CHAPTER 13 
CHAPTER 13 I woke up the next morning feeling cold and soggy. The window was wide open and it was pouring rain outside. My sleeping bag was soaked.
It was my own fault that I’d gotten wet; I’d opened the window last night to get some fresh air before crawling into my sleeping bag. Geoffrey’s room can turn into a smelly little bear den sometimes, what with the snoring and the diaper and the blanket and all.
I wriggled free and splashed across the rain-spattered floor, shivering as I shut the window. I stood there for a moment, watching Connor Dixon—he was huddled on his back lawn under an umbrella, waiting for Peanut to hurry up and go—then turned around, frowning. The room was oddly quiet.
“Geoffrey?” I said, popping out my earplugs and a toad. There was no response. Picking up the toad, I squinted at the clock across the room on his bedside table. It was 5:30 a.m.—way early for my little brother to be up. Like Iz, he isn’t a morning person, and Robo Rooster didn’t start for a while yet. Still, he must have gotten up for some reason, as the covers on the bed were thrown back. He was probably downstairs, waiting in front of the TV.
I figured I’d go downstairs and check on him, then check to see if my mother had e-mailed me back. I pulled on my robe and slippers—dry, fortunately, since I’d thrown them on the armchair over by the bookcase, away from the window—then went downstairs, pausing on the landing to peer out the stained-glass window. A sheriff’s car was parked in our driveway, and the single news van from last night had grown to an entire fleet. The whole street, in fact, was clogged with reporters and cameras.
I glanced down at the creature that was struggling in my hand. This news story was not going away, any more than my toads were.
I needed to talk to my mother.
The smell of coffee and bacon wafted up from the kitchen, where my early-bird dad was rattling around making breakfast. Geoffrey was probably in there with him; bacon is his favorite food, and the aroma would have drawn him like a magnet. My stomach rumbled; I was hungry too. I wanted to check my e-mail first, though, so I crossed the front hall to my father’s study, closing the door behind me.
My mother had gotten my message. Her reply was short and sweet:
Look for the envelope inside the lining of your suitcase, and call me after you read the letter it contains.
I sat there staring at the computer screen for a moment, surprised and intrigued by her response. Then I tiptoed back upstairs to find that Olivia had locked our bedroom door. This was nothing new—she used to do it all the time when we were little. Fortunately, being a 1912 bungalow, Dad and Iz’s Northwest Honeymoon Cottage has the original doors, with the original old-fashioned keyholes under the handles. I’d squirreled away a spare key years ago, when my stepsister had tried this trick before. I crept down the hall to the bathroom and lifted a loose corner of wallpaper in the bottom cupboard, behind where Iz stored the toilet paper.
Yep, the key was still there.
Unlocking the door as quietly as I could, I slipped into our bedroom, squelched the urge to pop a toad under my still-sleeping stepsister’s covers, and knelt on the floor by my bed. I slid my suitcase from underneath it, pulled out the clothes still piled inside, and started prodding at the lining.
Top? Nothing. Sides? Nothing there, either, nor on the bottom. Hmmm. Had I understood my mother’s instruction correctly? My fingers worked across the surface of the bottom lining again and stumbled over an almost-imperceptible thickness. That had to be it. I tugged at a small zipper tucked beneath a pleat in the lining and slid my fingers inside. They closed on an envelope.
Pulling it out, I sat back on my heels and looked at it. There were words emblazoned in bright red marker across the front:
OPEN ONLY IN CASE OF EMERGENCY!
This whole thing was getting more bizarre by the moment. But if anything qualified as an emergency, this did.
I stuffed my clothes into the suitcase again and shoved it back under my bed, then left the room, shutting the door quietly behind me. I relocked it and returned the spare key to its hiding place, then started downstairs. When I reached the landing, I hesitated. I wasn’t ready for anyone else to know about the envelope yet. My instincts told me the contents were important, and I wanted to be alone when I read whatever was inside.
There was only one place to go: the attic. I spun around and ran back up the steps, then on to the door at the far end of the hall. By the time I reached the top of the attic stairs, my heart was pounding like crazy. What could possibly be in this envelope that had caused my mother to hide it so carefully?
I crossed to the trunk by the front window, tugging it slightly to one side so as not to be seen by the reporters below. I peeked out at the street to check on them; they were still there, of course. People were starting to emerge from their cars and vans, yawning and stretching. It would stink to work for a magazine or newspaper that made you sleep in your car outside someone’s house, hoping to snag a story.
I sat down and slid my fingernail under the envelope’s flap. Then I took out the letter and began to read:
Dear Cat,
If you’re reading this, then something odd has happened in your life.
You can say that again, I thought, and continued:
There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you, but my assignment came up so quickly that I didn’t get the chance. I’d planned to talk to you about it during our special birthday trip. Normally, the way it works in our family is that this information is passed along to the eldest daughter when she turns 12. I decided it would be okay to wait until my return, but if you’re reading this now, that’s probably not the case, and I miscalculated. There’s no way to prepare you for this, so I’ll just say it bluntly: Great-Aunt Abyssinia isn’t really your great-aunt.
My forehead wrinkled. What did Great-Aunt Aby have to do with any of this?
She’s your fairy godmother.
My mouth dropped open. “No way,” I whispered, heedless of the toad that popped out. It squatted next to me, blinking in surprise.
She was mine when I was your age, and my mother’s before me, and her mother’s before her. In fact, Abyssinia has been with our family for several centuries now. She’s a most faithful servant, but she does get in a muddle sometimes. And occasionally more than a muddle, sometimes a downright mess. I hope you’re not in the middle of a muddly mess, sweetheart, but if you’re reading this, you probably are, so you need to find Abyssinia right away and see if she can set things to rights again.
All my love,
Mom
I stared at the letter. Great-Aunt Abyssinia was a fairy godmother? And more specifically, my fairy godmother?
Yeah, right.
It was a joke, obviously. I laughed out loud at the absurdity of the idea. Then I looked at the toad that had just plunked down on the trunk beside the other one, and my laughter faded.
The toads were just as absurd, and they were real. Could my mother be telling me the truth?
No way. Fairy godmothers didn’t exist. And even if they did, they belonged to princesses in fairy tales, not to girls like me.
I stood up and jammed the letter and envelope into the pocket of my bathrobe. I didn’t care what time it was on the space station, my mother and I needed to talk. She had some major explaining to do.
I sped back downstairs into my father’s study and fished around in the bottom drawer of his desk, where I’d seen Iz stash our cell phones last night. The second I had a dial tone, I punched in the same emergency number I’d called last week.
My mother must have left word with the operator at NASA to expect a call from me, because this time they put me straight through without any chitchat.
“Cat?” My mother’s voice was all echoey and distant, like she was at the bottom of a deep well.
“Mom!” I burst out. “What’s going on? Is this true?”
“Toads, huh?” she said finally.
“Everywhere!” I replied miserably, looking at the trio that stared back at me from my father’s desk.
“Well, I suppose it could have been worse.”
“What do you mean, ‘it could have been worse’?” I demanded, fighting back angry tears. “And what do you mean about Great-Aunt Abyssinia being my—”
“Your FG?” my mother quickly said. “Let’s just use that for now, shall we? Never know who may be listening.” Her deep sigh drifted to me from deep space. “Honestly, Cat, I planned to tell you the minute I came home. I realize now that I should have stuck to the usual schedule.”
“You mean my birthday?”
“Uh-huh.”
I was quiet for a few seconds, thinking back to the birthday party the D’Angelos had thrown for me the day after my mother blasted off. There’d been no mention of a fairy godmother. Just a trip to Splashworld and a cake. Well, that and a pile of presents, including the iPod from Dad and Iz and the necklace from my mother. “So this is for real, then?”
“’Fraid so.”
“Does Dad know?”
“Not really. I mean, he knows there’s something a little odd about Abyssinia. But has her actual, uh, title ever crossed my lips when we discussed her? No.”
There was so much I wanted to ask! “But why … I mean who … what … ,” I stammered as I tried to frame my questions. I sighed. “Did you get toads the first time too?”
She laughed. “Oh no, it was much worse than that. Let’s just say that I had a close encounter of the feathered kind.”
“What? Seriously?”
“Yep. All over.”
I tried to imagine my mother covered in feathers. It was a bit of a stretch.
“I was a late bloomer,” she went on to explain. “I was always fretting about my looks. Great-Aunt Aby was trying to teach me a lesson about patience and about not being obsessed with my outward appearance—you know, ‘Beauty is as beauty does’ and all that. Our family’s FG is all about building character, boosting self-reliance, and that sort of thing.”
I frowned. What the heck was my mother talking about?
“At any rate,” she continued, “she muddled things up.”
“No kidding,” I said. “So this muddling-things-up stuff—wait a minute, are you telling me I have a defective fai—FG?”
“I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call Abyssinia defective,” my mother replied. “She always means well. Occupationally challenged, perhaps.”
I laughed bitterly, then jumped, startled, as a toad fell onto my lap. It was just my luck to get stuck with an “occupationally challenged” fairy godmother.
“Abyssinia’s heart is in the right place, Cat,” my mother went on. “She’s just trying to teach you a life lesson, darling.”
“I thought it was an FG’s job to, you know, wave a wand or something and make all your dreams come true.”
My mother laughed again. “Sorry, honey, it may work that way in the movies, but not for the MacLeods.”
“Great,” I said morosely. “And speaking of our family, who exactly are we? And how come we get an FG?”
My mother’s voice dropped to a whisper. “That part really will have to wait, sweetheart. We’ll have plenty of time to chat when I get back to Houston.”
I needed answers now, not three months from now. “Can you at least tell me what kind of a life lesson involves toads?”
“Well, what did you and Great-Aunt Aby discuss that day she came to visit?”
I shrugged, trying to remember. “Olivia, mostly, I guess.”
“Ah. And how is your stepsister, anyway?”
“A whole lot happier with what happened to her than I am with what happened to me,” I said bitterly. “But you should see our front yard! It’s like a zoo out there—the street is crawling with reporters and camera crews!”
“I see,” she said. “This is escalating quickly. There’s really only one thing to do, and that’s to find Great-Aunt Aby right away.”
“How the heck am I supposed to do that?” I protested, swatting at the toads that by now threatened to overrun not only my father’s desk, but also the chair and the floor. I’d have to bring Geoffrey and his LEGO bucket in here for cleanup duty. “She doesn’t have a cell phone, and she’s on the loose in some national park someplace.”
“Hang on a sec, I can help with that,” my mother replied.
Seconds ticked by. I heard the thump of feet on the floor above me. Iz must be awake.
“Okay,” said my mother, returning to the phone. “She’s in the redwoods.”
“How the heck do you know that?”
“Um, the FGPS. It’s the you-know-who positioning system. I have the transceiver up here with me—I was planning to give it to you on our mystery trip, along with the necklace.”
“You’re tracking Great-Aunt Aby by satellite?”
My mother laughed. “It’s the only way to keep tabs on a free spirit like Abyssinia.”
“Is that how you got through to her before? To send her to see me, I mean?”
“Uh-huh. It’s a kind of combination GPS tracker and walkie-talkie.”
“Can’t you just call her again, then, or whatever it is you do —why do I have to go find her?”
My mother sighed. “I tried. The reception doesn’t always work well when the RV’s in remote places.”
Like national parks? I thought. Great. Not helpful, considering that was where Great-Aunt Aby spent half her time.
“But it may be that I’m just getting a weak signal because of the space station’s position,” she continued. “You should be able to find her eventually.”
“How? You’ve got the transceiver! Fat lot of good it’s going to do me up there.”
My mother hesitated, then dropped her voice to a whisper. “I’ve thought about that, and there might be a way to patch you through from Earth. The only thing is, we’d have to, uh, go around certain protocols—”
“You mean you don’t want NASA to find out we’re linking their satellite to it.”
“Uh, exactly.”
“Let me call A.J. and see what he can do.”
“Good idea.” My mother knows A.J. almost as well as I do, and certainly well enough to know that if anybody could get her scheme to work, he could. “Just remember, you don’t need to tell him everything. The FG part, I mean. Tell him you need to find your great-aunt and that your mother installed a tracking device on her RV, just in case. Because she’s elderly.”
“You think he’ll buy that?”
“Why not? It’s logical. Well, sort of. Listen, Cat, do not tell him—or anyone else, for that matter—about Great-Aunt Abyssinia’s true identity. You’ve got to trust me on this. If you do, people will think the cheese slid off your cracker.”
She had a point.
I promised, and she promised to e-mail me all the technical information that A.J. would need, and we hung up. I sat by the computer until her e-mail came through, then forwarded it to A.J., along with the explanation my mother had suggested as to why I needed the satellite link.
And then I went back upstairs to get dressed and discovered there were worse things than toads.
Far, far worse.