The Mysterious Matter of I. M. Fine Page 10

  “Yes,” Beamer said.

  “You are not to watch that tape.”

  “Absolutely. We promise.”

  20

  The tape opened with a shot of a green armchair. I recognized it as the one in the living room at Ida’s house. The chair was empty, but brightly lighted. After a few seconds, Ida appeared on the screen and sat down in the chair. She must have been filming herself.

  She had dressed up for the occasion in a dark dress and pearls. She looked better than when we’d seen her, though the light from the video camera really bleached out her skin. She licked her lips quickly, like a lizard, then began. She talked straight into the camera.

  “My name is Ida May Fine,” she said. “I am the author of forty children’s books, which I wrote under the name I. M. Fine. Thirty-nine of them were part of the Chillers series. Many of you, no doubt, have heard of me. You read my books back in the time before everything changed.

  “They sold very well indeed. Once the Chillers series was established, my publisher, Riverbend Press, shipped almost a million copies of my books every month. I really don’t know the grand total of copies sold, but it’s in the multimillions. And in addition, they were published in twenty different languages. To appreciate the full extent of my readership, you must remember that a great number of those books sold to libraries, where they were read by many, many children.”

  “What is this?” I said to Beamer. “Some kind of bragfest?”

  “Looks like it.”

  Ida May licked her lips again and adjusted her sitting posture. She glanced down, as though she was thinking what to say next.

  “That gave me enormous power,” she said, flashing a tight little goody-for-me smile. “As you can imagine. Money, too, of course, though I never cared for money. A lot of people say that, but they rarely mean it. I really do. I wanted the power, though, because I wanted to change the world. And I did. Those of you listening to me now are living with the consequences.”

  I gasped. This wasn’t what I had expected at all.

  “My father, Irving Fine, wanted to change the world, in his own small way. He was a gifted scientist and a fine teacher. He must surely have believed that his work would benefit mankind. And he must also have assumed the community would reward him with respect and gratitude.

  “But no—that’s not what happened. You see, he was accused of selling scientific secrets to the Russians, of betraying his country. Destroyed his reputation, and if he hadn’t died in an accident first, they would have put him in prison. Which was really unfortunate because, you see, it turned out to be a terrible mistake. He was completely innocent. Such an easy thing, isn’t it, to ruin a man’s life?

  “No, my father had no desire to harm this country or bring down the government. None whatsoever.

  “And you know what? That was his big mistake.”

  My hair stood on end.

  “In the years after his death, I came to realize that the society I was living in was beyond saving. It was corrupt, it was cruel, and it would go on being corrupt and cruel until someone brought it to its knees. It was already stumbling. I decided to give it a little push.”

  Ida May leaned forward, hands on knees, elbows out, like a spider about to spring.

  “Which brings me to the reason I am speaking to you now. I want you to know how things got to be the way they are. I am sure there are lots of pundits out there analyzing and explaining the surprising downfall of modern civilization. Trust me. They don’t have a clue what happened.

  “It was my last book, The Avenging Word, that changed the world you live in. That’s rather touching, don’t you think? Not a bomb. Not a plague. A children’s book!

  “It was one of my best. I used every trick I knew to draw my readers in, to make it ‘a real page-turner,’ as they say. It was positively irresistible—right up to page sixty-eight.”

  She sat back then, a little smile of satisfaction on her face.

  “What happened after page sixty-eight? You remember, surely! There were so many of you, all over America—all over the world. After page sixty-eight, you simply put . . . the . . . book . . . down. It was the last book you ever read, wasn’t it? Because after that, you were not able to read. Not ever again.”

  Beamer paused the tape so we could stare at each other. “Do you think she could actually do that?” he asked.

  I just shook my head and shrugged. I couldn’t find the words. Beamer pressed the play button and Ida’s mouth started moving again.

  “How? That’s what you’re wondering. How could she do that? Well, of course I’m not going to tell you. Not the details, anyway. But I will tell you that many years ago, during a brief stint in graduate school, I spent a lot of time in the library reading very dusty old books. You would be amazed what you can find in a university library. I came across an ancient text on mind control. Now, if you had come across that book, you would probably have said it was about ‘magic.’ I thought so, too, at first. But upon closer inspection, I realized that it was something far more exciting, far more powerful. It was a book on the science of magic. Not abracadabra. Not hocus-pocus. Real magic.

  “I took it from the library,” she said. “I have it with me here.”

  She reached over toward a table that was offscreen and got the book. She placed it lovingly in her lap.

  “Would it work? I wondered. Could I insert messages into something I wrote—a letter, say, or a story—that would cause the reader to do anything I wanted him to? I was just curious, you understand. So I tried it. I wrote a note to one of my professors, a very unpleasant and arrogant man, and left it on his desk before class. He came in, glanced at it—and then he started hopping around the room, like a rabbit.”

  Ida made paws with her hands and grinned.

  “I’m sure his reputation never recovered from that incident.

  “Anyway, once I knew it worked, I began to think about how I could use such power. I thought about it for years. Eventually, I started writing.

  “I knew someone who worked in the children’s books department of Riverbend Press. I asked if she would look at a ghost story for children that I had written. She thought it was good. Riverbend published it that year, and it sold quite well for a first book.

  “The editor suggested the Chillers series, and I was off and running. I discovered I had a real knack for writing, and . . . well, I already mentioned how successful I became. Then, when my readership had reached a truly phenomenal level, I tried a few practice runs. All of them were successful.

  “I knew the time had come to write The Avenging Word. As I speak to you now, it is ready for publication. In a few months, it will hit the bookstores, and the world transformation you are living with now . . . will begin. To be more precise, it has already begun, for my editor—alas!—has had to give up his job. He’s working over at Tastee-Freez now. Suddenly, inexplicably, he found himself unable to read a word! The copyeditor has retired, too. I needn’t tell you why.”

  “Cripes, Beamer!” I said.

  “It will be fascinating to watch what happens next. The school system will collapse, I have no doubt, pouring massive numbers of young people out into the workforce who can’t hold down skilled jobs. Whole sections of our economy will gradually go bankrupt and put people out of work. First, of course, the obvious ones: publishers, magazine companies, bookstores, libraries. And we certainly won’t need newspapers anymore. I guess you’ll have to get your news on TV.

  “I lie awake at night thinking about it. Trying to find one single corner of our economy that will not come tumbling down eventually. And you see, that’s the beauty of it all—every sector of our economy depends on some other sector. So it’s like those famous dominoes—first one goes, then another. Then they’re all down.

  “Now, machines are key to the whole collapse, because they make our economy run. But soon we won’t have any engineers or technicians. No one to design our automobiles or our computers or our electrical power plants. No one to
build them or repair them, either.

  “As the years pass—this is my favorite part—the only ones left who will know anything will be the old people. They won’t be walking around miserable anymore, wishing they were young, instead of flabby and wrinkled and bald—it will be the young people walking around feeling miserable because they don’t know how to do anything and the old people have all the power. Of course, people won’t live as long as they do today—not when there aren’t any doctors left to do their triple-bypass operations.

  “Before long, we’ll be back to making soap and candles at home. Now, isn’t that something? All of that monumental disaster from one little children’s book! More powerful than a thousand bombs.”

  Now she leaned forward again and looked hard into the camera lens—at us. She was getting ready to sum up.

  “Did I get it right? Did I describe the world you live in? Are you wondering now just why I would do such a thing? Well, I will tell you. Because maybe now you can all begin to look at one another as fellow human beings. It’s hard to be smug when the rug’s been pulled out from under you. You know how it feels to suffer. Maybe, after a while, you will build again. A new world. A better world. I won’t live to see it, but it is my gift to you. Use it well.”

  21

  The next morning, we asked Mrs. Gordon to swing by the post office on our way to Philadelphia. Here’s what I was thinking as we waited in line to mail the pachage: Grown-ups—even really smart grown-ups—don’t have a clue how far behind kids they are, technologically speaking. They’re just so used to knowing more than we do about pretty much everything. But who do they go to when their computers crash or they can’t program their VCRs? They go to us, that’s who. And yet they always seem so surprised when some twelve-year-old hacks into the Pentagon’s computer network or starts a web business that makes a million dollars. What is my point here? Well, my point is that apparently it hadn’t occurred to Ida that we could easily copy that tape. All we’d needed was the Gordons’ video camera and a blank tape.

  Whether we could take it to the police or not, it was still crucial evidence. For one thing, it would make it a lot easier to convince Ida’s family—or any other adult, for that matter—that our outlandish story wasn’t just the product of overactive imaginations. Now, armed with the above-mentioned evidence, our next step was to find the above-mentioned family.

  Mrs. Gordon dropped us off at the Free Library of Philadelphia right at 9:00. This made her a little late for work, but she didn’t want to get us there before it opened. She made us promise to stay in the library and not to go wandering around. She said she’d come by at lunchtime and take us to a nice little sandwich shop she knew. She watched to make sure we got inside safely. Then we were on our own.

  We found the newspaper section and asked the librarian there how we would go about finding an obituary from 1953. He walked us over to some shelves filled with boxes of microfilm, each marked with the dates and the names of the newspapers. Then he showed us how to thread the microfilm onto the machine.

  Pages whizzed by as we turned the handle. It was really fascinating seeing those old pictures and corny ads. For a second, I was tempted to stop and read some of them. But then I reminded myself why we were there and kept turning.

  We had started with the Philadelphia Inquirer and were looking for February 20, 1953, the day after Irving died. If we didn’t find it there, we’d check February 21. The librarian said it sometimes took a day or two for an obit to get into the paper.

  At last, we found the front page for February 21, then scrolled down carefully, page by page, looking for the obituaries.

  “There it is!” Beamer whispered, pointing to a headline that was just rising up from the bottom of the screen:

  ACCUSED SCIENTIST,

  WIFE KILLED IN CRASH

  I rolled it up and centered it on the screen:

  University of Pennsylvania physics professor Irving Fine, who was returning home after testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, was killed last evening when his car skidded off the road in a snowstorm. His wife, Ruth, was also killed.

  “Oh, man!” Beamer whispered. “They were both killed!”

  “Yeah,” I whispered back. “That’s horrible!”

  Fine was born in Wimberly, Pennsylvania, and received a bachelor’s degree in physics from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from Princeton. He married the former Ruth Cohen of Brooklyn and taught at the University of Pennsylvania, becoming the youngest professor in that university’s history to gain full tenure. He was noted not only for his innovative research but also for his dynamic teaching skills. His Physics for Poets was among the most popular courses offered at the university.

  His career came to a dramatic halt when it was alleged that sensitive material from his lab had been discovered in the possession of a Russian espionage agent. Dr. Fine was involved in an important project for the government, the details of which were not made available to the public, except that it was related to weapons research.

  In his testimony, Fine denied any involvement in espionage and admitted only that security at his lab was lax.

  Fine is survived by twin daughters, Iris and Ida, and a sister, Mildred Calloway, all of Wimberly.

  “Twin daughters!” I gasped. “That means there are two of them out there. What a scary thought.”

  “Maybe,” Beamer said. “Maybe not. The other one might be normal. In which case, that’s a good thing. I mean, we’re looking for family—somebody who might make her stop. And what could be closer than a twin sister?”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “If we can find her. Come on, let’s put this stuff away.”

  So we returned the microfilm to its proper place and headed for the library’s computers. By now, we were old pros at the “find a person” sites. In no time, we had located several people named Iris Fine, complete with phone numbers and addresses. One in Council Bluffs, Iowa. One in Richmond, Virginia. And one in Tyler, Texas.

  I wasn’t holding out a lot of hope, though, because I thought it was pretty likely that our Iris had long since married and changed her name. Plus, there was a good chance that since it was the middle of the morning, they would all be at work. We’d probably just get answering machines. But we had their phone numbers and the rest of the day to kill, so we got a whole lot of quarters from the change machine next to the copier and headed for the pay phone.

  The Iowa Iris was at home and sounded about eighty. She had never lived in Pennsylvania and didn’t have a twin sister. She was really sweet, though, and said she sure hoped we found the right one.

  The Virginia Iris wasn’t there. The woman who answered the phone said she was the housekeeper. Mrs. Fine was at the beauty shop. “Would you like to call back later?” she asked.

  “Mrs. Fine,” I said. “So Fine is her married name?”

  “Yes,” the housekeeper said. “Mr. Fine passed on about ten years ago.”

  The Texas Iris wasn’t there, either. Just a young-sounding voice with a thick drawl saying, “Hi. I’m not here. Leave a message.” I hung up. We could call her back later, but I knew there really wasn’t any point. She sounded way too young to be Ida’s twin and way too southern to have grown up in Pennsylvania.

  “Now what?” I said.

  Beamer was sitting on the floor by the pay phone, leaning against the wall, his face in his hands. He let out a huge sigh.

  “Come on, Beamer. Help me out here.”

  “Call the candy guy,” he said.

  “Jake Bermann?”

  “Yeah. She put his Jelly Worms in her book. Then she named her dog Jake.”

  “You’re right. She did!”

  “And he lived in Wimberly when the Fine twins were growing up. He must have known them. Maybe he can tell us something about Iris. Like if she married a local guy, he might know her married name.”

  So Beamer called Kute Kandy and asked for Edna Franklin, who gave him Mr. Bermann’s telephone number in Florida. She said
she didn’t usually give his number out to people, but we seemed like such nice kids. She just hoped we would keep in mind that he was quite elderly and not say anything to upset him. Beamer thanked her and hung up.

  We went back to the change machine for more quarters. Then I dialed the number.

  22

  Hello.” It was a man’s voice. He had a thick accent. German, maybe.

  “Is this Mr. Jake Bermann?” I asked, holding the receiver at an angle so Beamer could hear.

  “Yes. Who is this, please?”

  “Um, my name is Franny Sharp. Mrs. Franklin—from Kute Kandy?—well, she said it was all right if I called you.”

  “She did? Well, sure. That’s fine. What can I do for you?”

  “Okay, well we—I—need some help finding someone. Maybe you knew her in Wimberly a long time ago.”

  “Could be. Who, exactly?”

  “Well, actually, it’s two people. Iris and Ida Fine. They were twins. Their father was named Irving Fine and he was killed in a car wreck in 1953.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I remember that. Such a sad thing. The wife was killed also.”

  My heart leapt with excitement. He remembered them!

  “And the two little girls,” I said. “They lived with their aunt, Mrs. Calloway? Is that right? Lived up on Pleasant Hill Road?”

  He made a sort of noise in his throat like he was about to spit, only I think it was just his way of showing how disgusted he was. “No,” he said. “That Mrs. Calloway did not raise those children. That Mrs. Calloway put them both in the orphan home, if you can believe that.”

  “No kidding?”

  “No kidding.”

  “Where was that? The orphan home?”

  “In Wimberly—it’s gone now. It wasn’t such a bad place, you understand. But such a shame for those little girls. And shame on Mrs. Calloway is what I think.”

  “Gosh, that’s weird,” I said. “I wonder why. I mean, I’ve seen that house she lived in. It’s plenty big.”