The next morning, Benny woke up to the sound of tooting. He kicked off his covers and went to the window. Down in the harbor, a red tugboat tooted again. Slowly, it pulled a barge away from the dock.
“Henry,” Benny whispered. “Time to get up. Come look outside.”
Henry opened one eye, then the other. “Where are we? Why are there round windows in this room? Are we on a boat?”
Benny pulled off Henry’s covers. “We’re in Mr. Bolt’s house. The windows are round, like on a boat. Come look outside.”
Henry pulled the covers over himself again.
“You’re no fun,” Benny complained. “I’m going to wake up Jessie and Violet.”
Benny tiptoed down the hallway. The floor creaked. When Benny opened the door to his sisters’ room, that creaked, too. Mr. Bolt’s house was like an old, creaky boat.
Violet stood at the window. “Hi, Benny,” she whispered. “Look, there’s a tugboat pulling a barge. Come see.”
“I saw it already,” Benny answered. “Can we go down to the docks before we go to the mall?”
“As soon as we get dressed,” Violet told Benny. “Jessie and I will meet you and Henry downstairs in ten minutes. I think Mrs. Frye already has our breakfast started. I smell bacon.”
“There you are!” a cheerful older woman said when the Alden children appeared in the kitchen doorway.
“Good morning, Mrs. Frye,” Jessie said. “We didn’t need an alarm clock to wake us up. The sun reflecting on the water came right into our room.”
“And boats tooting. That’s my alarm clock,” Benny said. “It’s hard to sleep with all that tooting going on.”
Mrs. Frye laughed as she set out breakfast for the children. “After a while you don’t notice the tooting. I’m glad there’s no phone on the top floor, or you would have been up even earlier when it rang for you.”
Henry poured milk on his cornflakes. “Did Grandfather call already? He and Mr. Bolt only left last night.”
Mrs. Frye poured herself some coffee. “Oh, the call wasn’t from Mr. Alden. It was Hap Merchant. He said to go off and have a good day and not to worry about working at the mall until he calls again.”
“Gee, I think Hap might be mixed up,” Jessie said. “He was supposed to tell us when to meet him at Penny’s Emporium. We’d better get this straightened out.”
Mrs. Frye came around with a pile of toast. “We’re just a few minutes from Hope Harbor Mall. No need to rush off. Why you children want to work when there’s so much fun to be had, I just don’t know!”
Benny reached for another piece of Mrs. Frye’s buttery toast. “We do know. We like jobs. That’s our fun.”
“We’d better talk with Hap in person,” Jessie said. “Then we can explore.”
The Aldens helped Mrs. Frye with the breakfast dishes. She loved their company. While the children scraped and washed and rinsed the dishes, Mrs. Frye told them all about how Mr. Bolt had brought back the wonderful seaport of Hope Harbor.
“Now that the mall is here, the boats unload a lot of freight right off the docks for all the stores in the mall. Hope Harbor Mall is different from most malls. The stores sell things from all over the world. Just last week at Penny’s Emporium I found a lovely plate from Switzerland.”
Benny seemed worried. “Does Penny’s shop just sell little china dishes and fancy kinds of stuff like that?” he asked.
Mrs. Frye laughed. “Not to worry. Penny’s is the perfect place for children to shop in or work in. You can do both. Penny’s shop has everything—candy a caramel corn machine, souvenirs, and balloons. There’s even a corner in the shop where folks stick their faces behind a pirate cutout and have their pictures taken. You’ll find toys and souvenirs from all over the world. Penny gets her goods from Asia, Europe, Hawaii.”
When Benny heard Hawaii, he made his silly monkey face. “I had a coconut monkey that had a face like this. It came from Hawaii, only not on a boat. I carried it all the way back on the plane.”
Mrs. Frye laughed. “Did you eat your coconut monkey?”
“Not that kind of coconut. It was a big coconut shell with a monkey face painted on it. I bought it with my own money. They had pirate coconuts, but I like monkeys. I lost it when we drove here. It went into a garbage truck by mistake.”
Mrs. Frye patted Benny’s head. “What a shame. Well, you must tell Penny Block about it when you meet her. I’ve never seen coconut monkeys in her shop, but I bet she’d know where to get one. Now off you go, children. I’ll leave a message at Penny’s shop telling her to expect you. Take your time getting there. Penny doesn’t open up her shop until ten.”
On their way to Hope Harbor Mall, the Aldens had plenty of time to walk along the waterfront. Several freighters were unloading at the docks.
“I wonder what’s on all those boats,” Henry said. “Some of those freighters come from far away. That one says ‘Tahiti’ on it. See, Benny? That’s far away, like Hawaii.”
“Hey, look! The police are checking one of the boats,” Benny said.
The other children looked up. A man and woman in blue uniforms followed a young crewman with curly black hair from crate to crate on a small freighter. They poked around, checking some of the boxes and taking notes on their clipboards.
Benny grabbed Henry’s arm. “Maybe the crewman is really a pirate! What if there are stolen jewels inside one of those boxes? Will those police put him in jail?”
Jessie laughed. “We’ve all been reading too many mysteries to you, Benny! Those aren’t regular police. They’re customs inspectors. Customs people check goods that come into the country from other countries.”
Benny noticed that the inspectors checked some boxes but not others. “Well, they’re not doing a very good job. They skipped some boxes.”
“Let’s get a little closer,” Henry told Benny. “The inspectors can’t check every single thing, or they’d never finish. They just pick boxes at random. The shippers have no idea which boxes will get checked.”
“Maybe that’s why that crewman looks so nervous,” Benny said.
“Is this the last of the shipment?” one of the inspectors asked the crewman.
The young man shifted from one foot to the other. “As far as I know, that’s all of it,” he answered. Then he dropped the screwdriver he’d been holding. When it started to roll down the gangplank, Benny raced to catch it before it fell into the water.
“Thanks,” the young man told Benny. “Good catch.”
Finally the inspectors drove off in a government car they had parked on the dock.
The young crewman watched the car pull away. He yelled down at the Aldens. “Hey, you have to leave, too. Tourists aren’t allowed on this loading dock.”
The children looked at one another. The docks were open to anyone.
“He’s not very nice to us,” Benny complained. “And I even caught his screwdriver.”
Jessie checked her watch. “I guess we should get going. It’s almost ten o’clock. I wonder if some of the shipments they just unloaded are going to the mall.”
The children started to walk away. Benny turned around to wave at the crewman. But the crewman didn’t wave back. He was busy lifting up some kind of trapdoor from under a huge coil of rope. The young man pulled out some boxes, counted them, then put them back under the trapdoor. He looked around, then threw the rope over the door. From where the Aldens were standing, there was no way of telling that the crewman had a secret hiding place. The customs inspectors had missed it completely. |