The Conjuring Glass (13 page)

The sheriff looked surprised, but hid the expression quickly.

“Yes, you’re new here,” he said, as if reminding himself.

“Yes,” Penny said, feeling the tense silence that had grown and filled the hallway.

“Jodi goes to school with you, she was seen sitting near you and…” he pulled a small, well-thumbed notebook from his breast pocket and fingered through the first few pages. “You and Zoe Parker.”

He gave a quick physical description, but Penny didn’t need it. Only one person had sat anywhere near them during the show, the girl who had waved at them and smiled expectantly, as if hoping they’d ask her to sit with them. Penny remembered how she had screamed in astonishment when she’d seen another girl’s face staring out of the trick mirror at her.

“Yeah, I remember her,” Penny said when Sheriff Price had finished giving his description. “What do you want to know about her?”

Susan stopped pacing, standing directly behind Penny, and put her hands on Penny’s shoulders, squeezing them.

“Did you see her at all after the show last night? Do you know where she might have gone?”

Penny did not. She’d been too sharply focused on Tovar in the aftermath of the show to notice where anyone else might have wandered.

She shook her head. “Sorry.”

Sheriff Price considered her for a moment, his steady dark eyes seeming to probe her, and he nodded. “If you do remember anything, anything at all, please call me. It’s very important.”

Understanding it might not be wise to ask questions of her own at that point, understanding it might even earn her a scolding from the now stony-faced sheriff, but overcome by her natural curiosity, Penny said, “What did she do?”

Sheriff Price glanced over her shoulder for a moment, as if asking Susan’s permission to answer, and then focused on Penny again.

“Well, young lady, Jodi Lewis went and vanished on us.”

After a ten-minute interrogation by Susan, Penny escaped to her room with the phone. She’d told Susan the truth, she’d seen no one but Zoe after the show, and had gone nowhere but home after their chat in the shop.

She dialed Zoe’s number, fully expecting to reach her friend’s grumpy grandmother, but Zoe answered after the first ring.

“Did the sheriff visit you yet?” Penny asked.

“Yeah,” Zoe said. “It was weird. Grandma followed him outside when he tried to leave and wouldn’t let him go for five minutes.”

Zoe laughed, but it sounded uneasy.

“Did she get anything out of him?”

“Yeah,” Zoe said. “I hid behind the door and listened. He thinks she ran away. Her parents just got divorced and her dad moved, so they think she ran off to live with him.”

“Then why are they questioning people?”

“Because she’s not the first to disappear,” Zoe said.

“What?” This was the first Penny had heard of any disappearances, and she thought vanishing kids would probably count as big news in a small town like Dogwood.

“Not from here,” Zoe continued. “A couple of girls from Kent, a boy from Yelm, and another girl from Lacy. They took someone in for questioning, but they let him go.”

“Who?”

“Guess,” Zoe said.

At first, Penny didn’t have a clue, and then the answer hit her like a revelation.

“Tovar The Red,” she said with certainty.

“Grandma threw a fit when the sheriff said they let him go, but they had to. He went straight to his room at the inn after the show, the desk clerk saw him come in, and he was there all night. They would have seen him leave.”

“So maybe she did run away,” Penny said.

“Yeah, probably,” Zoe said.

“I’ll call you back in a bit,” Penny said. “Stay by the phone if you can so your grandma won’t hang up on me.”

“She’s not here now,” Zoe said. “She’s at the diner gossiping to anyone who’ll listen to her.”

Penny said goodbye, hung up, and started downstairs—relieved, a little, by the information Zoe’s grandma had coaxed out of Sheriff Price.

Now to convince Susan there was no reason to worry. Otherwise, Penny was apt to be spending quite a few boring hours pent-up in the house.

Only a few months ago that wouldn’t have bothered her, but now she had a friend, and they had Aurora Hollow.

The Face in the Mirror

The next few weeks dragged by in a haze of boredom.

Far from being relieved at the news that Jodi Lewis was a suspected runaway, and probably not a kidnapping, Susan abolished the newfound freedom Penny had enjoyed since leaving the city. Her bike leaned unused against the front porch, and Penny rode to school in the Falcon every morning.

Susan forbade her to leave the school grounds at lunchtime. And she spent the few hours after school let out and before the shop closed stuck inside with nothing more exciting than homework to occupy her. Zoe was with her for those few hours most days, but it was still idle time.

By the end of the second week, when Tovar The Red had not shown his face in town again and no more kids vanished, Susan began to relax and let Penny out after school, extracting a promise that she would not leave their property.

“I know you and Zoe have your own place back there somewhere,” she said, nodding in the general direction of the high, wild field. “When I was your age there was a grove out there I used to play in. I went looking for it again but couldn’t find it. I suppose it’s overgrown now.”

Penny suppressed a smile at this.

“We’ve gone down to the creek, but mostly we just hang out in the field.”

No sooner than Susan allowed Penny to leave the house again, Zoe’s curmudgeonly grandmother surprised them with an unexpected request. It came in the form of a letter, delivered by a thoroughly excited Zoe.

Penny and Zoe waited anxiously while Susan read the note, looking increasingly incredulous. After refolding and replacing it back in the envelope Zoe had handed her, she looked at the pair of them, her mildly chagrined expression fading into an indulgent smile.

“Tell her I said that would be just fine. We have enough room for one more.”

Penny at least knew what the chagrined look was about—Zoe’s grandma was part of a clique of grim-faced town ladies who remembered Penny’s mom and Susan from when they were teenagers. She had branded them, and Penny by association, unrepentant troublemakers.

This still puzzled Penny, who had never seen that side of her mom or Susan. The woman she’d grown up with had been predictably boring, reliable to a fault.

One of these days, she’d work up the guts to ask Susan what kind of mischief they’d gotten up to as teenagers.

Zoe’s grandma and a handful of her fellow curmudgeons were taking a two-week trip to Vegas; Zoe’s mother, who was supposed to have come back to town for that short time, had canceled her trip back.

This put Susan in the unique position to be able to deny one of the women she referred to as ‘The Town Elders.‘ However, she’d squashed the impulse for Penny’s sake—and because she liked Zoe, if not her grandmother.

Penny refrained, barely, from running to Susan and bowling her over in a tackle-hug. She could not stop a pleased squeal, which Zoe mimicked.

“Thanks, Susan!” Penny and Zoe shrieked in unison.

Susan only laughed and waved them off.

“I’ll drive you home so you can tell her I said yes and pack some clothes. I just don’t feel right letting you ride back to town alone. Especially in the dark.”

Penny rolled her eyes behind Susan’s back, making Zoe break into fresh laughter.

Susan spun around, as if she’d grown eyes in the back of her head and seen Penny’s mockery.

“You,” she said, pointing a finger at Penny and startling her into jumping back a step, “do your chores while we’re gone.”

Five minutes later Penny was alone, wiping down the kitchen counters before sweeping. Never in her life had Penny been so enthusiastic during her house chores.

It was Friday evening, Susan’s overprotective grasp had loosened for the first time since Jodi Lewis’s disappearance, the weekend stretched free and clear before her, full of freedom and possibilities, and now her best friend would be staying with her for the next two weeks.

For the first time since attending Tovar The Red’s show at the park, life was good.

In less than thirty minutes, Penny finished her chores and Zoe came back with a huge duffel bag filled to seam-stretching capacity.

Susan offered Zoe a guest room on the second floor, one of the unused rooms haphazardly furnished with decades-old furniture not yet rickety enough to throw out.

“Most of the stuff in there was mine when I was your age. The bed, the dresser, the curtains.” She pointed to a vanity on the opposite wall, and a large wooden chest on the floor beside it. “You can sleep here if you want. I thought you’d probably want to stay in Penny’s room, but this one is open if you get tired of her.”

They carried Zoe’s stuff up to the attic room and Zoe unpacked, stowing her clothes, books, and her favorite rocks—the ones she simply couldn’t be parted with—in the spare dresser.

Dinner was tacos. Susan cooked and seasoned the meat while Penny and Zoe grated cheese, shredded lettuce, and diced tomatoes.

After dinner, they sat quietly for a while watching Susan’s pick for movie night, a regular Friday evening event, passing a bowl of popcorn between the three of them. The movie was a little too sappy for Penny’s tastes, and so her attention kept drifting.

When it drifted to Zoe, her heart did a little flip-flop behind her ribs.

Zoe ignored the movie too. Her attention was focused on a shining oval object lying in her cupped hands.

Her souvenir mirror from Tovar’s show—The Conjuring Glass.

Penny waited a few moments for her heart rate to return to something approaching normal, then forced a little cough to draw Zoe’s attention. When that didn’t work, she sidled over closer to Zoe and gave her ankle a jab with the toe of her shoe.

Zoe looked up, startled and blinking like someone caught napping.

Penny jerked her head in the direction of the hallway and rose. “Think I’m going to get ready for bed, Susan.”

“Yeah,” Zoe said, and yawned. “Me too. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight girls,” Susan said, her eyes never leaving the screen. This Friday night’s hunk of a leading man was currently gazing deeply into the eyes of a breathless, young leading lady, and Susan, it seemed, didn’t want to miss the juicy part of the scene.

Penny waited at the top of the stairs for Zoe to catch up.

“Don’t let Susan see that,” she pointed at the mirror in Zoe’s hand. “She’s freaked out about Tovar already. If she sees that and figures out where you got it…Zoe, what’s wrong?”

Zoe looked frightened for a moment, on the cusp of panic. She cringed at the mirror, as if a large spider had just crawled onto her hand.

Then she shoved the mirror in her pants pocket, rubbing the palm of her hand against her jeans afterward, as if scrubbing off some unseen filth. Afterward, Zoe fixed a tired, resigned gaze on Penny.

“I need to talk to you, Penny. Something is going on. Something scary. I don’t know what exactly, but it has something to do with this,” she pointed a finger at the bulge the mirror made in her pocket. “It has something to do with
him
.”

There was no need to ask who Zoe meant by
him
.

Penny sat on the edge of her bed, and Zoe sat on the edge of hers, shifting as she pulled the mirror from her pocket and set it next to Penny. After a slight hesitation, she flipped it upside down, as if afraid to look into the reflective surface.

“That night after the magic show I took the mirror out and stared into it. I thought maybe if you were looking into yours, we’d see each other in them again. I thought maybe we could even use them to talk to each other.”

Penny’s first thought was:
yes, I bet we could if we knew how
. Her second thought was:
but I didn’t see her. I saw him
.

Had Penny told Zoe about that? She supposed not.

Penny hadn’t looked into the mirror that night. She had shoved it into the bottom of her nightstand drawer, and had not moved it since.

“What did you see?”

“A bird.” Zoe shivered, then continued. “A giant bird’s head. When I saw it, it turned and stared back at me. Its eyes were red, like they were on fire.”

“A bird?”

Zoe nodded.

“It looked at me, then it turned and walked away. It was huge…it walked like a person…it had arms and legs and wings. Then it vanished…and…”

The look Zoe shot at Penny was terrified, but not just terrified. She thought there was real shame in it too.

Embarrassment?

“What?”

For a moment, Zoe seemed unable to finish. She opened her mouth, her deeply tanned cheeks flushing a deeper red. There was some residual fear there, Penny thought, but the greater part of her discomfort was pure shame.

“Come on, Zoe. I won’t laugh.”

Zoe closed her eyes, leaned in close to Penny, and whispered.

At first, Penny thought Zoe was pulling her leg. Then Zoe moved away, opening her eyes again, and Penny knew she was not.

“What did you do?”

“I ran,” Zoe said. “Out the back door, got on my bike, and just rode. I was almost out of town before I realized where I was going. I rode around town until it was too cold to stay out, then I snuck back in and slept in the living room.”

“Did you tell your grandma?”

“Are you kidding?” Zoe actually laughed at the idea, though Penny didn’t hear much honest humor in the laugh. “She’d either call me a liar and ground me, or think I’d gone crazy and ship me to the closest lunatic asylum.”

“Oh,” Penny managed, feebly.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but she doesn’t like having me around that much. You should hear her talk sometimes.” Zoe scrunched up her face in a gargoyle-like caricature of wizened crotchetiness. “It’s all that Indian’s fault. I knew when your momma married him there would be nothing good from it. And now she’s gone off to drive a truck with him and I have another kid to raise.” She never says his name, he’s just
that Indian
.”