Mister Max: The Book of Secrets: Mister Max 2

  “What about the milliner?” Max asked. “Tess Tardo, what did you find out there?”

  “I found out she didn’t mind me trying on a lot of hats, so she’s patient; and I found out she’s honest, when she said none of them flattered me at all.”

  Max sighed, loudly enough so Pia had to notice it. She smiled happily.

  “And I found out it only took her half a day to get all the pieces of glass out of the hats in her window, and that the stones had dented but didn’t really ruin any. She just had to shake them clean and then push them back into shape. She did have to take a little off the prices, she said.”

  “Did she tell you anything useful?” Max asked.

  “Well, the attack took place during the lunch hour, but nobody saw who did it. She has no enemies, she says. She’s only been open a few weeks. She used to work for R Zilla—remember? I told you about her. There was some kind of disagreement, I think. She’s young.”

  “R Zilla?”

  “No, Tess Tardo. R Zilla is old, she says, and stuck in her ways, and Tess Tardo says she can’t imagine getting so proud and set in her ways that she’d charge that much for a hat. Or so greedy. Do you think it’s greedy to want to make as much profit as you can? Tess Tardo wants to make hats lots of people can afford. She sews little silk flowers to go on them and they are really nice. Not so noticeable as R Zilla’s but do you think everyone wants to be noticed all the time? I don’t. Except my mother and her so-called friends with their hats. I don’t know why everybody wants to wear hats, anyway.”

  Max stuck to the point. “Did she say anything more about the vandalism? Did she have any idea why it happened?”

  Pia shook her head. “And that is curious. I mean, here she is telling me all about how hard she has to work starting up the business, working alone, so she is the only one to do all the buying and designing and sewing and selling, too, but she didn’t complain about somebody ruining three of her hats or costing her a half day’s work. She told me personal things, about her mother’s illness and how her aunt and mother never got along and how she’d like to find the right man to marry, and then how much she hoped I’d bring my mother into the shop just to see how good her work is, maybe tell some friends. But there was nothing about the vandalism, except to brush it aside as if it didn’t matter. She says I have beautiful hair and she knows just the style of hat that would suit me. Nobody ever told me I had beautiful hair. Do you think I do?”

  What Max thought was that Pia hadn’t reported anything of use. “What do you think?” he asked.

  “I think my hair is all right,” she said, and at the expression on his face she broke out laughing. “All right, I know, you have no opinion about my hair. I know what you want to know and I can’t help. Nobody was complaining, nobody seemed worried, there were no hints or winks or whispers … There wasn’t anything anybody wanted me to learn.”

  Max nodded as if he entirely agreed, but—as so often happened when Pia chattered on—she had given him an idea. He felt its first faint stirrings, just a little breeze ruffling the hair at the back of his head, just one delicate wave licking at the lakeshore, just the hint of mint in a green salad. He sat motionless and speechless, so as not to dislodge it.

  “What do you want me to do now?” Pia asked.

  When he didn’t answer, she went up to the counter to talk with Gabrielle and Ari, leaving Max alone at his table, wrapped up in his private silence.

  In which we have an intermission

  At dinner that night, Max asked Ari if he would be willing to go to a couple of the shops, the greengrocery, which had suffered vandalism involving smashed fruits and vegetables, and Boots Wallack’s cobbler shop, where a fire had been set on the stoop of the entry, but succeeded only in scorching the door before it was put out by Boots and his wife, with the neighbors helping to form a bucket brigade. By the time the fire engine arrived on the scene, there was nothing for them to do except make a final check.

  “Why set a fire there, where it would be sure to be detected, even at night, almost right away? Where’s the fun for an arsonist in that?” Ari wondered.

  “I don’t want to even try to think like an arsonist,” Grammie remarked without looking up from her bowl of vegetable soup.

  “Do you think you could go as a reporter?” Max asked.

  “Why not as a student?” Ari suggested. “I’m not much of an actor.”

  “A reporter has a reason to be asking questions,” Max explained.

  “How does a reporter act?” Ari asked.

  Max thought about The Lepidopterist’s Revenge, in which he had played a reporter sent to interview the Absentminded Professor about a time travel machine he claimed to have sent the missing lepidopterist off in, into another century. A reporter had no uniform, no identifying badge. All a reporter did was announce that he was a reporter and take out his notebook, ready to write down whatever anybody said. People liked appearing in newspapers. It was almost as good as being really famous. He asked, “Do you have a notebook you can use? If not, I do.”

  “But I don’t look like a reporter. Do you think I look like a reporter, Mrs. Nives?” Ari asked, wanting to invite Grammie into their talk.

  “What do I know about anything?” she answered, without looking up from the slab of bread she was spreading with butter.

  Ari raised his eyebrows at Max, but Max shook his head. He had no idea.

  “Could you try?” Max asked. “It is important for the city,” he added, because as the next Baron Barthold, Ari had a more than usual interest in the city’s welfare.

  “The all-important city,” Grammie muttered.

  Ari and Max exchanged another puzzled look. Ari shrugged. “I guess I can try.”

  “Thank you,” Max said. He’d thought he might ask Grammie to go to the flower shop and try to find out what Annarinka Friedle thought, but this was clearly a bad time to ask Grammie anything. Besides, he thought his grandmother might be—What if she was insulted? He was asking her to help, not as an experienced professional librarian but as a little old lady, a nobody special, an ordinary grandmother with nothing better to do with her free time than oblige grandchildren.

  “It’ll probably take me a couple of days,” Ari told him.

  “That’s all right,” Max said. In the meantime, he might think of something himself, some way to investigate his suspicion. He hadn’t been able to think of anything yet, but that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t, any minute now, have an idea. Ideas, he knew from experience, arrived in their own good time, dressed exactly the way they wanted to be and saying only as much as they felt like.

  “It has to be all right, doesn’t it?” Grammie asked. “Since he’s doing you a favor,” she added unpleasantly. The look Max and Ari exchanged at this made her laugh, a humphing, sarcastic sound. “Don’t pay any attention to me. I’ll go up to bed now, I think.” And she rose abruptly from the table, leaving them to do the dishes and the worrying.

  Since the next evening was one of the nights Ari took Gabrielle to dinner with his great-aunt at the castle, Max and Grammie were on their own. That day, Grammie had gone from being uncharacteristically impatient and grumpy to being uncharacteristically silent and opinionless. As they sat on her back steps with the day’s paper and the day’s mail, Max tried to figure out a way to persuade her to tell him what was bothering her.

  Because he was pretty sure there was something she wasn’t telling him.

  Their shared concern about his parents loomed over every day, like the mountains at the northern end of the lake, always waiting in the distance, varying with any day’s weather but never going away. But this was more. Maybe, Max thought, Grammie was wondering about a response to the letter he’d written to the King of Andesia. Maybe that was what was disturbing her. It disturbed him, the waiting, the not knowing even if a response would arrive.

  He held his own mail in his hand and waited until Grammie was turning the newspaper page to ask casually, “How long do you think it’ll
take to hear back?”

  Grammie didn’t even ask what he was talking about. She knew. “How long has it been now? You wrote just after that girl disappeared, didn’t you?”

  “What girl?”

  “The Captain’s daughter. From the Miss Koala, that …” She couldn’t find a word bad enough to describe him. “Skunk,” she finally decided.

  Max worked it out. “It was then, yes. So it probably has to be at least another week before I could hear from him.”

  “What if you never do?” Grammie asked.

  Max had thought of that. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m going to wait and see. And hope.”

  “Summer won’t last forever. It’ll be August before you know it and you’ll have to think what you’re going to do about school.”

  Max had his own ideas for school, but he didn’t plan to share them with his grandmother. He could guess what she would think of them.

  “It takes up a lot of my time, tutoring you. I might not always be able to help you out like this.”

  “I am grateful to you,” Max said. “Haven’t I said that? I really am and you’re a good teacher, too.”

  “That’s not what I was talking about. And don’t go thinking I don’t want to do it. It’s just—Never mind,” Grammie said, and turned another newspaper page.

  Max looked at her profile. Her mouth was a straight line and the eyes behind her glasses were the distant blue of a pale December morning with snow on the way, not the lively warm April shade he was used to. He asked her, in the kindly, wise, sympathetic voice of the priest who sheltered an unknown wanderer in The Stranger from Across the Sea, “Grammie? Is something troubling you?”

  “Whatever could be troubling me?” Grammie asked, with uncharacteristic sarcasm. “It couldn’t be my daughter, who first disappears and then shows up in a newspaper photograph as the Queen of some tiny South American country, run by some crazed General, where revolution could break out any day. Why should I worry? Or there’s my job, which I’ve been doing for so many years maybe I am getting old, but isn’t experience an asset in this job? And oh yes, I’ve got a grandson who insists that he’s old enough to live alone and has gone to work as a detective—whatever you call yourself, Max, that’s what you are, and I’m no fool, I know it’s dangerous. This project of the Mayor’s worries me. And I worry whether you’ll keep on with your schooling and go to university as your parents hoped. And that’s without even mentioning the worry about supporting the two of us, or about being responsible—at my age—for an adolescent boy. What is there in that to trouble anybody? I should be as happy as a zucchini in a garden; I should just relax and lie around in the sunlight, getting greener and fatter. Until somebody picks me and eats me,” she concluded sharply.

  Like the old priest, Max nodded and murmured sympathetic humming noises as she spoke. When Grammie came to the end of her tirade, he murmured on for several seconds, “I see, yes; yes, I see,” before he told her, “I can at least reassure you about me. I’ve already had lots of jobs and look”—he held up the two unopened envelopes, both addressed to MISTER MAX, SOLUTIONEER, 5 THIEVES ALLEY—“there are more coming in. I’m not worried about supporting myself. And you, too,” he told her.

  This was truer than Grammie could know, because there were the coins his father had secreted away in the frame of the poster for The Adorable Arabella that was hanging so innocently in Max’s dining room, not a hundred yards away. But that was his own secret. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “Yes, well, maybe it’s not you I’m worried about,” Grammie muttered, not looking up at him.

  Max looked away, over the garden to his own little house and up over his rooftop to the cloud-choked sky. He admitted, “I try not to think too hard about them.”

  He felt Grammie’s quick glance, as if he had just uttered a non sequitur.

  Max made himself go on. “I mean, given how—bad—cruel—greedy—how nasty some of the people in the world can be.” And then, it was as if once he had started giving voice to his fears, he didn’t want to stop. “How cowardly, how selfish—like that Captain Trevelyn—how untrustworthy. He would have let all those people on the ship just drown, just—die. Even if that didn’t happen, it could have. And his daughter—what can she do? She has to be his daughter and he—It could have been terrible what happened to all of those people in that storm, I know, and could be happening to her, wherever she is. Anything could be happening to anyone right now.”

  This was, of course, the thing he didn’t want to remember, and worry about.

  “Oh,” Grammie said. She reached out to put a hand on his shoulder. “Oh, Max, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring that up. That isn’t what I was—I’m pretty sure your parents are safe enough, for now. I’m as sure as I can be without knowing for really sure. I wasn’t even thinking about them. I know how worried you must be, about them. No,” she said, anxious to reassure him now, “I was worrying about me. It’s selfish, I know, but I was … You didn’t ask me to help you out. With the detecting. You asked Ari, but you didn’t … Do you think I’m too old? Or unworldly?”

  “Oh,” Max said. It was his turn now to be surprised and apologize for misunderstanding. “I didn’t think you had any time to help out, you’ve been so …” He decided he shouldn’t say that. “You haven’t been …,” he started, but that was wrong, too. He didn’t know how to say it without it sounding like he was complaining to her, and really, he didn’t have a single complaint about his grandmother.

  “I’ve been feeling a little useless and unwanted,” Grammie admitted.

  “Would you want to help me out? Would you be willing to?” Max asked. “I thought you’d be insulted if I asked. I could pay you.”

  “It hasn’t come to that,” Grammie told him. “I don’t need you to support me yet. But yes, I think I’d like to try a little detecting.”

  Max had a sudden suspicion. “What do you mean yet?”

  “I’ll tell you if I need to,” Grammie said.

  But Max persisted. “You know, you never told me what your letter from the Mayor said.”

  “I didn’t, did I?” Grammie answered, adding immediately, “Where do you want me to ask questions? Which shop?”

  If Grammie didn’t want to talk about it, Max couldn’t force her, so he answered her question. “The florist,” he said. “She has a shop just outside—”

  “I remember,” Grammie said. “I read the newspapers,” she reminded him, holding up the copy of the Queensbridge Gazette and shaking it, twice, gently.

  Max could only smile and nod. She was looking at him now, looking straight at him with sparky blue eyes, in the amused way he was used to.

  “Her name is Annarinka Friedle,” Grammie said.

  “I don’t think you’ll need a disguise,” Max told his grandmother.

  “But I’m not going to do this as the City Librarian,” Grammie told him.

  “No, no, that wouldn’t be a good idea. Just be yourself. Your own self,” Max said.

  “A dotty little old lady.” Grammie was grinning now.

  “Not old.” Max grinned back at her.

  “I’ll do my best,” she told him, and opened the newspaper again, to take up her reading where she had left off. Her voice came to him from behind the thin wall of print. “This could be a whole new career for me.” She rattled the pages, to straighten them.

  Only then did Max look at his letters.

  It was odd: Neither one had a return address but both seemed to be in an adult’s handwriting, so the writers should have known to include one. He couldn’t guess what they might say.

  He opened the first, and read.

  Dear Sir,

  I know you spoke with the Mayor so I think you are the man for me. Meet me in front of the Harbormaster’s Office on the docks. They do not come to work until half past eight so we can speak privately. I will be there from seven until seven-thirty from tomorrow (that is, Saturday) for four mornings (that is, through Tuesday
), to talk with you. I have a family problem I hope you can help me with.

  Yours sincerely,

  Captain Francis Coyne

  The signature was written in thick, straight letters.

  Max stared at the piece of paper. He was of two minds about the job. On the one hand, work was work. On the other—maybe dangerous—hand, Captain Francis knew Max Starling, a boy who sometimes rode on the ferry, whose parents owned the theater in the old city. Max had gone out on The Water Rat only twice since mid-April, both times in disguise. Since the Captain stayed on the bridge, seeing his passengers from above, he had not recognized the man in the wide-brimmed black hat and long white scarf as Max Starling. Undecided about what to do, Max set this letter aside.

  The second letter had been mailed the same day. When he opened it, he saw that it was written on the same kind of paper that Captain Francis had used. This, it turned out, was no accident. This second letter had been written by Carlo Coyne, the Captain’s son.

  Dear Mister Max,

  I hope you can help me. Gabrielle from the ice cream shop said you were a finder of lost things.

  I haven’t lost anything but I have a friend—a very dear friend—who may be in trouble. It may be that she is not, but she acts as if she is. She acts afraid, but she will not talk to me about it. She will not let me help her. She says it is nothing, she says there is nothing bothering her, but I know, I know in my heart, that there is something. Until it is fixed, she cannot be happy I think. But if I do not know what it is, how can I fix it?

  I hope you can help me. I earn a good living and have no expenses, so I can pay whatever it costs. Please write to me, in care of Flora Bunda, the fishmonger. She is a good friend of my father and me and will receive a private letter for me. Please answer quickly. I am worried sick about my friend.

  Max was so deep in thought about both of these letters that Grammie had to ask him twice what they said, and who they were from. Because Max wasn’t ready to talk about it, not knowing, really, whether he’d be giving away someone’s private secrets, he answered only, “They’re not from Andesia, not about Andesia.”