Nightbird

by Alice Hoffman

  One day when we were walking through town we found ourselves right in front of Hoverman’s Hardware Store. Julia and I looked at each other and we both said, “Spray paint” at the very same time. We were ready to take the first step on our list.

  When we went inside a little bell over the door jingled. Usually I thought it was a pretty sound, like a fairy flitting over our heads, but now I nearly jumped out of my shoes. Julia looked a little nervous as well. When you set out to find the answers to your questions, you have to be prepared to be surprised by what you discover.

  We went over to the paint section and looked around. I loved the names of the colors. Some of them were as good as our nail polish shades. Julia and I argued over which ones were the best: There was Ice Cream (I pictured vanilla, Julia said it might easily be strawberry) and Bananarama (pale yellow, of course—we both agreed on that) and Have a Heart (Red for love? Green for jealousy? We settled on pink for true love) and Butterfly (I voted for orange, like a monarch butterfly. Julia suggested pale green, like the wings of a cabbage moth). For a while I wandered off and got stuck in the blues: Aquamania, Seascape, Blue Moon, Blue Heron, Bluebell.

  Julia came to guide me away. “The spray paints aren’t here. I’ve looked everywhere. It’s like they disappeared.”

  I finally spied them and pointed upward. The aerosol paints had been piled onto a high shelf and locked up behind wire meshing. The elder Mr. Hoverman came by, carrying some shovels. Even Miss Larch would have described him as ancient. “Under lock and key,” he said of the paints we were gazing at.

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Graffiti around town. I was asked by the mayor to write down the name and address of everyone who buys any. They’ve got to sign their names in my book; then I get my key and let them have what they want.”

  “Do you remember who bought spray paint before you had to lock it up?” Julia asked.

  “You girls are as bad as the sheriff with all of your questions. My memory’s mostly gone, but I’ll tell you what I told him: Mark Donlan, who was painting his patio furniture. Helen Carter, who had an old bike she wanted to paint. A girl who said she was going to paint silver stars.”

  Julia and I grinned at each other. That had been Julia, for her ceiling.

  “And some boy I never saw before. About your age,” Mr. Hoverman said.

  Julia and I exchanged a look.

  “Do you remember what he looked like?” I asked. “Or anything about him?”

  “I barely remember what I look like,” Mr. Hoverman joked. At least, I thought it was a joke. He was nearly at the century mark, and he had met and seen a lot of people in his time. “Whoever he was, you can be sure he won’t be getting any more paint without signing his name in my book.”

  It really wasn’t much help to know that the culprit was a boy our age. We couldn’t go around questioning everyone who fit that description. Clues were funny things. Some of them were useful and some of them weren’t and some came when you least expected them.

  We finally found a clue in the cellar of Mourning Dove one drizzly afternoon when we were exploring the cottage, looking for more old cookbooks. We pushed open a heavy storeroom door and there it was, as if it had been waiting politely for us to find it all this time. In the beam of our flashlight we spied something white on the ground, near a coal bin that hadn’t been used in decades. It was a crinkly, translucent piece of paper. The edges were yellow and we were afraid the paper might fall into shreds if we held it for too long.

  Cellars are strange places, where people tuck away bits and pieces of the past, but the last thing we expected was to find a message. Clearly, no one had been down here for years, unless you counted spiders. There were dozens of them.

  We held up the flashlight and began to read.

  What begins one way must end the same way.

  The letters AE were scrawled beneath this line.

  “Agnes must have written this,” Julia said.

  It had to be part of the enchantment.

  “Maybe she’d had second thoughts about the curse,” I said, “and wanted to make sure there was a way to end it.” We studied the line she’d written, and finally it hit me. To undo a spell you needed to re-create it; then it would unwind, like a spool of thread.

  “We have to find out exactly what she did.”

  We shook hands and agreed.

  We would end the curse the way it had begun.

  We decided to tell Agate our plans and reveal all we knew about our families’ histories. She had a job as a counselor at the summer camp at Town Hall and had been put in charge of the costumes for the play. We waited for her at the end of the day. The bell in the tower of the building rang every evening at six. It was so loud it could be heard all over town, even up in the mountains, if you listened carefully. When I walked through the apple orchard and heard the ringing in the distance, the sound made me happy to live in Sidwell, where people cared about old-fashioned things like libraries and bell towers and there was someone like Miss Larch who was making sure our history wasn’t forgotten.

  “Fancy meeting you two here,” Agate said cheerfully when she saw us. She had bits of thread and ribbon stuck to her clothes.

  “It’s a small town,” I said.

  “And you’re the best sister in it,” Julia added, picking a stray pin from Agate’s sleeve.

  “I’m getting suspicious.” Agate laughed. “You either want something from me or you have bad news.”

  It was actually a bit of both.

  We walked through town, arm in arm.

  “What do you think about the play?” Julia asked her sister.

  “Don’t you hate the way the witch is treated?” I piped up.

  “It’s just a play.” Agate shrugged. She’d clearly been paying more attention to the costumes than to the plot.

  “But this one is special,” Julia informed her sister. “She’s our witch.”

  We sat Agate down on a bench in the park across from the tourist center and told her everything we knew: how Agnes Early had been in love, and how she’d been betrayed. The result was the curse that had affected my brother.

  “I don’t believe in curses,” Agate said. “That’s like believing in monsters.”

  “Or boys with wings?” I said.

  There was silence then. I’d made my point. What happened in Sidwell didn’t happen in other places. Julia had told me Agate had begged my brother to take her flying, but he’d refused. He wanted to be just another normal person, the boy who walked across the orchard to meet her. But in Sidwell, things worked differently, and life wasn’t what you always wanted it to be.

  “We don’t know what happened to Agnes or Lowell, but we plan to find out. All we know is that the curse is still with us,” I went on, once the truth had sunk in. “That’s why my mother was so upset when your family moved next door. She was afraid it would happen again.”

  “And if it does, it will all be my fault,” Agate said sorrowfully.

  She took off, racing across the green. We sprinted after her. Luckily I was fast enough to reach her before she could get away.

  “It definitely wouldn’t be your fault,” I told her.

  Julia had reached us, and was doing her best to catch her breath. “In the first place, it happened over two hundred years ago,” she said.

  “In the second place, we’re going to fix it,” I told Agate.

  “What begins one way must end the same way,” Julia and I said at the very same time.

  Agate gave us both a hug. “I’ll make the witch’s costume the best one. She’s our witch, after all.”

  Agate worked late at the camp after that, taking special care with the witch’s costume. When she came home she often fell asleep curled up on the couch.

  “How can she be so beautiful and still be so kindhearted?” I asked. Sixteen was totally different from twelve.

  “She just is,” Julia said proudly. “Always has been and always will be.”

&nbs
p; No wonder my brother was under her spell. It was said that the first Agnes Early had enchanted my four-times-great-grandfather with her kindness and her beauty. Now the same thing seemed to be happening again. James left home earlier each evening, sometimes before dusk. He simply walked out the front door and walked through the orchard, like an ordinary boy, then met Agate by an old stone wall where they held hands like any other young couple. James was avoiding the attic, gone most of the time. I tried to feed his little owl, Flash, bits of hamburger and dry toast, but he wouldn’t eat when James wasn’t there. He waited by the window, gazing out.

  One morning when I went to get our copy of the Sidwell Herald I noticed that someone had written in very small letters on our back door. I felt dizzy, so I sat down. I was eye-to-eye with the message. There was the word Help, along with a small set of fangs. I ran to the garage and got an old can of green paint and quickly painted over it. As I did so, I had to wonder: Was someone actually asking for my help? Or did they simply want to set suspicion upon my brother?

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the message. Every time I passed the door I could see the shadow of the words under the green paint and I thought about whoever it was who might need me to be on their side.

  People in town seemed more upset about sightings of the Sidwell Monster than they were about the possibility of the woods being cut down. The Gossip Group began to have meetings at Town Hall in the evenings. Soon people outside the group started to attend. I even saw Mrs. Farrell, my English teacher, come out of a meeting with some of her friends.

  “Hi there, Twig.” She waved.

  “Are you going to these monster meetings?” I asked. When we’d discussed Wuthering Heights, Mrs. Farrell told me that no man was a monster, not even Heathcliff, and that most people’s misdeeds were rooted in the treatment they’d received in the world.

  “Well, I’m not one to believe in such things, but something scared the life out of Emily Brontë,” she said of her beloved cat. “Now she won’t go into the yard.” When she saw the worried look on my face she added, “We all just want Sidwell to be safe.”

  The Sidwell Herald was looking much better since Mr. Rose had taken over. Now there was a crossword puzzle and a horoscope, and a book review section, with most of the reviews written by Miss Larch, a true book lover. But my heart sank when I read the police log that night. Usually the log was filled with mentions of missing dogs, cars broken down, and lost keys and wallets. But there was one item that stopped me cold. Tourists from Boston had driven into a ditch after entering the town limits and were still in shock when the police came. After they were given bottles of cold water and some time to recover, the tourists reported spying a winged creature flying above them, and sheer terror had caused them to go off the road. They were so upset, they refused an offer of complimentary Sidwell Monster T-shirts and a free dinner at the Starline Diner.

  Every day there were more reports. A truck driver spied what he said was a dinosaur, or maybe it was a hawk. Sally Ann said some sort of creature had been sitting on the roof of the diner, leaving shreds of crumpled blue paper behind. Some children at Last Lake looked up after swimming, screamed, dropped their towels, and ran home to report to their parents that a huge hawk as big as a man had frightened them away. When Sheriff Jackson went to explore he found two shimmery blue-black feathers on the shore. The feathers had been reviewed by the entire police force, three officers and a secretary, Mrs. Hardy, before being placed on display in the Sidwell history room under Miss Larch’s care.

  I went to see them for myself. It was lunchtime and Miss Larch was having a selection of cucumber and lettuce sandwiches with her ornithologist friend. It was the perfect opportunity for me to complete step two of our plan: Question Dr. Shelton.

  Miss Larch poured us White Dragon tea, which she said gave the drinker courage and an open heart. When she went to get the sugar bowl and some napkins, I sat down beside Dr. Shelton. He still smelled a little mossy, like he’d just been trekking through the woods. He seemed to prefer the cucumber sandwiches to the lettuce ones. I tried one and was surprised to find it was delicious. I thought I might fix all sorts of vegetable sandwiches this summer: tomato and butter, asparagus and cream cheese, green beans and peanut butter.

  “What do you think of all this talk about a monster?” I asked, just to get a sense of Dr. Shelton’s thinking.

  “Stuff and nonsense,” he said.

  “What about the graffiti?”

  “Don’t take our home away plus the face of an owl. If you put it together what do you get …?”

  I suddenly understood what it meant. “The owl nesting area! That’s their home.”

  “That’s what I would presume if I were presuming things.” Dr. Shelton looked so proud of me I felt as if I were an A student.

  “Does someone want to take the owls’ home?”

  “Sometimes the most important part of research is asking the right question. I think you would make an excellent researcher. Most likely, quite a bit better than most of the scientists at the university who’ll examine the new exhibit.” Dr. Shelton nodded to the glass case.

  “Scientists?” I didn’t like the sound of that.

  “The ones who will test the feathers for their DNA.”

  I thought this over while we had our tea and came to a decision. Maybe there was something to the White Dragon tea’s effects. I did feel as if I had more courage.

  I thanked Miss Larch for lunch, then headed toward the door. I stopped at the case where the feathers were displayed, set onto some draped blue fabric. I looked over my shoulder and saw Miss Larch tidying up the cups and plates, so I opened the case, slowly, making certain it wouldn’t creak. I slipped the feathers into my cast.

  I glanced up and for a minute I thought Dr. Shelton was watching me, but I couldn’t be sure. I walked out, casually, as if I had nothing to hide, even though my heart was pounding. Then I ran home as fast as I could.

  I could barely sleep that night. I’d never stolen anything before, although technically it wasn’t stealing if you were taking something that belonged to your own family. All the same, I felt like I’d committed the crime of feather theft. And I felt especially bad when I considered what Miss Larch would think when she saw they were missing. I finally fell asleep, but when I woke up in the middle of the night, I thought the moon was a police car headlight.

  The next day I grabbed the newspaper, looking for a story about the history room theft at Town Hall, figuring it would be a front-page article since not much news happened here. But the missing feathers were only mentioned briefly on the next-to-last page, right below a story about a lost cat named Jitters. I was pleased to see that Mr. Rose had written an editorial about the importance of the Montgomery Woods to the town of Sidwell.

  I went to Julia’s to tell her about Dr. Shelton, and how I’d realized that the graffiti message had something to do with the nesting owls.

  “If it’s someone on the side of the owls,” Julia said thoughtfully, “then he can’t be all bad.”

  I didn’t say anything, but all that day as we finished up the stars on her bedroom ceiling, I wondered if James was behind the graffiti messages. He had shown me the nesting area, and I’d seen for myself how baby owlets would come to perch on his shoulders.

  We’d just finished the last star on the bedroom ceiling when Mrs. Hall came upstairs with a rolled-up sheet of paper. It looked very old and dusty.

  “Look at this, girls,” she said, excited. “Here are the plans for the original garden.”

  Mrs. Hall had found the old document on the top shelf of the library, hidden beneath some maps of Sidwell. She told us it appeared to be a colonial herb garden set out where a tangle of weeds now grew. The plan included four gravel walkways that met in the middle with a circle of stones that surrounded a wildflower garden. Printed in curly letters was the phrase Have the garden near the dwelling, for beauty and ornament, and most of all for reason. There was a list of herbs that had been used:
tansy, parsley, sage, bayberry, thyme, lavender, rosemary, mint, yarrow, wormwood, and feverfew.

  Dr. Hall came in from the hospital. After looking over the garden plan, he explained that many of the herbs were used for their medicinal value. “Some are still used today. If you have a stomachache, eat parsley. If you’re nervous, rest your head on a pillow of lavender.” That explained why I felt so relaxed after eating the lavender honey butter my mother made. Even a rose had a purpose, the doctor told us, for the petals and rose hips could be made into a soothing tea. I had the feeling that re-creating Agnes Early’s garden was a part of the spell.

  What begins one way must end the same way.

  It was the beginning of setting things right. It was what we were meant to do.

  Julia and I got permission to begin work right away. Dr. Hall drove us out to the garden center on Milldam Road and we both used our savings to buy as many plants as we could. The owner of the garden center, Mr. Hopper, threw in some wilted plants for free when he heard about our endeavor. “Just so long as you know it’s a witch’s garden you’re planning,” he said as he helped us load up the car.

  “That’s fine,” Julia said. “We like witches.”

  “We think they’ve been unjustly persecuted,” I added.

  I spied Mr. Rose at the cash register. He was buying a rosebush with enormous blooms, pink with creamy-yellow centers. They were lemony and rosy and fragrant. Mr. Rose waved a hello and I waved back. I didn’t mean to like him, but for some reason I did.

  “I read your editorial,” I called as we headed to the parking lot.

  “Approve or disapprove?” he called back.

  “Oh, approve. Most definitely.”

  Just as I approved of his choice of roses.