The Orphan and the Mouse (15 page)

There were words on the picture, and after Mary had groomed herself, she went to wake Andrew, then brought him back to read the words aloud.

“It says, ‘We can do it,' ” Andrew explained, “which is an excellent motto to inspire us. Now, shall we try the dining room for breakfast? I believe they had fresh bread at dinner.”

On their way, the two mice stopped off at the main larder and selected dry comestibles to round out their foraging. Mary took a shriveled kernel of corn. Andrew gnawed the head off a petrified ant. Once they had arrived in the dining room wall, Mary said, “It's my turn.”

“But I don't mind,” said Andrew.

“Nor do I,” said Mary, and before he could argue further, she squeezed through the portal. From elsewhere in the home came the sounds of human activity, but by this time of the evening, the dining room was deserted. Knowing where Jimmy sat, Mary checked first beneath his chair and was rewarded with an ample supply of bread crumbs, the best of them coated in margarine.

When she returned, Andrew made a fuss over her skills.

“With only the two of us here, it's so easy a pup could do it,” said Mary. “But let us get to work on a plan. How do we communicate what we know to Caro?”

“Can she read?” Andrew asked.

“Of course,” said Mary loyally. “She's exceptionally bright.”

“Then I have an idea,” said Andrew, and it turned out to be so simple, Mary wondered why she had not thought of it herself. Given the human pups' schedule, however, they would have to wait till morning to carry it out.

Meanwhile, it was time for their nightly spy mission on the third floor.

The boss's mate had yet to arrive when Andrew and Mary posted themselves beneath the overhang of the kitchen cupboards. The boss herself was seated with a book in her lap, but she was not reading. Rather, she picked the book up, laid it down again, and mumbled, “Of all nights for him to be late.”

Finally, Mary felt the quaking of the floorboards that meant the judge was on the stairs. The predator heard it, too, and looked up from his cushion on the sofa. Seconds later came the knock at the door, and the boss rose from her chair to answer it.

“Good evening, Judge,” she said.

The boss's mate stepped forward and put his arms around her. The mice had observed that she often resisted affectionate gestures, but on this night she did not.

“Do sit down and I'll pour the sherry,” she said. “I have a lot to tell you. I'm afraid we may have a problem.”

The boss took two glasses and poured a generous amount from the decanter into each. Meanwhile, the judge went through the rigmarole of lighting his cigar, in the process filling the room with a cloud of smoke. Only with the greatest self-control did Mary keep herself from coughing.

At last the two humans were settled. “What happened?” the judge asked.

“Carolyn suspects there may be something irregular about the adoption this week,” the boss replied.

“But how . . . what . . . did . . . ?” Blink-blink-blink.

The boss waited for her mate to finish stammering, then said, “I underestimated her,” and went on to describe her conversation with Caro that morning in her office.

“She is bright,” the judge said when the boss was finished.

“Bright enough to make trouble—especially considering Frank Kittaning's interest in her.”

“Do you think she would betray you?” the judge asked.

“The risk is there . . . for me, and for you. So, reluctantly, I made a telephone call.”

It was silent for a long moment. Finally, the judge said, “But aren't you fond of the child?”

There was another silence, then a sigh, and finally the boss said, “I can't afford to be fond of her. I've told you about my father, how he abandoned us?”

“I thought he was killed. An accident.”

“It amounted to the same thing,” said the boss. “He was a drunk. I didn't know it at the time, but his death was the making of me. I learned how to survive because I had to.”

“We were speaking of Carolyn,” said the judge.

“We were,” said the boss. “She'll learn the same hard lesson that I did. You can't count on anyone.” When the judge coughed and cleared his throat, she added, “Present company excepted.”

“I wonder if you mean that, Helen,” said the judge.

“Of course, I do, dear,” said the boss. “We need each other.”

The judge took a sip from his glass and puffed on his cigar. “It's an awful thing to do to a child.”

“We always knew it might be necessary,” the boss said. “That's why we forged the necessary, uh . . . relationships.”

“I suppose you're right. You always are,” he said. “Now tell me what happened with the infant.”

“The baby nurse was here at dawn. The infant was gone before the children rose. I had a telephone call from Miss Grahame's assistant this afternoon. The boy had arrived, and mother and child were getting acquainted.”

“I don't suppose she'll be much of a mother,” the judge mused.

The boss shrugged. “Many children have bad mothers. This one at least will have the comforts money can buy.”

The judge nodded. “Speaking of money?”

The boss smiled thinly—“I was waiting for you to bring that up”—then rose, walked to her writing desk, opened a drawer, and removed two envelopes, one sealed and one unused. With a letter opener, she slit the top of the sealed envelope, removed from it five green pieces of paper, and placed them in the second envelope. Then she reclosed the first one with paper clips, sealed the second one, and tossed it toward her mate.

“You'll see we made out rather well,” she said.

Primly, the judge said, “Thank you,” and tucked the
envelope into an inner pocket of his jacket. “When will Mr. Puttley's, uh . . . representative be here?”

“Day after tomorrow—Saturday,” said the boss. “I will tell Carolyn tomorrow.”

“Tell her?” The judge looked up.

“That she's to be adopted. She will be surprised, certainly—surprised and overjoyed.”

After the judge departed, the two mice watched Mrs. George place the paper-clipped envelope in her hiding place in the cold white box. Then she retired to her bedroom, and the mice descended to the ground floor, arriving at last at a pleasantly cramped and sawdust-strewn spot in the wall behind the kitchen.

Agitated, Mary began to pace. “Caro is being sent away! I don't understand where it is she's going, but it is someplace terrible. That I know.”

The smell of the previous day's cooking combined with rotten garbage made Andrew's mouth water. He wanted lunch, but could see he'd get none until he and Mary had discussed the latest intelligence. Resigned to the delay, he focused his mind on Caro.

“If we're going to help her,” he said, “we must remain calm and analyze the situation. It's money in the envelopes; I know about money from watching transactions at the newsstand. The boss traded the newborn—sold him. And her mate helped her in some way related to the papers in the cold white box. His payment was in that envelope she gave him.”

Mary agreed and shook her whiskers. “Stealing a pup from its mother for trade! Such wickedness!”

“It's unnatural,” said Andrew, “and it must be deemed unnatural by humans as well. That's why they're afraid of getting caught. So, to keep Caro from telling what she knows about the infant, they're sending her away.”

“But Caro is not a threat,” Mary said. “She still believes the boss is good. That's the heartbreaking part. We have to warn her that the boss is evil. We have to warn her to resist!”

“All right,” said Andrew, trying hard to ignore the empty feeling in his stomach. “But how?”

Mary thought for a moment, then said, “It would seem that the money and papers in the hiding place reveal the truth about the newborn pup. What if Caro were to find them?”

Andrew clapped his paws. “Excellent! You've solved the problem. Now can we eat?”

Mary ignored his outburst. “The question,” she went on, “is how to tell her where to look. Perhaps if she were to find a key to the boss's apartment? There is one in the ivory-inlaid box.”

“Of course,” said Andrew. Mice don't use keys themselves, but like all the colony's art thieves he was thoroughly acquainted with the geography of the the desktop plateau. “And . . . ?” he said encouragingly.

“And—what if Caro were to find that key on her pillow at the same time she found our other, uh . . . gift?” Mary said.

“Would she recognize the key?” Andrew asked.

“I think so,” said Mary. “The boss's door is the only interior one with a lock. Its key is made of gray metal, and it's a different shape from those for the exterior.”

Andrew was daydreaming. The children had eaten spaghetti for dinner. With luck, there would be bits of salty, powdery Parmesan cheese to forage. Andrew could almost taste it. Even as his hunger raged, he asked another question. “Will she know what to do with it?”

“That's the problem.” Mary sighed. “I don't suppose you learned to write when you learned to read? The hero Stuart Little could write.”

“The hero had the advantage of humans to teach him,” Andrew said.

“In other words, you did not learn to write,” said Mary.

“No,” Andrew admitted.

“Not that reading's a small accomplishment,” Mary added.

“Thank you,” Andrew said.

“But in that case,” Mary went on, “we will have to devise some other means of directing Caro to the boss's hiding place. Doing this will require thought. What do you say if first we eat our lunch?”

“Ha ha ha ha ha!”
said Andrew. “Excellent idea!”

It was a car crash that orphaned Jimmy Levine. He was four years old and riding in the backseat when his dad, lighting a cigarette, drove the family's Ford sedan into a truck that had stopped on the highway to allow a groundhog to cross.

Jimmy's parents went through the windshield. This was in 1943, a time before safety glass, seat belts, or airbags. The Levines' only son wasn't in a child seat; those didn't exist yet, either. But Jimmy was lucky and only hit his head. The blow was enough to knock him out—which turned out to be lucky, too, because he never saw the sad sight of his parents' remains, in fact didn't remember the accident at all, only waking up in the hospital, where the nurses gave him ice cream.

With his parents gone, Jimmy's closest relatives were clear out in California. None had the wherewithal or (in truth) the desire to take in a little kid they'd never met. Jimmy would have to go to an orphanage, but here he got lucky one more time. The child welfare officer took a shine to him and got him placed at Cherry Street, the best orphanage in the region. Even so, the boy's first few months were miserable as, day by day, reality sank in: His parents weren't coming back. This strange building full of people he didn't know was now his home.