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  OTHER YEARLING BOOKS BY ZILPHA KEATLEY SNYDER

  YOU WILL ENJOY:

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  THE EGYPT GAME

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  YEARLING BOOKS are designed especially to entertain and enlighten young people. Patricia Reilly Giff, consultant to this series, received her bachelor’s degree from Marymount College and a master’s degree in history from St. John’s University. She holds a Professional Diploma in Reading and a Doctorate of Humane Letters from Hofstra University. She was a teacher and reading consultant for many years, and is the author of numerous books for young readers.

  Published by

  Dell Yearling

  an imprint of

  Random House Children’s Books

  a division of Random House, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  Copyright © 1990 by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address Delacorte Press, New York, New York 10036.

  The trademarks Yearling® and Dell® are registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Visit Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Web site! www.microweb.com/lsnyder/

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80157-9

  v3.1

  To all of you

  who said,

  “I write too.”

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  1

  “I’ve decided to quit school again,” Libby said.

  That did it. All around the table voices hushed in mid-sentence. Shocked alarm quivered in the silence. Even Gillian’s cats, the three great Persian puffballs and one sleek Abyssinian, looked up nervously from their favorite spot near the swinging double doors that led into the kitchen. Libby realized at once that she’d made a mistake.

  It would have been better, she knew, to have approached the subject more gradually. To have prepared all four of them a little for what was coming, perhaps by giving them some reason for her sudden decision. Not the real one, of course. To tell them the truth about why she had to quit school was out of the question. But she could have mentioned some reasons—and there were many that she could think of—that they might understand and appreciate.

  She had, in fact, tried that approach. She had made a stab at preparing Christopher, her father, when she had gone out to the gazebo where he had been working on his poetry to tell him that dinner was ready. Leaning against his desk as he gathered up his pens and notebooks, she had mentioned casually that no one at Morrison Middle School seemed to know anything at all about Socrates. But to her surprise he hadn’t seemed shocked or even very much concerned. The calm smile on his thin, deep-eyed face didn’t even waver as he patted in the general direction of her cheek and murmured, “Mmm, that is too bad, isn’t it.”

  She was about to say something more on the subject, when Christopher suddenly sat back down, scratched out a line of poetry, and began to scribble rapidly. Realizing that it was a bad time—Christopher was always a little vague and distant when he was working—she had gone looking for someone else.

  But the results were much the same in the Great Hall, where she found Gillian, her grandmother, and her grandmother’s sister, Cordelia. Although neither of them was writing poetry, they were every bit as preoccupied as Christopher had been. Gillian and Cordelia were arguing, or as they liked to put it, “having a serious discussion.” At the moment the discussion seemed to be about politics—one of many subjects on which the two sisters always disagreed. But even though it was an old argument, they seemed to be too busy making the same old points to take much interest in what Libby was trying to tell them about Socrates at Morrison Middle School.

  Telling herself she just hadn’t gotten their attention, she’d tried a slightly more straightforward approach as soon as they were all seated at the huge old table in the dining room. While the food was being passed around—Elliott’s special pot-roasted chicken with lots of fresh vegetables—she’d made her plans carefully. Perched, as she always was at mealtime, on a couple of encyclopedias, since at age eleven she was still too small for the massive McCall House dining room furniture, she’d waited for what seemed a good moment to announce loudly that her eighth-grade math class was currently studying material she’d learned when she was nine years old.

  But Elliott had been busy telling Christopher about an attempted theft at the bookstore, and Gillian and Cordelia were still going on about politics. And all four of them seemed as unconcerned about the mathematics she wasn’t learning as they had been about Socrates.

  Libby was beginning to lose her temper. Usually they were only too interested in everything she had to say as well as everything she had been doing or even thinking, particularly anything about her experiences at Morrison Middle School. And even more particularly anything she really didn’t want to talk about. But when she really needed them to listen …

  Deciding it was necessary to do something drastic, she blurted out her announcement about quitting school—and suddenly had their complete attention.

  As the silence lengthened and stiffened, all four of them seemed to lengthen and stiffen too. Sitting around the long oak table, their suddenly erect bodies framed by the ornately carved backs of the huge old chairs, they looked like so many portraits. Like the stiff, solemn portraits with staring eyes that hang on the walls of ancient castles. Particularly Christopher with his poet’s face, fine-lined and melancholy, and Gillian in her bright fringed shawl and dangling earrings. For just a fraction of a second Libby’s awful load of misery was lightened by an urge to giggle.

  It was Libby’s father—Christopher McCall—who spoke first. Putting down his fork and fishing in his lap for his napkin, he wiped his mustache carefully and said, “What is it, Libby? Is there a problem at school?”

  She shrugged. “Not a problem, exactly. I’ve just been concerned lately that I’m not learning nearly as much as I was before I started school. Why couldn’t we just go on the way we were?”

  “Ah,” Gillian sighed, her worried frown drifting off into soft-eyed daydream. “The Way We Were. One of my favorite movies. With Robert Redford, you know.” She glanced at Cordelia, and her blue eyes, always surprisingly young and lively-looking in her small wrinkled face, went suddenly needle sharp. “Such a handsome man, Redford,” she said meaningfully. The meaning was that Robert Redford was better-looking than Charlton Heston—another favorite disagreement between Gillian and her sister.

  Gillian McCall, L
ibby’s grandmother, who was always just Gillian—not ever Mrs. McCall and absolutely not Grandma—flipped her fringes over her shoulder dramatically and sighed again before she went on. “Such a beautiful story. And in some ways quite like Graham’s and mine.”

  Everybody smiled. They’d all heard it before—many times. Any conversation about movies, past or present, was sure to start Gillian off about the two main characters in The Way We Were, the talented writer and his madcap wife, and how they were so similar to Graham and Gillian McCall. But this time Libby wasn’t going to let Gillian’s romantic memories change the subject. The subject was that she, Libby McCall, wanted to go back to “the way we were” until last fall—when she’d begun to attend school for the first time, at the rather advanced age of eleven years.

  “I’ve just been thinking about it lately and I’ve decided I’d really prefer to go back to studying at home.” She smiled at each of them, her father first, and her grandmother, and then Elliott and Cordelia. “Unless it would be too much trouble for everybody. To start teaching me again, I mean.”

  She knew what they would say. “Darling!” they said, and “Libby dearest, don’t be ridiculous.” It was hard to tell exactly who was saying what. With their sentences overlapping as if they were singing a round, they chanted soothing phrases, solo and duet. Phrases such as, “You weren’t any trouble. You know we all loved being your teachers. We all loved being the Libby McCall Private Academy. Didn’t we, Elliott? Didn’t we, Cordelia? Of course we did.”

  The Libby McCall Private Academy had started after Libby’s first day in kindergarten, when she’d come home and announced that she wasn’t going back. She couldn’t remember exactly why she’d come to that decision so quickly, except that it had something to do with the fact that there wasn’t any good reading material in the classroom.

  No one had made any fuss about it then. Everyone had agreed that there really wasn’t much point in making a person who could already read The New York Times spend the better part of a year learning the alphabet. And since Elliott had once taught school and still had a teacher’s credential, the school authorities hadn’t objected either. Dropping out of kindergarten had been very simple and easy, and it seemed to Libby that dropping out of a seventh- and eighth-grade combination shouldn’t be any more difficult.

  “Well, then,” Libby said, trying to sound as if it were all settled, “let’s do it again.” Choosing her grandmother as the one most apt to be on her side, she smiled, tucking in the corners of her mouth to emphasize her dimples—dimples that were especially admired by Gillian, from whom they were so obviously inherited. “The way we were. All right, Gilly?”

  But it seemed it wasn’t going to be quite that easy. As the four of them looked around, checking each other’s faces, they all began to frown again. Libby sighed. It was so like them, taking forever to make a decision, except of course when Mercedes was at home. But Mercedes O’Brien, Libby’s absentee mother, wasn’t at home and probably wouldn’t be for several months. And this couldn’t wait that long. It couldn’t, in fact, wait even one more week. “Well?” she asked finally.

  “Well,” Christopher said, “I don’t know. We promised your mother, you know. We promised that you’d attend public school. And you’ve been doing so well.”

  Libby winced. She’d been afraid they’d say something like that. That someone would mention what a fine social adjustment she’d been making and how right her mother had been to insist that learning to get along with your peers was an important part of education.

  “I know,” she said. “It was all Mercedes’ idea.” She tried to make her smile say that she was mature enough to be amused at her mother’s strange theories—theories that might be popular and perhaps even useful in New York City but had nothing to do with the life of Libby McCall of Morrison, California. “I know,” she said again. “Because I needed to be socialized. Well, what I think is six months is long enough to socialize anyone, especially a person who is a fast learner. You’ve always said I was a fast learner. What I think is that I’ve finished the course. I’m as socialized as I’m ever going to be—at least by Morrison Middle School.”

  “Libby, I’m getting an impression that …” On the other side of the table Elliott was leaning forward, his long, narrow face crinkling with concern, and his sloping, exclamation-mark eyebrows quivering the way they always did when he was worried. He studied her thoughtfully for a moment as if he were trying to read her mind and then went on. “I’m getting a strong impression that …” He paused again, sniffed the air like a bird dog, and suddenly dashed from the room.

  As Elliott rushed toward the kitchen door, he startled the cats, who stopped in mid-lick and scattered—Goliath under Gillian’s chair; Salome and Isadora under the sideboard; and Ariel, as usual, straight up. Racing up the heavy old velvet draperies, already frazzled by frequent high-speed escapes from many other real or pretend dangers, she peered over the edge of the valance with her astonishing Abyssinian eyes. Everyone except Cordelia laughed. Elliott, who also worried about such things as the frazzling of draperies, might not have either, but he was in the kitchen, so the laughter was almost unanimous.

  For a moment Libby felt better than she had since early that morning, but the heavy weight of gloom returned quickly. The others’ smiles faded quickly, too, and Christopher, Gillian, and Cordelia went back to worried frowns and expectant glances at the kitchen door. They were obviously counting on Elliott to solve the problem in the kitchen and come back and solve Libby’s, whatever it might be.

  For almost as long as Libby could remember, everyone had counted on Elliott Garner to take care of problems that shouldn’t really have been his responsibility. Elliott’s only real responsibility should have been managing his bookstore, but here in the McCall House, as people called it—the shabby, rundown, silly old McCall mansion—he’d somehow gotten stuck with managing the kitchen and laundry and Christopher’s bank account, and just about everything else one might mention.

  Christopher called Elliott his agent and manager, and Gillian called him an angel sent from heaven to save the McCalls from bankruptcy, squalor, and chronic indigestion. Cordelia, of course, wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about Elliott, but then Cordelia made it a point never to be enthusiastic about the same things as her sister. What she called Elliott was “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” which meant, of course, that he’d come on a visit and forgotten to leave. Of course Cordelia was a fine one to talk, since she’d done pretty much the same thing, but then she was a relative, and that, according to Cordelia, entitled her to make long-term—or even permanent—visits.

  Now they were obviously counting on Elliott to find out why Libby suddenly wanted to quit school. He’d solved so many of her previous problems. He was, for one thing, a marvelous math and science teacher, subjects for which no one else in the family had any particular aptitude. And for another, he was a talented builder and repairman.

  Over the years he had repaired any number of things of importance to Libby, delicate old things mostly, from her grandfather’s collections—such as music boxes, cuckoo clocks, and all kinds of fragile antique toys. Not to mention the most important of all—the Treehouse, the incredible, incomparable Treehouse that had once been Christopher’s but now was the private and exclusive property of Libby herself.

  Over the years it had been Elliott’s repair work that had kept the Treehouse safe and sound and usable, and Libby would always be grateful to him for that. But not even Elliott would be able to repair the damage that had been done at Morrison Middle School—even though the rest of the family was obviously expecting him to try.

  “Libby dear,” Elliott began again when he finally returned to the table with a bowl of slightly scorched gravy and Gillian’s cats had crept out from under chairs and tables. “I have the feeling something must have gone wrong at school today. Was it something about the visiting author? Did it have something to do with meeting Arnold Axminster?”

  Libby looked u
p quickly. It had been at least a month since she’d told them that Arnold Axminster, one of her favorite authors, was going to be visiting Morrison Middle School. She’d only mentioned it once, briefly, and since that time she deliberately hadn’t said anything more. Leave it to Elliott to remember.

  Until that moment she hadn’t meant to tell them everything. Or anything, really. She’d counted on their letting her quit school simply because, as far as they knew, there wasn’t any good reason not to. Because she had been sent to public school for a particular purpose, and as far as they knew that purpose had been achieved. But now Elliott’s unexpected question suggested a new possibility—a way of convincing them without actually giving away the whole truth.

  “Yes, you guessed it, Elliott. Something terrible happened today, and it was all Arnold Axminster’s fault.”

  They stared at her, at each other, and back again, their eyes saying, “How dreadful. How shocking. Whatever can it mean? What can it mean, Elliott?”

  It was Cordelia who spoke first. “Whatever do you mean, Libby?”

  Libby made her face into a tragic mask, banishing the dimples and pulling down the corners of her mouth. “I mean,” she said, “that Mr. Arnold Axminster, the famous writer, visited Morrison Middle School today and did something that will probably ruin my entire future existence.”

  She paused and checked the effect. Christopher and Elliott looked bewildered and worried. Gillian, who couldn’t help loving a good tragedy, even her own granddaughter’s, looked mostly excited. And Cordelia looked scandalized. Cordelia was easy to scandalize.

  Libby allowed herself a sad little smile—sad but hopeful. “My entire future,” she repeated, “ruined! Unless, of course, I’m allowed to quit school.”

  2

  “It’s really ironic,” she told them. (Ironic, a word she no longer used at school, had long been a favorite at home.) “I was so excited when I heard that he was coming—that Arnold Axminster was actually coming to Morrison Middle School in person. You know how many of his books I’ve read, and when I found out I was going to get to see him in person, I was really thrilled. And then he goes and ruins my life. Don’t you think that’s ironic?”