The Hidden Boy Read online

  “Maybe she’s visiting someone.”

  “Let’s take a closer look,” said Phoebe.

  Bea put the empty canteen into the backpack, being careful not to let Nails escape. They crossed the path and crept in among the trees. As they got closer they could see a man sitting on one of the oak tree’s enormous roots. He had a wedge-shaped head and large dark eyes. His thinning hair was slicked across the top of his head. He reminded Bea of the grasshopper who had selected Mr. Miller to be their host. His head was nodding with sleep, but every now and then he jerked himself awake and peered blearily about.

  “We need to distract him somehow,” whispered Phoebe.

  “It looks like he’ll fall asleep before long,” said Bea.

  “That could take forever. She might come out again anytime.”

  An idea came to Bea, and she smiled to herself. She began to hum very quietly, the way she had done to calm the bees before taking their honey. Phoebe gave her a puzzled look, but Bea put her finger to her lips and kept humming. The doorman’s head nodded again. This time his chin settled firmly on his chest, and within a short time he had begun to snore.

  “How did you do that?” asked Phoebe, stifling a yawn herself.

  “I’m not sure,” whispered Bea. “I tried to make the sound bees make when they don’t sense any danger. Maybe we all know that sound in the back of our minds, without realizing it.”

  “I don’t remember ever seeing a bee till we got here,” said Phoebe.

  “We need to find a way in,” said Bea. “We can’t go through the front door in case we meet her coming out.”

  “We can climb up the far side and look in through the windows.”

  Bea snorted with laughter. She put her hand over her mouth and checked on the doorman. He was still fast asleep. “Like the neighborhood watch,” she whispered, but Phoebe was already walking silently toward the tree. She stooped to pick a bright yellow flower, and creeping straight up to the sleeping doorman she tucked it gently behind his ear. Bea held her breath, but the man slept on.

  The mighty roots of the oak tree swept up from the forest floor, making the first part of the climb easy. Bea and Phoebe had removed their shoes to make their progress quieter. Bea’s stomach tightened with fear when she thought of the Ledbetter woman’s menacing stare. What if the old woman looked out of one of the glassless windows just as they reached it?

  There was a small round opening just below a branch, and she pointed silently to it. Phoebe nodded and ran up the steep trunk as though it were horizontal, waiting just below the window level for Bea to catch up.

  They reached the window and peered cautiously inside. The tree was indeed completely hollow. A circular floor had been built about halfway up the inside of the trunk, some distance below the high window. There was a hole in the center of the floor. The top of a ladder could be seen poking up through it. Nine chairs were arranged in a circle around the walls of the chamber. All of them were occupied. The Ledbetter woman stood by the top of the ladder with her hands on her hips, glaring at the person sitting in the chair in front of her. As Bea’s eyes got used to the dimness she saw with a start that the occupant of the chair was none other than Granny Delphine.

  “Then you must be Maize Ledbetter,” her grandmother was saying. “I’ve heard all about you.”

  “You’ll have heard a pack of lies, then,” said the woman in her scratchy voice. “And you’re sitting in my chair.”

  “Mrs. Walker arrived unexpectedly,” said a man with a wispy beard from the far side of the chamber. “She had an urgent matter to put before us.”

  Bea looked at Phoebe and silently mouthed the word Quorum. Phoebe nodded.

  “In any case we weren’t expecting you…,” began a beefy man who sat beside Granny Delphine. He looked as though he could wrestle a bull with one hand while enjoying a pint of turpentine with the other, but he sounded nervous speaking to the flat-faced woman.

  Maize Ledbetter snorted. “Nine clan leaders are entitled to sit in the Quorum, no more. I turns up when I sees fit. Between times my chair stays empty. Newcomers always think their little complaints is urgent.” She turned back to Granny Delphine. “What is it, then—Millers’ beds got fleas? Lost your post office book?”

  “I lost my grandson,” said Granny Delphine, making no move to vacate Maize Ledbetter’s chair. “Perhaps you have a suggestion as to where we might find him. I believe you’ve lived here longer than anyone.”

  The other woman started slightly at the mention of the lost grandson; then her expression became blank, as though a shutter had rolled down over her thoughts. “I’ve seen ’em all arrive,” she said at length. “Arguing, complaining, crying for their lost hamsters. Never seen a bunch careless enough to lose a kid, mind you, not in all these years. A boy, you said?”

  “A seven-year-old boy named Theo,” said Granny Delphine. “Some of the council members seem to think you might know something about it.”

  Bea could tell which were the council members who had expressed this opinion. They cleared their throats and looked at the floor. They checked their fingernails for dirt. They directed their eyes anywhere but at Maize Ledbetter.

  “And why do they think that?” said Maize. There was quiet menace in her tone. “They been complaining about nightmares again?”

  “They say that members of your clan invade people’s dreams while they sleep,” said Granny Delphine. She stood up now, and fixed the other woman with a level stare. “And that in those dreams you say only one thing: ‘Give us the Hidden Boy.’”

  The two women stood motionless, face-to-face. Bea knew well the mesmerizing effect of her grandmother’s stare, magnified as it was by her mysterious spectacles. She had been on the receiving end of Maize Ledbetter’s cold glare as well. She thought about a mongoose facing a rattlesnake, and she watched with fascination to see which one would outstare the other.

  “They all has nightmares,” said Maize Ledbetter, “because of guilt. They keep us on a rock in the middle of a lake. Ain’t nothing growing there. We got to slave for our keep. When that ain’t enough we got to take what we need. No wonder they don’t sleep easy.”

  “You chose to live on that island,” said the man with the wispy beard, “and there were plenty of fruit trees on it once. You cut them all down.”

  “Who is the Hidden Boy?” interrupted Granny Delphine.

  “You tell me,” said Maize. She folded her arms. Neither woman had averted her gaze.

  “My missing grandson can be heard, but not seen,” said Granny Delphine. “Let’s just suppose he is the Hidden Boy. What would you want with him?”

  “Now, that’s a different matter. If your boy do turn up, he must come to us. We got fostering rights.”

  “Fostering rights?” echoed Granny Delphine.

  “Ask your new friends,” said Maize Ledbetter. She looked away for a moment as she indicated the rest of the Quorum, and Bea felt that her grandmother had won a small victory.

  Wispy Beard cleared his throat. “The eldest son of every newly arrived group is fostered to one of the nine clans for a year. It helps to forge ties and avoid…er…conflict.”

  “Tell her whose turn it is, Morganfield,” said Maize.

  “I can guess,” said Granny Delphine, “but when we do find Theo you may be sure you won’t be getting your hands on him.”

  Maize Ledbetter laughed. It was a dry croak that you might expect to hear from a crow with laryngitis. “You don’t have a choice,” she said.

  “She’s right, I’m afraid,” said Mr. Morganfield. “It’s always been the rule, since Bell Hoot was founded.”

  “Rules are made to be broken,” said Granny Delphine. Bea almost snorted. It was a notion that her grandmother had never allowed anyone else in the family to get away with.

  “Not those that were given to us by Arkadi himself,” said Mr. Morganfield.

  Clinging to the outside of the tree, Bea and Phoebe looked at each other in puzzlement. Surely they couldn�
��t be talking about the ice-cream mechanic who was hiding in the woods, whittling a meerkat from a stick?

  “You have just arrived,” Mr. Morganfield continued, “and I can understand that you are not familiar with the way things work here. Arkadi meant Bell Hoot to be a world that avoided the mistakes of the past. Every family that arrives here joins one of the nine clans. The Millers are part of the Morganfield clan, and so will you be, since they were chosen as your sponsors. As new arrivals your eldest male child must be fostered for one year to another clan, and it is the turn of the Ledbetters to take him in. It’s a finely tuned system, and it works. Every new family must abide by the rules. No exceptions.”

  A man stood up who had been sitting directly below the window through which the two girls were eavesdropping. They could see only his bald crown, fringed with gray hair. It looked like an ostrich egg in an untidy nest. The man spoke quietly. “My niece, Tilly Horton, died this morning.” There was a shocked silence in the circular chamber. “She hadn’t slept nor eaten for six months. There weren’t nothing we could do for her. My sister’s heart is torn asunder with grief.” Bea felt the hair rising on the back of her neck.

  “There’s others in Bell Hoot that are fading fast,” the man went on. “Little Erika Spivey, Jim Hooker, the Miller girl and more.” The man raised a quivering finger and pointed at Maize Ledbetter. “It was her clan that killed my niece, sure as if they’d stuck a knife in her. I move that all rights be denied the Ledbetter clan. No fostering rights. No work. No handouts. Let them starve till they learn to act civilized.”

  Maize Ledbetter sneered at the speaker. It was an ugly expression on an already unpleasant face. “See what I mean? They gets a bellyache or a bad dream and we gets the blame.” She turned to Granny Delphine. “We’ll get the boy. You’ll see. Ledbetters don’t roll over for nobody.”

  She turned without another word and descended the ladder. Bea and Phoebe flattened themselves against the bark like geckos, so they did not see which way the Ledbetter woman went.

  Maize

  The meeting of the Quorum continued inside the great oak tree. Granny Delphine related Theo’s description of his surroundings as Bea had told it to her, but none of the clan leaders could match it to any place they knew of. An agreement was reached that each clan would lend someone to help in the search. The discussion moved on to other topics, but talk of pest control and the price of turnips held no interest for Bea and Phoebe.

  They crept quietly down the tree trunk and sat between two of the great roots, on the opposite side to the door. Bea frowned at the thought of Maize Ledbetter’s determination to foster Theo for a year. It was unimaginable that once they finally found Theo they would have to hand him over to a surly gang of unwashed burglars.

  They heard voices from the far side of the tree as the clan heads left the Quorum and separated on the pathway. They could hear Granny Delphine stopping awhile to speak to the doorman. When they judged she had gone they stood up to leave.

  Granny Delphine was standing on the other side of the root, her arms folded and a patient look on her face. “Are you quite ready?” she said.

  Bea nodded sheepishly and shouldered Theo’s backpack. Granny Delphine turned and began to march toward the path.

  “How did you know we were here?” asked Phoebe, half running to keep up.

  “I used my eyes,” said Granny Delphine.

  “I didn’t see you look up once,” said Phoebe.

  “I didn’t have to,” said Granny Delphine. “When you looked through the window the light dimmed by just the amount that two children’s heads would block, and the spiders and geckos on the far side of the chamber froze for a while, which meant someone was looking in their direction.”

  “But it could have been anyone,” said Bea.

  “Or a couple of monkeys,” added Phoebe.

  “I never heard of a monkey putting a flower behind the ear of a sleeping doorman,” said Granny Delphine.

  “Do you think anyone else knew we were there?” asked Bea.

  “All of them, I would say,” said Granny Delphine. “Mr. Morganfield has the hearing of a bat. They say he can hear grass growing on a stormy night, and your breathing would have been like two small hurricanes to him. Fred Horton would have felt through the soles of his feet the vibration as you climbed the trunk, and could probably tell your weight to the nearest ounce. You don’t get to be head of a clan without a thorough grasp of Mumbo Jumbo.”

  “What is Mumbo Jumbo?” asked Bea.

  “Your mother wouldn’t want me to tell you,” said Granny Delphine.

  “But it’s important, isn’t it? Especially…” Bea chose her words carefully. “Especially with Theo gone.”

  “It has never been so important,” agreed her grandmother. She looked at Bea with her owl eyes. “You’re the one who can find Theo, but then, you will know that from listening to our conversation last night.”

  “Sorry,” said Bea quietly.

  “Sorry? For what, girl? You have already taken the first step toward a basic grasp of Mumbo Jumbo.”

  “Eavesdropping is the first step?”

  Granny Delphine snorted. “Knowing what’s going on is the first step. Manners are no good to you if they stop up your eyes and ears.”

  “Doesn’t Mumbo Jumbo just mean nonsense?” asked Phoebe.

  “It does,” said Granny Delphine. “It was the Gummint who gave it that name, to try to weaken us with ridicule, but ridicule works only if you allow yourself to be offended. We adopted the term ourselves, and so it lost its teeth.” She stopped suddenly in the middle of the path. “What do you know?” she said.

  Bea looked about her, wondering what had surprised her grandmother. “What?” she said eventually.

  “That was a question,” said Granny Delphine. “What do you know?”

  “I know lots of things,” said Bea uncertainly.

  “I’m not asking the square root of sixty-four or the capital of Belgium,” said Granny Delphine. “What do you know right now? What are your senses telling you?”

  Bea closed her eyes. “We’re in a forest,” she said. “I can hear the leaves rustling, so there’s a breeze. There are lots of bees….” She felt a little foolish mentioning things that seemed so obvious.

  “Trees, breeze and bees,” said Granny Delphine. “It’s a start, but you’ve got a long way to go, child.” She began walking again. “There are twenty-two different flowers growing a stone’s throw from here. I’m not familiar with the Bell Hoot varieties, but there are five types of orchid, a kind of honeysuckle, something that might grow to resemble a melon, and two plants that eat insects, among others. One of those is trying to swallow a click beetle. I know that the doorman at the Quorum uses coconut butter on his hair and will be buying a new razor on Friday. That Ledbetter woman will send one of her clan to spy on the two of you wherever you go. It would be twenty-five past six if people used clocks here. It rained for three hours the night before we arrived in Bell Hoot.” She turned and looked at Bea through her owl spectacles. “And you climbed a birch tree to raid a beehive this morning. Why you and not Phoebe? I would have thought that was more her department.”

  Bea’s jaw dropped. It had always seemed that Granny Delphine had eyes in the back of her head, but how could she possibly know all these things?

  “You’re wondering how I could possibly know all these things,” said her grandmother. “It’s really very simple, but simple is not the same as easy. The meerkat in your backpack knows these things, because he pays attention to what his senses are telling him. All animals do, except for us. By the time we are thirteen we think we know what the world is about, so we stop paying attention.”

  “I think I can see how you would know about the flowers,” said Bea, “but what about the rest?”

  “The flowers announce themselves with perfume and color, of course. The sound of the click beetle is muffled, like he’s being squeezed, and the doorman’s hair smells of coconut. These are the
easy parts.”

  “How do you know he’ll buy a razor on Friday?” asked Bea.

  “There was a small square of tissue stuck to the corner of his jaw, where he had nicked himself with a blunt razor. At the Quorum meeting it was agreed to pay him his wages on Friday. When I told him this he seemed relieved, and stroked his stubble with his fingers. I’m not certain he’ll buy a razor with his pay, but I’d be happy to take a bet.”

  “What about the Ledbetter woman?”

  “Maize Ledbetter passed this way after leaving the Quorum. She pushed through those bushes—see how that twig is broken, and the footprint beneath it?—but it was less than five minutes ago. I know this because she disturbed the bird who nests in that bush. You can see her circling overhead, and she hasn’t returned to her nest yet.”

  “But Maize left the Quorum at least half an hour ago,” said Phoebe.

  “Precisely. That means she stayed nearby for some time after leaving. Since she already knew the kind of business the meeting would move on to, she must have stayed to eavesdrop on you two instead, but you didn’t say anything that would be useful to her.”

  “How do you know we didn’t?”

  “Because you don’t know where Theo is, and that’s the information she wants. She probably suspects we’ve hidden him deliberately, so she’ll send one of her grandchildren to shadow you. Once you know how to pay attention to the present, the future begins to come into sharper focus.”

  Bea shivered. “So even Maize Ledbetter knew we were there all along?”

  Granny Delphine gripped Bea’s elbow and stopped again in the path. “Maize Ledbetter is the oldest Pearlseed in Bell Hoot. It’s said she knows the exact moment an apple will fall from the tree before it has started to grow.” Her voice dropped to the softest whisper. “Maize was a student of Arkadi himself. He taught her everything she knows, and it was he who banished her to Bell Hoot.”

  “Who is Arkadi?” whispered Bea.

  “He was the founder of Mumbo Jumbo,” said Granny Delphine.

  Bea wondered if Granny Delphine already knew they had hidden an ice-cream mechanic named Arkadi in the hut near Cambio Falls. She tried to keep her voice casual. “Is he still alive?” she asked.