Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children(35)

“We should not, thank you,” Miss Peregrine answered curtly. I heard Millard’s bare feet slap away across the floorboards, and the door swung shut behind him.

“I would ask you to sit,” said Miss Peregrine, gesturing at a cushy chair behind me, “but you appear to be encrusted with filth.” Instead I knelt on the floor, feeling like a pilgrim begging advice from an all-knowing oracle.

“You’ve been on the island for several days now,” Miss Peregrine said. “Why have you dawdled so long before paying us a visit?”

“I didn’t know you were here,” I said. “How’d you know I was?”

“I’ve been watching you. You’ve seen me as well, though perhaps you didn’t realize it. I had assumed my alternate form.” She reached up and pulled a long gray feather from her hair. “It’s vastly preferable to assume the shape of a bird when observing humans,” she explained.

My jaw dropped. “That was you in my room this morning?” I said. “The hawk?”

“The falcon,” she corrected. “A peregrine, naturally.”

“Then it’s true!” I said. “You are the Bird!”

“It’s a moniker I tolerate but do not encourage,” she replied. “Now, to my question,” continued Miss Peregrine. “What on earth were you searching for in that depressing old wreck of a house?”

“You,” I replied, and her eyes widened a bit. “I didn’t know how to find you. I only figured out yesterday that you were all—”

And then I paused, realizing how strange my next words would sound. “I didn’t realize you were dead.”

She flashed me a tight smile. “My goodness. Hasn’t your grandfather told you anything about his old friends?”

“Some things. But for a long time I thought they were fairy tales.”

“I see,” she replied.

“I hope that doesn’t offend you.”

“It’s a little surprising, that’s all. But in general that is how we prefer to be thought of, for it tends to keep away unwanted visitors. These days fewer and fewer people believe in those things—fairies and goblins and all such nonsense—and thus common folk no longer make much of an effort to seek us out. That makes our lives a good bit easier. Ghost stories and scary old houses have served us well, too—though not, apparently, in your case.” She smiled. “Lion-heartedness must run in your family.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I said with a nervous laugh, though in truth I felt as if I might pass out at any moment.

“In any case, as regards this place,” she said, gesturing grandly. “As a child you believed your grandfather was ‘making it all up,’ as they say? Feeding you a great walloping pack of lies. Is that right?”

“Not lies exactly, but—”

“Fictions, whoppers, paradiddles—whatever terminology you like. When did you realize Abraham was telling you the truth?”

“Well,” I said, staring at the labyrinth of interlocking patterns woven into the carpet, “I guess I’m just realizing it now.”

Miss Peregrine, who had been so animated, seemed to fade a little. “Oh my, I see.” And then her expression turned grim, as if, in the brief silence between us, she had intuited the terrible thing I’d come to tell her. And yet I still had to find a way to say it aloud.

“I think he wanted to explain everything,” I said, “but he waited too long. So he sent me here to find you instead.” I pulled the crumpled letter out of my jacket. “This is yours. It’s what brought me here.”

She smoothed it carefully over the arm of her chair and held it up, moving her lips as she read. “How ungraceful! the way I practically beg him for a reply.” She shook her head, wistful for a moment. “We were always so desperate for news of Abe. I asked him once if he should like to worry me to death, the way he insisted on living out in the open like that. He could be so deucedly stubborn!”

She refolded the letter into its envelope, and a dark cloud seemed to pass over her. “He’s gone, isn’t he?”

I nodded. Haltingly, I told her what had happened—that is, I told her the story the cops had settled on and that, after a great deal of counseling, I, too, had come to believe. To keep from crying, I gave her only the broad strokes: He lived on the rural outskirts of town; we’d just been through a drought and the woods were full of starving, desperate animals; he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. “He shouldn’t have been living alone,” I explained, “but like you said, he was stubborn.”

“I was afraid of this,” she said. “I warned him not to leave.” She made tight fists around the knitting needles in her lap, as if considering who to stab with them. “And then to make his poor grandson bear the awful news back to us.”

I could understand her anger. I’d been through it myself. I tried to comfort her, reciting all the reassuring half-truths my parents and Dr. Golan had spun during my blackest moments last fall: “It was time for him to go. He was lonely. My grandma had been dead a lot of years already, and his mind wasn’t sharp anymore. He was always forgetting things, getting mixed up. That’s why he was out in the woods in the first place.”

Miss Peregrine nodded sadly. “He let himself grow old.”