The Witch of Gideon!
There was no way in the world Thelma Jackson had talked to the Witch of Gideon! Well … maybe it was possible, but not likely. Sam had figured out the timing on Friday morning after Charlie brought in the picture of the three of them as first-graders on a field trip to the ghost town.
The old woman in the woods they’d encountered that day had said she’d been ten years old when the town vanished. That would have made her eighty-five years old when she rescued the three friends lost in the mist. And she’d be 110 years old now.
“I thought that’d get your attention!” Thelma said and smiled. “I didn’t actually talk to the Witch of Gideon — whose name was Lily Topple, by the way. I talked to her daughter, Rose. It was about fifteen years ago and Rose was in a nursing home in Carlisle. She was seventy-five at the time, and her mind was still sharp.”
As Sam listened, she felt a little like she was back in high school history class learning about the “shot heard ‘round the world” or the Civil War or the invention of the cotton gin. Sam had developed a lifelong love of history because Mrs. Jackson — Thelma, her name was Thelma — had a gift for bringing stuffy facts to life. Sam remembered the day she’d held the class spellbound with the story of how the richest men in America, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, had met in secret and joined their fortunes to silence the anti-trust crusade of New York Governor Teddy Roosevelt — by getting him nominated to the do-nothing job of vice president on the William McKinley ticket. “When McKinley was assassinated and Roosevelt became president … I bet it ruined their whole day,” Mrs. Jackson had said.
Sam smiled at the memory
“I actually did talk to the Witch of Gideon, the real Witch of Gideon,” Malachi said — which definitely got Thelma’s attention. “It was a pretty harrowing experience for a little boy.”
He paused then, just for a beat, and Sam knew where his mind had gone: not as harrowing as watching somebody shoot your father dead to keep him from killing you! Charlie was likely thinking about Toby Witherspoon, too. It was hard for Sam to pull her thoughts away from the pitiful little boy Malachi’d brought to her house last night. They’d said nothing about him to Thelma, of course. Why get her tangled up in that drama? They hadn’t wanted to drag Sarah Throckmorton into it, either, but they’d had to hide Toby somewhere and the old woman who looked like Tweety Bird’s grandmother was so good with children.
“And for little girls,” Charlie amended, and then they told Thelma about their adventure on a first-grade field trip. Thelma listened, asked a couple of questions but mostly just listened.
“It was hard to tell sometimes if the stories Rose told me were real or just what she wished had happened,” Thelma said. “Her mother, Lily, always came off as the hero in Rose’s descriptions, sort of Tarzan meets Rambo with a side order of the Terminator. Lily was only ten years old when Gideon vanished, and she survived, lived off the land, all by herself. There was a smoke house where the town had stored its meat, and that didn’t vanish. And she said there were fruit trees all around — which aren’t indigenous to the area, but maybe the Quakers planted them. I don’t think there are any there now. Berries — blackberries, blueberries and raspberry bushes. Mushrooms. There was food to be had … but still, I can’t imagine how a ten-year-old did it.”
“The witch — Lily Topple — told us that day that she’d run away because she got blamed when her little brother broke a pot,” Charlie said.
“That’s what Rose told me, too.”
Thelma said the old woman had been very articulate about what’d happened to her mother, said she’d heard the stories so many times it felt like the memories were her own.
“I asked if Lily was afraid that whatever had taken all the other people would come for her, too, and Rose said no. If she had been afraid of that, she’d have left.”
“Remember what she said?” Charlie said to Sam and Malachi. Then Charlie quoted the witch’s words, even managed the dialect reasonably well. “It lets me and mine be ‘cause we done right by it.”
“Done right by it … I wonder what that means,” Thelma said.
“Remember what else she said — that it had ‘marked us,’” Sam said.
“And she was right about that part!” Malachi said.
Then they told Thelma what they’d figured out about why the Jabberwock had imprisoned the county — to capture the three of them. Thelma was surprised, but not disbelieving.
“Given what we know, I guess that makes sense,” Thelma mused, “as much sense as any of this makes. There’s a recurring theme here — little kids who run away.”
“Little kids.” Charlie said the words thoughtfully. “The words on my mother’s blackboard — ‘stay and play with me.’ Almost like a little kid …”
“The witch gave each of us a rock so we wouldn’t forget her warning,” Sam said and held hers up for Thelma to see. She had taken the rock out of the bowl of shells this morning, and Rusty had asked about it after they dropped Toby at Sarah Throckmorton’s on Elkhorn Road.
For a moment, her son’s face flashed bright in Sam’s mind, and her gut yanked into a knot because he wasn’t here where she could see and touch him. She didn’t like having him out of her sight … people were vanishing. But she was determined to shield him from the worst of the terror around him so she’d suggested he spend the day with his friend Douglas Taylor — just being a little boy. Dangling his toes in a creek. Playing in the woods.
Stay and play with me. She shook it off.
“It’s a broken-off piece of a geode,” Sam said and Thelma looked at it in wonder when Sam handed it to her.
“Lily gave the rocks to the three of you?” Thelma shook her head. “Then it must really have mattered to her that you remember. Those rocks had to be her most prized possessions. They were all she had left of her parents.”