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

  Max arrived home to an empty house and a note from Ari saying that he had looked at the castle account books and found some of the same names he had seen in the record books of the farming properties up in the hill villages. He was off to investigate and would return when he had found out all he could. Maybe, the note concluded hopefully, he would return with his Martha. Max changed out of Banker Hermann’s suit and back into his ordinary shirt and trousers. He was about to leave the house when Pia arrived, bringing strawberry tarts, and Max was actually glad to have someone to talk to, although he told her she couldn’t stay long.

  She stayed long enough to tell him news from Hilliard (“They notified all the parents that they’ve hired a guard for the gate, after a recent distressing event. That was you!”), to register her usual complaint (“boring boring boring”) about the schoolmates she didn’t want to rejoin when vacation ended, and to react to Ari’s plan (“He’s always so hopeful. Do you think he’ll ever find her?”). Then she suggested to Max that if he needed work he should talk to her father and offer to solve the problem Mr. Bendiff was having finding a location for his restaurant (“I don’t know if he’d be willing to pay you. Should I ask?”). When they had finished the pastries, he saw her off on her bicycle, then mounted his own. He rode by the Starling Theater to see that all was well there and then crossed the river to The Lakeview. He needed to take a long, fast ride. He had not enjoyed sitting still all day, even if it was a job. He wasn’t looking forward to sitting still all the next day, too.

  The Library Job

  • ACT II •

  It was the only job the Solutioneer had, so Saturday morning found Banker Hermann once again seated in his chair by the window, once again opening the financial section, which, he was relieved to see, was much thinner than it had been the day before. Time passed slowly. Max had difficulty staying awake.

  However, when the same pale young woman, dressed in the same shabby clothes, entered the room late in the morning, he woke up enough to watch her over the top of his newspaper. At noon, she closed the same three magazines she had looked at the day before and left them out on the table, not slipping any of them under her blouse or into the shopping basket she carried. He followed her anyway, out onto the street. She might have nothing to do with the missing periodicals, but she might; she was the only unusual thing he had seen in the reading room. Besides, how long could he ask himself to sit quietly, waiting to catch a periodical thief in the act?

  One and a half days, he answered. This young woman was a guess, but maybe she would prove a good guess. Certainly he was ready for a walk through the warm mid-May noon. He hurried along the sidewalk, twenty feet behind her.

  She was a small person, narrow-shouldered and narrow-hipped. She walked fast, but without energy or eagerness, and looked neither to her right nor to her left. He followed her along the boulevards and across the avenues of the New Town, where she drew curious glances in her shabby clothing and heavy boots, and then into the crowded, winding streets of the old city, where a banker was the one who looked out of place.

  The young woman was unaware of Max. She was unaware of everyone and everything. She walked in a cloud of fear, her head down and her narrow shoulders gathered in, her arms folded across her chest. There wasn’t anything very unusual about her, and Max wondered why she was so afraid, or was it embarrassment? She puzzled him. Her straw-colored hair was in neat braids, she had a sharp little nose and chin, and she seemed ordinary, so why did she walk along the street in that cringing way? What bad thing was it that she expected to happen if someone noticed her?

  She hurried down River Way until the buildings of the old city gave way to the district where boatyards and warehouses sat beside workshops in which carpenters and blacksmiths, stonecutters and brickmakers labored. Max followed, now a good distance behind. Just after the buildings gave way to riverside meadows, she stopped at a wooden gate, wide enough for a mail coach with its six horses to enter. Max hurried to catch up with her, but she slipped through a small door cut into the gate and disappeared from sight. He caught only a glimpse of a dirt courtyard within, enclosed by low buildings, before the door shut behind her and he heard a key turn in the lock.

  Max stood in front of the gate wondering what to do next. On his right there was a brick wall, two stories high with three windows on each story, to all appearances a house. On his left another two-story wall had only one blank window, at ground-floor level, beside which he saw a metal tablet tarnished with neglect. He crossed over to it. CHARITABLE WORKHOUSE FOR THE ELDERLY AND THE INFIRM, it said. ENTRY FROM DAWN TO DUSK DAILY.

  Max turned his back to the building and looked across the road to the broad river, where painted fishing dinghies floated among tall masts of yawls and sloops, and a small tugboat on its way to the Queensbridge docks struggled against the current. In the far distance, apple orchards were in bloom. Except for the grim building behind him, this was an entirely pleasant spot, and he lingered unnoticed, enjoying the view, before he returned home.

  On Sunday Max was free to paint, and that is what he did. The May sky lay closer overhead, its blue deeper and warmer, its clouds whiter and fluffier. It is what seems to happen in May, as if the sky itself bends down to inhale the scents of damp soil and new grass, of jasmine and hyacinth and primroses. It was the kind of perfect day that should bring only good news—that a war has ended or that lost parents are found. The news that day, however, was of a storm at sea and a great ship going down.

  Max might not have heard about this until the next day if Grammie had not gone to hear the band that played in the park on spring and summer Sundays, and rushed home with the Extra edition of the Queensbridge Gazette so they could “Read all about it! The sinking of the Miss Koala, as told to our special correspondent by Captain Eustace Trevelyn!” Only the captain, the ship’s head cook, and one officer survived, rescued from their lifeboat after days on the open sea, eventually brought safely to land in Portugal, where they delivered their tragic news.

  Before she gave him the paper, Grammie reminded Max, “We got a postcard, remember?”

  Max read the article and reminded her, “There was nobody on the Miss Koala’s manifest that sounded like them.”

  Aloud, they agreed, “I’m sure they weren’t on board the Miss Koala.”

  But each of them had doubts. Max’s parents had been well enough to send a postcard weeks ago, but Grammie and Max had no idea where they were when they sent it. They had no idea where they were now.

  As the afternoon and evening went on, each tried to convince the other not to worry. The Miss Koala hadn’t come to port in any place where the last letter of a postmark would be A. Still, the fact of any ship’s sinking was a shock. Max had imagined many unhappy ends for his parents, and that one of the worst had actually come to pass—even if not for his parents—was terrifying. Max couldn’t help thinking of those passengers, imagining their terror and confusion, all that death. Grammie mused on the precariousness of life, how you never knew in the morning what might happen before dark. Neither one of them slept well that night.

  Lucky for Max, the Solutioneer had a job and a plan of action for Monday. As soon as the shabby young woman came into the reading room on Monday morning, Max picked up his banker’s tall hat and left. She did not notice him go, because she was immediately engrossed in the new issue of The Toy Chest, which by Monday had already been read aloud to many small children and looked through by a few of the older ones. He bicycled home at top speed, changed into his dogcatcher’s costume—minus the net—and bicycled back. As he was walking up the wide steps to the library entrance, the young woman was hurrying out through the doors.

  He was just another city official, and she didn’t lift her gaze from where her heavy boots were being set down, first on the steps and then on the pavement, so that when Max tapped her gently on the shoulder she froze, taken by alarmed surprise. He stepped around in front of her and her eyes grew wide.

  “I wonder if I might hav
e a word with you, Miss,” he said, taking his cap by its long, stiff brim to doff it and speaking quietly so she could know he meant no harm.

  She said nothing. She stared at him for a long minute. Then she burst into tears, covering her face with her hands, hunched over in misery.

  “Now then, now then,” Max said, trying to soothe her. “Now then, Miss.”

  “I didn’t do nothing,” she blubbered. “I didn’t mean to. I won’t never again. What did I do?”

  “Come along,” Max said in the same soothing tone. A little crowd was gathering around them, which did not suit Max at all. “Make way, please, let us pass. The young woman is upset, please let us pass by.” He held her gently by the arm and moved her down the sidewalk and across into the park. She didn’t resist. She didn’t protest. He sat her on a bench and waited for her tears to cease, then handed her his large red bandanna to wipe her eyes.

  “Better now?” he asked. Head bowed, she nodded, and Max nodded, too. “May I have your name, Miss?” he asked, as if he had every right to be asking her questions.

  “Nance,” she answered, without taking her eyes off her hands where they twisted the bandanna in her lap.

  “How old are you, Nance?” he asked.

  “They tell me I’m sixteen but I’ve been there more than two years but maybe it’s written down somewheres?” She did look at him then. “Would they write me down?” she asked.

  “It’s very likely,” Max said, in the language of government officials. “You are presently domiciled—” Her confused, lost expression caused him to rephrase the question. “You live in the workhouse?”

  This reminded her. “I got to get back, Sir. They’ll be angry.”

  He shook his head and laid a hand on her arm to keep her from bolting up off the bench. “You must answer my questions first. However, I’ll walk home with you to explain your delay. May I continue?”

  “I got to get back,” she repeated urgently.

  “We have reason to think you have taken some magazines from the library,” Max said quickly.

  Relief washed over her face and she explained, “That’s what a library is for. Anybody knows, they told me, you take things home from the library.”

  “Not magazines. Not newspapers. Not reference books. Didn’t you see the sign?”

  She shook her head, looking down again to her hands on her lap.

  “It’s right there,” Max pointed out. “It says, ‘Periodicals may not be removed from the reading room.’ ”

  “I thought it said something,” she announced, pleased at her own cleverness.

  “You can’t read,” Max realized.

  “How could I?”

  “You learn at school.”

  “People like me don’t go to school.”

  “Like you?”

  She nodded, on this subject confident. She tapped her finger against her temple and told him, “Without the usual. Short a room upstairs. Simple Simon. Blockhead. Noodle?” she asked helpfully, thinking he didn’t understand. “Thickwit?”

  “Ah,” he said, speaking officially. “I see.”

  “I know numbers. I can do adding and take away. Not times,” she concluded sadly.

  “I see,” Max said again. “I see.” His stomach growled and he had an idea. “Will you come with me for some ice cream? While I think about those magazines.”

  “I won’t never, not no more, not now I know I oughtn’t,” she said. “Can’t I go home now?”

  “The store is on your way home,” he told her. “Come along,” he said, as if he had every right to tell her what to do. She obeyed.

  Nance refused to enter the ice cream shop with him, but she did keep her promise to wait outside, and she ate the chocolate ice cream cone with apparent pleasure, although it didn’t slow down her anxious pace along the street beside him.

  The Library Job

  • ACT III •

  Ari was still off on his search, so Max and Grammie ate alone again that evening. She wanted to talk about Ari’s chances of success, but Max wanted to avoid that topic. He was afraid he would give in to the temptation to tell Grammie his guess about Gabrielle so that when—as he confidently expected—he was proved right, someone would know how clever he’d been. He diverted her attention by telling her how easy it had been to solve the library’s problem and return the missing copies of The Toy Chest that afternoon once he had talked with Nance. Grammie reached immediately for her purse and paid him. Then she went back to her dinner and said, “I wondered about her. She was always slipping in and out. Like a ghost.”

  “It’s how she lives.” Max didn’t know how to tell his grandmother what he had seen at the workhouse. There were no words dull and flat and gray enough to do the job, no combination of letters to spell out the hopeless and lifeless atmosphere of the place. “It’s so sad” was all he could think of, and he had to immediately correct that. “Not that Nance is sad, she seems—she’s not happy either, just—”

  “Resigned?” Grammie suggested. When he shook his head, she tried, “Defeated?”

  He shook his head again. They were eating a minestrone, thick with vegetables, and there was dark bread to dip into the broth. Both of them ate slowly, and Max’s words came out slowly, too, without organization, the ideas chopped up and mixed together like the potatoes and zucchini and carrots in the soup. “Nance grew up in the orphanage, from—Somebody left her there, wrapped in a blanket, a baby. They told her at the workhouse that she’s sixteen.”

  “That means she left the orphanage two years ago. What did they train her to do there?”

  “I suspect they sent her away younger, because she says it’s been five winters she’s worked for Master and Matron. I don’t know how old she is, but it’s not more than eighteen, it could be— And she’s the only servant, Grammie, she does … There are three old men and two old women. And the Master and Matron, they’re middle-aged and in good health, but Nance still does everything. Cooks and cleans, does all the shopping, all the workhouse laundry. There’s no running water in the workhouse. They use zinc tubs, an outhouse. Except for the Master’s apartments. Do you know why she took the magazines?”

  “To look at the pictures, I assume. I assume she can’t read?”

  “In their rooms? They just have candles and oil lamps. Not even gas lamps. The Master’s apartments have electricity, of course, and he has a bathroom, too. The workhouse bedrooms have brick floors; the building must have been a stable, or a factory. It was never meant to be a place for people to live. Nance didn’t understand about borrowing library books. She can’t write her name, either.”

  “Is she perhaps simple-minded?” Grammie guessed. “I wondered that. Her timid expression, her … She seemed to always be at the edge of the room, scuttling.”

  Max nodded. Nance had waited for him, as obedient as a dog, and had never thought to ask why he’d give her ice cream. “She never even had ice cream before,” Max told Grammie. “It’s not right, not a bit right. She has to go across the road and wash the laundry in the river, even in winter, I think. She wasn’t complaining when she told me all this. Except Master and Matron’s laundry; she carries that to a laundress. Grammie? She thinks if she leaves, the police will put her in prison. It can’t be legal, what she’s … What’s being done. Can it?”

  Grammie asked, “Did you talk to this Master person?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you should have, so I think you must have. What did you find out?”

  “He says she signed a contract, she’s an apprentice. But if she can’t read—”

  “Exactly,” Grammie said.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Max said.

  “You’ll think of something,” Grammie told him. She tried to console him. “You did find the missing magazines. You earned your fee.”

  Max didn’t feel consoled. He couldn’t feel consoled when Nance had—and had always had—such bad luck in life, and where was there a place in the world for someone like
Nance?

  Tuesday brought another perfect May morning. Max rose early, troubled by memories of the day before and grateful for his luck, his own house, with electricity and hot and cold running water, clothes washed in the machine he shared with Grammie, grateful for having gone to school, for enough to eat, and good food, too, and for time to paint if he wanted to. Even if he had lost his parents, or they had been taken away from him, or they had abandoned him, he still had a lot to be grateful for. He sat down to finish the geometry problems Ari had set him, in case his tutor returned in time for their lesson. He had no idea when to expect Ari back, and he wondered what his tutor might have discovered, up in the high valleys. He wondered also if Ari’s feelings about the quiet up in the hills, the simplicity of life in that clearer air, would have changed over the years. In which case, he wondered if Ari might just stay there, disappearing from Max’s life into an entirely new life of his own, the life he had been dreaming of since he was a boy.

  Max doubted that, but he wouldn’t know if he was correct until Ari had returned. Or failed to return.

  Homework done, Max went out to the front yard with his easel, but instead of painting a new skyscape he studied the two best April pictures, a cloudy sky that promised a spring thunderstorm and an early-morning sky that promised a windless day. He thought about which looked more like April. After not very long he threw back his head and laughed, as victorious and booming a laugh as his father might have let loose in the final scene of The Worldly Way, when, as the humble manager, he foiled Banker Hermann’s scheme to take over the lumber mill and force the impoverished mill owner’s pretty daughter, as played most pitiably by Mary Starling, to marry him. Max laughed out loud, clapped his hands together twice, and went to the kitchen to write a brief letter. As he sat down, pen in hand, he thought that he needed not only business cards but also stationery, all declaring his profession, MISTER MAX, SOLUTIONEER.