MRS. LAMBERT CAME QUICKLY to pick up Poco that cold afternoon. She was at the door not five minutes after Miss Bone had called, much to Georgina’s surprise.
“My mother would have taken an hour at least,” she whispered to Walter. “Thirty minutes if I’d been run over by a truck.”
“Don’t say that,” hissed Walter. “You never know who’s listening!”
“I suppose it comes from being the only child left at home,” Georgina went on in longing tones. They both watched as Mrs. Lambert smoothed the hair off her daughter’s forehead and bent to give her a kiss.
“Not necessarily,” Walter said. “My grandmother never comes for me. She’s so old they took her driver’s license away. I have to call a taxi.”
“A taxi!” Georgina gazed at him with admiration. Lately she’d found herself beginning to like this nervous, wiry person.
Poco had recovered by now and was sitting upon Miss Bone’s couch with a blanket around her shoulders. She looked pale but otherwise herself again.
“You know,” said Mrs. Lambert, squeezing onto the couch beside her, “maybe it was a good thing to get you out of the house for a while. From what I can see, your rash has disappeared!”
“It has?” Poco examined herself. “Well … so it has.”
“How does your head feel? Still spinning a bit?”
Poco cocked her head and squinted across the room. “It’s better,” she admitted, then frowned as if she wished it weren’t.
“Aha!” Miss Bone exclaimed. “That’s my special chamomile tea at work. Look, she’s drunk nearly the whole cup. Chamomile seems to fix almost anything.”
“Chamomile tea?” Poco’s mother beamed. “My grandmother used to make that for me when I was sick.”
“Oh, it’s a grandmother’s remedy, all right,” Miss Bone agreed. “One of those things considered strange in this day and age for no other reason than that it’s been around so long.” She winked at Poco. “Look at this child! She already appears well enough to walk by herself to the car.”
“Of course I can walk!” Poco said crossly. She threw off the blanket, stood up, and began to put on her coat.
Walter and Georgina put on their coats, too. Mrs. Lambert had offered to drop them off at their houses on her way home. Then they turned and smiled at Miss Bone and apologized again for what they had believed. (But Georgina saw Poco scowl.) Miss Bone invited them to return soon, when she would have better supplies on hand, including Scottish scones and shortbread “and other recipes of mine from the dark ages,” she joked. “Your grandmother will know them, Walter. She was quite a cook in her day.”
“She was?”
“Casseroles were her specialty. I remember that she had the biggest casserole dish in town and used to cook for fifty or more for our church suppers. In fact, that’s how you first—” She stopped and put her hand over her mouth.
“How I first what?” Walter demanded. Here was something else he had never heard before. “Did you know my parents?” he asked her suspiciously. Miss Bone shook her head.
“Leave the past to the past,” she advised him, and changed the subject. “Is everyone ready to go? I’ll show you downstairs. Watch your step, my dears. Farewell! See you soon! But … where is Poco?”
They all looked around. She seemed to have stayed behind in Miss Bone’s apartment.
“I’ll get her!” cried Walter. He ran back up and found her in a corner of the kitchen. She was staring at a wooden peg, upon which hung a large gray fur hat.
“Poco, it isn’t what you think!”
“Why are you so sure?” Poco pushed his hand off her arm.
“Because I am. Miss Bone is just old and different from other people. When you get to know her, you can see she’s not a witch. Come on.”
“You go ahead,” Poco said. She waited until he was all the way downstairs again before walking down herself and getting into the front seat of her mother’s car.
So the extraordinary afternoon came to an end. Walter and Georgina climbed into the car also. They sat together in the backseat gazing thoughtfully out the windows. The facts of Miss Bone had been so whirled and changed before their eyes that they were still not entirely sure what had happened. They had the oddest feeling that they’d been under some enchantment but were now woken up to the real world again.
“Everything looks so different!” Georgina exclaimed. Her eyes had never been so sharp. Angela’s yard was as lovely as a painting. She saw a squirrel sprint up a tree.
“And so bright,” Walter added. “I feel as if I’ve been trapped in a cave and have finally been allowed to crawl out in the sun. Do you think some spirit put a spell on us and all this time we’ve been in its power?”
“Your horrible Ouija eye—that’s what started everything,” Georgina replied. “I’d get rid of it, if I were you. Its magic is too strong; it changes who you are. Poco, are you all right?”
In front of her, Poco had slumped down in the front seat. Only the topmost hairs of her head showed above it. When they leaned forward to investigate, Walter and Georgina discovered that her eyes were closed. There was nothing wrong, though. She had only fallen asleep.
The week following the investigators’ daring visit to Miss Bone’s apartment was so wild and woolly with the coming holidays that there was no time to think of what had happened. At school, it was the week before winter vacation, which meant pageants and singing programs, costumes and decorations, and strange things served for lunch that the kitchen crew invented.
“Green french fries?” Georgina muttered, gazing in amazement at her tray in the lunchroom.
Walter sat down across from her with his paper bag. “What is that fuzzy thing sitting on top of your hamburger?” he asked.
“A Santa Claus hat. All the hamburgers have them today,” Georgina said, then sighed. “Too bad Poco’s missing this,” she added, for Poco still had not returned to school. “I heard she had to give up her solo in the music program. She was going to sing ‘White Christmas,’ but Mrs. Henderson turned it over to Julia Francis instead.”
“Julia Francis! That screecher? Poco will be furious.”
“She already is furious. But not about that. She’s furious at us because she thinks we double-crossed her.”
Walter slumped in his chair. “I know. She won’t talk to me on the phone. When she hears my voice, she hangs up. Why doesn’t she get well and come back to school?”
“Because she is Poco and thinks she’s right,” Georgina said. “And because she’s right, she refuses to get well because if she got well it would prove she was wrong. She still believes that Miss Bone has put a hex on her and is keeping Juliette prisoner.”
“Poor old Miss Bone! It’s so unfair. What’s wrong with Poco? I always thought she was a reasonable type of person.”
“No one is a reasonable type of person. Not one person on this planet,” Georgina replied with a flick of her fork. “The older you get, the more you see that. The trouble with Poco is she can’t face up to Juliette being dead, so she’s decided to believe in spells. You should understand, Walter. It’s the same with your spirits.”
“What do you mean!” he protested. “My spirits are real!”
“Hah!” said Georgina with such a piercing glance that he looked away. Luckily her mind was not really on him, though. “Let’s walk over and see Poco this afternoon,” she said. “We should try to talk to her.”
“She won’t want to see us.”
“Let’s go, anyway. She has to stop pretending sometime that Juliette is coming back. Otherwise, she’ll just get crazier and crazier.”
For some reason, this remark seemed to unsettle Walter even more than the one before. He pulled his cap down over his eyes and refused to say another word during all the rest of lunch.
At first when they knocked on the Lamberts’ front door, everyone seemed to be out. Only after repeated pounding and ringing, and some yelling on the part of Georgina, did a small movement in a second-floor window catch their eyes. The curtains inside were parted. A face gazed out. A few seconds later soft footsteps could be heard coming down the stairs. The door was pulled open by …
“Poco!” Georgina cried. “How great that you’re up. We know you don’t want to see us, but here we are so maybe we could come in anyway?”
Georgina placed a determined foot over the threshold. Behind her stood Walter, slouched down and shuffling.
Poco stared at them. She was wearing a pretty rose-colored nightgown. Her expression wasn’t angry. It was blank.
“So, anyway,” Georgina went on, “we’ve been having the most amazing things for lunch at school. We thought you’d like to hear. If we could just come in. Aren’t you cold standing in the door like this?”
Poco continued to stare at them. Georgina felt unnerved. Had something already gone wrong in Poco’s head? She looked odd. Georgina put her other foot through the door and more or less forced her way in. Walter followed with a hop and a scuttle.
“So, anyway!” roared Georgina, who tended to speak more loudly the more nervous she was. “How’s everything? Is your mom at work? Are you getting better?”
Poco closed the door behind them. She turned around and gave them the sweetest smile. When Georgina opened her mouth to roar again, she raised a finger to her lips, over the smile, and beckoned.
“Come upstairs, please,” she whispered. “An amazing thing has happened.”
“An amazing thing?” Georgina bellowed.
“Ssh!”
They followed Poco up the stairs, down the hall, into her bedroom. There on the foot of her bed lay Miss Bone’s beautiful gray fur hat in a tremendous mound.
Georgina jumped. “Good grief!”
Walter backed away.
Poco positively beamed. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she asked. “Just where she always used to sleep.”
Georgina looked at her friend in horror. “Oh, Poco,” she began, and would have thrown her arms around the little figure and put her to bed at once, a person as sick in the head as that. But suddenly something impossible occurred. The fur hat twitched. One furry edge broke free of the mound and rose up in the air like a wisp of smoke.
Then, as Georgina and Walter watched, the hat began to unfold. A pair of ears developed in its middle; a pink nose appeared. Two blue eyes blinked open amid the fur. A long paw stretched out in a leisurely way, and the whole hat turned into an enormous yawning cat.
Georgina would have screamed if she could, but no sound came out. Walter fell into the chair across the room that was provided for visitors.
“It’s a miracle, isn’t it?” Poco asked them. “Juliette came back this morning. She just scratched at the door, and we let her in.”