October
Mom sent me out looking for Deirdre once, a few weeks ago now. I yanked my coat on and stomped outside, scowling. Like I’d even know where to look. The leaves were turning, and the sullen maze of the trees was ablaze in red and gold.
She didn’t answer me when I yelled, predictably enough. I crunched through the browning grass through the garden, to the edge of the woods. Past the twiggy remains of the rosebushes Mom tried to plant. They’d drooped and wilted within days. It was like the ground had rejected them. I heard somewhere that when they transplant an organ, sometimes the body attacks it, defends itself as if it’s being invaded.
I teetered down along the tree roots into the shallows of the swamp, branches snagging at my clothes and hair. I pulled my sleeve loose from a clinging branch, and Deirdre’s words to William popped into my mind, as clearly as if she’d spoken them beside me. You’re not welcome here.
I shivered, folded my arms. The afternoon was tilting into evening, golden light slicing through the leaves. Crows cawed in the treetops, wheeling and swirling in the air, black rags against the rosy clouds.
I made a full circuit of the yard, hopping awkwardly over the ragged ditch where the creek had sunk to a sluggish brown trickle, pushed through the tall dead grass to the castle, threaded my way around the back. Through the leaning cedar doorway, into the chilly shade of the clearing.
“Deirdre?” I shouted, turning around and around. “Deirdre, you have to come home!”
Stepping backward, I nudged something with my foot, something that rattled away with a hollow sound.
A bone, broken and cracked. Worn to a silver gray, almost like driftwood. It was one in a pile. Carefully stacked, thigh-high.
I shied away from them. There was no telling what animals they belonged to. Here the thin comb of a rib cage, there a long leg bone topped with a blackened knob. I thought I might have seen an eye socket staring out at me—or maybe the hollow of a pelvis—but I wasn’t looking any closer to find out. I just about tripped over the row of stones in my haste to get away from them, hurried back out into the fading daylight.
It was obviously Deirdre who’d put them there. Who else? The stone circles were Deirdre all over. The bones, though—that was a whole new level of creepy, even for her. The thought of what Mom would say about it settled over me, cold and sickening.
Whatever. That wasn’t my problem. I was done. I’d done my job. It would be dark soon, anyway. Gray twilight pooled under the eaves of the forest, in the hollows and the depths, slowly rising.
“Mom,” I yelled, slamming into the house and kicking off my boots, “Mom, I can’t—”
“Can’t what?” Deirdre asked coolly, passing the stairs on her way to the kitchen.
“There you are,” I sighed, and scowled at her. “Mom sent me out looking for you.”
“Well, I’ve been home for, like, ten minutes,” she shot back, tossing her hair.
“You could have at least answered me,” I snapped. “I know you heard me calling.”
“Sorry,” she said, clearly not sorry.
“Yeah, well, I went stomping all over the yard looking for you.” I glared at her pointedly. “Like behind the castle? In the trees there?”
Her face went blank and still, though her eyes didn’t leave my face. I shrugged off the memory of her staring at me in the dark, unblinking.
“Yeah.” The light from the kitchen made her half a silhouette, unreadable. “And?”
It was a challenge. A dare. Whatever she was trying to drag me into—again—I refused. I pushed past her. Our shoulders clashed, each of us refusing to cede the space.
* * *
Then came the night Mog didn’t come home.
It was the first time Deirdre knocked on the door of my new room, asking if I’d seen her. But none of us had. There had been no squeaking paws at the balcony doors—or at my new window. We called her from the balcony, over and over again; we pulled out a bag of her favorite treats to rattle enticingly. But no lithe shadow came bounding out of the dark to greet us; we stood side by side at the rail, listening, but the twinkling sound of the bell on her collar never came.
The sound of the back door closing pulled me from dreams of our old street, dark and icy, the lights of the houses shining down from higher hills than I remembered, gleaming secretively between trembling evergreen boughs. I lay in bed, muddled and dizzy for a moment, trying to figure out if the sound had been part of my dream somehow. But then a shadow slipped across the pale wash of the neighbor’s far-off porch light, a thin fleeting silhouette.
I started upright, but it was only Deirdre. The ghost of her voice carried through the glass, crying out.
I threw my sweater on and hurried upstairs, through the garage, to lean out the back door. The light from the garage spilled out into the yard, catching Deirdre standing under the apple tree, facing into the woods. Her long nightshirt flapped around her bare legs, a pale flag.
“Deirdre?” I called.
“Mog,” she wailed. “Mog! Here, kitty! Here, kitty, kitty!”
I hugged my sweater close and hurried out toward her.
“Deirdre! Deir, come inside!”
I tried to put an arm around her bare shoulders. Her skin was icy under my hand. But she pulled away, sniffled, went back to calling for the cat.
“Deirdre, come inside,” I repeated helplessly. “You’re going to freeze out here. She’ll come back eventually.”
“You don’t understand,” Deirdre said tearfully. “There are things out there. We have to find her before they do!”
“Mog has cattitude,” I tried to reassure her, but her panic pinched my heart. “She’s always made it back before.”
“You don’t understand.” She stormed away from me, her arms folded over her chest. “This is my fault. I have to find her. I should never have let her out—”
When I caught up to her again, grabbed her arm, she started to sob, sagging in place like a broken doll. I hugged her, holding her up, bewildered.
“Deirdre, that doesn’t even make any sense,” I protested. “Mog goes out all the time. She’s a cat. It’s not like you can give her a curfew.”
Deirdre buried her face in her hands.
“I wish we’d never come here,” she moaned. “I wish we’d never left. I’ll never see her again, never, never.”
“Oh, Deirdre, you don’t know that—”
But she just pushed away from me, ran back to the house, leaving me behind. Inside the garage, the door opened and closed with a bang.
I sighed, shivered, pulled my sweater close around my neck. Behind me, the leaves on the reaching branches fluttered and murmured speculatively. I turned to look up at their pale undersides flickering in the light from the garage. I stood there peering into the dark, every hair alert to the feeling of being watched. Evaluated.
“Go away,” I snapped, as much to hear my own voice as anything else, and I hurried back to the house, refusing to look over my shoulder. I pulled the garage door closed behind me with a bang and only then, let my breath out in a trembling rush, waiting for my jumping heartbeat to slow.
I was as bad as Deirdre. At least nobody had been around to see it.
* * *
The first few mornings after Mog disappeared, I came upstairs to find Deirdre asleep on the kitchen floor, waiting by the patio doors for the sound of paws on the glass, her head pillowed on a couch cushion. Mom woke her up while I retreated to the bathroom, cranking the water on to drown out the sound of her crying.
She spent more time than ever outside after that. Most days, she was gone when I got home, her backpack and sneakers left forgotten in a heap inside the front door. She came back just when it was getting dark, never quite late enough for Mom to worry, sticks tangled in her hair, her face smudged with dirt. Mom made a big deal over that, hauling Deirdre into the bathroom, growling all the while about her deadlines.
“You’re thirteen, Deirdre, for heaven’s sake,” she snapped, jerking the brush through a snarl in Deirdre’s hair. “I shouldn’t have to do this! I don’t have time!”
Deirdre just let her head yank back, expressionless, and said nothing. She seemed calm, at least. Preoccupied.
“Are you working on another kingdom?” I asked her at dinner that night, feeling like I should ask. She looked at me suspiciously.
“Kind of,” she muttered, but didn’t elaborate. I focused on cutting my chicken into little pieces to hide my relief and guilt. I didn’t ask for details.
The night she disappeared, before Mom came barging through my door, I’d been dreaming about the valley, the path an asphalt ribbon winding down the bottom of the ravine toward the river. I couldn’t do it again. I’d changed my mind. I had to turn back before I reached the dry streambed, the tumbled rocks leading into green shadow between the trees. But the tangled trees of the swamp had closed over the path behind me like gathering clouds.
“Hurry,” Deirdre demanded, crouching down at the crest of the castle to reach out to me, beckoning for me to take her hand. “I’m waiting.”