The Name of This Book Is Secret (12 page)

Truly she is a Golden Lady, I thought.

Afterward, I saw her standing by the entrance of our tent. When the rest of the crowd had left, she smiled and told my brother and me how much she enjoyed our show.

“Did you like your present?” she asked. “It seems you’ve put it to good use.”

“What present?” I asked.

“Why the Symphony of Smells, of course! It’s quite a treasure, you know. It was made by a French doctor many years ago. A scientist by training. But he was a great lover of the arts.”

Before we could thank her for the gift, the Golden Lady, she said she had a proposition for us. Could she take us to the dinner to discuss it?

Since we had never been to a restaurant before, her offer was very exciting and my brother eagerly accepted it. I, however, did not want to go. I had no real reason to be suspicious—and yet, as soon as I heard her speak, I knew she was not what she seemed.

Yes, as you may have guessed, the Golden Lady was the woman whose voice made me feel like as if I was drowning. I shiver now, just to think about it.

I tried to make the excuses, reminding my brother of all the chores we had to do. He kept saying our chores should wait. What was wrong with me? Here this nice woman was offering to take us to a real restaurant! And it went on like that. I think he was more than a little bit in love with her.

Finally, the Golden Lady she suggested that Luciano go to the dinner while I stayed behind. “If I can’t have both brothers, can’t I at least have one?” she asked, as if she was the child and we were the toys in the toy store.

I could see that Luciano was nervous about being separated from me for the first time in our lives, but we were too much angry at each other to argue against the idea. My brother, he left without saying the good-bye.

I stayed up all the night waiting for Luciano, imagining all the terrible things that could happen to him. When he had not returned by the morning, I searched the roads, looking for the signs of an accident. Then I searched the circus grounds, thinking maybe he was hiding from me because of the anger.

My brother, he was nowhere.

When I found the Ringmaster inside his trailer he looked very surprised to see me, as if I were a ghost or I had just sprouted the antlers. But he recovered quickly and started barking the orders at me. It was almost time to go. What was I doing lollygagging around? When I tried to tell to him about Luciano being taken away, he said he was too busy to worry about my brother.

The Ringmaster, he always acted impatient like this, but he said something else which confused me. “Anyway, she seemed like such a nice lady,” he said under his breath. “I’m sure your brother won’t come to any harm.”

How would he know? I wondered. Had he met the Golden Lady?

As he spoke, I noticed him pick up something from the table. It was a pile of the cash and he played with it in a very nervous way. I was still young but I’d been around long enough to comprehend what meant the money.

Nowadays, it would be a very shocking thing to sell a pair of ten-year-old twins to a stranger. This was the circus. My brother and I, we were some carnival attractions, no better than the trained monkeys. I wasn’t very surprised that the Ringmaster would trade us for a few dollar bills. But I hated him for it.

“I’ll kill you!” I yelled, and then I ran away from the trailer—and from the circus—as fast I could.

The rest of my story it is seventy years long, but it is really very short.

I knew better than to go to the police. I was young and Italian and a carny—three strikes against me as far as the police would be concerned. Instead, I spent the years living on my own on the streets, searching for my brother, checking the back of every neck for that crescent-shaped birthmark. I never found so much as a single clue as to where was Luciano.

Except once.

A couple days after I fled from the circus, I hitchhiked to the next town where the circus had put up its tents. My plan was to murder the Ringmaster in his sleep. How I intended to do this I do not know—I had no weapons nor any experience as a murderer.

Whatever my plan was, I was too late. Where once the circus had been there was now nothing but the ash.

I wandered around the blackened fairgrounds in a daze. Some of the larger pieces of the rubble were still smoldering and the smoke hovered above. There was also a terrible odor in the air which at the time I thought was the smell of the rotten eggs but I now know was the smell of the sulfur.

I did not know exactly what had happened, but I was certain about one thing: the fire, it had been meant for me.

In the middle of all the ashes and the debris, I spied a crumpled piece of paper. I recognized the handwriting on it even from many feet away. It was a note from my brother, written in a code we had invented for the Symphony of Smells.

It said one word: “HELP.”

The note, it was like a knife inside my heart.

After the loss of my brother, the magic it no longer had any magic for me. Still, I had to make the living. So I performed in the parks and on the street corners—and on the trains when I could hop a ride with the hoboes.

Eventually, I graduated to the nightclubs and the theaters, and I believe I am a success as far as magicians go. I never socialized much, however-—no friend could ever take my brother’s place—and today I am an old hermit.

Yet I have never given up the hope of finding Luciano. Against all reason, I feel inside me that he is still alive.

One day, a few years ago, I was looking in a science magazine—the world of nature it has always interested me far more than the world of man—and I noticed an article about the synesthesia.

What most caught me was a reference to a prodigy child of the 1960s, a girl so talented at the violin that she came to be an international sensation. She claimed to see the colors when she played the music—a well-known form of the synesthesia—and she wrote a magnificent piece of the music called “The Rainbow Sonata” when she was only seven years old. At age nine she was kidnapped and never heard from again.

Another child with the synesthesia kidnapped! Just a coincidence? Perhaps. But it was the first clue I had found in seventy years. I had no choice but to investigate.

Mysteriously, all the newspaper stories about the violinist were missing from the libraries. At last, in a used bookstore in Alaska, I discovered an old magazine article that described the circumstance of her kidnapping. According to an usher at the concert hall where she had last performed, the violinist was seen talking to a woman shortly before her disappearance. The usher he said the woman was “dazzling.” She had the blond hair and the gold—

“Aaargh! It’s so annoying!”

Cass turned the notebook over and over in frustration, looking for more hidden pages.

“That’s it?” Max-Ernest asked.

“Yeah, it just ends there.”

“But we never found out what the terrible secret is.”

“I know. I think maybe he wrote more but he ripped it out. Look—” Cass opened the notebook flat and pointed to a broken seam, barely visible on the inside of the spine. “Like if he had to run away really quickly and he couldn’t take the whole notebook, the pages had to fit in his pocket.”

“You mean like if he heard someone coming or he smelled fire or something? I guess that’s possible,” said Max-Ernest. “Or else maybe he was killed, and the killer took the pages. Or—”

“Exactly,” Cass interrupted, grim. “You know who she is, right?”

“Who?” asked Max-Ernest.

“The Golden Lady. Couldn’t you tell? The Golden Lady is Ms. Mauvais.”

Max-Ernest shook his head. “No, she’s not. She can’t be—”

“Yeah, she is. Listen—” Cass flipped through the notebook. “She has a teeny waist, all that jewelry. She wears gloves.”

“It does
sound
like her,” agreed Max-Ernest. “But she’s not the Golden Lady. It wouldn’t make any sense.”

“What—why? Name one reason you think it’s not her.”

“OK. Here’s one reason. The lady in the story, at the circus, it was a really, really long time ago. If it was Ms. Mauvais, she would be like a hundred years old now. If she was even still alive. How ’bout that?”

Cass bit her lip. He had a point. Ms. Mauvais didn’t look anywhere near that old.

“Maybe if she was a vampire, then it could be her,” Max-Ernest suggested. “But that’s highly doubtful. Nobody thinks there are real vampires. Except for vampire bats—they’re real. And Count Dracula—he was real. But he wasn’t a real vampire. He was just a mean old guy. At least, that’s what people think. There’s no way to know for sure. He’s dead. I mean, unless he really was a—”

“OK, OK. Forget vampires. I agree, it’s not her. It wouldn’t make any sense,” said Cass. “So what do you think we should do?”

“I think we should get rid of the notebook as fast as we can, just like he said we should at the beginning,” said Max-Ernest.

“You mean stop the investigation? Don’t you even want to know what the secret is?”

“It’s too dangerous,” said Max-Ernest. “We’re only eleven. Personally, I don’t want to be kidnapped—just so we can know what happens at the end of a book.”

“That’s not the point,” said Cass heatedly. “Don’t you have any sense of honor? We owe it to Pietro to find out what happened. He was such a nice man—”

“We didn’t even know him!”

“I know—he didn’t really know anybody. That’s why if
we
don’t continue his investigation, who will?”

Max-Ernest didn’t have an answer.

“Besides,” Cass added, “it’s too late to back out. Maybe we don’t know who Ms. Mauvais is, but she definitely knows who we are.”

Cass and Max-Ernest emerged from behind the gym so lost in conversation that it took them several seconds to notice that the entire school yard was empty.

“I can’t believe it,” said Cass. “Finally they evacuate the school, and I wasn’t even there.”

“I think maybe it was a false alarm.” Max-Ernest nodded in the direction of the auditorium: kids and teachers had started streaming out.

Amber walked toward them, her Smoochie-of-the-week dangling from her neck.

“Where were you?” she asked. “You missed the assembly!”

Amber, who aside from being the nicest girl in school was also the chattiest (if she wasn’t so nice, you might have said she was the most gossipy), told them the news: Benjamin Blake was missing. That was why the police and fire department had been there.

Amber explained that Benjamin had been dropped off at school that morning, but he’d never gone to class. Nobody had seen him leave; nobody had picked him up. He didn’t have a hall pass or a trip slip or a doctor’s excuse or even a note from his parents. Any student who had seen Benjamin or who had any idea as to his whereabouts was supposed to tell Mrs. Johnson immediately, so the police could be alerted.

“I can’t believe you didn’t know,” said Amber when she finished her summary of events. “I thought you loved emergencies, Cass.”

“I don’t love them,” said Cass irritably. “I just like to be prepared. Actually, that’s what we were doing just now. Preparing for an emergency.”

“We’re collaborators,” said Max-Ernest.

Which made Cass want to throttle him.

“Oh, well, I think it’s so great you two are friends,” said Amber.

Which made Cass want to throttle her.

“By the way, I’m almost done with this,” Amber added, holding up her Smoochie. “It’s Cotton Candy. Do you want it, Cass?”

“Um, sure. Thanks, Amber,” said Cass automatically.

Which made her want to throttle herself.

“It was my hundredth Smoochie,” Amber boasted, as she handed it over. “They gave me this when I bought it.” She gestured to the front of her T shirt which said:

I’VE SMOOCHED A HUNDRED TIMES!

in glitter writing that sparkled in the sun. She twirled around; on the back the T-shirt said:

Honorary
Skelton Sister