“You don’t think I would have done it already, if there were?”
“I don’t know how all this works,” Willard said quickly, holding his hands up in front of his chest, like he hadn’t meant to offend her. “Maybe I can help?”
“You want to help?” she asked. “Hmm. Well, that’s a different story.” She replaced the fork she was currently polishing back into its case and wiped her hands free of some invisible dust. She walked over to the coffeepot and poured a mug of coffee. With her back turned, so neither Willard nor I could see what she was doing to it, she fumbled around in a cabinet. She took out small, colored bottles of different things, moved them to the counter, placed them back. When she turned around, she was holding the mug in her hands. Her face had settled into an expression of compassion.
“There’s nothing I can do to help find Annabella. She has always been above my abilities,” she said sadly. “Butthere’s something you can do. Taste this, and it will reveal the right answer of whether or not the Fowl Fair should continue.”
Willard adjusted himself to his fullest height, standing straight and looking important as he took the mug from my mother. He looked into its depths, took a tentative swallow—then a deeper one—and then nodded once.
“Well?” my mother said, holding her hands in front of her like she was eager to hear what he’d learned. “What do we do?”
“The show must go on,” Willard announced confidently. He set the mug on the counter. “Penny, I thank you for your help, but there is much work to do!”
He turned and practically ran me over on his way out of the kitchen.
I walked over to the mug, picked it up, sniffed it, and took a cautious taste.
“Cinnamon and vanilla?” I guessed.
“And a bit of myrrh. People love myrrh,” Mom said.
“How did you know what he was going to say? What if he canceled the fair?”
“It’s Willard. He’s not going to pass up the chance for an islandwide shindig. This way, he feels important, I didn’t have to cook anything up, everybody’s happy. Besides, I see no reason to cancel the fair. I think it might be nice. People need a little distraction. Tensions are high.”
Tensions are highqualified for the understatement of theyear; just that morning, Liesel Channing had started crying so hard that her contacts washed right out of her eyes.
My mother sighed loudly and dumped the rest of the unmagical coffee down the drain.
“Are you all right?” I asked her.
“There’s a lot on my mind, Georgie,” she admitted.
“Like what?”
“Like how long these birdheads are willing to wait before they ask for their money back and get the hell off this birdless island.”
“Do you think that might actually happen?”
“I couldn’t begin to guess,” she said. “It’s not easy reading minds. Complicated recipe. Takes too much energy. And besides that, people don’t always think the truth.”
“But would we be okay? If they did that, would we have enough...” It was hard to say the wordmoneyaloud at the end of a sentence like that.
“Let’s just say it was your grandmother who could spin hay into gold, not me. And her gift had its limits too. We have a bit saved up, but not enough to last forever.” She paused, put her arm around my shoulders. “Tell me, you haven’t been feeling any tingling in your fingertips lately when you see hay?”
“Sorry, Mom,” I said.
“I thought not. Ah well. We better pray for a bird-shaped miracle, my love.”
Mary and I rode our bikes to the town green a little before six. The sight of the town square transformed—food tents, a small area of carnival rides, a little midway with games impossible to win—made me strangely calm. See, we could still function as an island, as a town, sans Annabella. We did not need some magical bird to make us interesting. We were unique all on our own! Look, a festival! An actual, proper, midsummer celebration of life! How very quaint and lovely of us!
Mary and I were on ride duty; our kingdom consisted of a thirty-foot-tall Ferris wheel, a bouncy castle mid-inflation, a little merry-go-round made up of a mermaid, a brightly colored fish, and a blue whale.
“Is this how we die?” Mary mused. “Of boredom?”
“I don’t think we’re that lucky,” I whispered back to her.
Vira showed up soon after with her ice cream cart. She gave us both cups and spoons, and we dug out the flavors we wanted ourselves, praising her good name.
