We are not girl detectives. We’re not plucky like that. We can’t hide. Maybe this would be true anyway—there are three of us—but there’s also Mirabel’s inability to walk, Monday’s inability to lie, my inability to go places without them. The lack of places to go. Under our folded clothes, our dresser drawers are all lined with Nancy Drews—Monday likes to keep them there because their spines are yellow—but Nancy’s got skills, resources, and horizons we can only dream of. Suffice it to say, some kind of teen-spies thing where we get wigs and fake mustaches and sit outside the library pretending to read a newspaper (Petra would say “surreptitiously”) is not an option.
Last night, in response to our mother’s mania, Mirabel suggested a fact-finding mission, but it’s not even fact finding. More like information gathering. Situation determining. It doesn’t make sense to think we’ll find the elusive, conclusive proof Mama and Russell have been searching for for entire lifetimes—our entire lifetimes—simply by befriending River Templeton. If her lawyer can’t, what chance do her teenage daughters have? So let’s just say we’re getting there first. Not before anyone else in town—no one will care as much as my mother, and everyone knows it. Getting to the Templetons before the Templetons get to us.
It’s overcast, which makes it seem dark still, dawning, and drizzling hard, almost raining, so it feels closer to floating, or maybe sinking, than riding bikes. Monday and I fly down Baker, the hill steeper than it is on foot and slippery with wet, just the hint of fall in our noses. The wind and rain tease our hair. Snaggled grass whips our legs. Our tires throw up gravel and pebbles like popcorn. We close our eyes for a moment, two, and I could not stop now if I wanted to. If I had to.
And then—like a sign spontaneously generated by flying too fast downhill—the road curves up again past the cemetery. It’s tragic but apt that this is the one place in Bourne that’s as it should be. It has soft, deep-green grass and meandery paths between sprawling trees. There are all these old, weathered gravestones because, hard as it is to remember, Bourne’s citizens died even before Belsum came to town. It’s hilly, and at the crest of a ridge are the showy monuments: giant angels, giant crosses, tombs that look like houses that would be cramped to live in but are probably plenty roomy if you’re dead, the same few family names over and over—Grove, Alcott, Anderson—town founders, our ancestors, our history. We used to ride by fast so we could hold our breath as we crossed, but now Monday slows as we pass, and I see her eyes seek and find our father’s grave.
This is the part of Bourne’s cemetery that is not as it should be. They had to dig it too fast without making any kind of plan. Mrs. Shriver says that when demand is greater than supply, it makes the economy stronger, but in our cemetery, it just made things overcrowded and chaotic. Maybe that whole supply-demand thing only applies to the living. And it’s sad, which makes sense for a graveyard, but ours is sadder than most because the years on either side of the hyphens are too close together. Bourne was not prepared for all our sudden dead. Maybe no town ever is, though.
Our dad lucked out. He is under a giant oak tree. Some of the trees in Bourne go straight to brown in the fall now, but his still blushes as if embarrassed. It’s already pinking a little as we go by. Monday closes her eyes too long, and I know, I know she doesn’t like to be touched, but I’m worried she’ll crash. I reach out and tap her arm as lightly as I can, but she still snatches it away from me like I burned her.
Her eyes snap open. “Why can it not be yellow?”
“What?”
“His tree. Many trees turn yellow in the fall. His turns red. It is not fair.”
“No,” I agree, “it is not fair.”
We continue down the hill, brake into the curve on Main, stand to pedal hard over the slight slope by the Do Not Shop, wobble off the end of the pavement and through the gravel, climb up across the bridge and over the ravine and pull, breathless and sticky-damp from drizzle and sweat, into the empty parking lot of the library.
Well, almost empty.
The moving vans are gone, but there are two cars. One is a shiny, black BMW, new, immense, almost uncomfortable to look at. (Petra would say “carnal,” “corporeal,” “lascivious,” “lubricious”—it’s weird how many vocabulary words there are to describe kind of gross and inappropriate cars.) The other is the same, only gray. Cars in Bourne are mostly not the shiny luxury variety. More like dented, rusted, ancient pickups or sad sedans with doors of different colors. Or tricked-out, million-year-old wheelchair vans.
Heaped at the far end of the lot are a dozen of those squat little library stools, some of them tipped over, like maybe they were bowled out the front door, their casters spinning uselessly up at the sky.
“Motherfuckers,” Monday curses.
Monday never curses. Which makes me think we can go home now. That word coming out of that mouth says it all really. My mother will be disappointed when we return without a single shred of new evidence, our holsters empty of smoking guns, but my mother is used to being disappointed. It was a dumb plan anyway. I’d maybe buy that River’s just a kid and can’t keep a secret. It’s that he has any confidences to betray that’s hard to believe. When you’re obsessed with something, as my mother is, it’s hard to remember that everyone else isn’t obsessed with it too, but I think about how healthy and whole and normal River seemed—oblivious, ignorant—and I’m certain we already know all we’re going to. We can leave now. But before I can explain this logic to Monday, the front door opens.
River Templeton stands in the doorway with an older version of himself. His father. Must be. My in-breath is quick and loud, and Monday’s head whips around from them to me again.
“Why did you gasp, One?”
“He looks just like his father,” I whisper, “who looks just like—”
“Why are you whispering?” Monday interrupts. “They are too far away to hear.”
Our river has washed away more even than we think. More even than our lives and livelihoods. It’s not just that we are pale, whittled down, water worn, corroded. Our actual DNA is weaker than theirs. Monday and I barely look related. Triplets are rarely identical, but the three of us don’t really even look alike or all that much like Nora either. River is a copy of his father who’s a copy of his. It’s like our genes are not just infirm but mutated, like we’ve sloughed off our essential natures. They’re shiny and strong and cloning themselves. We’re eroding toward gone.
Shiny Nathan Templeton claps his son’s shoulder and then gives him a little shove, and River stumbles out the door in our direction, slow and sheepish, like a cranky toddler.
“He is coming, One!” Monday shrieks, drops her bike, and tries to hide behind me. She is five inches taller than I am.
He stops a foot away from us. He looks more normal than he did at school—he’s got on a T-shirt and shorts and mussy Saturday-morning hair, but he still has that glow. It might, like Pooh said, be a lifetime of wealth, clean water, high (and met) expectations. Or it might be more a shimmer than a glow, like when it’s hot and it looks like there’s water pooling on the asphalt up ahead, but when you actually get there it’s flat and dry and empty.
He’s also carrying a top hat. And a wand. He’s bright red, trying to hide the wand by shoving it into his back pocket, and having about as much luck—for about the same reason—as Monday.
If he were my friend or even my sort-of friend, I’d be embarrassed for him since he was clearly in the middle of something private when his father pushed him out the door like a two-year-old. But since his family’s basically my family’s sworn enemy, I’m thinking it’s okay to laugh at him.
What Monday’s thinking (and therefore saying) is “There are no dance classes in Bourne,” her first words to him since they met on his way out of the boys’ bathroom at school. “There used to be Miss Molly’s when we were little, but she died and that was only ballet.”
He has no idea what she’s talking about. Even I have no idea what she’s talking about.
“So you better change,” she peeks out from behind me to add.
“Change?” He has a funny look on his face. Is he confused or contemptuous? (“Supercilious,” Petra would say.) I admit Monday’s not making sense, and he’s probably used to people making sense. Still. He came over to talk to us, even if he didn’t want to. We’re on his lawn, yes, but it wasn’t his until this week.
“Out of your dance clothes,” Monday explains.
He looks down at his ratty T-shirt, up at me for help, back to Monday. “These aren’t dance clothes.”
“The top hat.” She waves at it, her arm emerging over my shoulder alongside my ear. “The tiny dance cane.”
“Oh.” He blushes again. “It’s not a tiny cane. It’s a wand. I was”—it seems like he won’t finish that sentence but then concludes it’s too late anyway—“practicing magic.”
“You are magic?” Full of wonder.
“No,” he says at once. Then, “Well, you know.”
“No.” She does not. But she’s stepped out from behind me to get a better look at him.
“I’m just practicing. Messing around. An amateur magician or whatever.”
“A wizard apprentice?” Monday’s eyes are open as prairies, splitting the difference between impressed and afraid.
“No, just for fun.” He can’t decide if she’s making fun of him or not. “Or like for little kids’ birthday parties maybe.”
“Is that why your father made you come here?” This is the first on-point question she’s asked yet.
“What? No.” But he answers a different question, the one he thinks she’s asking rather than the one I wish she were. What she actually means is anyone’s guess. “He saw you ride up and thought the well-bred thing to do was come say hello. Dad’s big on well-bred.”
“He wants you to use your dark arts against us.” She scuttles behind me again. I can feel her trying to keep it together. I can also feel little flecks of spit flying out of her mouth onto the top of my head.
He assumes she’s joking, starts laughing, sees he’s the only one, trails off. We have run out of things to talk about already, and I’m glad because I’m ready to leave now. Past ready. Creeping toward desperate.
But then the library front door opens slowly—it’s still wired for wheelchair access to come ajar, ghostly, at the press of a giant square button—and we see Nathan again, standing in the doorway, smiling. In fact, his whole body is smiling. He’s wearing new-looking, tech-flaunting hiking boots, but you can tell that if you could see his toes, they’d be smiling too.
“Guests! Welcome!” He waves from the doorway for us to come in like when the lifeguards hear thunder at the pool, and then he turns and goes back inside, that confident we’ll follow, as the door closes slowly behind him.
I know that talking to Nathan Templeton is my best shot at finding out something my mother could use, but I have exactly no desire to do so. I feel many things, but one of them, embarrassingly, undeniably, is frightened.
River rolls his eyes. Then he reaches into his back pocket and retrieves his wand, waves it over us, makes his voice deep and cavernous. “The Raging River commands you to come inside.”
“The raging river?” says Monday.
“You know”—his voice back to normal—“like the Great Houdini. Or the Powerful Oz. Get it? Because a powerful river is raging, but raging also means—”
“Thanks for the offer but…” I interrupt then trail off with a tone and facial expression which I hope finish the sentence for me. Thanks, but you can’t command me to do anything, and I would rather drink actual tap water than spend my Saturday morning with your family.
But Monday is bouncing on the balls of her feet and doing a little dance with her fingers because, be it from the devil incarnate, or at least his grandson, an invitation to get back into her beloved library is not one she is going to refuse.