Family Grandstand (Nancy Pearl's Book Crush Rediscoveries)

  “I’ll find some way to feed him,” George said stoutly.

  “You might start feeding him guinea pigs and white rats,” suggested Susan.

  Dumpling had been sitting very quietly in her small chair, rocking Irene to sleep. But now she cried out in alarm, “Oh, no, Susie!”

  “Honey, I was just joking,” Susan said. “We’ll buy frozen horsemeat for him at the butcher shop.”

  “And do you know how much that will cost?” asked Mother. “It will cost almost as much as feeding another member of the family. If I could sell my murder-mystery story maybe we could afford a dog, but the way things are, I simply don’t see how.”

  “I know what,” cried George, changing the subject with great tact, “we’ll call him Angus McAngus!”

  “No, no!” said Mother. “Poor Angus is getting along too badly already. Don’t use his name in vain, please!”

  George looked speculatively at Father, “We might call him Hannibal,” he said.

  “That’s an excellent idea!” said Father enthusiastically, but then he remembered Mother’s fears about being able to feed the creature, and he added, “but, of course, there is little use in naming this animal, when we hope so soon to restore him to his rightful owner.”

  “The Terrible Torrences just called him ‘Dog,’” said Susan.

  “Why don’t you call him Torrible Terence?” asked Dumpling sleepily.

  They all stopped and looked at her, and then they cried out, “Well, why not?”

  And so, as George was fond of telling people later, “Torrible Terence is named Torrible Terence after the Terrible Torrences.” It made a very nice little tongue-twister if spoken rapidly.

  After Torrible Terence had been given temporary lodging for the night in the garage, and the guinea pigs, rabbits, and white rats had been locked up, and the canary bird covered, George and Susan and Dumpling came and looked at the five turtles.

  “Oh boy,” said George, “do I ever have a swell menagerie! A regular zoo! Gee, did I ever have a wonderful birthday!”

  “George, they aren’t sleeping,” said Dumpling. “They want to get out.”

  “By tomorrow they’ll be used to the goldfish bowl,” said George cheerfully. He dropped a few ant eggs on the water for the turtles’ midnight supper.

  “Come, children,” Mother said, “you must get to bed. Tomorrow is school, and we must put this ad in the paper, and you’ve had such a busy, exciting day.”

  “Gee, Dumpling,” said George, as they went upstairs, “how did you know I wanted turtles?”

  “She’s a very smart little girl,” said Susan proudly, “aren’t you, Dumpling?” But Dumpling did not say a word. She undressed herself and climbed into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. Susan and Dumpling shared the same room.

  Susan took a much longer time brushing her hair and cleaning her teeth and washing her face than Dumpling had taken, and when Susan crawled into her own bed she thought that Dumpling was asleep.

  Susan stretched and yawned and gave a long sigh, and then she promptly went to sleep.

  It seemed that she had been asleep for a very long time, when someone snapped on the light beside her bed and Susan awoke with a start. Through a haze of sleep she saw Dumpling standing beside her. Dumpling looked strange without her glasses and with her pigtails all sticking up the wrong way. “Susie,” she said, “I wanted to tell you something.”

  “What is it?” Susan murmured sleepily.

  “I would like to be very, very good, Susie, like you said, but I don’t think I am.”

  “Well, dear me,” said Susan. “But, yes, you are good, Dumpling, because you are the only one in the family who thought what George would really like for his birthday.”

  “That’s the trouble, Susie,” said Dumpling. She looked quite sad and worried. “I didn’t think about George either, not any more than anyone else in the family. I just saw the turtles and they wanted to get out, and I knew I would have to buy them to give them a better place to live.”

  “Well, for goodness sake!” said Susan. She sat up and put her arm around Dumpling’s shoulder. “And now they’re living in the goldfish bowl, honey.”

  “Yes,” said Dumpling sadly, “but, Susie, they still want to get out.”

  “Never mind,” said Susan. “Tomorrow we’ll see that George puts them into something bigger.”

  “You don’t think it was bad of me because I didn’t think what George would want?”

  “No,” said Susan. “You pleased him better than anyone else, unless it was the Terrible Torrences.”

  “But I don’t guess I’m very, very good, Susan. Maybe the lady was wrong,” said Dumpling hopefully.

  “You suit me just the way you are, Dumpling,” Susan said, giving Dumpling a kiss on the end of her nose.

  “Then I will go back to sleep,” said Dumpling gravely. Susan could hear her feet go pat-pat-pat across the bare floor to her bed. “Anyway, I aren’t terrible like the Torrences, are I, Susie?”

  “I think that you are very, very good,” said Susan.

  Dumpling climbed into bed with a long sigh, and whether it was a sigh of pleasure or of regret Susan could not tell.

  After Dumpling had gone to sleep, Susan still lay awake, thinking. She was more impressed than ever with this child prodigy that they had.

  My goodness! she said to herself. Dumpling has a grown-up conscience.

  Before they left for school in the morning, the Ridgeway children helped compose an ad for the paper.

  Found: Very large brown and black dog near football stadium. Owner may call College 2395. Please hurry.

  The “please hurry” had originally been “please do not hurry” and had been suggested by George, but just then Terence had wagged an ornament off a table and broken it into fifteen pieces, so Mother had hastily scratched out the “do not.”

  They read the Lost ads in the morning paper very carefully, but no one seemed to have lost a dog.

  “Hooray!” said George, and Susan added, “Three cheers and a rah!” because there was something about Terence which you could not help liking. Even Mother noticed it, although she tried not to. “He means well,” she said, “but he’s just at the awkward age.”

  When Terence heard the kind tone of voice in which she said these words, he came and put both front paws on her knees and began to pull up one of his hind legs with the idea of sitting in her lap. Mother pushed him down and stood up very quickly. “But I won’t have him sitting in my lap,” she added.

  “Keep him in today, Mother,” George begged, “so he won’t get away.”

  “I’ll keep him in until you have gone to school,” Mother said, “so he won’t make a nuisance of himself there. But after that I shall let him do what he likes. If he has a home, he had better return to it.”

  So it was quite an anxious day for George. But when he came home at noon Torrible Terence was lying in the sunshine on the front porch, lazily scratching his ear; and when he came home in the afternoon Terence had made himself a nest of leaves in the side yard. Terence seemed to have settled right down and decided to stay. As soon as he saw George he leaped up with yelps of delight, kissed George on both cheeks in the manner of a French general, and nearly knocked him over. For a few moments they wrestled together in the friendliest manner, and then they settled down to business and went to look at the turtles.

  The day after a birthday is often more satisfactory than the birthday itself. George wore a pair of his new socks, he passed the delicious chocolate-covered taffy, he looked at the very strange, old-fashioned illustrations in The Young Carthaginian, he tried out the new swing, and he and Torrible Terence were very, very busy with the turtles.

  First of all the turtles had to have a larger place to live in so that they would feel at home and not try to get out. Next George wanted to finish the turtle race track, because he had an idea. The idea was connected both with the turtles and with the problem of feeding Terence.

  Terence was inte
rested in the turtles as George was interested in the monkeys at South Lake Park. He liked to go and look at them, with his long ears pricked forward and his nose twitching. Sometimes he would push the goldfish bowl gently with his nose.

  “He feels sorry, too,” said Dumpling, “because they want to get out.”

  George went through the pan cupboard until he found an old dishpan which Mother felt that she could spare. Then he and Dumpling put sand in the bottom of it. They added five nice flat rocks, one for each turtle, so that there would be no crowding, and then they poured fresh water around the rocks and sprinkled a few ant eggs enticingly here and there. After that the turtles were introduced to their new home.

  “What are you going to call the turtles, George?” asked Dumpling.

  Susan thought it would be nice to name them after the Dionne Quintuplets, but George said, no, he would have to take a little time to think the matter over. While he was thinking, he went out and hammered away at his turtle race track.

  “Why are you in such a hurry to get it done, George?” asked Susan.

  “Because,” said George, and added mysteriously, “you wait and see.”

  Of course the Gimmicks and the Terrible Torrences came to watch, too. The Gimmicks were full of helpful and constructive ideas about the proper way to build a turtle track, but unfortunately the Terrible Torrences wanted to help. They snatched the hammer and nails out of George’s hands and began to put everything together crookedly and upside down and higgledy-piggledy.

  “Hey, you quit that!” George shouted.

  “We can do anything we want to,” said Alvin, flinging a handful of nails into the air and kicking boards in every direction, and Rudy shouted, “Yah! Yah! Yah!”

  “You go on home now,” cried George, “and leave my things alone.”

  “If we go home now, we’ll take our dog.”

  “He won’t go with you.”

  “We’ll make him. We found him first.”

  “But you gave him to me for my birthday.”

  “That was yesterday. Yah! Yah! Yah!”

  It looked very much as if George was doubling up his fists to punch the Terrible Torrences’ noses.

  Susan began to speak, quite rapidly, but in a very clear, strong voice, “Once upon a time there was a terrible old man with a very long blue beard, and his name was Bluebeard, and whenever he got tired of one of his wives he killed her and hung her up by her hair in a little upstairs room in his castle—”

  In just a moment the Terrible Torrences were sitting one on either side of Susan, as close as they could get.

  “Go on,” said Alvin.

  “What next?” said Rudy.

  Astonished but relieved, George undoubled his fists, picked up his nails, assembled his boards, and went on building his turtle track. Susan kept the story going until the turtle track was finished. “And so,” she concluded, “the lady’s brothers arrived and put an end to Bluebeard.”

  “Why?” asked Alvin.

  “Because he was such a very bad old man,” said Susan. “Bad people always have to be punished.”

  “Why?” asked Rudy.

  “Well,” said Susan, “I don’t know why, but they do. It is much better to get along nicely with other people than to be bad.”

  “Tell some more, Susan,” said Alvin.

  “Not now,” Susan said, “but I will some other time.”

  She looked around and she saw that Tim and Tad and Dumpling had been listening, too, and even George, at the same time that he had been building.

  Susan got up and brushed off her dress and walked into the house. She walked with a new feeling of importance, for she was the only one in the neighborhood, perhaps in the world, who knew how to control the Terrible Torrences.

  Tutor for Tommy

  Susan climbed the stairs to the Tower and knocked on the door. Today the typewriter was not going clickety-clack. Mother called, “Come in.”

  “Mother,” Susan said, “I think I know now why you like to write mystery stories.”

  “Do you?” asked Mother, looking up from her piles of yellow paper. “I’m glad you do, Susie, because sometimes I wonder myself.”

  “When you tell a story and everybody listens and pays attention it’s quite a good feeling,” said Susan, “isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is,” said Mother, “and I suppose that that is one of the reasons I try to write. But the sad part of it is that no one reads or listens. I just write.”

  “We read your stories on Saturday afternoons, Mother, and we like them.”

  “Bless you for that,” said Mother. “You are very satisfactory children.”

  “And when the editor that Mrs. Ewing knows comes to town, he’ll want to make your story into a book, and then everyone will read it, Mother.”

  “Well, that’s what I used to tell myself, Susie,” said Mother, “but the time is getting short, and I’m stuck.”

  “Stuck, Mother?”

  “Stuck at chapter nineteen,” said Mother. She looked tired and discouraged. She ran her hands through her short, dark, curly hair and sighed.

  “Don’t you know how it’s coming out?” asked Susan.

  “No, I don’t,” said Mother. “I thought that I did, but it won’t work that way. A murder mystery is like a jigsaw puzzle, all the pieces have to fit just perfectly, and suddenly mine seems to be a mess.”

  “Can’t Angus McAngus work it out?”

  “Confidentially, Susan,” Mother said, “Angus McAngus isn’t one bit smarter than I am. That’s the whole sad story.”

  “What is happening in the story now?” Susan asked.

  “Someone has murdered the Countess’s husband,” Mother said.

  “Was he quite unpleasant?” Susan asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Mother said, “a perfect wretch.”

  “That’s good,” Susan said, “because one never ought to let pleasant people be murdered.”

  “Certainly not!” said Mother. “And besides,” she went on, “the Countess’s diamond necklace has been stolen.”

  “And doesn’t Angus know who did all of this, Mother?”

  “He suspects the Countess’s wicked brother-in-law,” Mother said, “but the trouble is that all of the readers will suspect the brother-in-law, too. That’s why I’m stuck. At this rate Angus McAngus is not going to be a bit smarter than any of the people who will read the story. I need a deeper mystery, Susan, and a surprise at the end. Can you help me?”

  “I’ll think about it, Mother,” Susan said gravely.

  “Let’s go downstairs,” Mother said more cheerfully, “and make cookies. That birthday cake vanished into thin air.”

  “And Aladdin rubbed his wonderful lamp,” said Susan dreamily, “and the birthday cake vanished into thin air.”

  “Also,” said Mother on the way downstairs, “I need another corpse, another murder, but not an ordinary one at all. This must be something very strange and extraordinary, because we are dealing with no ordinary criminal.”

  “Mother, I thought about Angus McAngus and the criminals the other night when the Torrences took me to look at the dog in the toolshed. It made a wonderful noise like a kind of moaning. If you could only describe that, Mother, and the moonlight, and the thumping noises, and the mysteriousness of everything!”

  “Yes, yes,” said Mother. “Now let me see, peanut-butter cookies, chocolate-chip cookies, which will be quicker?”

  “We might ask George,” suggested Susan. “I think he would be quite good at plotting murders.”

  George was at work on the kitchen table, printing tickets with his rubber-stamp set. The Gimmicks and the Torrences had left, because it is not so interesting to watch a person print tickets as to watch him build a turtle track or to listen to Bluebeard. Terence was asleep at George’s feet, and Dumpling and Irene were playing house under Father’s desk. Dorothy had a book propped up in front of her so that she could read with her eyes while she peeled potatoes with her hands.

  “Geo
rge,” Susan said, “can you help Mother think up a real unusual murder for Angus McAngus to solve?”

  “Well,” said George, continuing to print tickets, “there might be this horrible old scientist in the zoology laboratory who cut up all kinds of frogs and things, and one day Angus McAngus came in and there was the scientist in a bottle, pickled in alcohol.”

  “My goodness!” said Susan. “Who done it?”

  “The frogs,” said George.

  “That is a little too unusual,” Mother said. “Would you mind moving to the other end of the table, George, so that I can get at the flour bin?”

  “Mother,” Susan said, “you might have a babysitter—”

  “Oh, yes,” cried George enthusiastically. “And in the morning the parents would find two little corpses in their cribs, and that would be the end of the Terrible Torrences, only Angus McAngus wouldn’t have any trouble finding Susan because all the clues would point—”

  “George!” cried Mother. “How can you be so horrible?”

  “I was just trying to help.”

  “I know, dear, but you have such ghoulish thoughts. I guess I’d better work this out myself.”

  “Mother, will you make a lot of money when you sell your mystery story?”

  “If I finish it, if I sell it,” Mother said, “I might make something. We could certainly use some extra money in this family.”

  “If you sell your mystery novel, Mother,” cried George, “will we be able to buy all the horsemeat Terence wants to eat?”

  “I expect so,” Mother said, “but long before I finish it, I hope that his former owner will claim him.”

  “The evening paper!” cried George and Susan together. They dashed out to the front porch, and the evening paper was lying there waiting for them. Terence dashed out after them, as if he understood how vitally he was concerned.

  George and Susan sat down side by side on the top step and slowly opened the paper to the classified advertising section. Terence sat beside them with his front feet in George’s lap and his tail going wham! wham! wham! on the porch floor.

  Susan ran her finger up and down the Lost and Found columns. She read out in an impressive voice: