Chicory Up: The Pixie Chronicles (24 page)

“W
HO DID YOU SAY YOU ARE?” Dick asked the waif standing in front of him. She’d asked him for directions and a handout. What was this world coming to that ragged teens could skip school and panhandle right in front of the courthouse.

“Do you remember Sandy Langford from high school?” She answered his question with a question, something Sandy used to do all the time. It drove him nuts.

“Sandy? Yeah, I remember her. She left town a long time ago.” He dismissed the question. A strange buzz started up around his nape, making it hard to think.

“I’m her daughter.”

“And?”

“Nothing. Forget it. Forget me. Everyone else does!” The girl wrenched out from under his grasp and ran full tilt toward Main Street.

His head continued to ring with a discordant whine. It might have been raucous laughter if it came from a miniature Pixie throat. No, too discordant to belong to a Pixie. Pixies chimed when they spoke, or laughed.

Ding dang chug shplach.

He looked around frantically and saw the bloated yellow figure with ugly red splotches on its wings, flying drunken spirals around his head. Snapdragon. The mutant Pixie-Faery half-breed everyone was talking about. “Tricked you. Tricked you all!” He wobbled away, laughing so hard he had trouble keeping air under his wings.

“Broke you and Thistle. Broke you, broke you, broke
you. She’ll never be yours now. Never, ever, ever,” he chortled as he disappeared among the rhododendrons beneath the courthouse windows.

Dick gave chase. He really needed to make sense of this.

Reality reared its ugly head and he remembered why he was trying to unlock his car.

“Thistle?”

No sign of her on the courthouse steps. Only a penetrating buzz like a streetlight on the fritz.

Then a renewal of the annoying laughter in the super-high soprano range that cut through the static as Snapdragon rose up from the shrubbery and wound his way higher and higher, pausing on each windowsill of the four-story building. Dick’s gaze riveted on the Pixie. Something about those fungal infection splotches on the wings triggered a memory. Something about insanity and red dyes….

Dick recognized the face of the large Pixie.

“Haywood Wheatland, come back here and face me like a man.”

“Tricked you. Tricked you good,” the Pixie sneered. “Tricked everyone.” He flitted toward the roof, a little steadier than a few moments ago.

“Where’s Thistle?” Dick demanded. He took the steps two at a time, hoping desperately that Thistle had taken refuge inside.

“Ring around the Rosie. Tricked you all. Trick you again. Trick Thistle better than Alder or sissy Milkweed.”

Ice particles pricked Dick’s veins from inside.

“Where is she? Where’s my Thistle?”

“Where you’ll never find her.”

“You can go back to your lost love now. Thistle won’t stand in your way,” another Pixie voice whispered. The voice didn’t chime with music like the other Pixies he knew. Nor did Snapdragon’s, what passed for his music,
ding dang chug shplach
, was as ugly and out of place as he was. But this other guy was surrounded by silence.

“What the f…” Lost love. Sandy Langford’s daughter. What was this all about?

“You don’t need Thistle. You need your lost love,” the whisper continued to wiggle into his mind.

Dick dashed back to his car, flung open the door, and dropped into the leather bucket seat. He’d turned on the ignition before he got settled and barely remembered to close the door before setting it into gear.

He peeled out of the parking spot and executed an impossible U-turn in the middle of the street.

How long had he talked to the girl? Not long. He hoped. Thistle couldn’t have gone far on foot. But why would she leave him for talking to a lost child?

Where would she go?

The last time her world had crumbled around her, she’d called Dusty. He prayed that the love of his life would seek out her best friend again.

He took the steep road twenty miles an hour over the speed limit, gears grinding, and turned onto Center Street on two wheels. The driver of a big red pickup yelled something obscene and shook his fist as Dick cut him off.

With a screech of brakes and one wheel on the curb he parked in front of the museum in a handicap spot. “Thistle!” he called as he ran inside. “Thistle, are you here?”

Then, through the side window in the parlor, he noticed the fire engine, police cruiser, and paramedic truck. His feet sped up without conscious thought. “Chase?”

“No running inside the museum,” Dusty reprimanded him as if he were a naughty fourth grader on a field trip.

“What happened? Have you seen Thistle?” He leaned forward, examining paramedic Bill Musgrave’s careful application of butterfly bandages over a wickedly swollen wound along Chase’s temple and cheek.

“I strongly recommend you see a doctor for this,” Bill said sternly as he dabbed away blood and lymph that still oozed.

“I second that,” Dick said. “That gash is already infected.”

“And I agree,” Dusty added.

“Later, when I’ve completed all the paperwork required from this little fiasco,” Chase ground out. “Bad enough I’m going to be patrolling a desk for the next couple of weeks. I need to be out walking my town.”

“I missed something,” Dick said.

Dusty gave him a quick report.

She said nothing about Thistle in her narrative, only suggestions that Haywood Wheatland might have hypnotized the culprits. She couldn’t mention Snapdragon with Bill still hovering over Chase’s wound.

Dick wanted to strangle the malevolent Pixie, right here and now.

He took a deep breath to calm himself. Thistle was unhurt. Upset and uncertain, maybe. Neither Snapdragon or the other Pixie voice—he suspected Alder—had said anything about Thistle being hurt.

Then he bent and looked more closely at the wound, almost like a knife slash. They weren’t telling him everything.

“Your refusal to see a physician is going on my report, Chase,” Bill said. “Since you’re going to be desk-bound for a while because you fired your weapon, endangering four civilians—one of them your fiancée—you might as well spend some of that time at the clinic.” Bill snapped his kit closed and exited.

“What really happened?” Dick asked. He opened an alcohol swab from a pile of packets Bill had left behind, as if he knew they’d be needed.

“I got sideswiped by part of Snapdragon’s army of Pixies,” Chase replied. He only winced a little when Dick cleaned the wound again.

“Did they use hawthorn spikes for swords?”

“Yep.”

“Um… I’m ordering you to get to the clinic. I’ll drop you off on my way. I’ve got to find Thistle, fast.” Worry gnawed at his gut.

“Explain?” Dusty asked, hands on hips, best schoolteacher frown on her face.

“No time for details.” He hauled Chase to his feet with a firm grip on his friend’s elbow. “But while we’re gone, Dusty, get on the Internet or into your personal reference library and see what you can find about ergot poisoning.”

“Moldy rye, Saint Vitus’ dance, great for making a red dye that doesn’t fade or bleed. What else do you want to know?”

“Does it affect hay or straw from grains other than rye?”

Dusty logged onto the computer in the corner of the employee lounge, fingers racing.

“I think Haywood Wheatland may have contracted it while partially underground in the old pioneer jail, where you stashed him while we fought the fire spreading to downtown last August,” Dick replied. “The purple-red pustules on his wings look something like a picture I saw in a biology text years ago. Either that or a fungus. But I can’t think of any fungal infection that would drive him violently insane. So, Chase, you’d better make sure the doctor irrigates that wound with lots of saline just in case Snapdragon poisoned those Pixie swords with his own disease. Come on, Chase. I have places to go and a fiancée to hunt for.”

Phelma Jo stood stock-still in the parking place next to her car in front of the grade school, three blocks from her meeting with Marcus. And with Ian.

An angry car horn and a shout made her jump to the curb. The distraught woman driving a forest-green minivan muttered a string of invectives at her all the while she rammed her car into the empty spot, slammed her car door, and stalked into the grade school. Rabid birds attacking innocent children earned as many curses as Phelma Jo.

She stared at the woman blankly, her mind jumping from Ian’s rejection, to the disjointed and nonsensical words, to the image of Haywood Wheatland as a weird dragonfly/moth/Pixie biting Ian’s finger.

“Oh, my God!” She clamped her hand over her mouth, gaze darting right and left, up and down.

Haywood Wheatland, the boy toy she’d flaunted in front of the town last summer was some kind of miniature flying pest. Right out of some fairy tale, and it sounded like he’d attacked a child. Images flickered through her memory: stuffing a purple dragonfly into a mason jar with a wolf spider and having Dick steal it, claiming the bug was really a Pixie. Then watching the dragonfly perch on Dick’s outstretched hand and morph into the tiny figure of Thistle Down as she blew him a kiss of thanks. Haywood Wheatland
binding her with magic before he ran out of energy and substituted duct tape. The flitting lights that streamed out of The Ten Acre Wood ahead of the fire. The sound of chiming laughter haunting her whenever she walked around town, especially in the environs of Dusty’s museum.

“I’m going crazy,” she reassured herself. “I have to be. Pixies do not exist.”

But she’d seen them with her own eyes.

Frantically she searched the soggy shrubbery next to the sidewalk where she suspected a deranged Pixie might hide and taunt her with the loss of someone she really cared about. No sign of the yellow bug with red splotches on its wings.

Nothing. If the creature existed outside of her mind, he’d found other people to torment.

Torment. That was a good word for the way Haywood had treated her, compelling her to set fire to The Ten Acre Wood, beloved by the entire town.

She shook her head, forcing the mind-numbing loop of questions aside. “I have too much work to do to waste time standing here in the rain.” With Halloween banners and scarecrows fluttering in the breeze, mocking her very existence.

Resolutely, she got into her car and headed toward her office building on the north end of town overlooking the river and the railroad tracks.

Something deep within tugged her away from her reality toward Dusty’s museum and The Ten Acre Wood. Answers. She needed answers. Answers that Dusty seemed to hold close to her chest, hidden from the world. Just as she hid herself.

“Shyness, my butt. She’s a silent manipulator hoarding the town’s secrets as if they were ancient artifacts.” Mabel did much the same thing.

Four minutes later she parked beside the museum.

“Why is it that everyone in town ends up here sooner or later?” Phelma Jo asked the air as she entered the dark but cozy entry.

“Because this is our history. We can ground ourselves in our roots here,” Dusty replied, looking up from the rocker
by the hearth. Flickering electric lights of a fake fire glowed behind the glass plate of the old iron stove in the corner. She stilled the motion of the chair and stood up. Dressed in a faded calico gown with a dirt-streaked apron and looking pale, frail, and insubstantial, she could have been a ghost.

Phelma Jo stepped back, hand to her heart. She forced herself to breathe deeply, center herself in the reality of today.

In decades past, Dusty’s shyness had kept her in the background, looking in on reality occasionally; otherwise living in her own world of books and history and artifacts. A metaphoric ghost.

Maybe she was just rehearsing for the after-dark tours scheduled throughout the week.

“I discarded my past. I look to the future,” Phelma Jo said haughtily.

“Do you? Is that why you built your steel-and-glass, high-rise condominium and office building on the lot where your mother’s shack used to stand?” Dusty stepped over the velvet rope that divided the front parlor from the entryway and casually walked to the back of the old home. “Can I get you a cup of tea, or did you want to pay admission and take the tour?” she called over her shoulder, as if she expected Phelma Jo to follow her.

“I’ll take the cup of tea and a bit of your time.” Phelma Jo forced aside a sarcastic retort, relying on politeness. One of her foster mothers had urged her to try politeness when anger and derision failed. Sometimes it worked.

“What do you need, Phelma Jo?” Dusty asked as she filled two mugs with hot water from a simmering electric kettle. She set them on the long worktable along with a box of tea bags, sugar packets, and spoons. “If you take milk in your tea, I think I’ve got some in the fridge.”

“That’s okay. Black is fine. With a little bit of fake sugar.” Phelma Jo took a chair at the far end of the table, amazed that she didn’t have to wipe dust off the seat.

“I presume you haven’t come to apologize for rubbing my face in the dirt during recess in fourth grade,” Dusty said, fixing her gaze firmly on Phelma Jo. She stirred a disgusting
looking pale syrup into her herbal tea. Agave syrup was the name on the bottle. Who ever heard of that?