Nightbird

by Alice Hoffman

  I’d found the back entrance to the Montgomery estate.

  Unless I was very much mistaken, I’d also found the graffiti artist.

  Colin Montgomery. The boy whose family owned these woods.

  I noticed there was a pile of stones once used for an old road that had fallen apart. I picked out some white ones; then, as quickly as I could, I arranged them to spell out my message:

  I’ll help you.

  I walked home slowly, thinking about how complicated families were and how many secrets people kept. Now I had one, too. One I didn’t intend to mention to Julia, or even to James. I needed to figure some things out first.

  I didn’t realize how long I’d been gone until I stepped through our front door. There was my mother, waiting for me.

  “Where have you been?” A worried expression crossed her face. “Half the time I don’t even know if you’re home. Is there something I should know about?”

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said.

  My mother laughed. “Well, there’s nothing wrong in that! What a relief!”

  “I’ve been thinking about our family history.”

  My mother didn’t seem so cheerful when she heard that. “I can’t help you. Sorry.”

  She went into the kitchen, intending to end the conversation, but I followed her.

  “I’ve been thinking about Lowell Fowler.”

  My mother smiled faintly. “That’s ancient history.”

  “Seriously.” I wasn’t giving up. “I don’t know anything about him.”

  My mother shrugged and told me she didn’t know much either. Only that his parents had begun this orchard and our family had been here ever since. He’d lived and died in Sidwell.

  “Did he disappear?” I wanted to know.

  “Into the woods to think?” she teased.

  “Mom. Seriously.”

  “If he did disappear, he came back. He’s buried in the town cemetery.” My mother was distracted, turning the pages of the Sidwell Herald.

  I started for my room but found James in the hallway, headed toward the front door. “Don’t try to stop me,” he told me. “I can’t live this way anymore.”

  “If Julia and I figure out the cure you won’t have to. If we can find out what happened to Lowell, maybe we can reverse it.”

  “Don’t you think someone would have stopped it a long time ago if it could have been done?”

  Instead of listening to me, James went outside to the front porch. It was a beautiful afternoon. I thought of all the days he’d been locked away. I felt a lump in my throat as I went to stand beside him. I didn’t blame him for not having faith in anything. But at least he had me to back him up. The boy at the Montgomery estate seemed to have no one.

  “Some nights, I don’t fly,” my brother told me. “I put on my long coat and I walk out the door like I’m anybody else. I head down the road and go through town. I stand on Main Street. I sit on the steps of Town Hall. I look in through the library windows. Just so I’ll know what it’s like to be normal. No one’s caught me yet.”

  A car had turned onto the dirt road that led to our house. I worried it might be the sheriff again, but James didn’t seem concerned.

  “Maybe it’s time for everyone to see me. Maybe it’s fate. Let them put my picture on T-shirts so people can see the real Sidwell Monster. Here I am!” he shouted to the car.

  It wasn’t the sheriff, but I tugged on James’s arm and dragged him inside. I had recognized Mr. Rose’s car, and if James wasn’t quick his story might be plastered all across the front page of the Herald.

  “Just for now,” I said. “Stay inside.”

  When Mr. Rose got out of his car I was back out on the porch, sitting on the railing. He handed me the quart of ice cream he’d brought along. I checked out the flavor. Apple cinnamon. My favorite. I looked at him carefully, wondering if he was a mind reader or if he just happened to have the same taste as me.

  “Hello, Twig. I could have sworn someone was standing here with you.”

  “Nope,” I said, my fingers crossed behind my back. “Just me and my shadow.”

  “Funny,” he mused. “I have twenty-twenty vision. Is your shadow a tall boy, about four years older than you?”

  I shook my head, feeling panic rising. Could it be that he really was a mind reader? “Maybe you should get your eyes checked. Vision changes as you age.”

  “You’re right. I probably should.”

  I hadn’t heard my mother come up behind me, but suddenly there she was. “Teresa,” she said, using my given name for emphasis. “Why don’t you put that ice cream in the freezer. I’m going to have a talk with Mr. Rose.”

  I was stunned. I would have never expected her to go walking through the orchard with a newspaper editor when we had so much to hide and so much at stake if anyone found out about James. All the same, she looked so happy I felt happy, too, and when Mr. Rose waved to me from the orchard, I waved back.

  Sometimes you think you know what’s going to happen next, and then the world surprises you, especially in Sidwell. I went walking to think things over. I found myself back at the old gates of the Montgomery estate. I suppose I wanted to see if my message was still there. It wasn’t. The stones were all scattered. At first I thought it was an accident—some deer had run by and wrecked my words. Then I realized the stones had been rearranged to form a message back to me.

  Thank you Twig.

  CHAPTER SIX

  At the Intersection of the Past, the Present, and the Future

  MY MOTHER HAD SAID LOWELL HAD BEEN buried in the Sidwell Cemetery, so that was where Julia and I went next. The old cemetery was on one of the steepest roads outside of Sidwell. It hadn’t been used since 1901, when a new cemetery was built a little closer to town. We hiked up and finally made it. It was a hot day and the sky was a fragile cloud-streaked blue. The grass was so tall it reached past our knees. There were blackbirds wheeling above us, screaming at us as if we didn’t belong, doing their best to chase us away.

  I hadn’t yet told Julia about Colin Montgomery. I just didn’t want to share him with anyone. Not yet. But whenever I kept a secret from someone it built a wall between us, and now it was happening with Julia. She chatted away, but I stayed quiet, deep in my own thoughts. It was easy enough to do. This was a place where silence felt right.

  The cemetery was surrounded by a rusty iron fence. But the gate wasn’t locked and was easy to push open. We put our hands against the metal, and in seconds, we were inside.

  Several members of the Fowler family had been buried here, along with the ancestors of many townspeople whose names I recognized: the great-grandparents of Mr. Stern from the General Store; the aunts and uncles of the drama teacher, Mrs. Meyers; several relatives of Mr. Hopper from the garden center; even a Larch or two.

  We found Lowell’s grave on a hillside where there were banks of wild pink roses. It was off by itself and had the plainest of markers, a simple white stone. Julia and I crouched down so we could clear off the dust and pebbles and read the inscription.

  Lowell Fowler, son of Sidwell

  Now I can fly free

  “He probably thought Agnes would still be here when he came back,” Julia said, a sad cast in her eyes.

  I nodded in agreement. “Only this time she was the one who had disappeared.”

  “Their true fate was interrupted.”

  It was always windy on this hillside, even on a bright sunny day. I had the shivers. I noticed that something had been left on Lowell’s grave. A white stone. I looked around. There was nothing but grass and wild roses and the iron fence all around us.

  I almost told Julia about Colin Montgomery then.

  But I didn’t.

  She was talking about what we needed to do next. “I’ll search the cottage to see if Agnes left any more clues on how to undo the spell. I’m going to find out where she went when she left Sidwell. We’re going back to Brooklyn this weekend so my father can finish his work there and we can p
ick up some boxes we left behind. I’ll go to the library and see if there’s anything in their files about Agnes.”

  “I’ll try to find out why Lowell disappeared in the first place and where he was during those missing years.”

  We didn’t want fate to get all confused again.

  While Julia was gone I went to the newspaper office on the corner of Fifth and Main. I was ready to research Lowell Fowler, but there was someone else’s life I wanted to check into as well. Mr. Rose was an editor, used to digging into stories, and for some reason I felt I could trust him. I thought he would likely understand issues of crime and destiny. Maybe he could help me figure out whether you should turn a person in when he might be doing something that could get him in trouble, something that might affect your family and maybe the whole town.

  A bell rang over the door when I went inside the newspaper office. The sound was jingly, like the sleigh bells that used to hang on horse-drawn sleds. I felt as if I was stepping back in time again, and to tell the truth, it was a good feeling. The past seemed like the place where things could be settled and sorted out.

  Mr. Rose was sitting behind an old-fashioned oak desk with lots of different cubbyholes filled with bills and letters. There was a computer, but he was writing longhand. He hurried to put his notepad away when he saw me. What he was writing looked a little like a love letter. I was fairly certain I saw a heart next to the rose where he’d signed his name.

  “Twig!” he said cheerfully. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”

  I sat in a worn leather chair. For some reason the way Mr. Rose said my name made me smile. I tried to remember to be standoffish, the way I was with everyone else in town, but it wasn’t easy. “I need some information. I’m on my way to the history room at Town Hall to see Miss Larch.”

  “Aunt Florence.” Mr. Rose nodded. “Excellent historian. No one knows more about Sidwell.”

  “But I also need some more current information.”

  “At your service.” He moved his chair away from his desk and crossed his long legs, ready to listen.

  There were only two other employees, Mr. Higgins and Miss Hayward, both busy on the phone. I couldn’t help but overhear bits of their conversations. Mr. Higgins was talking to his daughter Ruth about dinner—he preferred fried chicken to beef stew—and Miss Hayward was speaking with her dentist’s office about an appointment to have her teeth checked. Not exactly breaking news. Both reporters were about ninety years old and had worked for the paper forever. Miss Hayward wrote up the police log. Mr. Higgins covered the social scene, which included school plays, town meetings, and the apple festival. They called out to me after they finished with their phone calls.

  “Fancy seeing you here, Twig,” Mr. Higgins said.

  “Make yourself at home,” Miss Hayward said warmly. “I’m in a forgetting state when I work, so in case I haven’t said so, hello and how are you?”

  I said hello back and assured Miss Hayward I was fine; then I turned to Mr. Rose. I lowered my voice. “I wanted to find out something about the Montgomery family.”

  “So do I. Seems like we’re on the same wavelength.”

  Mr. Rose brought out some files.

  “Mr. Montgomery bought acres of the woods bordering Sidwell twenty years ago. He lives in Boston and used to spend summers here, but in the past couple of years he’s only come up occasionally.”

  I thought back to the summer when I was supposed to play the witch. I remembered my friend from that time. It was Colin Montgomery. That was why he’d looked so familiar at his gate. Even at five he’d been a tall, shy boy with blond hair who carried a black backpack. “Good-bye, Twig,” he’d said to me on the day I had to leave and give up my part. We always had lunch together out in the playground, and because he never liked his own lunch, I always gave him half of mine. “Good-bye, Collie,” I’d said. He’d grinned at me, because we’d both had nicknames.

  “I’ve been researching Hugh Montgomery for an article,” Mr. Rose went on. “He plans to develop the woods, put up a hundred houses, along with a shopping center, several restaurants, maybe even a new school. The town has to vote in September. The construction would mean jobs, so some people are for it, but it would also ruin many of the things most people in this town love most.”

  “The woods,” I said.

  Mr. Rose nodded. “The woods.”

  “What about the owls?” I said.

  Mr. Rose leaned forward. “What owls?”

  “The black saw-whet owls. They only exist in Sidwell. Miss Larch’s friend Dr. Shelton knows all about them.”

  “Does he?” Mr. Rose shrugged on his jacket. “Why don’t I walk you over to see Miss Larch?”

  Because of his long legs, Mr. Rose walked fast. I had long legs, too, but I still had to hurry to keep up with him. I was a little nervous about going back to Town Hall after I’d stolen the feathers. Once we went inside, I looked over my shoulder, afraid someone would grab me and say, “Aha, here’s the thief!” Luckily, no one noticed me as I followed Mr. Rose.

  We passed the auditorium, where the camp was rehearsing the play that was always performed on August 1, the day of Lowell’s disappearance.

  One little girl was clearly the witch. She was dressed all in black, standing on the papier-mâché cliff. “Do not pry into my business if you know what’s best for you and yours!” she said in a shaky voice.

  “I hate this play,” I told Mr. Rose.

  We watched as the little witch was pushed off the cliff by the other kindergartners. She fell too hard, skinned her knee, and started to cry.

  “I can understand why,” Mr. Rose said. “It should be rewritten.”

  “Someday,” I assured him, “it will be.”

  “Someday, I plan to see your version.” That made me like him even more. “Shall we delve into Sidwell history?” He opened the door to Miss Larch’s domain. “Aunt Florence.” Mr. Rose greeted her with a kiss on the cheek. “I’ve brought Twig for some historical help.” His glance strayed to the table. He noticed it was set for two. “Were you expecting anyone else?”

  “Well, it appears that I’m expecting Twig now, aren’t I?” Miss Larch said.

  I could tell she wasn’t very practiced in keeping secrets.

  Mr. Rose looked directly at his aunt. “I’ve got some research to do on owls. You couldn’t help me out with that, could you?”

  “I would if I could, but I can’t. Owls are not my personal specialty, and what others know, I can’t divulge.”

  I suspected Miss Larch was used to protecting Dr. Shelton and that she had her reasons, just as I had my reasons for protecting James, and now, it seemed, for protecting Colin Montgomery as well.

  “I think you can trust me, Aunt Florence,” Mr. Rose said. “I want what’s best for Sidwell. And I think you know, I can keep a secret.”

  “If you do find the person who can help you,” Miss Larch said, “give him this. He might be hungry. Tell him I sent you.”

  She cut a large slice of the cinnamon coffee cake set out on a flowered platter and wrapped it in a napkin.

  “Turn left at Last Lake,” she said. “Then look up.”

  Mr. Rose nodded, then turned to me. “Good luck, Twig. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

  “I hope you do, too.”

  We shook hands and I had a sort of teary feeling for no reason. I guess I had the sense that we were trying to save Sidwell together, even if no one knew we were trying to save the people we cared about as well.

  “My nephew is a fine fellow,” Miss Larch told me when we were alone. She had put up the kettle for tea. We were having memory tea, which was especially fitting considering that my research had to do with the past. It was ginger peach with a hint of vanilla. “Heartbroken, though,” Miss Larch added.

  “Really?” I might have been right to guess that Mr. Rose had been writing a love letter when I first walked into the Herald’s office.

  “You can always see heartb
reak in a person’s eyes. Plus he sings love songs to himself. That’s a sure sign.”

  My mother sang love songs when she thought I couldn’t hear. Actually, I noticed Miss Larch was singing a love song as she fixed our tea. The very thought of you and I forget to do the little ordinary things that everyone ought to do.

  She had also forgotten to put out teaspoons and sugar, not that I minded. I hadn’t known you could fall in love at Miss Larch’s age.

  “What brings you here today?” she asked.

  I told her about Lowell, my four-times-great-grandfather, and how he’d disappeared in 1775 and left heartbreak behind and no one seemed to know why.

  “It was the beginning of the American Revolution,” Miss Larch said as she went to the files. “The shot heard round the world was fired in Concord, and that was the beginning of our country. Unfortunately, if you’re looking for the news from that time, there may be a problem. There was a major fire in Sidwell soon after. Lightning struck and started the sparks. Half of Main Street was burned down.

  “I have seen some papers on Lowell Fowler. He was a war hero. There was a grand parade for him on Main Street when he returned. Biggest one Sidwell’s ever had. And then Johnny Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed, gave him the Pink apple tree and the orchard began.”

  Miss Larch put on her reading glasses, then took out the records from the year Lowell went missing. Thankfully Town Hall hadn’t burned down in the fire and there was still an accounting of marriages, births, deaths, and military records, dating back to the 1700s.