The Lost Girl

by Anne Ursu

  Iris’s eyes widened. This was not good.

  When they were younger, Lark had made a big bestiary of monsters, complete with drawings and crucial information like the particular predilections of ogres.

  To Lark, an ogre took great pride in his collection of children’s hearts, and when the other ogres would come over for dinner (usually ogres serve yak to guests) he would show off his treasure, boasting about how he had the finest collection in the land. He’d take a jar off the shelf and tell the great and glorious story of the capture of the child the heart once belonged to. (Whether or not the story was actually great and glorious, or even true at all, only the ogre knew. After all, who was going to question him?)

  “He seems kind of small for an ogre,” Iris said.

  “That’s just his disguise. So no one suspects him. I mean, if you were an ogre and you really wanted access to some fresh children, wouldn’t it make sense to pretend to be a mild-mannered fifth-grade teacher? He’s probably actually eight feet tall and over five hundred years old.”

  “His name isn’t very subtle, though. Hunt. Like, what he does to children.”

  “Ogres,” Lark said darkly, “are not known for their subtlety.”

  “They also can’t tell the difference between an octopus and a squid,” Iris grumbled, nodding to her sister’s shirt.

  “It’s obviously a squid!” Lark said. “Why would I have a shirt with an octopus on it? Tommy and Jeff called me Octopus Girl all day, and I couldn’t exactly be like, ‘Duh, I’m Squid Girl.’” Lark flushed slightly. This was clearly not something she wanted to talk about.

  “So, what exactly makes Mr. Hunt an ogre? Did something happen?”

  “Not really. He’s just an ogre. I can tell.”

  “Okay, good. I mean, not good that he’s an ogre, but—”

  “He made everyone stand up and introduce themselves and talk about their hobbies. I don’t have any hobbies.”

  “What are you talking about? You have all the hobbies!” Lark was the one with hobbies, and Iris was the one who didn’t have any hobbies, unless you counted being suspicious all the time.

  “Not really. Not that people care about. Chloe rides horses and Elodie plays hockey and Adam does YouTube. I stood up and I could barely remember my name and everyone was looking at me and probably making fun of my shirt in their head. I finally said I played the piano.”

  Lark did not play the piano. The last time she’d even touched a piano was when she was six and they were at the airport and she started pressing the keys on the piano on the main concourse and some tall lady yelled at her.

  “And then,” she went on, “Caitlin Morris said she played the piano too and tried to come up and talk to me about it before gym so I ran to the bathroom and now I have to learn about the piano.”

  “If I’d been there I could have reminded you of your hobbies and then this never would have happened.”

  “Yeah,” Lark grumbled. “I bet Mr. Hunt doesn’t have any hobbies he can name either. You can’t just say you collect kids’ hearts.”

  “Probably not,” Iris agreed, shifting in her seat. She could not seem to get comfortable today, anywhere. Maybe this was going to be the rest of her life—squishy uncomfortable seats and gray mushy days.

  But Lark was okay. She’d survived the Octopus Girl incident, at least, and other than thinking her teacher was a mythological child-eating beast, she hadn’t had a terrible day.

  It was something, anyway.

  Their mom wasn’t there when they got home, but fifteen minutes after they walked in the door her computer pinged—their dad trying to Skype. The girls looked at each other. Iris shook her head, but Lark raised her eyebrows. We have to answer.

  “My girls!” he beamed. “Now which one of you is which?”

  “Dad . . .” Iris said. He always did this.

  “Oh, yes. You’re Iris. How was the first day?”

  His eyes were so bright, his face so happy, like he just knew they were going to say that it was really good, and being separated turned out to be a great idea, and they loved their teachers, and each of them had made six new friends.

  “Lark thinks Mr. Hunt is an ogre,” Iris said.

  It was like someone turned off the light switch in his soul, and because they were on the computer and her dad sat way too close to the camera, they could see the minutiae of his emotions on his face—the way his eyes dimmed, the way his cheeks collapsed, the way his eyebrows transformed from perky arches to droopy caterpillars.

  “I mean, not like a real ogre,” Lark said. She’d gotten lots of talks on the difference between having a good imagination and creating problems for herself. “Just an ogre ogre.”

  “And why do you think that?” he asked.

  “He made fun of her,” Iris said. “In front of the whole class.”

  Their dad’s eyelid twitched slightly. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” he said after a moment. “If this happens again, we can dialogue with him about it.”

  “Dad!” Iris said.

  “Huh?”

  “That’s not a verb. You can’t dialogue with someone. You can talk to him, or have a dialogue. That’s what you can do.”

  “Exactly.” As he looked at her, his eyebrows knitted together, the caterpillars uniting in mutual concern. “Are you wearing all black?”

  Iris shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “Have you gone goth all of a sudden? I’ve only been gone three weeks!”

  Iris scowled. “No? I just felt like wearing this.”

  “Good. You’re not allowed to go goth until you’re at least twelve. How was your day?”

  Gray and mushy. “Fine.”

  “Good,” he said. “How’s your mom doing?”

  “Fine, I guess?”

  “I miss her.”

  “Okay. Didn’t you talk to her earlier?”

  “Sure, but I miss her. And you guys too. It’s lonely over here without my girls.” The eyelid twitched again. “Anyway. Love to your mom. I hope tomorrow’s even better than today.”

  “He seemed sad,” Lark said, when they hung up.

  “I guess.”

  “We should, like, make him a card or something.”

  Iris gave her a look. Really? After what they did?

  “I know, I know,” Lark said. “But . . . he still seemed sad.”

  This was why Lark was the nice one. “Okay,” Iris said grudgingly. “So what do you want to do?”

  Lark grinned. “I’ll get my stuff.”

  When Lark came back downstairs, she had paper and a box of markers and was holding a small green plastic figurine in her hands. “Look!” she said, placing it on the table.

  Lark had innumerable figurines of various shapes, sizes, materials, and species, mostly from various dollar-store trips or Christmas presents from their assortment of aunts. This one was from some box of mythological monsters, purchased from the zoo if Iris remembered correctly. It was an inch high and had a round bald head on a thick body, with ears that stuck out straight on either side of its head, and it wore something like a large loincloth.

  An ogre.

  “Do you see the resemblance?”

  “Not really?”

  “Me neither. But I’m sure this is what Mr. Hunt looks like on the inside.” She positioned the little figure on the table so it looked at Iris. “Hello, young lady,” she said in an ogre voice. “Do you have any hobbies?”

  “Ew,” Iris said.

  “Tell me about it,” Lark said. She sat back and opened the big marker box while the ogre stared at Iris with its hollow gaze. She turned it so it was looking away.

  “So,” Iris said, pointing at the markers, “what do you want to do?”

  “Well,” she said, eyes brightening. “I thought we could make a little book for him? About England? You could come up with, like, facts about London or British history or something, and then I’ll draw the pictures?”

  Lark, being Lark, had come up with the perfect way for them to m
ake something together. Iris could provide the hard facts, Lark the beautiful lies.

  Iris considered. “I don’t think I know anything about London outside of Harry Potter, which probably isn’t historically accurate?”

  “Go look stuff up, then. I’ll work on the cover.”

  So Lark tilted her head and began to draw a double-decker bus, her tongue sticking out slightly as she worked. Iris got up to wander to the computer but felt the eyes of the plastic ogre on her. So she stuffed it in her pocket where it couldn’t bother anyone.

  Fifteen minutes later, she presented Lark with a list for her perusal, including:

  ·In the nineteenth century, people used to dump their sewage in the Thames, and once during the summer it started to smell so badly they had to close Parliament.

  ·If you put a postage stamp with the queen’s picture upside down on a letter, that’s treason.

  ·King Henry VIII wanted to get a divorce but couldn’t under Catholic law so he invented a new religion.

  ·King Henry III had a pet polar bear.

  ·There’s a legend that London will fall if ravens fly away from the Tower of London so now ravens are kept on the grounds at all times.

  “I don’t know if I want to draw the Thames full of sewage,” Lark said, eyeing the list.

  “You could just make stink lines coming from it.”

  Lark curled up her nose. “I guess.”

  People used to bathe in the Thames and drink from it, but Iris decided not to tell Lark that part. Lark was not a huge fan of any stories involving bodily functions, which had made it hard on her when they did a unit on the digestive system last year.

  “I’m going to start with the polar bear. I don’t think I can really illustrate the Henry the Eighth thing? I don’t know how to draw someone inventing a new religion.”

  “He had eight wives, too.”

  “Oh, yeah! I can draw that. What else?”

  The ravens. Lark loved the raven part, as Iris knew she would.

  Ravens are the biggest birds in the crow family. The collective noun is either an unkindness of ravens or a conspiracy of ravens (which would sound bad, but their sister crows are collectively a murder). Like crows, ravens like to collect shiny things and hoard their treasure. Like crows, ravens are considered bad omens.

  Because of the legend there are seven ravens in the Tower of London, and their wings are clipped so they cannot escape, though sometimes they do anyway—a raven couple once eloped into the nearby woods, and another time an elderly raven fled the Tower and began living in a pub.

  And it was just when Iris was through telling Lark some of this that she saw a flash of black outside.

  “What’s wrong?” Lark asked.

  Iris had no idea what had appeared on her face, but whatever it was, Lark had noticed. And of course she had. She might not notice a fire truck about to run her over, but she could catch any subtle shift in Iris’s expressions. Which was obviously a big deal, since according to the kids in school she didn’t actually make facial expressions.

  “Oh, there was a big crow outside and it startled me.”

  Lark’s eyes widened. “A crow! Is it still there?”

  “No.”

  It was. It had settled on a telephone pole. It was staring at Iris as she spoke. Iris could see it, but Lark could not.

  The no had just popped out of her mouth like a reflex, like when the doctor hits your knee with that little hammer and your leg bounces. And now it was there, this flat-out lie just hanging in the air, daring Iris to keep pretending it wasn’t.

  But she couldn’t do anything about it now. It was a mistake, that was all. A reasonable mistake. This wasn’t a good time for Lark to get all weird about crows. She had enough to worry about.

  “Do you think it’s in the backyard?” Lark asked, eyes suddenly bright.

  “It didn’t go that way.” Which was true. The bird, which seemed way too big to be a normal crow, was perched on the pole, and began nibbling at something underneath its wing.

  “Bummer,” Lark said, then looked back down at her project.

  Iris glanced at the big crow, now a giant living representation of her ability to lie to her sister.

  But Lark knew nothing. She was working happily, all thoughts of ogres and the school day clearly forgotten. Lark with her head in an art project was a girl with no worries at all.

  So Iris put her head down to work on the text portion of the book too, trying to ignore the lie just above her. And when their mom finally got home, Iris was so absorbed in lettering the text that she almost forgot about the crow and the lie, about the ogre, about the school day, and almost forgot to be mad.

  Almost.

  That night, when Iris was getting ready for bed, she found the plastic ogre in her pocket. It really did have weird eyes. She placed it on her nightstand, turning it around so it wouldn’t watch her while she slept.

  When she woke up the next morning, it was gone.

  Chapter Ten

  Meanwhile . . .

  The Bell Museum and Planetarium in Saint Paul, Minnesota, began as a one-room natural-history museum founded to study the wildlife of the state. Over the decades it became known for its elaborate dioramas with stuffed animals placed in careful reconstructions of their natural habitats. More than a few local children were distressed to find, upon visiting the museum, that the figures in the dioramas were not stuffed animals as they understood them to be, but made of the corpses of actual animals, preserved through taxidermy.

  (Lark Maguire was definitely one of those children.)

  But the museum has some treasures very much not from Minnesota.

  In 1890, an extremely rich Minneapolis man named Louis F. Menage sponsored a scientific expedition to the Philippines to benefit the Minnesota Academy of Natural Sciences, which was the sort of thing extremely rich people did back then. The man, a real-estate tycoon, funded the project with the understanding that his name would be associated with it, and that is a thing very rich people still do.

  The scientists traveled around remote islands of the Philippines and Borneo for two years and came back with thousands of specimens—or, as other people call them, animals—which had never before been seen by American eyes. It was going to be the most glorious exhibition, a treasure trove for scientific discovery. New species of birds! Lizards! Orangutans! Wild hogs! Lemurs! A pig-tailed monkey! A stink badger!

  Once the specimens were ready for display.

  Which would just require some more time, and of course funding from the generous Mr. Menage.

  But—funny story—it turned out that Menage’s name was also attached to four million dollars’ worth of fraud, and as the men were beginning their work, he fled to South America.

  Some of the samples survived, though, and the Bell Museum has a few, including the Sulu Bleeding-heart, a species of bird that only exists on those islands and that no Westerner has ever observed outside the Menage samples. Recent expeditions to those islands have shown no traces of it, and naturalists fear it is extinct.

  I like to think it just got smart.

  I also think that killing a rare bird and stuffing it so you can keep it forever is a strange way to appreciate it.

  Nonetheless, the specimen of the Sulu Bleeding-heart is considered one of the Bell Museum’s great treasures. And it was with tremendous excitement that a visiting ornithologist set out to view it.

  But when she came to the window where the bird was supposed to be, instead of finding the stuffed corpse perversely displayed in something designed to represent its natural habitat before it was killed and taken out of it, she found an empty perch.

  She spoke to a guard, and the guard called the curator, and the curator called the executive director. No, they would never loan out the specimens from the Menage expedition! No, no one should have removed the Sulu Bleeding-heart!

  But the bird was not there. It was missing.

  Someone had stolen it.

  Chapter Eleven
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br />   Iris Dissents

  No, Lark had not taken the ogre from Iris’s nightstand, as Iris discovered when she called her sister into her room the next morning. She hadn’t even known that Iris had pocketed it the previous afternoon, and in fact was somewhat confused as to why Iris had placed it on her bedside table in the first place, and Iris could not explain. “I just . . . felt like it?”

  I just felt like it was a perfectly natural-sounding reason for Lark. But as to the question of where the thing had gone, she had no answer. It was just like her bracelet. It had disappeared.

  “Gnomes?” Lark suggested.

  “Oh, that’d be great.” Iris had enough problems without fairy-tale creatures coming to life.

  “Maybe the thing actually is Mr. Hunt. Maybe it had to go work on planning today’s lessons.”

  “I don’t really want that to be true, either.”

  “Did you look under your bed? Behind the nightstand?”

  “Everywhere,” Iris said. Something was very weird when it was Lark giving her advice on how to find things.

  Lark was used to things getting lost—not important things, like the bracelet, but things from the clutter of random objects that populated her daily life. A plastic ogre getting up and walking away didn’t bother her too much. Iris, however, was not used to it at all. If you paid attention, and you had places for things, and you put everything back in those places, they tended to be easily findable.

  Or they were supposed to be.

  “Hey, can I borrow a T-shirt?” Lark asked, motioning to Iris’s closet.

  “Sure. Did Mom forget to do laundry again?” Laundry had always been their dad’s domain and their mom didn’t seem to be adjusting well.

  “No . . . I just don’t want to wear any of mine.”

  “How come?”

  She shrugged.

  “Okay. Sure.”

  “I’m not going to wear, like, all black or something. I’m not going all goth-emo or anything, like some people.”

  “Okay.” Iris, herself clad in black again, opened her closet door. “Whatever you want. I really like your squid shirt, though.”