A Mixture of Mischief

by Anna Meriano

  “Okay,” JP said. “Do you . . . still want to go to the bakery?”

  She couldn’t act like everything was normal, but maybe she could create a diversion, and catch JP just when he thought he was safe. A plan formed in her mind, a way to lure her cousin into action, if indeed he was in cahoots with Abuelo.

  “This is all my fault!” Leo cried. JP flinched, Leo let go of her concentration, and by the time JP reached for her she was already invisible, running in the wrong direction down Main Street, kicking up puffs of pollen as she went.

  “What do you mean, she ran away?”

  Daddy’s face was scrunched into wrinkles and his hair stood on end from running his fingers through it too many times. He glared at JP, who stood in the bakery doorway, mouth hanging open while Mamá, Isabel, and Marisol moved to surround him.

  Leo, who had snuck in invisibly behind JP, watched the scene with a belly full of guilt.

  “She said, um, that it was all her fault, and then she ran away,” JP mumbled.

  “Paloma?” Mamá had her phone tucked between her shoulder and her ear. “No, we didn’t find it. We have another problem. It’s Leo.”

  “Ran away where?” Daddy asked. “Why didn’t you follow her?”

  “Well, I . . . I’m not sure? Because . . .” JP looked at Isabel pleadingly.

  “What direction?” Daddy said, his voice squeaking in frustration. “Did she go back to Caroline’s house? Or toward the freeway? Was she heading toward our house? Give me something here, Juan Pablo.”

  JP just opened and closed his mouth.

  “He doesn’t know,” Isabel said, coming to the younger boy’s rescue. “It’s not his fault. He doesn’t know because—because Leo can turn invisible now.”

  Mamá dropped her phone. It clattered to the floor and lay there until JP picked it up and handed it back.

  “Paloma? Yes, sorry. I’m going to have to call you back.” Mamá hung up the phone and sagged against the counter.

  “Cucaracha,” Marisol whispered. “What are you doing?” That made Leo freeze on her way past the counter, but when she looked at Marisol, her sister was gazing out the front window, not actually talking to Leo.

  “Is she training with . . . him?” Mamá asked faintly.

  “No!” Isabel said while JP shook his head quickly. “Mamá, it’s not like that. It’s just her power. She came into it on her own. We were thinking . . . it seems like it might be her birth-order power.”

  “That is the last ability Leo needed,” Marisol muttered under her breath.

  “Okay,” Mamá said slowly. “Okay.” She tugged the strings of her apron and tightened her ponytail. “I’m going to scry for her.”

  “Elena.” Daddy held up his hand. “You’ve done so many scrying spells this week, and they take a lot out of you, and . . . well . . .”

  “They don’t work very well.” Marisol, as usual, had no problem being blunt. “Tía Paloma got better results from across the state.”

  “Hush, Marisol,” Mamá snapped. “Yes, scrying isn’t my specialty, but I can make sure Leo’s safe, at least.”

  “Tía Paloma could do that,” Isabel said gently, “and she has the twins to help her conserve energy.”

  Mamá fumed. “Fine.” She tapped her phone with quick, angry fingers.

  “There’s something else,” JP said. “Something that happened right before we left Caroline’s, I mean, Brent’s, uh . . . right before Leo ran away. She sort of . . . got in a fight. With Caroline. And Brent. About . . . things.”

  Leo didn’t want to stand there while JP tried to lie awkwardly. She moved to the kitchen instead, crawling under the swinging blue doors so she wouldn’t disturb them. She had a plan to carry out.

  On the top shelf of the last wooden cabinet, the bakery’s magical items hid. Leo didn’t know how many special heirloom artifacts her family had—she had learned about the mixing bowl and the molcajete just this month—but there was one other item she knew for sure would tempt a thief.

  She needed to bait her trap.

  Luckily, the kitchen was a disaster zone, turned upside down in the search for the molcajete. That made Leo’s job a whole lot easier. Ms. Wood had done a whole science class on Rube Goldberg machines: elaborate domino-effect contraptions where each part set off the next part in a complex mechanism designed to do one simple task. Leo didn’t have marbles or rubber bands, but while her family argued outside about her disappearance, she carefully shifted the contents of the shelf, the position of the cabinet doors, and the mop bucket into just the right positions.

  “We should go home,” Mamá was saying. “Before we work ourselves into any more of a panic. Leo’s smart; she might have been upset, but she wouldn’t have run off to do anything dangerous.”

  Marisol snorted and Isabel grimaced.

  “And anyway,” Mamá continued, “I’m not in the mood to work anymore today. We can leave the cleanup for later. I’m not sure . . . I’m not sure if we’ll open tomorrow anyway.”

  Leo stood just inside the kitchen doorway, wishing she could give Mamá a hug and erase the tired worry lines across her forehead.

  “I’ll turn off the ovens and the lights,” Isabel said. She walked to the blue doors and pushed them open.

  The doors knocked the mop bucket, sending it rolling across the tiled floor . . .

  . . . where it knocked the second wood cabinet, jostling its ajar door more fully open . . .

  . . . and into the last cabinet’s door, which flapped shut with a bang, upsetting the barely balanced object hanging over the edge of the top shelf, knocking it to the floor with a slightly muffled clink.

  “Everything okay in there?” Daddy called.

  Leo held her breath, watching Isabel’s face as she stared at the path the mop bucket had taken. Leo’s plan depended on secrecy, so if Isabel figured out that someone had set all these things to fall, everything would be ruined.

  “Fine!” Isabel called back. “Sorry, it’s a mess in here. I’m fine.”

  She walked to the fallen object, small and silk wrapped, a clear crystal Mamá had once placed in Leo’s palm to show her how strong her magic could be. Isabel held the crystal inside the silk, tapping her bottom lip in thought.

  Come on. Leo tried to telepathically beam thoughts to her sister. Come on, Isabel.

  “Mamá,” Isabel called, “do you think we should bring the crystal with us tonight? We might not want to leave it here, considering everything that’s gone missing.”

  Leo let out a sigh of relief as Isabel made her way back to the front of the bakery. Then she slipped out the back door and hid in the back of Daddy’s truck. Nobody would dream of connecting the crystal with Leo now, which meant that JP would have no idea that she was on to him.

  And no idea that he was about to steal himself straight into a trap.

  CHAPTER 18

  CAUGHT!

  Leo had hitched a secret ride home in Daddy’s truck and raced past him when he unlocked the door, and she was innocently and visibly pouting on her bed when he rushed to check her room.

  “You scared us big-time, Leonora,” he scolded while he hugged her. “Don’t do that again, please.”

  Dinner was solemn, and nobody wanted to talk unless it was to lecture Leo for being irresponsible or for not telling them about her invisibility. Leo barely touched Isabel’s spaghetti, too nervous waiting for Mamá to hide the crystal.

  “What’s that?” she made sure to ask loudly when Mamá slipped the silk bundle into a kitchen cupboard, followed by the family recipe book and a wooden box Leo had never seen before.

  “Heirlooms,” Mamá said. “We brought them for safekeeping.”

  In the chair next to Leo, JP seemed to be totally focused on inhaling his pasta, but Leo saw his eyes flick to the cabinet after Mamá sat back down.

  Mamá wanted to “chat” with Leo, which probably meant a long lecture and then a long discussion of her new power, but Leo told her that she was worn out from a long day of
magic and needed rest more than she needed to learn a lesson. Mamá agreed, but not before she confiscated Leo’s herb pouch. Then Leo retreated to her room to hide until the sun set and the house settled into quiet.

  That was when she got up, slipped effortlessly into the shadows, and crept into the kitchen.

  Leo didn’t know if JP, or whoever the thief was, was a saltasombras too, or had some way to see invisible people. So she hid in the pantry, the crack in the door giving a perfect view of the cupboard where the heirlooms slept. She sat down on a bag of dried pinto beans, stomped her feet to scare away any spiders or cucarachas or other creepy crawlies, and settled in for a long stakeout.

  Only about fifteen minutes had passed, however, when she heard creaking footsteps crossing the living room.

  Leo leaned forward, heart pounding as a tall figure entered the kitchen. It cut through a moonbeam coming through the window, and in that moment, Leo saw her cousin’s face illuminated.

  “You! I knew it!” Leo yelled as she leaped to her feet. But she forgot that JP couldn’t hear her. She pulled open the pantry door, ready to confront her treacherous cousin.

  But he was opening the refrigerator door, and a moment later was fumbling to stick a straw into a cardboard juice box, his hand shaking. Leo let the pantry close quietly behind her, waiting to see what he was up to.

  JP sucked his juice until the straw made empty bubbling noises, then tossed it into the trash. He pulled out the leftover bowl of spaghetti, ripping off the Saran wrap and digging in without even heating up the sludgy cold mass. He didn’t so much as glance at the cupboard.

  “JP?” Leo stepped out of the shadows, “What are you doing?”

  “Gah!” JP dropped the bowl and the fork, sending spaghetti everywhere.

  Leo braced herself in case someone heard, but after a moment of silence, it was clear that everyone was still asleep.

  “Marisol was right,” JP grumbled once he caught his breath. “You’re already so sneaky, of course your power ended up being invisibility.”

  Leo grabbed paper towels from the pantry. “What are you doing up in the middle of the night?” she asked as they both cleaned spaghetti off the floor.

  “Low blood sugar,” he answered. “What are you doing up in the middle of the night, and invisible?”

  Leo hesitated. Her plan depended on JP not knowing that she suspected him.

  “What?” he asked. “There’s no one here to spy on, except . . .” He tilted his head and glanced toward the cupboard. “Oh, of course! A stakeout. That’s smart. But why didn’t you tell me you were—” His eyes widened. “Oh.”

  Leo shrugged guiltily.

  “So you thought I was . . .” His mouth turned down. “But I don’t even . . .” He shook his head. “Why does it feel like anything I say is going to make me sound guilty? Leo, I promise I didn’t steal your heirlooms.”

  “I know.” Leo sighed. A real thief likely wouldn’t stop for spaghetti while pulling a heist, and JP was way too terrible a liar to have been spying for Abuelo Logroño all along anyway. “I guess I just had to rule it out.”

  JP nodded slowly. “It makes sense, actually.”

  “You did just happen to show up at a suspicious time,” Leo said.

  “No . . . I mean, this must have been Abuelo Logroño’s plan,” JP said. “He got into your head, you know? He’s got you feeling unsafe, suspecting everyone, fighting with your friends, worrying your family. I bet he thinks that if he can make you feel like you’re on your own, like there’s no one you can trust, you’ll eventually decide you need more power to protect yourself. Then you’ll turn to him.”

  Leo stared at her cousin as he stood and dumped his soggy paper towels into the trash. Was he right? She had thought the only way to beat Abuelo Logroño was to beat him at his own sneaky, secretive game. Mamá and Daddy hid their worries and their spells too, and wouldn’t tell Leo or her sisters what they were thinking. Maybe this wasn’t the way to go about things at all.

  Maybe Abuelo Logroño didn’t even need to sabotage the bakery to hurt Leo’s family.

  Leo wiped the final streak of spaghetti sauce off the floor. “I think we need to have a family meeting.”

  JP nodded. “And we should do it in here. We don’t want Abuelo’s accomplice to snatch the heirlooms while you’re fixing things.”

  “So you spied on us, and you lied to us about spying on Belinda O’Rourke.” Mamá frowned at Leo from across the table. She and Daddy had reluctantly woken up to come to Leo’s family meeting, and they were still pretty groggy. Marisol and Isabel were more awake but just as confused. “And now you want to tell everyone what you learned while spying?”

  Leo nodded. “I’m sorry. I thought I had to be sneaky because . . . well, because Abuelo was being sneaky, and you were being sneaky. And when I tried to tell you about my worries—”

  Mamá sighed. “I guess I wasn’t exactly modeling proper open communication. You girls really know how to throw my mistakes back in my face.” Marisol snickered. “Okay, fine, you’re right. Your father and I have been stressed, and worried. We didn’t want you girls to be scared, and we thought that it was our responsibility to protect you, but I can see how that backfired. I should have told you that I’ve been scrying and scrubbing the house and bakery with as many positive-energy herbs as possible. Still, I haven’t found any trace of whoever is stealing our things. I just don’t understand it.”

  “I thought it was Belinda O’Rourke,” Leo said. “But she and her daughter seem innocent. And then I thought it was JP, but when he had the opportunity tonight, the only thing he stole was spaghetti.”

  “You’re always welcome to our spaghetti, JP,” Isabel said softly.

  “Thanks. Sorry I dumped it on the floor.”

  “So I don’t have any answers either,” Leo continued, “but it’s got to be someone working with Abuelo Logroño, someone who can get through the wards. That’s what Abuelo Logroño hinted at, anyway. And we know that they’ve been able to steal things right out from under our noses before, even while people were in the bakery.”

  Isabel looked at the cupboard. “So if someone’s after out magical heirlooms, and the heirlooms are here, why don’t we just follow through with Leo’s plan? It seems like it’s still our best chance to catch the thieves.”

  “If we haven’t already tipped them off by having this obvious family meeting,” Marisol muttered.

  Mamá nodded slowly. “I’d prefer to know what magical plots are going on under my own roof. But I must admit, Leo’s plan was a good one. And one that may still work.”

  Leo smiled. Before, her plan had been sitting like a knot in her stomach that she had to clutch tightly or else it would fall to pieces. Now the knot was gone, and her breathing came more easily.

  “Hold on,” JP said. “Does anyone hear that . . . ?”

  Everyone froze. Mamá snapped her fingers, putting out the kitchen light with a burst of magic that Leo could smell in the air. Leo heard the sound, a rhythmic scuffling, just before it stopped abruptly.

  In the dark, a pair of glowing eyes peeked into the kitchen doorway.

  “Gatito,” Mamá groaned. She snapped her fingers again, and the lights came back on. Señor Gato leaped from the floor onto the stovetop, his tail bushy as he meowed loudly. Everyone around the table laughed.

  “He wants to know why everyone’s up, probably,” Daddy said. “And I don’t blame him. It’s way past my bedtime.” He stood up from the table and stretched. Mamá pushed her chair back as well, making a screech that rattled the cupboards.

  But one cupboard in particular rattled more than the others.

  “Wait,” Leo said. She held up a hand. The door of the cupboard where the heirlooms were stashed stilled, but came to rest slightly open. Almost like something was stuck in the way. . . .

  Leo slipped into the shadows, and only then could she see that there, standing perfectly still on the counter with one hand reaching into the cupboard, was a small figure
with bright yellow eyes and skin the greenish-orange color of dried catkin pollen. It had a round face with big eyes like a kindergartner, but its skin was as wrinkly as a grandparent’s, and it wore an oversized floppy brown hat with a wide brim and pointed crown.

  And it was stealing their heirlooms.

  “Stop that!” Leo shouted. The creature pulled its empty hand out of the cupboard. “Mamá, the thief is here!”

  She had no idea if her family could hear her, but she didn’t wait to find out. She jumped on top of the counter and scrambled toward the creature, who tucked into a ball and rolled away, so fast that Leo’s fingers barely grazed the tip of its hat. The thief stopped dead in the center of the kitchen, eyes flicking warily between Leo and its fallen hat on the floor in front of her.

  “Leo?” Mamá asked. “What happened? Are you okay?”

  The creature looked at Leo and started to shimmer. Leo turned visible too, hopping off the counter to look more closely at the upright triangular ears on top of the creature’s head. “What is going on?” she asked. “What are you?”

  The creature whined.

  “Uh, is this normal?” JP’s voice cracked, “Can somebody tell me if this is normal?”

  “Not normal,” Daddy answered in a whisper. Mamá patted his arm, but she also stared open-mouthed at the creature.

  The thief didn’t move, but another creature of the same type darted out from behind the refrigerator, faster than Señor Gato chasing a lizard, and wrapped bony fingers around Leo’s toe.

  “Hey!” Leo yanked her foot away and heard her toe pop like a cracked knuckle as she escaped the creature’s clutches. “Cut it out! What is your problem?” She couldn’t bring herself to kick something so much smaller than she was, so she reached out her free hand and snatched the red floppy hat off the second creature’s head.

  “Give it back give it back give it back!” She was not expecting its sudden high-pitched squeal. The creature reached for its hat, arms flailing. Señor Gato hissed from his perch on the stove.