The Lost Girl

by Anne Ursu

  When she walked in—and there, the smell; and there, the dust in the air; and there, the silence—Mr. George Green was already at the glass counter, hunched over another experiment. This one was a pyramid made out of dowels with a small doughnut-shaped magnet hanging in the middle and long magnets strapped to the base. The hanging magnet was swinging around the pyramid, bouncing around and spinning.

  He smiled when he saw her. “Miss Maguire! I was afraid you weren’t going to return!”

  “Oh.” Iris could not help but be flattered that he remembered her, though she supposed not many eleven-year-olds came into Treasure Hunters. “I was busy.”

  He put his hand to his chest dramatically. “I was afraid it was something I’d done. I’ve been told I am ‘a little strange.’”

  “No! I mean, no.”

  “Well, I am glad. You must live near here?”

  “Sort of. I mean. Yes, but. I go to this . . . camp. At the library after school every day. And I bike home, so—”

  “So, you have time on your hands to explore the wonders of antiquing.”

  Iris’s eyes popped open. “Yes, that’s exactly it,” she said, hoping she sounded convincing.

  “And”—he motioned to the contraption on the counter, a sly smile spreading across his face—“I suppose this is science too?”

  “Well, yeah? Those are magnets, right? So it’s just the different polarities making it spin. . . .” The doughnut continued to bounce and spin, and as Iris looked more closely, she realized the whole thing was set upon an antique map of Minneapolis, and the whirling doughnut was moving back and forth over it as if in a frenzy of indecision. “What are you doing, anyway?”

  “It is a finding spell,” he said. “Or an attempt at one. As you see, the magic seems to be a little confused. But I will persevere! Or perhaps,” he added with a sly grin, “I should use ‘science.’”

  “You might be a little strange,” Iris said. He winked. “Can I look at the books? . . . Just on the one shelf, of course,” she added quickly.

  While Mr. George Green turned his attention back to the magnets, Iris settled back into Alice’s book and the world as it was in 1947.

  Last time she’d just browsed through the brittle yellowed pages of the book, reading its brittle yellowed facts, but now she went through looking for Alice’s pencil marks.

  Really, it didn’t make sense that this was Mr. Green’s Alice. Iris could not tell if he was thirty or sixty, but he didn’t seem 1947 old. But maybe this book was old for Alice, too. Maybe she read it, marveling at the dusty facts, just like Iris was.

  Now that Iris was looking more carefully, she realized that this Alice had spent a lot of time with this book, and not just drawing wings on dinosaurs. In the entry for SCIENCE they kept saying man for person and he for they: A scientist is a man who studies science. He records his observations. He does experiments. A psychologist is a man who studies the minds of men. The sociologist studies man’s way of living in groups of men. Alice had circled every man and every he. There were a lot of them.

  Some of her notes felt more random. Under BIRDS she’d underlined everything about flying. (It seemed clear what her superpower would be.) Under MUMMY she’d written, It Lives! Next to CAT she’d written, Travels through clocks! Above OPERA she’d scrawled, The Phantom Is Coming for You!

  It was the entry for MAGIC that was most curious. Alice had underlined Magic is tricks performed by magicians for entertainment and added several exclamation points. And then in the margins she’d added, Magic has a cost.

  Iris took out her journal and wrote this down. And then added some of the other notes:

  It Lives!

  Travels through clocks!

  The Phantom Is Coming for You!

  Magic has a cost.

  When she went back to the BIRD page to look for any other notes, she noticed that Alice had drawn on top of the existing full-page illustration under the BIRD entry. She’d given some of the birds speech bubbles—the sparrow said cheep and the mallard said quack and the mockingbird said ha-ha. But it was the drawing on the crow that caught her eye—there was something hanging out of its mouth. Iris squinted at it. It looked like . . . a necklace.

  Iris carried the book over to Mr. Green. “Was this book Alice’s?”

  “How do you—”

  She thrust the inscription on the front in front of him. “Is this the same Alice?”

  His eyes widened. “How could this be? Where did you find this?”

  “On the shelf.”

  “This is a mistake. I need to put this back in her room.”

  “Her room . . . where?”

  “I would not have imagined this was hers. Alice was not interested in—hmm.”

  “Who is she?”

  “. . . My sister.”

  Iris took a step back. “Oh.”

  Mr. Green did not look like a mole anymore. His eyes were big and sad and oddly focused, like he was watching a parade of ghosts. “Yes,” he said, taking the book. “She was my sister.”

  “Could I—could I ask you a question?” She should not do this, she knew. He clearly did not want to talk about it, and talking about it was poking him in a bruised place. And yet Iris poked. “Here, on the bird page.”

  “Yes. Alice had . . . quite an imagination.”

  “It’s the crow I’m wondering about. Do you know why she’d draw . . . a necklace hanging out of a crow’s mouth?”

  His eyes flickered, hardened as he stared at the page. “Alice had a friendship with crows when she was a girl. They liked to bring her gifts. You are a sensible girl and I know that must sound like odd behavior to you, but crows—”

  “Are collectors,” Iris breathed.

  He exhaled. “Yes. Alice was enchanted with them. That’s the sort of girl she was.”

  “What happened to Alice? Where did she go?”

  And there, his eyes filled with ghosts again. “She disappeared,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The Wolf in the Closet

  Iris nearly stumbled backward.

  “This will be hard for a girl like you to understand,” he continued, “but Alice was not a sensible girl. Everything was a story to her. She longed for magic, but if she’d had it . . .” He shook his head. “She couldn’t have handled it. She couldn’t even deal with the mundane world. Her imagination—she saw monsters everywhere.”

  “I do understand,” Iris said quietly.

  He nodded at her. “The things that would be nothing to people like you and me, Miss Maguire, they hurt her deeply. Such a sensitive girl, you understand. Slings and arrows. Doom everywhere.”

  “But what happened?”

  “She was sixteen. It was hard enough for her when she was a child, but then it got worse and worse. She was becoming . . . untethered. One afternoon I put her in my study so she was closer to me, and when I went to check on her I opened the door to find her . . . gone.”

  “Did she run away?” Iris breathed.

  “It would not have been possible. She was just gone.”

  Off the edge of the earth, never seen again.

  “So I look for her wherever I go,” he finished.

  The magnet still spun and swung within the pyramid, jittery and panicked, like a disoriented prey animal trying to find safety.

  If something happened to Lark, maybe it would be Iris making compasses out of water and batteries out of potatoes and calling them magic.

  She had watched a show about hoarders once, people who kept things. Sometimes, it was because they’d lost something. Sometimes, they needed things to hold on to. Maybe that was why Mr. George Green had a store of old things that he called treasure.

  “What about the crows?” Iris asked, though she did not quite know why.

  And now his face changed; his eyes met hers; his voice hardened. “Well, yes, Miss Maguire. What about the crows?”

  “I . . .” What was she supposed to say? He thought she was practical.

 
“It is sensible to see the truth of things, even if the truth strains credulity,” he said, as if reading her mind.

  She did not say anything.

  “Alice was such a softhearted girl, you understand. She loved animals. And they loved her. And yet, when I look back . . .”

  “What?”

  His lips twitched. “You will think me irrational, I am afraid. But . . . I do not trust the crows. That’s all I will say.”

  As Iris biked home, her thoughts whirled. She was not conscious of the route she took home, of whether her legs ached on the big hill, whether the fallen leaves crunched beneath her tires.

  No, she was not being rational either. Mr. Green thought she was sensible; meanwhile a great murder of crows was swarming around in her mind.

  No, she did not believe in omens. No, she did not believe her nightmare about the crows taking Lark would come true. She did not believe in such things.

  But you do not need to believe in something to be afraid of it.

  Now, something else in the bag of things she could not tell Lark. The bag was straining from the weight. But she couldn’t tell her—it would have been hard to explain that she’d been at the shop at all, given she hadn’t ever told Lark she’d been back in the first place. Lark had clearly almost seen the lie last time, and if she started talking about the shop again, Lark would look more closely at her words, take them apart, and see the lie underneath.

  And then the rest of it. The magic, the sister, the crows. What would she say?

  Alice, where are you?

  Lark had dismantled more of her dollhouse during the day, and when Iris went into her room the mom, dad, and one of the girls were lying on the floor like toppled statues. Iris took a step closer to examine it, but Lark interrupted her.

  “Baby Thing is gone,” she said, motioning to the dollhouse.

  “Like, it doesn’t live there anymore?” Knowing Lark she’d decided it got carried off by a bear and was now being raised as one of its own.

  “I mean the doll. It’s missing.” Her voice cracked, and she added, “I looked everywhere, I promise.”

  Iris flushed. “Oh, no,” she said. She did not say It will turn up. Nothing had turned up, not the bracelet, the ogre, the pen, the key.

  Not Alice.

  As for the house, the attic was still full of boxes. But much of the rest of it was gone—the bird room, the bear habitat, the disco room with its hanging sparkly ball and bedazzled walls. Lark had taken the bedroom on the second floor and she’d done the oddest thing imaginable—changed it into an ordinary dollhouse room. In a way.

  It was a girl’s bedroom, just a garden-variety room. Lark had made wallpaper, big white daisies stenciled on a pink background, and unearthed the original dollhouse furniture, with a dressing table, bureau, and four-poster bed covered in a comforter with one giant daisy in the middle. The room reminded Iris of Abigail, somehow. Doll Lark sat at the dressing table, staring into the mirror.

  The little room next to the girl’s room had once been the bathroom, way back when. Now Lark had covered all the walls and one of the doorways in shiny black paper, so the only entrance was from the girl’s room. That door was shut, but right behind it stood the only object in the room—a wolf figurine.

  “It’s her closet,” Lark said. “I need to put clothes in there and stuff, but I have to make them.”

  “But—”

  “There’s a wolf in the closet.”

  Really, it was obvious.

  “She doesn’t know it’s there,” Lark continued, “but she knows something’s there. She’s terrified to open her closet door. She just won’t do it.”

  “How does she get her clothes?”

  Lark shrugged. “She can borrow clothes from her sister. Anyway”—Lark gave her a half smile—“she’s been wearing the same thing for three years.”

  There was something behind Lark’s words, something lingering behind the closed door. And Iris did not know how to get the door open.

  “So . . . what are you going to do with the rest of the house?”

  The other bedroom was still hulled out, but Lark had left the first floor intact, so now the house consisted of the attic with all the boxes, the girl’s room, a wolf in a closet, an armory, a haunted room, and the stage with the chicken on it. The house had gone from quirkily strange to terrifying—even the chicken stage now seemed menacing in context. The only thing normal was the girl’s bedroom, but even that didn’t look right anymore. It was too put-together and normal against the nightmare house—aggressively normal, the sort of room girls had in TV shows in which the rich parents had hired an interior decorator and never allowed the children to eat in there or play in there or read or sleep or talk or breathe. Aggressively normal, in a way that said things were absolutely not normal.

  She considered. “I don’t know. Maybe a panic room? I’ve never had a panic room.”

  “And is that where the rest of the family is?”

  “No. They’re just gone. Looking for the baby, I guess.”

  Iris swallowed. “Even me?”

  Lark lifted her head, her gray eyes meeting Iris’s. “It’s not really you.”

  “Well, sometimes it is.”

  “No! You’d never leave me.”

  It wasn’t until later in the night that Iris realized that when Lark had said, You’d never leave me, the me was the doll. Which meant that even though the absent doll wasn’t Iris, the girl alone with the wolf was Lark.

  It was hard to sleep after that.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The Compliment Box

  At school the next day, Iris could not stop thinking about Alice. About the sensitive sixteen-year-old girl who had grown less and less—what was the word he’d used?—tethered. About the crows around her.

  What was it with the crows? What did they see in girls like Alice? In girls like Lark?

  Of course, it could be a coincidence. It could be that the girls were both animal lovers, and prone to shiny things themselves.

  Anything more would have to be magic.

  And there was no such thing.

  Lark was the girl who defeated the monsters—the Pied Piper, the ogre, the vampires, the trolls. She was the one who taught Iris how to be safe. So what was Iris supposed to do when Lark invited them in?

  Lark would be back in school tomorrow, and Iris did not know how she was going to do it. For Lark, if you threw up in class, the only proper course of action would be to transfer schools, and possibly states.

  If this were a Disney movie, Iris and Lark would switch places now—Lark would happily enjoy Iris’s pod and get into arguments about superheroes and anxiety disorders while Iris stared down the snickering masses in Mr. Hunt’s class while demolishing them in math drills. But in her heart of hearts Iris still could not believe that people couldn’t tell them apart: they were identical, but not the same. They’d get caught. She didn’t know what the punishment was for identical-twin-related fraud, but it was probably pretty dire.

  And life was not a Disney movie.

  What life was, though, Iris no longer felt sure.

  It Lives!

  Travels through clocks!

  The Phantom Is Coming for You!

  Magic has a cost.

  It was this last one that stuck in her brain. The Child’s Guide to Our World was clearly not interested in magic in the same way that Alice was: it spoke of magicians pulling rabbits out of hats and picking a card, any card. There was no cost to those kinds of tricks, except perhaps to the rabbit.

  “Do you guys know what it means to say magic has a cost?” Iris asked her pod during lunch. It seemed like the sort of thing they would know.

  “Oh, yes,” Mira nods. “It’s true for psychic powers, too. Whenever my aunt does a reading on a cat, she gets a headache.”

  “True,” said Jin. “In lots of stories you can’t just do magic. You have to give something up or else it takes something from you. Like Mira’s aunt gets sick. Or maybe you ne
ed to give up some blood or something.”

  “Not in Harry Potter,” Oliver said. “You can just do spells.”

  “Yeah, but it does have a cost,” Jin said. “There are dark wizards and stuff. There’s no cost to do spells, but, like, there’s a big cost to magic existing. There’s a Dark Lord and Death Eaters and this whole war, and most of the good guys die.”

  Oliver regarded Jin for a moment and then began to nod slowly and gravely.

  “Not everything’s in your dictionary, Oliver,” Mira said.

  “Well, I’m going to write that in, and then it will be,” Oliver said.

  Iris stared at the page in her notebook: Magic has a cost. What did Alice mean? Was it the crows—a cost to them giving her gifts? Or something else? Was that why she’d disappeared?

  Magic has a cost. There was magic to Lark, and it made it hard for her to live in a world of owl pellets and Tommy Whedons and math drills.

  And there was magic to their sisterhood. There was. She’d always known it, on some level, but now it was clear that no one else understood what they had. It was rare and special. And now everyone was trying to take it away.

  And that was the cost.

  But she wasn’t going to let them. She was going to hold on, with everything she had.

  She was going to fight back.

  First, she needed to know more. About Alice, about just what Mr. George Green was not saying. There was something behind his words, something he was keeping from her.

  But, before she could go to Treasure Hunters again, there was Camp Awesome to endure.

  Every day when she walked in, Iris felt a little worse than the day before; by the end of the semester she was going to be oozing into the room like a pile of insecure goo.

  Yesterday Abigail had had them decorate shoeboxes for what she termed SECRET REASONS, and today the shoeboxes were lined up on the table at the side of the room, each one labeled with the name of the girl who had made it.

  Iris had done her best. She’d taken paper and colored markers and written out things she knew to be true and pasted them on the box. Grover Cleveland was the only president to get married in the White House. The collective noun for ducks is a paddling. There’s no word that rhymes with orange. It was something, anyway.