Mister Max: The Book of Lost Things: Mister Max 1

  “What are you doing here?” Max asked. Then he looked back to the open door. “I have to—” He turned to his house.

  “Give me a hand up? You’re Clarissa’s Mister Max, aren’t you?” she asked as he pulled her to her feet. “Why are you wearing a clown costume?”

  “Hunh?” he asked, trying to sound confused, trying to figure out if it mattered if this girl knew who he was and where he lived. “Mister who?”

  “I tricked her. She thought she was proving how rich and smart she and her father are, boasting about hiring a detective to find her stupid dog.” The girl grinned at him, and her dark blue eyes sparkled. “It really was a stupid dog; golden retrievers are. Sweet-natured and gentle, but not smart. If I were a dog, I’d be a poodle. Except not the kind of well-groomed poodle you see, so maybe a mongrel, half poodle the other half … Alsatian,” she decided. “What about you?”

  “I need to—” Max turned around and started for home.

  “I’m coming with you,” Pia said.

  Max was too concerned about what he might find to argue with her. They picked up their bicycles and rolled them inside the gate, which they shut and latched behind them before racing up the steps into the house, to find whatever was waiting there.

  In which the Long-ears reappear

  “What happened in here?” Pia’s voice asked from behind Max, but Max moved right through the mess of overturned chairs, dismantled bookcases, and scattered posters to the body that sprawled facedown across the dining room table. He rolled it over and, as he expected, as he feared, saw his tutor.

  Ari’s eyes were closed and his skin colorless. A trickle of blood came from his cheek, but that was the only blood Max saw. With no expression on his handsome face, Ari reminded Max of someone. Just as he was about to remember who, the eyelids fluttered, so Max got down to the business of finding out if his tutor was seriously injured and finding out what had happened, after which he would decide what he was going to do about it, after which—now he did look around the room—he could start dealing with the mess.

  “He needs a doctor.”

  Pia’s voice reminded him that she was there and he told her, “Out the kitchen door, across the garden, there’s a house. It’s my grandmother’s. The key is in the geranium pot on the step. There’s ice in the icebox.”

  Without a word or a question—although he’d have guessed she was the kind of person who tended always to have a word or a question—Pia ran off.

  “Ari?” Max asked, and the eyelids fluttered open. Ari’s eyes were angry, hard, scornful, and once again Max had the feeling that he had recently seen someone who looked enough like Ari to be his brother.

  Then Ari’s face assumed its usual expression, the dark eyes sympathetic and alert. “Max?” He slid unsteadily to his feet and buckled at the knees. His hands flew out to Max’s shoulders.

  Max righted one of the chairs and gently pushed his tutor down onto it.

  Ari closed his eyes. He put a hand up to his head, just behind the right ear. “That hurts,” he admitted. “It’s pretty tender.”

  Max gently touched the place. “You’re getting a real goose egg.”

  “I think he hit me with Shakespeare’s Complete Works. Or maybe one of those posters?”

  “Probably a book,” Max decided. “It’s not bleeding,” he explained.

  Ari groaned. “Would one of those frames have hurt less, do you think?” He folded over at the waist and rested his head on his knees. “I feel … bad.”

  “What happened?” Max asked.

  “Really bad,” Ari said, and he raised his head so that he could lean it against the back of the chair to admit, “I’m no good in a fight.” He tried to smile but couldn’t, and closed his eyes again. “Never was.”

  Max realized that this was not the time to ask what had happened, so he turned his attention to the room. Books were scattered all over the floor, some lying open, some on their sides. Also scattered all around were the scripts of plays the company had produced or were thinking of producing. The walls that had been lined with his parents’ proudly framed advertising posters were bare, and the posters had been dropped onto the floor with such force that a couple of the frames had split, although at first glance, Max could see no broken glass. That was one good thing. If the room was going to have to be set to rights, it would be a lot easier if he didn’t have to look out for shards of broken glass. Then he had a thought. “I’ll be right back,” he said to Ari. “Don’t move.”

  “No danger,” his tutor assured him.

  “She’s getting ice,” Max said, and went to check the front parlors, where there was no damage. The kitchen, however, was a mess. Plates and glasses had been shoved aside, drawers emptied, chairs upended, pots and pans scattered, oven door wide open, and bread dumped out of the bread box. Had the intruder come in the back door, then? Max went to check on Ari.

  Pia returned with a cloth-wrapped chunk of ice in one hand. In the other she held a sprig of mint and a vanilla bean. “I bet your grandmother’s a good cook,” she said, stepping around Max to help Ari press the ice against the right side of his head. Then she asked, “Where’s your teapot? Mint tea, with a little vanilla, it’s a restorative. My nurse knows about these things,” and went back into the kitchen. Max, watching to see that Ari was able to hold the ice steady against his head, heard water running and then, when that stopped, her voice calling, “The old lady was just getting home. Is that your grandmother?”

  “She’s not so old,” Max called back.

  “She’s just changing her shoes,” Pia told him. “She’ll be right over. Does she have a job?”

  Ari groaned softly, and Pia came into the room. “The infusion will take a few minutes, but it’ll help.” In case Ari hadn’t heard her the first time, she repeated, “My nurse knows about these things. She says if people are going to take you for a gypsy you might as well know something about what gypsies know. But really, she isn’t one. Which is too bad, if you ask me, which nobody does. Who was that man who pushed me over?” she asked Max. Then, “Is this your brother?”

  “Do I look like him?” Max asked. He’d never thought of himself as handsome, but if he looked like Ari, maybe he was.

  “Not really, but you don’t look like much of anything in particular. You could be anybody’s brother, even mine,” the girl said. “Except for your weird eyes, I mean. Also, neither of my brothers would ever wear pants like that— Your stuffing has slipped, by the way. No, I just thought if he lives with you he must be related.”

  “How do you know he lives with me?” Max asked, pulling free the pillow, which he’d entirely forgotten in the excitement of the attack on his house and his tutor. He put the pillow on the table with not one word of explanation.

  “Well, this is your house, and you’re more worried about him than about chasing the person who was running out of it. Who probably wrecked all this. And hit him.”

  Pia was pretty logical, Max thought but didn’t say. Instead, he asked, “How do you know this is my house?”

  “I know your name, don’t I?” she answered, and smiled, like a cat with a mouse’s tail hanging out of its mouth. “That Clarissa … she’s pretty silly. All I had to do was pretend—and it wasn’t even really pretending anything. I let her suspect I thought she’d lost her dog because she was careless, and she blabbed and blabbed about her father and the detective. You’re Mister Max,” she told him. “Are you a detective?”

  “No,” Max said, but she ignored him.

  “Because I wanted to tell you—”

  Grammie’s voice and the slamming of the door interrupted her. “Max?” She called out her news: “The Simón Bolívar docked in Miami yesterday, nothing out of the ordinary, and there’s still no word of the Miss Koala. Ari? Are you home? Who was that girl? What’s happened here?” Then, “What has been going on?” she demanded from the kitchen doorway. But when she saw Ari’s pale face, for the next several minutes she was busy pressing her fingers onto his skull
and looking into his eyes, and she wasn’t interested in whatever anyone said.

  While Grammie was seeing to Ari and the herb tisane infused, Max and Pia put the chairs back in place around the table. Max piled books and scripts into stacks while Pia set framed posters on the table. “I hope you didn’t get hit with one of these,” she said to Ari. “You’ll have a concussion for sure if you did.” She disappeared into the kitchen and after a few minutes brought out four mugs and a pot of tea. “My nurse swears by this.”

  “Aren’t you too old for a nurse?” Max asked.

  “My father doesn’t like to let good servants go,” she told him, pouring a light brown, sweet-smelling liquid from the teapot. “If you ask me, he just doesn’t like to fire anybody. Although sometimes”—a grin lit up her face—“he helps them want to quit.”

  What did that mean? Max wondered and would have asked her, but Ari was blowing over the top of his drink to cool it, and this was such a relief to Max that he finally realized where he had seen Ari’s face before. However, Grammie was still fussing beside the young man, so he couldn’t ask his tutor if he was by any chance related to the Barthold family. And then, as he watched his grandmother adjust the ice pack and heard her grumbling that she didn’t know what things were coming to around here, Max found bits of information fitting together in his head like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle: Ari’s odd reaction to the Baroness’s note, the frequent appearance of good pastries, that red hair and handsome face, and the reasons for the Baroness’s low estimate of her great-nephew’s character. About which, in Max’s opinion—that is, if his hunch was correct—the old lady was much mistaken.

  “I want him to see a doctor, but not here,” Grammie announced. “You two, help him across to my house.”

  “I’m fine, there’s no—”

  “You, young man, would do well to save your strength for your trek across the garden. Because until we know what’s going on, I don’t think we want anyone official making inquiries in this house. Do we?” she asked Max, then, “Who are you?” she asked Pia, whom she seemed to have just noticed. “Never mind, you two take him across to my house, and I’ll bring the doctor. It’s not far. I’ll be right back.”

  She was as good as her word, but the doctor wasn’t with her. “He has two people in his waiting room, but he’ll be here in less than an hour. You two, sit,” she ordered Max and Pia. Then she said to Ari, “You look a little better. Precisely how do you feel?”

  “My head hurts.”

  “Dizzy? Nauseous?”

  “I was dizzy at first but not anymore. No nausea.”

  “We left his tisane behind,” Pia realized.

  “Are you going to tell me who you are?”

  “Pia.”

  Grammie looked at her for a long minute. “You’re not a reader.”

  “Yes I am.”

  “You don’t come to the library.”

  “I go to Hilliard. We have our own library and it’s a good one.”

  “Not as good as mine,” Grammie said. “You should take a look.”

  “I will,” Pia answered, and Grammie nodded, satisfied.

  “Go get him that infusion, then,” she said, and as soon as the door closed behind Pia, she asked Ari, “What happened? Be quick.”

  “I was studying and dozed off, but the noise woke me—a lot of crashing and swearing, from downstairs. There was a man. Tearing the dining room apart. I tried to—”

  “Who was it?”

  Ari shook his head, then pressed his hand to it with a muffled groan.

  “What did he want?”

  “He was mumbling something about ‘too clever by half.’ ”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Youngish, dark hair … medium height, but”—he looked at Max first, then Grammie, not hiding his concern about this—“he had pretty long ears. Long earlobes, I mean. I asked him what he was doing, told him to put down the book he was holding, and grabbed him by the arm when he started to run away. Then he hit me.”

  Grammie looked at Max, who reported, “He was running out of the house when I rode up. Pia tried to block him—at least I think she did. Anyway, it looked like that was what she was doing. But he shoved her over and ran off. I couldn’t just leave her there and chase him. I didn’t know if she was hurt.”

  “I didn’t say you should have. But who are these Long-ears?”

  “What does your policeman friend know?”

  “I didn’t ask him.”

  “Maybe,” Max suggested, “you should?”

  “And what is that girl doing here?” Grammie demanded.

  But Pia was at the door and answered the question herself. “I’m here because of the dog he was hired to find.”

  “That dog?” Grammie asked Max, and he nodded.

  Ari told Grammie, “I can’t wait for the doctor. I have to be at work.”

  “You’re not going to work. You’ve had a bad blow to the head, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “I’ll be fine, Mrs. Nives. I’m the night clerk. All I do is sit behind the desk.”

  She shook her head. “The doctor needs to look you over. Max will tell them at the hotel that you won’t be in.”

  “I need that job.”

  “He’ll think of some good excuse. Won’t you?” she asked Max sternly.

  How could Max answer that? He had no idea what he might say to the manager of the Hotel Iris to explain Ari’s absence.

  “If he doesn’t, I will,” Pia promised.

  And what was she doing, butting into his business like that? But before Max could ask Pia who she thought she was, Grammie said, “Good girl. Max, you better change into something more … less … exotic, then it’s off with the two of you. We’ll tackle this new mystery later.”

  In which Pia is irritating

  By the time they stood in front of the manager of the Hotel Iris, whose gold-rimmed spectacles gleamed as brightly as did the polished wood of the receptionist’s desk and the polished brass hinges and handles of the doorways in the lobby, Max had thought of an excuse. “Ari is sick. He has a fever,” he told the man.

  “He can have his fever as easily here as home in bed,” the man answered, rubbing his bald pate in frustration. “What am I supposed to do for a night clerk at the last minute? It’s not as if the job’s very difficult … Unless, did he send you in for a replacement?” He glanced at Pia, who stood just behind Max. “Not you. I don’t hire children, and especially not little girls.”

  “I’m not a little—”

  Max cut her off. “No, Ari just asked us to tell you he won’t be able to come to work tonight.”

  “In which case, I am asking you to tell him that if he doesn’t come in tonight he needn’t bother coming back, because there won’t be a job waiting for him,” the manager said. He looked a challenge at Max. Clearly, he thought Max wasn’t telling the truth, which, since Max wasn’t, seemed fair enough. Except, since he didn’t know Max was lying, seemed pretty distrustful, of Ari if of no one else.

  “I’ll tell him that right away, because I know how much he wants to keep this job,” said Pia, who now stepped up to stand beside Max. “He’ll probably come in and be sick here, and it probably isn’t too serious, because he’s had a temperature for about a week and it’s only just today gotten really high,” she told the manager, with as wide-eyed and innocent an expression as if she were Clarissa asking her father to hire Mister Max to find her beloved Princess Jonquilletta of the Windy Isles because she would just die of sadness if her dog was lost forever. “We don’t think it’s typhoid,” Pia assured the manager, who at the word looked sharply around to be sure none of his guests were close enough to listen in.

  “There’s been no talk of typhoid in the city,” he said nervously.

  Pia nodded. “I know, and I wouldn’t have wondered myself if his mother hadn’t died of it last—”

  The manager stepped back. He rubbed his head again, this time in anxiety.

  “But I know he’ll
want to come in, once he knows how you feel,” Pia assured him.

  “No, no need, I’ll cover it myself if there isn’t anyone else to be found.”

  “We couldn’t ask you to do that,” Pia told him, with a guileless smile. “You’re the manager—you have to work all day. I’m sure Ari can do it. He’s stronger than he looks.”

  “No, no need for that. Tell him I’m holding the position for him, tell him to take all the time he needs,” the manager said. “Now, I better find that replacement—if you’ll excuse me?” and he hurried off, almost as if he was running away from them, as if he thought they might be carrying the dreaded disease themselves.

  Max did not dare to look at Pia until they had exited the building and were climbing back onto their bicycles. “You think fast,” he said, and then allowed the laugh he had been holding in to break free. “Did you see his face?”

  Pia grinned. “That was fun,” she said.

  “Thank you for helping out,” Max said, and then he had an idea. “Let me buy you an ice cream, I know a really good shop. Unless you’d rather have a pastry? The pastries there are better than anything.” He really was grateful to the girl, and now he remembered, “Besides, didn’t you come looking for me?”

  “Sort of. Well, yes, actually, I did,” she admitted.

  “Why did you want to see me?” Max asked. It would be another case for him to work on, and he was feeling so confident about himself that he was mostly just curious about this new job. Because this girl struck him as the kind of person who would rather figure things out for herself, so it might be an interesting and difficult one.

  “I’ll tell you when we get to your ice cream shop.”

  When they entered Gabrielle’s workplace, they had to wait for a few minutes while a large family (parents, one grandfather, four children ranging in age from about six to sixteen) bought themselves pastries for a special dessert after that night’s dinner and then ice cream cones for their present pleasures. Eavesdropping on the conversation, Max deduced that it was somebody’s birthday, and probably, he further deduced, one of the grown-ups, since there would be pastries rather than a cake with candles. Pia apparently agreed because she said, “What’s your guess? I think it’s the old man’s birthday,” standing on tiptoes to speak quietly into Max’s ear.