Winterhouse Page 4

  Elizabeth took a piece of candy, placed it in her mouth, and immediately—in the way a song melts into your thoughts even if you haven’t heard it in years—realized she had tasted it before. The sensation was so powerful, she felt overwhelmed. She began to chew quickly, studying the candy with her tongue.

  She couldn’t think of when she might have eaten this candy before, but the taste was as familiar as the feel of her blankets at night or the smell of rain in autumn in Drere. The strange thing, though, was that Aunt Purdy and Uncle Burlap never bought candy or had any in the house; Aunt Purdy often informed Elizabeth that candy rotted not only a girl’s teeth but also her brain, though Elizabeth suspected her aunt and uncle just didn’t want to spend money on anything as extravagant as candy. She couldn’t imagine she’d ever eaten Flurschen at the house in Drere.

  “I’ve had this before!” Elizabeth said, even as she considered if, on her list of “Favorite Candies,” “Flurschen” should go above or below “Rocky Road Bars,” something she’d had twice. She took one more piece of Flurschen, and then another. She kept trying to remember where she’d had it. “You make it here?”

  “Nestor Falls himself perfected the recipe!” Norbridge said. “After he’d been running Winterhouse successfully for a dozen or so years, he branched out into the candy-making business and, well, Flurschen was born. It’s famous all over the world!”

  “It’s delicious,” Elizabeth said. “Make that—delectable!” She stood chewing away as Norbridge reached into his breast pocket, pulled out the Winterhouse coin, and began running it across the back of his fingers in a quick little flip and skip.

  “You’re a magician, aren’t you?” Elizabeth said. “You know how to do tricks.”

  Norbridge said nothing. Without warning, he flicked the coin toward the ceiling, and before Elizabeth realized what was happening, a purple kerchief with silver trim was drifting downward from the very point where, it seemed, the coin had been a split second before.

  “How did you do that?” she asked in astonishment.

  “I know magic,” Norbridge answered as the kerchief settled over his waiting palm. “As you said.”

  “But that was a coin!”

  “You believe in magic, don’t you?” He leaned forward slightly. “Real magic?”

  Elizabeth was flustered by the question. The trick Norbridge had done was so startling she wasn’t sure she trusted her eyes. “Well, yes,” she said. “I believe in magic tricks.”

  Norbridge winked. A strange silence filled the hallway, and he looked away from Elizabeth and glanced down the long corridor as if listening for something. His face had a faraway look to it and, it seemed to Elizabeth, a touch of worry. She looked behind Norbridge. A placard on the wall there said LIBRARY and had an arrow pointing in the direction he was looking.

  “Is everything all right?” Elizabeth asked.

  A smile rose on Norbridge’s lips, and whatever had been troubling him disappeared. “All fine,” he said warmly. “Absolutely.”

  “The library is down that way?”

  “It is,” Norbridge said, “and because I can tell you like books and will want to visit, you’ll find our librarian eager to welcome you in the morning. Leona Springer is her name. The library opens at nine o’clock sharp and…” He glanced in the direction of the library, and the worried look seeped into his eyes again. He seemed to have lost his train of thought. “Yes, it…” He appeared flustered and he shook his head. “Yes, sorry, it opens in the morning.”

  “At nine o’clock, you said?”

  Norbridge nodded. “Yes, yes, of course!” And then he put a hand to his chin before spreading his arms wide and smiling. “The main thing I wanted to say was that while you’re here, I hope you’ll consider Winterhouse your home.” He glanced away, and then took a step toward Elizabeth. “But right now we need to get you to your room, young lady. I’ll send someone with a sandwich for you.”

  Elizabeth took one more piece of Flurschen and popped it into her mouth.

  “Mr. Falls!” someone called.

  A bellhop, a young man with flushed cheeks and a worried expression, had rounded the corner behind them and was looking to Norbridge.

  “Sampson?” Norbridge said.

  The young man eyed Elizabeth as if to indicate he wanted to choose his words carefully in the presence of a guest. “Please come right away, sir.”

  Norbridge turned to Elizabeth, slipped a ring of silver keys from his pocket, and handed one to her. “And into your room for the night, Elizabeth Somers,” he said.

  “Good night,” she said. “And thank you for the candy.” She looked to the bellhop and then back to Norbridge. “I hope everything’s all right.”

  “All is fine,” Norbridge said. He strode away and disappeared around the corner with the other man. Elizabeth thought she heard the bellhop say the word “library,” but she couldn’t be sure. She examined the key in her hand and then headed down the corridor.

  CHAPTER 7

  A VISIT TO THE LIBRARY—JUST PAST MIDNIGHT

  LAST

  LOST

  LOOT

  LOOK

  Room 213 was small and tidy, with a quilt-piled bed, a wide sofa, a cherrywood wardrobe, a television set, and best of all, a little desk with a Tiffany-shade lamp on it. The room was neater, cleaner, and smelled better than Aunt Purdy and Uncle Burlap’s house a million times over.

  “This definitely makes the ‘Top Ten Most Amazing Days of My Life,’” Elizabeth said aloud.

  She pulled back the curtain that hung over the window and saw the lake, gray-gleaming-silver in the dark night. Huge lampposts cast a pale light away from the hotel and to the edge of the lake. In the distance the massive mountain peaks stood like the shoulders of the earth.

  “Definitely in the top ten,” she repeated. She kept thinking back to the coin Norbridge had turned into a kerchief, and the things he had pointed out to her on their way to the candy kitchen, and the funny way he had of explaining everything. I wonder if every day here will be as interesting as this one, she reflected, though in the back of her mind she had a troubling thought that there must be some mistake—it just didn’t make any sense that she would be staying three weeks at such a wonderful place.

  She decided not to think about it for now.

  * * *

  After a bellhop came with her sandwich and she’d had her fill, Elizabeth plopped down on the couch with a book. The lamp on the desk provided the only light in her room, and she settled in for some reading. It was half an hour later when she thought she heard something in the hallway. The sound was faint and then it stopped abruptly, as though someone was standing just outside and maybe trying to put an ear against her door. Elizabeth tiptoed over and looked through the peephole, but saw nothing in the hallway. When she sat back down and resumed her reading she felt slightly uneasy. She told herself, though, that if anyone had been outside her door, it most likely had been a hotel worker doing some sort of midnight check.

  Five pages of reading later, she got a glass of water from the bathroom sink, and as she sat and drank she began to wonder what the Winterhouse library might look like. She imagined a modest little room with some shelves of books inside; and because she was restless, and because she felt the late hour might be a good chance to see the library without anyone else around, she dropped the silver door key into her pocket and slipped into the hallway.

  A quick trip to the library isn’t any big deal, she told herself.

  The photographs along the walls of the corridor captivated her—there were pictures of loggers beside enormous trees in summer forests, people in old-fashioned suits and dresses picnicking beside a lake, and plenty of pictures of what appeared to be guests at Winterhouse from decades before enjoying some sledding or skiing or skating. There were framed pictures up and down the hallway, and Elizabeth studied each of them. One of the photographs reminded her of Aunt Purdy, and she wondered how her aunt and uncle had spent the time since she’d last se
en them. It had been two nights earlier, just after she’d brushed her teeth before going to bed, that Elizabeth had decided to risk Aunt Purdy’s anger by asking her a question.

  “What is Winterhouse?” she’d asked, standing in the gloomy doorway of the “Telly Room,” her bare feet cold against the rugless floor. The house was always cold in winter. “I saw a brochure about it on the table.”

  “You shouldn’t have been sneaking around and reading things that don’t belong to you!” Aunt Purdy said, not looking up from where she sat on the enormous recliner she sprawled on for hours every evening. She had just finished watching her favorite television show, Amazing Animal Attacks, and Elizabeth was hoping to find her in a moderately good mood, though the fact was, she had been worrying less and less about her aunt’s tantrums lately. Uncle Burlap, who occupied his own recliner beside Aunt Purdy, was fast asleep, his head flopped back to make it easier for a wheezing snore to escape his mouth. He always claimed some issue with his adenoids accounted for his thunderous snoring, and both his noise and his whiny explanations irritated Aunt Purdy to no end.

  “I wasn’t sneaking around,” Elizabeth said. “The brochure was just sitting there.”

  “You have an answer for everything!” Aunt Purdy said. She cracked the knuckles of her bony fingers (for someone who sat in front of the television set so much, Aunt Purdy remained almost as thin as a Popsicle stick). Then she stuffed a handful of cheese puffs into her mouth and kept her eyes on her program. “Like your mother.”

  Elizabeth often wondered how Aunt Purdy even knew anything about her mother—Uncle Burlap was some sort of distant relative of Elizabeth’s father, and so it wasn’t exactly accurate to call him and Aunt Purdy “aunt and uncle”—but whenever Aunt Purdy wanted Elizabeth to be quiet, she drew some sort of comparison between her and her mother.

  “My mother probably had an answer for everything because she was smart,” Elizabeth said, and then added, quietly, “And she didn’t watch television all the time.”

  “It’s past your bedtime!” Aunt Purdy screeched. And then she lifted The Stick and glared menacingly at Elizabeth. Aunt Purdy hadn’t actually ever used The Stick for anything, but Elizabeth was still intimidated by it.

  “I just want to know what Winterhouse is!” she said.

  “It’s a place where you’ll stay while your uncle and I take a vacation we’ve been deserving for a long time,” Aunt Purdy said.

  “But it’s almost Christmas!” Elizabeth said, though she knew this would not go over well. “Why do I have to go somewhere? Can’t I stay here while you’re gone?”

  “If you keep pestering me, I’ll let the people at the hotel know you shouldn’t mix with any of the other kids!”

  “I just want to stay here!”

  “Go to bed!” Aunt Purdy yelled. “We’re not talking about this!” And she clicked to a new station with the remote, shuffled her skinny body in the chair, and settled in to watch her second-favorite show, Even Famous People Get Humiliated!

  “Someday I’ll leave here and never come back!” Elizabeth said as she headed for her room.

  “Won’t that be nice?” Aunt Purdy called after her. “Save us from buying more groceries!”

  And as Elizabeth retreated to her room she heard her aunt mutter, “Just like her mother,” and then smack Uncle Burlap with the rolled-up newspaper she kept by her side.

  “Hush up that snoring!” Aunt Purdy hissed.

  “Huh?” Uncle Burlap said. He always said “Huh?” when Aunt Purdy spoke to him; most of the time he went on to say nothing more.

  Elizabeth let these unpleasant thoughts drift off as she stood in the Winterhouse corridor on her way to the library. One final wisp of a memory came to her, though, about something she’d found two months before inside a book Aunt Purdy had left on the living room shelf. Elizabeth hadn’t intended to snoop, but the book—Three Months on an Iceberg—had looked interesting, and when she opened it to take a look, a photo had fallen out. The black-and-white picture was of a young boy, maybe ten years old, smiling and standing beside a merry-go-round. Elizabeth turned the picture over. Written there, in Aunt Purdy’s handwriting, were these words: “Since we lost you, I will never love another child again.” Elizabeth had returned the photograph to the book and the book to the shelf; she told herself one day she would work up the nerve to ask her aunt about it.

  Elizabeth stopped thinking about her aunt and uncle and followed the arrows on the walls. An unlit corridor that seemed to be a dead end lay ahead. Unlike the rest of the hallway on the floor, the lights here were turned off and there were no guestrooms to either side. A sign on the wall beside her read LIBRARY, and an arrow pointed forward. Elizabeth saw she was approaching two enormous wooden doors, though the corridor was so dark, they were hard to see, even as her eyes adjusted to the dimness.

  She came to a stop in front of the doors and tried to turn the handles on them, but both were locked. On either side of each door was a narrow strip of glass window, so that, by pressing her face up against one of them, she had a view of the library inside. It was too dark to see much of anything, but Elizabeth could tell the library was huge, much bigger than she had imagined, even though all she could make out were silhouettes and dark shadows. Still, the space seemed to stretch far into the distance and overhead.

  A light moved near an opposite wall of the library. Elizabeth peered into the darkness to see what it was. A flashlight was scanning across a shelf of books, and in its reflected light, Norbridge was studying the volumes before him. He held the flashlight with one hand and slid a book out of the shelf with another, and then he opened the book and flipped through a few of its pages before sliding it back where he’d found it. He repeated this with the next book, and then the next one and the next. Elizabeth watched him work his way down a line of books. And then Norbridge stood for a long moment before the shelf, just looking at it. He stroked his beard, examined a shelf behind him, and then his light disappeared.

  What is he doing? Elizabeth wondered. She waited to see if he would reappear, but after several moments she drew away from the window and hurried back to her room. As she was about to close the door behind her, she heard voices from down the hallway.

  “It’s not open at this hour, sir, and that’s all there is to it,” someone said. A bellhop, Sampson—the same one who had called Norbridge away earlier in the evening—was walking backwards and holding up his hands in protest as he spoke to someone still unseen. And then, when he came into view, Elizabeth saw that Sampson was talking to the man and the woman in black. She closed her door nearly all the way, keeping only the tiniest fraction of a sliver clear so she could see what was going to happen.

  “We are paying guests of this establishment,” the man in black said curtly, “and we want to visit the library. My wife is unable to sleep, and she is looking for a good book.”

  Elizabeth was puzzled—hadn’t they brought a crate full of books with them?

  “The doors are locked, sir,” Sampson said. “There’s nothing to be done about it.” He came to an abrupt halt, and the man and woman nearly crashed into him. Elizabeth held her breath as she watched.

  The woman in black pointed a finger in Sampson’s face. “Look here, young man,” she said, her voice a staccato hiss. “I insist on entering that library to find a book! Do you understand?”

  “I understand what you’d like to do, ma’am,” Sampson said. “But it’s impossible at this hour.”

  She stood fuming before him, searching for words. A throbbing silence seemed to fill the corridor, and no one spoke. The man in black flicked his head to one side and then the other before slowly twisting it to glare in the direction of Elizabeth’s door. He was far enough away that it would have been impossible for him to see the thin seam through which she was spying, but for some reason his gaze came to rest precisely on the hidden eye with which she was peeking at him. She was afraid she might bump her door closed or jiggle the handle, she felt so alarmed.

/>   “What is it?” the woman in black said to the man.

  He continued to stare at Elizabeth’s door.

  CHAPTER 8

  A BREAKFAST GAME

  SAME

  SOME

  SORE

  WORE

  WORD

  “I demand to see the management about this,” the man in black said, ignoring his wife and turning back to Sampson. Elizabeth gave a silent sigh.

  “We can go to the lobby and take it up there,” Sampson said.

  The man and woman in black looked at each other and came to some silent agreement, and then the man made an impatient gesture forward with his arm. The three disappeared around the corner of the hallway, and Elizabeth closed her door.

  Very, very interesting place, she said to herself.

  * * *

  Elizabeth awoke in the morning to the sound of a bell chiming in the distance. While they had been walking the night before, Norbridge had told her that a bell would ring twenty minutes before breakfast began, and so Elizabeth quickly changed, brushed her teeth, and stepped out of her room to head to the dining hall with one of her school library books—The Mysterious Benedict Society—in her hand. She followed the signs that led downstairs, joining the stream of other people heading in the same direction and, finally, walking along an enormous hallway lined with brightly painted murals. They depicted scenes of men climbing mountains and women cross-country skiing and people working at large machines or singing around a campfire. Underneath each mural was a brass plaque with something on it such as THE ASCENT OF MT. ARBAZA, or THE RESCUE OF THE GENERAL’S NIECE, or FIVE THOUSAND BOXES OF FLURSCHEN DELIVERED TO THE SHEIKH—ON TIME. Elizabeth had never seen such huge paintings close up like this, and she told herself she would be sure to study each one carefully when she had more time, because right now everyone was busily making their way into the hall ahead.

  Above the doorway she was about to pass through, painted in gold and decorated with elaborate petals and curled lines, was what appeared to be a family tree. It looked like this: