Pearl Buck #3

Chapter 1
The Blond Woman

Maisie and Felix Robbins watched from their third-floor apartment’s kitchen window as one of the biggest Christmas trees they’d ever seen was unloaded from a truck. Thanksgiving was still a week away, but Newport, Rhode Island, seemed to be skipping that holiday and racing right toward Christmas. On Bellevue Avenue, white lights twinkled from lampposts and fences, and wreaths hung on the doors of all the stores. In front of a restaurant on Thames Street, Santa sat in a sailboat pulled by eight leaping dolphins. And at Elm Medona, the mansion where Maisie and Felix lived with their mother in the old servants’ quarters, a team of people had arrived to put up decorations, including the gigantic tree, which would sit in the Grand Ballroom.

“The one at Rockefeller Center is bigger, I think,” Maisie said, squinting against the bright November sun.

Felix wasn’t sure. But he said, “Absolutely,” because to his sister everything in New York was bigger and better than here. Ever since their parents had gotten divorced and they’d moved from their apartment on Bethune Street in New York City to Newport, Maisie had spent most of her time either homesick or scheming to get back. Felix, on the other hand, had started to feel at home in Newport. He had grown to love the smell of the salty air and the sound of buoys clanging on the wharf. The sight of sailboats in the bay on a sunny day looked beautiful to him. He had even started to enjoy eating seafood, stuffed quahogs and fried scallops and fish-and-chips. In fact, if their father lived with them instead of in faraway Qatar, life would be pretty perfect.

From their perch at the window, Maisie and Felix could now see oversized gold ornaments getting wheeled inside.

“Gauche,” Maisie said, enjoying the word. She loved using words that most twelve-year-olds didn’t know. Like this one, which meant crude.

She wondered where those ornaments, too big for even this enormous tree, would get hung. Another truck arrived with piles of evergreen boughs. A blond woman in a camel-colored coat stood in the driveway directing all the workmen.

“Let’s go see what they’re doing,” Maisie suggested.

Before Felix could answer, she was slipping on her sneakers and heading out the door. Felix followed his twin sister, as usual.

“Well now,” the Blond Woman said, frowning up from her clipboard at Maisie and Felix. “Where did you two come from?”

“Up there,” Maisie said, pointing.

“And what were you doing up there?” the Blond Woman said. Her hair was cut in a bob, and she looked like she’d spent too much time in the sun. Maisie thought she had a nose like a pig. And beady blue eyes.

“We live here,” Maisie said.

“I don’t think so,” the Blond Woman snorted.

“Well,” Felix added, “on the third floor.”

The Blond Woman knit her overplucked eyebrows into a scowl.

“Phinneas Pickworth was our great-great-grandfather,” Maisie said, standing up straighter and trying to sound rich.

“Humph,” the Blond Woman said.

Two men navigating a giant wreath decorated with enormous pinecones and gold ribbons hesitated in front of her.

“That one goes on the front door,” she said, checking something off on her clipboard with a purple pen.

She glanced at Maisie and Felix again. “Did you want something?” she asked.

Felix shook his head.

“How long does it take to put all this stuff up?” Maisie said.

“In twenty-four hours, Elm Medona will be transformed into a Christmas wonderland. Just in time for all the holiday activities,” the Blond Woman said, studying her clipboard.

“What kinds of activities?” Maisie said.

“Oh, all kinds of things,” the Blond Woman said distractedly. “There are a few weddings. Lots of Christmas concerts and some kind of Victorian party. And of course the big VIP Christmas party on the ninth.”

“You mean Elm Medona is going to be crawling with people for the next month and a half?” Maisie said, trying not to panic.

“Basically, yes,” the Blond Woman said.

A dolly loaded with poinsettias rolled past.

“Pink? Pink poinsettias?” the Blond Woman shouted. “No, no, no. The pink ones belong at Rosecliff. Elm Medona gets the red ones.” She scurried over to the men with the plants, waving her clipboard at them.

Maisie looked at Felix. “With people all over the place, we’ll never be able to get into The Treasure Chest.”

He could tell how upset she was. But a feeling of relief washed over him. When they had first moved to Elm Medona, they got a tour of the mansion. The docent showed them a secret staircase hidden behind a wall on the second floor. At the top of the stairs was a room called The Treasure Chest. It smelled like the Museum of Natural History and was filled with curious objects: maps, seashells, peacock feathers, a small gold telescope, seedpods, an arrowhead, a porcupine quill, a compass, a bouquet of dried flowers, and hundreds of other things.

One night they snuck back into The Treasure Chest and found a letter dated 1864. When they both yanked on it, they got carried back in time to the childhood farm of Clara Barton. Clara had told them how she’d nursed her brother David back to health after he fell from a barn rafter, and they’d listened to her father tell stories about his time at war. The next time, they landed on the island of Saint Croix with Alexander Hamilton and stowed away on a ship to America with him. Even though both trips had been grand adventures, Felix was afraid to time travel again. Their great-great-aunt Maisie made them promise they would do it one more time, but the more Felix thought about it, the more he worried they might be pushing their luck. What if they didn’t get back home? What if they were stuck in the past?

Maisie had no such worries. She couldn’t wait to get back in The Treasure Chest, pick up an object, and leave Elm Medona and the twenty-first century behind.

“Well,” Maisie said as she watched the Blond Woman point an angry finger at the men with the poinsettias, “I guess that means we’ll just have to do it tonight.”
 
Maisie loved her mother’s bacon-and-egg pasta more than almost anything. The real name for it was spaghetti carbonara, but Maisie liked her name for it better. Her mother fried bacon nice and crispy, tossed it with spaghetti and Parmesan cheese, and then added three beaten eggs to it. Before the divorce, she added four eggs, and this small detail made Maisie sad. When Maisie walked into the kitchen, she smelled bacon cooking and saw her mother beating eggs in the green-striped mixing bowl. She grinned. They would eat, their mother would go back to her law office at Fishbaum and Fishbaum, and then she and Felix would go to The Treasure Chest.

“Perfect,” Maisie said out loud.

“I count my lucky stars every day that you two never get tired of spaghetti carbonara,” their mother said.

Felix did not love spaghetti carbonara, mostly because he didn’t like eggs. They were slimy. But beaten like this and mixed up with the cheese, he could almost forget there were eggs in it.
Almost.

“Why so miserable?” their mother asked him.

“I . . . I wish you didn’t have to go back to work,” Felix said. He could practically feel his sister glaring at him.

“Oh, sweetie,” their mother said, and tousled his hair.

“We could play hearts tonight,” Felix said hopefully.

“Not tonight,” his mother said. She pulled a strand of spaghetti out of the pot of boiling water and offered it to him. “Done?” she asked.

Miserable, Felix took a bite. “Done.”

His mother studied his face. “What’s going on?”

“Yeah,” Maisie said evenly. “What’s going on?”

“Maybe I just want to stay home tonight.”

“You are staying home, aren’t you?” their mother said, confused. She looked from Felix to Maisie, who smiled and shrugged innocently.

“I won’t be too late,” their mother added as she drained the pasta and began mixing it with the bacon, eggs, and cheese. “We’ll play hearts tomorrow night. Okay?”

“Great!” Maisie said so enthusiastically that their mother actually looked at her suspiciously. “I love hearts.”

Felix tried to eat as slowly as possible, as if that might make their mother stay home longer. He couldn’t help it. As the weeks and months had passed, Newport and their small apartment at Elm Medona felt more and more like home to him.

Time traveling had scared him each time. But even more than ever, he wanted to just stay here and go to school and eat quahogs and play hearts. Besides, their father was arriving on Christmas Eve, and that was enough for Felix to look forward to.

But before he’d finished his last bites of spaghetti, their mother glanced at her watch and decided it was time to get back to the office.

“You two stay out of trouble,” she said as she put on her powder-blue puffy coat and a pair of blue-and-white mittens.

Maisie smiled at her sweetly.

At the door, their mother turned to Felix. “Tomorrow night, buster,” she said. “I’m shooting the moon.”

He nodded and watched her as she walked out. The sound of her boots on the stairs faded, then disappeared.

“What is wrong with you?” Maisie hissed at him. “We promised Great-Aunt Maisie.”

“I know,” Felix said. He twirled and untwirled the spaghetti on his fork.

“So?” Maisie demanded.

“So I don’t want to go, that’s all. I want to stay right here. I like it here, Maisie. I like Ms. Landers and my whole class and . . . and everything.” When he saw the hurt look on her face, he said, “I’m sorry, Maisie. But I do.”

“Without Dad?” she asked. Her bottom lip trembled like she was about to start crying.

“Of course not. But he’ll be here soon and—”

Maisie blinked at him a few times, then took a deep breath. “Whatever,” she said. “We have to do it for Great-Aunt Maisie. Not for me.”

Her lie broke his heart, but he still wished he could talk her out of it. “Maybe we could tell her we did it. We could pick somebody and say that’s who we met. Like . . . George Washington? Or Abraham Lincoln?”

Maisie stood up. “You can stay right here if you want. I’m going to The Treasure Chest.”

“Maisie,” he said, “come on.”

But she ignored him. She walked out the kitchen door without looking back.

“Maisie!” Felix called.

He ran after her, surprised that she’d already made it down the stairs. The first time they had gone to The Treasure Chest, they’d used the dumbwaiter in their kitchen that led to the kitchen in the basement of Elm Medona. But now they knew where the key to the first-floor door was hidden, and they let themselves right into the dining room.

Maisie was already putting the key in the lock when Felix reached her.

She turned when she heard him. “I don’t care if you come or not,” she said, her green eyes blazing.

Felix suspected that for some reason the time travel only happened if there were two people. And those two people had to both hold an object from The Treasure Chest. He hadn’t figured out all the rules exactly yet, but he felt pretty certain about these.

Maisie stepped into the dining room with Felix close behind. The smell of Christmas—pine trees and cinnamon—filled the air. The large dining room table that always remained set with the Pickworth china now had a dozen tall red pillar candles wrapped with evergreen and pinecones in the center. Boughs of evergreen looped across the borders of practically everything: the side bar and serving table, the doorways and backs of chairs.

“Wow,” Felix said, “the Blond Woman works fast.”

A sense of yearning struck Maisie so hard that she let out a long, sad sigh. She thought it was possibly the longest, saddest sigh of her life so far.

“What is it?” Felix said.

Maisie looked at her brother. “I can’t do it,” she said.

When she saw the relief flicker across his face, she shook her head. “No, I mean I can’t do the holidays. It’s all wrong. Thanksgiving at the nursing home with Great-Aunt Maisie. And then Christmas with Dad staying at the Hotel Viking instead of with us.”

“Mom said we’d all have Christmas morning together,” Felix reminded her softly. “Dad will make his eggnog French toast, I bet.”

But Maisie just shook her head again.

She was thinking of her father dragging the Christmas tree down Hudson Street, she and Felix guiding him along. She was thinking of how, when they walked in the door, their mother always complained they’d chosen a tree that was too big. And how their father made them hang the tinsel one silver strand at a time.

“Even if we do go to The Treasure Chest,” Felix told her as gently as he could, “we’ll still have Thanksgiving at the nursing home, and Dad will still be in a hotel at Christmas.” No matter how long they stayed in the past when they time traveled, it was as if no time at all had passed in the present when they returned.

“I know,” Maisie said. “But somehow going back in time and meeting Clara and Alexander and who knows who else makes it a little better.”

Felix’s heart ached. Not just for Maisie, but for their family and all they had lost. He took his sister’s hand and pulled her out of the room.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go to The Treasure Chest.”

The giant Christmas tree they’d seen arrive earlier that day now stood all decorated in the Grand Ballroom. Wreaths, oversized pinecones, boughs of evergreens, and twinkling lights seemed to be everywhere Maisie and Felix looked. As they walked up the Grand Staircase, Felix paused as he always did at the black-and-white photograph of Great-Aunt Maisie as a little girl that hung on the wall. For the first time, he saw a glimpse of the Great-Aunt Maisie he knew in the girl’s eyes. Funny, Felix thought as he stared at the photo. When they’d arrived in Newport, Great-Aunt Maisie had barely been able to speak or walk. Now she was making her way down the corridors of the Island Retirement Center with the help of a walker and ordering around the staff as clear as anything. Every time she saw them, she asked about the details of their journeys with great interest. And she’d practically ordered them to go again. Soon. You must, she’d said.

“Come on,” Maisie called from the top of the stairs.

A chill ran up Felix’s back. He turned from the picture and gazed upward at his sister.

“Maisie,” he said. “I think our time travel is . . . is . . .”

She tapped her foot impatiently. “Is what?” she said.

“Is making Great-Aunt Maisie get better,” he said.

“That’s ridiculous,” Maisie said, even though he could tell she was considering the possibility.
“I don’t think it’s ridiculous,” Felix said thoughtfully. “I think when we go back in time, so does she. I mean, she gets younger.”

Maisie twirled a strand of her tangly hair around her finger, tugging on it as she thought about what Felix said.

“Is that why she wants us to do it again so badly?” she asked.

Felix nodded. “I think so.”

“Well,” Maisie said, breaking into a grin, “then we definitely have to do this. We’re practically saving Great-Aunt Maisie’s life!”

Unable to wait any longer, she walked down the hallway to the spot on the wall that opened to reveal the hidden stairway. But when she got there, she couldn’t believe what she saw.

“Oh no!” she shrieked.

Felix came up behind her.

Right on the place they had to press for the wall to slide open hung one of those giant wreaths, decorated with gold ribbons and pinecones.

Maisie stared at the wreath in disbelief.

“Well,” she said finally, reaching up for it, “we’ll just have to take this gauche thing down.”

Felix, knowing better than to argue with her, took hold of the bottom of the wreath as Maisie grabbed the side.

“Lift it on three,” Maisie said. “One . . . two . . .”

Felix leaned his shoulder into the wall beneath the wreath for extra heft, ready to lift.

A voice cut through the air.

“What in the world do you two think you’re doing?”

Without letting go, Maisie and Felix both turned their heads toward the voice.

The Blond Woman stood at the top of the stairs. She was dressed like a Christmas tree herself, in forest-green pants, a green turtleneck, and a red sweater tied loosely around her shoulders. Her hands were on her broad hips, and her beady eyes were narrowed menacingly.

“Don’t. Move,” the Blond Woman said.

Then she pulled a walkie-talkie from her pocket, lifted it to her mouth, and said, “Security! We have a break-in!”