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but the night was cold and the sky was full of tearing clouds, with the moon appearing and then disappearing behind them. When we turned up the Coast Road, past the Skunk Train Station, what should I see parked in the lot but a tiny red car with someone sitting inside. “Ms Peckworthy!” I said, and everyone looked, and sure enough it was her, alone in the dark car, waiting.
    But waiting for what? Or perhaps for whom? We drove along in silence, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether the Creeper had gone out of our lives now that he had gotten the briefcase, or whether he had been drawn more deeply into them. “Mark my words,” he had told me. “I’ll know you again.” The memory of it made me shudder, and I had to force myself to think about other things.

Chapter 5

    The Black Iron Key
     
    That night after dinner we were eating vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup in the kitchen. Uncle Hedge let us dish it out, because it had been a long day, and we had four scoops apiece in big bowls with so much chocolate syrup that there was a chocolate lake in the bottom. Brendan said the lake was a tar pit and the scoops of ice cream were the sinking bodies of albino wooly mammoths, but he had only just thought this up when Uncle Hedge cleared his throat in a meaningful way. We forgot about the mammoths and the tar pits because he looked serious and thoughtful.
    “You recall Mr. Asquith?” he said, and of course all of us did.
    “I think he was nice,” Brendan said.
    “That he was,” Uncle Hedge said, “and lucky for us that he was nice. This business at the Museum has set me thinking, though.” He took off his spectacles and polished them on the tail of his shirt, and then he held them up and looked through them before putting them back on. I could see that he was trying to think up the right words to say, as if they were important words, but even so I was surprised at what he said next.
    “Ms Peckworthy has something important to tell us,” he said, “and I want all of us to listen to her.”
    “ Peckworthy !” Brendan said, snorting it out through his nose.
    Uncle Hedge held up his hand and shook his head. “Never you mind her for the moment. What I mean to say is that…is that I’ve tried to be a father to you three, and maybe sometimes I haven’t done as good a job as I might have.”
    Immediately we all shouted that he had too, but he waved us quiet and went on. “Sometimes a man is good at being a father because there’s a good mother alongside of him.”
    “There’s Old Sally,” Brendan put in.
    “And we’re lucky to have her. But she’s not a mother, is she? And I’m not a father,” he said, “not really, although I do what I can.”
    He drew in a deep breath and fell silent for a moment. Old Sally had told me once that our mothers were the daughters that Uncle Hedge never had, although now he’s got me, which I hope makes up for it a little bit. Perry and Brendan were very quiet now, and I was, too, because I was thinking about my mother, just like they were probably thinking of their mother, and I knew that Uncle Hedge was at least partly right. It didn’t matter to me that Ms Peckworthy had called me a perfect little tomboy, because of sticks and stones and all that, but there were times, a lot of times, when I wished I could talk to my mother, if only for a few minutes, to ask her things that I couldn’t ask Uncle Hedge. It was hard right then not to cry, but I didn’t, because I knew that Uncle Hedge felt bad enough, and I didn’t want to make it worse for him. If he started to cry it would just be too awful.
    “What I mean to say,” Uncle Hedge told us, “is that we can’t let Ms Peckworthy be right.”
    “She’s not right,” Brendan said. “I’m doing better in school. I did my history paper on John Adams and what’s-his-name, the other Adams, and I did my leaf collection, and I did extra credit for science, too. We proved that thing about hot air, didn’t we, Perry?