In spite of its windowless gloom, the Weatherby House’s library had always been Harleigh Four’s favorite room. Under a high-domed ceiling, its soaring walls supported shelf after shelf of darkly shining wood. Here and there a series of circular stairs led up to narrow balconies, which gave access to even higher rows of shelves. And every shelf was solidly covered by beautifully bound books. So many books and shelves there was barely enough open wall space for the more-than-life-size oil painting of a frowning man sitting, with a book in his lap, on a thronelike chair. The man in the picture was, of course, Harleigh J. Weatherby the First, and in his great-grandson’s opinion the library, of all of the grand Weatherby rooms, was undoubtedly the grandest.
He had to admit, however, that it was a bit gloomy. The famous portrait of Harleigh J. Weatherby the First soared up, from only an inch or so above Harleigh Four’s head, when he measured himself on the wall below it, to just below one of the second-floor balconies, completely covering the only space where there might have been room for a panel of windows.
“Poor architectural planning,” Harleigh Four’s father, Harleigh the Third, liked to say about the library. Harleigh the Third, an architect himself, seemed to spend most of his time criticizing, not only Weatherby House, but also famous buildings all over the world. “Planned for the grand effect,” was one of his favorite comments, “rather than for any useful purpose.”
Harleigh Four didn’t entirely disagree. But, at the same time, he did feel that this kind of picky criticism of Weatherby House didn’t serve any useful purpose. He liked the enormous library just the way it was. So what if it was dark and gloomy. There were plenty of lamps, after all, and if it sometimes felt lonely it was only because . . . well, because nowadays no one was allowed to use the library except Harleigh Four and Uncle Edgar. And, as Uncle Edgar liked to say, when he could get anyone to listen, it was quite likely that no one had ever used it very much.
The very next day after Harleigh Four discovered the “flying” trespasser, Uncle Edgar once again brought up his favorite criticism. The picky one about how little time the original Weatherby must have spent in his glorious library. As Harleigh came into the room that morning, Uncle Edgar was holding up a book called The Iliad and saying, “We have here in this grand room every book you’d expect to find in the library of a well-educated, highly literate person But not a one, except for the ones you and I have been perusing, looks the least bit loved—or even briefly visited. Not a one that seems a little worn or that falls open easily to a favorite page. No, I’m afraid”—Uncle Edgar pointed up at the painting of Harleigh the First—“our famous ancestor was a bit of a fake in more ways than one. All this”—he waved his big arms and then pointed to the portrait—“that book in his lap, and all these beautiful volumes just to make people think he was a well-read man.”
Harleigh tried to copy the frown on the face in the portrait. He didn’t see the point in putting down his famous ancestor for unimportant faults, as if he’d only been an ordinary, unimportant person. In the past he’d tried to say so, but today was no time for an argument, or for one of the long rambling discussions that Uncle Edgar liked to get into.
Today Harleigh Four was determined to get away as quickly as possible to see if the mysterious trespasser had been lying when she said she would be back. So today’s lessons needed to be dispensed with quickly, and that was what he set himself to do. By concentrating fiercely on everything Uncle Edgar gave him to read, and on every problem put before him, Harleigh finished all his assignments in record time, surprising not only Uncle Edgar but himself as well.
“My word!” Uncle Edgar exclaimed as he went over the page full of geometry problems Harleigh slapped down in front of him. “I am impressed. And a bit puzzled, too, I must say. To what should I attribute the sudden improvement in our attention span?” His smile widened. “Turning over a new leaf, are we?”
Harleigh didn’t return the smile. Instead, he just shrugged impatiently and asked if he could go. Uncle Edgar’s broad grin faded into the folds of his fat face. “All right, all right, be off with you,” he grumbled, and a few seconds later Harleigh Four was on his way.
Heading for the nearest exit, he crossed the broad entryway at a run and dashed down the wide west corridor as far as the door that led into the glass-roofed greenhouse, or as Aunt Adelaide called it, the solarium. He continued at a run down one of the solarium’s narrow aisles, dodging around hanging vines and under huge fronds of exotic plants. Passing old Ralph, the gardener, without stopping to say hello, he burst out into the open courtyard, where he stopped long enough to catch his breath and decide on his next move.
The next problem was that he wasn’t sure if he could remember exactly how he’d arrived at the place where he’d first seen the trespasser. He knew he’d been a long way out into the most neglected part of the property, in an area he’d only started to explore since he’d gotten some of his strength and endurance back. He thought he might have seen that old tree that stood in the midst of a surrounding clearing on one of his recent explorations, but he wasn’t sure. It wasn’t until he had made several false starts that he stumbled on the bamboo thicket and knew he was on the right track.
But one crooked, narrow path through the bamboo ended only in a thorny blackberry thicket. Back at the beginning of the bamboo, Harleigh chose another heading, which for a time seemed to be slanting in the wrong direction before it ended exactly where he wanted it to—under the same tree the trespasser had been hanging from when he first saw her.
Just as he remembered, several thick limbs branched out from the wide trunk, quite a way off the ground. But today no one was hanging from any of them. And what’s more, there seemed to be no way to get up to them. He walked slowly around the thick trunk—the tall, smooth trunk that offered nothing at all that could be used as a hand- or toehold.
Giving up on the trunk, he had gone back to staring up at the limb the girl had been hanging from, when he noticed that this particular limb branched out from where the main trunk divided into three parts, forming a large crotch. And right there in the crotch was something that looked like the edge of a platform, and above it a glimpse of a smooth wooden panel that might be a part of a wall. It really looked as if something had been built high up there in the tree.
A tree house, right there on Weatherby property? But how did it get there, and once it was there, how in the world did anyone get up to it? As far as Harleigh could see, there was no way to get up that wide trunk unless you had a ladder or . . . Unless you flew, he found himself thinking, but not believing, of course. Not for a minute.
“Yeah, sure.” He snorted, and turned to walk away. Then he turned back to once again stare at whatever it was that had been built way up there in the big old tree. He was still staring when, just above the section of wall, something appeared and then disappeared so quickly he wasn’t sure he’d actually seen it. A hairy brown something that might have been—an animal, perhaps a squirrel? Or else . . . And then there it was again, the same mop of dusty-brown hair and beneath it, two eyes. And then a whispery voice called, “Here I am, Harleigh. Up here.”