by Brian Knight
The expression on his face was plain. It was a look of shocked recognition.
A moment later he shooed them from the stage and called on two more volunteers. After this final pair he ended the show by telling them he would be back in a few weeks for Harvest Days, and that he hoped to see them all there.
Penny was on her feet before he’d finished his final pitch, moving toward the stage again.
“Penny, wait up.”
She could hear Zoe behind her, diving through breaks in the dispersing crowd, but did not slow for her.
While Tovar The Red gathered his few remaining props, stowing them into the well-hidden pockets of his cloak, his eyes met Penny’s again.
“Penny!” Not Zoe’s voice this time, Penny knew that, but didn’t turn to see who it was. She was only feet away from the gazebo, and breaking through the last of the milling crowd.
Her fast walk became a jog.
Tovar grinned, pulled his black wand from inside his cloak. Penny stopped, shocked by the certainty that he was going to attack her with it.
Instead, he pointed it at the floor between his feet, and a thick white fog wafted up from between the cracks in the white boards. The fog filled the gazebo within seconds, completely covering him.
“Wait!” Penny started up the steps, ignoring the looks from the thinning crowd, and felt a hand on her shoulder, clamping down hard enough to hurt, stopping her in her tracks.
The fog thinned, faded, disappeared, and Tovar was nowhere in evidence.
Penny shouted in frustration and turned, shrugging the hand from her shoulder.
Susan stood behind her, and the look on her face stole Penny’s anger.
Fear?
Chapter 12
Vanishing Act
Penny rode home alone that night; Zoe’s grandma was in her usual foul mood and wouldn’t let her spend the night. She replayed the scene in the park after Tovar had vanished, and in the dark interior of Susan’s store. After sending Zoe home, Susan had told her some very startling things. Penny was glad Zoe wasn’t there to hear them. They were revelations she had to consider on her own before she shared them with anyone, even her best friend.
“I know what you’re thinking, Penny.” Susan held up her hand to stop Penny’s denial before she could voice it. “I don’t know who he is, not for sure anyway, but I know who you think he is.”
Susan turned away then, looking through her shop window at the now empty town park.
She’s watching for him, Penny thought. She’s afraid he’ll come back.
When Susan seemed satisfied that no one was watching, she turned back to Penny. “He’s not the first Red Magician to come here. I think there’s a family of them, but it has been a long time. They used to come to town with the carnival during Harvest Days every year, and usually left with it. The last time one decided to stay … it didn’t turn out well.”
“What do you mean?” Penny could sense the conversation hovering somewhere near the heart of the mystery she wanted badly to solve.
Her mystery.
“He’s not your father,” Susan said, “and even if he was I’d tell you to stay away from him.”
Penny felt her face blush red in fresh anger. “What’s so wrong with me wanting to find my dad? Mom wouldn’t ever talk about him, and I guess you’re in her corner! What did he do that was so bad?”
Susan regarded her for a moment, her face a picture of indecision. Her eyes flicked to Zoe, who sat huddled in the furthest chair from Penny and Susan, her eyes fixed on the hands folded in her lap.
When her eyes found Penny again, the indecision was gone, replaced with a grim and hard resolve.
“Zoe, are you coming over tonight?” She asked this without taking her eyes from Penny. She no longer looked angry, only tired.
“No,” Zoe said, her voice no more than a whisper. She sounded as if she would rather be anywhere in the world at that moment. “Grandma wants me home for chores.”
“You better get home then,” Susan said. Then she did look at Zoe, and her expression was kinder, less forbidding. It was the Susan they both knew and loved, not the angry stranger who dragged them inside after Tovar The Red’s show. “You’re welcome to come over tomorrow, if it’s okay with your grandma.”
As always, Susan’s face darkened a little at the mention of Zoe’s grandma. They were both town women, and Susan knew her well enough to dislike her even though she never spoke a single word against her in either Penny or Zoe’s presence.
Zoe relaxed a little and rose from her seat. “Okay. Goodbye.”
A few seconds later she was out the door and sprinting down the emptying sidewalk for her home.
When Susan faced Penny again, the resolve on her face was a little frightening. Penny steeled herself for the worst. She’d asked, screamed actually, to hear this, so she would—however bad it turned out to be.
“You were born a month premature. You weighed just under four pounds when I found you. I was sure you were dead. Seeing you like that, on the ground next to your mother, very tiny and not moving, it was the worst moment of my life. I thought you were dead. I thought you were both dead.”
A few tears leaked unnoticed from Susan’s eyes and fell into her lap.
“What …” Penny’s mouth was dry, and she was unable to finish her question. She knew she’d been born prematurely, but always assumed her entrance into the world had been otherwise uneventful. She swallowed, cleared her throat. “What happened?”
“We don’t know … not all of it anyway. Diane was out, with him.” There was real venom in the last word, and Penny didn’t need to ask who she meant by him.
“Di,” Susan smiled briefly, “that’s what we called your mom. Never Diana, always Di, and your aunt Nancy had a fight that day, and Di ran off with him. Nancy and her friend Tracy went looking for them …”
“What?” Penny had nearly shouted, and Susan flinched away from her. “I have an aunt?”
Susan regarded her in silence for a moment, then nodded. “She never told you?”
“No,” Penny said, and was unable to keep her resentment to herself. “She never told me anything. I didn’t even know who you were until the director at the group home told me you were coming to get me.”
Susan nodded. “I guess she just wanted to forget about everything that happened before you came along. A lot of bad stuff happened that night, and then there was you.” Susan smiled, tears still shining in her eyes, and Penny loved her for it.
“Nancy was your mother’s twin sister, identical in every way but temperament.” She smiled again. “Di was very easygoing, very devil-may-care. Nancy was sweet but hot‐ tempered.”
In a much calmer voice, all her anger was gone now, extinguished by the love in Susan’s smile, Penny said, “What happened?”
“There was an accident. That old red Mustang she loved so much was in flames, and I found her,” she looked up for a second to regard Penny, “and you. She went into labor on the side of the road. She was unconscious when we found her, and you weren’t moving at all. Jan, another of our old friends, was with me so she drove you to the hospital in my car.”
“That old Falcon?” Penny asked.
Susan chuckled. “No, back then I drove an old VW Minibus. Jan took you to the hospital. I didn’t think you’d live, but you were stronger than you looked. I stayed with Di until help arrived. Nancy and Tracy were the first, and by the time they got there your mom was on her feet again.”
Penny breathed a little sigh of relief. It was silly; she knew her mom had survived, but didn’t like to think about her being hurt.
“Nancy and Tracy both left town a few days later. I don’t where they are now, I haven’t seen them since they left. I don’t know about Tracy, but I think Nancy went looking for your father.”
Penny sat in stunned silence for a moment, understanding what Susan was about to say next, but not wanting to believe it.
“He was with her that night, and after the accident …
” Susan shrugged. “Like I said, we don’t know everything that happened, Di couldn’t remember the accident, but your father never came back to find out what happened to you, or to her.”
“But you know it’s not...,” Penny gestured vaguely toward the empty park where Tovar The Red had entertained that night.
“It’s not,” Susan said.
“How do you know?”
“Because he knows if he ever showed his face around here again, I’d kill him for abandoning you and Di.”
Penny didn’t know what to say to that, and the look on Susan’s face was enough to convince her she might do it.
“What’s his name?”
Susan shook her head. “That’s enough for one night, kiddo, let’s get home. We’ll stick your bike in the trunk and you can ride with me.”
“No, I’m okay,” Penny lied, trying to hide her frustration. “I’ll ride my bike home.”
Penny didn’t think Susan would let her, but after a moment she nodded her head.
“Fine, you get going and I’ll catch up to you.”
The ride home seemed to go very quickly, or maybe Penny just had too much on her mind to pay attention to the time, and Susan passed her in the old Falcon just before the turn on to Clover Hill.
Though she was dead tired by the time she’d changed into her pajamas and lain down in her bed, it was a long time before Penny slept. When she finally did, her troubled thoughts and endless questions followed her into the land of dreams.
Penny awoke to shouting from below and opened her eyes on bright sunlight slanting down through her parted curtains. Glancing at her alarm clock, she saw it was almost noon.
“Penny, get up! You have a visitor.”
“I’m up,” Penny shouted. “Give me a minute!”
She rolled out of bed, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, and reached for the clothes lying in a heap at the foot of her bed.
Before she could start to change though, she saw the mirror on her nightstand. She remembered the startled face of Tovar The Red staring up through it, and shivered.
Penny opened the top drawer of her nightstand, put the mirror inside, and after a moment’s hesitation, swept a stack of books over it before closing the drawer.
Penny let down the attic door, the ladder sliding smoothly down to the hallway below, and climbed down. She ran down the steps to the hallway, eager to get Zoe away from Susan, to go to the hollow. She wasn’t ready to share Susan’s story from the night before with Zoe yet, but she wanted her company badly.
Instead of Zoe, she found a man in a khaki uniform, tin star badge, and white Stetson waiting just inside the open front door.
His thumbs hooked into his belt, the right only inches away from his holstered gun. He was speaking with Susan, his expression serious and his bushy white eyebrows drawn together.
Susan looked more than worried; she looked terrified.
Then they saw her coming to a stop halfway down the stairs, and Susan composed herself, drawing a neutral expression over her real one.
Penny had seen the sheriff around town, cruising in his jeep or walking down Main Street, but had never talked to him before. He turned to her, and his grim expression vanished, replaced by a sunny grin full of large white teeth. The name embroidered on his khaki chest was Price.
She wondered if he was related to Rooster and his dad. In a town this small, having the same last name, he just about had to be.
“Young Miss Sinclair,” he said, sweeping his Stetson off and stepping forward to take her hand. His thin white hair was short as peach fuzz, and the scalp below so deeply tanned it looked like leather.
He took her hand and gave it a single, companionable squeeze.
“What’s wrong, sir?” Penny had never been in trouble before, but the sudden appearance of the sheriff…here to see me?…made her nervous.
The wattage of his smile dropped considerably, and his expression became businesslike. “You’re not in trouble, young lady. I just want to ask you a few questions about Jodi Lewis.”
“Who?”
Susan began to pace, passing back and forth behind her. The flashes of her in Penny’s peripheral vision, and the clop-clop-clop of her shoes on the hardwood floor were distracting.
The sheriff looked surprised, but hid the expression quickly.
“Yes, you’re new here,” he said, as if reminding himself.
“Yes,” Penny said, feeling the tense silence that had grown and filled the hallway.
“Jodi goes to school with you, she was seen sitting near you and…” he pulled a small, well-thumbed notebook from his breast pocket and fingered through the first few pages. “You and Zoe Parker.”
He gave a quick physical description, but Penny didn’t need it. Only one person had sat anywhere near them during the show, the girl who had waved at them and smiled expectantly, as if hoping they’d ask her to sit with them. Penny remembered how she had screamed in astonishment when she’d seen another girl’s face staring out of the trick mirror at her.
“Yeah, I remember her,” Penny said when Sheriff Price had finished giving his description. “What do you want to know about her?”
Susan stopped pacing, standing directly behind Penny, and put her hands on Penny’s shoulders, squeezing them.
“Did you see her at all after the show last night? Do you know where she might have gone?”
Penny did not. She’d been too sharply focused on Tovar in the aftermath of the show to notice where anyone else might have wandered.
She shook her head. “Sorry.”
Sheriff Price considered her for a moment, his steady dark eyes seeming to probe her, and he nodded. “If you do remember anything, anything at all, please call me. It’s very important.”
Understanding it might not be wise to ask questions of her own at that point, understanding it might even earn her a scolding from the now stony-faced sheriff, but overcome by her natural curiosity, Penny said, “What did she do?”
Sheriff Price glanced over her shoulder for a moment, as if asking Susan’s permission to answer, and then focused on Penny again.
“Well, young lady, Jodi Lewis went and vanished on us.”
After a ten-minute interrogation by Susan, Penny escaped to her room with the phone. She’d told Susan the truth, she’d seen no one but Zoe after the show, and had gone nowhere but home after their chat in the shop.
She dialed Zoe’s number, fully expecting to reach her friend’s grumpy grandmother, but Zoe answered after the first ring.
“Did the sheriff visit you yet?” Penny asked.
“Yeah,” Zoe said. “It was weird. Grandma followed him outside when he tried to leave and wouldn’t let him go for five minutes.”
Zoe laughed, but it sounded uneasy.
“Did she get anything out of him?”
“Yeah,” Zoe said. “I hid behind the door and listened. He thinks she ran away. Her parents just got divorced and her dad moved, so they think she ran off to live with him.”
“Then why are they questioning people?”
“Because she’s not the first to disappear,” Zoe said.
“What?” This was the first Penny had heard of any disappearances, and she thought vanishing kids would probably count as big news in a small town like Dogwood.
“Not from here,” Zoe continued. “A couple of girls from Kent, a boy from Yelm, and another girl from Lacy. They took someone in for questioning, but they let him go.”
“Who?”
“Guess,” Zoe said.
At first, Penny didn’t have a clue, and then the answer hit her like a revelation.
“Tovar The Red,” she said with certainty.
“Grandma threw a fit when the sheriff said they let him go, but they had to. He went straight to his room at the inn after the show, the desk clerk saw him come in, and he was there all night. They would have seen him leave.”
“So maybe she did run away,” Penny said.
“Yeah, probably,” Zoe said.
“She’s not here now,” Zoe said. “She’s at the diner gossiping to anyone who’ll listen to her.”
Penny said goodbye, hung up, and started downstairs—relieved, a little, by the information Zoe’s grandma had coaxed out of Sheriff Price.
Now to convince Susan there was no reason to worry. Otherwise, Penny was apt to be spending quite a few boring hours pent-up in the house.
Only a few months ago that wouldn’t have bothered her, but now she had a friend, and they had Aurora Hollow.
Chapter 13
The Face in the Mirror
The next few weeks dragged by in a haze of boredom.
Far from being relieved at the news that Jodi Lewis was a suspected runaway, and probably not a kidnapping, Susan abolished the newfound freedom Penny had enjoyed since leaving the city. Her bike leaned unused against the front porch, and Penny rode to school in the Falcon every morning.
Susan forbade her to leave the school grounds at lunchtime. And she spent the few hours after school let out and before the shop closed stuck inside with nothing more exciting than homework to occupy her. Zoe was with her for those few hours most days, but it was still idle time.
By the end of the second week, when Tovar The Red had not shown his face in town again and no more kids vanished, Susan began to relax and let Penny out after school, extracting a promise that she would not leave their property.
“I know you and Zoe have your own place back there somewhere,” she said, nodding in the general direction of the high, wild field. “When I was your age there was a grove out there I used to play in. I went looking for it again but couldn’t find it. I suppose it’s overgrown now.”
Penny suppressed a smile at this.
“We’ve gone down to the creek, but mostly we just hang out in the field.”
No sooner than Susan allowed Penny to leave the house again, Zoe’s curmudgeonly grandmother surprised them with an unexpected request. It came in the form of a letter, delivered by a thoroughly excited Zoe.
