“Where did you find her?” Pru asks.
“Damnedest thing. My brother gave it to me last night. Said it came from one of his clients. I thought of you right away. I cleaned her up and put her on the dash of my truck, saving her for you.”
She pictures thick-bodied Mr. Marcelle scrubbing at the elephant with a toothbrush covered in Brasso. Making that pachyderm shine.
“She’s perfect,” she tells him. “She’s just what I need. Priscilla, I’ll call her. Priscilla the golden elephant.”
It’s the best gift he’s given her. And although he doesn’t know it, could never guess, Mr. Marcelle with his mustache waxed and curled has saved the circus once again.
Necco
Necco’s clothes are still damp, but they’re drying, feeling stiff and sparkling a little from the silt in the river. Necco, the glimmer girl. She hurries along the streets, through alleys and abandoned buildings, making her way to the Winter House as quickly and carefully as she can. She’ll hole up there, as Miss Abigail instructed, until tomorrow night. She’ll go through Hermes’s backpack, take some time to try to wrap her mind around all this new information: try to remember everything her mother ever said about Snake Eyes, look to her own past for clues.
“He’s a trickster,” Mama said once. “A man who is never what he seems. And he’s terribly clever, Necco. He fooled me. He outsmarted your daddy even, and you know that couldn’t have been easy.”
Necco has pulled a wide patterned scarf from Hermes’s bag and used it to cover her head, disguising herself in case she’s seen. When she’s on the sidewalks, she chooses the most crowded ones and blends in, losing herself among the groups of students and mothers trying desperately to keep track of young children. She passes the VFW, smells beer and cigar smoke, hears laughter and the dull murmur of a television through the open door. She sneaks around the side of the old brick building, cuts through the parking lot of the Chinese restaurant, comes out by the Laundromat, where a man is taking a smoke break while his clothes wash. Necco turns, heads along the back side of the City Hall park.
“Never follow a straight path,” Mama would say. “And never take the same route more than once. Vary your routine. Keep people guessing. That’s the key to survival.”
After all the seasons on the street with her mother, Necco knows the safest routes across Burntown. She’s also learned the best dumpsters for food, clothing, whatever they might need. And they knew which ones were watched by the roving eyes of security cameras. Mama hated cameras of any sort.
“They’ll steal your soul,” she warned. “It’s important that you and I are never seen, Necco. We have to live like ghosts, like shadow people. To have our image captured by one of those cameras means we ourselves might be captured next.”
Necco cuts through an old warehouse now (empty, fortunately), comes up behind Laverne’s Bakery on State Street, where she stops to check the dumpster: there are often bags full of rolls and bread, sandwiches, too, sometimes, and today she’s in luck: ham and Swiss on rye with tomato. Necco doesn’t eat meat, not since she once got food poisoning from fried chicken that had looked and smelled fine, so she pulls the ham out, leaves it on the ground for a lucky dog or cat to find. There are strays all over the city, scrounging for food, making the best of things, just like she is.
Necco gulps down the sandwich as she walks, realizing this is the first she’s eaten since the hunk of bread and cheese last night. Her stomach is in knots, but she knows she needs her strength. And she’s eating for two now. She’s got to try to start eating regular meals. Pick up some prenatal vitamins. Eat plenty of leafy greens so she doesn’t get anemic. She needs to start drinking milk so the baby will have strong bones.
But her first priority is to get off the streets. Drinking milk and eating spinach aren’t going to make a damn bit of difference if some wacko decides to put a knitting needle through her eye or throw her off a bridge. Even though she’s being careful as she ducks and weaves her way across the town, she can’t help feeling like she’s being followed, like Snake Eyes is out there watching, waiting, biding his time. The knot in her stomach grows when she realizes this is exactly how her mother felt all those years. Her mother, whom she never believed. She wraps up the rest of her sandwich and tucks it into the backpack for later, starts walking as fast as she can without breaking into a run.
There are two entrances to the Winter House: the one on the west side behind the old woolen mill, where you have to pry up a round metal cover and climb down a ladder, and the one she heads for now: the door in the rocks on the other side of the river.
To get there, she travels north on Canal Street, passing the brewery with its warm roasted-malt smells. Beyond the brewery is the area Mama called the Ghost Trains: an old switchyard with a roundabout; rows of old freight cars sit rusting on the tracks that extend out from a big circle in the center. The trains quit running before the mills did. Now, people squat in the cars, which are tagged with graffiti, and she’s always careful crossing through here—you never know who might be lurking in the shadows. She reaches down, draws her blade just in case, but all is quiet.
She leaves the old train yard, climbs the hill to the Millyard Bridge, which takes her right over the dam.
She hears the deafening roar of water charging at the concrete wall, spilling over the top. It’s here the old canal system started, channeling the water to power the mills.
Once she’s across the bridge, Necco finds the path that leads down to the water’s edge. It’s slow going; the woods are overgrown and tangled, the path hard to see in the dark. She thinks of pulling a flashlight from the pack, but doesn’t want to risk being spotted. The trail is rocky and steep, slippery in places. She grabs on to saplings and vines to keep from falling. This area is loaded with bittersweet vines that pop open each fall, revealing a red berry covered by yellow pods. “A beautiful plant,” Miss Abigail once told her, “but one that doesn’t belong—an invasive species. See how it girdles the trees, crowds out the native bushes; it’s a plant that is determined to survive.”
At last, Necco reaches the bottom, and begins to creep along the narrow path between the river and the wall of rocks. Her eyes are searching.
She finds the entrance easily enough, even in the dark. There, about ten feet up—above the old, bricked-over tunnels that were once part of the canal system—is a small door set into the stone. A magic door. A fairy door. A door that makes no sense at all, is almost impossible to believe in. When you first see it, you blink, sure you’re imagining things.
She looks carefully in all directions and sees no one, nothing, so she starts to climb. The climb is not easy—there are only a few places to put her hands and feet, which slip easily on the damp, mossy stone—but her body remembers the way. There are places where stones protrude just enough to get a handhold and foothold, little brick ledges around the old canal tunnels. She used to do this several times a day back when she and Mama lived here. Hermes’s pack is heavy on her back, and her limbs ache from the hours of walking she’s done today, but still, she climbs.
No one was sure what the Winter House was, exactly. They heard rumors that the tunnels went back to the days of the bootleggers smuggling whiskey from the north and rum from the south. Local historians said the Jensen family ran rum and had numerous speakeasies around the city during Prohibition.
Necco reaches the door and is relieved to see it has the same old broken lock hanging from the hasp. She pushes it open and heaves herself into the cement and brick tunnel, quickly pulling the door closed behind her.
Flicking on Hermes’s flashlight, she shines the beam down the tunnel, startling a rat, which runs in the other direction. She doesn’t mind rats. They’re intelligent. Focused. Survivors, like her. They’ve just got a bad reputation.
The tunnel is arched overhead, wide enough only for people to walk single file. It smells like damp brick, old wood, mildew, forgotten things. The smell hits her like a punch in the gut.
Th
is was once her home. Hers and Mama’s.
She moves forward and is relieved to see carefully woven spiderwebs crisscrossing the tunnel—a sure sign no one has been here for a while. About twenty yards in, the tunnel forks. You can go right or straight. Straight takes you another hundred yards or so, then you hit a brick wall. Necco had always wondered what’s behind the bricks; she had even started chipping away at the mortar, revealing glimpses of wood heavy and thick like ship timbers. Before she got very far with her excavation project, however, Mama died.
She takes the tunnel to the right, a strange excitement building as she gets closer. Another ten yards and she sees the heavy metal door with a rusty ring handle. Holding her breath, she tugs on the handle, pulling the door open.
Nothing has changed: as Necco moves her flashlight around the room, she sees it’s exactly the way it was when she left that last morning.
It’s not a large space, maybe ten by sixteen feet. At the far end are their beds: wooden pallets with mattresses piled high with blankets. There is a low row of shelves between the two beds stacked with paperback books, magazines, and newspapers—mostly from the free box at the library. Her mother’s paintings and drawings are scattered around the room. They are brightly colored and heavy on the reds given how many were inspired by her snuff-induced visions—a berry-covered vine that reached high up into pink clouds, where a pair of eyes looked down, watching; a fish with red-feathered wings flying up over the Steel Bridge; and fire, with images hidden in the flames, faces, a pocket watch, a little girl holding a doll.
The kitchen area has a big blue water jug with a spigot up on a shelf above the table and a plastic dishpan they used for a sink. Under the table is a five-gallon bucket for the dirty water that came from washing dishes. Every morning and evening, it was Necco’s chore to go dump this and the bucket they used as a chamber pot into the river.
Pots, pans, bowls, plates, cups, and silverware live in a dented metal cabinet between the sink and the old Coleman propane camp stove. They used to steal small cylinders of propane from the hardware or outdoor supply store. Across the room from the kitchen area is the table they used for eating, cobbled together from broken-down shipping pallets. The chairs around it are mismatched, scrounged from the roadside. Everything they owned had been cast off, rejected. But it suited them fine.
When Necco was a little girl, her father used to read her a wonderful book called The Borrowers, about little people who lived beneath the floor and within the walls of an old house. Necco liked to think of herself and her mother as Borrowers of a different sort; larger, human, but still, surviving in the shadows off of things no one will miss.
To the left of the little table area is their second entrance: a tunnel that leads down a long passageway that goes past four other doorways, all bricked up, until it reaches a metal ladder bolted to the wall. If you climb up and lift the metal plate on top, you’ll find yourself out behind the old woolen mill, a crumbling brick building on the edge of town that has been closed now for over half a century. While it was rare that anyone would trespass, she and Mama had camouflaged the round metal plate as best they could, painting it with a thick, smelly glue and covering it with dirt, stones, and pieces of brick. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d never find it.
Still searching with the flashlight, Necco spots Mama’s old red sweater draped over the chair. Two empty cups on the table hold the last bit of tea they drank together. She half-expects Mama to be lying down on the mattress, to sit up when she hears Necco enter, to say, “What took you so long?”
But there’s no movement. No sound. Only more cobwebs.
Necco goes over with her light, lifts up Mama’s cup. There’s a dead moth at the bottom—brown, dried, and dusty.
“Oh, Mama,” she says, letting herself cry for the first time all day. The weight of everything that has happened bears down on her, roaring like the water at the dam.
She sinks to her knees, clutching the empty mug.
Once she’s cried herself out, Necco finds a box of matches and lights the candles and oil lamps. She spends a few minutes tidying up, and it feels good to be busy—she sweeps, washes the two mugs, and makes sure that there’s plenty of water and propane left, as well as a few things still in the pantry. After putting the kettle on, she makes herself a cup of tea with plenty of sugar, and helps herself to a stale cookie from a dented metal tin.
She sees the easel her mother cobbled together out of sticks and scrap wood in the corner of the room. It holds the last painting her mother was working on, the whole thing draped in an old white sheet like some misshapen ghost. There is the coffee can lid she used as a palette, but the paint, a swirl of earthy colors Lily mixed herself using clay, coffee grounds, and berries, has hardened, the brush sitting in it ruined. Necco walks across the room, pulls back the sheet; and studies the unfinished painting for the first time; when Mama was working on a painting, Necco was never allowed to look until it was finished.
She sees right away that this one is different, breaking away from her mother’s usual style. It’s a painting from the time Before the Flood. She’s painted Errol and Daddy in their old living room. Daddy and Errol are sitting on the oval braided rug in front of the fireplace, playing cards. Necco looks closer, sees the cards in Errol’s hands; they’re more like tarot cards, each with a creepy image: a giant wave, a pair of dice with one dot on top of each, a Chicken Man, a terrified little boy standing behind a wall of flames.
The image of Errol on the living room floor is so like him, it startles Necco. Mama has captured the mischievous sparkle of his eyes, and the shaggy dark hair that always hung across his forehead, nearly covering the scar above his left eye. She can almost hear Errol’s voice: “Want us to deal you in, Little E?”
She reaches out, touches his cheek, feels the brushstrokes on wood. Remembers how he was Big E and she was Little E. “Together, we’re E squared,” he used to say. “Together, we’re so much more than just E plus E. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” he said.
Suddenly, she feels tired. Dead tired. But there is one thing she needs to do before letting herself sleep.
Setting Hermes’s black backpack up on the table, she begins unzipping all of its various compartments and pulling everything out. Hermes never went anywhere without the pack, and it seemed, to Necco, to be almost magical. Whenever she needed anything—a safety pin, a candle, a piece of candy—he would reach in and make it appear.
She works slowly, but determinedly, touching each object with reverence and then sorting them all into neat rows. A pencil is not just a pencil, because the last person who touched it was Hermes. Hermes when he was alive.
She doesn’t find the one thing she was hoping for most—the elephant charm with its broken chain he’d taken from her to have repaired.
It can’t be gone. It was the one thing of her father’s she had left.
Necco blinks back frustrated tears, tells herself not to think about the lost elephant now. Nothing she can do. She looks at the first row of things she’s pulled from Hermes’s pack.
In addition to Theo’s school bag with its pills and money, there are two flashlights, a soldering iron, a metal canteen, clumps of wires, screwdrivers, a circuit board, batteries of various sizes, a pry bar, a Zippo lighter, gum and butterscotch candies, a stack of index cards and a pen, a tiny sewing kit, a bundle of black nylon cord, half a dozen stolen cell phones, an assortment of various electronic cords and cables, and, zipped into a padded case, Hermes’s laptop.
She opens the laptop. It asks for a password. She guesses HERMES, NECCO, even tries his real name, MATTHEW. None of it works. She closes the screen, then looks at the next row of items she’s pulled from the pack.
A small first-aid kit, a roll of electrical tape, a roll of silver duct tape, three different sorts of pliers, a folding knife, and finally, the little leather pouch he used as a wallet. Inside, she finds four dollars and twenty cents, a bus pass, and a handwritten receipt from
the Westmore Lanes Family Fun Center. She looks at the receipt carefully. He’d paid fifteen dollars—ten dollars plus a five-dollar key deposit—to rent a locker for the month. Locker number 213.
She pulls the strange key with the round shaft and orange head out of her pocket.
213.
It’s going to change everything.
She reties the string it’s on and slips the key around her neck. After digging the tattered paperback copy of The Princess and the Elephant out of the tall girl’s satchel, she curls up on Mama’s bed and buries her face in the pillow, trying to catch a trace of Mama’s smell. But there’s only dust. She opens the book to the dedication page: For Lily, who is my everything. She closes the cover, tucks the book under her pillow, pulls her knees to her chest, and wills sleep to take her, to carry her away.
Theo
I just talked to Jeremy. He’s really pissed, Theo. Please call.
Theo has her phone pressed against her ear, listening to her messages.
She had gone to her morning classes in a daze, unable to focus on anything but the missing bag and money. She wondered what had happened to the Fire Girl, and she had to stop letting herself imagine her knitting needle impaled through some guy’s chest or else she was going to puke all over the pale yellow student desk. While her teachers droned on about derivatives and allegory, she nervously drew spirals and question marks and dollar signs in her notebook. At last, just before lunch, she realized she had to get out of there and work on a solution to her problem. Besides, if Hannah and Jeremy decided to come looking for her, they’d come to the school first. She imagined them hanging out by the front steps, waiting for the last bell to ring and for their chance to accost her as everyone skittered out the main doors like bugs.
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