by Brian Knight
Trees stood behind the opening. Trees and nothing else. She walked through it, then around to the front again, faced Penny, and raised her hands palms up, as if to say I don’t get it.
“How did it get there?” Penny wondered aloud.
“You’ve got me,” Zoe responded. She seemed torn between amusement and concern. “Ronan, maybe?”
“Maybe,” Penny said. But there was no way to know for sure until they saw him again, so Penny decided to try not to think about it too much. They had come here to practice.
“Come on, Zoe. Let’s practice.”
The next hour of ineffectual bangs and other accidental magic proved how out of practice they were. They improved during their second hour, and by the time they were ready to leave, Penny felt as if they were not just back on track, but gaining.
Penny, pointing the wand at her shoes, had levitated herself a full ten feet off the ground before nerves had forced her back to the earth. Zoe, who had practiced the irritatingly slow growth spell on the overhead willow boughs almost every time they had visited the hollow before their forced hiatus, finally saw the results of her work. They were thicker and greener than ever, almost completely blocking out the sky overhead.
Zoe was also getting better at casting fire, and if she was quick enough, could catch the little red sliver she’d cast in midair and hold it until it had bloomed into a full-fledged fireball. Penny tried duplicating that trick and succeeded only in setting half a dozen small fires in the underbrush.
As always, they consulted the book again before they left, and as always found nothing new.
Zoe shouted in exasperation. “Ah! This is getting old!”
Penny commiserated. “How do we tell if someone else can even join?”
Zoe considered this for a moment, then grinned, her anger departed. “If they can see Ronan, they can join.”
An idea so simple and so obvious, there was no use trying to reason it out or pick it apart. All Penny could do was return Zoe’s smile and agree.
“Where is he?”
“Beat’s me,” Zoe said.
They stored the chest inside the hollowed out portion of the big tree, but packed the wand and the book in Zoe’s empty bag.
They were up the slope and halfway across the high field before they heard the voices shouting their names from down below.
“Penny! Zoe!” Susan and someone else.
Exchanging startled looks, they jogged the rest of the way across the field of high, wild grass. Before they reached the decline to the lower field, the top of a brown-haired head appeared, and Susan’s employee Jenny topped the slope, looking frantic.
She saw them, and her face relaxed. “Up here! I found them!”
Susan appeared only seconds later, puffing as she raced up the steep incline, then dropped to her knees before Penny and Zoe.
Penny braced herself for some serious shouting. What she was not prepared for was for Susan to drop to her knees and seize both her and Zoe in long and crushing hugs.
“What?”
Susan, tears streaming from red and puffy eyes, did not answer.
Jenny did.
“There was another disappearance last night,” she said. “We found out a little while ago, and when we couldn’t find you …”
She didn’t need to finish. Penny understood. She also understood that her restored freedom was at an end—and was doubly thankful that Zoe was staying with her, at least for the next few weeks, and that they had decided to bring their wand and the book back this time.
Part of her wanted Zoe to go home though. Her friend’s unwelcome suspicion about Tovar The Red, the man Penny was convinced was her long lost father, festered, growing into resentment.
Lying in their beds that night, Penny drifting on the edge of sleep, Zoe spoke.
“They’ll never find him,” she said.
“Yeah they will.” Penny injected all the confidence she could into her reply. “They have to.”
“They won’t. They don’t know where to look,” Zoe said. “For all we know he’s five hundred miles away.”
Penny considered this, decided it could be true, and wondered how many other kids from other towns The Birdman had taken.
“I’ll talk to Tovar when he comes back. It can’t be a coincidence, him coming at the same time as The Birdman.”
Zoe said nothing.
“He might know something about it. He might be able to help.”
“What if he doesn’t come back? They did try to arrest him.”
Penny sat up until she could see Zoe leaning against her stack of pillows. “He’ll come back. Susan said they used to come here for Harvest Days all the time. He’ll come back.”
To see me, if nothing else, Penny dared to hope.
For several seconds they were silent, then Penny said, “We’re going to have to tell someone what you saw.”
“No one would believe us, and even if they did, no one could catch him,” Zoe said. “For all we know he flies away.”
For that, Penny had no rebuttal.
The next lag in conversation stretched, and Penny was about to ask Zoe what she thought they should do, when her friend’s soft snores sounded.
Penny closed her eyes and let exhaustion take her.
In her dream, Penny stood in Aurora Hollow watching the door, colored blood red by a low-burning fire. A flash of bright, white light shone through the creases where the door wasn’t perfectly flush inside its frame. Then the door flew open, and a dark shape, half‐bird and half‐man, blocked out the perfect rectangle of bright white light.
Penny bolted upright on her bed, the light of a new sunrise throwing dusty motes over her, half blinding her. And when a new shape rose to block it from her eyes, she was half‐ convinced The Birdman had followed her from her dream.
“What?” It was Zoe, sitting up in her bed, startled and wide‐eyed. “What’s wrong?”
Penny felt the sweat of fear, tacky and cool on her forehead, begin to dry.
“Nothing,” she said. “Sorry.”
Zoe slid back onto the bed and appeared to go back to sleep, and Penny imitated her. She did not sleep again that morning though. She only lay there, her eyes closed, wishing the dream’s afterimages would fade from her mind’s eye.
Later that day, Penny heard rumors at school that another girl from another nearby town had vanished in the night.
The town held its breath for the next few days. There was school, where Penny’s fellow students wandered the halls between classes in subdued groups and pairs. Parents volunteered as hall and playground monitors and herded the children like sheep every moment of the day. No one else from Dogwood disappeared in that time, but two kids, a twin brother and sister, did vanish from their home in Auburn the night before.
“I don’t know why they’re bothering,” Penny heard Katie West say to her small group of friends once, while they all waited for their parents to pick them up and take them home. “Nothing’s going to happen during the day. It doesn’t matter what they do. It’s the dark they should worry about.”
Then she noticed Penny and Zoe standing close enough to hear her conversation, and led her friends away, throwing a scowl over her shoulder. The scowl seemed halfhearted though, more habit than hate.
“What does she have against us anyway?” Penny asked Zoe, not really expecting an answer.
She got one anyway.
Katie turned and stalked toward them, an expression of lazy contempt on her face. For a moment, Penny thought Katie was going to hit her, and she had a crazy impulse to pull her wand, but Katie stopped a few feet short and faced Penny, hands on her hips.
“Your whole family is trouble, Little Red. Every single one of them, and you’re just as bad.”
Penny had no response. She simply stood agape.
“Yeah, I know all about you guys. Your mom and your aunt.” Penny’s shocked silence seemed to enrage Katie further, and her voice rose to a shout. “My dad told me all about them when h
e found out you came back. He told me what happens to people who get mixed up with your family.”
Penny’s shocked silence broke. “What are you talking about? What did my mom ever do to …”
Katie didn’t wait for her to finish.
“Ask Susan about Tracy West sometime. Ask her why Tracy had to leave town. Then you’ll know what I have against you!” That said, Katie turned, joining her friends, leaving Penny standing in a sea of curious rubberneckers.
“She’s crazy,” Zoe marveled. “Absolutely bug-eyed.”
Penny said nothing, but thought she understood. Her mom’s friend Tracy, who had left town never to return after the accident, was Katie’s aunt. It was a revelation she wasn’t ready to share with Zoe yet, because sharing that would mean having to share a whole lot more.
The next morning, after getting ready for school, Penny found Susan on the phone looking shaken and tired. A third town girl had disappeared. It was Katie West.
Chapter 15
The Wrong Boogeyman
The day Katie disappeared, Penny and Zoe heard gossip at school that the sheriff was going to cancel Harvest Days. Penny wasn’t surprised, but she was disappointed. She’d been looking forward to the fair week.
That night at home she overheard Susan on the phone with Jenny, saying Penny might be safer back in San Francisco at the group home until they caught the kidnapper.
A few months earlier this would have been welcome, but now it made her feel like shouting and crying simultaneously.
That night another kid went missing; a boy Penny remembered very vaguely from the magic show in the park. This time there was a bit of good news to balance out the bad.
Sheriff Price had a suspect in custody, and expected to find the missing kids soon.
The gossip was unspecific, and Penny went through the day in a daze of confused anticipation, wanting to believe they had managed to catch The Birdman, but not quite able to. She just could not imagine some small‐town sheriff, elected more because of family influence than any flair for crime fighting according to Susan, stopping such an exotic and frightening foe.
That evening they watched the television, channel surfing from one news program to the next, hoping for some scrap of information. There was nothing beyond vague references at first, short teasers that sent Susan into uncharacteristic cursing tirades.
At last, the local station rewarded them with a full story.
They watched live, as the sheriff stood on the steps of the town’s courthouse, armed guards flanking the door. They could hear the angry shouts of off camera parents and townspeople, and Penny thought the guards were there more to keep the citizens from lynching the imprisoned man than to keep him from escaping.
“I wonder who they got,” Penny said, exchanging a meaningful glance with Zoe.
“Hush,” Susan barked, and Penny hushed at once.
Sheriff Price spoke.
“Early this morning, following the reported abduction of a fourth child from Dogwood, we received an anonymous tip naming Gregory Hicks, formerly of Puyallup. Mr. Hicks has moved from city to city, staying at campgrounds since retiring from his job at a Puyallup mill last spring. We arrived later in the morning with a warrant, and found personal items belonging to some of the missing children in Mr. Hicks’s camper.”
A volley of questions followed, during which Sheriff Price merely stood closed-mouthed and still as a statue, arms crossed over his chest.
Penny took advantage of the moment to venture a question. “Where is Puyallup?”
“Shhh,” Susan said, pressing a finger to her lips.
After a few moments, the reporters decided there would be no answers to their questions, and settled for Sheriff Price to continue his statement.
“While we haven’t yet located the missing children, we believe it’s only a matter of time.”
Angry babble from the crowd rose again, but Sheriff Price pressed on, raising his voice to be heard.
“In the meantime, I’d like to squelch rumors that our city council has decided to cancel Harvest Days. Nothing—” he had to shout to make his voice heard, “We will find our missing children, and nothing would please me more than to welcome them back in celebration.”
With that, the sheriff stepped back from the microphone, raised his hands, palm out to forestall any further questions—not that it did any good, the questions rained at him fast and furious—and retreated past the armed deputies guarding the door. A few of the bolder reporters tried to follow him, still firing questions, but the deputies blocked them.
The scene in front of the town courthouse vanished, replaced by the ever-grinning face of the anchor, saying Hicks had no family, no job, and that he was a wanderer, moving from town to town and living out of his camper. Running in a column to her left, top to bottom, were photos of the missing kids, and to her right, a photo of Gregory Hicks.
Hicks was an old man with flyaway white hair, dark sunken eyes, and a narrow, scarecrow face.
Penny thought if you looked up the word boogeyman in the dictionary, you’d find his picture next to the definition. He certainly looked the part of the kidnapping boogeyman.
He was innocent, and Penny knew it.
Susan turned the television off, and blew out a gusty sigh of relief. For several moments there was utter silence in the living room.
“Do you think they’ll find them?” Zoe asked.
Susan looked at her, distracted, and Penny thought her relieved expression tensed just a bit.
“I hope so,” she said. Then, with a little more conviction, “I’m sure they will. I’m just glad I don’t have to worry about you two now.”
Penny forced a smile of her own. “Yeah, me too.”
Penny herself was very worried. She was worried enough for the both of them.
“We have to do something,” Zoe said as Penny tried, but failed to go to sleep.
“I know,” Penny said. “Not yet though.”
“What?” Zoe’s disbelief was clear in her voice. “Are you kidding me? After tonight, you know they won’t catch … him.”
“Yes, you’re right. But right now we don’t need to worry about him kidnapping anyone else. At least not for a while,” she hastened to add before Zoe could argue again. “Who do you think tipped the sheriff off? Who do you think planted that stuff in his camper?”
“You think it was Tovar?”
“No,” Penny said. She knew her certainty was irrational, but she knew, just knew, that if Tovar was involved, he would be on her side.
Maybe that was why he had come, to catch The Birdman.
“I think it was The Birdman, and I think he’s coming here for us. But not yet.”
“What about Tovar?”
Penny grimaced.
“He’ll be back for Harvest Days. We’ll talk to him then. This time,” she said grimly, “we won’t let him get away.”
“And what do we do about The Birdman?”
“We wait until the fair starts,” Penny said. “Then we’ll call him out.”
“Oh, good,” Zoe said without enthusiasm. “Sounds like a great plan to me.”
Though she didn’t say so aloud, Penny couldn’t help but agree. She wasn’t thrilled with the idea either, yet what other choice did they have? They could wait for The Birdman to come for them, or they could go after him.
There were only three days left of the school week, then the weekend and the week-long fair. Only three days, but those three days seemed to drag.
The town seemed wrapped in a bubble of nervousness. The relief at having a suspect locked safely away, a suspect that appeared doubly guilty when the disappearances stopped, was a short-lived relief. The children were still missing, and the silence from the Sheriff’s Office suggested that there was no progress in finding them.
Parents of the missing kids appeared on local television on Wednesday, giving separate interviews; on Thursday night they were together, speaking out on a national show that promised to bring their
cases all the attention they could stand.
On Friday, Main Street became a parade of news vans and strangers behind microphones and cameras, which, Penny supposed, is what the parents of the missing children wanted. They tacked and taped posters to every available surface in town, each with a different and hauntingly familiar face. There was Katie; the boy, Joseph; Amber, the teenage girl who kept breaking out in flowers during the magic show; and Jodi, the first to vanish.
The reporters broadcast their faces all over the country, and everyone would watch for them, hoping for the ten seconds of fame any rescuer would receive.
Not a bad plan, Penny thought—but in this case, she knew it wouldn’t work.
The night of Friday, September 29th came, and with nine school-free days stretching out before them, Penny and Zoe snuck out of the house just before midnight.
More than anything else, they needed to practice their magic. The Birdman would come for them soon. They could only hope they would be ready when he did.
They felt none of the usual anticipation as they crested the slope to the wild stretch of land leading to Aurora Hollow, only a sense of hopelessness, almost a feeling of doom.
Zoe clutched the wand at her side, itching for the small comfort of firelight the old stone pit would at least offer, and dreading the first of a new series of practice sessions just as much. As much as they reviewed the spells they had learned, they could find nothing they considered a practical offensive spell in their current repertoire, only things that seemed moderately useful at best, and downright silly on the whole.
There was the modified fire spell Zoe had succeeded in casting on their last visit to the hollow, but it was too unsure. Zoe just didn’t know if she could pull it off when the time came.
Zoe had a hunch, a hope she’d shared with Penny, that they might be able to create the right spell, the magical equivalent of throwing rocks at The Birdman, but only if it was a simple one.
Penny was hopeful too, but not at all convinced.
They’d just have to see.
“I hope Ronan is there tonight. I bet he could help,” Zoe said.
