The Velvet Room (22 page)

“Bridget!” Robin said. “She must be worried. Has anyone gone over to tell her that I’m all right?”

“Yes, Bridget knows. As soon as I got home last night, I sent Rudy over to tell her that we’d found you and you were all right.” Dad sat down in the chair by the bed. “By the way, Robin,” he said. “I can understand about the old house — why you kept it a secret and all. I’d have been crazy about a secret like that when I was your age.”

“Have you been there?” Robin asked in surprise.

“Just this morning,” Dad said. “While you were still asleep, Mr. McCurdy took me over and showed me all around. We had quite a conversation. It’s been a long time since I’ve done much reading about California history, but a bit of it came back. There are a lot of books in that library that I’d like to read. Wonderful stuff. First editions and early records.” There was a look in Dad’s eyes that Robin remembered from a long time in the past.

Robin was sure that with all the sleep she’d already had there wasn’t much use trying to go to sleep again. But the sedative must not have worn off entirely, because she began to feel very vague and dreamy. Her thoughts started drifting up and down like waves. Up — into an idea — and down — into soft comfortable fuzziness. “I saved Palmeras House…,” she thought. “I saved the Velvet Room…Now we’re even…Mrs. McCurdy said I saved a dream. I guess I lost one too, but that’s all right. Dreams have to end when you wake up…I’m awake now…” Dad was standing up slowly, trying to be quiet. “I’m awake now,” Robin said out loud. Dad sat back down, and Robin groped sleepily for his hand. “I wanted to tell you something,” she said, and her voice sounded slow and mumbly, even to herself. “I almost forgot. I wanted to tell you that I’m going too. I’m going with you when you go to Uncle Joe’s.”

I
T HAD BEEN DECIDED
that Robin was to stay at the McCurdys’ until the following morning, when Doctor Woods would be back to look at her hand. She had a late supper in bed in the guest room next to Gwen’s — the room that was to have been hers. Gwen brought a tray up, too, and ate with Robin to keep her company. Something, perhaps a letdown after all the excitement or the aftereffects of the sedative, made Robin feel silly and light-headed. They got the giggles over something and laughed until absolutely everything seemed hysterically funny. They kept on laughing until their sides ached and tears rolled down their faces.

Once in a while Robin stopped laughing long enough to remember that she would have to tell Gwen about the decision not to stay. But she couldn’t do it just then. It would have to be sometime when she could go home to the cabin right afterward.

The next morning Robin was trying to make the bed — the big soft bed, almost three times as wide as the one she shared with Theda — when there was a knock on the door. It wasn’t Gwen, as she expected, but Mr. McCurdy. He asked how she was feeling and peeked under the bandages on her hand to see if the swelling had gone down any. Then, just as she thought he was leaving, he sat down instead and just looked at her.

“Robin,” he said. “I’ve been puzzled about something, and maybe you could set me straight. It’s about that key you found, the one to the underground exit.”

Robin swallowed hard. She should have known it was too good to be true — everyone’s accepting her story about finding the key. Her folks could perhaps, because they didn’t know much about Palmeras House, but not the McCurdys.

“You said you found it in a box,” Mr. McCurdy was saying. “Could you tell me where the box was?”

“Well,” Robin began, keeping her eyes down, “it was in this old wooden box…down in the…that is, it was in the…” Then she broke down altogether and said nothing at all for a moment. Finally she gave up with an anguished wail. “I can’t tell you! I can’t tell you! I promised!”

Mr. McCurdy took her hand and pulled her down on the footstool beside him. “Here now,” he said. “Don’t get yourself all upset. You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to. And I wouldn’t ask you to break any promises. But how would it be if I already knew the secret you’re keeping. Then it wouldn’t be breaking a promise to talk about it, would it?”

Robin shook her head slowly. “I guess not.”

“Well then, it occurred to me that you might have gotten the key from Bridget. Am I right?”

Robin stared in consternation. “Do you really know the secret?” she asked. “Bridget’s secret?”

He nodded.

“But how? I mean, Bridget said that nobody knew except me.”

“A lawyer told me. When Bridget first came back to Santa Luisa, she went to see a lawyer about claiming part of Las Palmeras.”

“Yes,” Robin said, “I know. She told me that.”

“Well, Bill Weber, the lawyer, happened to be a friend of mine. He thought Bridget might be a fake, and he came to the house that night to talk to me about it. She hadn’t asked him to keep it secret at that time, so he didn’t feel he was betraying a confidence. It was the next day that she sent him a message saying she had decided not to tell, at least not right away. But I was sure she was no fake from the moment I saw her.”

“Does Mrs. McCurdy know? And Gwen too?”

“Not Gwen, but Mrs. McCurdy knows. I told her immediately; and when Bridget applied for the housekeeper’s job, we decided to hire her and wait and see what would happen.”

“Were you angry?” Robin asked. “I mean about her being Bonita?”

“Angry? No, I don’t think we were angry. We were a little worried at first about what would happen, but you can’t know Bridget for long and distrust her motives. As we got to know her better, we decided to respect her wish for secrecy and wait until she was ready to tell us. And she never has. How did she happen to tell you?”

Robin took a deep breath and told Mr. McCurdy all about it: that she hadn’t known Bridget’s secret until Friday evening, when Bridget had told her to keep her from making a big mistake. She tried to explain, without hurting Mr. McCurdy’s feelings, that even though she liked him and Gwen and Mrs. McCurdy, she had really been going to stay because of the Velvet Room. “I guess it sounds crazy,” she said, “but I’d started believing it was more important than anything else. And Bridget wanted me to see that it shouldn’t make that much difference.”

Mr. McCurdy nodded in a way that made Robin know he understood. “We’ll be sorry to see you go,” he said. “But I think you’ve made an admirable decision. To tell you the truth, Robin, I wasn’t happy about taking you away from your family. They’re a fine bunch, and you’re important to them.”

Mr. McCurdy was starting out the door when Robin called him back. “I was just thinking about what you said about Bridget,” she said. “That you weren’t angry that she was really Bonita.”

“Yes?” Mr. McCurdy nodded.

“Well, when I asked Bridget why she hadn’t told anybody who she was, she said it was mostly because she liked you and Mrs. McCurdy so much. She didn’t want to risk changing you, the way her aunt and uncle were changed when they found out that Las Palmeras was going to belong to her. I was just thinking it might make her happy to know that you know and you’re not angry about it.”

Mr. McCurdy didn’t say anything for a while, but then he put his hand on Robin’s shoulder and said, “You may be right. We’ll have to think about it.”

The next Tuesday morning Robin woke up reluctantly. It was the Williamses’ last day at Las Palmeras. Dad had already postponed their departure for two days, and there was no reason to do it again. Uncle Joe was probably going to be mad as it was.

Not that they could have helped it, because they couldn’t. The police had wanted Robin handy in case there were more questions, and Doctor Woods had wanted to be sure there were no bones broken in her hand. But yesterday Fred Criley had come back and turned himself in, and his two accomplices had been captured in Los Angeles; so the police didn’t need Robin any longer. And the swelling was almost gone from her hand.

So Wednesday the bags and boxes would be back on the roof and running boards of the Model T, and the Williams family would be back on the road again. The thought made Robin close her eyes tight and hope she really wasn’t awake. But of course she was.

When she opened her eyes and thought about it clearly, she realized this wasn’t quite as bad as all the other times. At least there was an end in sight. It was much better to be going somewhere instead of anywhere, even if it was only to Uncle Joe’s.

Uncle Joe’s! What would it be like to live there? It didn’t seem probable that Uncle Joe would have changed for the better, but maybe he wasn’t as bad as Robin remembered him. It was hard to picture the tourist cottages exactly, but it seemed as if some of them were almost as big as the cabins in Palmeras Village. Besides, the cottages had indoor bathrooms, which was certainly an improvement. And if they were fixed up a bit, they might not be so desolate-looking. Uncle Joe had said in his letter that he was going to open them for tourists again, so maybe he would have some painting done. Perhaps he’d even plant a little lawn.

The sound of someone moving across the room interrupted Robin’s thoughts. It was Rudy getting up to light the fire in the stove. In a few minutes he crawled back into his cot to wait for the room to warm up. Cary was still sound asleep at the other end of the bed, curled up in a small mound. Near him, on the floor, were his sword and shield, and his hand on the pillow was clenched into a fist.

“Poor Cary,” Robin thought suddenly, and then wondered why. It had something to do with the clenched fist and the beat-up old garbage-can lid. It wasn’t much of a shield for somebody so little and so determined about everything. Thinking about Cary, Robin smiled suddenly. He’d been so funny the last few days. He’d been telling everyone that Robin had saved Palmeras House. In Cary’s version, one of the bandits hit Robin’s hand with a great big flashlight, but she just took it away from him and hit him right back. And then she put out a huge fire and chased the bandits away all by herself. And, as Cary put it, Robin was a “hero” and would probably get a golden medal. It had gotten so that every time Robin went outside, all the younger Village kids gathered around her and reverently asked to see her bandaged hand. She tried to explain that Cary had exaggerated just a bit, but she couldn’t help feeling pleased by all that admiration and awe.

She sighed and tucked her feet up against Theda’s warm back. She would have missed Cary if she’d decided to stay with Gwen. Cary — and Shirley too, funny little frightened Shirley — and everybody. She was glad, really
glad,
they wouldn’t be driving away tomorrow without her. That was one thing she was quite sure of, even if she couldn’t be glad about leaving Las Palmeras.

It hadn’t been easy giving it all up. There had been times when she had wavered. One of the worst had been when she had to tell Gwen. Gwen had cried and cried, and Robin had felt just awful. She hadn’t believed before that it mattered that much to Gwen. Down underneath she had thought that it was a sort of whim of Gwen’s — like wanting to have a party or a certain kind of new coat. But Gwen didn’t cry about things like coats and parties.

There had been another bad time, when she had had to go to Lincoln School for her transfer. She had counted so much on finishing the year at Lincoln — one whole year at the same school.

But perhaps hardest of all had been saying good-bye to Bridget. But at least she didn’t have to worry about Bridget’s being lonely and unhappy. The McCurdys had told her that they knew her secret. Bridget was happier than she’d been in years. Not that it meant much of a change in her life — she was quite content in her little cottage with her animal family — but it was nice, she said, to feel she was a McCurdy again. And Mr. McCurdy had asked her to help him with a history of Las Palmeras. She was really excited about that. He’d even asked her to serve as an adviser on the board of his historical society.

The cabin was warmer now, so Robin slid out of bed and got down the coffee pot. She filled it with water from the old green faucet and put it on the stove. It was going to be a busy day for all the Williamses. They might as well get started.

R
OBIN WAS ALONE IN THE CABIN
that afternoon when she heard a car pull up and stop out in front. Mama, Theda, and Shirley had gone to the Bryants’, three cabins down the row. Mama was returning some borrowed sugar, and Theda went along because of Joy Bryant. Joy was about Theda’s age, and they had a lot in common — like boys and favorite movie stars. Dad and Rudy were out back working on the Model T; and where Cary was, was anybody’s guess, as usual. So Robin was alone. She had been sitting on the cot folding and packing dresses, but when she heard the car she looked out the window. It was the McCurdys’ big maroon Buick. Mr. McCurdy got out and came up the stairs. He was dressed in a dark business suit and tie instead of the stock pants and wool shirt he usually wore. Robin ran to the door.

“Hi,” she said. “Won’t you come in?”

“Hello, Robin. How’s that hand feeling today?”

“Oh, it’s fine. It doesn’t hurt at all any more.”