The Conjuring Glass (14 page)

Penny felt a rush of anger for Zoe’s grandmother, but held her tongue.

“Grandma never did like Dad, and she’s given up trying to like me, I think. She’s just counting the days until they come back for me.”

A long silence unwound itself following that pronouncement. Penny just couldn’t find the right words to break it. Finally, Zoe did.

“You’re the only one I told,” she said, her voice dropping to a near whisper again. “Who else would believe me?”

“Why do you keep looking at it then?”

Zoe shrugged, reached over, and picked the mirror up again, glanced into the reflective glass quickly, then turned it upside down on the palm of her hand. “I don’t know. I just keep looking. I can’t help it.”

“Jodi Lewis had one,” Penny said. “Just like ours, remember? She was one of the first onstage that night.”

Zoe nodded. “I know.”

Penny thought about the face she’d seen staring back at her through her own mirror and shuddered.

Zoe looked into hers again, longer and deeper this time, her gaze seeming to almost fall into it.

“It doesn’t mean
he
took her though,” Penny said.

Zoe looked up from the reflective glass again, catching Penny’s eyes with her own. She did not reply or dispute Penny’s words though. She didn’t need to.

Zoe climbed into her bed, lying on her side to face Penny, and Penny did the same, pulling the sheets up underneath her chin and scooting to the edge closest to Zoe so they could resume their conversation.

Her words to Zoe,
It doesn’t mean he took her
, played back in her mind; chased around and around in a circle by the words she’d spoken—shouted really—at Susan a few weeks before.

What did he do that was so bad
?

Susan’s reply came back to her, making her stomach tighten, making her feel sick.

“Penny?”

“What?”

“How did your mom die?”

The question jolted Penny, but after a few seconds consideration she realized that every time their conversations turned toward Penny’s past or Penny’s mother, she had quickly deflected. She didn’t like talking or thinking about it. It was still painful. But Zoe was her friend. She knew almost everything about Zoe, and Zoe knew very little about her.

It’s mine
, Penny thought with uncharacteristic avarice.
My past … my pain, and I don’t want to share it
!

Penny understood better than ever before why her mom had been so reluctant to share her past, her pain—and she understood why it was wrong to not share.

“If you don’t want to talk about it you don’t have to,” Zoe said, sounding shamed.

“No, it’s okay.” Another long moment passed before Penny continued. “She worked for a talent agency and she had to travel a lot between San Francisco and L.A. The agency used a private jet. She was over the ocean when the engine failed.”

Zoe said nothing for a while, waiting to see if Penny had finished.

“I’m sorry,” Zoe said at last.

There was no more conversation that night. Within a few minutes, Zoe’s light snores filled the room.

Strangely enough, Penny felt better after the telling. As if by sharing the story she was also sharing her pain. It was a feeling she wished her mom could have experienced with her.

It felt good to share.

Penny moved to the other side of her bed, reaching for the lamp, then moving to the top drawer of her nightstand. She slid it open slowly, not wanting the scrape and squeak of the warped wood to wake her friend.

She searched blindly until she found her mirror, then steeled herself, and brought it up before her face.

Her own reflection stared back at her.

Penny let out a long breath, closed the drawer, turned off the lamp on the nightstand, and then lay down to sleep.

She drifted off minutes later with the mirror clutched in her hand, and Zoe’s whispered words echoing in her sleeping mind. The words she’d been too afraid to say aloud.

My closet door opened and something huge came out of it
.

Penny awoke once to the bump and scratch of something against wood. A mouse in the wall maybe, but it sounded too big to be a mouse. It came again once, then no more, and she slept again.

Sometime during the night a teenage girl, who still had the wilted bouquet of flowers a handsome magician had given her a few weeks earlier, vanished. There at bedtime, gone the next morning.

Neither Penny nor Zoe found out until much later the next day, but they both awoke with a feeling that something bad had happened.

The Door

They left for the hollow early the next morning, after a hastily eaten breakfast of eggs and toast. Susan was still asleep when they left, so Penny left her a note.

Susan,

Zoe and I are going out. We promise not to leave the property. Maybe we’ll look for that old grove you told me about.

We’ll check in around noon.

Love ya,

Penny

The sun was barely up when they’d finished breakfast, and had only just crested the eastern horizon when they walked into the lower field. They were used to sleeping in on weekends, so they felt strange being up and out with the rising sun. Sleeping in would have been impossible that morning after the nightmares that had plagued them that night.

They had awakened at the same time, both bolting upright. Before the feeble glow of dawn’s approaching light could burn the full horror of their dreams away, they faced each other, and Penny spoke a single word.

Birdman
.

The dream itself faded quickly, until all she could remember of it was feathery darkness and the slamming of a door.

When asked, Zoe said she couldn’t remember anything from hers.

They walked quietly for a while, wallowing in the shared gloom of the morning, but as they climbed the rise to the higher, wilder field above, their spirits lifted.

The top of the hollow was in sight, and knowing they would shortly be back at their place after a forced absence of two weeks cheered them.

Penny had decided to keep the wand with her from now on, at least until the shadow that had fallen over Dogwood lifted. She didn’t like leaving it behind. It made her feel vulnerable.

“Have you seen Ronan around at all?”

Zoe’s question broke the crisp, autumn morning silence, startling Penny.

“No, I’m kind of hoping he’ll be around. Maybe he knows what’s going on,” and since conversation had finally started again, Penny decided to tell Zoe something she should have already told her. She’d held her tongue for personal reasons.

Despite what Susan had said, Penny couldn’t get the idea that Tovar The Red might be her father out of her head. Even if he wasn’t her father, she was sure there was a connection between them. Penny was determined to uncover it, whatever it was. She would not allow herself to think that Tovar might have had anything to do with Jodi Lewis’s disappearance.

He couldn’t have
, an inner voice argued.
He never left his room that night. He had an alibi, that’s why they had to let him go
.

A second voice, not hers, but one that sounded like Ronan, replied with cynical humor.

Convenient, aye, Little Red? Very convenient
.

What is that supposed to mean?

He’s a magician
, Ronan’s voice spoke in her head, then retreated.

“Zoe?”

“Yeah?”

“During the show, when we looked in the mirrors …”

Zoe stopped walking, regarded her curiously.

“You saw me in the mirror, right?” Penny asked.

“Yes,” Zoe said, her curiosity becoming bewilderment.

“I didn’t see you.”

Penny told her what, who, she had seen staring back at her in the mirror.

After a moment Zoe asked, “What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know,” Penny said. “Maybe it was because I wanted to see him.”

They started walking again, and when Zoe’s silence held, Penny asked, “What do you think it means?”

“You’re not going to like it,” she said with a sad certainty.

“Tell me anyway.”

“I think Tovar and The Birdman are working together.”

There was another silence—that morning seemed to be full of uncomfortable silences, Penny reflected—and Zoe broke it.

“You mad at me now?”

“No,” Penny said. She was a little mad though. She couldn’t help it.

“Do you still want to find out? Do you still want to talk to him?”

“Yes.”

Zoe offered no reply to this, and it was just as well. Nothing she could have said would have changed Penny’s mind.

They both felt the magic of the place as they descended into Aurora Hollow—a tingling in their fingertips, a high buzz of energy that seemed to saturate them, and their excitement grew, pushing the nagging question of Tovar The Red and The Birdman out of their heads. A little, anyway.

They had never felt it this strongly before.

They hoped to see Ronan, either lounging in the mouth of his little cave or on one of the high boughs of the big tree at the water’s edge.

Ronan was not there, but something else was. Something new.

“Look!” Penny pointed to the new thing, standing between two trees beyond the fire pit.

A door, old and weathered, standing there for no reason either girl could fathom.

Zoe strode to the door without hesitation or fear, inspecting the front, then walking around it. When she was standing before it again, she grasped the knob and turned it. The doorknob gave a faint rusty, dusty sigh when she turned it, then she pulled the door open.

Trees stood behind the opening. Trees and nothing else. She walked through it, then around to the front again, faced Penny, and raised her hands palms up, as if to say
I don’t get it
.

“How did it get there?” Penny wondered aloud.

“You’ve got me,” Zoe responded. She seemed torn between amusement and concern. “Ronan, maybe?”

“Maybe,” Penny said. But there was no way to know for sure until they saw him again, so Penny decided to try not to think about it too much. They had come here to practice.

“Come on, Zoe. Let’s practice.”

The next hour of ineffectual bangs and other accidental magic proved how out of practice they were. They improved during their second hour, and by the time they were ready to leave, Penny felt as if they were not just back on track, but gaining.

Penny, pointing the wand at her shoes, had levitated herself a full ten feet off the ground before nerves had forced her back to the earth. Zoe, who had practiced the irritatingly slow growth spell on the overhead willow boughs almost every time they had visited the hollow before their forced hiatus, finally saw the results of her work. They were thicker and greener than ever, almost completely blocking out the sky overhead.

Zoe was also getting better at casting fire, and if she was quick enough, could catch the little red sliver she’d cast in midair and hold it until it had bloomed into a full-fledged fireball. Penny tried duplicating that trick and succeeded only in setting half a dozen small fires in the underbrush.

As always, they consulted the book again before they left, and as always found nothing new.

Zoe shouted in exasperation. “Ah! This is getting old!”

Penny commiserated. “How do we tell if someone else can even join?”

Zoe considered this for a moment, then grinned, her anger departed. “If they can see Ronan, they can join.”

An idea so simple and so obvious, there was no use trying to reason it out or pick it apart. All Penny could do was return Zoe’s smile and agree.

“Where is he?”

“Beat’s me,” Zoe said.

They stored the chest inside the hollowed out portion of the big tree, but packed the wand and the book in Zoe’s empty bag.

They were up the slope and halfway across the high field before they heard the voices shouting their names from down below.

“
Penny
!
Zoe
!” Susan and someone else.