Annie's Adventures (5 page)

"What came over her?" Georgia asked.

"
You
did," Jackie said with rare venom.

"How do you mean?" Georgia was the picture of innocence.

"What do you imagine it must be like," Jackie said in a more even tone, "having Mommy and Daddy disappear—"

"But that happened to all of us," Rebecca objected on Georgia's behalf.

Jackie went on as though Rebecca hadn't spoken. "And then be the one who has the most pressure on her to get everything
right,
the most pressure to fix everything so the rest of us remain okay?"

"I can't do it!" Annie cried, running into the room and then out again, a crazed look in her eyes.

Georgia shrugged. "Annie wanted to be in charge and now she is. I don't see how any of that's my fault."

"Great," Jackie said. "You don't
see.
But what do you think will happen to the rest of us if Annie does give up? How long do you think it will be before everything falls apart and we get split up?"

"She has a point," Rebecca said.

"Yes, I do see that," Georgia said.

"Good." Jackie nodded. "Now, what are you going to do about it?"

"Lead an ambassadorial delegation?" Georgia suggested.

So that's what we did. With Georgia in the lead, we hunted through the house until we at last found Annie. She was sitting in Daddy's study. The lights were out in there, so we couldn't see her at first, but we knew she was there because we could hear her sobbing.

Durinda switched on the lights, illuminating the soothing golden-orange walls of the room, and there was Annie in Daddy's oversize blood-red leather chair, her forehead pressed down on the great big mahogany desk as though she might never lift it again.

"Annie?" Georgia took a few cautious steps forward. Okay, we pushed her. "I wanted to apologize. I'm not sorry I brought you the bills. After all, if we don't pay them, we'll have no lights, heat, or phone, and we'll starve. But I am sorry I brought them to you in such a nasty way."

It was a long speech for Georgia, who was more given to nasty snippets. It even sounded as though she were sincere.

Just then a carrier pigeon with a poor sense of how close it was to the nearest object smashed up against the window behind the desk. It was one of Daddy's friends, of course. Why else would it come to Daddy's study? When Daddy was at home, he was often visited by carrier pigeons.

Durinda opened the window and the pigeon hopped onto her finger.

"Check to see if there's a note attached to its leg," Jackie advised.

Durinda unfurled the tiny scroll she extracted from the silver tube attached to the pigeon's leg, but it was empty except for a single red letter that could have been an
M
or a
W
or even a funny
E
or a 3.

"What should I do?" Durinda asked.

"Send a note back." Jackie shrugged. "It's what Daddy always does."

But none of us had any idea what Daddy put in those notes.

We are all fine here
, Durinda wrote.
No need to worry.

"Shouldn't you be putting
SOS
in that instead?" Rebecca wondered.

"No, I shouldn't." Durinda let the pigeon go. "We want the world to think we're okay here, don't we?" Then she shut the window.

"We need you," Georgia went on softly to Annie, who had completely ignored the advent of the pigeon. "We can't do anything without you."

"It's true." Petal let out a slight sob. "Without you, we'd be orphans."

"We
are
orphans," Rebecca corrected, holding up her end of the testiness Georgia had dropped for the time being, "practically."

"Please, Annie," Georgia half begged, slitting open the envelope of one of the bills, "won't you just look at one of these little bills? I'd do it myself, but I can't make heads or tails of it. 'Minimum balance due,' 'total balance due'—how is a person to know which one to pay?"

Why, we wondered, hadn't our mother invented an automatic bill-paying system? We knew some people paid their bills by computers, but Mommy didn't wholly trust computers.

"And look," Marcia said, holding up a gray and white puffball. "Anthrax is here too, and I'm sure she'll sit at your feet for as long as you need her." Marcia held Anthrax up; we could all hear her purr.

Annie still hadn't spoken, but at the sound of Anthrax's purr, she forced her forehead off the desk and looked at us. Tears streaked her face. It was horrible to see Annie looking like that.

Angrily, she wiped the tears from her cheeks. Then, with a weary sigh, as though she were the oldest person in the world and not just in this house, she held out her hand.

We wondered, did she want us to hand her the cat?

But she snapped her fingers and then pointed at the bill in Georgia's hands. "Let me see it," she commanded. "I can at least look."

Now that Georgia had what we had wanted, she looked hesitant. Perhaps she was worried that when Annie looked at the bill, she'd have another breakdown and run screaming into another room.

But at last, with a tiptoeing step followed by a hasty retreat, Georgia deposited the bill into Annie's hand.

Annie studied it for a moment without speaking, and we studied Annie.

"I think I'll ride the car for a bit," Petal announced nervously.

Petal wasn't referring to the car in the garage. She was referring to the miniature pink convertible that had been one of our gifts on our sixth birthday. The rest of us had long since outgrown it. Not Petal, though. She still liked to tool around in it whenever she was nervous about something.

"Fine," Annie said, waving her away. She was still thinking, studying the bill. Then a smile broke across her face.

"This is easy!" she said. "If we don't want to pay it all, the minimum balance is the least amount we can pay without getting in trouble. But look at this rate here. If we don't pay the entire balance, they want 19.4 percent interest—that's usury! They're crooks!"

None of the rest of us knew what usury was, but from the look on Annie's face, we could tell it wasn't anything good.

"But how do we know if we can afford to pay it all?" Durinda asked. "How can we pay any of the bills Georgia delivered?"

"
I
didn't make the bills come!" Georgia objected as Petal zipped in and out of the room in her car. "It was that wretched mailperson who—"

But Annie cut her off with another snap-point of her fingers. "Georgia." Snap-point. "You get me the rest of the bills and then hand them to me one at a time as I tell you to. Zinnia." Snap-point. "Get me a pen. Jackie." Snap-point. "You get me the calculator. Rebecca." Snap-point. "Go to Mommy and Daddy's bedroom and get the strongbox. Remember they always said to grab it in a fire? Well, I'll bet anything the money stuff is in there. Petal." Snap-point. "You keep riding your car."

We all ran to do her bidding. But for once our actions weren't grudging. We were happy to help, even Rebecca; happy to be told what to do.

When we returned with the things she'd asked for, Annie opened the strongbox and discovered a black leather ledger. It was the checkbook.

"This is exactly what I wanted!" she said. "Now, if only there's enough money in here to keep the bill collectors from the door for another month."

"What if we're broke?" Petal stopped her driving long enough to ask. "We'll have to pick pockets like those street urchins in that movie
Oliver!
Mommy had us watch."

"I'll bet I could pick a pocket or two," Rebecca said.

Annie opened the ledger very slowly, as though scared to see what was there. Well, who could blame her? What if we really were broke?

But then another huge smile spread across her face and she laughed out loud.

"What is it?" Georgia, now seated in a chair to the right of Annie's desk, asked anxiously. We were all worried our sister had gone nuts.

"We're rich!" Annie said.

"We're rich?" Zinnia was puzzled, as were we all. "What did Mommy and Daddy do for a living to make us all rich?"

"Don't you remember?" Annie said. "Daddy was a model and Mommy was a scientist."

"Huh. Really?" Zinnia asked. "I thought Mommy just cooked and cleaned and Daddy read books."

"Where do you think all these inventions came from?" Annie asked. "They were all Mommy's from, you know, being a scientist."

"Who knew," Durinda said with wonder, "that there could be so much money in modeling and science?"

"Durinda." One last snap-point. "You go prepare the biggest feast you've made yet." Annie rubbed her hands together, then picked up a pen. "I have a feeling that when I'm done here, I'll be very hungry."

And then Annie got to work.

First, she practiced Daddy's signature. At the end of fifteen minutes, her forgery wasn't perfect—it had too many stops and starts—but it was close enough that someone looking at it would probably only think the writer had a bad case of the sneezes that day.

Then Annie did as she'd said she would do, having Georgia hand her one bill at a time.

Every now and then, Petal would whiz through with a beep of her horn.

"This is easy," Annie said with glee, her fingers flying on the calculator. "I could do this all day."

"You're very good at it," Georgia said with real admiration, and then a light dawned in her eyes and
she
snap-pointed. "That's
it!
" she cried.

"What's it?" Annie briefly looked up from her work, then put her head down to the task once more, muttering, "I'll tell you one thing: there will be no more paying the minimum balance in
this
household. I refuse to give the usurers the satisfaction." She looked at Georgia, who was bouncing excitedly in her seat.

"That's
it!
" Georgia said again.

"What's it?" Annie said again.

"Your power!" Georgia said with glee. "Your power!
This
is your power!"

"The calculator?" Annie asked, confused.

"No!" Georgia said breathlessly. "Although I must admit, you are very good at it. But no, what I meant was, your power is to be smart!"

"But I've always been smart."

"Perhaps," Georgia conceded. "But not like this. Two weeks ago, you were happy enough watching cartoons on TV and dreaming up ways to short-sheet my bed. But now look at you! You're running a whole household! You're keeping us in line! You're using a calculator! You're forging signatures! You're balancing a checkbook!" She paused, as though hearing a drumroll. "
You're managing household finances!
"

Annie sat up a little straighter. "I suppose I am doing those things."

"You are," Georgia went on enthusiastically, "and you're doing them
splendidly.
This is your power: you're smarter—a
lot
smarter—than you once were. Why, if you weren't only seven, you'd be an adult!"

"I don't know what to say." Annie blushed. Then: "But what kind of lame-o power is that, being smarter than I once was?"

"It's a
fantastic
power," Georgia said. "It may not be glamorous or exotic, like seeing through walls or making people go invisible. But being as smart as an adult? That's the exact power we all need for you to have right now. It's the best power you could have."

"Well, when you put it like that. ...
Say.
" Annie's eyes lit up. "If I have my power, and it was here all along, do you think my
gift
might also be lying around the house and I don't even know it?"

"Like, where were you thinking of looking?" Georgia asked with interest, although some of the glimmer had left her eyes.

"I dunno." Annie shrugged. "Maybe it's behind that loose stone in the drawing room, where we found the original note?"

"Don't be daft," Georgia scoffed. "Do you really think it's going to be that easy? Every time we move that rock—
whoops!
—there's a gift?"

"Well." Annie shrugged again. "It would be nice if it worked that way."

Despite her scoffing, Georgia followed Annie to the drawing room and watched as Annie removed the stone from the wall. Georgia was right in that there was nothing you could call a gift in the darkness behind the stone, but Annie was right also: there was
something
there.