The Name of This Book Is Secret (2 page)

In fact, when you’re reading this book, it’s a good idea to forget everything you read as soon as you read it. If you’re one of those people who can read with their eyes closed, I urge you to do so. And, if you’re blind and reading this in braille, keep your hands off the page!

Why do I write under such awful circumstances? Wouldn’t it be better to scrap this book altogether and do something else?

Oh, I could give you all kinds of reasons.

I could tell you that I write this book so you will learn from the mistakes of others. I could tell you that, as dangerous as writing this book is, it would be even more dangerous not to write it.

But the real reason is nothing so glorious. It’s very simple.

I can’t keep a secret. Never could.

I hope you have better luck.

T
rue, I cannot tell you the year this story begins, or even the month. But I see no harm in telling you the day.

It was a Wednesday.

A humble, unremarkable day. The middle child in the weekday family. A Wednesday has to work hard to be noticed. Most people let each one pass without comment.

But not the heroine of our story. She is the kind of girl who notices things that others don’t.

Meet Cassandra.

Wednesday is her favorite day. She believes it’s just when you least expect something earth-shattering to happen that it does.

According to Greek myth, the original Cassandra was a princess of ancient Troy. She was very beautiful, and Apollo, god of the sun, fell in love with her.

When she rejected him, Apollo became so angry he placed a curse on her: he gave her the power to predict the future, but he also ensured that nobody would believe her predictions. Imagine knowing that your whole world was about to be destroyed by a tornado or typhoon, and then having nobody believe you when you told them. What misery!

Unlike the Cassandra of myth, the girl who figures in our story is not a prophet. She cannot see into the future. Nor has she been cursed by a god, at least not to my knowledge. But she resembles a prophet in that she is always predicting disaster. Earthquakes, hurricanes, plagues—she is an expert in all things terrible and she sees evidence of them everywhere.

That is why I am calling her Cassandra—or Cass, for short.

As you know, I cannot describe Cass in detail. But this much I will tell you: from the outside, Cass looks like a typical eleven-year-old. Her major distinguishing feature is that she has rather large, pointy ears. And before you tell me that I shouldn’t have told you about the ears, let me explain that she almost always covers her ears with her hair or with a hat. So chances are you will never see them.

While she may look like other girls, Cass is in other respects a very un-average sort of person. She doesn’t play games involving fortune-telling or jump rope or strings of any kind. She doesn’t even watch television very often. She doesn’t own a single pair of soft suede boots lined with fleece. She wouldn’t even want a pair, unless they were waterproof and could protect her in a snowstorm.

As you can tell, Cass is very practical; she has no time for trivial matters.

Her motto:
Be Prepared.

Her mission: to make sure that she and her friends and family survive all the disasters that befall them.

Cass is a
survivalist.

These are things Cass carries in her backpack every day:

Flashlight

Compass

Silver Mylar space blanket
—surprisingly warm if you haven’t tried one; also has useful reflective properties

Box of juice
—usually grape, doubles as ink in a pinch

Bubble gum
—for its sticking value, and because chewing helps her concentrate

Cass’s patented “super-chip” trail mix
—chocolate chips, peanut-butter chips, banana chips, potato chips (and no raisins, ever!)

Topographic maps
—of all the closest desert and mountain areas, as well as of Micronesia and the Galápagos Islands

Rope

Tool kit

First-aid kit

Dust mask

Extra pair of socks and shoes
—in case of flash floods and other wet conditions

Matches
—technically not allowed at school

Plastic knife
—because a jackknife is
really
not allowed

Schoolbooks and homework
—when she remembers, which is not very often (she keeps forgetting to put schoolwork on her supplies checklist)

On the evidence of the items in her backpack, you might guess that Cass had led a very adventurous life. But you would be wrong. The truth is, up until the time this story begins, none of the disasters she predicted had befallen her. There’d been no earthquakes at school—none strong enough to shatter a window, anyway. The mildew in her mother’s shower turned out to be just that—not the killer mold Cass predicted. And that child spinning around on the grass did not have mad cow disease—he was just having a good time.

Cass didn’t exactly mind that her predictions hadn’t come true. After all, she didn’t
wish
for disaster. But she couldn’t help wishing people took her concerns more seriously.

Instead, everyone was always reminding her about the boy who cried wolf. Naturally,
they
took that story to mean the boy shouldn’t have cried wolf when there weren’t any. But Cass knew the true moral of the story: that the boy was right, there really
were
wolves around, and they’d get you in the end if you didn’t watch out.

Better to cry wolf over and over than never to cry wolf at all.

Of all the people in the world, only two paid attention to Cass’s predictions: Grandpa Larry and Grandpa Wayne.

Larry and Wayne weren’t Cass’s original, biological grandfathers. They were her
substitute
grandfathers. Larry had been Cass’s mother’s history teacher in high school, and they’d remained friends ever since. Since neither of Cass’s original grandfathers were around, Cass’s mother asked Larry and Wayne to fill in.

Larry and Wayne lived around the corner from Cass in an old abandoned fire station. The bottom floor, where the fire engines had been kept, they had converted to an antiques store and warehouse. Their living quarters were upstairs, where in the old days the firemen had slept between fires.

Every Wednesday after school, Cass was supposed to work in their shop until her mother called to say dinner was ready. But, in truth, very little work ever got done at the fire station.

“You’re just in time for tea,” Grandpa Larry would say whenever she visited.

Grandpa Larry wasn’t British, but he’d spent time in England when he was in the army and he’d developed a serious tea habit. Cass thought Larry’s elaborate tea rituals were a little silly, but she loved the cookies Larry made (he called them “biscuits”) and the stories he told while their tea was brewing. By now, Cass suspected that most of his stories were exaggerated, if not entirely made up, but they always included useful information—like how to put up a tent in a sandstorm or how to milk a camel.

On the particular Wednesday that this story begins, Larry was showing Cass how to make a compass by placing a cork in a bowl of water.
^*
The compass was almost complete, and the cork just about to point north, when her grandfathers’ basset hound, Sebastian, started barking so noisily that the water shook out of the edge of the bowl.

Sebastian was blind, and now that he was growing old he was very nearly deaf as well. But he had the keenest sense of smell in town—everyone called him “Sebastian, the Seeing-Nose Dog”—and he always knew when visitors were about to enter the shop.

“Fire drill!” called Grandpa Wayne from down below, which was their code for when a customer had arrived.

“Guess the compass will have to wait,” grumbled Grandpa Larry. “Now get down. Smoke rises, so the best way to keep breathing is to stay low to the ground.”

He and Cass crouched down and pulled their shirts over their noses, as if the room were filling with smoke. Larry pointed to the station’s old brass fire pole: “Ladies first.”

Cass eagerly grabbed the pole and stepped out into the opening in the floor.

“Wait,” said Larry. “Promise not to tell your mother?”

“Promise,” said Cass, already starting to slide.

Despite the fact that it was their job, Cass’s grandfathers couldn’t bear to sell anything; they loved all their things too much.

As a result, their store was crammed so tight it was like a huge maze with walls of furniture. Every surface was covered with stuff they’d collected—from old clown paintings to mechanical monkeys to broken typewriters to things you couldn’t describe if you tried.

By the time Larry and Cass had navigated their way through, the front door was opening to reveal a short pair of legs staggering under the weight of an enormous cardboard box.

As soon as he saw the box, Larry rushed to the doorway and threw his arms across it, barring the way.

“No, no, no! Bad Gloria!” he said sternly, as if he were addressing a dog and not a person under a box. “I told you last time, no more things. Look around. We’re stuffed to the gills.”

“At least let me put this down for a minute,” complained the voice of the unseen woman.

Taking pity on her, Larry grabbed hold of the box and placed it on the threshold. A small round woman in a bright yellow suit scowled at him. This was Gloria Fortune.

“Don’t you even want to hear where it comes from?” she asked, still red-faced and breathing hard under her tall beehive hairdo. “Such fascinating things... Well, never mind!” she said brightly. “Is there a Dumpster in back?”

Larry almost choked. “No! I mean, yes, there’s a Dumpster, but...you’re not...you wouldn’t... throw the box away?” he asked, as if Gloria were threatening murder.

Gloria smiled slyly as she twisted a curl of hair that had sprung loose. “Sorry, Larry. You’re my last resort.
I
certainly don’t have any room.”

Larry hesitated. “In that case—why don’t you come inside for a cup of tea, and I’ll just take a peek, before you do anything rash—”

Gloria grinned victoriously. “You won’t regret it,” she said, entering the store.

Sheepishly, Larry picked up the box and followed her back inside.

“Sorry,” he whispered to Cass. “This should only take a second, er, minute, er, five, er, ten...twenty minutes at the most....”

Gloria, as Cass learned over her third—or was it her fourth?—cup of tea, was a real estate agent, a “probate specialist,” meaning that she sold houses after their owners passed away. She was, in effect, a real estate agent for the dead.

Gloria loved to gossip, and Larry was always ready to listen to ghoulish tales about her dead clients. (Wayne, who was a retired auto mechanic, always left to go fix something when Gloria was around.) As for the box of stuff she had just brought, it came from the home of a “strange and reclusive man—some kind of magician or something. What I call a real old coot,” Gloria said.

“Watch it, Gloria,” said Grandpa Larry. “Some of us are pretty cootish ourselves!”

The magician, Gloria continued obliviously, had died very suddenly several months earlier in a kitchen fire, the source of which was never determined. He had no known relations or survivors. “Not a single friend left, poor man.”

Because the magician’s house was so “off the beaten path” his death might never have been discovered had not his gardener investigated the terrible smell emanating from the kitchen.

Cass nodded knowingly at this bit of information. “The smell of decomposing flesh can be very strong,” she said, trying to show she was familiar with cases of this kind (although, I hasten to point out, her knowledge of corpses was not yet firsthand).

“True,” sniffed Gloria. “But actually what the gardener was smelling was something else. Sulfurous, he described it. Like
huevos podridos.
”

“That means ‘rotten eggs’ in Spanish,” said Cass, who was studying the language at school.