Read Us and Uncle Fraud for Free Online

beside it was the small box, also closed and still sealed with its strap. My bed was neatly made. The green and red Life Savers were gone.
    I wanted to get credit for the gift. "I see you ate the Life Savers I left for you," I said to Claude.
    He looked puzzled for a moment, then glanced at the pillow where I had left them, and finally rolled his eyes in horror. "Life Savers?" he asked. "You mean they were candy?"
    "Of course," I said. "You know what Life Savers are."
    "My dear Louisamanda," he said, heaving a huge sigh, "my life is such that I cannot trust anything. Imagine entering an unfamiliar house, a house I have not visited for three years, so that I no longer knew if the inhabitants were friends or enemies. Imagine finding—"he hesitated, and then spoke in a whisper, "—
edible objects
on my pillow."
    I giggled. "I only meant them as a sort of present," I said.
    "What a relief to hear that," he said, shaking his head. "I just couldn't be certain. The colors seemed meaningful—well, you can imagine."
    "What color were they?" Marcus asked.
    "You tell him, Louisamanda," Claude said. "I can hardly bring myself to speak of it. The shock of finding them there was so great."
    "They were red and green," I told Marcus.
    "You realize what that signifies," Claude said.
    Marcus frowned. "
Stop
and
Go
?" he suggested. "Like on traffic lights?"
    Claude reached over and shook Marcus's hand firmly. "Good man," he said. "You have the kind of quick perceptions that may bring you fame someday."
    "It means cherry and lime," I scoffed. "It doesn't have any other meaning."
    Uncle Claude put his arm around my shoulders. "I like that, Louise," he said. "You are not a suspicious person like Marcus and me. My life has been so fraught—absolutely
fraught
—with sinister occurrences that I confess that I misconstrued your gift. I felt that it was a message of some sort: a message that I should
Stop,
or perhaps Go, and—well, here they are. I saved them as evidence."
    He reached over, pulled open the drawer of the
little table beside my bed, and revealed the two Life Savers. "I am humbled by your generosity," he said, "and shamed by my suspicions."
    "Uncle Claude," I told him, "I wanted to give you a present because you said that you had a present—you know, in your little box."
    "Ah," Claude said, "the little box." He picked it up and turned it over carefully in his hands. "Have you two ever been to Russia?"
    "No," Marcus and I said together, watching his slender hands curved around the box.
    "Russia today," Claude said in a soft, slow voice, "is a gray place. You probably go to the movies on Saturdays, don't you?"
    We nodded.
    "Well, many of the movies you see are Technicolor: everything bright and clear, with music and singing and dancing and romance. Am I right?"
    We nodded.
    "But some of them are black and white: grainy, drab—"
    "The mysteries," I said, "and spy movies."
    "Well," Claude went on, "Russia is grainy and drab these days. But there was a time when Russia was a Technicolor place, all sunlight and glistening golden onion-shaped domes. Czars and czarinas, and music and dancing. And in that time—" He paused. He was telling it like a story, the kind of story that made you want to say, "Yes? Go on!"
    We waited.
    "In that time, Easter mattered. The Russian Easter. Now of course I'm not talking about your Easter Bunny—"
    We grinned. Marcus poked me.
    Claude grinned, too. "The Russian Easter was the biggest celebration of the year. The brightest clothes, the best food, the happiest music, and the most decorated eggs."
    "They had eggs, too? Like ours?"
    "Aha," Claude said. "You've hit on the essential difference. No, their eggs were not at all like yours. Maybe the eggs of the
peasants
were. But we're talking now about the eggs of the czars. There was a jeweler—the jeweler to the royal family—the man who made the
crowns,
you understand. And he began to make the most fabulous Easter eggs