Gold Dust Letters

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  “I’ve noticed that somebody is living in the apartment over the garage,” Georgina replied. “There are lights on up there every night, and a car is parked outside one of the doors sometimes.”

  “It’s Miss Bone.” Poco frowned. “She’s living there while she looks after the house. My mother said she used to be a teacher at the high school. Now she’s too old and does housesitting jobs.”

  “Miss Bone,” Georgina mused. “That’s a strange name.”

  “Sort of horrible when you think of it,” Poco agreed.

  The most important animal missing from the Harrall house and garden was, of course, Juliette. There was nothing odd about this, however. The big Siamese was staying with Poco while the Harralls were away, an arrangement that seemed to make everyone happy.

  Angela had an excuse to call up from Mexico, so the friends, who were not great letter writers, could stay in touch. Meanwhile, Poco had a sleeping companion at last. Every night Juliette curled up on the foot of her bed, just as she had used to snuggle under the radiator in Angela’s kitchen.

  “Juliette is a person who likes order … like me,” Poco told Georgina proudly. “Now that she’s settled, she doesn’t mind moving at all. We are very good and don’t talk long at night. We know we need to get our beauty sleep.”

  “Beauty sleep. Good grief!” Georgina rolled a desperate eye. She wondered how she would ever get through an entire year of being friends with Poco without Angela there to help her.

  Luckily, the problem would soon be partly solved. A new person was about to appear on the scene. He was not someone the friends had ever expected to know. Though he had been in their school classes for years, they had never spoken to him. He lived quite close to Poco, however, and this was why he happened to be walking by on the sidewalk when, with a terrible squeal of tires and a sickening thud, Juliette was run down by a car in the street.

  Two

  POCO RAN TO THE WINDOW the moment she heard the tires screech. Some flash of intuition told her what had happened. It was late afternoon. The big cat had just gone out. A bleary-eyed sun hung low in the sky.

  “Juliette! Where are you?” Poco screamed. She saw a dark sports car speeding away. With another shriek of tires, it reached the end of the block, turned right, and disappeared.

  Poco grabbed her coat and ran outside into the road. She searched the sidewalks up and down. An oddly shaped gray mound was lying near a street drain not far off.

  “Oh no!” She crept toward it, hardly daring to breathe. The mound became a tail bent, a head crushed, a body smashed on the cold pavement. Poco’s stomach rose up. But when she stepped closer, the mound suddenly changed. It took on a brownish, brittle look, and she realized with a gasp that it was only a pile of leaves.

  Poco stared weakly up the street. “Juliette? Please come. Are you hurt?”

  Soft footsteps sounded behind her. A person wearing a baseball cap pulled far down over his eyes appeared at her side.

  “If you are looking for your cat, it ran over there,” the person said in a low voice. He pointed to a tangle of shrubs across the road and turned to leave.

  “Wait!” Poco cried. “What happened? Did you see?”

  The person turned back warily. He was a boy, short-legged and wiry, not much taller than Poco herself. There was something familiar about him, she thought.

  “Your cat got hit,” he said. “It flew up in the air like a football. I thought it came down on the Rollins’ lawn, but it’s not there now. Maybe it ran in the bushes.”

  “Which bushes?” Poco raced across the street. The boy in the baseball cap followed and pointed. She pushed some branches aside, but there was nothing underneath.

  “Maybe it kept running.” The boy began to edge away again. Beneath his cap, his eyes surfaced and met hers, then drew back into shadow.

  “Walter Kew!” Poco exclaimed. “I know who you are.”

  “Well, don’t go yelling it around,” Walter said, glancing over his shoulder. “I like to keep a low profile out here.”

  “A low what?” Poco tried to see his eyes again. They were the palest blue, very nearly white when the light shone in them.

  “Never mind.” Walter Kew pulled his cap down. “If I were you, I would look in the Rollins’ backyard. The cat is probably hiding out there.”

  “Do you think she’s hurt?” Poco said, gazing fearfully down the driveway. “Could you help me find her? My mother’s at work. No one’s home except me.”

  “Oh, all right,” Walter muttered, but he didn’t look happy about it.

  The Rollins were berry people. Strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries—every sort of berry bush was planted in their yard. By this time of year, the berries were gone, leaving a snarl of brambles. Poco and Walter Kew waded in on tiptoes.

  “Juliette! Please come out. Or make a noise and I’ll find you,” Poco coaxed.

  “Cat? Here, cat,” Walter Kew called.

  There was no answer.

  They walked back to the street and went around the block to the yard Juliette would have come to if she had kept going through the Rollins’ brambles. Nothing was moving there, either.

  Walter glanced over his shoulder. He grasped his baseball cap and pulled it farther down.

  “I guess I’d better get going,” he said. “I don’t like being out on the street for too long.”

  “Why not?” Poco asked.

  “Spirits,” he said mysteriously. But then he stood around and didn’t leave.

  “You are Poco, right?” he said, looking at her sideways.

  She nodded.

  They inspected the second street up and down and asked some people on the sidewalk if they had seen a large gray Siamese cat. They hadn’t. There was no sign of Juliette. Poco began to feel sick again.

  “Thanks for helping,” she told Walter when they came back around to her house. “I guess I’ll just sit on our porch steps for a while and see if she comes back.”

  “Time for me to disappear,” he said. He slunk off down the sidewalk. About ten minutes later, though, Poco saw him coming back. He slipped into her yard like a spirit himself and scuttled up the path to the porch.

  “I thought you might like some help waiting,” he whispered, pulling up his cap a fraction of an inch. His pale eyes flashed out from under the brim. “I’ve had a few things disappear on me like that.”

  “Thanks.” Poco moved to make room. “I guess the spirits are still watching you, right?”

  “You never know,” said Walter Kew. “It’s a crazy world out there.”

  Poco called Georgina that night. “Juliette was run over?” Georgina bellowed into the phone. “And now she’s lost? I knew this would happen! It’s Angela’s fault for going away.”

  Poco held the receiver away from her ear.

  “Are you sure Walter Kew was the person who came out and helped you?” Georgina went on shouting.

  “Yes. He couldn’t find her, either. But he said not to worry. He doesn’t think Juliette is dead. Yet.”

  “How would Walter Kew know that? He never knows anything,” Georgina pointed out. “He never speaks to anyone and he usually doesn’t answer if someone speaks to him. His parents got killed when he was little, you know. Now he lives with his grandmother and is thought to be a strange person.”

  “I know,” Poco said. “He is strange. But nice. He believes in spirits. He said we could use his Ouija board if we wanted, to find out where Juliette has gone. I said I’d let him know.”

  “Ouija board!”

  “George, you don’t have to yell every word you say,” Poco said, holding the receiver out at arm’s length. “My mother can hear you in the next room.”

  There was a rustling noise on Georgina’s end of the line, as if she was changing position.

  “Listen, Poco. Don’t get mixed up with Walter Kew,” she said in quieter but more earnest tones. “He has weird ideas. Anyway, Ouija boards are fake. Everybody knows it.”

  “I don’t
know it,” Poco said stoutly.

  “Yes, you do!” Georgina’s voice rose again. “We used to do that stuff in second grade. It never told us anything we hadn’t already figured out. Not only that but …”

  Poco lay the phone down on the living room couch, where she was sitting, and got up and walked across the room. Georgina’s voice went on without pause in the distance. It sounded like a flock of ducks quacking across a pond. After a while, Poco walked back and picked up the receiver again.

  “… quack, quack, quack, so I will come over to your house tomorrow, whether you like it or not, and help you look for Juliette,” Georgina was saying. “She probably went under somebody’s house. That’s what cats always do—go under houses.”

  Poco hung up the phone completely when she heard this. She felt too worried to bother telling

  Georgina that she was wrong, as usual. Cats do not “always do” anything. They are unpredictable, which is why humans, who are also unpredictable, love them so much. Furthermore, though a cat may go under a house, it usually will not stay there. This is because dust clogs up its sensitive nose and dirt falls onto its beautiful coat, and it is very shortly sneezing and miserable.

  No, Juliette was not under a house at that moment. But in that case, where had she gone?

  Poco took a telephone book out of a table drawer and looked up a number. She punched it into the telephone and waited through four rings.

  “Hello! Speak up!” an elderly voice barked at the other end. Poco jumped. Old people made her nervous. They frequently looked angry or couldn’t hear what she said.

  “Hello?” she quavered. “May I speak to Walter Kew?”

  Three

  THE NEXT DAY AT SCHOOL Poco saw Walter Kew walking to his classroom. At least, she thought it was him whisking past in the shadows. Even in a bright-lit school corridor, he managed to make himself nearly invisible.

  “Walter? Is that you?”

  The figure stopped and glanced around. His baseball cap was pulled down so far that it looked as if the circulation was being cut off in his ears.

  “I called you last night, remember?” Poco asked. “And you said …”

  Walter placed a finger on his lips. With his head, he motioned her around a corner into an empty classroom. This was such weird behavior that Poco felt a small zing of alarm. But she followed him.

  “For my Ouija board to operate, it needs privacy,” Walter said when he had inspected the room to be sure it was vacant. “How are things at your house?”

  “Things are fine,” Poco said. “My mother works today so she won’t be home until dinner. All my brothers are older and away at school.”

  “Good.” Walter’s eyes stared out from under his cap like two pale headlights. He looked twice as strange at school as he did outside.

  “Would it be all right if my friend Georgina came, too?” Poco asked. “I already asked her actually, this morning before school. She doesn’t completely believe in Ouija boards yet, but she said she’d try.” This was a slight exaggeration. What Georgina had really said was, “I am not coming! No matter what! And don’t you ever dare hang up on me again!”

  “If she tries, your friend will believe,” Walter said. “The Ouija works.”

  “Will it really be able to tell us where Juliette is?” Poco asked. “We’re all so worried. My mother left some milk out on the porch last night, but Juliette never came.”

  “I can’t guarantee anything,” Walter said, “but this Ouija sees a lot. The board is old. It’s got power to look into amazing places when you handle it right.”

  “I thought Ouija boards only tell you who you’re going to marry or where you’re going to live when you grow up,” Poco said.

  Walter Kew smiled. “That’s what everyone thinks. A real Ouija is interested in real life, though. A lot of things go on around us all the time that we can’t see. Bad stuff and good stuff. The Ouija finds it out. It sees and then it tells.”

  Poco was so excited by this report that she tried to run immediately to Georgina’s classroom to tell her. Unfortunately the bell signaling the start of the school day rang at that moment, and she was forced to go back to her own room. This gave her time to think again, however. In the end, she decided not to pester Georgina anymore.

  “George is like one of those old pack mules you see in the movies,” Poco said to herself. “They take up a position in the middle of the road and refuse to budge no matter how hard you push or pull them. But if you go away and leave them alone, they get restless. Then, with no fuss at all, they end up walking in the very direction you wanted in the first place.”

  This, as it turned out, was exactly what happened. At three o’clock that afternoon, Georgina sauntered through the Lamberts’ back door with a mulish air of indifference.

  “So where is this great Ouija board?” she asked, gazing first at Poco and then at Walter Kew. They were sitting at the kitchen table with that very item between them, as Georgina could plainly see.

  “Oh, hello, George. We were wondering when you’d get here,” Poco said carelessly. But then, unable to contain her excitement, she jumped up. “Look at this Ouija board. Isn’t it amazing? Have you met Walter Kew? He’s amazing, too!”

  Walter Kew’s Ouija wasn’t the ordinary kind—Georgina saw that in one glance. His board was made of wood, not the cardboard of the store-bought ones. The alphabet was painted across its glossy surface in two rows of dark red letters. Below the letters, the numerals one through ten were painted in blue. Odd symbols and designs filled the margins of the board.

  Georgina walked across the kitchen and picked up the tear-shaped message wand that lay on the board. It was carved out of the same heavy wood. A clear circle of glass was embedded near the pointing end.

  “This Ouija is from my family, way back in time,” Walter Kew explained before Georgina could even ask. “My grandmother said it came across the ocean.”

  “Across the ocean!” Georgina looked at him suspiciously. “What ocean. From where?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s real, though. See that open eye?”

  Poco nodded. In the upper left-hand corner of the board, a large lidless eye had been painted. It was dark in its interior and seemed to gaze straight at them.

  “That’s the Ouija’s seeing eye,” Walter said. “It can see anywhere you tell it to look.”

  “Anywhere?” Georgina asked. “You mean anywhere in the world?”

  “I mean anywhere,” Walter said, in such an ominous voice that an image of dark, unspeakable places leapt into Georgina’s mind and she shivered.

  “Poco, look! There’s some sort of bird painted in the other corner,” she said to cover her fright.

  “It’s a falcon,” Poco replied. “You can tell by its curved beak and talons.”

  Walter Kew nodded at Poco. “That’s right,” he said. “It’s a falcon that lived in the old-time countries. People used to hunt with them. Falcons caught rabbits and small animals. Their eyesight is very keen. That’s why this one works for the Ouija.”

  “What do you mean?” Georgina asked. “What does it do?”

  “It carries the Ouija eye high into the air and helps it to hunt for the places it must see into.” Walter glanced down at the board again. “The other things you see painted here work for the Ouija, too. My grandmother told me about them. This is a sunbeam, for instance …”

  He pointed to a bright streak of yellow and orange in the lower right-hand corner of the board. “It gives the Ouija’s eye light for looking into dark places. And this mountain goat is for walking up steep mountains and cliffs. That is a veil for showing when something is hidden behind something else. Here is a piece of rope, because you always end up needing rope wherever you go.”

  “Rope! Oh, come on!” Georgina gave a snort. There was something about this Ouija she didn’t quite like.

  “That’s what my grandmother told me.”

  “And who is your grandmother?” Georgina folded her arms across her chest. �
�If you expect us to believe all this about the Ouija, you’d better start giving us a few more facts.”

  “George!” cried Poco, but it was too late. Walter Kew was already on his feet. He picked up the wonderful board and tucked it under his arm. Then he stuffed the wooden pointer into his jacket pocket.

  “Oh, please!” Poco wailed. “You can’t leave. We need to find Juliette before it’s too late.”

  Walter looked angrily at Georgina. “The Ouija does not speak to people like her,” he said. “It does not speak to people who try to insult it.”

  “Sorry!” said Georgina. “I didn’t mean to insult anything. I just wanted to get a little background.”

  “Well, you used a very insulting voice,” Walter Kew said. “If you want the Ouija to work, you will have to apologize to it.”

  “Apologize! To a Ouija board?” Georgina turned on him with battle-ready eyes. She was on the verge of opening her mouth to say a great deal more when Poco grabbed her and dragged her away into the living room.

  “Georgina Rusk, if you don’t apologize to Walter’s Ouija board this minute, I will never speak to you again,” Poco hissed. “And neither will Juliette, if we ever find her, which we never will if you keep on this way.”

  “Juliette never speaks to me, anyway,” Georgina snapped, and stamped to the other side of the room. But after a moment, Poco saw that, for some reason, she had decided to give in. Perhaps, after all, Walter’s board had impressed her.

  “Oh, all right,” she said, walking back toward the kitchen.

  A minute later she had apologized to the Ouija’s lidless eye and Walter Kew had settled into his chair. No sooner was he there than he placed his hands on the board and recited in a soft voice:

  “Come together, all believers,

  Let us turn this day to night

  And surround the ancient Ouija

  With the gloom it needs for sight.”

  Poco was enchanted. “Oh!” she breathed. “How do we do that?”