept the fact that school and Annabelle just don't get along. ”

“A genius?” Clara said, always interested to discover a Somebody she had never heard of. “What sort of genius? What does he
do?”

“Dad?” Annabelle tucked a hank of floppy hair behind her ear and smiled. “Oh, he's a thief.”

Clara looked at Annabelle for a minute, wishing suddenly that she had her sunglasses on—it was always easier for her to tell if someone was lying when she was wearing her glasses. She inspected Annabelle's dark eyes but determined only that they looked steady and honest and even, much to Clara's surprise, quite intelligent.

“What does he steal?” Clara asked.

“This and that. It's changed over the years. He started by stealing cars, years and years ago, before I was born. Then he met my mom and she didn't like the hours he was working—when you steal cars you mostly have to work nights—so he started robbing banks. That way he could be home for dinner. But the problem with bank robbing is that you generally have to work with other bank robbers, and they're not the most reliable people in the world. They'll show up late for a robbery, or they'll forget to bring the masks, and sometimes they're really mean to the bank tellers. And besides, right after he became a bank robber, my mom divorced him, which meant the hours didn't matter anymore. Then my father became a jewel thief ... so he'd be around a better class of people, you know? I started working with him a couple of years ago. ”

“You're a thief, too?”

“Hello! You're a bright one.”

Clara didn't know which to be more shocked at—the fact that Annabelle was a criminal or that she had the nerve to speak to her in that way. But then she considered that it had been pretty thickheaded of her not to realize it. After all, Annabelle had fourteen police officers trying to arrest her while she was prowling around a rooftop in the middle of the night.

“What were you doing on the roof?” Clara asked again, swallowing back her pride.