The Headless Cupid Read online

  Blair was getting ready to say something, and he probably would have told Dad about his lizard, except that Janie interrupted with a long story about something or other.

  A little later Molly asked about the shoestrings. Before David could explain their real purpose, Amanda said, “They’re neckties. Like cowboy neckties.”

  “Oh,” Molly said, “so you and Blair are cowboys today?”

  David had to nod agreement, although actually he was embarrassed to have Dad and Molly think he’d do something as juvenile as playing cowboys.

  He raised his eyebrows in a questioning way at Amanda, but she didn’t seem to understand—even though David was sure that he’d made it clear that, while Dad had some definite prejudices about table manners, he didn’t have any at all about reptiles. Amanda was really confusing. Just when it looked as if she was going to be doing everything she could to make the ordeals hard on everybody, she seemed to be doing the opposite. After breakfast David asked her about it.

  “Why’d you make up that stuff about cowboys?” he asked. “I could have said we had pet snakes in our shirts. Dad wouldn’t have cared. He wouldn’t have made us get rid of them.”

  Amanda just looked at David for a while before she said, “Yes he would,” and then she turned and walked away.

  David was sure that Amanda didn’t know what she was talking about. At least he was sure until about eleven o’clock, when he found out something that put everything in a different light. It started with a horrible scream from the kitchen.

  David had been walking down the hall at the time and he turned and ran back. In the kitchen he found Janie standing near the sink and Molly backed into a corner near the stove.

  “What’s the matter?” David asked. “Who yelled?”

  Molly was coming out of the corner slowly, with her eyes on Janie. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was foolish of me. But what is that awful thing?”

  “It’s just my salamander,” Janie said. She turned to David. “I was just dampening him. I have to dampen him, or he’ll die.”

  “A salamander?” Molly said, with a sick look on her face.

  “Sure,” Janie said. “I’ve had lots of pet ones. They won’t hurt you, but you have to keep them wet or they die.” She started towards Molly, opening her hand to show the freshly dampened salamander.

  “Don’t,” Molly said, backing away.

  “Take him outside, Janie,” David said. “And don’t dampen him in the sink anymore.”

  After Janie left, Molly came out of the corner and sat down, looking shaky. She smiled weakly at David.

  “I’m sorry to be so silly, David,” she said. “But I’ve always had a terrible fear of anything like that. I was almost bitten by a rattlesnake once when I was a very little girl. My mother thought I had been bitten, and she got so hysterical she scared me about to death. Ever since then I’ve had a silly phobia about everything like that.”

  “You—you mean things like snakes and other reptiles?” David asked.

  “Yes,” Molly said, shivering. “Everything slimy and crawly. But snakes more than anything. Snakes are the worst.”

  “Oh, snakes are the worst,” David repeated stupidly. He reached over and took hold of his right arm with his left hand, hoping that Molly wouldn’t notice the wiggle going back up his right sleeve.

  “Of course, I know most snakes are harmless,” Molly said. “And I’ve really tried to get over being so silly about them, but they still frighten me almost out of my mind.”

  “Out of your mind?” David said. He was beginning to sound like an echo. He crossed his arms to hide the wiggle that was now going across his chest. As soon as it was out of sight behind him, he said, “But Amanda has a pet snake—and a pet horny toad.”

  Molly nodded, smiling in a strange way that seemed to mean the opposite of what a smile is supposed to mean. “I know,” she said. “She certainly does.”

  “But don’t you care?” David asked. “Why do you let her keep them?”

  “Well, you see, it’s difficult, David, because I didn’t give them to her. Besides,” Molly smiled a more normal smile, “they are in good strong cages. And I don’t think Amanda ever takes them out.”

  “She doesn’t take them out?” David asked. “Why not?”

  But just then the kitchen door opened with a bang, and Amanda came in. “What’s for lunch?” she said. “I’m hungry.”

  Chapter Nine

  AS SOON AS DAVID FOUND OUT ABOUT MOLLY’S SNAKE PHOBIA, HE BEGAN to see why Amanda had wanted to keep the reptiles a secret—or why she had wanted to keep them a secret at least until Dad was out of the house. One little scream out of Molly while Dad was around, and that would have been the end of the reptile ordeal—for everybody—forever. After thinking it over, David decided that there was only one thing for him to do—make very sure the rest of the reptiles were kept a secret from Molly, in spite of whatever Amanda might have in mind. To do that, the kids would have to be warned right away.

  He found Janie and Esther in the yard and warned them and then went looking for Blair. It was a good thing he located Blair before Molly came upon him, because Blair was sitting on the landing playing with his lizard. He’d taken it out of his shirt and was letting it crawl around on the outside of his clothes.

  “Hi,” David said. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m resting,” Blair said.

  “Resting?” David asked. “From what?”

  “From the tickling.”

  “Oh. Well, you better not do it here. I’ve been looking for you to tell you something very important. Remember I said you could tell Dad and Molly about your lizard?”

  Blair nodded.

  “Well, you can’t. I found out that Molly is scared to death of snakes and lizards. If she knew you had that lizard in your shirt, she’d probably faint.”

  Blair wrinkled his forehead. “Afraid of snakes,” he said. “Amanda is afraid.”

  “No, Blair. Not Amanda. Molly! It’s Molly who mustn’t find out about the lizard in your shirt.”

  “Oh,” Blair said, “Molly is afraid, too.”

  David sighed. It was really hard for Blair to get things straight sometimes. Blair held the lizard up to the banister and let it crawl along the wooden vine. It crawled up the vine to the cupid with the missing head.

  “There’s that cupid,” Blair said. “Janie said a giant did it.”

  “No, it didn’t,” David said. “I told you before. Probably some kids who used to live here did it a long time ago. Probably some kid cut it off to try out his new saw, or something.”

  “No,” Blair said. “A girl sawed it. A bad girl.”

  David grinned. Living with Janie, and now Amanda, it was no wonder that Blair thought girls were the ones who caused trouble. He pulled the lizard down off the banister and handed it to Blair.

  “You better put him back in your shirt,” he said, “before Molly comes along and sees it. I’m going outside. Want to come?”

  So everyone was warned in time to keep the reptile ordeal a secret, and the rest of the day went very smoothly. Most of the other ordeals went well, too. There were a few minor problems from time to time, but nothing too drastic.

  During the ordeal where every neophyte had to wear a garlic bud and a slice of onion and a piece of anise weed on a string around his neck, there wasn’t any real trouble. But David noticed Molly doing a lot of sniffing, and after dinner Dad asked David if he was remembering to bathe every day.

  Then, on the day when no one was allowed to step on the wood floor, there were a few problems. The kitchen was easy, because it had linoleum, but all the rest of the house had hard-wood floors and not a single room had wall-to-wall carpeting. It was pretty tricky, but by the end of the day they had established regular routes through most of the rooms. Coming into the living room from the hall, for instance, you stood on the edge of the hall runner and grabbed one of the living room double doors and swung hard enough to land on the little oriental thro
w rug in front of the love seat. Then you jumped to the hassock by Dad’s chair and from there you slid on your stomach over the top of the grand piano and came down on the stack of TV floor cushions. Then you scooted along the edge of the library table on your seat and slid off onto the small rug at the other end of the room. From there you could just make it to the edge of the dining room rug. Nobody failed the ordeal that day, but a lamp got tipped over and a vase of flowers was broken, and Janie got caught right in the middle of the piano and was sent to her room as punishment for climbing on the furniture.

  The only ordeal that anybody really failed was the day of silence. On that day no one could say anything unless he was asked a direct question and then he had to reply in only three words. Blair was the only one who made it through a whole day on the first try. David failed because Dad decided to have a serious man-to-man talk with him that evening after dinner. It was pretty discouraging because David had made it through the whole day until then, and he hated to have to ruin it at the last moment. But when he saw how upset Dad was, he knew he’d just have to fail, and try again on another day.

  Dad was worried about a lot of things. He’d noticed a lot of strange behavior, he said, like bad table manners, and things getting broken, and basic rules of civilized behavior being ignored, such as not climbing on the furniture. And to top it all off, Dad said, after having to put up with a stepdaughter who hadn’t been speaking to him for almost a month, he was beginning to get the feeling that his own children were developing the same malady.

  “And just when I was hoping that you children would be on your very best behavior so Molly wouldn’t be sorry she ever heard of the Stanley family.”

  David came very close to telling Dad the whole story that evening. All about the world of the occult and the ordeals and the initiation and everything. But just as he opened his mouth to start, he got a mental picture of Amanda’s face, smiling her upside-down smile and saying something about “Davie tattling to his daddy.”

  So instead David just tried to reassure his father that it wasn’t anything serious or permanent. “It must be just a phase we’ve been going through,” he said. “You know how phases are.”

  Dad smiled. “I suppose so,” he said. “But this one’s been a little hard on Molly. I think Molly feels she hasn’t been much of a success in her new job as mother of a big family.”

  “Wow,” David said. “She shouldn’t feel like that. We all think she’s great. That is all of us but—”

  “But who?” Dad asked.

  “Well, I was thinking about Amanda.”

  “What about Amanda?”

  David had talked himself into a hole. He was positive that Amanda wouldn’t like him to mention what she had said about hating her mother. And David was sure Dad wouldn’t like hearing it either. So he just said, “Well, Amanda would really rather live with her father, I guess. She really likes her father.”

  Dad made an angry noise. “Amanda has a lot to learn about liking—and loving,” he said.

  “Like what?” David asked.

  Dad thought for a moment and then shook his head. “Well, what Amanda has to learn, and when, is not up to you and me, I guess. I guess we’d better stick to discussing our own problems. Or phases?”

  David grinned. “Yeah, phases,” he said. “That must be it. With moving to the country and getting a new mother and everything all at once, it’s no wonder the kids have had a few phases to go through. But I think everything will be all right now. I think it’s about all over.” David could say it was over because the day of silence was the last ordeal and there was nothing left except the initiations. He couldn’t see how that was going to cause trouble—or very much trouble anyway.

  After that, it took about three more days before everyone had passed the day of silence ordeal, because David decided that only one person should try it at a time. That way it wasn’t so noticeable. It worked fine. Under cover of Janie’s chatter, no one noticed David’s silence, and David tried hard to cover up for Janie. But that didn’t work quite as well.

  It would have taken a lot more distraction than David could provide to keep people from noticing something as unusual as a silent Janie. Dad and Molly kept asking her if something was wrong, and Janie kept saying “I feel bad” because that was all she could think of that only had three words in it. The result was that Janie got sent to bed and her temperature was taken. Later when David snuck her up a peanut butter sandwich, he was really worried about her. She seemed very tense and nervous, and her face was flushed. She didn’t have any fever, though, and David decided it was just the strain of keeping quiet for so long. Sure enough, the next morning after Janie had talked steadily for almost three hours, she seemed to be entirely back to normal.

  That was the end of the last ordeal, and there was nothing left but the initiation. For several days Amanda spent a lot of time in her room with the door locked, getting things ready. She was very mysterious about the whole thing. When David asked her about it, she would just say that she was making preparations, and the rest of them had better be making their preparations.

  Of course, by that she meant that David and the kids should be getting their robes ready, and they had been trying—but it wasn’t easy.

  Some of the requirements were not particularly difficult. For instance the rule that one of the things they wore had to have belonged to someone who was dead. David had helped Dad put some boxes of things that had been his mother’s away in the attic. The clothing and jewelry in the boxes were things that Dad said Janie and Esther might like to have someday. So since Dad meant for the kids to have them someday, David figured he wouldn’t mind too much if they used them a little right away.

  On the other hand, however, Dad hadn’t said that David could take anything out of the boxes yet, so it occurred to David that the things from the attic might fulfill another requirement. Maybe they could count for the articles that had to be stolen as well as the thing that belonged to a dead person. But when David suggested that the ring and the necklace and scarf and gloves from the box in the attic could count as stolen, Amanda looked scornful.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “You have to steal from somebody alive.”

  David had been afraid of that—even before he asked. After he had thought about it some more he asked if flowers would be all right.

  “Flowers?” Amanda said. “It has to be something you can wear, like clothing or jewelry.”

  “You can wear flowers. Like, in your buttonhole or hair. I was thinking those people down by where the road turns to go into the village have lots of flowers. They probably wouldn’t even notice any were missing.”

  “It can’t be flowers,” Amanda said, “and besides, the thing that matters about stealing, is not whether anybody notices that anything is missing, but whether anybody sees you taking it.”

  “Yeah,” David said. “I guess you’re right.” He just hadn’t been thinking about it in that way.

  “How did you do it?” he asked. “I mean, what part of your costume did you steal?”

  “The black stockings,” Amanda said. “I stole them at a rummage sale. Leah told me about its being easy to steal at a rummage sale because everything is such a mess and there’re so many people around. I saw these black stockings on a big table with a lot of other junk, and I just put them in my pocket and walked out.”

  David decided that stockings would be a good thing to try for, for several reasons. The main thing was, of course, that stockings were small and easily hidden.

  The only smaller thing to wear that David could think of was jewelry, and he’d already ruled that out, because of the kids. The thing was that, while David could understand that stealing something as part of an initiation was a lot different from just stealing for ordinary reasons, it might not be clear to kids as young as the twins, or even Janie. If he were to let them steal some jewelry for the initiation, and then, someday, one of them turned out to be a jewel thief, he knew he’d feel responsible.<
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  That was the other good thing about stealing stockings. David had never heard of anybody taking up stocking robbery as a career.

  However, having decided on stockings, there were still several problems to be solved. There were no clothing stores at Steven’s Corners, and the only way for all the kids to get to the city would be for Molly to drive them there, and it wasn’t likely she’d do that without knowing why they wanted to go. So the city was out.

  That meant they had to do the stealing right there at home, which narrowed things down considerably. Actually, the only thing left to decide was whether it would be Molly’s stockings or Dad’s. Then, when David had gotten about that far in his planning, a wonderful opportunity presented itself.

  Coming through the living room one morning, David noticed that Molly had left her mending basket near her favorite chair. It was a big basket, full of all sorts of torn and ripped stuff, because Molly didn’t like mending and she was usually way behind on it. Near the top of the basket, David recognized the jeans he’d skinned the knee out of a couple of weeks before and the dress that Janie had gotten hung up by when she tried to jump the picket fence. Near the bottom of the basket David made a very interesting discovery.

  Before they moved to the country, Dad had played tennis sometimes after his classes, but he’d had to give it up because of the time it took for the long commute home. So the large size white tennis socks at the bottom of Molly’s basket had been there for some time. In fact, since Dad had quit tennis Molly would probably never get around to mending the socks, and Dad would never miss them. David looked around cautiously, lifted one sock out of the basket, leaving three others, and walked quietly back upstairs.

  Then he found the kids and told them about his discovery and sent them down one at a time to steal a sock. Of course Janie wanted to be first, but David insisted that she be last. It was a good thing too, because she made such a production out of it, she almost gave the whole thing away. She crept down and back by such a complicated route and took so long about it, that Molly came out of her room where she’d been painting all morning, to make lunch while Janie was still sneaking around.