I WOKE UP, TIPTOED OVER Jack and Oli, and snuck into the bathroom to leave another message on the hotline.
“Hi, this is Baylor Bosco again. I have new information. If someone could please call me back, I’d appreciate it.” I left my number again and hung up.
“Smooth,” Kristina said. “I like the air of mystery around the message.”
“I don’t want to give the news or Carla Clunders any ammunition.”
“That . . . or you don’t want the Baylievers to have any new fodder to comment on.”
I blushed. “That didn’t cross my mind at all.”
“Sure it didn’t,” she said.
“Anyway,” I said, “I don’t know what to do. How can I help them?”
She shook her head. “I’m not sure you can.”
“Then why am I seeing them? There’s got to be something I can do.”
She didn’t say anything, and I got the feeling again that she knew something she wasn’t telling me. I tilted my head and narrowed my eyes. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” she said quickly.
“Can’t you go ask your spirit guides or something?”
She smiled meekly. “Do you really think I haven’t discussed this thoroughly with them?”
“Well? What did they say?”
“They wouldn’t tell me anything useful,” she said. “I’m just as in the dark as you are.”
“You’re my connection to the other side, Kristina,” I said, feeling irritated. “If you can’t tell me anything useful, then . . .”
“Then what?” she said sharply. “What’s the point of my entire existence? Thanks a lot, Baylor.”
“That’s not what I was going to say.”
“Then what were you going to say? Finish that sentence.”
“If you can’t tell me anything useful, then . . . I don’t know . . . then we’re not going to be able to help Archie and Helena.”
She shook her head. “Well, in that case, maybe you should focus more on your side of things.”
Maybe she was right. I had some resources on my side; perhaps it was time to use them.
Since I was up so early, I texted my friends to figure out plans for the day. To my surprise, they were up too. We decided to meet downtown at two o’clock (after scarfing down leftover turkey sandwiches at home, of course).
* * *
The morning passed by slowly. The adults weren’t functioning at 100 percent, a consequence of last night’s champagne and wine. Everyone grazed on leftovers and camped out in front of the TV for most of the morning.
Once it was nearly one o’clock, I announced that I was meeting up with friends downtown in case anyone wanted to join.
“Well, that sounds fun,” Uncle Glenn said. “We should all go.” To my astonishment, everyone nodded in agreement, and they got up to get ready. Gillie was the lone holdout, and she sat on the couch, staring gloomily at the TV.
“Not coming?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Whatever.”
“All righty then,” I said, getting up just to move away from her.
“You ruined my life, you know,” she said.
I turned slowly to face her. “Excuse me?”
“It’s all your fault. If you weren’t such a freak, I wouldn’t be grounded in the first place.”
I had felt sorry for her up until five seconds ago. Now I was just furious.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve trying to blame any of this on me,” I said. “You’re the one who recorded me in the first place.”
She glared at me. “Grandpa Horty was right about you. You should never have been born.”
I didn’t know what to say, but before I could think of anything, Kristina tuned me in to show me her aura. Auras are the outward reflections of people’s souls, and Gillie’s was a deep blood red. She was furious.
“Just walk away, Baylor,” Kristina said. “It’s her anger talking. Nothing positive will come of this.”
I glared back at Gillie for another second, but walked away. Kristina was right—it wasn’t worth engaging her. I was still mad, though. How dare she use Horty’s words as a weapon against me? Maybe Uncle Glenn was right—maybe she did need a good exorcism.
We loaded into the cars and headed downtown. Aiden and J were already in the square; Bobby was late because he had eaten too much turkey and was moving slow. I waved to them as we circled around to find a spot on one of the side streets.
“What’s up, guys?” I said as my family swarmed around them a few minutes later. I introduced them to my uncle and cousins, and everyone said hello except Gillie, who sneered unpleasantly the entire time.
“Where shall we go first?” Uncle Glenn asked.
“I need to do some, uh, research for a bit, but I’ll meet up with you guys later.”
“Research?” Mom asked. I couldn’t see her eyes behind her dark sunglasses, but I knew she’d be looking at me suspiciously. “Lead the way, Baylor. You’re not going anywhere without us.”
My mouth dropped open while Kristina laughed loudly. “This should be fun.”
“You guys will think it’s boring,” I said. “Don’t worry about me.”
“Baylor, sometimes I think you forget you’re only thirteen,” Mom said. “We’re sticking together. Lead the way.”
I sighed. “Fine.” I spun around and marched in the direction of Madame Nadirah’s Mystic Shoppe.
The bell rang when I opened the door, and Madame Nadirah appeared from the back room and said, in her faux breathy voice, “Welcome to Madame Nadirah’s Mystic Shoppe!” Then she noticed it was me and chuckled. “Baylor Bosco, my favorite customer.” She swept me into a hug as my mom lifted her sunglasses and surveyed the scene in surprise.
“You two know each other?”
“Of course!” Madame Nadirah said, laughing. “I helped Baylor cross into another dimension a few weeks ago to find his missing sister.” My eyebrows shot up nearly as fast as my mom’s.
“Anyway,” I said sharply, glaring at Madame Nadirah, “no need to bring up the past, it’s all behind us, right? Onward!”
“Onward, indeed,” she said, glancing at the crowd that had followed in behind me. “Is this your family?”
“And two friends,” I said, motioning to J and Aiden, who were off admiring the huge display of candles, crystals, dream catchers, and essential oils.
“Oh my,” she said hoarsely, seized by Gillie’s presence. “Girl, you are hurtin’!” She grabbed a small bottle of sage essential oil from the counter, rubbed some into her palms, and then placed her hands over Gillie’s temples.
Gillie stood there in shock and said, “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Breathe deeply, my girl,” she said, inhaling and exhaling dramatically. “Breathe deeply. Let that anger out.”
Gillie, to my surprise, listened to her instructions, and her shoulders slumped.
“Feel better?” Madame Nadirah asked.
“A little,” Gillie said faintly.
“Mmhmm, yep, you do,” she said. Then she turned to me. “You have a question for me.”
It wasn’t a question; she could sense I was there for a reason. Madame Nadirah wasn’t a medium like me, but she was connected to the other side as an empath—her intuitive energy was as keen as a search dog’s nose. And that’s why I was here. I needed her help to figure out how I could save Archie and Helena.
I rushed forward, grabbed her arm, and led her away from where my mom could hear us. “I only have a minute before my mom is going to try to eavesdrop, and honestly, it might be less than a minute, so listen carefully. You know those two Florida kids who’ve gone missing? They’ve been all over the news? I somehow can talk to them while I’m dreaming. I have no idea how.”
“Does that mean they’re dead?” asked Madame Nadirah.
“I don’t think so. It’s weird. I think it has something to do with being lost in the ocean.”
“What does that have anything to do with it?”
“It’s too long to explain now. I’m trying to figure out a way to help them, but I don’t know how. There’s no way for me to pinpoint their exact location; all I can do is talk to them.”
“So you’re looking for a way to track them?”
“I guess.”
“Some kind of metaphysical beacon,” she said quietly, looking around her shop.
“A what?”
“If you’re meeting them through dreams, the object needs to exist in multiple realms so that you can access it in both the conscious and unconscious states.”
“Right,” I said. She may as well have been speaking Chinese. “So whaddaya got?”
She shut her eyes and tapped her foot for a few seconds. “I have an idea, but I’m not sure whether it’ll work.”
“That’s still better than the nothing I’m working with right now.”
She nodded. “Well, it’s not going to be easy for you, Baylor.”
“Why?”
“You’ll need to leave a piece of your soul with them.”
“I knew it,” Kristina said sotto voce.
Kristina seemed far too calm. I wasn’t expecting Madame Nadirah to say that, and a horrible sense of panic spread through me.
“What? My soul ? I’m not messing with my soul! Besides, wouldn’t I have to kill someone else to break a piece of it off?”
“This isn’t some He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named black magic, Baylor,” she said, raising her hand fast. I thought for a second she was going to slap me upside the head, but instead she imitated holding a wand and casting a spell. “What, you believe everything you read?”
“Well, I don’t know! It’s not like I’m in the habit of breaking off little pieces of my soul to use as some kind of otherworldly bread crumb trail.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” she said, her smile glinting with mischief.
“So what’s the proper way to do it?”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds, Baylor,” Kristina said calmly.
“Is your sister there?” Madame Nadirah said sharply, looking right at Kristina. Kristina looked startled.
“Can . . . can you see me?” Kristina asked, a note of excitement in her voice.
“Because I can feel her,” Madame Nadirah said. She lifted her left arm and sliced through Kristina. “I’ve had the chills for the last few seconds, but only on the left side of my body. And you keep looking right there.” She flourished her hand dramatically at Kristina.
“Yeah, Kristina’s there,” I said. “She just said breaking my soul up isn’t as bad as it sounds, though I’m going to have to disagree with that one.”
“People leave pieces of their soul lying around all the time,” Madame Nadirah said. “Almost always by accident too. They don’t know they’re doing it, but they can feel it.” She must have noticed how confused I looked because she sighed and shook her head fast, as if she were trying to shake the perfect example into place. “Ever love a place so much that you feel like you’re one with it?”
I immediately thought of my dad’s parents’ house down in Ohio. Grandpa Bosco had died years ago, but Grandma Nora still lived there. I’d had so many happy memories and occasions at that house—warm, pink-sky summer evenings running around the yard catching fireflies in glass mason jars, ice-cream parties with my cousins, endless sleepovers and movie nights with buckets of popcorn filled with M&M’s—that I could close my eyes and feel like I was there.
“There!” Madame Nadirah said excitedly. “Whatever you just thought of—you’ve left a piece of your soul there.”
“My grandparents’ house in Ohio?”
She nodded. “I’d bet my life savings, all ten bucks of it, that most people have left a piece of their soul at their grandparents’ house. I’m assuming you had a lot of happy childhood memories there?”
“A ton!” I said, still feeling warm and fuzzy at the thought of those memories. “But I’m not sure I’d put two kids lost at sea on the same scale as all the memories at my grandparents’ house. I don’t want a piece of my soul floating around in the ocean. Who knows what could snatch onto it?”
“Baylor, a piece of a soul isn’t going to tempt a demon,” Kristina chimed in. “It’d want the whole thing.”
“But still,” I said, thinking of my soul, even though I wasn’t entirely sure what it looked like. It tended to change shapes a lot in my head. Today I imagined it as a fiery white cage that surrounded my heart. “It’s my soul.”
“But it’s their lives at stake,” Kristina said, sounding more annoyed with every word. “You’re thinking about it too much. It’d be like thinking a fingernail clipping was worth a million bucks. It’s just not the case.”
“I don’t know what is going on between you two right now,” Madame Nadirah said, fanning herself, “but, oh, there is some friction here.”
I could see my mom watching us while pretending to look through a display of T-shirts. “Okay, quickly—how do I leave a piece behind?”
“Well, this part is why I said it wouldn’t be easy,” she said. “You need to forge a strong emotional connection to the place. You know you’ve done it when you can close your eyes and picture the place exactly as it is. That’s because you can glimpse it through your soul—a part of you really is there.”
“But . . .” I thought of the shiny capsized boat, and the vast ocean with its rolling water as far as the eye could see and the mind could imagine, and two stranded kids struggling to stay alive. “But I don’t think I can. It’s not exactly a place I want to remember, and I’m not really sure I can fake something like that.”
Madame Nadirah looked at me seriously. “You need to try real hard then, kid,” she said. “Otherwise, you better hope one of those planes spots them soon.”
By that point, Mom had inched her way over so close that I had no choice but to introduce her to Madame Nadirah. After they shook hands, my mom said, “So what were you saying earlier about other dimensions . . . ?”
I shot Madame Nadirah a look and shook my head, but before I could say anything, my phone started ringing. It was a Florida number.
“I’ve got to take this!” I said, running outside. After the door shut, I picked up and said, “Hello? This is Baylor Bosco.”
There was a brief silence, and then the voice on the other end said, in a thick accent, “And this is Helios Papadopoulos. I’m Helena’s father.”
Bingo.
“Thanks for calling me back, Mr. Papadopoulos.”
“This is not easy for me to do, young man,” he said, swallowing loudly. “But it’s been a week, and”—his voice trembled—“I’m desperate for anything that could help us find our kids.”
“They’re still alive, Mr. Papadopoulos. I’m trying to figure out a way to find them, but I know this much—they’re alive and they’re okay. They look like they’ve been sitting out in the sun for a long time with no food, but they’re in decent spirits at least.”
There was another long pause. “How am I supposed to believe you? Anyone could tell me something like this.”
“Helena mentioned it was your wife’s birthday last weekend.”
“Yes,” he said slowly, suspiciously. I heard an odd muffled noise on the line, too, but ignored it.
“She told me to tell you her present for your wife is in her nightstand, in the bottom drawer under some tank tops. It’s an elephant figurine made out of sea glass.”
I heard a screech and a crash on the line, and I pulled the phone away from my ear. “What was that?” I asked loudly. “Are you okay?”
“My apologies,” he said, his voice deep and shaky. “I have you on speakerphone, and my wife knocked over her chair in her hurry to get to Helena’s room.”
“Oh,” was all I could muster. I imagined my mom in Mrs. Papadopoulos’s shoes, desperately looking for any piece of me that might serve as a clue, or a memory. It was just a couple days ago that I’d seen her crying on the news alongside Archie’s mom, begging for anyone to help them.
A loud shriek pierced my eardrums from the phone, and I had to hold the phone away once more.
“It’s here,” a female voice cried out. “Just like he said. It was exactly where he said. It’s real.” She sobbed violently. “He’s real.”
I heard Mr. Papadopoulos swallow repeatedly, but I didn’t say anything. I wanted to let them process in silence.
“Baylor,” he said, “you must come help us. You’re the first person who’s been able to tell us . . . anything, actually. The police, the coast guard, they’ve all been looking, but this is the first solid evidence we have.”
“Honestly, I wouldn’t be a lot of help at the moment,” I said. “I’m trying to come up with a plan, but I have no way to find them.”
“Then you can relay messages for us. We can pay for your plane ticket, for your parents’ plane ticket. Heck, we have friends with seaplanes who have been aiding in the search. We could have one of them come fetch you.”
“Seriously, if I thought my presence would help, I’d already be down there,” I said. “But for now, it wouldn’t do anyone any good.”
“Baylor, this is Dina,” Mrs. Papadopoulos said loudly into the phone. Her accent was strong, and she had a deliberate way of speaking. “How did she look? How did my baby look? Is she okay?”
I hesitated. “She and Archie were joking with each other, but . . . they look really weak,” I said. I thought of that wave hitting the boat, and Archie saying he wasn’t sure he’d be able to crawl back up if he fell off. “I know it’s obvious, but we need to find them really, really soon.”
“Archie,” she said, a hint of anger in her voice. “I will never forgive him for this. He wasn’t supposed to take the boat out by himself. He betrayed his father’s trust.”
“He mentioned he made a mistake . . . ,” I said, trying to think of what else he said about it. But that was the first time I had seen them, and a giant wave slapped me back to Loved Ones’ Lane a second later.
“A mistake,” she scoffed. “Willful rule-breaking, more like it. This was no mistake. He knew he didn’t have permission, but he did it anyway, and he dragged Helena out to sea with him.”
“I’m really sorry this is all happening,” I said. “I hope knowing they’re alive and okay is helpful.”
There was a silence. “It’s been a week. How much longer can they go without food, without fresh water?”
“They had some water,” I said. “But it was running low.”
Another moment passed in silence, and I said, “I’ll call back with any news.” I almost hung up, but before I did, I had to say it. “And I know you’re mad at Archie, but if you could tell his family that I know he’s wearing his favorite red bathing suit with the flowers that his mom got on a cruise, that might comfort them, too.”
Yet another silence, but finally Mr. Papadopoulos said quietly, “We’ll tell them.”
I hung up and took a deep breath. That was horrible.
I walked back inside to see Aiden finishing up a purchase from Madame Nadirah. He stuffed a small bag into his pocket while J chatted merrily with her about the shop’s wide variety of candles.
“I can’t believe I’ve never been in here before! Your selection is so amazing and unique. This is going to make the perfect Christmas gift for my mom.”
“Ready to go, everyone?” I asked.
Gillie had curled up into a ball on a leather armchair in the corner of the shop, her expression as pleasant as a car crash. “Finally,” she muttered, untangling herself and heading for the door. “This place gives me the creeps. And I reek of sage.”
“You might want to reapply before you go,” Madame Nadirah called out as the door shut behind her. Then, quietly, she said, “Though I doubt even a long soak in a swimming pool of sage would do her any good.”