“I wish I were,” said Cass.
“So what was the joke?”
“You know I can’t tell you.”
“But you said I knew the joke already!” Max-Ernest protested. “Just give me a hint, at least.”
Cass looked at him. What’s the difference? she thought glumly. “Think chicken.”
“Chicken, as in scared?”
“A chicken chicken.”
“A scared chicken?”
“No. Just a chicken!”
Max-Ernest looked nonplussed. “A joke about a chicken. The you-know-what is a joke about a chicken.”
“Uh-huh.”
“A story joke or a riddle?”
“Riddle.”
Max-Ernest thought for a second, trying to absorb this new and thoroughly distressing piece of information. Then his eyes widened. “Is it a famous riddle?”
Cass nodded.
“Like, really famous?”
Cass nodded.
Max-Ernest shook his head. “Really? That is the… you-know-what?”
Cass nodded. “Yeah. That’s it. Only substitute ibis for chicken.”
“I can’t believe it! I thought… well, I thought a lot of things. But nothing like that. It doesn’t make any sense!”
“I know. I couldn’t believe it, either.”
“Well, so what’s the answer?”
“What do you mean?”
“What’s the answer? Which is it?”
“Which is what?” asked Cass, totally confused.
“Which came first—the ibis or the egg?”
Cass put her head in her hands. “Not that chicken joke!”
There was no time for her to clear up the matter, however; they had reached Pietro’s trailer.
Cass could see Yo-Yoji’s bicycle parked next to one of the tents nearby. Inside, she could hear Lily Wei shouting instructions. “Kiyah!” Yo-Yoji responded. He was practicing martial arts. It seemed almost sad, Cass thought, to hear the two of them working at it all so seriously, now that she knew the Secret was nothing more than, well, what it was.
For the hundredth time, Cass tried not to think about it. If the Secret was a joke, did that mean the whole Terces Society was? Pietro and everyone? The Jester? The homunculus?
Was she a joke, too?
Pietro’s trailer was small and simply furnished, with a cot-size bed, a card table, and a sink and mini-refrigerator for a kitchen. The only personal touch was an old, banged-up bureau—painted with dragons and other chinoiserie*—that looked as though it had traveled the world, as indeed it had. On top sat Pietro’s top hat, which was looking a bit past its prime; the hat tilted to the side as if engaged in conversation with an invisible partner.
Pietro was sitting at the card table when they entered. His eyes were red, and his hair and mustache were even more bedraggled than usual. It looked as though he hadn’t slept. On the table in front of him were an old circus ticket, a playbill advertising the Bergamo Brothers, and the mandolin-rose vial that Dr. L had given him—the last remaining scent instrument from the Symphony of Smells.
He smiled at the sight of the young Terces members. “Ah, Cassandra, Max-Ernest, I forgot you were coming,” he said, standing. “I should make some espresso?”
“That’s OK,” said Max-Ernest. “We don’t really drink espresso.”
“Oh, right—I forget. You are still so young.”
“But if there’s more hot chocolate—”
Cass cut him off. “You can have hot chocolate later.”
All business, Cass pushed aside the circus ticket and the playbill. Then she opened her backpack and laid three objects on the table in front of Pietro: the Tuning Fork, the Double Monocle, and the Ring of Thoth.
Pietro raised a bushy eyebrow. “Aha. Well done. Mr. Wallace, he will be very happy. He will put these things in the archive along with the Sound Prism and the last vial of the Symphony of Smells. There they can do no more mischief, I hope.” His eyes twinkled briefly. “Unless you steal them back again.”
“Taste. Sight. Touch. Hearing. Smell.” Max-Ernest folded his arms. “One object for every sense.”
Pietro smiled at him. “Very astute.”
There was an awkward silence. They were all standing; Pietro had not asked his guests to sit down.
He looked at them with heavy eyes. “Is there anything else?”
“Uh—” Max-Ernest didn’t know what to say. The question was so unlike Pietro. Usually, Pietro was almost as chatty as Max-Ernest was, but it seemed very much that he was trying to end the visit.
“Yeah, there is,” said Cass stiffly. “I have to ask you something, and I want you to tell me the truth.”
“I always tell the truth, when I can.”
“When you made us swear the Oath of Terces, when you told me I was the Secret Keeper and finding out the Secret was the most important thing in the world, when we were fighting the Midnight Sun all that time…” She broke off, trembling. It was almost too hard to say.
“Yes?”
“Did you know the you-know-what—?” She stopped herself; what was the use of hiding the name anymore? “Did you know the Secret was a joke?” she spit out.
“I’m sorry—I don’t understand,” said Pietro.
“Well, I don’t understand, either!” declared Cass. Angrily, she started describing her experience with the mummy.
Pietro raised his hand just before she could tell him what the mummy said. “Please, do not repeat his words. You know the Secret has power.”
“Why? It’s just a joke. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“You are so sure?”
Cass laughed derisively. “So you still think it’s serious? You wouldn’t if you knew it.”
The old magician shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe those things—the joke and the serious—they are not always so different as you might think.”
Max-Ernest looked confused. “That doesn’t make sense. Something serious and a joke, they’re opposites.” In all his studies of jokes, this was one conclusion he considered incontrovertible. As far as he was concerned, his problem in the past was that he had taken jokes far too seriously.
“Think about it—if the Secret is a joke, it is not only a joke,” said Pietro. “Or put it another way: if the biggest secret in the world is a joke, jokes must be a lot more important than you thought.”
“I still don’t understand,” said Cass.
“I know, Cassandra, and I am sorry. But can we please to continue this conversation another time. It is very important, yes, but…” He trailed off. There were tears in his eyes.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” As mad as Cass was, it made her uneasy to see the old magician cry. It took the self-righteous umph out of her anger.
“It is my brother.”
“Dr. L? What did he do now?” asked Max-Ernest. “Is he mad because we got out of his trap?”
“He has done nothing. He has died.”
“Oh,” said Max-Ernest.
He and Cass were silent. As you know, fatal illnesses and disasters were their respective specialties. But death itself left them speechless.
“After you two saw him, my brother, he stopped taking those evil elixirs,” explained Pietro. “I think he wanted to prove to me he was true—he was done with the Midnight Sun. He came for a last visit and looked very old, very old. He could hardly to speak. And then this morning—he is no more.” His eyes filled again with tears. “I only wish that I had gotten to tell him I knew he had changed, I knew he was sorry. I hate to think that he left me, not knowing that I believed him. That I forgave him.”
“I guess you still loved him a lot,” Cass ventured.
Pietro nodded and opened the door for them. The visit was over.
“Do not worry too much for me. I will see him again soon, I am sure,” said Pietro, ushering them out.
Cass stopped short. She looked stricken. “You’re not… dying, too?”
“Oh no,” he said reassuringly. “I meant on
l’altro lato.”
“Where’s that?” asked Max-Ernest. “Is that in Italy?”
Pietro smiled through his tears. “It’s everywhere. And nowhere. It’s the place you cannot touch. L’altro lato. The other side.”
He closed the door with a tad more force than perhaps he intended.
Cass and Max-Ernest stood outside the trailer, their brains churning.
“The other side…” Max-Ernest repeated, turning to Cass. “The other side. That’s the answer, isn’t it? I mean, that’s the Secret, er, the riddle, I mean, that’s the chicken joke! Not ‘Which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ It’s ‘Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.’ How could I not have thought of that?”
But Cass didn’t answer. She was lost in her own thoughts, Pietro’s words still reverberating in her head as well.
The other side… the other side…
Perhaps Pietro was right, and the mummy wasn’t telling a joke, she thought. Or not only a joke.
“What if the joke’s not the whole Secret,” said Cass in a rush. “What if the Secret is the other side. Or how to get to the other side. Or maybe even something on the other side.”
“What are you saying? I just figured out the joke, and now you’re saying that it’s not the Secret after all!” Max-Ernest couldn’t help being a little irritated.
“No, it is, yeah, but also it isn’t,” said Cass. “Think about it—all this time, we’ve been looking for the Secret, we’ve seen so many things. I mean, the homunculus, where did he come from? Señor Hugo’s chocolate, where did that take me? There’s been some secret place… or dimension or something… all along.”
“The other side?” Max-Ernest tried to understand what she was saying.
“I’ve got to tell him I know what he means. I was all mad about something I had no reason to be mad about.”
She knocked on the trailer door. “Pietro?”
There was no answer.
“Pietro, please. I want to apologize.”
There was still no answer. Cass and Max-Ernest looked at each other.
“Pietro, are you OK?”
Worried, Cass opened the door and cautiously stepped inside. She took in the room at a glance. Pietro was nowhere to be seen.
Max-Ernest looked in after her. “Where’d he go?”
Everything in the trailer was just as they’d left it—except Pietro’s top hat. It was now lying in the middle of the linoleum floor, as though it had been carelessly tossed and forgotten. Max-Ernest picked it up and put it on his head. It fit perfectly (and he still has it to this day).
They looked around. There was almost nowhere to hide except under the bed; and there was nothing there but balls of dust.
“This is really weird. There’s no way he could have come out without us seeing him.”
“He’s a magician,” said Max-Ernest, peeking behind and beneath Pietro’s old chinoiserie bureau. “I’m sure there are all kinds of hidden doors and hatches in this place—in the floor, in the ceiling.” He opened drawers; they were full of scarves, balls, dice, coins. “Pietro is expert at all that stuff.”
“You think?” Cass wasn’t convinced.
Max-Ernest nodded, waving one of Pietro’s wands. “He probably just snuck out the bottom of the trailer and then… presto!… he ran off without us seeing him. How ’bout that?”
“Then why don’t we see the opening now?”
“A magician never reveals his tricks.”
“Why trick us at all? He could have just waited for us to leave.”
“Um…” Max-Ernest didn’t have a good answer.
“Look,” said Cass, picking up the Ring of Thoth off the floor. “It must have been hidden under the top hat.”
As she turned the ring over in her hand, she felt a familiar buzz. What was it about the touch of this ring that was so powerful? Perhaps, on some level, the ring was a gag, as Max-Ernest had once suggested. But it was also something more. It had brought a mummy to life. What might it have done to Pietro?
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Max-Ernest, seeing the expression on her face. “You’re thinking he put the hat on and then the ring and he just—”
“Went poof? Yes.”
Max-Ernest shook his head. “Remember the last time he disappeared—when we first met?” They’d thought he went up in a puff of smoke in his kitchen, but it was a trick.
Cass disagreed. This time, she thought, Pietro had truly disappeared. He had gone somewhere else. L’altro lato. The other side.
And she was confident that if she needed to, she could find him there.
But she didn’t say anything to Max-Ernest. He didn’t need to believe it if he didn’t want to. The other side was her secret—the Secret.
She was the Secret Keeper.
One month later
“Grandpa Larry! Grandpa Wayne!”
Cass ran into her grandfathers’ arms, her graduation cap falling off her head.
“I didn’t know you were back.”
“Surprise!” Grandpa Larry grinned. “We wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
“We got in this morning,” said Grandpa Wayne. “We didn’t even have time to shower.”
Cass wrinkled her nose. “I can tell.” They all laughed.
“Actually, we didn’t get very far—our money ran out,” admitted Grandpa Larry cheerfully.
“Really? After everything you sold at the garage sale?” asked Cass, incredulous.
“Turns out we’re not very good businessmen.”
“Well, I could have told you that!” said Cass, who was wondering how many gold coins it would take to buy them a lifetime supply of cruise tickets.
Grandpa Wayne looked at Cass. “What’s different about you? You look taller… more free….”
Grandpa Larry snapped his fingers. “She’s not wearing her backpack!”
Cass shrugged sheepishly. “Well, I figured graduation was bound to be such a total disaster that nothing in my backpack would help.”
As Larry and Wayne regaled her with stories—no doubt much exaggerated—about their adventures at sea, Cass’s eyes wandered around the soccer field, where the rest of her classmates were greeting their friends and relatives.
Everybody was very dressed up—as if it weren’t enough to graduate from middle school, they had to skip all the way to adulthood. It gave Cass a funny feeling, like she was looking off a precipice.
Yo-Yoji, who was sparring with his little brother while talking to his parents and sister, was wearing a dark, skinny suit that made him look like a mod British rocker from another era. Max-Ernest, who was looking back and forth between his parents like a referee at a tennis match, had tried to smooth his spiky hair with some kind of gel; it kept popping up—and he kept patting it down.
As for Cass, she wasn’t in a dress—much to her mother’s chagrin. She had consented to a skirt, however; and she had gotten a second manicure, this time deep green—“as a statement,” she said. But privately she admitted to herself that she rather liked the way it looked.
Amber, of course, looked the most polished; for her, dressing up was effortless. But she seemed oddly quiet. Rather than chatting and gossiping with Naomi and Veronica, as she normally would, she was standing by her parents’ side, her mind evidently elsewhere.
Cass was considering Amber’s unusual behavior, when she finally saw the person she was seeking. “Excuse me,” she said to her grandfathers. “There’s somebody I have to talk to.”
Promising to spend more time with them after the ceremony, Cass ran across the field, glad she had refused her mother’s suggestion of high heels.
She found her mother standing under the MUMMY RETURNS banner (now a bit tattered) with Albert 3-D and Daniel-not-Danielle.
Daniel-not-Danielle’s dreads were tied back, exposing the whole of his face for the first time. For a second, Cass couldn’t tell him apart from his father.
“Hey, Albert 3-D, I mean, Albert, I mean, P
rofessor,” said Cass, breathless.
The professor laughed. “Albert 3-D is fine. I can’t seem to shake it.”
“Even I call him that sometimes,” said Daniel-not-Danielle.
“Well, anyway, I just wanted say, well, I never said I was sorry. I know I caused you a lot of trouble. I should never have touched the mummy, and then—”
Albert 3-D stopped her. “It’s OK, Cass, I know you’re sorry. And I’m grateful to you for finding the mummy. And for, well, a lot of things.” He smiled at Cass’s mom.
“Albert’s a forgiving man—a very nice quality,” said Cass’s mother, smiling. “I’ll bet sometimes you wish your mother were more like that—don’t you, sweetie?”
As her mother spoke, Cass noticed that her mother’s hand was grazing Albert 3-D’s—for much longer than one would normally touch a fellow parent at school. In fact, if Cass didn’t know better, she might have almost thought the touching was intentional. Yes, it must be—their pinkies were interlocked!
For a second, Cass locked eyes with the equally alarmed Daniel-not-Danielle. Was it possible their parents were having a romance? The idea was too icky to contemplate.
“Bye!” said Cass hurriedly. “It’s almost time—we gotta get our seats.”
On the other hand, she thought, as she and Daniel-not-Danielle scurried away, if her mother had to be involved with someone, there were worse choices than a Nigerian archaeologist. At least with him around, there was a chance they would get to travel….
“And now I am proud to present the winner of this year’s Book-a-Day Reading Challenge, our very own Bookworm…”
Mrs. Johnson, resplendent in an apple-green hat and pantsuit, gestured to the still-short (but growing!) boy sitting in the front row next to Cass and Yo-Yoji.
“… Max-Ernest!”
Grinning from ear to ear, Max-Ernest stepped up to the podium and shook Mrs. Johnson’s hand. Then he laid his speech down, looked at the microphone, and took a breath.
“Thank you, Principal Johnson,” he began formally. “Greetings, Parents, Teachers, Fellow Classmates.”
He had greased his hair back again, but as he spoke, it sprang back to its usual spiky state with an almost audible boing. He patted it down. “For the last few months—”