Worlds Collide (The Land of Stories #6)(7)
With no further assessments to make, the firefighters taped off the area and gave the hospital manager the contact information for a destruction investigator who lived in the next town. The specialist wasn’t available for another week, so the missing bathroom remained a giant and mysterious hole until his arrival.
The scene was completely untouched until midnight on the eve of the inspector’s visit. A fifteen-year-old young man stepped over the yellow tape and had a seat in the doorway that led to nowhere. His eyes were baggy, his heart was heavy, and he hunched as if the weight of the world rested on his shoulders. Deep in thought, he gazed through the large hole at the buildings of downtown Willow Crest in the distance.
The young man had hoped that if he returned to the missing bathroom, it might provide answers to the questions haunting him. Unfortunately, all the answers had disappeared with the bathroom.
“Hey, Conner!”
A sixteen-year-old young woman suddenly peeked into the hospital from outside, almost giving Conner a heart attack. She wore a purple beanie and had blonde hair with a streak of pink and blue at the front.
“Bree!” Conner said. “What are you doing here? I thought you were grounded for running away.”
“Oh, I am,” Bree said. “I’m not allowed to leave the house until college. I’ve never seen my parents so furious. As far as they know, I just snuck off to visit family in Connecticut. I can’t imagine how they’d react if they knew we flew to Germany and back.”
“What if you get caught sneaking out?” Conner asked.
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” Bree said. “I’ve been sneaking out of the house since I was eight. I put a wax head on my pillow and leave a cassette playing of someone snoring in case my parents check my bedroom.”
“That’s both impressive and scary,” Conner said.
Bree shrugged. “It’s just like Laurel Thatcher Ulrich said. ‘Well-behaved women seldom make history.’”
She climbed into the hospital, carefully stepping on the remaining floorboards so she didn’t fall into the basement below, and had a seat next to Conner in the doorway.
“You weren’t home, so I figured I’d find you here,” she said.
“I wanted to take one last look at the damage before the inspector starts digging around tomorrow,” he said. “You know, just in case there was something we missed.”
“Any luck finding Alex?”
“Not at all,” Conner said with a sigh. “It’s been a week since she disappeared and we haven’t found a single clue to where she went. My mom and stepdad have looked all over town, but there’s no sign of her. Jack, Red, and Lester are searching the fairy-tale world as we speak, but so far they haven’t returned with anything.”
“It’s so bizarre,” Bree said. “I barely know her, but it seems so out of character for her to run off like that. Has she done anything like this before?”
Conner’s knee-jerk reaction was to defend his sister’s reputation, but the more he thought about it, the more he remembered it wasn’t entirely unlike her to go missing.
“Sort of,” he recalled. “Alex went through this weird phase not too long ago. She would get overwhelmed about something and lose control of her powers. But the circumstances were so different—she was really stressed out and easy to provoke.”
“What was she stressed out about?”
“It was back when we were searching the fairy-tale world for our uncle Lloyd,” he explained. “All her hunches about him were right, but no one wanted to believe her. The Fairy Council thought she was becoming reckless, so they ordered her to stop looking for him. Alex got so upset, she disappeared into a ball of flames, but she resurfaced a couple of days later.”
“Oh,” Bree said. “So maybe it isn’t out of character.”
“Disappearing, maybe, but she’s not the type who abandons her friends in their hour of need,” Conner said. “Things were finally looking up for a change. We had just recruited all the characters from my stories. We were finally ready to fight the Literary Army in the fairy-tale world. So why would she vanish now? It makes no sense.”
“The detective in me wants to believe your uncle had something to do with it, especially if he was the reason behind her previous outbursts,” Bree said. “But Emmerich and I were with him the entire time he was in the Otherworld. Alex never laid eyes on him. If she was provoked, it was by someone else.”
Conner nodded. “And that’s what I’ve been trying to figure out.”
Alex’s behavior puzzled them as much as the vanished bathroom puzzled the fire department, and just like the firefighters, they knew they were missing a piece of the story. Unfortunately, there was no specialist they could call to help them solve Alex’s disappearance.
“How are all the characters doing?” Bree asked.
“They’re a little stir-crazy from being cooped up in the commissary,” Conner said. “We have to let them outside for fresh air in shifts so no one around here gets suspicious. Bob has been teaching the Merry Men and the Lost Boys how to play football at the park to burn off some energy. My mom has rewrapped all the mummies with fresh bandages, so the commissary smells a lot better. The Cyborgs have blown every fuse in the hospital from using the outlets too much. The Ziblings have been patrolling downtown at night to get their hero fix, so the city’s crime rate has gone down. And the Starboardia pirates found a television and have been watching I Love Lucy reruns non-stop—it annoys everyone else, but at least it keeps them occupied.”