Chapter 2: Toad Spit and the Martin Case
“His name’s Mr. Kwilp,” Gramps said.
“Are you serious?” I said, snorting at the name. “What’s he so mad about?”
“Mad!” Gramps said. “Didn’t you see the gleam in his eye? Nell, he’s only pretending to be mad. He’s a venture capitalist.”
“OK, that explains it, Gramps. Uh… What’s that?”
“A demented evil Tyrannosaurus. Generally speaking. This one lends money to people. People like me, Nell. Then when we can’t pay back the money, he
pretends to get angry and he takes everything. Business. House. Furniture. Life savings. He has a huge auction and sells you down to the last shoelace. That’s how he makes his money. Except I don’t wear shoelaces. I like to go barefoot.”
“That man lent you money?” I said.
Gramps nodded miserably.
“And you can’t pay him back?”
He shook his head.
“Gramps! It can’t be as bad as you think.” I had my allowance in my pocket, so I dug my hand in and pulled out some bills. “Look here, I’ve got fourteen dollars and fifty cents. No, fifty-three cents. Wait. One of them’s a really nice old penny I’d rather keep, so let’s say fifty-two cents. And if that’s not enough, I bet Mom and Dad would help out a little. I mean, there’s no reason to take it so hard. There’s…”
I stopped at the look on his face.
“Just how much did he lend you, Gramps?” I said.
He groaned and put his face in his hands. “Enough,” he muttered, “that I tried to feed him poison sandwiches.”
“Gramps!” I said, sitting down on the opposite side of the table and staring at him. “You can’t do that!”
“I didn’t know what else to do,” he said, sniffling and looking like a wrinkly little schoolboy in trouble.
I took a smell at the plateful of sandwiches, and the aroma made me gag. Whatever poison was in there, if Mr. Kwilp had functioning nostrils he wouldn’t have put that stuff in his mouth anyway.
“What did you put on these?” I gasped.
“Aunt May’s Warm Toad Spit.”
I jumped back to get the smell out of my face. “That’s from your store,” I said. “I remember those jars. I’m impressed Gramps. I didn’t think any of that stuff would ever have a use.”
He took a little jar out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me. I knew he had a crate of those jars in a display case, but I had never looked at them up close. The label was ancient and had a faded picture of a frowning toad on it, and, under the toad, the date 1367. From the look of the jar, I was pretty sure it was modern and somebody had made it up to look antique and then sold it to Gramps for a large sum of money. But ancient or modern, it obviously contained something fairly nasty. It was still half full of gray jelly. I wasn’t sure it would actually kill you, but it might send you to a mental hospital from the pure shock of disgustment. Gramps must have been at the last end of desperation to break into a fake antique like that. Usually his antiques were his babies.
I put the jar on the table and checked over my fingers to make sure I didn’t have any on me. “Why did you borrow money from him?” I asked. “What did you need it for?”
His eyes opened wide with a look of the most pure innocent wonder. “I found something amazing, Nell, and I had to buy it. Only three of them were ever made.”
All the worry disappeared from his old face. He didn’t seem able to keep two things in his mind at the same time, and his love of useless clutter drove everything else out. Get him started on one of his antiques, and he wouldn’t stop. This time I was curious, so I let him rattle on while I cleaned up the sandwiches. I didn’t want Gramps accidentally picking one up and eating it while he was babbling. I knew where everything was in his kitchen, so I pulled out some plastic garbage bags and dumped the sandwiches, the plate, and the bottle, all together in six layers of bag and tied it off. The air smelled better after that.
“Nell,” he said, “it’s the find of a lifetime. Just to see it was worth everything. I never dared to dream that I’d…I mean, I wouldn’t ever put it on display, of course. I’d just keep it and… With a thing like that you have to be careful, of course. It’s delicate enough that…”
“Gramps,” I said, “stop blithering and just tell me what it is.”
“It’s on the counter. Bring it here, Nell, and I’ll show you. I’d get it myself, but, you know, my knees…”
I saw a black briefcase sitting on the counter next to the microwave. It was a tatty, frayed case, the black color bleached and splotchy. The handle was rusty. When I picked it up, it felt light. I wondered if the case was filled up mainly with cotton wrapped around the Hope Diamond, or something equally fabulous.
Normally I’m skeptical about Gramps’ merchandise, but this time I wondered if he had got onto something real. I didn’t think a person like Mr. Kwilp would involve himself in anything silly and useless – at least, not knowingly.
I put the case down on the table in front of Gramps and he reverentially ran his fingers over the worn-out fabric. His mouth was slightly open and he stared at it as if he still couldn’t quite believe he owned it. He gently touched the rusty brass hooks that fastened the lid.
“Go ahead, Gramps,” I said. “Open her up.”
His eyes snapped from the case to me in horror. “Nell!”
“What’s the problem?” I said impatiently. “It can’t be as sacred as all that. Let’s take a look at the thing.”
He shook his old leathery head at me as if disappointed by my foolishness. “You’re looking at it now, Nell.”
“I’m looking at a briefcase. What’s in it?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
I was thoroughly confused. “Gramps…you paid for a…what exactly did you pay for?”
“The case,” he said. “The case, Nell. Look at it.”
I couldn’t see anything unusual about it, except that it was so ratty.
Gramps turned it around and pointed with a trembling old finger. What looked like a smear was actually a word written in paint or magic marker. It was hard to read because the letters were in black and only slightly darker than the faded black of the case itself.
“It says C. Martin,” Gramps announced to me triumphantly, a huge smile lighting up his face. “It’s a Martin case.”
“A what?”
“Nell! Don’t you know what a…”
I put my face in my hands. I was stunned. I was horrified. This innocent idiot had put himself in hoc and sold everything and ruined himself to get hold of a briefcase, just because it had the autograph of some C. Martin character nobody’s ever heard of. It was worse than the Gorilla-Chicken ensemble. It was way worse than the three-headed lamb. It was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard of.
When I lifted my head again, Gramps was crooning over the case, petting it with his trembling old hands. I don’t think he even noticed that I was the slightest
bit horrified. I had to admit, though, whoever Martin was, and however much Gramps had paid for this piece of worthless garbage, he was so excited that he had stayed wide awake for the last fifteen minutes, which was the longest I’d ever clocked him at. He previous record, I mean that I ever saw, was seven minutes and thirteen seconds. And his average was three minutes two seconds. So the ridiculous antique had at least that much good to it.
“All right, Gramps,” I said, trying to keep the negativity out of my voice.
“Tell me all about it.” In the meantime, I started to unpack the giant Easter egg so that we could eat something for lunch other than toad spit.
“A Martin case,” Gramps said, with awe in his voice, “is the dream of the curiosity market. Carl Martin was the greatest genius the world ever saw.”
“Never heard of him,” I said, stripping the tinfoil wrapping off the egg.
“True geniuses don’t make it into the public eye. People laugh at them.
People don’t trust them. But there’s always a few of us experts, here and there, who recognize them. Collectors and aficionados. We know about Martin. He was a great inventor. He worked for the government for a while , and who knows what they got out of him. In the end he turned himself into an orangutan.”
I choked on a little bit of chocolate. “He what?”
“It’s true,” Gramps said, looking at me earnestly through his solemn old eyes. “And then he and his son disappeared into the Catskill Mountains. Some
experts think he’s still there, hiding in a cave, inventing things. But nobody can find the cave.”
“That’s convenient,” I muttered.
“When he was a boy, he made three Martin cases.” Gramps held up three splotchy fingers. “He never made any more. Once he knew he could make them, he got bored with them. That’s what he was like – he had a restless imagination. He put the briefcases in his closet and forgot about them, and when he moved, they ended up in the trash. One of them was smashed in a compactor.” Gramps sadly lowered one of his three fingers. “The other two disappeared and nobody knew what happened to them.” He stared at the two remaining fingers with a sort of eager longing. “Rumors, yes. Lots of rumors. But the actual cases never surfaced. Until now. I’ve got hold of one, Nell. I’m sure of it.”
“A boy from my school,” I said, sniggering, “has a napkin signed by Tiger Woods. He saved up a hundred and fifty dollars and bought it, and he thinks it’s genuine. Who knows? Maybe it is. And you have a black briefcase signed by Carl Martin that somebody sold you for… how much?”
“Two million.”
I really did choke. I sprayed chocolate across the table, and Gramps snatched up the case and hugged it. “Careful!” he squawked.
“Gramps!” I blurted out. I took a deep breath to steady myself. “Say that again?”
“It’s not just an autograph,” he said, glaring at me with an injured look. “Nell, it’s a Martin case. He was an inventor.”
“So what does it do?” I said. “It better fly through the air and go to the bathroom for you, for that money.”
He looked at me earnestly and whispered, “They time travel.” He nodded.
“That’s right, Nell. You open them up and crawl through. You have to be thin to fit, though. The inside dimensions are seventeen inches by twenty-three. He made them when he was six, and he was slender at the time.”
The look on his face was so serious that I didn’t know what to believe. A prickle of excitement went up my spine, while at the same time I was thinking,
“Ridiculous.” I stared at the case with a new curiosity. “Where would you travel to?” I asked.
“Nobody knows,” Gramps said. “Each one took you to a different place and time. One of them took you to ancient Rome. Who knows what the other two did, and I don’t know which one I have anyway.”
“Then let’s find out,” I said. “Gramps, a thousand to one it’s a briefcase somebody scribbled on and took you to the cleaners. But what the heck. Let’s put it to the test.”
“Oh, no, we can’t do that!” he said, looking shocked and hugging the case tightly to his chest. “Opening it would be terribly dangerous! It could lead right to the moon, and we’d suffocate before we could shut it again. Or it could open into the middle of a volcano and lava would spew out of it and kill us. Or a Medieval arrow could fly right out and stick you through the pancreas. No, Nell, we need to study it. We need to do more reading and find out everything we can. You can’t rush into a thing like this.”
Chapter 3: A Dirty Rotten Spy
For the next two days, Mr. Kwilp left us alone, and Gramps and I were happy. We had chocolate on toast for breakfast, and melted chocolate soup for lunch, which slid down nice and smooth, and chocolate steak for dinner. Mom and Dad would never have let me, but Gramps didn’t mind. He loved it. In fact, I think the chocolate did him good. I had never seen him so awake. He was obsessed by his Martin case and forgot to ask me to dust off the junk in his store.
I did a little bit anyway, out of habit, and because I didn’t have a lot else to do I’d sit in the kitchen on my phone or my laptop while he studied the Martin
case, and now and then, when I needed to stretch my legs, I’d get up, walk through the dim isles of the store with a feather duster in my hand, and take a swipe at this and that. Genghis Kahn’s spear, Plato’s original toga, I even gave a few passes at that blackened old dinosaur skull at the front of the store. It was probably the only valuable object in the lot, because an actual dinosaur scientist had given it to him, which must be why he put it right up front where customers in the unlikely event that any ever came in would see it right off, first thing. I always thought it looked intelligent. I mean, like the animal it belonged to must have been intelligent. It had a big round top that seemed like it would fit a lot of brains, like I could teach it English if I could get it to sit still long enough. It had deep dark eye sockets, both staring right at me. To tell the truth, it looked a little like Gramps in one of his thoughtful moods.
Gramps sat all day at the kitchen table, papers and books spread around him, and he read and scribbled and did bits of math and muttered to himself. Sometimes he inspected the outside of the briefcase, measuring it with calipers, or looking through a magnifying glass for this marking or that stain. But he wouldn’t risk opening it yet.
He fetched an old stethoscope from his store, probably an antique model. It was rusty and dirty. He put the earpieces in his hairy old ears and placed the end against the case, as if he was a doctor listening for a baby kicking around inside
someone’s belly. One time he sat so still, with his eyes closed, that I thought he was asleep. But no. Suddenly he opened his eyes and sat up straight with a huge smile on his face. “I heard something,” he gasped. “Nell, I heard something!”
“What was it?” I said.
“It was a kind of a thump. Or a thud. It was more like a thud than a thump. I definitely heard it.”
Then I could hardly believe it he stood up out of his chair, his old, knobby, hairy legs sticking out from the bottom of his dressing gown, and started to dance. I had never seen him so excited before and I stared at him with my mouth open. His feet were bent up from age and hardly look ed like feet anymore. At first I thought he was wearing wooden shoes, but it was just his yellowed corns. He danced around the kitchen table, clapping his hands over his head, shouting, “Ha ha!”
Then he hurried back to his chair, sat down, and eagerly searched through his books and papers. Soon he was deep into reading again, trying to figure out the significance of a thud or a thump, I suppose.
I sat at the other end of the table and played on my laptop. I surfed for this and that, and played solitaire, and shot up some alien life forms, and what not.
“If you want to pay back the two mil,” I said, looking up from my computer, “you should sell your stuff. All that junk in your store.”
He lowered the book he was reading and stared at me as if I had hurt his feelings. “Nell. If I could, don’t you think I would have already? I’ve been trying for the past fifty years.”
“I know, but you’re not trying the right way. Put it on eBay.”
“On what?” he said.
“Take a photo and put it online,” I said. “People on the internet are crazy. They’ll buy anything.”
“You go do that,” he said, not really paying attention anymore. He was too busy with his research.
I tried to sell the three-headed lamb, but the best bid I got all day was twenty dollars, so I took down the listing. I guess even people on the internet weren’t that stupid. Then I put up the dinosaur skull, which I thought might do better, because I would have bought a cool thing like that if I had the money and was into dinosaurs but still no good. A few people asked about where it came from and what species it was, but I didn’t know any of that and neither did Gramps. So nobody bid on it.
It was my third day visiting, the day before Easter, and we were licking the chocolate off our breakfast plates, when the bell on the front door tinkled. Somebody must have just come into the shop.
Gramps shoved the briefcase under the kitchen table, whispered in a choking voice, “It’s him, he’s back!” and then flopped his head to the side and pretended to be asleep. You could tell he wasn’t really asleep because his eyelids were trembling in agitation. Plus, you don’t normally sleep with your tongue sticking out. He looked more like he was pretending to be dead.
I wasn’t going to let anyone yell at Gramps again, so while he played dead, I stood up and waited, glaring at the kitchen door, listening to the footsteps clumping closer through the shop.
But it wasn’t Mr. Kwilp. It was Kevin, with a canvass grocery bag hanging from each hand and white iPod wires hanging out of his ears. He was singing softly to himself. He stopped in the kitchen doorway and stared around the room at us, at Gramps playing dead with his tongue sticking out, and me playing Muhammad Ali with my fists balled, and a giant half-eaten chocolate egg sitting in a soup tureen in the middle of the table. Kevin was a tall, brown kid with lovely dreads almost down to his waist. He must h ave been about fifteen. He was always nice to Gramps, so I liked him.
“Bad time?” he said, grinning at us.
Gramps came back to life instantly. His head came up and his eyes popped opened. “Hello Kevin,” he said cheerfully. “Have some chocolate.” Then he went right back to his books and notes and forgot about his panic.
“What’s wrong with Granddad?” Kevin said as I helped him unpack the groceries. “Who did he think I was?”
“He’s studying time travel,” I said. “And he owes two million dollars. So he’s a little confused. He thought you were Mr. Kwilp.”
“Tall man, bad haircut, teeth?”
“You know him too?” I said.
Kevin bent closer, his dreads tickling my shoulder, and whispered in my ear, “He’s in the bushes, looking in the kitchen window.”
“Right now?” I yelped.
“Sure.”
“He’s spying on us?”
Kevin nodded.
I glanced at the window as casually as I could, but I didn’t see much except leaves and twigs. Because we were in the basement, the window was small and up near the top of the wall, so I couldn’t get a direct line of sight out of it.
“Gramps!” I said, but then changed my mind. I didn’t want Gramps to feel like he was being spied on every second of the day. He’d go into permanent panic mode. He’d lose his mind entirely. He’d pull the last three hairs out of his leathery old turtlehead, and I liked the way they floated in the air around him like cosmic strings.
I gestured Kevin out of the kitchen into the dark shop, and we stood in the gloom next to the Gorilla-Chicken.
“Think we should call the police?” I whispered.
“Why don’t we just ask the man what he’s doing?” Kevin whispered back.
I thought he was crazy. “You mean, ‘Please, kind Sir, can I helpeth you,’ sort of thing with a bright smile, while he’s creeping around like a dirty roach?”
“You never know,” Kevin said, shaking a brown finger at me and smiling.
“Maybe he dropped a cufflink the last time he was here, and he’s looking for it.
Sometimes people do surprise you.”
“Yeah right, I bet he’d surprise me. I say we sneak up behind him and kick his ass so hard his head smashes in through the window.”
“Nell!” Kevin said, stepping back and looking at me in astonishment.
“It’s a joke,” I said. “Jeez, Kevin, just because I got curly hair and dimples doesn’t mean I’m a sickly putrid angel. I got an idea. We can follow him home and spy on him. He’s so evil, maybe we can find out something, like he’s got a dead body in his bathtub, and we can blackmail him and…”
Kevin looked more and more uncomfortable.
“Look,” I said, “I know what that evil Kwilp man is doing. He’s spying to find out what Gramps did with the money. As soon as he finds out that Gramps did something boneheaded and bought a fake antique souvenir that doesn’t do anything
except sit on a table and smell like mold, and there’s no possible way Gramps can ever make any money or pay back anything, what do you think he’ll do? He come storming in here and it’ll be all over for Gramps. He’ll…”
It was Gramps screaming in the kitchen. It was a horrible, loud, gravelly scream, and it ended in a squeak and a thump and then silence. Kevin and I stared at each other for one half of a second, and then turned and ran to the kitchen.
Chapter 4: Mist and Antlers
The kitchen was empty. Gramps wasn’t in it. I didn’t understand. He couldn’t have walked out, because Kevin and I had been standing right outside the door and we would have seen him. My first thought was, that nasty spy must have opened the window, reached in, and snagged Gramps, pulling him out. But the window was still closed, and it was locked on the inside.