Us and Uncle Fraud (7 page)

Kenny's pinched, thin face looked more nervous than ever. He shook his head. "No," he whispered. "My dad doesn't even know that I've gone in there without him."

"Do you think our fingerprints are on the key?" Marcus asked tensely.

Kenny shook his head. "They said that my dad would have wrecked any fingerprints, because he was the last one to use the key when he went in to check the house. It wasn't his fault," he added again, absolving his father of yet one more mistake. "How was he supposed to know? The key was hanging right there the way it always did."

The bell rang, calling us back to class at the end of recess. We stood there for a moment, watching the other kids trudge reluctantly across the playground toward the school steps.

"They wanted a list from my father," Kenny added in a low voice as we began walking back. "The police wanted a list of everybody who knew about the key. But my father said he was the only
one, except for Mrs. Shaw, and she's in Kansas City. They even called Kansas City long distance, and talked to Mrs. Shaw, and she said that nobody else knew about the key."

I kicked a stone across the muddy ruts of the playground. "Your father knew that you knew about it, Kenny," I pointed out.

"Yeah," Kenny acknowledged. "Because sometimes he takes me with him when he checks the house. But he didn't tell the police that. He said it wasn't important. He told me that he would have noticed if I'd come home with five thousand dollars worth of silver." He laughed morosely. "You better not tell, either," he added, "because then I'd tell on you."

Marcus and I shook our heads solemnly as a promise, and the three of us climbed the cement steps back into the school. "It wasn't my father's fault," Kenny said again in the empty hall as he and Marcus headed toward the fifth-grade room.

"Oh, shut up," I muttered, as I turned the corner to the door of the sixth grade. "Who cares?"

Usually I walked home from school with my friend Nancy Brinkerhoff, who lived a few houses away from mine. Marcus always dashed down the street with his friends, throwing their caps back and forth, calling insults to each other, making plans for ball games in the vacant lot.

But today Marcus and I walked home together.
At first we were silent. Then, suddenly, we both began talking almost at once.

"I don't care if Claude
did
know where the key was," I announced. "What does that prove? Probably
lots
of people knew where that key was. Kenny might have told other people."

"And Mrs. Shaw probably told her stupid daughter in Kansas City," Marcus said, "and her stupid daughter could have told
anybody.
"

"And Claude doesn't need silverware, for heaven's sake," I said righteously. "He's a traveling man. A traveling man doesn't need silverware."

"Anyway," Marcus scoffed, "where would he have put it? All he had was that one dumb suitcase."

"And the box. You couldn't put five thousand dollars worth of silverware in that little bitty box." I shifted my schoolbooks to the other arm and tossed my head knowingly.

"Yeah," Marcus agreed. "Even if he
wanted
to steal all that stuff, where was he going to put it? In a pillowcase? He's going to walk to the train station carrying a pillowcase full of clanking silverware?"

We hooted with laugher at such a preposterous picture.

"
Ya tebya lyublyu
," I pronounced defiantly.

"
YA TEBYA LYUBLYU
!" Marcus shouted in response, with a grin.

We raced each other the rest of the way, reaching our front steps together and out of breath.

"Do you think maybe we ought to tell Mother?" I asked suddenly.

Marcus whirled around and stared at me. "That's a great idea, Louise," he said sarcastically. "Claude's her brother. What's she going to do? Call the police and tell them that her brother knew where the key was? Would you do that to
me—
even if you thought I was the thief, and we know Claude wasn't?"

"I never tell on you, Marcus. You know that."

"Yeah. So just shut up about it. I wish we knew where Claude went, so we could call him up and tell him what happened. Boy, would he laugh."

"He's probably a hundred miles away by now," I said.

"Probably a thousand."

"A
million.
"

"Three million," Marcus decided. "He may be back in Russia by now, for all we know."

I walked backwards into the front yard, looking up, watching our house grow as I backed into a new perspective. The third story—the attic—seemed immensely high, and countless blank windows looked back at me. We had spent all of the previous afternoon in that attic, foraging in trunks and cubbyholes.

"Somewhere in there, Marcus." I sighed. "I know they're somewhere in that house, or in the shed. But it may take us
forever
to find them."

Marcus dropped his books on the porch and came to stand beside me. "You know something, Louise?
A house looks different, once it has a treasure inside. Even if we
never
find them, the house will always look different."

And he was right. I had always thought that our ordinary, shingled, unglamorous house was much like every other house on the block. It was no more interesting than Nancy Brinkerhoff's; we had a porch swing and the Brinkerhoffs didn't, but they had a chiming doorbell and ours was only a dull buzz. Even Mrs. Bostwick's house was ordinary, now that she had died and it had been sold to a young lawyer and his wife; they had painted and repaired it, planted flowers in the once unkempt yard, and today their baby's playpen stood on the porch, the way Stephie's had always stood on ours until she outgrew it. Ours had always been an ordinary street of ordinary houses filled with ordinary things and people.

Until now. Now our house was special, because Claude had come and gone, and now, somewhere, we had a treasure.

"Hey, Lulu," Tom called from his room. "Come in here a minute, will you?"

"The name is Louise," I said automatically, and folded the piece of paper on which I had been rearranging the letters of Claude's mysterious message. I put it into the drawer of my bedside table and went to the hall. Tom was standing in the doorway of his bedroom.

"What do you want?" I asked him.

"I want to talk to you. Marcus, too. Where is he?"

"He's in the attic. I'll call him." I went to the attic stairs and summoned Marcus, who shook his head at me as he came down, streaked once again with dirt. Nothing. He had found nothing.

We went to Tom's room, and I marveled once again, as I always did, how someone fourteen years old could be so tidy and organized. Mother was not
as good a housekeeper as Tom. His books were arranged alphabetically, and if you borrowed one without asking and put it back in the wrong spot, he knew; and you were
dead.
His clothes were always hung up; his bed was always made; and even his baseball cap was on a shelf and his sneakers were lined up neatly side by side below it.

Marcus and I sat down on Tom's bed, and Tom sat at his desk, facing us, the way I imagined that a doctor would when he told you that you were going to die soon. And Tom had that same look on his face, the look that the doctor would have: grave, no-nonsense, and very concerned.

"I have a stone in my shoe," I announced, "and it's been there all day. I bet anything I'm going to have foot gangrene." Changing the subject was the way I handled anything that made me feel apprehensive, and Tom's look was making me feel apprehensive.

"If you do," Marcus said, "they'll have to cut your foot off. But they can make pretty good artificial ones."

"Listen, you two," Tom said, ignoring my foot gangrene, "I was talking to Joyce Stratton at school today."

I leaned over to investigate the stone in my shoe more thoroughly. Joyce Stratton was Kenny's older sister, and she was just as skinny and boring as Kenny, but I sure wished that Tom hadn't been talking to her.

"So?" Marcus said.

"So. She said that Kenny knew about that key, and that he had shown it to you kids, and that all three of you had been in the Leboffs' house."

"So, you know what that proves, Thomas Frederick Cunningham? It proves that Joyce Stratton knew about it, too! And maybe she was the person who robbed the house!" I drew myself up, prepared to testify against Joyce Stratton till the end of time.

"Yeah," Marcus added. "Joyce Stratton hangs around with that whole gang of junior high girls, and maybe they all did it together. Heck, maybe you even did it with them, Tom!"

Tom leaned back in his chair with a patient sigh. "Look, pip-squeaks," he began.

I interrupted him angrily. "Don't you dare call us that! Only Father calls us that!"

Tom tried again. "Okay, I'm sorry. But look, you guys. I know you didn't steal the stuff. And Joyce and Kenny didn't steal the stuff. I'm only trying to tell you that you could have gotten yourselves into a lot of trouble, breaking into the Leboffs' house—"

"It wasn't breaking into," Marcus said. "When you have a key, it isn't breaking into."

"Listen to me, will you? I'm trying to tell you that you should
think
before you do stuff like that. Think about what could happen if you got caught. I don't want you dragging the name of this family through the mud."

I giggled, picturing the letters that spelled Cunningham, at the end of a string, being dragged
down the street through puddles and dirt. Tom glared at me.

"Are you going to tell on us?" Marcus asked.

"Of course I'm not. I just wanted to have a talk with you, that's all."

"You can't tell us what to do, Tom," I said belligerently. "You're not Father. And you're only fourteen."

"I know that. And I've done a lot of stupid stuff, too. But I don't go around breaking into people's houses." Tom stood up. "Well, anyway, I just wanted to warn you. If you end up in jail, don't say I didn't warn you."

Dismissed, Marcus and I left Tom's room and went to mine, where we closed the door, fell onto my bed, and laughed. "He never even guessed that Claude knew, too!" I said with pleasure.

Marcus imitated Tom's serious voice: "I don't want you dragging the name of this family—"

"THROUGH THE MUD!" I shrieked and fell over again, laughing.

"You know what Tom is?" Marcus whispered.

"What?"

He lowered his voice even more, until I could barely hear him. "A turd," he said with furtive glee.

I pounded my fists on the bed with delight. We repeated the wonderful, forbidden word over and over again, roaring with laughter until our stomachs ached, muffling our mouths with the pillows
from my bed, until Mother called to tell us that Father was home and it was time to wash our hands for dinner.

In the evening, I did my homework half-heartedly, sitting at the table under my bedroom window. Outside, it was beginning to rain: first a light spring drizzle, then increasing in force until it pelted the house fiercely. Mother came upstairs to check the windows.

"Did you put your bike in the shed?" she asked Tom.

"Of course. I always put my bike away."

I could hear Marcus puttering in his room next to mine. "'Of course,'" I heard him mimic Tom in a low, exaggerated voice, "'I
always
put my bike away.'"

"Well," Mother said, sticking her head into my doorway, "I left the sheets on the clothesline. I guess there's no point in going out to get them now."

"If it's still pouring in the morning, do you think Father will give us a ride to school?" I asked her.

"I suppose so," she said. "The radio says it isn't going to let up. I hope it doesn't ruin the forsythia." She came over to my window and looked out, but the bright forsythia bush beside the driveway was invisible through the driving rainstorm.

"Mother," I asked, pushing my geography book aside. I unfolded Claude's note again. "Do you think it's true that Claude is crazy, like Tom said?"

She sighed. "Oh, Louise, who knows what 'crazy' means? He's
different
, certainly. He always has been."

"What was he like when he was a kid?"

She sat down on my bed. "Well, he was different then, too. He's the only child I've ever known who created whole worlds for himself. He always had entire cities built out of blocks—or later, when he was older, out of Erector sets—in his room."

"All kids do that. Marcus does."

"Yes, but—well, this was different. His cities and worlds became very real to him. Sometimes it was as if he lived in those worlds, instead of the real one."

"I don't understand what you mean."

"Once, out in our back yard, he built a tree house. It was the most wonderful tree house, with little windows and a ladder that he could pull up after he was inside so that no one else could climb it. Sometimes he slept out there."

"Did he let you play in it? Or was he selfish, like Marcus?"

She smiled. "Marcus isn't selfish, Louise. He's just a normal boy. Claude was a lot like Marcus in some ways: cheerful and fun. He always had wonderful ideas, but sometimes they were so complicated, and sometimes he took them so seriously, that the other kids in our neighborhood would get sick of him, and they'd go off to play their own games."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, the tree house, for example. After it was
built—and he took a long time to build it, and wouldn't let anyone help—he did invite a group of neighborhood children to climb up. And me, too. It was the first time I'd been in his tree house. We were all thrilled, of course, because it was truly the most spectacular tree house we'd ever seen. But then Claude started explaining the
rules
of the tree-house—"

"That's okay. I can understand about having rules, especially if you built it all by yourself."

"Yes, but Claude had created one of his worlds up there in that tree. He had made it into a kingdom—I remember he even called it that: kingdom. He was the king, of course."

"That's fair," I said. I could sympathize with that, the need to be king if you had invented the kingdom.

"But more than that. He had made up a language, and we were to speak only that language when we were in the tree house kingdom. And there was a set of complicated laws. Rules about the kind of food you could eat and particular sorts of clothes that people in the kingdom were to wear. I seem to remember that he had even created a special religion for this kingdom, with songs and prayers, all in this strange language that he had spent hours concocting."