Prince of Air Read online

  When he ignored her, she leaned her face close to his and said loudly, “Aha!”

  “If x represents the number of soup labels,” he mumbled.

  “I am loathe to exaggerate my predicament because my brother, Felix, won’t help me, anyway!” Maisie said triumphantly.

  Felix sighed.

  “Nine twenty-five,” Maisie said. “Let’s go.”

  “I have no idea which expression shows how many soup labels the sixth grade collected,” Felix told her. “And I have five more problems after I figure that one out.”

  Maisie closed his math book and tugged his hand, pulling him to his feet.

  “Do you think she’s going to time travel?” Maisie said, her eyes bright with excitement.

  “No,” Felix said.

  He had a pit in his stomach, the kind he got whenever his homework wasn’t done and time seemed to pass too quickly. The kind he got whenever he let Maisie talk him into something he knew he shouldn’t do.

  “But why else would she want to go to The Treasure Chest?” Maisie asked.

  Felix shrugged. “If she wanted to time travel, she wouldn’t need us, would she?”

  But Maisie hadn’t waited for him to answer her. She was already walking out of the Library. As usual, Felix had to hurry to follow her.

  Maisie and Felix walked across the Grand Ballroom and up the Grand Staircase, past the photograph of Great-Aunt Maisie when she was their age. Great-Uncle Thorne had stuck his face in the way just as the camera clicked, so his face appeared slightly distorted in the corner. Felix always paused at that picture. Sometimes it made him feel sad to see the young girl in it and then think about how old she had grown. Sometimes it made him smile, as if he and that girl shared a secret. Tonight, though, he shook his head at that young girl. What was Great-Aunt Maisie up to?

  The wall hiding the secret staircase that led up to The Treasure Chest was closed tight. Just as Felix arrived at it, Maisie pressed her hands to it, and it opened.

  “Maybe she’s not there,” Felix said hopefully.

  “Of course she’s up there,” Maisie said. “She just didn’t want Great-Uncle Thorne to see.”

  Felix followed Maisie up the stairs.

  Sure enough, the red velvet rope that usually hung across the door to The Treasure Chest was unhooked.

  Great-Aunt Maisie stood in the very center of the room. If Maisie or Felix had expected to find her overjoyed to be back in The Treasure Chest where she had time traveled herself as a young girl, they were wrong. She looked about as angry as they’d ever seen her.

  “Finally!” she said.

  “We—” Maisie began, but Great-Aunt Maisie waved her hands to stop her from speaking.

  “There isn’t much time,” she said. “Thorne might figure out where I am and show up at any minute.”

  “Honestly, Great-Aunt Maisie,” Felix said, “no one’s around. Mom is at work and—”

  “Do you think I haven’t planned this perfectly so that of course your mother is at work? Thorne went to a lecture on Egyptology at The Rosewood Library that goes until ten PM.”

  “If you knew he was at the lecture, why were you creeping around downstairs?” Maisie asked.

  “Because I just confirmed for certain that he was there,” Great-Aunt Maisie snapped. “I thought he said he was going there as a decoy.”

  “But—”

  “Enough! Let’s get to work,” Great-Aunt Maisie said.

  That was when Felix noticed that she was holding a pair of handcuffs.

  “What are those for?” he blurted, imagining her handcuffing him and Maisie together and locking them up here. Maybe forever.

  “What do you think they’re for?” Great-Aunt Maisie said angrily. “Come here.”

  Maisie stepped forward.

  “Not you, you nitwit,” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “I need Felix.”

  Felix gulped. “No, no, that’s all right. If Maisie would rather do it, that’s fine.” Even as he said it, he wondered what it was.

  “No!” Great-Aunt Maisie bellowed. “It has to be you.”

  “Really, I—” Felix stammered.

  “Take hold of these handcuffs this instant,” Great-Aunt Maisie ordered.

  Maisie gave him a little push toward their aunt. Holding his breath, Felix stepped closer, closed his eyes, and put his hand on the metal handcuffs. For a moment, it felt like the entire room held its breath.

  Felix opened his eyes.

  Great-Aunt Maisie stood holding the other end of the handcuffs, a look of utter disappointment on her face.

  “It can’t be!” she said, stomping her foot.

  She glared at Felix as if he’d done something wrong.

  “Are you holding on good and tight?”

  Felix nodded. His heart pounded against his ribs. Was Great-Aunt Maisie trying to go back in time with him? Why? And where?

  “Drat!” she shouted in frustration. “What am I missing?”

  “Great-Aunt Maisie?” Maisie said. “Do you want to time travel?”

  “Thorne and I used to both hold the object. It was that easy,” she said, ignoring Maisie.

  “Maybe if I held on, too?” Maisie said.

  Great-Aunt Maisie looked at her as if she just noticed that she was in the room.

  “Hmmm,” she said, considering the idea.

  “Maybe you need to be a kid,” Felix said.

  “Maybe you need a girl and a boy,” Maisie said.

  “Wait!” Felix said. “You need the shard! Yours is missing.”

  “I know that it’s missing,” Great-Aunt Maisie said dismissively. “I have yours.”

  She reached into her pocket and showed them a shard.

  “You stole our shard?” Maisie said.

  “I did not. Technically, it’s mine. The entire house and everything in it is mine.”

  “Well,” Maisie said. “Yours and Great-Uncle Thorne’s.”

  “Hmph,” Great-Aunt Maisie said, and turned her attention back to the handcuffs.

  “No offense, Great-Aunt Maisie,” Felix said nervously, “but I don’t want to time travel with you. Or with anybody right now. I just want to do my math homework and go to bed.”

  Great-Aunt Maisie stared at him, hard.

  “Actually,” she said finally, “I don’t really care what you want. The time has come for me to go back there, and go back there I shall.”

  “Where’s there?” Maisie asked her.

  Again Great-Aunt Maisie ignored her.

  “I always assumed it took two. A girl and a boy. Your point about age can’t be ignored, obviously. Thorne and I stopped when he stole the shard when we were sixteen years old. Sixteen is still so young,” she added wistfully. “Isn’t it?”

  Maisie and Felix both knew that was the kind of question that did not require an answer. A rhetorical question, which was a vocabulary word from back in January.

  “We all know you two can do it. But we don’t know if you can take me along. If we three hold the object, and you two go without me, that won’t do, will it?”

  Another rhetorical question.

  Great-Aunt Maisie’s brow was creased with concentration.

  Finally, she said, “Oh dear.”

  Maisie and Felix waited.

  “I believe I need Thorne in order for it to work,” she said.

  “And Thorne refuses to do it,” Great-Uncle Thorne bellowed from the doorway.

  He walked in The Treasure Chest, his silk top hat still on his head and a fresh white flower in the buttonhole of his tuxedo jacket.

  Great-Uncle Thorne’s walking stick had a miniature solid-gold replica of Elm Medona on top of it. He held the stick by that and pointed it at each of them, from Maisie to Felix to
Great-Aunt Maisie, his shaggy white eyebrows lowered above his brilliant blue eyes.

  “Now,” he said, “suppose you all tell me exactly what is going on here.”

  The walking stick was pointed at Great-Aunt Maisie.

  “Starting with you, my darling sister.”

  “As if you didn’t know, darling brother,” Great-Aunt Maisie said. And with that, she turned and walked out.

  Maisie sat in the corner of the Billiard Room, mentally sending bad vibrations to Jim Duncan as he set up his pool shot.

  Jim practically laid across the pool table, stretching the stick and gently making his shot.

  The five other kids gathered around the table all let out a big whoop. Stupid Jim Duncan had made the shot. So much for mental telepathy, Maisie thought.

  Aiofe appeared, wheeling a cart with a pitcher of lemonade and a tray of assorted cookies for everyone.

  “Whoa,” Jim said when he saw Aiofe. “You’ve got a maid?”

  “Actually,” Maisie said from her perch on the window seat, “we have, like, six maids.” Take that, Jim Duncan, she thought.

  But Jim didn’t hear her. No one did. They were too busy already on to their next topic of conversation, the upcoming Talent Show at school. Jim was going to play his guitar and sing “Hotel California.” Avery Mason, she of the prettiest hair in the entire sixth grade, maybe even the entire school, and Bitsy Beal, whose family was so rich she arrived at school every day in a chauffeured limousine, had choreographed an interpretive dance performance.

  “You playing something on your cello?” Jim asked Lily.

  “Bach,” she said.

  Lily had on one of her dumb vintage dresses, a paisley button-down thing that needed to be hemmed.

  “Bach,” Maisie said under her breath, imitating Lily.

  “How about you, Maisie?” Jim asked.

  Lily, Avery, Bitsy, Felix, Jim, and Daniel Dunne in his ridiculous red sailing shorts and raspberry polo shirt, all seemed to turn to look at her at once. Maisie kept her eyes on the peacock-and-peony pattern on the window-seat cushion.

  The silence seemed to be about the noisiest things Maisie had ever heard. She shifted uncomfortably on the window seat but didn’t look up at Jim.

  “She’s going to be my assistant,” Felix said finally.

  “Assistant?” Bitsy said. Or maybe Avery said it. To Maisie, they were practically interchangeable.

  “Sure,” Felix said. “Every magician needs an assistant, right?”

  “Are you going to saw her in half?” either Bitsy or Avery said.

  Everyone laughed at that brilliant idea.

  “Or maybe make her disappear?” the other one said.

  Maisie tried hard not to cry.

  Even when Felix said, “Knock it off, guys,” Maisie still sat there on the window seat, the image of Pickworth peonies and peacocks blurring from holding the tears back, not moving.

  “All right,” their mother announced when she came home from work and into the Library, “the three of us are going to That’s Amore for pizza tonight. No maids. No butlers. No Great-Aunt-Maisie and Great-Uncle-Thorne.”

  At the end of the day, their mother always looked so tired that everything about her seemed to droop. Her wrinkled, copper linen suit hung crookedly. Her hair fell flat around her face. And the small lines around her eyes suddenly appeared deeper and more plentiful.

  “Yay!” Felix said.

  He was practicing the disappearing handkerchief trick, which involved wearing a fake, hollow thumb over his real thumb, pretending to stuff the red silk into his hand while really shoving it into the fake thumb, then opening his hand and saying something like “Voilà! Vanished!” To Maisie, it looked like he was shoving that red cloth into a fake thumb. No one would fall for this trick.

  “I thought Great-Aunt Maisie forbade magic tricks,” their mother said. She fished a tube of lipstick out of her purse and, without looking in a mirror, slid it across her mouth, leaving a red slash.

  “She doesn’t know,” Felix admitted.

  “Just make sure she doesn’t find out,” their mother said wearily. Great-Aunt Maisie and Great-Uncle Thorne were wearing her out with their fighting and their various eccentricities.

  Felix opened his hand, the tip of the red handkerchief poking out from the fake thumb.

  “Voilà!” he said. “Vanished!”

  “Hey,” their mother said, impressed, “you’re getting good at this magic stuff.”

  “I can see the handkerchief,” Maisie said, pointing. “I can tell that’s a fake thumb.”

  Felix’s face fell.

  “Remember what Great-Uncle Thorne said?” their mother said, shooting an angry look at Maisie. “Good magicians get better by practicing.”

  “How about crummy magicians?” Maisie muttered.

  “Maisie!” their mother scolded.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” Felix said. “She’s had a bad day.”

  Maisie looked at him, surprised.

  “I’m sorry Bitsy and Libby were such jerks,” he added.

  “I don’t care,” Maisie said, feeling her bottom lip start to tremble.

  “Well I care,” Felix said. “I told them so, too.”

  “I don’t need you to defend me,” Maisie said, even though she felt grateful to her brother. “I mean, you’re my little brother after all.”

  They smiled at each other. She loved reminding him that she was seven whole minutes older than him.

  “Is anyone going to fill me in here?” their mother said.

  Neither Felix nor Maisie answered her.

  “Okay then,” their mother said, “I’m thinking Hawaiian?”

  “Yuck,” Felix said. “I cannot eat pineapple on a pizza.”

  “How about anchovies?” Maisie teased.

  “How about extra anchovies?” their mother said, dropping an arm around each of their shoulders.

  At That’s Amore, after they’d eaten their pizza and the salads their mother insisted they have to counter the pizza, their mother cleared her throat in a way that made Maisie and Felix know they were either in trouble or about to hear something they did not want to hear.

  “So,” their mother began, “there have been some interesting changes in our lives since Christmas.”

  “Great-Uncle Thorne,” Felix said.

  “Elm Medona,” Maisie added.

  “And servants and fancy cars and tuxedos and”—their mother’s voice rose with each new word she said—“and . . . and . . . all sorts of nonsense!”

  “I kind of like living in the mansion,” Maisie admitted. “It’s fun.”

  “My room scares me to death,” Felix said. “I mean, there’s a bull’s head on the wall.”

  They started to giggle.

  “How about mine?” their mother said.

  They giggled even harder.

  Their mother was ensconced in the Aviatrix Room. Among his many interests, Phinneas Pickworth adored female pilots. According to Great-Uncle Thorne, he’d been engaged to at least two different ones. Whenever one visited Elm Medona, he put them up in what was now called the Aviatrix Room.

  “Brave Bess Coleman, Pancho Barnes, Amy Johnson,” their mother said through her laughter. “And only one of them survived her flying. It’s creepy living with all those dead women’s pictures and goggles and leather jackets everywhere.”

  “But,” Maisie pointed out, “you have real airplane wings hanging from your ceiling. We don’t have anything that cool.”

  “You have tusks,” Felix reminded his sister, which sent them all into a new fit of laughing.

  When they had caught their breaths again, their mother took a breath.

  “All of this . . . this crazy stuff going on right now, it’s all temp
orary. You guys understand that, don’t you?” she said solemnly. “Soon enough we will be back upstairs, making our own beds and washing our own dishes.”

  “I can’t wait,” Felix said.

  Thinking of that apartment where they’d spent the months before Great-Uncle Thorne showed up made him miss his twin bed and the desk with the rickety leg where he did his homework and the three of them sitting around the enamel kitchen table eating spaghetti.

  “I can,” Maisie said. “I like being rich.”

  Their mother wagged a finger at her. “The problem is, you aren’t rich. Great-Uncle Thorne and Great-Aunt Maisie are. I mean, even my father wasn’t rich. Phinneas Pickworth made all the money and kept it in his own lineage. We grew up perfectly happy and perfectly middle class. And so will you two.”

  Maisie sighed dramatically. “Living inside Elm Medona makes me feel rich,” she said. “I feel special for a change,” she added.

  “Special and rich are two different things,” their mother reminded her. “I understand, though. I do. I always felt like you do when we’d visit Elm Medona, seeing the way my father’s aunt and uncle lived. Living that way for a week or so every summer. But then it was back to reality.”

  Maisie sighed. “I hate reality.”

  The waitress came over to the table with their bill, and their mother pulled out her wallet. She handed the waitress her credit card.

  As soon as the girl had walked away, their mother said, “There’s one other thing. I mean, it’s nothing really. Or, I mean, I’m sure it won’t be anything.”

  “Huh?” Maisie said.

  Their mother blushed. “It’s just that Bruce Fishbaum invited me to dinner tomorrow night. That’s all.”

  Bruce Fishbaum was one half of Fishbaum and Fishbaum, the law firm where their mother worked about ninety hours a week.

  Felix shrugged. “Okay,” he said. “Don’t you spend, like, practically every minute with him, anyway?”

  “Wait a minute,” Maisie said, narrowing her eyes. “Are you saying he asked you out on a date?”

  “Well,” their mother said, her blush deepening. “No. I mean, yes.”

  “You can’t go on a date!” Maisie said.

  “What about Dad?” Felix asked.