The Order of Odd-Fish Read Free Page A

wishing it would be gone the next day. But she couldn’t help feeling the package was waiting. She almost felt like it was daring her.
             
    In the meantime there was Christmas morning, and Aunt Lily’s hangover, to deal with. Jo dragged the moaning, woozy Aunt Lily out of bed, got some coffee into her, and helped her hobble downstairs to the darkened ballroom.
    As usual on Christmas morning, Jo and Aunt Lily opened their gifts in front of their battered aluminum Christmas tree, listened to carols crackling on the AM radio, and had a huge breakfast of bacon, eggs, and pancakes. They couldn’t buy proper presents for each other this far out in the desert, so every year they rummaged through Aunt Lily’s storage rooms for forgotten trinkets and exchanged those instead. This year Aunt Lily gave Jo a fake gold sarcophagus, a prop from a mummy movie she’d once starred in. Jo gave Aunt Lily a giant stuffed octopus she’d found rotting away in the attic, origin unknown.
    Ordinarily Aunt Lily would’ve been delighted by the octopus, but this morning she was a wreck.
    “Oh, why do I do the things I do?” she groaned, holding an ice pack to her head and fumbling with an antique shoebox-sized remote control. “Jo, could you—Jo?”
    “What?”
    “You mind if I turn on the Belgian Prankster?”
    Jo grimaced. “Do we
have
to watch the Belgian Prankster?”
    “Please, Jo—ooh, I feel like somebody turned on a blender inside me. You know? I think the Belgian Prankster’s in Denmark this week. Do you think, could I just…?”
    “Okay, okay!” Jo could never resist Aunt Lily’s wheedling.
    Aunt Lily clicked the remote and the television slowly came to life. A goggled man in furs was rampaging around the streets of Copenhagen on a dogsled, chasing screaming Danes. “The Belgian Prankster!” said Aunt Lily, and her eyes glazed.
    Jo lay in the sarcophagus, her eyes closed, and tried to block out the yammering of the Belgian Prankster. She was expected at work in an hour, but there was still some time to relax after her exhausting late night. The inside of the mummy’s coffin, lined with black velvet cushions, was surprisingly comfortable. Lying in it, she felt pleasantly dead.
    Still, the dim quiet of the house by day, after last night’s wild noise and glittering lights, made her gloomy. She had a headache. The television was shrill, frantic, too loud. And the Belgian Prankster…
    “Hey, Jo?”
    Jo opened her eyes.
    “That package—why haven’t you opened it?” said Aunt Lily.
    Jo turned over. “I don’t know. I don’t feel like it’s mine.”
    “Of course it’s yours,” said Aunt Lily. “Had your name on it, anyway, huh?”
    Jo frowned. “It also said something about fish…have you ever heard of that? The Order of Odd-Fish?”
    Aunt Lily didn’t answer at first. After a moment Jo twisted up out of the sarcophagus and looked at her. Aunt Lily seemed to be concentrating very hard, puzzled and frustrated.
    “I don’t know,” she said at last. “I think I
have
heard of an Order of Odd-Fish, somewhere. But I can’t…it must’ve been a long time ago.”
    Something about the words
Order of Odd-Fish
disturbed Aunt Lily; Jo could tell. Her eyes darkened, and her usual liveliness faltered. Jo and Aunt Lily sat silently in the crumbling ballroom’s gloom, and even though Jo was sweating in the heat, she shivered.
    “I do want to open that package,” said Jo. “But didn’t Colonel Korsakov say it would be unsafe in the wrong hands?”
    Aunt Lily perked up. “Korsakov? What does he know about safe? The fool threw himself in front of a flying bullet. He’s lucky it just nicked him.”
    “You could say he saved my life.”
    “It was his fault there was any shooting in the first place. I’d kick him out of the house if he weren’t so darned cute.” Aunt Lily turned back to the TV. The Belgian Prankster was pouring tons of cottage cheese down the streets of Copenhagen, burying his