“She’ll show up,” I said, trying to sound convincing. “She always does.”
“I hope so,” she said. “Hey—what are you doing now? Maybe we could take a walk.”
The six most beautiful words that had ever been uttered in the English language. Maybe! We could! Take a walk!!!
“I could do that, sure,” I said, trying desperately to find some appropriate balance betweenunmatched excitementandcasual, cool indifference.
“That’s great. Let me change quickly? I’ll meet you out front.”
“Yeah, sure, of course,” I said. She slipped into her room, and I tried not to actually skip for joy as I walked back through the inn and took up a post on the porch.
She joined me a few minutes later, wearing a dress with a full sailor’s collar complete with a little bow just below the hollow of her neck. It would have looked absurd on anyone else, but on Prue it looked off-handed and sweet. She had one of those old cameras with her, a clunky box that you had to look down into to focus.
“Has it stopped raining?” she asked, holding her hand flat to the sky. “That’s nice.”
That’s because you brought the sun with you to By-the-Sea; it follows you like a doting celestial body, I wanted to say, but miracle of miracles, I managed to keep my mouth firmlyshut, choosing instead to only nod and smile, the far, far, far wiser choice.
“Where should we go?” Prue asked.
“I know someplace,” I said, and we stepped off the porch together.
The sun was low in the sky, just an inch or two off the horizon. We weren’t going far. The big oak tree was a short walk, sitting directly on the southern tip of the island, so close to the edge of the cliffs that some of its roots actually lurched out over the air, and the bravest of souls could climb carefully, carefully out, holding their breath while their friends snapped a picture. I thought it was hilarious, because what I knew that they didn’t know was that the cliffs held no danger for them. My mother’s grandmother had placed a protection spell on them after a birdhead with his nose in an ornithology magazine had walked straight over the edge to his death. “There are enough ways to die on this Earth,” my great-grandmother had famously declared, “let ‘distracted reading’ be one less thing to worry about.”
For the less daredevilishly inclined, there was a tire swing attached to one of the tree’s largest branches. At full swinging power, your feet came almost to the edge without going over—if you looked straight ahead and angled your chin toward the sky, it was exactly like you were flying into nothingness, into air, into blue, into clouds. When I was younger I used to think that’s what Mary must havefelt when her feet left the ground: the soaring, stomach-dropping punch of potential.
When Prue saw the tree, she gasped a little, and then when she saw the tire swing, she gasped again, and she ran the rest of the way to it with her camera bouncing painfully on her hip.
“Georgina! Did you know this washere?” She shrieked, and then she laughed and said, “Wait, duh, of course you knew this was here. This is unreal.”
The tree was pretty impressive, even to me, and I’d grown up with it. I had seen it and climbed it and hugged it and carved my initials into it and hid behind it. It looked like a tree straight out of a Southern gothic romance; all it was missing was the Spanish moss.
Prue unslung the camera from her shoulder and set it gently on the ground, and then she threaded her legs through the center of the tire swing. I wondered if she would ask me to push her, but she didn’t, just backed up slowly on tiptoes and kicked her feet up in front of her, flying forward and back, pumping her legs, gaining speed quickly.
To our right, the sun was just dipping into the ocean. Everything was bathed in orange, peach fuzz, candy apple-y colors that made By-the-Sea seem like something out of a storybook.
“Georgina, come on!” Prue said. She’d dragged her toes into the grass to stop herself, and she was currently waitingimpatiently for me to join her. There was not enough room for us both to sit, and so I climbed carefully to the top of the swing, standing straight up on the tire with my hands wrapped around the rope for balance.
And the sun blinked its final glow, and Prue reached a hand up and touched my left ankle briefly, and this, too, must be what flying felt like: stomach-dropping, indeed.
Fowl Fair
The day of the Fowl Fair dawned to a low buzz of disappointment. There was nothing to celebrate. Annabella still hadn’t turned up. She had never been this late before. The island was in disarray, and the inn was the epicenter of its specific breed of chaos. Everywhere you turned there were birdheads in various states of mental unraveling. The energy was cluttered, confused, frantic. It seemed absolutely absurd that the Fowl Fair would continue despite Annabella’s absence, but everything had been planned, and we were an island of routine and tradition. It was impossible that we would forgo something as steadfast as the festival.
Willard Jacoby came to the inn to see my mother. He was the mayor of By-the-Sea, the first selectman of By-the-Sea, the town chairman of By-the-Sea, and basically theelected official of everything you could be an elected official of.
I knew what he would ask even before he reached the front door.
He wanted to see if Penelope Fernweh knew how to fix this. If she could throw some things together in a big black pot and magically pull Annabella out of it. “Truth be told,” he said, standing nervously on the front porch, “I was hoping maybe your mother... well, maybe there’s something she could do?”
I had to think that if my mother could have done something to find Annabella, she’d have done it by now, but nevertheless I led Willard into the house and brought him into the kitchen, where my mom was polishing silver (was my mom obsessed with polishing silver? I would have to look into this later). She looked up when we walked in, and I knew she’d figured out what Willard was going to say before he even opened his mouth, just like I had. She made a shooing motion with her hands, an indication that she wanted me to leave, but I hung back toward the door and watched. It was always fascinating to me, seeing the people of By-the-Sea trip over their words in an attempt to ask Penelope Fernweh for a favor. It was almost better than a movie.
“Penny, dear,” Willard began. “You know I wouldn’t come to you unless it was an emergency.”
I actually knew for a fact that Willard had come to mymother last year when he’d noticed his hair was starting to thin, which could hardly be considered an emergency, and the faintest smirk on my mother’s face told me she did too.
“What’s on your mind, Willard?” she asked, because she wasn’t the sort of woman who just handed things to people. She liked to make them work for it.
“Penny, the people are panicking. Annabella is so late, and... well, you know. I thought there might be something you could... do.”
