The Harriet Bean 3-Book Omnibus (6 page)

I was a little bit frightened of Aunt Majolica to begin with, but after a few minutes I realized that underneath the bossiness she was really very kind. As we sat in the trailer and talked, she asked all about my father and myself and told me how happy she was that we had found her.

“Now there’s something we must ask you,” said Aunt Veronica when there was a short break in the conversation. “Do you, by any chance, know what happened to Thessalonika and Japonica?”

I waited with bated breath for an answer. I was prepared for a disappointment and for Aunt Majolica to deny all knowledge of them, but she said something quite different.

“Of course,” she said. “I see them for tea every Sunday at three o’clock.”

Aunt Veronica and Aunt Harmonica
clapped their hands together with pleasure and I let out a whoop of delight.

“Then we can get in touch with them?” I said. “Can we call them this afternoon?”

Aunt Majolica looked at me in surprise.

“Oh no,” she said. “That won’t be necessary. Anyway, I don’t think they have a telephone in their house. Or at least, they’ve never mentioned one to me.”

“In that case,” said Aunt Veronica, “can we go and see them?”

“That won’t be necessary either,” said Aunt Majolica. “They’ll know to come.”

We all looked very puzzled.

“I don’t understand,” said Aunt Harmonica eventually. “How will they know that we want to see them?”

As she spoke the question, I began to realize what Aunt Majolica meant. My father had said that the twins had an extraordinary ability to read minds. Did this mean that they would know what we were thinking, even if they weren’t here?

Aunt Majolica answered my question before I even asked it.

“All I have to do is think really hard,” she explained. “If I stand still and think: ‘Thessalonika! Japonica! Please come and see me!’ they’ll come. You watch.”

While Aunt Majolica and Aunt Harmonica sat in the trailer and waited for the arrival of the last two aunts. Aunt Veronica and I went into the playground to find the girl who had sent in the winning letter. The advertisement had promised a prize for the winner, and we had not forgotten the promise.

“But what are we going to give her?” I asked Aunt Veronica. “We haven’t bought her anything.”

Aunt Veronica turned and whispered, “There are some things that can’t be bought. These things are by far the most valuable.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant by this, but I didn’t have time to find out, as the girl whose name we had asked had been pointed out to us, and Aunt Veronica was making her way toward her.

The girl was very pleased to hear that she had been successful.

“We like our teacher,” she said. “We really do. But she is very bossy!”

Aunt Veronica nodded. “She’s always been like that,” she said. “Right from the time she learned to talk. Her first words were bossy ones. Can you believe that?” The girl laughed.

“Now,” Aunt Veronica continued, “I promised you a prize, and a prize you will get. I’m not going to give you anything you can touch, or keep, or eat. I’m going to show you something that you’ll be able to use for the rest of your life. It will need a little bit of work on your part before you can do it properly, but if you do the exercises as I tell you, I promise that you’ll be able to do it.”

The girl’s eyes lit up with excitement.

“I’ll do them!” she said enthusiastically.

“Good,” said Aunt Veronica. “Now listen to me. Do you like to eat nuts?”

“I do,” said the girl. “I love them.”

“Very well,” said Aunt Veronica. “And
when you have a nut, can you usually find the nutcrackers?”

The girl shook her head. “Never,” she said.

“So I imagine that you would like to be able to crack nuts with your fingers?”

“I’d love that,” said the girl. “But it’s impossible. Nuts are far too hard for that.”

“You’re wrong,” said Aunt Veronica. “Look.”

Aunt Veronica reached into a pocket and took out a large walnut. Holding it between her thumb and forefinger, she gave it a quick flip and cracked it neatly into four pieces.

The girl was very impressed, and she watched closely as Aunt Veronica showed her how to do it.

“As I told you,” she said, “you’ll have to practice. But all you do is move this finger like this … and then this finger a little like that … and then you push down there, and turn the thumb around through there and …”
Crunch!
Another walnut had been cracked. The girl watched carefully and then
Aunt Veronica gave her a few walnuts to use for practice. Then, thanking her again for helping us find Aunt Majolica, we returned to the trailer.

I opened the door and went in. There, sitting on a stool was a tall, rather thin lady. She looked at me carefully through the tiny pair of glasses that perched on the end of her nose, and I knew at once that I had found another aunt. It was Thessalonika or Japonica, but I had no idea which one.

“Thessalonika,” said the new aunt, “I could tell that you were uncertain which one I was.”

I went forward and shook hands with Aunt Thessalonika. She had a kind face, and I knew at once that I was going to like her. The only problem, of course, was her mind reading. Could she really tell what people were thinking? And if she could, then I’d have to be very careful not to think about anything rude.

That’s very difficult, you know. Just you try it. Imagine that somebody else, maybe your best friend, could tell what was in your
mind, and imagine that you knew it. The very first thing you’ll think about is something that you wouldn’t want her to know you were thinking about, and this happens even if you weren’t thinking about it before.

“Don’t worry,” said Aunt Thessalonika, as if she knew exactly what was on my mind. “I don’t read minds all the time. I find it a bit exhausting, you see, so I only use my powers at work.”

“Your aunt Thessalonika is a detective,” explained Aunt Majolica. “She and your aunt Japonica have a detective agency.”

“That’s right,” said Aunt Thessalonika. “And that’s why Aunt Japonica isn’t here at the moment. We’re in the middle of a very important investigation and I shall have to return to it in a very short time. In fact, I can tell that Japonica is becoming a bit annoyed, and so I’d better leave right now.”

She rose to her feet.

“There’s a good place to park your trailer in our backyard,” she explained. “Majolica
will show you the way. We can all meet back there this evening.”

“May I come with you?” I asked, not wanting to lose my new aunt so soon after finding her.

Aunt Thessalonika looked at me and frowned.

“We have an awful lot of confidential matters in our office,” she said. “Can you keep a secret?”

“Of course,” I assured her.

She looked at Aunt Veronica, who nodded encouragingly.

“In that case,” she said, “you may come.”

The door of my aunts’ office had a bell and a small peephole. Aunt Thessalonika ushered me inside and led me along a narrow corridor to a further door at the end. This door was locked, and she fiddled with several keys for a moment or two before it opened.

Inside, I found myself in a large room with no windows at all, but it had a high skylight that let in the daylight. The room was lined
with shelves and cupboards, and at the far end there were two desks. A tall man was sitting at one of the desks, and he looked up sharply when we came in. Aunt Thessalonika jerked her head in the direction of this man and told me to go and say hello to him.

“How do you do?” said the man, rising to his feet as I approached his desk. “So you’re Harriet.”

I was astonished to hear that he knew my name, and I assumed that Aunt Thessalonika must have called to say that we were coming.

We shook hands and he asked me to sit down. I did so and studied the man before me. He had a large mustache, gray hair, and a pair of heavy glasses. He was the sort of man you could walk past in the street without ever noticing. Looking at his mustache, which was rather bushy, I wondered how he cut it. Did he use…

“Scissors,” said the man. “Most people with mustaches use scissors.”

I gasped. Here was another mind reader!
Were all private detectives mind readers, or was it just my two aunts and their friends?

“However,” the man went on, rising to his feet, “this mustache never needs to be cut at all. And why is that?” He paused, his eyes glinting through the thick lenses of his heavy glasses. “It’s because it is utterly and completely … false!”

And with that he ripped the mustache off his face with a quick flick of his wrist.

“Nor,” he continued, “do I have to spend too much time combing this hair, because it, you see, is … a wig!”

And with another flourish he ripped off the wig and I saw his real hair tumble out from beneath. And then I realized—he was a woman. In fact, he was my aunt. It was Aunt Japonica in disguise.

As I stared in astonishment, Aunt Japonica took off the rest of her disguise with a few deft movements. Off came the suit, to reveal a shiny green dress underneath. Off came the glasses and, with a wipe of a handkerchief, off came the makeup.

“Now you see me as I really am,” said Aunt Japonica with a sigh. “But I love disguises, and I’m so glad that our job requires us to dress up so much.”

“She’s very good at it,” chipped in Aunt Thessalonika. “You should see her disguised as a nun.”

“Or as a bus driver,” added Aunt Japonica.

“And what about the time you were a dog?” said Aunt Thessalonika. “Tell her about that.”

“Oh yes!” said Aunt Japonica, her face creased with pleasure. “That was a case where we had to try and trap somebody in a park. I managed to get hold of a dog’s outfit and I dressed up in it. Everybody thought I was a large dog, even the other dogs.”

“Yes,” said Aunt Thessalonika, “and everything would have gone very well if the dogcatcher hadn’t come and spoiled it all.”

“I’ll never forgive him,” said Aunt Japonica. “I felt so ashamed being dragged away like that in his awful dogcatcher’s van. But I got my own back in the end.”

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“I asked him the time when he opened the back of the van to get me out at the other end,” said Aunt Japonica, with a smile. “He got such a fright that he dropped his keys and ran. I drove his van back to the park, but by that time the person we were planning to trap had gone. It was a great shame.”

After Aunt Japonica had finished her story, I glanced at the room around me. It was full of very intriguing things, and I was on the point of asking to be shown around when Aunt Thessalonika suggested that we do just that.

“I can tell you’d like to see some of our things,” she said, mind reading again. “Is that all right with you, Japonica?”

“Of course,” said Aunt Japonica. “Let’s start with some of the disguises.”

I was led by Aunt Japonica to a large cupboard in a corner. She opened the doors with pride and I saw inside an array of extraordinary outfits. There was a uniform of the French Foreign Legion; there was the outfit of a Russian sailor. Then there was a
doctor’s white coat and a ballet dancer’s tutu. There were many others.

Next, Aunt Japonica opened a drawer to the side of the cupboard. Inside were all sorts of devices to stick on your face. There were scars—straight and curved—there were pimples and spots (these were for use if you wanted to look like a teenager). Then there were false ears and false noses—all very realistic—and several kinds of false chins.

“I could make you look like anyone,” Aunt Japonica said proudly. “I could pass you off as the president of the United States himself, if I wanted to.”

“That’s enough of that,” said Aunt Thessalonika rather impatiently. “There are other things in the office, you know.”

I followed Aunt Thessalonika past a row of neatly stacked notebooks.

“Our old cases,” she said proudly. “We keep notes on everything we do.”

I stopped and looked at some of the titles. “The Case of the Double-cracked Mirror.” “The Case of the Vanishing Bus.” “The Case
of the Poisonous Lettuce.” (“A very disturbing case,” said Aunt Thessalonika, shaking her head rather grimly.)

Next we came to a shelf that was full of magnifying glasses. I was wondering why the aunts needed so many of them, when Aunt Thessalonika took one of them off the shelf and showed it to me.

“These are no ordinary magnifying glasses,” she said, her voice lowered almost to a whisper. “Look through that.”

I held the glass over a section of the shelf and stared through it. All I saw were fingerprints.

“You see,” said Aunt Thessalonika, “that’s our fingerprint glass. If you look at anything with that magnifying glass, you’ll see any fingerprints that happen to be around. It’s a very great help, I can assure you.”

I picked up another magnifying glass and showed it to Aunt Thessalonika.

“What does this one do?” I asked.

Aunt Thessalonika took it from me and examined it for a moment.

“Ah!” she said. “That one’s very useful indeed. There aren’t many of these around.”

“But what does it do?” I pressed.

“Translates French into English,” said Aunt Thessalonika. “Look.”

She reached for a book off another shelf and opened it. I could see that the book was written in French.

“Now look at this page through the magnifying glass,” said Aunt Thessalonika.

I held the glass over the page and looked through it. At first the words seemed a little bit blurred, but when I moved the magnifying glass slightly they became clearer. What is more, they were in English!

“This one does German,” said Aunt Thessalonika, pointing to another, very heavy and serious-looking magnifying glass. “And this one,” she went on, pointing to a very elegant magnifying glass with swirls of silver around the handle, “does Italian.”

We moved around the room, examining all the bits and pieces that my aunts used in their unusual work. There were bags of coins, all
neatly labeled; there were maps; there were pens that wrote in different colors. At one point I picked up a large white object and asked Aunt Thessalonika what it was. “That,” she said, “is very strange. It still puzzles us.”