Nightbird (9 page)

Julia rushed at him.

“Leave my sister alone!”

“We’re just sitting here,” James assured her. “Or we were.”

Agate came between them. She looped her arms around Julia. “Please be on our side.” There were bright tears in her eyes. “We’ll have enough people who will be against us.”

“So of course I am,” Julia told me as we sat whispering in the woods. “On their side, I mean.”

And of course I was, too.

Since we were now officially soul sisters, we vowed to keep their secret. Julia and I made a pact that we would do whatever we could to help James and Agate this summer. And that was how we sealed our friendship.

With trust.

After that, whenever I had free time and had finished my chores I sneaked away from the orchard. There was a heat wave, and the air was crackling as the temperature hovered around ninety-five. I usually met Julia at the shore of the bottomless lake she had blundered upon in the dark on the night she first saw James. The lake sat right between our properties. People called it Last Lake because it really was the last lake in Sidwell. All the others had dried up years ago during a heat wave that lasted all summer long, when there wasn’t a drop of rain. It was said that the fish in all those other lakes grew feet and walked across the meadows and ended up in Last Lake. There certainly were a lot of fish here. We lingered by the shore so we could see their silver and blue shadows flashing below the surface of the water. There were nearly as many frogs in the shallows, where lily pads floated. Some water lily flowers were white and some were yellow and some were the palest pink. Dragonflies darted above the water, their iridescent wings catching the glint of the sunlight.

I couldn’t swim because of my cast, but I could still call out “Polo” every time Julia called out “Marco” as she splashed around in the water. Afterward we would lie
out on the wooden dock that my grandfather had used for fishing. We read our books out there, and wore water lilies in our hair, and we talked about the future, when we would share an apartment in New York City.

And then on one perfectly perfect day I saw it again. On a rock beside Last Lake.

The blue graffiti.

Julia hadn’t shown up yet, so I turned and did a headstand and there it was again. The face of an owl.

Julia and I were meeting at the dock so early in the morning there wasn’t another soul around. It was the best time of the day. Even the frogs were still asleep. A few sparrows rustled in the bushes and doves were cooing nearby when Julia arrived. She spied the blue paint right away.

“What is that?”

We sat on the dock and I told Julia everything, how the blue monster was an owl turned upside down, how a very smart old gentleman had said it might not be what it appeared to be, how upset people were that someone
was stealing from houses and stores, leaving the mark of a monster all over town.

“We have graffiti in Brooklyn and it’s no big deal. It’s part of New York. A lot of people think it’s art.”

“Well, we don’t have it in Sidwell,” I said. “And this graffiti seems like it’s definitely a message, except I have no idea what it means.”

“I’d guess someone’s playing a joke. Someone who’s seen too many scary movies and believes all that nonsense about the Sidwell Monster.”

“If the thefts and graffiti don’t stop they’ll hunt down the monster. And if they find James, it’s all over. They’ll blame him for everything.”

“We could protect him if we found the real culprit,” Julia suggested.

It was a perfect idea. We immediately made a list of steps we should take:

One: Check out the spray-paint section of the hardware store.

Two: Talk to Dr. Shelton.

Three (and this was a little scary, but maybe it was how things were done in Brooklyn because it was Julia’s idea): Meet the culprit.

In the meantime, we would help Agate and James and act as go-betweens. They had begun to write to each
other, like star-crossed lovers in an old book. Sometimes Julia gave me a letter from her sister to bring to James. Agate used old-fashioned notepaper, the kind I didn’t even think they made anymore, a creamy-white parchment. There was a gold bee imprinted on the back of the envelope. Other times I had a note from James for Julia to bring home to Agate. He used the lined paper and thin blue envelopes that I’d found in my mother’s desk. It turned out my mother had quite a lot of stationery and stamps, as if she was having a long correspondence with someone, not that I’d ever seen her writing to anyone, nor had she ever received any personal mail. It was all flyers and bills, and now the
Sidwell Herald
arrived every day.

When I carried my brother’s messages for Agate, I could almost read what he wrote through the sealed envelopes, but not quite.

Julia and I grinned at each other when we exchanged these love letters, but we also shivered, and not from dipping our toes in the ice-cold lake. We both had the feeling something could go terribly wrong. Wasn’t that what had happened to Agnes Early and my four-times-great-grandfather Lowell? First love that had been cursed?

We planned to find out more about Agnes and Lowell
and to catch the graffiti artist, but it was summer and we had so many other things to do, the kind of things you can only do when school is over and time stretches out before you. We rode our bikes everywhere and visited every ice cream stand in Sidwell—there were four—and decided on our favorite flavors. Julia’s was peppermint stick, and mine, of course, was apple cinnamon. On rainy afternoons, we sprawled out on the window seat in Julia’s room to read. I was in the middle of Andrew Lang’s
Red Book of Fairy Tales
and Julia had chosen the
Violet Book.
We found an old cookbook from 1900 in the pantry and on some days we took over the kitchen of Mourning Dove Cottage, making desserts that probably hadn’t been made in Sidwell in a hundred years: graham cracker muffins, banana trifle, orange meringue. We collected wildflowers and pressed them between sheets of waxed paper, and thought of the poet Emily Dickinson as we did so. We painted our nails in shades we chose because of their names: First Light (silvery pearl), Saturday Night (bright red), Picnic (minty green), Summer (a delicate blue that was the color of the sky in July was my personal favorite, even though anything blue made me think of the graffiti).

One day when we were walking through town we found ourselves right in front of Hoverman’s Hardware
Store. Julia and I looked at each other and we both said, “Spray paint” at the very same time. We were ready to take the first step on our list.

When we went inside a little bell over the door jingled. Usually I thought it was a pretty sound, like a fairy flitting over our heads, but now I nearly jumped out of my shoes. Julia looked a little nervous as well. When you set out to find the answers to your questions, you have to be prepared to be surprised by what you discover.

We went over to the paint section and looked around. I loved the names of the colors. Some of them were as good as our nail polish shades. Julia and I argued over which ones were the best: There was Ice Cream (I pictured vanilla, Julia said it might easily be strawberry) and Bananarama (pale yellow, of course—we both agreed on that) and Have a Heart (Red for love? Green for jealousy? We settled on pink for true love) and Butterfly (I voted for orange, like a monarch butterfly. Julia suggested pale green, like the wings of a cabbage moth). For a while I wandered off and got stuck in the blues: Aquamania, Seascape, Blue Moon, Blue Heron, Bluebell.

Julia came to guide me away. “The spray paints aren’t here. I’ve looked everywhere. It’s like they disappeared.”

I finally spied them and pointed upward. The aerosol paints had been piled onto a high shelf and locked
up behind wire meshing. The elder Mr. Hoverman came by, carrying some shovels. Even Miss Larch would have described him as ancient. “Under lock and key,” he said of the paints we were gazing at.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Graffiti around town. I was asked by the mayor to write down the name and address of everyone who buys any. They’ve got to sign their names in my book; then I get my key and let them have what they want.”

“Do you remember who bought spray paint before you had to lock it up?” Julia asked.

“You girls are as bad as the sheriff with all of your questions. My memory’s mostly gone, but I’ll tell you what I told him: Mark Donlan, who was painting his patio furniture. Helen Carter, who had an old bike she wanted to paint. A girl who said she was going to paint silver stars.”

Julia and I grinned at each other. That had been Julia, for her ceiling.

“And some boy I never saw before. About your age,” Mr. Hoverman said.

Julia and I exchanged a look.

“Do you remember what he looked like?” I asked. “Or anything about him?”

“I barely remember what I look like,” Mr. Hoverman
joked. At least, I thought it was a joke. He was nearly at the century mark, and he had met and seen a lot of people in his time. “Whoever he was, you can be sure he won’t be getting any more paint without signing his name in my book.”

It really wasn’t much help to know that the culprit was a boy our age. We couldn’t go around questioning everyone who fit that description. Clues were funny things. Some of them were useful and some of them weren’t and some came when you least expected them.

We finally found a clue in the cellar of Mourning Dove one drizzly afternoon when we were exploring the cottage, looking for more old cookbooks. We pushed open a heavy storeroom door and there it was, as if it had been waiting politely for us to find it all this time. In the beam of our flashlight we spied something white on the ground, near a coal bin that hadn’t been used in decades. It was a crinkly, translucent piece of paper. The edges were yellow and we were afraid the paper might fall into shreds if we held it for too long.

Cellars are strange places, where people tuck away bits and pieces of the past, but the last thing we expected was to find a message. Clearly, no one had been down
here for years, unless you counted spiders. There were dozens of them.

We held up the flashlight and began to read.

What begins one way must end the same way.

The letters
AE
were scrawled beneath this line.

“Agnes must have written this,” Julia said.

It had to be part of the enchantment.

“Maybe she’d had second thoughts about the curse,” I said, “and wanted to make sure there was a way to end it.” We studied the line she’d written, and finally it hit me. To undo a spell you needed to re-create it; then it would unwind, like a spool of thread.

“We have to find out exactly what she did.”

We shook hands and agreed.

We would end the curse the way it had begun.

We decided to tell Agate our plans and reveal all we knew about our families’ histories. She had a job as a counselor at the summer camp at Town Hall and had been put in charge of the costumes for the play. We waited for her at the end of the day. The bell in the tower of the building rang every evening at six. It was so loud it could be heard all over town, even up in the mountains, if you listened carefully. When I walked
through the apple orchard and heard the ringing in the distance, the sound made me happy to live in Sidwell, where people cared about old-fashioned things like libraries and bell towers and there was someone like Miss Larch who was making sure our history wasn’t forgotten.

“Fancy meeting you two here,” Agate said cheerfully when she saw us. She had bits of thread and ribbon stuck to her clothes.

“It’s a small town,” I said.

“And you’re the best sister in it,” Julia added, picking a stray pin from Agate’s sleeve.

“I’m getting suspicious.” Agate laughed. “You either want something from me or you have bad news.”

It was actually a bit of both.

We walked through town, arm in arm.

“What do you think about the play?” Julia asked her sister.

“Don’t you hate the way the witch is treated?” I piped up.

“It’s just a play.” Agate shrugged. She’d clearly been paying more attention to the costumes than to the plot.