Naughty or Mice Read online

  “I don’t know, I was just looking behind everything, and I moved the tablecloth, and there it was. Do you think they did it, Dad?”

  “I don’t know.” Dan leaned over and pressed his ear to the wall, then rapped on it like he was knocking on a door. He thought the noise might make Brewster and Chuck scurry around if they were in the wall, and then he’d be able to hear them.

  What he heard wasn’t what he expected. He knocked again, just to be sure, then straightened up and frowned at the wall.

  “What’s wrong, Dad? Did you hear them?”

  Dan shook his head and said, “No, but it sounds hollow in there, more than it would if this was a regular wall.” He rubbed his chin. “I think there’s a hidden room behind there.”

  o0o

  Roxie answered the door a few moments after Melissa pressed the old-fashioned brass button attached to the bell. The little girl looked excited about something as she said, “Oh, hi, Melissa…I mean, Miss Logan.”

  “That’s all right. We’re not in school. You can call me Melissa.” She looked stern. “Just don’t get too much in the habit of it.”

  When Melissa and Dan had been dating and the three of them had been together, it had seemed too stiff and formal to insist that Roxie call her Miss Logan. Especially since it had seemed possible to Melissa for a little while that she might wind up being Roxie’s stepmother. If Dan had ever asked her to marry him, she planned to suggest that they wait until the school year was over and have the wedding during the summer. That way, Melissa would be able to concentrate on being Roxie’s stepmom—and Dan’s wife, of course—without having to complicate things by being the little girl’s teacher as well.

  Of course, that was all moot now, since Dan had decided for some unfathomable reason that they ought to cool things off between them. Actually, that was probably the smart thing to do, since Roxie was in her class, but Melissa had been hurt by it anyway and missed the time she and Dan had spent together.

  Now she looked at Roxie, still sternly, and went on, “You and I are going to have to have a long talk, young lady.”

  “I know, about Brewster and Chuck and what a bad thing I did, but not right now.”

  “What do you mean, not right now? Where’s your father?”

  “He’s upstairs, tearing down a wall.”

  Well, that was…not the answer Melissa had expected. “Tearing down a wall?” she repeated. “Why in the world is he doing that?”

  “Because there’s a secret room behind it!”

  Melissa didn’t know what to make of that. It sounded like something out of an old black-and-white movie.

  “I’m going to have to see this for myself,” she said.

  “Yeah, I know. It’s really cool. When the doorbell rang, Dad said it was probably you and told me to bring you upstairs. Come on!”

  Roxie turned and ran to the staircase, clearly caught up in the excitement of whatever was going on. Melissa followed at a slower pace, but she was intensely curious herself.

  “Have you found Brewster and Chuck yet?” she asked.

  Roxie stopped halfway up the stairs and looked sheepish. “Not yet,” she admitted. “We’ve been looking for them. That’s what we were doing when we found the secret room.”

  She started climbing again. Melissa followed, torn by a mixture of curiosity and worry over her little pet friends.

  Dan stood at the far end of the hall with a crowbar in his hands. He had already pulled off the baseboard and the trim. He looked over his shoulder at Melissa and said, “Hey. You got here just in time to watch me be destructive.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “The sheetrock’s got to come off, and there’s no way of doing that without busting it up. So here goes.”

  He brought the crowbar back and then slammed it into the wall, knocking a hole right through the wallpaper-covered sheetrock.

  Melissa said, “Oh!” She couldn’t contain the exclamation. She hated to see the old house being damaged, but obviously Dan was determined to find out what was on the other side of that wall. He could repair whatever damage he did.

  “I’ve known all along that there was something off about this hall,” he said as he prepared to strike again with the crowbar. “I never took the time to work out the dimensions in my head, though, or else I would have known that it wasn’t long enough. There are eight or ten feet unaccounted for back there, and I want to see what’s in it.”

  “Could it be something…bad?” Melissa asked, thinking about some of the movies she had seen. If Hollywood had taught her anything, it was that usually it wasn’t a good idea to go around opening up secret rooms in old houses.

  Of course, those movies were all just fiction. There couldn’t be any monsters or evil spirits lurking in that hidden space.

  Could there?

  The crowbar slammed into the wall again. Dan set the tool aside, reached into the hole he had made, and started breaking out large sections of sheetrock.

  “There used to be a door here,” he said, “but somebody walled it up.”

  “Dad, this is startin’ to feel a little creepy,” Roxie said. “Maybe we should have left it alone, unless you’re sure Brewster and Chuck are in there.”

  “I don’t see any sign of them.” Dan tore another large piece of sheetrock out of the wall. “It’s just a room with some boxes in it. A storeroom of some sort, it looks like.”

  “Then why was it walled up?” Melissa asked.

  “Beats the heck out of me.” He kicked another piece out of the wall and now had an opening large enough to step through. Some light from the hall slanted into the room beyond, but for the most part it was shrouded in gloom. “There’s a light,” he muttered. “Must be a switch somewhere…”

  “The bulb won’t burn after all this time, will it?”

  “Only one way to find out,” Dan said. “Ah, there it is. Here we go.”

  He flipped the switch he had found, and light flooded out from the bare bulb screwed into a fixture mounted on the ceiling of the hidden room.

  Like he had said, there was nothing in here but a bunch of dusty cardboard boxes.

  “Well, that’s a letdown,” Dan said dryly. “I thought there would be a ghost, at least.”

  “Don’t joke about things like that, Dad,” Roxie told him.

  “Sorry.” He took a look around. “And sorry to say, I don’t see any mice, either. That hole didn’t really look recent enough for them to have done it, but I figured it was worth taking a look.”

  “You just wanted to see what was in this room,” Melissa said.

  “Yeah, that, too, I guess.” He chuckled. “Hey, with my background, things like this interest me.” He stepped closer and studied one of the boxes. “There’s writing on here. Lew and Beth’s pictures, it says.”

  “Who are Lew and Beth?”

  “The young couple who lived here when the house was built a hundred years ago. They spent their whole married life here, so I guess they weren’t young the entire time.”

  Melissa stepped into the room, turning sideways to go through the opening so the rough sides of it wouldn’t snag her clothes or get dust from the broken sheetrock on them.

  “Do you think we should check inside them?” she asked. “It’s not likely the mice got in any of those boxes, but you never know.”

  “Yeah, that’s true. I guess it won’t hurt anything.”

  Dan opened the top box on the stack. Inside were half a dozen old-fashioned photo albums wrapped in plastic to protect them from dust. It looked like the coverings had done a good job of that. Dan pulled the plastic back and took out one of the albums.

  “What are you doing?” Melissa asked. “Those don’t belong to you.”

  “I know, but…it sort of feels like they go with the house. According to what I was told when I bought this place, Lew Collins pretty much built it with his bare hands.”

  “Really? That must have been a lot of work.”

  “People were
more willing to work back then. I can tell from the way the house is built that Lew took a lot of pride in it, too.”

  “You talk about him almost like you know him.”

  Dan looked at her, frowned slightly, and said, “You know, sometimes I feel like I do.”

  He opened the photo album.

  o0o

  That just couldn’t be right, he thought as he looked at the photographs carefully mounted in the album’s first pages. They showed a dark-haired man in a suit, standing next to a pretty woman with wavy blond hair. Both of them looked fairly solemn, but that was the custom of the time. Judging by their clothes, the photo had been taken in the early Twentieth Century.

  On a piece of paper underneath it, written in the same feminine hand, were the names Lew and Alice.

  But Lewis Collins’ wife’s name was Beth, Dan recalled. Maybe this Alice was his sister.

  There were other photos of the couple, though, less formal and posed, with both of them smiling or holding hands or embracing. They were definitely a couple, Dan thought. In some of the pictures, their left hands were visible, and both of them were wearing wedding bands.

  Roxie had overcome her nervousness and come into the hidden room as well. She opened the top box in another stack and said, “Dad, there are Christmas ornaments in here!”

  Dan placed the photo album back in the box with the others and turned to look. Melissa did the same thing, and their shoulders brushed as they leaned toward the box Roxie had opened. The contact was brief, but it felt really good.

  Roxie was right. Inside the box were dozens of what appeared to be homemade wooden Christmas ornaments, small enough to be hung on a tree.

  Just because they were small didn’t make them any less elaborate, however. A lot of highly skilled work had gone into carving these figures, and as Dan studied them, he knew instinctively that Lew Collins was the one who had made them. There were snowmen, candy canes, Santas, wreaths of holly, snowflakes, and stars. They had been painted by hand as well, by someone with a delicate touch. Dan thought they were beautiful, even though the paint had faded with time and they were chipped here and there from being used.

  “Can I touch them?” Roxie asked in a hushed voice.

  “Yeah, just be careful with them.”

  She picked up one of the snowmen and turned it over in her hands, smiling as she ran her fingertips over it. She said, “Look, there are names on the bottom.”

  “Let me see.”

  Lew and Alice, Dan read. The two of them must have worked on these together, he thought. Lew had carved them, and Alice had painted them. That made sense.

  Other than the fact that Lew was supposed to have been married to Beth.

  Melissa took a Santa Claus figure out of the box and turned it over. “This one has Lew and Beth written on the bottom,” she said.

  “Keep checking them,” Dan said as he turned back to the box with the photo albums in it. “I want to look at something.”

  About three-fourths of the first album had pictures of Lew and Alice in it. Then, abruptly, came photos of just Lew. They were all labeled neatly in the same handwriting as the first ones.

  Dan paid particular attention to the pictures where Lew was by himself. Even over the gulf of years between them, he saw the pain in that other young man’s eyes. Something had happened, and Dan could make a pretty good guess what it was.

  The second album started out the same, Lew Collins by himself. But then there was a picture of him standing beside another woman, this one a brunette. Lew looked a little shy and awkward, but his eyes weren’t as haunted in this photo.

  Under it, still in the same script, was a label reading Lew and Beth – Our First Date.

  Dan flipped quickly through the rest of the pages, which were filled with pictures of Lew and Beth, at first just the two of them…then with a baby cradled in Beth’s arms. Dan checked the other albums and saw the entirety of their lives playing out before his eyes, other children, dogs, older children, babies—grandchildren?—and all the while Lew and Beth got older but never lost the expressions of adoration on their faces when they looked at each other.

  Beth had written names and sometimes dates under each photo. Over the years the writing grew shaky but was still unmistakably hers.

  Melissa said, “A few of these ornaments have Alice’s name on them, but most of them say Lew and Beth. Dan, what’s going on here?”

  “It’s pretty simple,” he said. “Lew Collins was married to a girl named Alice before he was married to Beth. He must have built this house for her. You can see it in the background in some of the photos of them. And they worked together to make those ornaments, probably the first Christmas they spent together. Maybe the only Christmas they spent together.”

  “Oh,” Melissa said, her eyes widening. “She died.”

  Dan nodded solemnly. “That’s the only thing that makes any sense. They didn’t split up, not the way they felt about each other. You can see that in all the pictures of them. Something happened…maybe that big flu epidemic that killed so many people back then…and Lew was left by himself.”

  “Then Beth came along,” Melissa said.

  “Yeah.” Dan laid a hand on the first album he had opened. “She’s the one who mounted all these pictures and wrote the labels. She didn’t leave Alice out. She made sure all the pictures of her went in, too, and were just as important as any of the others. Because Alice was part of Lew’s life.”

  “Beth sounds like a very smart, generous woman.”

  Dan looked at her and swallowed hard. “Yeah, she does. Seems like…I know a woman like that.”

  In a voice that was little more than a whisper, Melissa said, “One who would never try to replace anybody in your life who was important to you? Who would never insist that you forget about everything—and everybody—who made you…who you are?”

  “Yeah, that’s…who I mean.”

  Then, without wasting any more time or breath on talking, Dan took her in his arms and kissed her. Hunger, need, admiration, affection, everything that added up to love welled up inside him and flowed through the sweet heat of their lips as they molded together.

  “Guys,” Roxie said plaintively after a moment, “I don’t mind this, I really don’t, but we still have a couple of mice to find!”

  o0o

  In the end, it was Melissa who found them. She came into the living room carrying a shoebox with some holes punched in the top and straw bedding inside.

  “I thought I heard some squeaking in Roxie’s room as I went by in the hall,” she explained. She lifted the box’s lid. Brewster and Chuck were inside, their noses and whiskers twitching as they peered up at the humans.

  Roxie said, “I fixed up that box so I could keep them in it in my room part of the time. They must have found it, pushed the lid up, climbed in, and then couldn’t get back out again when the lid fell down.”

  “Uh-huh,” Dan said, eyes narrowing. “Sure. That must be exactly the way it happened.”

  Roxie looked away and shifted her feet a little.

  Melissa handed the box to her and said, “Why don’t you take them and put them back in their cage for now? And make sure the door is fastened properly.”

  “I will, Miss Logan…Melissa. I promise.” She hurried out of the room.

  Dan and Melissa sat down on the sofa. It felt completely natural to her as she leaned against him. Just like it was natural for him to slide his arm around her shoulders.

  “You know what happened, don’t you?” she asked quietly.

  “Of course I do. Roxie’s smart as she can be. She knew you’d figure out that she’d taken the mice. She hoped that if she ‘lost’ them, you’d come over to help us look for them, and you and I would have to spend time together again.”

  Melissa nodded and said, “Smart girl. As her teacher, I’d know that.”

  “But finding that hidden room upstairs, and what was inside it, and the way it opened my eyes to things…well, nobody could have pr
edicted that.”

  “No, I don’t suppose. But you said yourself that you’ve always felt some sort of connection to Lew Collins ever since you moved in here. Who’s to say that he didn’t lead Roxie somehow to that mouse hole…?”

  “That’s a pretty fanciful notion. I thought teachers were supposed to be level-headed.”

  She laughed and said, “Are you crazy? We’re just as messed-up as anybody else, in all sorts of different ways.”

  He kissed the top of her head and said, “I won’t argue about that.”

  “Hey!” She punched his arm lightly, then snuggled against him again. “Seriously, Dan, I meant what I said. I’d never try to make you forget about Erica. You never could, anyway, as long as Roxie’s around to remind you of her every day. But the happiness you lost…doesn’t mean you can never find happiness again.”

  “I know,” he said softly. “Roxie figured that out before I did. I guess she knew somehow why I broke things off with you, even before I figured it out myself.”

  “She wants you to be happy.”

  “That’s all I want for her. And you.”

  “I think it all sort of goes together…” Melissa whispered.

  After a while, Dan said, “So…a June wedding?”

  “Aren’t you moving a little fast?” Melissa asked with a laugh, not mentioning the fact that the same thoughts had occurred to her.

  “Maybe. But when you know something’s right…”

  Melissa turned her head, reached up, and kissed him again. After a long, delicious moment, he moved back a little and went on, “Roxie’s still going to have to be punished for taking those little guys without permission. I’m thinking maybe two weeks’ worth of grounding.”

  “A week,” Melissa said.

  “You don’t have to be easy on her just because you’re going to be her mom.”