Chapter Five Analyzing Data
"Stop!"
"Seventy-nine," Mary said, writing the counter number down.
Mrs. Tweedlebare pressed rewind, stopped the tape and pressed play. 'K xxx SE! Squawk! Squawk!'
She edited out the squawks and tried again. 'Kay-Mar-Say.'
The silence was deafening. For at least a minute, there was not another sound other than the faint whir of the tape spool. A tremendous squawk made the speakers twang like a too tightly strung fifty-dollar guitar. Mrs. Tweedlebare nonchalantly raised her teacup to her lips.
Over the sound of someone walking along a gravel path, Mary said, "Freddie's munching raw potato. He loves them."
'Mat An Za' was followed by 'Ahhh Choo.'
Mrs. Tweedlebare consulted her Spanish-English dictionary. "Let's see," she said. "Quemarse means to be burned." She flipped back a few pages. Here it is. Matanza means the act of . . . " Mrs. Tweedlebare paused.
The tenseness in her face suggested that something serious was in the offing. For a suspenseful moment, she said nothing. Taking a deep breath she mumbled something so quietly that Mary leaned forward.
"Killing, the act of killing, slaughter."
"Whew!" Mary exclaimed. "What do you think Freddie means by that?"
"I think it means your Uncle Herman could be in danger."
"Do you think jungle dwellers have a lot of colds?"
"Freddie does seem to sneeze a lot."
"I wonder if parrots really do sneeze. Somehow, I doubt it."
"Look it up in the index under parrots, sneezing," Mrs. Tweedlebare said. "Freddie was probably just imitating those around him."
While Mrs. Tweedlebare was getting down the gist of Freddie's words, Mary re-logged each item. In three days, Freddie Fudge had uttered words for a total of sixty-three minutes. Allowing for short pauses and some unidentifiable sounds, the condensed tape ran for about ninety minutes.
"I'll say one thing," Mary said, in an effort to keep Mrs. Tweedlebare up to date with her growing vocabulary. "Freddie is not your average, mono-lingual Macaw."
Mary let out a satisfied sigh as though she had just finished a big dinner. For two or three days, she had been searching for an opportunity to find a place to drop monolingual. "He is definitely bilingual." She was proud of monolingual. Precocious was last week's word. Now that she had absorbed precocious, she was uncertain whether she really wanted to be a child ahead of her time. She liked being just a kid. Monolingual was less threatening, less show-offish.
"That he is," agreed Mrs. Tweedlebare. "He was undoubtedly witness to some very strange goings on. There were probably at least three languages spoken at Uncle Herman's camp, maybe even four."
"Trilingual, Mary said. "Of course that's why Freddie seems to have such a smattering of languages."
"English, Portuguese, Spanish and I can't figure out what the fourth language could possibly be," Mrs. Tweedlebare said giving Mary space to comment.
"It is probably a language spoken by the Indians who were teaching Uncle Herman their knowledge of Amazon botany. I don't know which language they spoke for there are many Indian tribes in the Amazon basin. At school, we've been learning about the indigenous people of the Amazon."
That part is going to be tough because I don't think there are any Amazonian-English dictionaries," Mrs. Tweedlebare said.
Mary's stomach growled.
`"We'll have to get Uncle Herman to help us out with the Amazonian words," Mrs. Tweedlebare said.
"I’m going to call Mrs. Janeiro. Before seeing her, we will go over the notes we've made.”
“I’ll get us some ice cream."
"Is it all set for us then?" Mary asked upon returning with two heaping bowls of ice cream covered with multi-coloured sprinkles.
Mrs. Tweedlebare smiled but did not answer straight away. She was debating whether it would be wise to take the child with her. She took a trial spoonful of ice cream. Normally she did not smother her ice cream in sprinkles.
"This hits the spot."
"Hits the spot," Mary agreed.
Mrs. Tweedlebare scooped up a kid-sized spoonful of ice cream but only licked it for a moment. Mustn't get brain freeze, she cautioned herself. She thought for a moment and then decided that if Mary were old enough to work responsibly on what just might turn into a case requiring a detective's expertise, she should certainly deserve to be allowed to learn what Mrs. Janeiro had to say.
"We'll have to ask your mother first," Mrs. Tweedlebare said blushing. After all was said and done, this was Mary's story, not hers. Why did she keep forgetting that? It's really getting interesting, she thought. Perhaps there are stories in it for both of us.
"What if Mom says no?"
"I’ll just have to inform her that your assistance is vital," Mrs. Tweedlebare said. As an afterthought Mrs. Tweedlebare added, "I don't think we need tell your mother, at this point that the situation could be dicey. Besides, this is your story, not mine so it will be your decision."
"She’d only worry."
Mrs. Tweedlebare nodded.
Mrs. Tweedlebare drove leisurely as though they merely were out for a Sunday jaunt instead of on a venture to learn about what may soon prove to be a rescue mission.