At breakfast, for instance, Aspen sets down a bowl in front of Grumps with a smile like a smarmy waiter’s and a wink at Sumac. “Your favorite cereal, m’lud, with a little something special.”
Sumac snatches the bowl just as Grumps puts his spoon into it. The spoon flies across the table and clangs on the tiles, splashing milk.
Everybody stares.
“Sorry,” she cries. “It, ah, it had a bit of dried food stuck to the rim.”
“Wouldn’t bother me,” says Grumps with a snort.
But Sumac’s running to the garbage to empty the bowl already, and find a new one, and fill that with cereal herself, and wipe up the floor.
When Grumps is halfway through his breakfast, Sumac hisses in Aspen’s ear, “What was the something special?”
“Only a little sprinkle from the sandbox,” whispers Aspen.
Sumac pokes her in the shoulder.
Aspen pokes her even harder, in the solar plexus, so Sumac doubles over. “Sand wouldn’t kill him unless he ate kilos of the stuff!”
“No more poisoning!” whispers Sumac, right in Aspen’s face.
“Could you two behave yourselves or leave the table?” asks MaxiMum.
“I’m done anyway,” says Aspen, who’s only had a couple of bites of her breakfast sandwich. She uses her plate to juggle her crusts all the way to the sink.
Later that morning Sumac’s rounding up the dirty clothes, which is one of her favorite Lots: collecting the bags from outside each bedroom and kicking and rolling them down all the flights to Sock Heaven in the basement.
She hears balls clacking in Gameville and puts her head in to find Aspen playing a game she calls Ricochet, which is pool without cues.
“Superglue,” sings Aspen.
“What about it?” asks Sumac. “Have you made yourself a fumb again?”
Aspen draws a big rectangle in the air. Then mimes trying to open a door handle, and frowning, and struggling.
“You didn’t!”
“It’s guaranteed to annoy him,” Aspen assures her.
“Which door?” asks Sumac desperately.
“Duh, Grumps’s.”
“Is he in his room or out of it?”
As if answering her come two massive thumps from the ground floor, above them, and then the bang of a door against a wall.
“Out, now, I guess,” says Aspen, disappointed. “The old guy’s got a kick like a mule.”
“No more clever ideas,” Sumac pleads with her. Then scurries back to Sock Heaven to busy herself filling the second washing machine, so she can pretend she had nothing to do with it.
“Only if they’re ultra clever ones,” Aspen calls through the wall.
But nobody comes looking for Sumac, and the cowbell doesn’t ring, nor the police whistle (which is for family emergencies). Grumps must not have complained to any of the parents about his door being stuck shut. Maybe he thinks that’s just something that happens in a hundred-and-thirty-year-old house?
When Sumac passes the Grumpery a little later, the door is ajar; you’d never notice the little shiny line of glue unless you were looking for it.
More than one voice inside. “No bigger than your three-legged friend there —”
Does he mean Diamond? She puts her head in.
“— but this fella could kill a deer nonetheless,” says Grumps.
“Seriously?” asks Wood. He and his dog are peering into one of a set of huge boxes full of packing beads, which take up nearly the entire floor.
“No bother to him. There was one up north, suffocated a polar bear by biting his throat.”
“But a polar bear, that’s like ten times the size. Twenty. No way.” Wood says it as if he wants to believe it. He’s lifting something out of the beads now.
A head! Sumac recoils. Stuffed, glass-eyed. A terrible animal muzzle with a faint mask of silvery hair. Wood is grinning at it, nose to nose.
As Grumps bangs a hook into the wall — her blue-sky wall, that’s how Sumac still thinks of it — it releases a little shower of old plaster. Should someone with Swiss cheese for brains be allowed a hammer, she wonders? “Is that a, uh, some kind of bear?” she asks, troubled that she doesn’t know.
Grumps blinks at her. “Who invited you in, missy?”
Her throat locks. “I was just asking. There are no stupid questions,” she quotes.
He snorts as if he doesn’t agree. “It’s a wolverine,” he says, taking the horrible head from Wood and hanging it on the wall.
Diamond barks at it fiercely.
Sumac frowns. Aren’t wolverines endangered or something?
“Got a special sideways tooth in the back there, meant for tearing into frozen carrion,” says Grumps.
Wood sticks his finger into the dark maw. “Sharp!”
“Wouldn’t have been much use if it wasn’t,” says Grumps.
“Is it related to a wolf?” asks Sumac.
“More like a, a, a whatchamacallit,” says Grumps, smacking his leg quite hard, as if that’ll shake the word loose. “Pardon my tartle.”
“Your what?” says Wood.
“Tip of my tongue,” says Grumps as if to himself. “Your man here is big brother to the wee fella, long-legged….”