The Kneebone Boy (2 page)

Ignoring her was no good, they knew. They had tried it before. She would hunt them down clear across town if need be.

Reluctantly, they crossed the road while Mrs. Carnival waited, tapping the stick against the pavement. Her eyes, which were the exact color of bananas when they go thoroughly rotten, fixed on them impatiently.

“Come on, don’t drag your feet, Hardscrabbles! Stand up straight, Otto, I’ve told you a hundred times not to walk like a baboon. You may act the part of the village idiot but there’s no need to walk like one!”

Lucia opened her mouth to shoot back an angry response, but Otto stopped her with a quick shake of his head. He was right, of course. It was no use arguing with Mrs. Carnival. She would always have the last word, and besides, they had to stay at her home several times a year. It wasn’t a good idea to get on her bad side.

As Lucia and Otto came close, Mrs. Carnival turned her attention back to the object on the ground.

“Get rid of this thing,” she demanded, nudging it distastefully with the tip of her stick. “I don’t want to touch it, and it’s spoiling the street.”

It was a robin, tiny and plump and lying horribly still. Otto knelt down next to it. Its thin eyelids were closed except for the tiniest slit, through which a still-bright dark eye gleamed.

Otto shook his hair to the side in order to see better, and with one finger he gently touched the bird’s small russet chest.

“Is it dead?” Lucia asked Otto.

He shook his head no.

“Well, it
should
be if it had any sense! Flew into my window, the nitwit,” Mrs. Carnival said. “What are you doing down there, Otto? I asked you to get rid of it, not groom it! Oh, get out of the way, I’ll kill it myself.” And she lifted her stick in order to bring the pointed end down on the little bird’s chest.

Swiftly, Otto slid his hand beneath the little bird and scooped it up before Mrs. Carnival could touch it. He wrapped his scarf around it gently and cradled it against his chest.

“Ridiculous boy,” Mrs. Carnival muttered, shaking her head. “Remember to wash that scarf afterwards,” she called to Otto as he and Lucia walked away. “That bird is certainly diseased. I won’t have you staying at my house if you catch something from it.”

“As though that’s punishment,” Lucia said, almost loud enough for Mrs. Carnival to hear. But not quite. Mrs. Carnival was the only person who was willing to take care of them when their father went on his trips abroad. The Hardscrabbles didn’t like her but they needed her.
Or Dad felt they did anyway, though I’m sure they were perfectly capable of taking care of themselves.

Otto cupped his hand over the small lump under his scarf as he and Lucia passed through the heart of town and then turned up a lonely street whose broken pavement tilted this way and that. On either side of the road were a few houses in moderate states of disrepair. Their own house was at the very end of the street, a ramshackle butter yellow house with a wild-looking garden in the front. Ruffled pink and white roses spilled giddily every which way, blue lobelia carpeted the ground, and gangly lilies stretched up toward the sun, their lemon-colored petals unfurled. Arched over the brick path leading toward the house was a rickety arbour that was thatched with bright purple clematis.

A black-and-white cat named Esmeralda was sunning herself on the path, but when she saw Otto and Lucia approaching she popped up and bolted out of the garden and across the road. She wasn’t their cat anyway. She was only one of the many street cats that hung around their house. The cats came when their mother had still lived with them and they still kept coming after she was gone. Their mother didn’t believe in keeping animals, Dad told them, any more than she believed in keeping humans. Creatures stayed as long as they needed to stay, she had said, and when it was time for them to leave, you just had to tip your hat and wish them well.

Ironically, though, the cats
never
thought it was time to leave the Hardscrabble house. It was really as if they were
hanging around waiting for Tess Hardscrabble to return. Consequently, as Lucia and Otto approached the house, they startled six other cats out of the depths of the garden. A seventh, a big fat tabby, had draped itself in front of the door and would not move, so they had to step over him.

Inside the hallway, Otto and Lucia dropped their schoolbags and headed directly to the kitchen, just as they always did, but they stopped short at the entrance. Sitting at the kitchen table was a chubby red-haired girl they’d never seen before. In front of her was a large bowl, into which their younger brother, Max, was scooping chocolate ice cream from the carton. He stopped when he saw Otto and Lucia, and his face grew a little pink.

“Who’s this?” Lucia demanded.

“Her name is Brenda. She’s new at school, moved here all the way from Loughborough, and doesn’t know a soul, so I thought wouldn’t it be a good thing for her to come over.” Max said this very quickly, and there was a pointed tone to his voice when he said that Brenda was
new at school.

What followed was a long awkward silence, during which Otto slouched even more than usual and cradled the robin closer to his chest. Lucia flashed an irritated glance towards Max then turned her dark eyes on Brenda. Her expression was stern but kind.

“Did Max tell you that he has a time machine in the basement?” Lucia asked Brenda.

The girl shook her head while Max hastily plopped another scoop of ice cream in her bowl.

“Did he tell you he has a pair of llamas in the backyard?” Lucia persisted.

Brenda shook her head, but her eyes flitted to the window that faced the backyard.

“No, Brenda, there aren’t any llamas there,” Lucia said. “Nor time machines. Nor anything else that Max might have told you. Incidentally, what
did
he tell you to make you come here?”

Brenda looked down at her bowl of ice cream wistfully, as though she sensed that she was not going to have a chance to eat it.

“Why don’t you mind your own business, Lucia,” Max said, scooping out the last bit of ice cream from the container.

Lucia ignored him and kept her black eyes on Brenda, who was beginning to squirm. “Well?” Lucia demanded.

“He told me he’d found a brontosaurus bone in the garden,” Brenda said. Then she looked at Max. “Was that a lie?”

Lucia snorted. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, of course it was a lie! I’m surprised a girl your age would believe such rubbish. I honestly think kids are getting stupider by the year.” She murmured this last bit to Otto.

Brenda frowned over at Max, who quickly turned his back to grab a container of milk from the fridge.

“Can I eat the ice cream, at least?” Brenda asked Lucia.

“You don’t have to ask
her
permission, you know,” Max said, placing a glass of milk in front of Brenda. “She’s not the parent.”

The real, actual parent walked into the kitchen just then. He didn’t look much like a real, actual parent. Casper Hardscrabble was a tall, thin, bespectacled man with curly dark hair down to the base of his neck and a grizzled, unshaven face. His eyebrows were thick, like Lucia’s, but his were the scowling type. Had he plucked them, he might have looked more friendly to his neighbours. He would have resembled a shy, rumpled college professor, and his neighbours might not have thought the awful things that they thought about him. But he wasn’t the type to pluck them, so there’s nothing to talk about really.

Oh, and he was wearing yellow pyjamas.

“You’re new,” Casper said to Brenda.

“She was Max’s idea,” Lucia muttered.

Casper looked at Brenda’s bowl of ice cream, then at his youngest child, who was now sitting across from Brenda, pretending to be engrossed in smashing the lumps of sugar in the sugar bowl with the back of a spoon.

“I see you’ve finished off the ice cream,” Casper said, glancing at the empty ice cream carton on the kitchen counter.

Brenda squirmed a little.

“Well done,” Casper said. “I was just about to throw it out to make room for the triceratops bone.”

They all looked at him with puzzled expressions.

“What?” he said, gazing back at them. “You have to put dinosaur bones
some
where before the museum comes to fetch them, don’t you? A freezer is the best place. Keeps them nice and fresh.”

“You never said anything about having a dinosaur bone, Dad.” Lucia narrowed her eyes at him.

“Not to you, maybe,” Casper said. “But I told Max all about it this morning, didn’t I?”

Max stared at him for a moment, then nodded.

“Really? Then why did he tell Brenda it was a brontosaurus bone?” Lucia persisted.

“Well, that’s what I thought it was at first,” Casper said. “But I looked it up afterwards. It’s definitely triceratops.”

“Can I see it?” Brenda asked, already making a fair-sized dent in her ice cream.

“Oh, yes, let’s
all
see it,” Lucia said, throwing a dry look at Max, who had wilted in his chair.

“All right. Wait right here. I’ll go get it.” Casper opened the kitchen door and walked out into the garden. All the kids went to the window to watch what he would do next.

“My dad is never home at this hour,” Brenda said. “Doesn’t your dad work?”

“Sure, he does. He just works at home,” Max explained. “And every so often he goes away.”

“Where?” Brenda asked.

Casper was now circling the garden in his bare feet, staring hard at the ground.

“All different places. The Philippines, Africa, Indonesia,” Max said. “He paints portraits of kings and queens and empresses. Not the famous ones, though. The ones he paints have been booted off their thrones.”

Brenda scrutinized him doubtfully, then turned to Lucia. “Is he lying?”

“No, he’s actually telling the truth this time,” Lucia replied distractedly, her eyes fixed on her father. Casper was kneeling down, frog fashion, and was clawing up the earth. It flew backwards between his legs.

“Do you get to go with him?” Brenda asked.

Max shook his head. “He’s too busy when he’s there to look after us. And we’d miss too much school.” He added in a grim voice, “We stay with a lady in town.”

“What about your mum?” Brenda asked, looking around suddenly as though their mum might be hiding in the room somewhere.

“Haven’t you heard about our mum?” Lucia asked.

Brenda shook her head.

Max flashed a warning look at his sister, which Lucia completely ignored.

“She’s dead,” Lucia said.

“She’s gone missing,” said Max.

“Dead,” Lucia said.

“Missing,” Max said. “Dad says she’s missing.”

“He just says that to make us feel better. She’s dead.”

Now Brenda appeared completely confused. Her eyes darted around nervously between Lucia and Max, stopping briefly to look at Otto, who would not look back at her.

A scurrying movement out the window made them turn their attention to Casper again. He was down on all fours, one hand pawing around the hole he’d dug in the ground. He pulled something out, something largish, and
began brushing the dirt off of it. Then he hopped up very nimbly and trotted back to the house. The front of his pyjamas was filthy and there were bits of soil in his hair and on his spectacles, but when he entered the kitchen, he held up the dirt-encrusted object triumphantly.

“Found it!” he cried. “I put it back in the ground earlier, just until I could get the freezer cleaned out.”

He placed the thing on the kitchen table with a thump. It was definitely a bone, and a very large one.

“Whoa,” Brenda said quietly.

“Max believes it may be the beast’s ankle bone,” Casper said, looking at his son admiringly. Brenda did the same, and Max’s face turned bright red.

“Oh, for goodness’ sakes, that’s just an old beef bone,” Lucia said. “One of the neighbourhood dogs probably buried it.”

“Really?” Casper raised one eyebrow at Lucia, a thing that none of his children could do, though they all had practiced in front of a mirror. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Lucia said resolutely.

“How much do you want to wager?” Casper asked.

Lucia shrugged carelessly but she looked a little uncomfortable.

“How about your birthday money?” Casper suggested.

Lucia hesitated while Otto examined the bone with his free hand, as though he were trying to assess Lucia’s odds.

“Forget it.” Lucia backed down. Her nostrils puffed
out very widely and she added smirkily, “Believe what you want to believe.”

“Well said!” Casper exclaimed and he kissed Lucia’s forehead, leaving a smudge of garden dirt on it.

Later, Lucia watched out the window as Max walked Brenda down the front path, then stood at the edge of the front lawn and watched her walk away. Brenda turned around once to look back at him and he waved enthusiastically. She waved back. A small careless wave.

Here’s what Max looks like: dark hair like Lucia and blue eyes like Otto. Chin slightly cleft like Lucia and nose on the snubby side like Otto. If you studied him, you would swear he looked like a perfect combination of the two, but if you looked away from him suddenly and then you looked back at him, you’d think that he didn’t look a single thing like either of them.