Attack of the Spider Bots (15 page)

“It's unlocked!”

Mrs. Drummond's office was small compared to other rooms they'd seen in this house, but it was still bigger than any two rooms in Beamer's house. However, Mrs. Drummond was strictly low tech. Nothing resembling a computer, fax machine, copier, or printer was in sight. Both her typewriter and her phone were clearly BPC (Before Personal Computing). Beamer wondered if the electricity was also antique, but the lights worked. Of course, that might have been because the lamps were also antique. Anyway, there was enough light for them to do the grunt work of searching through the filing cabinets and the boxes of records stacked in the large closet. At least there were no cobwebs to worry about — just paper, lots of paper.

Eventually, Scilla's bird-like voice echoed from the closet. “Hey y'all, I think I found somethin'.” They found her sitting spread-eagled on the closet floor almost buried in large envelopes. “I don't know what they are, but they have a lot of big numbers on them,” she said as she handed an envelope up to Ghoulie.

Ghoulie flipped through the pages and said, “Stock certificates — these are stock certificates!”

“What's that?” Jack asked.

“Well, here's the name of a railroad company,” Ghoulie said, pointing to the heading. “And this number tells how much stock he has in the company — ”

“What's stock?” asked Scilla.

“I'm not sure, except that my dad has lots of them,” said Ghoulie. “It has something to do with how many pieces of a company you own.”

“How do you own a
piece
of a company?” asked Jack.

“I think I get it,” chimed in Beamer. “It's like if we all chipped in to buy a box of firecrackers. We'd each own part of the box load, assuming we all put in the same amount of money, that is.”

“I think these numbers say how much Mr. Parker's stock is worth,” said Ghoulie, his face all scrunched up figuring.

“Wait a minute,” Beamer said, pointing to the upper right hand of the page, “This says 1962. That's prehistoric!

“You're right,” Ghoulie said with a shrug. “For all we know, he could have sold them all off by now. Do any of those envelopes have a more recent date?” he asked Scilla.

She rummaged through them quickly and finally said, “Sorry.” Getting ready to stand up, she plopped the stack of envelopes on the floor creating a cloud of dust that made them all sneeze.

“Then look around,” Ghoulie said, “and see if you can find more of these — some with less dust on them.” They scattered, looking for anything that had to do with stock, or a railroad company, or money in general. Beamer finally made his way to Mrs. Drummond's desk. He opened one drawer, then another, and then spotted something on top of the desk. Things on the desk were very neatly arranged. But just edging out the side of a folder was a piece of paper with the name of the railroad. He opened the folder and stared. “Hey guys, I got it!”

The others crowded around him, staring at the report. Scilla started counting the number of zeroes then the number of numbers before the zeroes. Ghoulie snatched it from her hand. “Hey!” she protested.

“Uh . . . guys,” Ghoulie said as he took a deep gulp. “This is way beyond millions!”

“And look at this!” Scilla said, holding up a ledger they had knocked onto the floor when they were scrambling for the stock report. She flipped it open to where her thumb was holding a place. “It's the household budget, but it doesn't look anything like my grandma's budget.”

“Beamer's eyes grew even bigger. “Since when does anyone need $50,000 for a month's worth of groceries?”

“So that's it then,” Scilla said in hushed amazement. “She — or they — want his millions!”

“Sure looks that way,” said Beamer. “Come on, let's get out of here.”

Suddenly they heard a key in the lock. Ghoulie hurriedly tucked the report back into the folder as the door opened.

19

Triple Trouble

“I told my sisters they should have called the police on you the first time!”

“Holy tamole! There are three of them!” Scilla said with a gasp.

It was another Mrs. Drummond! This Mrs. Drummond, though, walked with a cane.

“Triplets!” Beamer echoed her. “Run for it!” he cried as he ran for the bathroom door. Before Mrs. Drummond the third could figure out what they were doing, they were through the bathroom and into the hallway behind her.

“Stop, you children, or I'll call the police!” she cried out.

“No you won't,” Beamer yelled back at her, “unless you want the police to see what you've been doing with Mr. Parker's money.”

She pulled up short with a look of uncertainty.

Then she clenched her jaw and went to the nearest wall communicator. “Security! Security!” she said into the wall, “Intruder alert! Close down all exits. Apprehend four children now in the main hallway.”

“Hurry!” cried Beamer. Abandoning any attempt at secrecy, they galloped up the steps like a herd of goats. In the background, Beamer heard mechanical voices on communicators relaying orders for intercepting them in this hallway or that one. More alarms went off as they rushed past cameras and sensors they didn't bother to mask. Finally they reached the attic. They saw lights sweeping the grounds outside the windows. Not wanting to squeeze back through the vent, Beamer unlocked one of the attic windows and removed the screen. They poured out onto the roof to find lights sweeping up there too.

“Watch out!” cried Beamer as a searchlight swept toward them. Scilla and Ghoulie ducked behind a chimney while Jack and Beamer slid to the other side of the roof, hanging on to the ridgeline for dear life.

That's the way things went for awhile — ducking between roof lines and behind chimneys — until they reached the big tree. Not surprisingly, the house security system did not expect intruders to be exiting along a passage through the trees. Few lights swept the trees.

Did Solomon Parker know that a “treeway” led to his house? Why would anyone make all these passages? Did they go up to
every house or just some of them and why? How many mysteries
could one street have?

When they finally made it to the tree across the street, they gave a collective sigh big enough to bring snow down on their heads. They stood there at the intersection of several branches, gasping for air and looking like ice cream sundaes.

Beamer showed his dad the folder they had found, while Ghoulie and Scilla looked on in hushed excitement. Jack had already headed back to wherever he was living, afraid that Beamer's mom would turn him back in to Social Services. As Beamer expected, he had to take a pretty good tongue-lashing, not only for being late to dinner but for breaking into someone's house.

“But — ” Beamer started to say several times. He wondered what it would be like being grounded until he was thirty.

“No, get it into your head,” Mr. MacIntyre said with his finger about to poke a hole in Beamer's sinuses. “Something like this could put you in juvenile hall!” Finally his father's eyes turned back to the paper. “But I see your point. We'll have to get this to a lawyer right away.”

“What about Ghoulie's mom?” Beamer asked, still breathless with excitement. “She's a lawyer.”

“Yes,” said Ghoulie, “a pretty good one too.”

“We can begin with her, anyway,” said Beamer's mom. “Now if you all wouldn't mind, it's time for Beamer to go to bed . . . without his dinner.” Beamer groaned and headed for the stairs while the other kids made a swift exit.

And so the legal machine started to grind, as Beamer's dad put it. Exactly how a machine with no gears and bolts or other metal parts ground anything, Beamer had no idea.

The full story came out piece by piece. Just as Beamer expected, Solomon's shares in the railroad had grown until, for all practical purposes, he owned a railroad company. But since he had never answered mail or messages or telegrams from the company, the railroad had gone on without him. Mrs. Drummond had kept the truth from him while collecting the share in the profits the company regularly sent to Mr. Parker. Right away, Mrs. Drummond accused the Star-Fighters of breaking and entering. Nobody made them go to jail just yet, but there was the possibility that, if she won her case, they just might. Wearing an orange jumpsuit and hammering rocks the rest of his life didn't sound like a great career move to Beamer.

Mrs. Drummond had most of Solomon's money firmly in her hands and could afford to pay bogus doctors to declare that he was wacky and high-priced lawyers to help her handle the stocks. Things were looking bad for both Solomon Parker and the Star-Fighters.

Then Old Lady Parker got wind of what was happening to her brother. She had little love for Solomon but tremendous loyalty for the family name. She wasn't going to let anyone swindle a Parker. Like a force of nature, she blew into the halls of justice and got a judge to freeze her brother's accounts. That meant Mrs. Drummond could no longer use his money. Finally, with Mrs. Drummond's high-priced lawyers no longer blocking the way, evidence began stacking up against her and her sisters.

Yep, all of Mrs. Drummond's claims about Mr. Parker's sanity and about her right to control his money were finally overturned. At the same time, her breaking and entering charges against the Star-Fighters were also dismissed, and Beamer no longer had to worry about how he would look wearing a bright orange suit.

On the day they heard the news, Scilla started singing “Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead” until the boys and, eventually, Beamer's mom and dad joined in. It was like having Christmas before Christmas, except that the good news was the only present. They drank hot cider and eggnog and munched on Dr. Mac's Christmas cookies until way past bedtime. It was too bad Jack couldn't be with them, but he wasn't about to drop in where adults were hanging around. He'd visited the tree ship a couple times since the break-in, and each time they'd told him the latest about the Parker case, but they had no way of contacting him on their own. Then, like a dragon stripped of her treasure hoard and with only one fiery breath left, Mrs. Drummond hurled her last fireball! She had the tree ship condemned!

The Star-Fighters never saw it coming. When the news arrived two days after their little celebration, Beamer felt like he'd been hit by a nuclear shock wave. When he called to tell Ghoulie and Scilla the bad news, they had the same reaction. They were all tongue-tied, unable to speak.

“Can she really do that?” Scilla asked as she crab-walked up a large tree branch toward the tree ship later that day.

“Apparently so,” Beamer said gloomily. “Dad called up the officials right away and argued with them about it. ‘It's just a kids' tree house,' they said. Dad told them how he and Mom had reinforced the tree house to make it safe, but they said safety wasn't the problem. It was just higher in the tree than city building regulations allowed and had to be torn down.”

“Maybe we could take it apart and put it back together lower down in the tree,” Ghoulie said with a hopeful shrug as he came out of the tree ship.

“It won't fit anyplace lower,” Scilla said, shaking her head.

“How do you know that?” Beamer grumbled to her.

“Hey, I know this tree better than anybody,” Scilla said with a smug look. “I'd been playing in this tree long before Beamer even moved into the neighborhood. Besides,” she went on in a more mysterious tone, “what would happen to the . . . oh, you know what I mean . . . if we tried to move or rebuild the tree ship?”

“Oh, I never even thought about that,” Beamer said, his eyes widening.

“What are you guys talking about?” Ghoulie snapped impatiently. Then it struck him, and his eyes got bigger too. “You mean our little . . . jumps into other worlds,” he said, not really knowing what to call it.

“Yeah,” Beamer muttered with a heavy sigh, “that little touch of the miraculous we haven't figured out yet.”