WE crept through the gate of the Sunny-dale Nursing Home only to be met by another sign. This one was larger than the first and had lots of words written on it, but there were only three that mattered to us at the moment. Three little words near the bottom.
NO ANIMALS ALLOWED.
“Well, Pop,” said Howie, “there’s your omen.”
“More obstacle than omen,” Chester muttered. Then, seeing the forlorn look in Hamlet’s eyes, he added, “And an obstacle is nothing more than a victory waiting to happen!
I recognized Chester’s statement as one of the many he’d been quoting ever since finishing that recent best-seller, Everything I Always Wanted to Be I Already Am. I wondered if The Weasel had read it too; it seemed like his kind of book.
“I appreciate the sentiment,” Hamlet said, “but I don’t see how—”
“All we need is a plan,” Chester said.
Howie ran to a nearby rock garden and pulled a fern out by its roots. “Here,” he said, presenting it proudly to Chester.
“That’s plan, Howie, not plant.”
“Oh.”
“Keep that up, and we’ll be bounced out of here before you can say—”
“Open window.”
We all turned at the sound of Felony’s voice.
“There’s an open window over there by the parking lot,” she said. “We make our way under the cars, see; then it’s a dash and a leap and we’re in.”
“Not a bad plan,” Chester said, squinting his eyes and nodding approval. “With a little help, it’ll be better than not bad. It’ll be good.”
Felony and Miss Demeanor scowled. I had the feeling they weren’t used to having their plans improved upon.
But Chester wasn’t used to having somebody else come up with the plan in the first place. “The problem is we don’t know what’s on the other side of that window,” he went on. “Now, the hedge underneath will make an excellent hiding place while one of us gets up on Hamlet’s or Harold’s back and checks out the interior. The only other problem is how we get to the window without being seen.”
“I told ya,” said Felony, gritting her teeth, “we skedaddle under the cars.”
“But some of us aren’t going to fit,” Chester pointed out, with a nod toward Hamlet and me.
“I’ve got it!” said Howie. “We’ll disguise ourselves. That’s what they do in the movies. Okay. It’s a nursing home, right? So let’s make ourselves look like nurses. First we need those little white hats. Wait, I’ve got a better idea. We could pretend we’re delivering pizza.”
“Excellent idea, Howie,” said Chester, rolling his eyes. “Maybe you could write it up and submit it in triplicate, hmm? Meanwhile, the rest of us will try to come up with an alternative.”
“Okay, Pop,” Howie said.
“Let me just give this some thought,” Chester said. “We need to be sure that no one sees Harold and Hamlet. Hmm.”
Hamlet cleared his throat. “If you’ll pardon my saying so, Howie’s idea may be useful.” Leading us to a large tree, he indicated a pile of cut-down branches. “In Shakespeare’s play Macbeth,” he told us, “an army disguises itself with the branches of a tree. We could do the same thing. If anyone spots us, we could just stand still and we’d look like—”
“A bunch of branches with furry feet and tails,” said Miss Demeanor. “That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard.”
“Now, wait a minute,” said Chester. “It might just work. After all, a bunch of branches is less likely to raise suspicions than a bunch of animals on the loose.”
We nodded our heads. All except Howie, that is, who was too busy trying to figure out what triplicate meant.
And so, with branches clenched firmly between our teeth, we set out across the parking lot, looking like a cross between an Arbor Day parade and a very strange family of deer with sprouted antlers. We got close enough to the window so that we could see some movement on the other side when suddenly a door opened and a man and a woman burst out. We froze.
Looking out across the parking lot, the man said, “Listen, Helen, it’s all well and good that you want to humor him, but this is a waste of time.”
“It may be, George,” said the woman. “But he is mentally sound. If he said he saw—what was it he said again?”
“‘Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane.’ Whatever that means.”
“Why, George, it’s from Shakespeare. And you know how Archie loves to quote from Shakespeare.”
I heard Hamlet gasp. “Archie,” he said weakly.
“That’s just it,” said the man named George. “He loves to quote from Shakespeare. That doesn’t mean we have to drop everything and run out here just because he saw a bunch of trees move. He was probably daydreaming about the good old days and—”
The woman placed her hand on the man’s arm and he stopped speaking. She pointed in our direction. I gulped and swallowed a little sawdust in the process.
“Look,” she said. “Over the roof of the blue Honda. What in the world are those branches doing there?”
The sawdust was tickling my throat. Hamlet, meanwhile, was starting to quiver with excitement from hearing Archie’s name. Between the two of us, Birnam Wood was getting a little shaky.
“Good heavens!” the woman cried. “They are moving. What is going on?”
The man shook his head. “I don’t have a clue,” he said. “But there’s one way to find out.”
With no more warning than that, the two of them moved briskly in our direction. Chester spat out his branch seconds before I sneezed and lost a grip on mine. “Run for it!” he squealed.
“The door!” Felony cried. “They left the door open!”
We ran out from behind the parked cars and scrambled toward the open door before George and Helen knew what was happening.
“Animals!” Helen cried.
“Stop them!” George shouted.
Several residents of the nursing home had gathered on the other side of the open door and instead of stopping us were cheering us on.