The Mysterious Matter of I. M. Fine Page 11

  “Oh, she was ashamed of her brother, Irving. He was in trouble—bad trouble—and she didn’t want any of it to rub off on her. She had a rich husband and the big house. She just wanted to live like a rich lady, I guess.”

  “Did you know the little girls? Did you see them around town or anything?”

  He laughed. “I had a candy shop,” he said. “I saw all the kids.”

  “What can you tell us about them? Anything at all.”

  “Well, let me think. Pretty little redheaded girls, such curly, curly hair.”

  “Were they identical twins? You know, did they look the same?”

  “Oh, yes, identical. Dressed alike and always together, always holding hands. Never saw the one without the other. Then after the parents died, like I said, they went to the orphan home. But they still came by the store after school two, three times a week. Then one day, there was just the one of them.

  “So I says, ‘Which one are you?’ and she says, ‘I’m Ida’—kind of whimpering, you know. So I says, ‘Where’s your sister?’ and she says, ‘Adopted.’

  “Well, I couldn’t believe it, you see. ‘Just her? Not you?’ I asked. And she shook her head, so sad, and just cried her little heart out.”

  “Iris was adopted?”

  “Yes. Like I said, I just couldn’t believe it. So I went over there, to the orphan home, and asked the director, ‘Couldn’t you keep those two babies together?’ and he said he had tried real hard, but nobody wanted two. It was hard enough to find homes for them, he said, as old as they were.”

  “Did . . . did she live there in the . . . in Wimberly? With her new family?”

  “No. The people were from Philadelphia. But Ida said they were moving anyway. California, I think.”

  “Iris would have a different name, then, wouldn’t she? After she got adopted?”

  “Yes. But I don’t know what it was. She just disappeared.”

  “Wow!” I said. “What happened after that?”

  “To Ida? She grew up. Moved away. She was smart, you know. Went to college.”

  “Did she have friends? Did she get over being sad about her mom and dad and sister?” The minute I asked that question, I wondered whether anybody could get over losing a whole family like that.

  “Excuse me,” Mr. Bermann said. “But I wonder—why are you asking about Ida? Did something happen to her?”

  “No,” I said. “Not exactly. It’s sort of complicated. She’s kind of mad at the world, actually.”

  “Mad at the world, huh? She had a right to be mad, I think. There were a lot of not-so-nice kids, you know. Treated her real bad. Talked to her mean about her father. Put gum in her hair once, so she had to cut out this big chunk of it. And then they called her ‘Baldy.’ I wouldn’t let those kids in my store. So they broke the window one night. Wrote things on my door. It was mostly just these three or four boys, but lots of others went along. You know how that is. Scared of ’em, I guess.”

  “Mr. Bermann, did you know that Ida is a writer now?”

  “I was pretty sure that was Ida—the I. M. Fine who writes those kids’ books. She wrote about Jelly Worms in her book, and all of a sudden we couldn’t fill all the orders. I wondered, you know. Thought it had to be her. Doing me a little favor after all these years.”

  “She didn’t call or write or anything, after she moved back?”

  “She moved back? To Wimberly?”

  “Yeah. She lives up in Mrs. Calloway’s old house. That’s why we thought, you know, that she had grown up there.”

  “Well, well,” he said. “Imagine that. Ida got to live in that house after all. I guess the old lady didn’t have anybody else to leave it to.”

  I was running out of quarters.

  “Mr. Bermann, I have to go now, but thank you so much for helping us. And . . . I may need to call back. Would that be okay?”

  “Yes, of course. I’m not going anywhere.”

  We hung up.

  Beamer and I both sat down on the library floor. Neither of us said anything for a while. We were each thinking our own thoughts.

  “We’ll never find Iris,” I said finally. “She’s had a different last name since she was a kid. She moved away. The orphan home is out of business.”

  “You’re probably right,” Beamer said. “I guess our only hope is to get Jake to call Ida. He seemed really nice, and we know she likes him. We’d have to send him the tape, though. ’Cause otherwise he’d never believe us.”

  “Yeah, I agree. But I don’t think a phone call is going to do it. I think he’s going to have to go there in person.”

  “It’ll cost a lot—flying up here from Florida.”

  “Yeah, but he’s rich. I bet he’d pay his own way.”

  “What if he’s too old to travel?”

  “I didn’t think of that. He might be.”

  We were both quiet for a while.

  “Man, she really got gypped,” I said finally. “You know that? Iris gets the new family and Ida gets the orphan home and the Wimberly bullies.”

  “Yup,” he agreed.

  “I wonder what she’s like—Iris. I mean, think of it—she’s an exact copy of Ida, only she’s lived a totally different life!”

  “Yeah, that is weird to think about. That there could be another, identical . . .”

  “What?”

  Beamer just sat there like a dog who’d heard a noise and was about to bark bloody murder.

  “What?”

  He put his face in his hands. Then he looked up.

  “I just . . . had a thought.”

  “Well, congratulations!”

  He glared at me out of the corner of his eyes but didn’t say anything.

  “Beamer!”

  “Wait. Hold on. Give me some time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “To figure something out. I just have a hunch. Let’s hold off on Mr. Bermann till I check it out. I promise I’ll tell you if I’m wrong. But it will be so cool if I’m right.”

  That night, he went into the study, shut the door, and made a long phone call. I sat out in the living room, alternately excited because he apparently had a lead and steaming mad because he wouldn’t tell me what it was. Beamer can be so exasperating. I mean, whose brainstorm was this whole I. M. Fine thing, anyway?

  When he came out, he was smiling like he’d just won the Nobel Prize or something.

  “I hate it when you’re smug,” I said.

  Beamer just kept on smiling.

  “Trust me,” he said. “It’ll be a lot more fun this way.”

  The next morning, Beamer decided we should make pancakes. It was perfectly clear to me that he was just killing time, waiting for something to happen. But hey—might as well have a nice breakfast while you’re waiting to be amazed.

  So we got out Mrs. Gordon’s Fannie Farmer Cookbook and found a recipe for pancakes. Beamer said his dad likes to add fresh blueberries to the batter, only there weren’t any in the refrigerator. He thought canned pineapple might make a good substitute, but I nixed that idea. There wasn’t any syrup in the house, either, so we just made do with powdered sugar. Still, all in all, our pancakes were pretty good—if you didn’t count the first batch.

  It was a pretty complex operation, what with looking for ingredients and breaking eggs and measuring flour and milk and figuring out that if you set the burner on high, your pancakes got burned. And then there was eating them—which, naturally, was the best part—followed by the wiping off of counters and putting all the stuff in the dishwasher. It took the better part of an hour. And the whole time, I kept catching Beamer glancing at the clock.

  What the heck was going to happen?

  Shortly before noon, we heard a car pull into the drive. Beamer lit up like Times Square and dashed to the kitchen window. I was after him so fast, I practically knocked him into the sink. Peering over his shoulder, I saw a white Toyota and, inside, a flash of red hair.

  “Beamer?” I said, astonished, leaning clo
ser to make sure. “Mrs. Lamb?”

  “Y . . . e . . . s,” he said, dragging the word out slowly. Obviously, there was something else—the big something—which I was supposed to figure out.

  The car door opened and Mrs. Lamb got out, brushed her skirt smooth, and looked around at the jungle of trees that surround the Gordons’ house. As she stood there in the driveway, the sun lit up her hair and—

  “Beamer!”

  23

  It’s Iris! Mrs. Lamb is Iris!” Beamer just grinned.

  “How did you know? Oh, Beamer—you’re such a genius! They look so different! Ida is so skinny and sour and her hair is all short. . . .”

  Beamer kept smiling. “When we were watching that tape, the whole time I kept thinking I knew her somehow, you know? But obviously, I didn’t. I thought maybe it was just some famous person she reminded me of, only I couldn’t think of who.”

  “Me, too. For a second anyway. But then it got all creepy and I never gave it another thought.”

  “And there was something about her voice, too. You know, kind of deep and strong. It reminded me of Mrs. Lamb’s.”

  “So when did you put it all together?”

  “It was when we were talking yesterday, after we called Jake. You know—that there was this exact copy of Ida walking around out there somewhere? And, well, she’s so unusual-looking, with that red hair and the pale skin and the blue eyes. And I was trying to picture someone who looked like that, only, you know, normal. And then it just clicked.”

  Mrs. Lamb passed near the kitchen window on her way to the front door. If she had turned her head, she would have seen us looking at her. There was an anxious expression on her face, like a kid on the way to the principal’s office. Which wasn’t surprising, I guess—she was about to see her twin sister for the first time in almost fifty years!

  Beamer slipped the copied tape into the VCR. He turned to look at Mrs. Lamb, a little nervously, I thought.

  “Ready?” he said.

  She made a sort of helpless gesture with her hands. She clearly didn’t know how to feel about the whole thing. “Play it,” she said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  When the tape began and Ida was seated in her chair, talking, Mrs. Lamb asked Beamer to pause it. She went up closer to the TV and studied the face. I was watching her back and I could see her take a sudden big breath. “Yes,” she said. Then she came back and sat down. “All right, go ahead.”

  I tried not to stare at Mrs. Lamb while she was watching the tape, but I couldn’t help it. First of all, I wanted to see whether she was going to believe it or not. But also, I just couldn’t imagine how a person would react to such a thing: finding your long-lost twin sister—and then hearing that same twin sister admit she was out to destroy the world. I mean, that’s pretty heavy stuff.

  Well, in case you’re curious, she started out looking a little wary. Then when Ida got to the part about her father, Mrs. Lamb started to cry. I ran to the bathroom to get her some Kleenex. Toward the end of the tape, I stopped looking at Mrs. Lamb at all. She seemed so stricken, it didn’t seem right for me to watch.

  The drive to Wimberly took us half the time it took to go by bus.

  “Did you bring the pictures?” Beamer asked.

  Mrs. Lamb patted her purse, beside her there on the seat. “Right here,” she said.

  “What pictures?” I asked.

  “All kinds,” Mrs. Lamb said. “Pictures of me when I was little. Pictures of my husband and my kids. Pictures of my grandkids.”

  “Wow,” I said. “A whole family she doesn’t know.”

  Mrs. Lamb just shook her head in silent agreement. Tears were welling up in her eyes again.

  “Do you really think you can win her over?” I asked.

  “I truly hope so,” she said, and fished a Kleenex out of her purse.

  We parked in front of the house. Mrs. Lamb just sat there in the car for a while, staring up at it.

  “I don’t remember this place,” she said finally. “You say it was my aunt’s house?”

  “Mildred Calloway,” I said. “Your father’s sister. Maybe you never even came here. She wouldn’t take you in after your parents died. That’s what Mr. Bermann said. Because of your dad—well, the spy thing and all.”

  “I sort of remember that,” Mrs. Lamb said. “More a shadow of a feeling, really. I couldn’t have described it or quoted actual words. But there was this blue carpet with a fancy design. I remember staring at it and feeling just overwhelmed with . . . shame. Like I had done something disgraceful. That’s appalling, isn’t it? I mean, we were just babies.”

  Then she pulled herself together. “All right, boys and girls,” she said, “are we ready?”

  We said we were, and the three of us traipsed up the hill.

  The paint on the porch was still peeling. Solicitors were still not welcome. Beamer rang the bell.

  A face appeared in the parlor window, looking out at us. This was the moment I had been waiting for, and it happened just as I knew it would: First, she recognized us, and her face took on this angry scowl. Then, two beats later, the face was still staring, but confusion was washing over it. That woman standing beside us on the porch with masses of unruly red hair, that sweet round face and blue eyes—it was her own face, only happy, not eaten away by bitterness and rage. Then a look that I can only describe as heartbreaking, when she finally understood. The figure in the window raised her hand to the glass, as if to touch her sister’s face.

  All this took place in a matter of seconds and I was the only one who saw it. Beamer and Mrs. Lamb were watching the door, wondering whether to ring again.

  “She’s coming,” I said. And seconds later, we heard the rustle and click of someone frantically undoing bolt and chain; then the door swung wide open.

  The two women stared at each other, afraid to speak.

  “Iris?” This in a trembling whisper.

  “Can you believe it?” Mrs. Lamb said, and took her sister into her arms.

  “I searched for you,” Ida said between sobs. “For years.”

  Mrs. Lamb stroked her sister’s hair. We knew what she was thinking, because she had told us in the car. With flushed cheeks and her hand on her heart, Mrs. Lamb had admitted that she had never even thought of searching for Ida. She had gradually forgotten Wimberly and the family tragedy. She had started a new life with new parents, who were good to her. Her name wasn’t Fine anymore; it was Carter. She moved to California and made friends and started school. And as she got older, those days and those people faded in her memory, until she could scarcely remember them at all. “Isn’t that awful?” she had said. “I was so content with my life that I never looked back.”

  So, anyway, that’s why I knew what Mrs. Lamb was feeling, why her voice trembled when she said, “I always dreamed I’d find you one day.” She was lying and she felt terrible about it.

  When they had finished hugging, Ida remembered us.

  “Those kids . . .” she began.

  “They’re my students, Ida. And they’re the ones who brought us together.”

  She glared at us for a few more seconds, then threw up her hands and hugged Mrs. Lamb again. Mrs. Lamb winked at us. Then we all went inside.

  It was really weird to be invited, however reluctantly, into a house you had just burgled two days before. There we were, in the very same living room. And there was the same green chair Ida had sat in to record her dying message. Only she didn’t sit there that day. She sat on the couch so she and her sister could hold on to each other.

  Beamer pulled me back into the entryway.

  “I think we should go,” he said. “Let them talk alone.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” I said. “But how are we going to get home? Wait across the street till Mrs. Lamb comes out?”

  “No, dummy. We’ll take the bus. She’ll probably spend the night here, anyway. She brought a bag.”

  He waved at Mrs. Lamb and made a telephone gesture. She nodded. She’
d call and let us know how it all turned out.

  “Fifty years!” Iris was saying as we left. “Imagine!”

  We were feeling pretty proud of ourselves just then, though it was hard to take in the enormity of it all. I mean, we had actually changed the course of history. How do you get your head around that?

  “You think Mrs. Lamb can really do it?” I asked.

  “Yup,” said Beamer, “I do.”

  “I sure hope you’re right.”

  “Franny?”

  “What?”

  “We can’t tell people about this, you know.”

  “Couldn’t we just leave out the part about breaking and entering?”

  “It’s not just that. It’s Ida.”

  Then I understood. “It would mess her up big-time, wouldn’t it?” I said.

  “Big-time,” he agreed.

  We didn’t say anything for a while.

  “But we know what we did,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah.”

  “And someday we can tell our grandchildren,” I added.

  “Is that a proposal?”

  “What?”

  “Well, if we’re going to have grandchildren, we’ll have to get married first.”

  I punched him.

  “Is that a ‘No’?”

  “Beamer . . .”

  “What?”

  “Shut up!”

  “Okay.”

  He had a big grin on his face. So did I. We were on top of the world.

  24

  That night, we had Thai food for dinner. I had never tasted it before, so it was sort of a revelation. There was this grilled meat you dip in peanut sauce. And two different kinds of curries that were kind of spicy and kind of sweet. I know it sounds gross, but it really was fabulous. I told Beamer I would reconsider his proposal if he promised we would live in Thailand.

  His grandparents asked more than once why we were in such a silly mood. Was it that field trip we went on with our teacher? And where had we gone, anyway?

  “To visit her sister in Wimberly,” we said. “She’s a writer.”

  That seemed to satisfy them.