WHEN I woke up the next morning, we were holding hands under my quilt. Nicky’s head leaned away from mine so I couldn’t see her face. With my free hand, I slapped myself lightly on the leg. My skin felt like custard. Like it belonged to someone else. A hum still buzzed through me, like every blood cell was crowing “I’m awake! I’m awake!” I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since I got the news about Margaret, almost six months ago. I could feel the nourishment in my cells now that I had actually been asleep for more than five hours in a row.
Nicky was not awake. I raised myself up to look at her. In sleep she looked like a little girl, all the guile rolled away, only vulnerable round cheeks and black lashes. Her eyebrows hunched for a second, and I was afraid I’d get caught watching her. The way you’d watch someone if you were in love. Was I in love?
If I was, I wouldn’t say it. I’d be cool. I’d make banana waffles, and she’d blink her way into the kitchen wearing my XXL Gits T-shirt, which would come down to her knees, and I’d swing out of the house to go to school before I could say anything dumb like I’m a whole new person now. I never knew I could feel like that.
I slid out of bed into the chill air, marveling at being naked. I never slept naked. Oh, beautiful girl still lying there. But I had to get up. I extracted clean underwear and leggings from the dresser, careful to lift the drawer where the wood would stick and scream if I tugged on it too fast. Nicky remained motionless. Good. My hand hesitated over a dark orange Frankengown in my closet. Why not wear a Josy Grant original? Today was a special day. I bundled everything in front of me and eased the door open to make my way to the bathroom.
Laura’s bedroom door was still closed. I eased it open: closet full of tops and dresses ranked from baby pink to raspberry, white bookcase crammed with dead European composers, frilly bed with no pianist in it. I knew she was at her friend Saori’s, but I still needed to call her again. I felt a passing pang that Laura and I were not the best-friend kind of sisters, that if I called her now, at seven in the morning, it would just be to make sure she was still alive. Not to talk about exactly who was asleep in my bed right now.
Neil would be up. But the last he heard, I wasn’t speaking to Nicky. That was going to take some explaining.
I ran my hands over my legs in the shower, made circles with the scrubby ball on my shoulders, thinking all the time my whole skin is different. It turned out I was a goddess. Who knew? I pulled my towel to my chest and breathed in the touch of dry fibers, the citrus smell of conditioner filling the steamy air, felt the cold grit on the tile under my bare heels. Every sensation felt heightened, like I had gone from black and white to full color, high definition. My leggings slid on over stubble and tickled my calves. I pulled the rest of my clothes on and spun in the full-length mirror. I ran my fingers through damp pink-and-brown hair and put on lip gloss. I had company for breakfast, after all.
I tiptoed into the kitchen and started the coffee, then turned around to see Nicky leaning in the kitchen doorway, one foot tucked up to her knee. She was dressed in the same clothes as last night and looked as if she’d just slept for twelve hours and spent another twelve at the spa: hair smooth, skin gleaming. Even her teeth shone.
I smiled uncertainly. What was the etiquette with a girl you’ve just abandoned yourself to?
“I think you should see this” was her greeting.
I followed her back into my room. Rumpled quilt, my outfit from yesterday still heaped where it had landed on the floor just a few hours ago. Everything’s different.
Nicky stood to the side of the puppet theater and gestured to it with a ringed hand like the assistant in a magic act. The velvet curtains were drawn closed, and in front of them lay a slender branch covered in red leaves. “It wasn’t like that before, was it?” she asked.
“I’ve never seen it with the curtains closed. This is my—Margaret made this. There’s been, I don’t know what to call them, messages. Through the puppet theater.” I rubbed a tender leaf between my fingers. “What is this? Where did it come from?”
“We’re not mind readers. We know about the toy house, but I have no way of knowing what the rest of the Folk are up to. I wouldn’t want them to be GPSing me all the time either.”
All week, the fey had been communicating with me through the puppet theater. I still didn’t understand how, or who was doing it. I’d been so distracted and overwhelmed by the whole Faerie Realm, and so afraid for Laura. All of a sudden I had to know. “No, I mean, what is it? Who’s sending these messages?”
“I don’t know a lot more than you about the toy house. I know that Margaret built it, so that’s likely why it’s special both to my kin and yours. You. These devices are sometimes used as a kind of—if it was one of the Folk who could not come face-to-face with you, they might try to attract your attention through this. But I can, so I don’t need one of these.” She gave me a huge grin and darted in to kiss the corner of my mouth. “See? Face-to-face.”
“Wait a minute. Can we test that out again?”
She kissed the other side of my mouth and then picked up the little branch, rotating it in the light. “But everybody does seem to want a piece of the Lady’s new favorite,” she said.
“I don’t even know what that means. Am I supposed to stop them from grabbing the next victim? Because that’s going to be Laura.” I stopped and swallowed. I’d spent the night not worrying about Laura. Selfish and distracted. I cast around the room for my phone. Who cared how early it was? She’d just yell at me no matter what time I called.
“Hey,” Nicky said, and her arms were around me. “I told you. You won’t be alone. Blossom told me the Lady’s guard will be here if you ask.”
I pulled back to look at her. “The guard? Does that mean the weird—I saw these soldier-type people the other night with the Lady. In Tilden. Is that them? I don’t really know what they do.”
“The guard will make sure no one can get in or out of your house that you don’t want. They’d go with Laura to school or wherever she goes, if that’s what you ask for, even though she already has Hill. That’s the deal the Lady made.” There was a chuckle in her voice that said silly mortal.
I bristled. I’m just trying to take care of the sister I have left. So I don’t know the rules.
“Well, I’m asking. Laura needs… somebody to look out for her. Because I don’t know about that Professor Hill guy. Remember, the Winter people think they can take him.” I pictured the ferocious woman in the bark dress walking Laura to her piano lessons, carrying the dumb Julliard tote bag she kept her scores in. “How do I, uh, submit my requisition?”
“I’ll talk to Blossom. She’ll take care of it.”
“Can you do it right now? And are they going to look like—I mean, they kind of stand out.”
She brushed the branch’s thick leaves against the inside of my forearm. It tickled, but it wasn’t unpleasant. “In a town full of mortals just back from Burning Man?”
“Don’t make fun of me. I’m worried about her.” I took the branch away and set it down.
Her face went still, going from impish to serious as the planes of her cheeks dropped. “Oh. Ash and thorn, I didn’t mean to scare you. My girl is worried. We’re going to keep your sister safe.”
Am I her girl now? I was glad I’d already brushed my teeth. This time kissing her felt different: less curiosity, more of a sense that I knew for sure what everything was going to feel like. She made mmm noises, and I felt my body going alert. “Stay home with me,” she said.
“Nope. I already skipped one day this week.”
“Something about ‘goody’ and ‘two shoes’ comes to mind.” She dangled one of my high-tops by its laces.
“Please do not hold my shoe hostage. I’ve had a long night.”
She handed it to me with a look that was all seriousness. “How are you doing with that? Being the, uh, honored guest of the Winter Queen last night?”
She doesn’t know how to bring it up. I guess I wouldn’t either. I thought about how I would tell Neil, and I could not come up with a simple explanation. I felt the traces of the terror and physical hurt from being in the Winter Queen’s theater. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to handle it if it happened again. And I would still be trapped there if it weren’t for Blossom and Nicky. I felt a fresh trickle of fear at that thought. I opted for saucy. “Okay, but it’s going to be hard to tell where some of those bruises came from.”
She laughed, but her face reverted to furrows so quickly I could tell she was just humoring me. I went into the kitchen to pour coffee and get away from the concern on her face.
“I have a fey-type question,” I said when we both had mugs. She sat with one knee up in the spare chair at the kitchen table, the one that was not Mom’s or Laura’s or mine. We called it the Elijah seat so we didn’t have to call it Margaret’s chair, which is what it was.
“No such thing.” She looked up with a milk mustache. Her eyes and lips tugged upward, like she was trying not to laugh. That was how her face looked most of the time. We were back to normal, then. She settled deeper into her chair and held her mug under her chin.
“I mean a question about the fey. Is there any coffee in that at all?”
“I love milk. I really love it. And when we need to know something, we never ask a direct question if we can find out by subterfuge,” she answered.
“That doesn’t surprise me. So how come I could get my arms unstuck last night, after the muscleman glued them on or whatever? And before, last night, there was a creepy thing like a—this sounds weird—a snow globe that made this creepy music, and I told it to stop.”
“And it stopped.”
“Yeah.”
She set her mug down slowly, resting it first on the far side of the bottom, then the near side. She addressed the potted jade thicket in front of her. “This snow globe. Describe it.”
I did my best. When I got to the impaled insects, she held up a palm. “Did you try it on anything else? Tell anything else to stop or start?”
I told her about testing my new powers on the lamp, my iPod, and the door at the burned Winter Court theater. “It seemed like I had to be touching whatever it was. And it didn’t work on normal things, only, well, it did on my hands. Not on regular old—what?”
The look on her face was alarm, or fear: nose pinched in, mouth turned down. “It works on Winter spells.”
Oh. I might have worked that out for myself. If I knew anything about Winter spells, whatever they are, which I don’t.
“There was the thing with the Lady,” I said.
“What thing?” she said, and her voice caught and rasped in a way that made me wonder if she’d actually slept.
“She said she gave me a gift. When Neil and I met her and her… the guards. Blossom was there,” I added, as Nicky’s head sank onto her arms, flattened on the blue and purple ikat tablecloth.
She drew herself back up again and sat very still. “I was afraid she’d underestimated you. But I guess not, since she gave you a gift. That’s—see, fey gifts are never just gifts. Never simple.”
“But what is it? What does it do? Besides help me get unstuck that one time. Does it only work when I really need it to?” I shuddered as the gray man’s dirty-dishrag smell washed over me, even though there was no way he could be in my cluttered kitchen right now with the white morning sun straining through the greasy window.
She met my eyes, finally. Hers were small in a blanched face. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I can ask Blossom. She’s kind of like an advisor, higher up in the Lady’s Court than I am. But I can tell you that whenever a mortal takes on any fey aspect, it can—” She cut herself off. “It’s not always what you expect.”
“What were you going to say?”
“It’s mostly been mortals who want to be one of us. When something happens to them. They think they can handle a massive dose of—you’d call it magic—and it changes them into something they weren’t prepared for. Do you remember the iron shoes? Snow White?”
That was not the first time someone had brought up Snow White since this business had started. “Seven dwarves, hi-ho, hi-ho?”
She smiled a tight smile. “The dwarves would have my guts for garters. But yes. What do mortals say is the moral of that story?”
“Um, true love? Love conquers all?” I thought of every Top 40 song I’d ever heard.
“No. It’s about the danger of meddling in something you don’t understand. What happened to the girl’s mother?” Now she was reminding me of the Winter Queen, with her hard voice and her long stare.
“Mother? It was her stepmother. The Wicked Witch. Didn’t she melt or something?” I stirred my coffee with a finger and stuck it in my mouth.
She lifted her eyes to the ceiling and said, “Not exactly. This might not be the Snow White story you know. An elf made her put on a pair of iron shoes that had been heated in the fire, and Ossian played a tune, and she danced until her heart stopped.”
Another horrible death by the fey. “Ossian?”
She sounded old when she answered, and very tired. “The fiddle player from the revel. You danced too. On the path.”
“When you spit in my shoes!” And I remembered looking at the dark crown of her head streaked with sunlight, my legs still moving on their own as that irresistible music played while she slid my shoe off. That was only… four days ago. How was that possible? This girl has been undressing me since the minute we met. I guess that makes me cheap.
“One of the few ways to treat the mortal weakness for fey music.” She was almost laughing again. This time I didn’t mind so much.
“Don’t tell me that music didn’t make you do—you know. The accordion and all. When we first—”
“Oh, you mean this?” She was around the table in a breath, lifting my head to kiss me, and my mind vanished.
“Heart of Gold” rang out from my bedroom. Neil’s ringtone. I knew he’d expect an account of last night, and I didn’t want to give him one while Nicky was here, but I owed it to him to tell him I was all right. I ducked into my room. Our deal was one ring, then the other person texted. I found my phone under the mattress and typed see you in class. Then I scrolled to Laura’s name and texted her too: everything good?
Back at the kitchen table, Nicky was drawing with a spoon handle in a puddle of milk on the upturned bottom of a mason jar. She looked up and grinned when she saw me staring. “Telling Blossom I need to see her,” she said.
“You guys don’t have phones?”
“This has worked for centuries.” She added a flourish and in one fluid movement stood and slung her jacket on.
“When I see you again, and I’m planning to see you again, I’m going to need some answers. Like how old you really are.” I tried for confident, but what came out was bossy and too fast. I opened the front door, since she was standing in front of it.
“Oh, I won’t be without you for long,” she said, stepping out into the sunlight. Emphasis on the you. A full-body shiver started before I knew it was happening, and I felt my skin hum.
I thought of something, and before I could stop myself, I was saying it out loud. “Am I—not that it’s my business—but do you have another sweetheart?”
“Josy. No. I do not.”
“It’s just Timothy said that, and I know you guys can’t tell lies.”
“That’s true, but we will twist the truth if it suits us. Oh, not that—oak and ash, I am botching this. Timothy wanted you to believe something, and he chose his words to make you think a lie was the truth. He said I have a friend back home, and it is true that I have friends, many. Not other lovers.”
She took my hand, closing the distance between us, and I said, “Me neither,” but I wasn’t sure she heard me, because we were kissing by then.
When I let her go, Nicky loped away toward 65th Street. Mr. Hegel, across the street, jogged backward right into his mailbox when I waved at him.
And then Laura pulled up in the rust-and-blue Grant family Volvo. She climbed out of the driver’s seat, glanced at me, and looked down at the phone in her hand. “Don’t you have SAT prep or whatever?”
“Crap!” I punched my knuckles into my thigh. Friday mornings, seven thirty to eight thirty, I was a tutor for the English learners. Two ninth graders were waiting for me in the library right now. They were sisters from Afghanistan, one fifteen and one sixteen but both in their first year of American high school, and when I’d signed on to tutor for senior service this year, I’d picked them because that’s where they were from. Margaret had wanted to help people who needed her, and I suppose what I wanted was to be like Margaret, for now, until I could find my own way. Youmina brought homemade almond cookies every Friday. She’d be sitting there now, looking at the clock. “Can you give me a ride?” I asked Laura.
“Not really. Chamber was cancelled, but I have study group instead in, like, an hour, in the city. I just came home to change.” She pushed past me into the house in a cloud of Miss Violet’s Body Powder.
I should talk to her. Now, before anything else dangerous happened. I knew she was supposed to be under the wing of her piano teacher, and Nicky said she’d get the Lady’s guards on the job. And I knew she’d been glamoured to go all dreamy whenever I mentioned the fey. But I had to try. “So, Lor?” I called after her.
“I’m in the bathroom!”
I went back inside and stood beside the peeling white bathroom door. “Something weird happened.”
“What? I’m peeing.”
“I’m kind of worried. You know the elves and stuff?”
She sighed happily. “And Professor Hill? And Pretty Peg? He told me she used to dance there. I’m going to a revel.”
“Wait a minute, so you know about Margaret being all up with the fey? And Jerome being an elf and all?”
“They’re pretty.”
“Yeah. I know Professor Hill is supposed to keep an eye on you, but now I’m not so sure he’s up to it.” What could I tell her that would sink in? She was under that glamour spell. “Some other people are going to watch out for you too, okay? And me. You’ll meet Nicky.” I didn’t know if Nicky was acting as my bodyguard or not, now that I thought about it. I didn’t understand the first thing about the protection that was supposedly on our house now. What would happen when I went to school? Did drinking from the Lady’s cup mean there was a force field around me? And for how long…? Oh right. Until the fall equinox. That was coming on Sunday. Was that the revel Laura kept talking about? “And be extra careful this weekend. Stick close to Professor Hill, yeah?”
“So bossy.” She still sounded dosed, a pleasant TV sister instead of my real, bitchy one.
She’s all right. She’ll live to annoy you for years. I packed up my things for school, thought a sharp prayer that Laura would make it to study group and the protection would hold, and headed out the door.
A block from the bus stop, I realized that what I was kicking at on the sidewalk was a cluster of red leaves. I looked up to see telephone poles and the mottled canopy of sycamore leaves just starting to go brown. There was no tree these leaves could have blown from.
I swung onto the half-full AC Transit number eighteen and slid bag-first into my favorite seat, behind the rear door. A star-shaped leaf was stuck between the sliding windowpanes. I looked at the veiny red flesh, so thin I could see shadows through it. Okay. Someone is trying to tell me something. Or there’s a bunch of invisible red trees on 62nd all of a sudden.
It wasn’t until English, second period, that I figured it out. And it wasn’t me, it was Neil. He saw the leaf sticking out of my copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, bigger than the book, so its red points jutted out like starfish arms. I hadn’t put it there.
He slid it out. “Nice bookmark.”
“I keep seeing them today. It’s weird.” We were whispering, and pretty soon we were going to get caught. Mr. Collier was already pointing his beard in our direction while he kept his aviator glasses trained on the page he was reading aloud from. We always sat in the back, but that never did any good. I knew he could hear us talking. Most of the time he didn’t bust us because we were good students, but I didn’t want a trip to the office today.
“Maple leaf. It’s so shiny.” He stroked it with a long fingertip.
“Are you stoned?”
“Jerome Desroches had them in his office in a vase. It was pretty.”
“Oh shit. This is Jerome.” I said it loud enough that giggles erupted from rows far ahead of us. I didn’t remember Jerome having maple leaves on display, but it was possible Neil had seen something I didn’t.
“Miss Grant, Mr. Hernandez, care to share?” Mr. Collier was striding between desks toward us in his midlife-crisis cowboy boots, pudgy hand outstretched.
“No, sir. Sorry, sir.” I did not know why teachers fell for that subservient military thing every time Neil busted it out. It must have been his big-eyed saint look. The boots clipped back up front to the whiteboard.
I plucked the leaf back from Neil and examined it. No writing. No recognizable message. Nothing convenient like that. It smelled just like any green plant, not like the fresh-cut wood smell I remembered from Jerome’s office. The veins were stiff, and the leaf was slightly asymmetrical, the way real leaves were. It didn’t look like anything magical.
I knew Mr. Collier couldn’t see clearly all the way to the back of the classroom. I fingertipped my phone up from its pocket in my bag and held it on my lap, praying Neil’s ringer was off.
jerome trying to send me message, I typed.
Neil made a motion that in a less suave boy would look like he was adjusting his underwear. He hunched over the open binder on his desk. should we go see him again?
omg u have the hots 4 doc. no. will call like normal person.
Neil’s large ears went red. notice no im last nite.
I hadn’t even turned my computer on since I’d gotten home with Nicky last night. I’d forgotten all about instant messaging with Neil. sorry. spaced.
were u w/ saucy wench?
“How did you know?” I burst out. Mr. Collier stamped toward us, still chattering about sheep in his falsetto Titania voice, and held out his hand again. I sighed, and we both dropped our phones into it. They disappeared into his vest pocket. “Miss Grant, have you been kidnapped by pod people? You don’t show up for tutoring and you talk in class?”
Neil zoomed huge eyes at me, but I couldn’t get kicked out of Honors English. I stayed quiet and let the shame of being exposed as a tutoring slacker boil me. I thought about what Blossom had told me about the Folk protecting people’s farms, while I traced around the sawtooth edges of the maple leaf on a sheet of blurry college-ruled paper with my good rollerball. Magic people pushing back the tide of bad luck and sickness and grief, a whole other force like gravity that we never knew about. They were fighting off the Winter Folk for, among other things, the right to keep on doing that. Helping normal mortals just live their lives. I still didn’t totally understand. But I knew I didn’t want anything to happen to Laura or Blossom or even pathetic Jerome.
Or Nicky. My hand went to my fringed hem, midway down my thigh. Her hands had been there. I let my body relive last night and felt a joyful all-over flush.
The bell finally rang, and Neil shouted over it, “You were?” I nodded, feeling a massive grin spread across my face that I could not stop. There was no time to go into detail. “Girl!” He fist-bumped me. “Are you, like, girlfriends now? And look what you’re wearing! You must be feeling super fine.” He indicated the Frankengown, one I’d cut down from a vintage cocktail dress. I had worn it to one of Laura’s concerts, but never to school.
I didn’t know if Nicky was my girlfriend now. I still wasn’t sure why a girl like her would want to be with a girl like me, and I’d been too shy or scared to ask her. “I do like her,” I admitted.
“Believe it or not, young miss, I actually worked that out. You calling Jerome?” he asked as he slid his pristine blue binder into his backpack. His copy of the text was unmarred by dog-ears or graffiti, and I knew his was secondhand.
“Yeah, if I can find his number again.” I wedged the rollerball into my overcrowded Betty Boop pencil case, the one I’d inherited from Margaret, and stuck the maple leaf back into my doodle-covered Shakespeare.
I retrieved my phone from Mr. Collier and took the back staircase to the exit by the gym, where there was a corner in the lee of the basketball court bordered by a strip of tall hedges that muffled most of the traffic noise.
A couple of false leads with the 411 service, and I was connected. I fumbled my way through introductions in my hola como esta-level Spanish, until I’d said Jerome’s name clearly enough times that the drill sergeant who’d answered the phone switched to English and said “Wait.” I pictured her in her kitten-print scrubs scowling out at that packed waiting room. Hold music, the bland greatest-hits-from-the-’80s-’90s-and-today kind. I stood in the warm breeze on my patch of weedy white pebbles and kicked Nicky’s initials in the soft dirt all the way through “Voices Carry” before a rushed male voice snapped “Dr. Desroches.”
I told him who I was, and his voice dipped into confidentiality. “Give me a moment, will you please? No, the thirty-five, not the fifty. Patient is Garcia, M. Okay. Josephine Grant. My apologies.”
“I got your message. The, uh, leaf mail.” I felt a flutter of confusion, too late: the message was from him, wasn’t it?
“Yes. I didn’t know how else to reach you, since the number you left led me to an Indian restaurant. You and your friend are well?”
I thought about Neil, the impossible healing of his broken hand. I owed Jerome for that, no matter what else happened with the fey. “Yeah, we’re good. So what’s up with the leaf thing?”
“A message through the entryway.” His tone said I should know what he was talking about.
“Entryway? What entryway?”
“The—but you don’t know. I thought, since you are the Lady’s favorite and Pretty Peg’s sister, that you would have an explanation.”
“You mean the puppet theater? You’d be surprised what I don’t know.” Through the echo in my cell phone, my voice came back flat. Was Jerome going to be able to explain it to me, since Nicky couldn’t, not really?
“That was the way Peg came to us. She called it the toy house. An entryway is a… think of it as a passage between worlds. The mortal world and the realm of the Folk.”
“Yeah, we’re talking about an old detergent box with construction paper stapled to it. So you sent me a message through there—wait a minute, that’s how she got through? It’s some kind of magic doorway?” I hunched my shoulders against the sudden chill in the breeze.
“Oh no, it’s too small for that,” he said. There’s that “silly mortal” voice again. “Entryways are for messages. Usually from your people to mine, but they can travel the other way just as easily. If a mortal asks the Folk for something—sanctuary, or a favor—if they need a way to reach us, they could create one, and it would draw us in. It would be like the entryway was a light and one of the Folk were a moth. They’re most appealing if they have something to do with children’s toys, or with illusion. The toy theater was irresistible. My people are playful, even though our play can be deadly.” He sounded old then, and sad.
Margaret died because of your games, little doctor. You might have meant well, but look at the mess you left. “So that’s how she found you.”
“And how you were found.”
It dawned on me, fully and with a sick feeling of being spied on, that Jerome must have been the one moving the puppets around in the theater from the beginning. I’d still been secretly letting myself believe it was Margaret. Even though I knew, knew that was impossible. But Jerome would fit. Nicky said it would be someone who couldn’t talk to me face-to-face, and Jerome was not allowed to come to the Summer Realm, and for all I knew that meant he wasn’t even allowed into Alameda County. “So you were the one who sent all the messages? In the puppet theater?”
“I knew the Summer People would want to reach out to you. I wanted to nudge you in their direction. Maybe that was wrong.”
His voice said he wanted me to contradict him, to say, “Sure, I’ve been loving this wacky adventure where me and my sister almost get killed every day all week!” I didn’t say anything. The Winter guys got me through the puppet theater too. Should I tell him about the evil snow globe? But then he’d know there were spies, and how much can I actually trust this guy? I know he’s not the real bad guy, but he did make a deal with them. Maybe that wasn’t the only time. I drew a knuckle across the rough surface of the stucco gym wall. It left a clean cream line in the grime.
But something didn’t sit right. “You sent all the messages? I got one with an oak leaf, telling me to go to Tilden Park. A couple days ago.”
“Oh, my sweet Lady.” He said it as if I wasn’t there.
“Uh, so you think she sent that message? Your Lady? The Summer Queen?”
“I cannot know who sent you an invitation, but I know I did not. Now listen. I needed to reach you because there is something of Peg’s that may help you. That you need. I should have thought to tell you about it during your visit, but I was… taken by surprise. Surprised and very sad. I remembered later, when I was myself again,” Jerome said.
“What is it?”
“You see, I didn’t realize fully…. Forgive me. I am nothing more than a lonely old man. I should never have let it out of my sight, but it was something of hers, and I suppose I was just too weak.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Peg kept a diary in Kabul. It has a key to….” His voice sounded choked. “But you will see why I’m hesitating.”
Margaret’s diary? What if there’s stuff about me in there? Oh God, she hated me. Fat tagalong little sister. “Shouldn’t that have gone to the police? Or maybe back with her ashes? To us?” I hated the way I sounded: prissy, self-important. She’d been planning to marry Jerome. He was hugely important to her. I should give him a chance, even if he had opened up the floodgates and let in whatever got her killed.
But a diary was private business. Mine was password-protected in a folder on my hard drive labeled “1884 California Shipping Term Paper.” Not that Mom or Laura would be interested. Would I even read Margaret’s? She might have had secrets she would want to keep—well, beyond the grave.
Except that it contained a key.
“You can’t know what it was like. We were all so shattered, the other Médecins Sans Frontières workers and I. When I returned home I was… not myself.” He pronounced the French the real French way, not the way a normal self-conscious American would. But he was Canadian, from the French-speaking part of Canada, if I remembered right.
Canadian and fey. And Margaret’s fiancé. I should try to make this easier on him for her sake.
“So you kept her journal, and there’s a key in it? What is it? Can you give me a hint?” I pictured him sitting in a rocking chair, old in everything but body, nursing a glass of brandy or whatever old people drank and cherishing a cheap spiral notebook crammed with my sister’s bubble handwriting.
“That is… it is impossible to speak of.”
“Well, can I speak of it? Is it about how she died? Is it about”—it occurred to me as I was speaking—“who the Woodcutter is?”
Silence.
“It is, isn’t it?”
“Believe me when I say I quite truly cannot answer that question. And as I said, I no longer have the book.” I heard regret in his stiff voice.
“Nothing’s easy with you people. So where is it?” I was losing patience.
“I told you that I came home again after Peg was taken from us. That I was tried by the Summer Lady’s Court and, as they put it, relieved of my honor.” Through the cheap little cell phone speaker I heard him swallow. I waited until he took in a breath and spoke again. “I had other things that belonged to Peg. They were all taken. The diary is in the keep of my brother now.”
Something about the way he pronounced the word “keep” made me think that was a real place. “Timothy. Where is his, uh, keep?”
“You know that some of the Fair Folk are prejudiced against mortals. Against interacting directly with mortals.”
“Sure, that was the sticking point with Margaret, wasn’t it?” I knew that could make him angry—the sticking point was that the two of them were together—but I was sick of him beating around the bush.
“Timothy believes in the mortal stain. As far as he is concerned the diary is a fey object now. He thinks it belongs to him. To us.”
What he said sank in after a moment. “You can’t be serious. He’d hold on to—it’s my own sister’s diary! It should be with me and my mom and Laura. And it’s all mortally polluted and shit! Why would he want it?”
“I can’t explain my brother any better than…. But then, you hardly know us. We are very different, Timothy and I.”
Because he’s a snob with a stick up his marble-white ass? “Just tell me where to find it.”
“You’re not following. He has sealed it and hidden it.” When I didn’t say anything, he added, “With magic.”
“Okay then, if I can’t have it, what’s in it that’s so crucial?”
Silence. Finally he said, “What your sister wrote can be read, but not spoken aloud. That’s the spell. You must believe that I have tried.”
“I have to read it myself. Let me get this right. Timothy won’t give it to me, and even if I can figure out where he has it, there’s some kind of whammy on it, and the only way I can find out whatever burning news is inside is if I….”
This was a different silence. After a long time I took the phone away from my ear and stared at the Call Ended display in disbelief.