Wink Poppy Midnight(40)

His voice was a song I didn’t want to end. It made me feel safe. It made me feel . . . normal.

There was a knock on the front door. I’d been expecting it, somehow.

Peach was standing on the steps, red curls and bare feet.

“Follow me,” she said.

So I followed her, short strong legs pounding into the ground with focused, kid-like purpose. Across the road and into the garden. Wink was sitting in the strawberry patch, feet in the dirt, fat white clouds shielding her from the passionate noonday sun.

“I was up in the hayloft,” Peach said to both me and Wink, now that she’d gathered us together. “It didn’t smell like hay. It smelled like tea, or flowers. And this was on the floor.”

She handed me a piece of black paper.

Wink watched me take it, face calm and passive, like it was nothing, just an ordinary thing, another note from a missing girl, left in a hayloft.

I felt Peach staring at me. “I can read,” she said. “I can read all kinds of things. I’m really good at it, better than you, probably.” I hadn’t questioned her reading skills, it hadn’t even occurred to me, but Peach wasn’t the kind of kid to let that stop her from putting me in my place.

I didn’t want to open the letter.

I wouldn’t.

I had to.

I did.

My fingers were clammy. They left damp smudges on the page.

Midnight.

It’s up to you.

Show me what you’re made of.

Gather the Yellows.

Go to the woods.

Find me.

Find me in the mist.

I read it again. And again. And then I gave the note to Wink.

Peach shook her curly hair, chin to the right and left. “I read the note and that’s how I knew it wasn’t for any of us Orphans. Going into the mist is what Mim calls contacting the spirits. If you’re having a séance, I want to come.”

“No,” Wink said, softly. “Not to this. But later we can hold another séance in the hayloft, just us, and I’ll let you be the medium this time, all right?”

Peach tapped her finger on the tip of her nose and started nodding. “I’ll make a great medium. The best ever.”

Wink smiled, and the tips of her ears popped out between piles of red hair. “You will,” she replied, very serious.

Peach ran off, shouting to Hops and Moon, wherever they were, about how they were going to be so jealous because Wink put her in charge of a séance and soon she would be bossing ghosts and spirits around, just wait until tomorrow in the hayloft.

Wink picked the last three ripe strawberries off their green stems, and gave one to me.

I fiddled with the strawberry, spinning it in my palm. “The flowery smell in the hayloft that Peach was talking about? It’s jasmine.”

“Poppy wore jasmine oil.” Wink looked up, green eyes wide open and innocent, like always.

I nodded. I didn’t tell her about my bedroom, about how the sheets and pillows smelled like Poppy at night. I just couldn’t do it. It came too close to admitting that Poppy had been in my bed. And I didn’t want Wink to know this.

“Buttercup and Zoe came to my house this morning. Buttercup found a black note from Poppy too.”

“What did it say?” Wink ate a strawberry, two small bites.

“Something about me and something about the time they went apple picking. I walked them home and we found Briggs and Thomas in the woods. I told them, Wink. I told them we’re the reason Poppy is missing. I told them that we tied her up and left her in the Roman Luck house.”

Wink dug her small, pink toes into the black soil, past her heel, up to the ankle. “I think Poppy threw herself in the Blue Twist, Midnight. I think she drowned. And I think one of the Yellows is writing the notes.”

The world started spinning. I dropped my strawberry and pressed my hands to my eyes. Stop with the blur, stop all the blurring, I can’t take it, I can’t . . .

I sat down in the dirt and Wink’s arms went around me, tight. I took deep breaths and moved my hands away from my face so I could hug her back. She was wearing a fraying green cardigan over her overalls and she smelled liked strawberries and soil and jasmine.





I WAS THERE when Midnight found the Yellows down by the river, waiting for my body to wash ashore or something, though it never would, it never, ever would.

I watched them all and they didn’t see me, not one damn speck of me. I liked being invisible, I was learning things, there were so many things I’d missed before, back when I always needed to be the center of attention.

Midnight told them all about some letter I supposedly wrote that said I wanted them to come together in the woods for a séance, as if I would ever ever ever ask them to hold a séance and contact my spirit, everyone knows that I don’t believe in that crap, Grandpa never had any patience for the mystical and neither do I. That stuff was for Wink and her mother and all their other fairy ilk, not for me.

Midnight got three of them to agree right off the bat. Thomas wanted to get out his Ouija board and ask it about the letter clues, and Buttercup and Zoe nodded in that twee twin way that used to drive me up a wall. Briggs just laughed, though, he knelt down and splashed cold river water on his face and just laughed, and went on and on about how I hadn’t even been missing that many days, and I’d gone missing before, and it was nothing to get worked up about, the bastard. Midnight reminded him what he’d been up to lately, digging around in the forest for a marble like a lunatic, all because he’d gotten a letter too, and Briggs shut up after that.