Sovereign Hope

by Frankie Rose

The note had been there when I woke up, slipped under my bedroom door. I’d been staring at it since then, trying to figure out what to do.

   

  Farley,

  Sorry about Daniel. He said you had questions. Meet me at the Monterey Fair tonight, 8 p.m. sharp.  I’ll do my best to answer them.

   

  Agatha

   

   There was no sane reason on earth to go and meet with this Agatha. She could be a psycho killer, intent on luring me out to chop me into little pieces. Only the faintest voice of reason suggested that if that were the case, this Agatha would likely have killed me when she broke into the house to leave the note. That would make more sense. The house was quiet and secluded, whereas the fair was the exact opposite, filled with over-excited children all hopped up on sugar. Killing someone there wouldn’t exactly be easy to get away with.

  Tess would usually provide sage advice on the matter, but when I called, Mrs. Kennedy informed me she was off on some epic day hike with Oliver. She wasn’t expected back until late. The thought of Tess in the outdoors, hiking no less, only served to confuse me more. Tess thought the great outdoors was the realm of survivalist nuts who lived off road-kill stew.

  Her thoughts on the Monterey Fair matter were pretty much guaranteed, anyway.  I could almost hear her now: This is awesome! I’ll run interference in case anyone’s watching. I’ll bring my dad’s taser. If it looks like things are going south, I’ll pop the crazy bitch.

  She was going to be mad that she’d missed the opportunity to camo up and break out the walkie-talkies we hadn’t used since we were eleven. She would probably be even madder that I was considering going alone, but what else was I supposed to do? The likelihood of Daniel showing up and filling in the gaps of his own volition was slim to none.

  That left only one option: Agatha.

  The decision had been fairly easy to make, but as the day rolled by and seven-thirty approached, things suddenly seemed less clear-cut. What if the hundreds of people at the fair were a distraction, designed to make me feel safer than I truly was? I had no way of knowing what these people’s motives were or what they wanted from me. What if this woman had nothing to do with Daniel at all?

  I grabbed my leather messenger bag and pushed down the jitters playing havoc with my stomach. This was about my mom. Every fiber of my body told me so, and even if it was incredibly dangerous, there was nothing I wouldn’t do to find out where she was.

  I marched out of the house, only to freeze in the driveway. The truck. Of course. The Tacoma had been torched. I didn’t even know where the wreck had been taken. The insurance company needed calling, and who knew how understanding they were going to be. Was accidental destruction due to being caught in supernatural crossfire even covered under car insurance policies?

    I called a cab before I could change my mind about the fair, pulling the huge red coat my mom had bought me for Christmas tighter around my body. The battered yellow taxi arrived shortly afterwards. The car journey didn’t last long enough, and I was still riddled with nerves by the time I pulled into the swamp that was the Monterey Fair parking lot. Yesterday’s rain had turned the ground to sticky, churned up mud, and the thick brown mess had somehow found its way up the walls of the white canvas tents erected around the perimeter of the fair. It sucked greedily at my shoes, trying to pry them from my feet as I struggled to avoid the worst of it on my way to the entrance. Bare light bulbs in red and yellow formed a brightly lit archway, where a ticket booth was located to one side. The female vendor inside smiled broadly when I finally made it to the window without slipping over.

  “Ev’n, honey. You want ride tickets?”

  I shook my head. “No. Just entry.”

  The woman gave me a quizzical look but accepted the ten-dollar bill and stamped my wrist with an ink-blue juggling clown. A sea of people swarmed beyond the lit archway, smiling and laughing, all snaking their way to the various stalls and rides that spread out inside the fair’s compound. The air was rich with the smell of toffee and caramel, salt and smoke. All around, food vendors touted a vast array of saturated fats disguised as candy apples, hamburgers, giant pretzels, and fried donuts.

  The rides at the Monterey Fair had been the same since I was a kid. I tended to get motion sick pretty quickly, so I steered clear of them. The memory of throwing up on the Gravitron six years ago was still too fresh. I preferred the games that tested your skill, like the archery stands.

  The target markers were in their usual spot at the other end of the field, and a handful of other amusement stalls lined the way in between: balloon darts, horse shoes, hoop games. I made my way down the familiar walkway and paused by a stall covered in small glass jars. The game was an old favorite, the premise a simple one: get the rubber ball in the jar, win a goldfish. The goldfish in question—the kind that only lived for three days after you took them home—hung from hooks on the ceiling, glaring boggle-eyed out of their water-filled bags. They looked kind of depressed. The stall appeared unattended until a middle-aged, balding man emerged from around the back, stubbing out a half-smoked cigarette.

  “You wanna win a fish, missy?”

  “No, no, I—”

  “You don’t wanna play the game then move along. Gotta keep this area free for people who do wanna play.”

  A steady stream of people weaved back and forth in front of the stall, yet no one seemed interested in winning a fish.

  “Can you just give me a second? I’m waiting for someone.”

  The fat man re-lit his half-spent cigarette and spat on the ground. “Well, you’ll have to meet them somewhere else, sweetheart. You’re cluttering up my area.”

  “Fine. I’ll just…hey, where would people usually arrange to meet here?” The note just said to meet at the fair. I hadn’t really considered how big the fair was before now, and the overwhelming flood of people suddenly seemed all the larger. Finding this woman was going to be impossible, given the fact that I had no idea what she looked like.

  “There’s a security tent where people pick up their kids when they lose ’em. Could try there,” the attendant said.

  That was probably the last place I would find Agatha. I huffed, “Fine,” and pushed back into the flow of people. Suddenly every woman I saw looked suspicious. It was maddening. Any one of them could be her, this woman who had promised me answers, but each time I made eye contact with one of them, I would only receive a curious frown or a polite smile in return.

  Across the fairground, the huge Ferris wheel that had been stationary since I’d arrived squealed into action. The sound was grating and sharp, too much metal grinding on rusted metal. More bulbs flashed on the chairs that slowly rotated up into the night air, occupied by young couples and children. It had to have been twenty years old and a hundred years past rickety. My knees trembled just looking up at it. It didn’t really go all that high, but the wheel’s dilapidated condition sent a barrage of images tumbling through my head. Metal struts snapping like elastic. Screaming. Falling. Falling…

  “Farley?”

  Adrenalin shot through my chest. It fizzled out when I spun around to find Mitchell Hunter grinning sheepishly at me. Definitely not a stranger named Agatha. Mitchell had been St. Jude’s ‘most likely to attain sex symbol status’ the past three years running and would probably earn the title again this year. His shaggy blond surfer hair had grown during the break. He flashed his dimples in a way that made most of the girls in my year go weak at the knees.

  “Oh, hey, Mitch. What’s up?” I said.

  His grin widened. “My little sister’s been bugging me to bring her here all week. My parents said they’d confiscate my car if I didn’t give in. Hence the mud all over my insanely expensive jeans and the crystallized sugar I can’t seem to get out of my teeth. What about you?”

  “I’m, um…I guess I’m meeting a friend.” Telling him I was meeting a strange woman potentially involved in my mother’s disappearance didn’t really feel right.
>
  Mitchell shoved his hands into his pockets and rocked back onto his heels.  “And how are you feeling about going back to school? Break’s over in three weeks.”

  “Okay, I guess. I hadn’t really thought about it.”

  “And your mom? Have they…y’know, have they found…anything?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Oh. Well, you know what they say. No news is good news and all that.”

  I gave him a generous smile, but it felt tight around the corners of my mouth. He was only trying to be nice. He wasn’t to know that the longer someone was missing, the more likely they were to stay that way.

  “Yeah. No news is good news. So where’s your sister, anyway?”

  Mitch gestured over to a group of giggling young girls around the balloon darts obviously whispering about the cute stall attendant behind their hands. “They’ve been stalking this guy, I swear. He’s the only reason they come here. It kinda makes me wanna throw up in my mouth. Hey,” he paused,  “are you okay? You’ve gone a weird color.”

  I wasn’t listening. I was locked to the spot, straining to get a clear view through the crowd. People slipstreamed past one another, blocking the view I was searching for. The woman I had seen. The blue dress.  The short, wavy black hair. The flash of familiar blue eyes that had met mine for a split second before being swallowed by the hustling jostle of bodies. 

  “Farley?”

  “Huh?”

  “You okay?”

  “Uh, no, actually. I think…I think I have to go.” I left Mitch standing there. The woman had looked exactly like my mom. That dress was one of her favorites. It couldn’t have been anyone else.

  “Mom!”

  People scowled as I shoved passed them, pushing forward as best I could. It was hopeless, though. No matter how hard I fought, I kept getting pushed further back. The crowd closed in around the distant woman, and the bobbing head of black hair vanished out of sight.

  “Mom!” I screamed. Why wouldn’t she turn around? She’d looked right at me. Why hadn’t she come to me?  “Mom!”

  “It’s not her, Farley,” a voice behind me whispered. I shouldn’t have been able to hear it over the thump of the bassy music coming off the rides, and yet the voice filled my whole head. A woman’s voice.

  “Agatha?”

  I turned. No one there. Just the smiling, oblivious faces of the other fairgoers. I spun around, blurring the flashing lights into one continuous stream of red and gold and green and blue. The colors traced together, flooded my head, blinding me. The music distorted so that the lyrics stretched out low, like a tape being chewed up and pulled out of an old school cassette player.

  “Don’t panic.”

  I did another three-sixty. A group of guys loitering by an air rifle game stopped to watch me, giving me bemused looks. One of them muttered something and the others burst into fits of harsh laughter. Fantastic. I was going mad.

  And yet…I couldn’t be, because the voice came again. “Come with me, Farley.” A hand slipped into mine. The next thing I knew, a small woman with a chestnut braid was dragging me through the crowd. She wore a long-sleeved dark grey shirt and black jeans tucked into her boots, brown leather caked with red dirt. As the woman walked, her long braid swung from side to side like a heavy pendulum. Her heart shaped face was very pretty, dashed with a handful of freckles that gave her a girlish appearance, although she was probably close to thirty. 

  “You’re Agatha?” I croaked, trying to pull my hand back.

  The tiny woman gave a curt nod. “And you’re Farley.” There was a lilt to her voice, the echo of an accent. Maybe Scottish.

  “We’re going in the wrong direction. My mom was here. She went the other way.”

  Agatha tugged me into a darkened walkway between two tents—a fortune teller and a miniature red-and-white striped big top, inside which the smallest man on record could apparently be found. She pulled her lips into a tight line. “No. She didn’t. Your mom’s not here.”

  “I saw her. I have to—”

  “You saw what you were supposed to see. There are other people here that want to talk to you, too. You met them briefly the other day with Daniel.”

  “It was her. I know what my own mother looks like.” I yanked my hand free from Agatha’s. I made to step back out into the melee, but the other woman caught hold of me.

  “She’s not out there, okay? I promise you it wasn’t her.”

  “You can’t promise me that.”

  “I can. She’s not walking around anywhere, kiddo. She’s dead.”

  The words sank like a knife into my back. I whipped around. Agatha stared up at me with a firm look on her face, yet her soft brown eyes held a note of sadness. “I’m sorry. I realize there are better ways to break that news. You came here to talk. Can we talk?”

  “What do you mean, she’s dead?” The world had slipped into a strange slant. I peeled my sandpaper tongue from the roof of my mouth, tasting something cloying and overly sweet.

  “It’s true. I’m sorry, really, I am.” Agatha cast a swift, appraising look around us and bit down on her lower lip. “Come inside.” She motioned to the fortune teller’s tent. “There are things you should know.”

  I stepped back. “No.” Suddenly getting answers didn’t seem all that important. Not if they were these kinds of answers.

  Agatha almost managed to conceal her frustration, but her anxiety was all too evident in the way her body tensed with every passing second we stood out in the open.

  “Have you heard from Moira since she disappeared? Have you had a phone call? An email? Have the police found any evidence to suggest where she might have gone? Have you any other reason to believe that she’s alive somewhere?”

  The answer must have shown on my face, even if I refused to voice it. No, there was no real reason to believe that she was alive. But that didn’t mean I was just going to give up and accept that my mom was gone.

  “I shouldn't have come.”

  “Yes, you should. You’re in danger. If you walk away now, I can’t promise we’ll be able to protect you.”

  The sounds of the fair throbbed like a beating, demented drum, refusing to let me think properly. The smells were all too much, too saccharine sweet, too sour, too overwhelming. I sucked in a deep lungful of air, trying to move past the panic. “This is ridiculous. Who exactly do you think I need protecting from? I’m an eighteen-year-old girl, for crying out loud. Who would possibly want to harm me?”

  Agatha scanned the area with worried eyes; she grabbed hold of my hand again and pulled me further into the walkway. The shadows enveloped us, concealing us in a cloak of shadow.

  “The same person who killed Moira. The same person who will kill me and Daniel and everyone else we know, given the chance.” Agatha stopped searching the crowds for a moment and fixed me in her gaze, her expression earnest and pleading. She took a deep breath.

  “Your father, Farley. Your dad.”