by Joan Holub
“As in Leader of E.V.I.L.? Ooh! Who could it be?” Red asked. She and Cinda began discussing ideas. Half-listening, Snow picked a crystal ball at random and twirled it in circles on the table like a top. Then she leaned toward Wolfgang and quietly said, “I guess you know that my stepmom could get you kicked out of the Academy for stealing that pipe.”
He shook his head. “Won’t happen. She won’t tell because she’s as guilty as I am! More, actually.”
Snow wasn’t so sure about that. “No one saw you give Ms. Wicked the pipe, right?”
He nodded. By now, the other two girls had given up on ideas for who the E.V.I.L. leader could be and were just listening to Wolfgang and Snow.
“Then it’s your word against hers,” Red said, sounding concerned.
“And my stepmom is a very good liar,” Snow informed Wolfgang. “She could definitely get you kicked out!”
Wolfgang stood and began to walk to and fro, dodging various floating crystal objects as he paced. Finally, he returned and brought up a good point. “Principal R would wonder why she took so long to tell him. When it comes to the Society, he knows more than he lets on. My grandtress, I mean Grandmother Enchantress, told me so.”
“Your … um … grandtress?” Snow asked, flashing him a look of confusion.
“That’s what I call her for short,” Wolfgang explained, half-sitting across from her on one edge of the table. “Great-great-grandmother takes too long to say. And Grandmother Enchantress is a mouthful, too.”
Snow frowned as she gave her crystal ball another spin. Red had never told her that Wolfgang and Grandmother Enchantress were related. Cinda didn’t seem surprised, though. Did Rapunzel know? Was Snow the only one that hadn’t been told? Because Red didn’t entirely trust her? Well, that really stung.
Avoiding Snow’s eyes, Red picked up a crystal dragon and pretended to examine it. Humph, thought Snow as she twirled the crystal ball again.
“I hope this missing-pipe disaster doesn’t affect my chances of getting into E.V.I.L.,” Wolfgang said. “The Society is supposed to vote on my membership tonight.”
Just then, Rapunzel burst into the room. “I didn’t see any empty spaces where the diary could have been in the D section.” Her eyes skimmed everyone’s faces. “What did I miss?”
“Diary?” echoed Wolfgang.
As Red produced the diary from her basket and showed Wolfgang the inscription, Cinda and Snow filled Rapunzel in on what she missed. “Sorry I couldn’t show you the diary during class,” Red told Wolfgang. “Someone else might’ve seen.”
“Who do you suppose Lotte G. was?” Rapunzel asked him.
From out of nowhere, a voice replied, “Not was. Is.”
Startled, the girls all gasped, wondering where the voice had come from, but Wolfgang only grinned.
Snow’s green eyes narrowed on him. Before she could speak, a sparkly pink mist began swirling inside the crystal ball she’d been spinning. She snatched her hands from it in surprise. Suddenly, the ancient, lined face of Grandmother Enchantress appeared in the ball. She looked a little dizzy to Snow. She hoped it wasn’t because of all the spinning!
“So this is where you’ve been keeping her crystal ball?” Red asked Wolfgang.
“Not a bad hiding place, huh?” he said, grinning. “Who in E.V.I.L. would think to look for it among all these other crystal balls?”
Snow had to agree he’d chosen well.
“So back to your question, my grandtress wasn’t always called Grandmother Enchantress,” he told Red with a smile.
“Certainly not,” the head in the ball agreed. “I was young once. And back then, my nickname was Lotte. As in Charlotte.”
“And what did the G stand for?” Snow couldn’t help asking.
Grandmother Enchantress blinked. “Why, Grimm, of course. I’m Wilhelm and Jacob’s one and only sister!”
The girls’ mouths fell open and Red flashed Wolfgang a look that plainly said, You should have told me. Snow couldn’t help feeling a bit satisfied. Maybe now Red would understand how it felt when a friend withheld important information!
“I was several years younger than the two of them,” the enchantress went on. “But fortunately that didn’t stop them from including me in their adventures.” A happy, faraway expression came into her eyes.
“So this diary is yours?” Red asked, holding the book up to the ball.
“Indeed,” the enchantress confirmed. “I’ve wondered where it got to all these years. I used to teach Scrying classes in my younger years, and I misplaced it one day.”
“Ms. Wicked must have found it,” said Snow.
“And she tore a page from it,” Cinda informed the enchantress. Red flipped through the pages and showed her where it had been ripped out.
“Oh, dear. I believe that page explained that I’d hidden the mapestry under the tile in the Great Hall,” said the grandtress. Her wrinkly face wrinkled even more with worry now as she nodded. “If the Society is searching for the mapestry, that must mean they also plan to search for Grimmlandia’s fabled treasure.”
“Like us!” said Red.
Rapunzel looked at Wolfgang. “Who all is in the Society anyway? Is Mr. Hump-Dumpty?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “That’s one of the things I hope to find out by spying on them. All I know now is that Ms. Wicked values his knowledge of Grimmlandia history enough that she gave the diary to him to examine and decide if it was genuine.”
Snow nodded. “That makes sense.” Her stepmom was shrewd. It was a precaution she would take.
He paused. “When she saw me in the hallway before third period on Wednesday, she asked me to fetch the diary back. Apparently, Mr. Hump-Dumpty wouldn’t return it. I asked him for it like she wanted, but had no luck, either.”
“I saw you go in there,” Snow admitted. “Which later made me suspect you’d been planting the pipe on Mr. Hump-Dumpty.”
“Think your stepmom put the pipe in his pocket as payback?” Rapunzel asked.
“Wouldn’t put it past her,” said Snow, sighing.
“The good news is that the instructions on that diary page won’t do anyone in the Society much good since we already found the mapestry under the tile before they could,” said Cinda.
“But what will happen when E.V.I.L. discovers that the mapestry isn’t there?” Red asked.
“Ah, but perhaps it will be,” the grandtress said at last, her eyes twinkling. “If we’re in time.” Her eyes shifted to Snow’s blue bag, which was sitting on the table right beside the enchantress’s crystal ball. It was as if she somehow knew about the tapestry hidden inside!
Red cocked her head. “I don’t understand.”
Grandmother Enchantress looked over at Snow now and smiled. “Snow will explain.”
Huh? How had Grandmother Enchantress known what she was working on? Snow wondered. But that was the kind of question you simply didn’t ask an enchantress. Just like magicians, they had their professional secrets.
“Okay, I have something to show you,” Snow announced. Her friends all stared at her as she opened her blue bag. She glanced down into it, and for about a half second she thought she glimpsed some tiny hands waving at her. And grinning bearded faces? Then the fake mapestry practically leaped into her hand. She set it on the table and opened her bag wider, tilting it and causing everything inside to begin tumbling onto the table. On the way out, her handbook fell open. There was a quick flash. Poof! Just like that, the figures were gone. Weird with a beard!
No one else seemed to have noticed. As they watched her unfold her needlework project, she decided she’d probably only been imagining things because she’d been up so late last night. Tonight she really needed to get more sleep!
When Snow’s fake mapestry lay flat on the table at last, Cinda looked puzzled. “A blank piece of tapestry fabric? I don’t get it.”
“It’s a mapestry,” Snow explained. “A fake one almost identical to the real one except it’s not magic in an
y way.” She ran a finger over it, pointing out and naming the various locations she’d stitched. “You can’t see anything yet because I’m using invisible thread to make it.”
“Which means that until the mapestry is completely finished, it’s only visible to you,” said Red.
Snow nodded, then her gaze shifted to the enchantress. “Unless you can see it, too?”
Grandmother Enchantress smiled. “I can, actually. And it’s perfect.”
Snow glowed under this praise. Just then some of the sparkly pink inside Grandmother Enchantress’s crystal ball whooshed out and covered Snow’s tapestry project. She pushed back in her chair, surprised. When the pink sparkles evaporated, Red exclaimed, “Hey, I can see your stitching now!”
“Me, too,” Rapunzel and Cinda chimed in.
“And me,” added Wolfgang.
A feeling of pleasure filled Snow as they crowded around to marvel at it. She started gathering her belongings to stash them back in her bag. Noticing that the opal brush her stepmom had given her had gotten tangled up in some of her thread twist, she began carefully untangling the threads from the brush’s bristles.
“Let’s compare,” said Red, as she opened the hinged lid of her basket and pulled out the real mapestry. Snow continued untangling threads from her brush as she watched Red spread the two stitched maps out side by side on the table.
“Grimmazing!” said Rapunzel.
“The one you’re making looks exactly like the real one!” Wolfgang told Snow in awe. “You did it from memory?”
Snow nodded. Having successfully untangled the brush and threads, she set them down. Instantly, the brush began tangling itself in the threads again. She gasped. It was another of her stepmom’s cruel tricks! If the brush had stayed in her bag much longer its bristles probably would’ve clawed through the thread twist and the stitches of her tapestry, too. Even through her purse. She hated to think what the brush might have done to her hair if she’d actually used it that morning!
She remembered what her stepmom had said when she’d given it to her. Use it in good health. Oh, right! For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, Snow vowed never, ever to trust her stepmom again.
“What’s wrong?” Cinda asked her, seeing her expression. The others had all been so focused on the tapestries that they hadn’t noticed the brush’s behavior.
“Nothing,” said Snow. She tossed the brush across the room into a crystal trash can. Thunk! Good riddance.
“Score!” Wolfgang cheered.
Snow couldn’t help smiling a little at that. “There’s still the Great Hall, Pink Castle, and Neverwood Forest left to finish,” she said as the others continued to compare the twin mapestries.
“No, your forest is done,” Red corrected.
“What?” Looking closely at her mapestry now, Snow did a double-take. It was true, she realized. She didn’t recall having stitched the rest of it or getting the wall surrounding it completed, either. But she must have.
“Your stitches are perfect,” Cinda said in admiration. “You’ve even matched the colors.”
“I left out your cottage on purpose,” Snow told the enchantress. On the real mapestry, a tiny representation of the Enchantress’s cottage was smack dab in the middle of the embroidered Neverwood Forest, but Snow’s forest just showed trees there. “In case it ever fell into the wrong hands, I didn’t want to direct anyone to where you live.”
The enchantress nodded in approval. “Good thinking,” she said warmly.
“The wrong hands?” Red asked, eyeing Snow with new suspicion. “Why did you make this thing, anyway? How did you know we’d need it?”
Quickly, Snow explained about the crystal ball order form she’d seen Ms. Wicked holding just yesterday morning. “The Society wants a mapestry, so we’ll give them one. A fake one,” she finished. She was gratified to see some of the suspicion fade from Red’s eyes.
“Snow has provided just the right solution to our problem!” Wolfgang’s grandtress congratulated her.
“Thanks.” Snow smiled. After a slight hesitation, she added, “Only, I’m worried that E.V.I.L. will know my mapestry’s a fake when they discover there’s no magic in it.”
The enchantress smiled back at her from inside the crystal ball. “Not to worry. I’ll —”
Suddenly, she looked over her shoulder at something the others couldn’t see. “Someone’s coming. I must go.” She raised one hand and pointed a finger at Snow’s fake mapestry. At once, it folded in half and rose from the table. It hovered over the crystal ball for a moment before being sucked inside it.
The girls stared in amazement as the mapestry appeared in the enchantress’s hand within the ball. “When the time is right and the mapestry is ready, I’ll return it to Wolfgang, so he can put it under the tile in the Great Hall where the Society will surely search for it,” she told them. Then she turned away and scurried off, becoming smaller and smaller in the crystal ball. She was only a few inches tall in the crystal ball when she stopped and turned back toward them. “Almost forgot. I’m keeping this.” As the enchantress spoke, her diary flew from the table and into the crystal ball, where it appeared in her free hand. Then she dashed off again, disappearing into the ball’s misty pink cloud.
As Red tucked the real mapestry back into her basket, she said to Wolfgang, “Maybe you should leave the library first. Just in case we run into Ms. Wicked.”
Good idea, thought Snow. Her stepmom knew that Wolfgang and Red saw each other for play practice, but she’d be suspicious of him hanging with all four girls.
Wolfgang nodded. “See you, Red Robin,” he told Red in a fond, teasing voice. With a wave of farewell to the rest of them, he headed out the glass door of the Crystal Room back into the library. Snow trusted him a bit more now than she had before. But she still didn’t trust him completely. Maybe because shape-shifting wolf-boys just didn’t seem all that trustworthy!
Minutes later, the four Grimm girls headed out of the Crystal Room, too. Just before they left the library, Snow pulled the others aside. “Something’s bothering me about that diary.”
Her three friends looked at her expectantly.
“Well, what is it?” asked Rapunzel.
“Are we sure that it’s what we were supposed to find?” Snow blurted. “It hasn’t been much of a help. Or a treasure clue or anything. Maybe we should still be searching for something else.”
“My glass slippers did lead us to the diary,” Cinda said uncertainly.
“They did,” Red agreed. She hesitated. “But maybe Snow’s right. I mean, if the diary was what we were supposed to find, it seems like a new trail of golden stitches should have appeared on the real mapestry by now.”
“Maybe they’re just slow in appearing this time,” said Rapunzel.
“Maybe,” said Red. “But even though the trail stitches have faded away, the X is still there in the same spot as last night. I noticed it just now in the Crystal Room.”
“Really?” said Cinda. “I guess I was too busy admiring Snow’s duplicate mapestry to see that.”
“I didn’t notice, either,” admitted Snow.
“Nor me,” said Rapunzel. Her forehead wrinkled in thought for a moment. “The glass slippers led us to Mr. Hump-Dumpty’s desk,” she said at last.
The girls all looked at one another. Then, without another word, they raced out the library exit, up the halls that were empty by now, and back downstairs to the first floor of Pink Castle and Mr. Hump-Dumpty’s room.
Red poked her head in Mr. Hump-Dumpty’s door, then looked back at the others. “The coast is clear,” she whispered, pushing the door wider. As the girls slipped inside, Snow sneaked next door to peek inside her stepmom’s room. Seeing that it was empty, too, she heaved a sigh of relief and rejoined her friends.
“I’ll keep a lookout,” said Red, waving Snow past her when she came back inside the History classroom. Snow nodded and joined the other two girls as they searched Mr. Hump-Dumpty’s desk. There had to
be something else in it that was what they were really supposed to find!
“This old desk is so cool,” Snow said. “My stepmom told me the ones like this are left over from the time the school was built.” Snow ran her hand over one of its drawer fronts, which was carved with an intricate flower and leaf pattern. But she hesitated to open it. It was a teacher’s desk, after all.
Rapunzel didn’t hesitate one bit. She pulled on an ornate brass handle and opened the center drawer. “Nothing but ink bottles and vellum paper pads,” she announced in disappointment.
Snow slowly pulled open a drawer, too. “Same here.”
“Ditto,” said Cinda, shutting the drawer she’d searched.
Squeak! Snow winced at the sound as she pulled open a bigger bottom drawer. She kneeled and leafed through the papers inside. Mostly old test papers and essays. Then she noticed a bottle of Cracks-be-Gone and some Shell Bandages. “There’s some weird stuff in here,” she murmured.
Suddenly, Cinda giggled. “I’ll say.” She had been poking around in the top right drawer and now pulled something out of it. It was a large, floppy, bright yellow bow tie with red, blue, and green polka dots all over it. “Look at this!”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Mr. Hump-Dumpty wear that,” Red said in a loud whisper from over by the door.
“Good thing, too,” quipped Rapunzel. “He’d look like a clown!”
The girls all laughed, and Snow knew they were all picturing Mr. Hump-Dumpty in the bow tie, with huge red lips, baggy trousers, and big shoes.
Cinda hesitated as she started to put the bow tie back inside the drawer. “Think this is what we were supposed to find?”
“I’ll check the mapestry,” said Red, pushing her basket down her arm so she could open it up. “Nope, the old X is still there,” she reported back from her post by the door.
Snow had emptied out the bottom drawer by now, but found nothing of real interest. As she was stuffing the folders and papers back inside, however, her hand happened to brush the back of the drawer.
Snap! She let out a gasp as a panel slid up. “There’s something behind this drawer. In a secret compartment,” she said in excitement. She grasped the silvery object she’d glimpsed and pulled it out to examine it. “A hand mirror!” Her face fell — and the mirror did, too. When she saw what it was she’d found, she let it drop back into the drawer.