The sun was high in the sky by the time Tuesday and Baxterr reached the edge of the Peppermint Forest. They were hot and tired and footsore and hungry, and glad to leave behind the heat of the day and the open grassland for the fragrant shade of the forest. Tuesday would have loved nothing more than to flop down on the ground and rest for a few minutes, but Baxterr whined, his ears flattened. Suddenly the ground beneath their feet trembled and there was a distant rumble. Had it been a roll of thunder—or an earthquake? Tuesday waited, but there was nothing more.
Baxterr barked.
“It’s okay. We’ll be there in no time now,” she said to him. “If we go straight into the forest, then we’ll come to a stream. We follow it downstream until we find the Twining Bridge. We cross that and then follow the golden moss beds until we reach a line of tree ferns that looks rather like a front fence.”
Tuesday was showing off a little, but it was only to her dog, and she was sure that he didn’t mind. In the many hours she had spent studying the maps that were drawn on the inside covers of the hardback editions of all the Vivienne Small adventures, she had never imagined that it would be so useful to have those maps memorized.
Tuesday had never been in a forest before. At home there was City Park, which had plenty of trees, some of which were very big and very old, but it was still nothing like this. Here the trees clustered thickly together, their branches growing high overhead. The light in the forest was almost like twilight, but with a golden-green glow to it. And with every step, there was something new to wonder at—a new fern frond uncoiling, a strange leaf pattern, a flower in a shade of blue she’d never seen, the sparkle of a spider’s web across the path. There were moss beds growing tiny yellow and white flowers, and on the trunks of the trees were curling fungi with little frilled edges like the lace on a ball gown. At the bottom of the tree trunks were toadstools: some orange, some brown, and even some that were red with large white spots.
As it turned out, the stream was easy to find. But the Twining Bridge was quite difficult to cross because of all the branches that stuck out from it and the fact that the wet trunks that had grown together to make the bridge were as slippery as ice. The golden moss beds too were beautiful but spongy, and walking on them was like walking on damp feather pillows. By the time they reached a glade of towering tree ferns, growing in an orderly row, Tuesday was exhausted from the morning’s efforts. And she had noticed something unusual. It was too quiet in the forest. Since they had entered the trees, she had heard not a single birdcall. Yet she knew the Peppermint Forest rang with birdcalls. This silence made her cautious.
Tuesday knew they would find Vivienne’s tree beyond the ferns. Then she would somehow have to get Vivienne’s attention—if she was home—and have her throw down the rope ladder she used for visitors. Tuesday’s heart was beating fast from the excitement of soon meeting Vivienne Small, and from an increasingly uncomfortable feeling that things were not right.
She pushed her way between the tree ferns, and her breath caught in her throat. Bright sunshine was flooding into the forest, and the effect was as shocking as if someone had turned on the light in the middle of the night. The gentle gloom of the forest was shattered. Instead of a vast tree reaching so high you’d have to drop your head right back to see the branches soaring into the canopy, and a trunk so wide that you could take a whole minute to walk around it, there was only clear blue sky and the freshly sawed stump of a giant peppermint tree.
She and Baxterr gazed in shock at the massive trunk that had fallen, crushing everything in its path. She understood what Baxterr had been sensing all morning and the cause of the eerie silence that had settled on the forest. Tuesday held back tears. Together she and Baxterr scrambled up and made their way along the length of the fallen trunk, stepping over broken limbs and clearing away smaller branches, surveying the chaos of flattened trees and bushes caught in the fall. At last they came to what had been the upper branches of the tree, and there they discovered the wreckage of Vivienne’s house. The thatched roof, the oval windows, and the arched front door were all in pieces. The wooden ladders and curved veranda railings were familiar to Tuesday, as were the flowering creeper and woven bird feeders that hung from them. In among the splintered timbers were shards of smashed glass, broken crockery, and furniture.
“Vivienne!” Tuesday said. Her heart hammered inside her body again, this time in panic. “Vivienne! Baxterr, you don’t think she … that she might have been here when whoever did this? She might be under here, she might be crushed—Baxterr, we have to find her!”
Tuesday swung into action, pulling away broken branches and lifting shattered walls. Baxterr, his nose quivering, tried to catch a trace of Vivienne’s scent. Together they searched, and though they found pieces of Vivienne’s life—her leather shoes (very small), her spyglass (broken), and her Lucretian blowpipe (intact but without darts)—there was no sign of Vivienne.
When she was quite sure that Vivienne was not buried beneath the wreckage, Tuesday sat down with her head in her hands.
“Perhaps Vivienne wasn’t here when it happened,” she said to Baxterr. “Or maybe she’s been captured by … well, by whoever did this. And maybe Mom is with her. Maybe that’s what’s happened. Maybe they’ve been captured together. And there’s only one person who would do this kind of thing. Mothwood!”
Baxterr continued to forage in the fallen branches as if he were looking for something specific. At last, he looked up and barked excitedly. Tuesday leapt to her feet and dashed over to Baxterr. What he had found was not Vivienne Small. Instead, he was nosing at a glass bottle that was nestled—quite unbroken—under a splintered shelf. Inside the bottle was a miniature sailboat with a gleaming red hull and white sails the size of daisy petals.
“Oh, you good dog!” Tuesday said, as she gazed at the tiny boat in wonder. It was Vivienne Small’s boat, Vivacious.
“You know, Baxterr, if Vivienne Small and Mom have been captured by Mothwood, then they are almost certainly on the Silverfish. Perhaps that’s why I saw the Silverfish through the binoculars! Because that’s where we have to go! To the Silverfish. So, of course, we’re going to have to set sail too, aren’t we?”
“Ruff,” said Baxterr, tipping his head to one side and looking concerned.
“You’re right,” said Tuesday, peering into the bottle where the tiny vessel lay. “It is a bit small. What we need, doggo … what we need is…”
Tuesday searched about in the crushed leaves until she found a small object, which she held out triumphantly for Baxterr to see. It was a tiny glass marble. One side of it was silver, the other gold.