“I told my sisters they should have called the police on you the first time!”
“Holy tamole! There are three of them!” Scilla said with a gasp.
It was another Mrs. Drummond! This Mrs. Drummond, though, walked with a cane.
“Triplets!” Beamer echoed her. “Run for it!” he cried as he ran for the bathroom door. Before Mrs. Drummond the third could figure out what they were doing, they were through the bathroom and into the hallway behind her.
“Stop, you children, or I’ll call the police!” she cried out.
“No you won’t,” Beamer yelled back at her, “unless you want the police to see what you’ve been doing with Mr. Parker’s money.”
She pulled up short with a look of uncertainty.
Then she clenched her jaw and went to the nearest wall communicator. “Security! Security!” she said into the wall, “Intruder alert! Close down all exits. Apprehend four children now in the main hallway.”
“Hurry!” cried Beamer. Abandoning any attempt at secrecy, they galloped up the steps like a herd of goats. In the background, Beamer heard mechanical voices on communicators relaying orders for intercepting them in this hallway or that one. More alarms went off as they rushed past cameras and sensors they didn’t bother to mask. Finally they reached the attic. They saw lights sweeping the grounds outside the windows. Not wanting to squeeze back through the vent, Beamer unlocked one of the attic windows and removed the screen. They poured out onto the roof to find lights sweeping up there too.
“Watch out!” cried Beamer as a searchlight swept toward them. Scilla and Ghoulie ducked behind a chimney while Jack and Beamer slid to the other side of the roof, hanging on to the ridgeline for dear life.
That’s the way things went for awhile — ducking between roof lines and behind chimneys — until they reached the big tree. Not surprisingly, the house security system did not expect intruders to be exiting along a passage through the trees. Few lights swept the trees.
Did Solomon Parker know that a “treeway” led to his house? Why would anyone make all these passages? Did they go up to every house or just some of them and why? How many mysteries could one street have?
When they finally made it to the tree across the street, they gave a collective sigh big enough to bring snow down on their heads. They stood there at the intersection of several branches, gasping for air and looking like ice cream sundaes.
Beamer showed his dad the folder they had found, while Ghoulie and Scilla looked on in hushed excitement. Jack had already headed back to wherever he was living, afraid that Beamer’s mom would turn him back in to Social Services. As Beamer expected, he had to take a pretty good tongue-lashing, not only for being late to dinner but for breaking into someone’s house.
“But — ” Beamer started to say several times. He wondered what it would be like being grounded until he was thirty.
“No, get it into your head,” Mr. MacIntyre said with his finger about to poke a hole in Beamer’s sinuses. “Something like this could put you in juvenile hall!” Finally his father’s eyes turned back to the paper. “But I see your point. We’ll have to get this to a lawyer right away.”
“What about Ghoulie’s mom?” Beamer asked, still breathless with excitement. “She’s a lawyer.”
“Yes,” said Ghoulie, “a pretty good one too.”
“We can begin with her, anyway,” said Beamer’s mom. “Now if you all wouldn’t mind, it’s time for Beamer to go to bed . . . without his dinner.” Beamer groaned and headed for the stairs while the other kids made a swift exit.
And so the legal machine started to grind, as Beamer’s dad put it. Exactly how a machine with no gears and bolts or other metal parts ground anything, Beamer had no idea.
The full story came out piece by piece. Just as Beamer expected, Solomon’s shares in the railroad had grown until, for all practical purposes, he owned a railroad company. But since he had never answered mail or messages or telegrams from the company, the railroad had gone on without him. Mrs. Drummond had kept the truth from him while collecting the share in the profits the company regularly sent to Mr. Parker. Right away, Mrs. Drummond accused the Star-Fighters of breaking and entering. Nobody made them go to jail just yet, but there was the possibility that, if she won her case, they just might. Wearing an orange jumpsuit and hammering rocks the rest of his life didn’t sound like a great career move to Beamer.
Mrs. Drummond had most of Solomon’s money firmly in her hands and could afford to pay bogus doctors to declare that he was wacky and high-priced lawyers to help her handle the stocks. Things were looking bad for both Solomon Parker and the Star-Fighters.
Then Old Lady Parker got wind of what was happening to her brother. She had little love for Solomon but tremendous loyalty for the family name. She wasn’t going to let anyone swindle a Parker. Like a force of nature, she blew into the halls of justice and got a judge to freeze her brother’s accounts. That meant Mrs. Drummond could no longer use his money. Finally, with Mrs. Drummond’s high-priced lawyers no longer blocking the way, evidence began stacking up against her and her sisters.
Yep, all of Mrs. Drummond’s claims about Mr. Parker’s sanity and about her right to control his money were finally overturned. At the same time, her breaking and entering charges against the Star-Fighters were also dismissed, and Beamer no longer had to worry about how he would look wearing a bright orange suit.
On the day they heard the news, Scilla started singing “Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead” until the boys and, eventually, Beamer’s mom and dad joined in. It was like having Christmas before Christmas, except that the good news was the only present. They drank hot cider and eggnog and munched on Dr. Mac’s Christmas cookies until way past bedtime. It was too bad Jack couldn’t be with them, but he wasn’t about to drop in where adults were hanging around. He’d visited the tree ship a couple times since the break-in, and each time they’d told him the latest about the Parker case, but they had no way of contacting him on their own. Then, like a dragon stripped of her treasure hoard and with only one fiery breath left, Mrs. Drummond hurled her last fireball! She had the tree ship condemned!
The Star-Fighters never saw it coming. When the news arrived two days after their little celebration, Beamer felt like he’d been hit by a nuclear shock wave. When he called to tell Ghoulie and Scilla the bad news, they had the same reaction. They were all tongue-tied, unable to speak.
“Can she really do that?” Scilla asked as she crab-walked up a large tree branch toward the tree ship later that day.
“Apparently so,” Beamer said gloomily. “Dad called up the officials right away and argued with them about it. ‘It’s just a kids’ tree house,’ they said. Dad told them how he and Mom had reinforced the tree house to make it safe, but they said safety wasn’t the problem. It was just higher in the tree than city building regulations allowed and had to be torn down.”
“Maybe we could take it apart and put it back together lower down in the tree,” Ghoulie said with a hopeful shrug as he came out of the tree ship.
“It won’t fit anyplace lower,” Scilla said, shaking her head.
“How do you know that?” Beamer grumbled to her.
“Hey, I know this tree better than anybody,” Scilla said with a smug look. “I’d been playing in this tree long before Beamer even moved into the neighborhood. Besides,” she went on in a more mysterious tone, “what would happen to the . . . oh, you know what I mean . . . if we tried to move or rebuild the tree ship?”
“Oh, I never even thought about that,” Beamer said, his eyes widening.
“What are you guys talking about?” Ghoulie snapped impatiently. Then it struck him, and his eyes got bigger too. “You mean our little . . . jumps into other worlds,” he said, not really knowing what to call it.
“Yeah,” Beamer muttered with a heavy sigh, “that little touch of the miraculous we haven’t figured out yet.”
Beamer didn’t know it, but at that very moment his mother was at City Hall, trying another ploy. She figured that since the tree ship was pretty old and practically a legend in the community, she might get the city to declare the tree house a “historical monument.” It was a shot in the dark and, unfortunately, it didn’t work. She did manage to give the people there a good laugh. It wasn’t exactly the Christmas cheer she had in mind.
“Well, it was worth a try,” she said with a shrug that night at dinner. Beamer’s father smiled, got up from his chair, and came over behind her and wrapped her up in a big bear hug. It was all way too mushy for Beamer.
As he went back to his dinner chair, Beamer’s dad said, “I’ve decided I just can’t do it. If the city wants the tree house down, they are going to have to do it themselves. I imagine we’ll have to pay for it, but — ”
Beamer couldn’t tell if his dad was choked up or not, but he didn’t finish his sentence. For some reason, though, what he said gave Beamer a strange feeling, like a warm glow, inside. Then when his dad prayed over dinner, he asked that God would work things out for the best. Sometimes being part of a family that trusts in God is a pretty neat thing.
The next morning, Ghoulie’s mother called Beamer’s mom and dad from the courthouse. In a last ditch effort, Old Lady Parker herself had approached the mayor personally to convince him to grant an “exception” to the height rule. Word was that she had known the mayor since he was “knee-high to a chipmunk” and if he couldn’t bend the rules for the sake of her neighbor’s tree house, then he couldn’t expect any more election donations from the Parker family.
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. It was going to be a great Christmas after all. There was no way the mayor could ignore Ms. Parker’s request. Nobody ever ignored Ms. Parker.
Two days later, Beamer’s Xbox time was interrupted by the rattle and groan of old trucks in the street. He and Ghoulie ran to the window and saw the approach of doom. Several men jumped off the back of a flatbed truck as another truck pulled up with a machine for grinding up tree limbs.
“What’s happening?” Beamer cried as he ran out the front door.
“Just following orders,” the man in charge said as they pulled out their axes, chain saws, and other equipment.
Ghoulie ran alongside the grinding machine as it backed up the driveway toward the tree in the backyard. “Hey, you can’t do this. The mayor said — ”
“The mayor changed his mind,” the man interrupted him as he pushed the boys out of the way. Only much later did Beamer learn what had happened. The mayor discovered that Ms. Parker had failed to contribute anything to his last two election funds. The destruction of the tree house became the mayor’s personal payback to Ms. Parker.
Scilla saw what was happening from her second-story bedroom and ran down to throw in a few complaints of her own. “That’s our tree!” she yelled. “You can’t just bust in and — ”
Somebody revved up his chain saw, and Scilla’s cries could no longer be heard.
Phones all over the neighborhood began ringing and, by the time the workmen had assembled their equipment, the Star-Fighters and all their assorted parents, guardians, nannies, and siblings were under the tree. The half of the neighborhood that had been there when the police came the first time was back. Some of them even carried placards protesting the tearing down of the tree house. A few of them shouted at the workmen — things they shouldn’t have said, especially since it wasn’t the workers’ fault.
As the workmen approached the tree, a hush fell over the crowd. It parted to allow a powerfully large, elderly woman dressed in black to pass through. It was Old Lady Parker looking like a thundercloud on the verge of shedding lightning. Beamer hadn’t thought it was possible, but it looked like she had even more and deeper wrinkles than she’d had the first time they saw her. And she looked just as scary.
Seeing her expression, the unpopular crew hurried to the tree. Beamer’s little brother, Michael, started throwing acorns at them until his mother made him empty his hands and pockets. Beamer appreciated the support. He expected his sister, Erin, to pass out gifts to the demolition crew. Amazingly, she kept wiping tears out of her eyes. As far as he knew, her only contact with the tree had come when she threw things out her window to get the ship’s crew to quiet down. Girls were definitely strange creatures.
Ms. Parker spat out a vow to pour millions into supporting the mayor’s next opponent. Then, with the grace of a mountain rotating on a pin, she turned, retreated through the crowd, and disappeared. Eyes were wet with tears, and the sound of sniffles filled the air. The workmen swallowed as if they had received a terrible curse, but they resumed their course up the tree. Beamer had never felt so helpless. At least against Jared, he’d been able to put up a fight. Now, there was nothing left to do. The tree ship was lost!