“Right,” Charlie agreed. He wished his knees would stop shaking.
“Rachel?”
Rachel rammed the sunbonnet on her head and peered out at them. “Right,” she said. “But I really do feel weird.”
EPILOGUE
Charlie wanted to walk. He promised his family he’d meet them at the softball diamond at nine to see the fireworks, and then he took off into the dark, enjoying deep breaths of rain-washed air.
It had been a pretty good day, considering the way it had begun. Rachel had stepped with typical Rachel determination into her role as Sunbonnet Queen. After a fast stop at home to clean up—Rachel showered, John washed at the kitchen sink, and Charlie brushed spot remover on the white collar and cuffs of the queen’s costume—they’d arrived at the park just as Grandma Lou was bustling around the log-cabin float. She’d apparently been asking people if they’d seen her granddaughter, and she was starting to panic. Rachel had climbed quickly to the cabin door and posed there, so Grandma could see how the queen had looked during the parade. Her smile was forced, her expression glazed, but she waved at the people milling around the float and even blew a kiss. Charlie marveled. When they’d reached the park, Rachel had told him she felt as if she were going to throw up.
From twelve until two Charlie had helped Grandma and Grandpa at the hotdog stand. That had been fun, but as soon as the crowd began to thin out, he had slipped away to look for his father. It had seemed important to know where everyone was.
He found his father, pale but cheerful, watching Rachel award balloons to the winners of the three-legged race. John admitted his shoulder was too sore to play his guitar in the contest, but he’d volunteered to act as master of ceremonies and be one of the judges. Charlie walked with him to the bandstand.
As he sat in the audience and listened to his father’s patter, Charlie felt as if he were discovering something important. The only reason his father had believed the truth about Katya Torin—the only reason he’d been there in time to save Rachel’s life—was because he was a special kind of person. Childlike. Trusting. Ready to believe the unbelievable. Another grown-up—even Grandpa Will—would have doubted, wanted proof, until it was too late.
“Hey there, kid. Mind some company?”
Charlie came back to the present with a start. His father was ambling toward him, whistling “Dinah” as he cut across the grass. He’d bought a new straw hat from a peddler to replace the one he’d lost in the fire, and he looked as jaunty as ever.
“Kind of nice, walking in the dark,” he commented as he fell in step next to Charlie. “You know, when I was a kid growing up in this town, I thought it was the dullest place in the world. Now I’m glad to be back. On a night like this anything seems possible.”
Charlie sighed. All afternoon he’d felt his dream of life in California slipping away. Thoughts of Jake Fisher’s swimming class had flickered through his mind. He imagined himself playing a trumpet, or a trombone, and marching with the Pike River Middle School band. He had even wondered what it would be like to go cross-country skiing with his father during a long Wisconsin winter.
On a night like this anything seems possible.
There was a sharp crack, and a shower of silver and red burst across the sky.
“Hey, how about that!” John exclaimed. “A whole fleet of unidentified flying objects!”
“It’s just the fireworks starting,” Charlie said automatically. Then he decided he liked his father’s idea better.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1988 by Betty Ren Wright
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1335-2
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In Holiday House: The First Sixty-Five Years (2000), Russell Freedman and Barbara Elleman describe the early days of the publishing house, which was founded in New York City:
In 1935, a new firm called Holiday House set up three desks in the corner of a printing plant and prepared to publish its first list of books. “The event was unique in at least one respect,” Publishers Weekly would say. “The new company was the first American publishing house ever founded with the purpose of publishing nothing but children’s books.”
The first of its kind, then—a specialized publisher with a unique program and a diminutive catalog, small enough to fit in a child’s palm. The catalog announced five books, three nursery rhyme broadsides, and the publisher’s intentions: “… Its editorial policy embraces only such books as are worthy of inclusion in a child’s permanent library.”
And so began our history. Holiday House “has changed over the years, sometimes by design and sometimes not. And it will continue to evolve and adapt. Yet in many ways it remains the same old place: relatively small, very independent, and completely devoted to its authors and illustrators.”
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The Pike River Phantom Page 11
