Benny kicked at the gravel as they continued walking back to the house. “I didn’t get my lucky penny,” he said. “Now it’s an unlucky penny.”
As the children crossed the front yard, Ruff and Tumble ran to greet them.
“Why are they outside?” Jessie asked. “Ms. Putter put them in the screen porch before she left.”
Benny sat down on the porch steps. “Hey, you guys,” he said to Ruff and Tumble.
“It’s lunchtime for you, too. Where’ve you been?”
Jessie bent down to pet the dogs. “They got into the pond, I’d guess. They’re all wet. I wonder how they got loose.” She went to the main door. “I’m going to bring their dog dishes out to the porch so they can eat out here and not get the house all wet.”
Ruff and Tumble tried to follow Jessie. They waddled over to her, ready to scoot inside where their food was.
“Let’s bring our lunch out here, too,” Violet said. “I feel sorry for them.” She went over to the window. “Look, there’s poor Midnight indoors. She’ll be relieved that Ruff and Tumble have to stay on the porch.” Violet leaned closer to the partly open window, where Midnight sat, staring at the dogs. Then Violet spotted something strange. “Come here,” she whispered to her sister and brothers.
Peeking through the open window, the children saw Martha wandering in the entryway. She had a book in her hand, and she was reading aloud from it.
“Half of me is part of the day.
Half of me is clear.
Pick me up, then turn me down,
For passing time to appear”
Jessie motioned everyone away from the window. “It’s one of the riddles! The answer is an hourglass,” she whispered. “Martha must have come in the side door just now. Didn’t she say she had to be someplace? Let’s wait a little bit to see what she does.”
They didn’t have to wait long. A minute after all the clocks stopped their noisy noontime sounds, Martha came out to the porch.
“What are you kids doing here?” she asked. She was empty-handed, but the children saw something sticking out of her jacket pocket.
Henry stepped forward. “We came to make our lunches. Would you like some, too? We would have asked you before, but we thought you said you were going somewhere.”
“I was, but it was noon, so I ...” Martha didn’t finish. “I mean ... uh ... well, yes, noon is lunchtime.”
Benny looked up at Martha. Maybe she would be friendlier if they all ate lunch together. “You can have one of my cookies from the cookie jar.”
Martha hesitated before speaking. She seemed confused by all the Aldens standing there. “That won’t be necessary,” she said. “I usually eat lunch in town at the Red Rooster Diner. That’s where I’m going now.”
The Aldens looked on as Martha headed to her car.
“Maybe she doesn’t like cookies,” Benny said after Martha drove off. Then he thought about this. Who didn’t like cookies?
“You know what’s stranger than turning down cookies?” Henry asked. “Martha said she came to the house because it was time for lunch. Then she said she eats at the Red Rooster Diner every day. She must have rushed over here for some other reason.”
“Let’s eat,” Jessie said. “It’s twelve-ten. Too bad we were outside when the clocks sounded.” Jessie opened the door, then stood still, listening. “There’s that tapping sound again — and a phone ringing. I didn’t think there were any working phones in this house.”
The other children stopped to listen. The tapping stopped, but the ringing didn’t.
“We’d better answer that,” Jessie said, stepping forward.
The ringing stopped, and a man’s voice came from the kitchen.
“I guess you could say the inspiration struck at midnight,” the voice said. “I just need to put a few more pieces together. The surprise will be ready in time for the convention.”
The Aldens heard footsteps. They weren’t sure whether to leave the house. When the oak door from the kitchen swung open, the children stood there like statues, facing Brad.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “Are you eavesdropping on my phone calls?”
“No!” Jessie said. “We just came in to make lunch.”
Brad stared at the children. “Well, come back in twenty minutes or so. I need to use the big kitchen table to finish a project. The light in the cellar is too dim for work.”
Benny almost offered Brad his flashlight hat, but he didn’t think Brad would appreciate it.
Henry was glad that he’d grown a couple inches over the summer. Just by standing tall, he could see over Brad’s shoulder into the kitchen. On the long kitchen table sat a large wooden crate. Sticking out from the crate was an object that Henry couldn’t quite identify — it looked like a curved frame of some kind. He couldn’t quite tell.
Brad let the kitchen door swing shut, with the Aldens outside of it. Through the crack in the door, the children saw Brad push whatever it was down into the crate.
The next thing the children heard was more banging, only louder this time.
“He sure didn’t want us to see whatever he has inside that crate,” Henry said.
“Yeow,” Midnight cried as she walked up to Benny and rubbed against his legs.
Benny bent down to stroke the cat. “Midnight doesn’t want to wait for lunch, either.”
Jessie looked up at the grandfather clock. “We have twenty minutes to wait. Let’s see if we can figure out a piece of that riddle Benny read.”
“Good idea, Jessie,” Henry said. “That’ll pass the time. Speaking of time, the grandfather clock is about to chime on the half hour.”
Sure enough, at the next click, the grandfather clock made a deep rich sound when the minute hand passed over the six.
Violet stared up. “Look how beautiful the painted moon face is. Alice Putter was a very talented artist.”
The children stood still, admiring the clock.
Suddenly, Henry smacked his forehead. “The riddle! What are the words again?”
“When the moon is in the sky,” Violet said. “No, that’s not it.”
“When the moon is out at night,” Jessie guessed. “Is that the first line? Too bad Martha took the riddle book away so fast. Now I can’t remember the exact words.”
“I know!” Benny announced. “When the moon’s at twelve o’clock.”
Jessie hugged Benny. “That’s exactly it! Hey, what if the moon in the riddle isn’t a real moon? It could be something like the painted moon on the clock.” She looked at Benny’s excited face. “Do you remember the rest of it?”
Benny took off his hat, as if he were thinking so hard he needed to let his thoughts fly out. But this time, the right words didn’t come.
None of the Aldens could remember the whole riddle.
“Here’s what I do remember,” Jessie said finally. “Ms. Putter mentioned that her grandmother used to write riddles to remind herself of her secret hiding places.
What if this riddle leads to a hiding place?”
Benny liked this idea very much. “Know what? Maybe the riddle tells the secret hiding place for the missing plan book!”
Henry stared at the clock face almost as though it were going to talk back to him. He walked around one side of the clock, then the other. He rapped on the bottom panel to see if it opened. “I just have the feeling Jessie is right — that the moon in the riddle might not be a real moon. And I have a hunch something special happens when the clock strikes twelve. If only we could turn the hands back.”
“We might harm it,” Violet said. “We’ll have to wait until Ms. Putter comes back.”
Jessie had another thought. “Or we could ask Mr. Percy. Oh, never mind. He acted so strangely when Benny looked in that box, who knows what he might do if we told him we wanted to see inside the clock?”
What if someone else hid the plan book, not Alice Putter?” Henry suggested. “After all, Isabel has all the others. Just this one is missing. Let’s just keep an eye out for the book and for who might have a reason to take it.”
The Aldens thought about this as they went to the dining room to work. They moved dishes, plants, and knickknacks into a nearby closet to clear space for the inventions yet to come. The job didn’t take long, even after they searched around for the missing plan book.
Jessie checked her watch. “Ten more minutes before we can use the kitchen. Let’s check in the library room. It could be behind other books or in the closets.”
“I don’t see anything like one of those black plan books,” Henry said after he checked a magazine rack under the window. “Oh, good. Brad’s walking across the lawn. I guess we can use the kitchen now.”
“Good thing,” Jessie said. “Ruff and Tumble are howling for their lunch out on the front porch.”
When the Aldens came into the kitchen, they went straight to the refrigerator. Inside they found a bowl of tuna fish salad Ms.
Putter had left for them, along with a loaf of sliced bread and a bowl of grapes and peaches. On top of the refrigerator was a cookie jar the shape and color of a shiny red apple. The Aldens liked apples just fine, but they loved cookies.
In no time, they had set up their sandwich assembly line the way they did back home.
“What does inspiration mean?” Benny asked Jessie. “That’s what Brad said. ‘The inspiration struck at midnight.’”
Jessie cut a sandwich and handed the plate to Benny so he could put pickles on it. “Inspiration means getting an idea,” Jessie said. “You know how sometimes you get good ideas about things when you wake up in the middle of the night? That could be what Brad meant.”
Henry stopped pouring himself a glass of milk. “Or maybe Brad’s midnight idea came from the grandfather clock.” |