Brave Warrior Read Online Free Page A

him.
    Felix peered inside.
    Hundreds of similar phrases were written there, filling the entire inside of the trunk.
    “Whose trunk was this?” Felix wondered.
    Maisie shrugged.
    “I think it’s a code or something,” she said.
    Felix tried to make sense of any of it. After every few dozen, the person had written Elm Medona again, then more of the nonsensical phrases.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “Why did they keep writing Elm Medona?”
    “It reminds me of that day Great-Aunt Maisie made us try to crack the code for the Fabergé egg, remember?”
    “Of course I remember.
Metaphoric kiwis
was an anagram for Maisie Pickworth,” Felix said.
    They both looked up from the words they’d been staring at.
    “Anagrams!” Maisie said, excited. Just as she had suspected all along! “These are anagrams for Elm Medona!”

CHAPTER 3
Penelope Merriweather
    “M aybe we could ask Great-Uncle Thorne?” Felix said.
    This was much later, after Maisie had dutifully read aloud each entry and they’d both decided that whoever had tried to crack the anagram had not succeeded. None of them made any sense or led to anything even remotely interesting or revelatory. They’d puzzled over the anagram themselves, each of them writing the words Elm Medona on a piece of paper and then rearranging the letters the entire time they ate dinner. The cook had left roasted chicken and French fries—Cook insisted they call them
frites
, which they both found ridiculous—for them, and they’d sat together in that enormousKitchen, nibbling and writing and thinking.
    Maisie did not want to ask Great-Uncle Thorne. In fact, she didn’t want to involve him at all. Finding the writing in that trunk had been just the thing to bring Felix back into her orbit. He was finally paying attention to her again. Once they told someone else, she would become the third wheel again. And Maisie was sick of being the third wheel.
    “I don’t know,” she said, dipping a fry into mayonnaise, which Cook approved of; apparently everyone in France dipped their
frites
in mayo. “I think we can solve this if we just stick to it.”
    Felix looked doubtful.
    “Maybe we’re missing something,” Maisie said.
    “Obviously,” Felix said with a sigh.
    He chewed the eraser of his pencil, an old habit that he’d mostly lost. It made Maisie feel nostalgic watching him. She remembered when all the pencils in his pencil box had gnawed bottoms. Their second-grade teacher, Miss Lupa, had put Tabasco on his pencils, and when their father found out, he’d gone to the school and demanded she be fired. Of course she wasn’t. But Maisie and Felix had enjoyed the drama of their burly father in his paint-splatteredclothes defending Felix’s right to chew his pencils.
    “What are you smiling about?” Felix asked.
    “Miss Lupa,” Maisie said.
    “The pencils,” Felix said, nodding.
    “Remember when Dad said, ‘Who’s named Lupa anyway? It means
wolf
!’”
    Felix walked over to the giant stainless-steel refrigerator and peered inside.
    “There’s chocolate pudding,” he reported.
    “Yum,” Maisie said happily.
    “Except, of course, Cook calls it
pot au chocolat
,” Felix said as he brought two ramekins of pudding and two spoons to the table.
    “She has a French name for everything,” Maisie said.
    “Great-Uncle Thorne does it, too,” she added. She took a taste of the thick chocolate pudding. “Mmmm,” she said. “Heavenly.”
    “And Great-Aunt Maisie. The whole lot of them throw French words into everything they say.”
    “Bon appétit!”
Maisie said, imitating the way Great-Aunt Maisie used to speak.
    “À demain!”
Felix said with a giggle.
    “Pourquoi!”
Maisie said.
    “Mon dieu!”
Felix said.
    Maisie looked at her brother.
    “Elm Medona,” she said.
    “That’s not French,” Felix said.
    “Maybe,” Maisie said, studying the anagrams she’d written.
    “What are you thinking?” Felix asked.
    He looked down at his own anagrams. None of