Magic Nation Thing (2 page)

Actually there was plenty of time before she had to leave, but she had needed to get away. Sitting down at her desk, she picked up her notes for her Future Career essay and started to reread them, but her mind kept flip-flopping back to one thing in particular that had been said at the breakfast table. To one word, actually. The word
left
—as in “since your father
left.
” As if the divorce had been all his idea.

Not that either of them had ever said so. Neither of them had told Abby much about why they’d gotten divorced. They’d probably thought she was too young to understand at the time, but even now that she was almost thirteen, they still wouldn’t talk about it. But it had always seemed obvious to Abby that everything had been fine until her dad’s firm moved him to Los Angeles and her mom chose San Francisco and her new detective agency.

As for the things that had been said at the breakfast table, there was definitely no point in trying to explain to Dorcas why Abby’s idea of a
normal
family didn’t include a parent who spent most of her time associating with people like purse snatchers and hit-and-run drivers instead of spending time with her family. And it certainly didn’t include having weird supernatural ancestors.

That was just how she felt about the whole thing, and what happened with the kidnapped kid’s locket didn’t change her way of thinking one bit.

T
HE MOOREHEAD KIDNAPPING EPISODE
began only a few days after Abby and her mother had had that discussion at the breakfast table. Dorcas had just taken a case concerning a kidnapped six-year-old kid. The little girl, whose name was Miranda Moorehead, had gone out to visit a friend who lived right down the street—and she never got there. Disappeared, it seemed, into thin air.

The police thought the kidnapper might be the girl’s father, who was divorced from her mother and had moved to Oregon. A father who had lost the right to see his daughter because, according to his ex-wife, he had a mean streak and a violent temper. But nobody knew for sure if he was the kidnapper, because he’d recently sold his house and business in Portland and dropped out of sight. And no one, not even the police, could find out where he’d gone. Then Mrs. Moorehead called up and said she’d heard about the O’Malley Agency from a friend, and asked Dorcas to take the case, and Abby picked up the kitchen phone and listened in.

As a rule Abby tried not to pay any attention to the cases her mother was working on. But this case had been a little harder to ignore because it had happened so close to where the Bordens lived. And also because Paige Borden, Abby’s absolutely best friend in the whole world, was sure she’d seen the victim at the supermarket a few days before the kidnapping.

According to Paige, she’d been right behind this kid and the kid’s mother in the check-out line, and they’d been arguing about whether to buy some candy. The little girl kept saying, “Daddy always let me buy some.” And the mother kept saying, “Miranda, please stop saying that.” Paige was sure the mother had called the little girl Miranda, which, as she kept pointing out, is not a terribly common name. And later, when the
Chronicle
printed a picture of Miranda, Paige was sure she looked exactly like the girl she’d seen in the market.

That made the whole thing a little more interesting, and Abby had even gone so far as to read some of the newspaper stories about the kidnapping. It was mainly because Paige was so fascinated by the whole thing that Abby had eavesdropped when Dorcas had been talking on the phone to the kidnapped girl’s mother. But that was all she’d done about it until the locket thing happened.

Dorcas had been on the Moorehead case for only a few days on the Saturday morning when Abby got involved. She might have flown down to see her dad that weekend, but he was visiting a client in New York, and as for Dorcas, there was no telling where she was. She’d made a quick trip to Portland the day before. And that day, who knew where? But Tree was supposed to be in the office that morning when Abby went in to look for a pen because all of hers had run out of ink.

Abby’s pens frequently ran out of ink because of her notebook, a special loose-leaf binder that was partly a diary but also contained a large collection of lists, as well as maps and floor plans. The maps she’d drawn of her favorite places, such as the Marina and Pacific Heights and Squaw Valley, and the floor plans were of houses she’d lived in or visited. As for the diary, she’d been keeping one since she was about seven years old, and she’d started making lists even before that. Long lists of everything she did and wore and ate, of all the books she read and whether she liked them, as well as all the other things and people she especially liked or disliked. She wasn’t sure why, but there was something satisfying about list keeping—even though it did use up a lot of ink.

The office of the O’Malley Agency consisted of two rooms, one of which had once been a fairly large Victorian parlor complete with high ceilings and a nice marble fireplace. But now, instead of comfortable chairs and sofas like you’d find in most people’s living rooms, it held a couple of big beat-up desks, several cluttered tables, three computers, and a couple of armless chairs where clients were supposed to sit. And beyond the parlor, in what had once been a dining room, there were more cabinets and office equipment, such as copiers and fax machines. Because neither Tree nor Dorcas had much interest in unexciting housekeeping activities, the whole area also had a lot of dusty surfaces and overflowing wastebaskets.

That morning the office was, as usual, full of dust, but unusually empty of people. No Tree, that is. But the
BACK IN A MOMENT
sign was on the front door, which probably meant that Tree had run down to the corner grocery store to buy something for lunch.

Abby managed to find a pen on Dorcas’s messy desk and was about to borrow it when she noticed a fat envelope with
Moorehead
written across the top. She didn’t pick it up right away because—well, just because she wouldn’t want to give anyone who happened to come in the idea that she was all that interested in one of her mother’s investigations. Instead she went to the front window, where she could see if anyone was about to arrive on the scene.

It was a typical autumn day in San Francisco, clear and sunny but with a lot of wind. No dark blue Honda in the driveway, so no Dorcas. Also there was a big clue that Tree wasn’t approaching at the moment: a man washing the windshield of his car right in front of the office was paying strict attention to what he was doing, which was something men hardly ever managed to do when Tree Torrelli was anywhere in the vicinity.

So the coast was clear. Abby scooted back to the desk and as she picked up the envelope some photographs fell out, and along with them a pink heart-shaped locket on a gold chain. Picking up the locket, Abby released the catch. The picture in the heart-shaped frame was obviously of Miranda herself; a larger version of the same picture had been in the
Chronicle
a day or two before. But why was the locket in the envelope? Of course Dorcas needed to know what the kid looked like, but the picture in the paper was a lot bigger and clearer.

Abby frowned as she began to understand why a locket that had belonged to Miranda was in Dorcas’s file. She was remembering the Great-aunt Fianna story that had always bothered her the most: the one about how some of the strange ancestors could hold objects in their hands and get information about the people the objects belonged to. Like a message about where the owner was at that moment, or what was happening to him or her.

A special reason why that part of the weird ancestors’ story made Abby particularly uneasy was that it made her wonder about something that had happened to her a lot when she was very young. But she wasn’t going to let her mind go in that direction. With one side of her mouth twisted into a disbelieving smile, Abby was reaching out to put the locket back in the envelope when something strange began to happen.

The locket suddenly began to feel very warm—as warm as if it had been lying in the sun. What came next, weird as it was, wasn’t an entirely new sensation. Abby remembered having that strange woozy feeling quite often when she was a little kid. The feeling that her eyes had begun to see in extra dimensions. There would be brightly colored shapes and pieces that spun around inside her head and then began to arrange themselves into patterns. One pattern and then another, until they finally came together in a real-life scene, like something in a movie. And now it was happening again. Still there, but in the shadowy distance, was Dorcas’s messy desk, and behind it a dusty file cabinet, but on a closer plane a whirl of parts and pieces was quickly spinning into view.

When Abby was really young she’d kind of enjoyed the strange sensation, as if it were her own private TV show. A show that she thought of as taking place in her Magic Nation, because that was what Mrs. Watson, the day care lady, said when Abby asked about it. “It’s just your Magic Nation, dear,” Mrs. Watson told her more than once. “Nothing to worry about.”

So for quite a while Abby went on thinking of the experience as a visit to her Magic Nation, like Mrs. Watson said. “It’s just your Magic Nation,” Abby would tell herself firmly. “Nothing to worry about.” And she went on not worrying about it even after she realized that what Mrs. Watson might have said was “It’s just your imagination.”

By the time she was nine or ten, however, Abby had started to react to the woozy feeling, and what followed it, in a different way. By then she’d begun to spend a lot of time at the Bordens’ with her friend Paige, and now and then with other kids she knew from the Margaret Elston Barnett Academy, a well-known and expensive school for girls. A school that the O’Malleys never could have afforded if not for a scholarship fund that one of her father’s grateful clients had set up for Abby when she was still a baby.

Most of Abby’s Barnett Academy friends lived lives that were more or less like the Bordens’. Maybe a little bit less, as in having slightly smaller mansions, maybe only two or three cars instead of four, and nothing to compare to the Bordens’ enormous cabin in Squaw Valley. But most of their lives were pretty much the same, with parents who had regular jobs instead of ones that required doing surveillance in Oakland one day, looking through police files in San Francisco the next, and then flying off to Portland, Oregon, to track down a suspect the day after that. Activities that Dorcas might or might not get paid for, depending on how rich—and honest—a particular client happened to be.

As time went by and Abby became very much at home at Barnett Academy, as well as at the Bordens’, she became more and more resistant to Dorcas’s Great-aunt Fianna stories. And for a long time, when one of the strange visions started to happen, she would whisper, “Stop it, right this minute,” put down whatever she was holding, and quickly do something to deaden her mind, like watching TV.

Now it was happening again, and as always, Abby resisted it. But even as she tried to stop it, she wasn’t able to keep herself from noticing that one of the vivid scenes flashing before her eyes had formed itself into a familiar face. The smiling face of a little pigtailed girl with a missing front tooth, looking just the way she had in the newspaper picture with the article about the kidnapped kid named Miranda Moorehead.

Seeing and recognizing that face kept Abby from throwing the locket down immediately, and in that extra second or two she couldn’t help zeroing in on some other things that were flashing before her eyes. Such as the fact that Miranda was starting to cry, crying hard now and pushing at something—or someone. Pushing at a large man, wearing sport shoes and a denim jacket, who was holding her by her arms and pulling her toward…

Toward what seemed to be a carnival ride. There was a small open vehicle, behind which a twisting metal track soared into the air. A track that was beginning to look more and more familiar. Beginning to look, in fact, exactly like the tracks of a well-known roller coaster in Disneyland. A scary roller coaster that Abby had been on more than once, and that certainly made some little kids cry when they thought about riding on it.

And then the bits and pieces that made up the roller coaster scene were blurring and fading away and a moment later reforming into… a smiling Miranda sitting on the shoulders of the same denim-jacketed man, who was now standing in a long line in front of what looked a lot like Mickey’s House in Toontown.

When Abby dropped the locket back into the envelope, the pictures faded, and she ran away to try to put the whole thing out of her mind, not thinking about it, or at least trying not to, even though she kept remembering how hard the Moorehead kid’s mother had been crying when she called Dorcas to ask her to take the case.

No one had said anything about Disneyland. Nothing at all. But Abby, who had been to Disneyland several times when she was visiting her dad in L.A., was almost sure she’d recognized some familiar Disneyland places in the scenes that had flashed before her eyes. Sitting on her bed, Abby twisted her hands together, trying to rub out the quivering, living warmth of the pink locket and at the same time wipe away the feeling that she ought to tell someone about what she’d seen—or imagined seeing.

It probably didn’t mean anything, she told herself. Not anything like the possibility of Miranda being at Disneyland right at that moment. And even if it did, that didn’t mean Abby ought to tell anyone about it. After all, the little girl didn’t seem to be in any danger. And if the man who had taken her to Disneyland was her father, maybe it was okay that the two of them were getting a chance to spend some time together. Abby could see how that might be true. Which meant she didn’t have to do something that would be as good as admitting that she, Abby O’Malley, really had inherited some weird powers from Great-aunt Fianna.

A
BBY WAS WORKING AT
keeping her mind off the whole locket episode by concentrating on the tuna sandwich she was making when she suddenly realized that she ought to call Paige and ask if they could play some games on her computer or even just watch TV together for an hour or so. She wasn’t going to say, “Or anything else that might help keep my mind off that stupid locket,” even though that was definitely what she was thinking. So she called Paige’s cell phone number and, with her mouth still full of tuna, mumbled her question about whether it was a good time for her to visit. To her immense relief, Paige said, “Sure. Come on over.”