by Brian Knight
Penny snuck another surreptitious glance and saw Zoe holding out a small dreamcatcher. About the size of her outstretched hand, a dozen beaded strings crisscrossed a frame of slender willow. In the center, a clear crystal caught and reflected light from the overhead fluorescents.
“That’s beautiful,” Susan exclaimed, turning it back and forth in her hand to watch the reflected light dance in the crystal. “I’ll hang it over the door.”
“Thanks,” Zoe said, and Penny saw a blush creep into her cheeks.
She turned to Penny next, and instead of looking away again Penny forced a smile. “Hi Zoe.”
“Hi … I brought you this.” She held out an old and clearly well-read paperback book, a Year’s Best Horror Stories that was older than both of them put together. “I noticed you like scary stories, so …”
“It’s great,” Penny said, and meant it. Not the book—Penny thought this one looked especially cheesy, even for a book of horror stories—but that Zoe had brought it. Maybe what Penny had mistaken for snobbery was just shyness. “Thanks.”
Zoe looked up then, even smiled. “You wanna go hang out for a bit?”
Chapter 6
The Fox’s Game
Within the hour, Penny knew as much about Zoe as she ever had about any of her friends from the city.
Zoe had moved to Dogwood at the end of the last school year to live with her grandmother while her mom and dad pursued careers as over-the-road truck drivers.
“It’s just for a few months,” she said. “They’ll get tired of it pretty soon and come back for me.”
Penny couldn’t help but notice that Zoe didn’t seem completely convinced of this. She avoided Penny’s eyes for a second, fiddling with a hole in the knee of her jeans.
“My dad’s an Indian. For a while I stayed with my other grandma on the reservation, but I didn’t like it there much, so they said I could come here.”
“Do you like it here?”
Zoe shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess. I like Sullivan’s and the rock shop, but I don’t have any friends here.”
“Me either,” Penny said. “I just moved in with Susan. She’s cool, but my closest neighbor is that little booger with the mullet.”
Zoe laughed. “Lucky you.”
There was a nervous silence, the kind that grew harder to kill with every second it survived. Then, much to Penny’s relief, Zoe ended it. “Have you seen the rock shop yet?”
“No,” Penny said, glancing back toward the Golden Arts. The display window that had still been dark the only time she’d taken a good look in it, now glowed with bright fluorescent light.
“Let’s go,” Zoe said. “You’ll love it…they’ve got the prettiest rocks in there.”
Penny had to work to keep up with the taller girl’s strides. Crossing the street halfway between intersections, Penny shot nervous looks up and down. The lack of morning rush-hour traffic still unnerved her.
They passed Sullivan’s, and she saw Susan smiling at them through the window. They waved, and she waved back.
The bell over Golden Arts’ door jingled, and she had to rush to catch it before it swung shut again. She found Zoe inside, striding toward an open door set in the far wall.
An old man behind the glass display counter nodded at Zoe and said, “Morning, Zoe.”
Then his eyes fell on Penny, and he flinched as if goosed.
Penny gave a little wave, which he returned, and he watched her all the way through the showroom door as she caught up with Zoe.
Penny found Zoe standing at the end of a long table, pawing through a bin of loose stones. “What’s with that guy?”
“Dunno,” Zoe said, showing zero interest.
While the main floor of the shop looked like any other low-end jewelry store Penny had ever been inside, the smaller back room was a warehouse of rough gemstones, crystals, and strange minerals. Shelves crowded with displays of sparkling stones, opened amethyst geodes, great shining lumps of fool’s gold, and interesting formations of unidentifiable crystals covered the walls. A row of display shelves dissected the room.
“Weird,” Penny said, staring around.
“I want to be a geologist,” Zoe said. “I love minerals and gems.”
“You’ll make a good one too,” said the old man from the doorway.
He reached into the stone bin, plucking a handful of stones at random. “What’r these?”
Zoe grinned, and named them, one by one. “Carnelian, Jasper, Obsidian, and Turquoise.”
“And this one?” He held up a blue crystal, Penny’s favorite of the bunch.
Zoe, however, seemed unimpressed. “Quartz crystal. But someone dyed it to turn it blue, so it’s not really blue.”
The man laughed, dropped the stones into a paper bag, and handed it over to Zoe, whose grin returned.
“You win again,” he said dramatically. Then he turned to Penny. “You’re a Sinclair, aren’t you?”
“Uh, yeah,” Penny said, a little surprised.
“I knew it,” the man said, snapping his fingers. “I have an eye for faces. Never was good with names, but I knew I recognized you.”
“I’ve never been here before.”
The man waved her comment away. “Don’t matter. Family resemblance. I near jumped out of my skin when you walked in. You look a lot like your mamma.”
“You knew my mom?”
Zoe quit sifting through the bins of crystals and polished stones, watching Penny and the old shopkeeper with interest.
“Oh, yeah,” he said enthusiastically. “She used to come in here all the time when she was younger. Must have had quite a collection of pretty rocks, all the time she spent here.”
He must have quite a memory, Penny thought. The excited flutter in her stomach intensified. Would he remember her father too?
“Your mamma, your aunt, and their friends were in here all the time.”
Penny’s hopes sank at once. She didn’t have an aunt. The old guy might have a good memory for faces, but seemed confused about other details.
Still, it was worth asking.
“Do you remember …” but Susan’s voice cut her off as she stepped up behind the old shopkeeper.
“Penny, why don’t you two head back to the shop? I’m sending Jenny out for a late breakfast.”
Penny didn’t know if she’d done anything wrong, but Susan looked irritated. Had Susan guessed what Penny was about to ask the old man?
“Thanks,” Zoe said, grinning as she stepped past Susan into Golden Arts’ showroom. She waved at the shopkeeper and said, “I’ll be back later.”
He nodded, keeping a wary eye on Susan as Penny followed Zoe out.
They waited outside Golden Arts for a few moments, but Susan did not join them.
“Come on,” Zoe said, striding toward Sullivan’s open door.
Penny took a step, and gave a little gasp, freezing on the spot.
The talking fox stood at the other end of the block facing her, unconcerned, as a small group of old women passed it on their way to the senior center, which had a banner over its door advertising All Day Bingo Friday.
A boy on a bicycle passed it a moment later, stopping to scan the street before he continued toward the park.
Could no one else see it?
The fox’s furry snout parted in a sharp-toothed grin, and it winked.
Penny ran to catch up with Zoe, pulling the shop’s door closed behind her.
Penny sat next to Zoe on one of Sullivan’s comfortable reading couches while her new friend cheerily recounted the story of their meeting. Zoe burst out laughing during the retelling of her favorite part, sitting on Rooster’s back and making him apologize.
Susan, for her part, tried not to look too amused as she admonished them both, but wasn’t able to hold the stern look she strived for. The corners of her lips kept quivering with a barely suppressed grin.
Penny, her attention split between the sidewalk past the glass front and Susan, nodded when it seeme
d appropriate, and promised at the end of Susan’s halfhearted lecture not to beat up any more town boys. She was afraid that weird fox might just trot up the sidewalk and push through Sullivan’s front door.
Slowly, Penny calmed down, silently telling herself that her overactive imagination had shown her the fox where a dog had been. That made sense—the people passing it wouldn’t have made a fuss about a friendly neighborhood mutt—but she remained only half-convinced.
When Jenny returned, her arms loaded with a tray of Styrofoam cups and a box of doughnuts, Penny rushed to open the door.
Jenny caught sight of Zoe. “Welcome back.”
Zoe waved, giving the doughnuts a hungry look as Jenny set them on the table in front of the reading corner couch. “Thanks,” she said, accepting an Italian soda from Susan and grabbing a maple bar.
No sooner had Susan and Jenny gobbled down a doughnut each, chasing them with heavily creamed coffee, the business day started at Sullivan’s. A half-dozen people, young and old, and even an elderly farming couple from out of town, browsed the shelves. The phone rang constantly, local businesses ordering office supplies, which Jenny would deliver later that afternoon.
Penny and Zoe stuffed themselves on doughnuts and headed back outside.
Penny scanned the street and sidewalk again, but there was no sign of a fox, talking or otherwise.
“Come on,” Zoe tugged on Penny’s arm. “There’s an amethyst crystal in there I want to buy.”
Penny had no real interest in spending the day rummaging through boxes of rocks, interesting as Zoe found them, but followed anyway.
The old shopkeeper met them with a wave, and a slightly embarrassed smile. “Welcome back, young ladies.”
Zoe gave him a distracted wave as she honed in on the back room again, but Penny lingered, more interested in his memories than his rocks.
“I’m sorry to hear about your mother, young lady. She was a nice girl. You must miss her a lot.”
Mention of her mom momentarily drove all questions from her mind. Just when she was finally thinking of something besides her mom, when it seemed she was able to go a day without crying, all the sadness crashed back down on her. Penny looked at her feet so he wouldn’t see her burning eyes, so he wouldn’t see how close to tears she was now, and said, “Thank you. I do miss her, but I’m doing okay.”
He made a sound of affirmation, almost a grunt. “Miss Taylor is the nicest person you could have found to stay with. She’ll take care of you.”
Penny nodded, then hurried to the back room, questions about her father forgotten for the time. She found Zoe standing over the same bin as before eyeing the polished stones like the contents of a treasure chest.
“Ah ha!” She pulled a cluster of fat purple crystals from the bin and held them up for Penny to admire, then rushed past her to pay for them.
Oh well, Penny thought, giving her shoulders a shrug. So what if she’s a bit weird.
Everyone was weird in some way. At least Zoe was weird in a fun way.
Rooster, his brother, and the rest of the boys were back at the park for their daily ball game, so Penny and Zoe decided to walk over to the school and have a look around. As they passed the game in progress, Zoe stopped and said, “Look at that!”
Penny turned and saw the fox again, sitting in the outfield, watching the game.
“You … you can see it too?”
Zoe gave her an incredulous sideways glance and said, “Of course I can.”
However, when the fox rose on all four legs and trotted into the infield, Zoe’s mouth dropped open. The fox passed between second base and shortstop, stopping behind the pitcher’s mound and Rooster.
She turned back to Penny and said, “Can’t they see it?”
Penny shrugged, continuing to watch the spectacle.
Rooster’s arms pinwheeled in a comically exaggerated pitch, but before he could release the ball the fox stepped up behind him and grabbed the hem of his shorts with its teeth. It yanked them down to his ankles, exposing Rooster’s saggy, stained underwear.
The other boys in the field, including Rooster’s older brother, exploded in laughter as Rooster’s pitch flew wild and he scrambled to get his shorts back up.
Penny was too shocked to laugh, but Zoe laughed hard enough for both of them.
“Do you think we can get it to follow me home? Maybe I could train it to tie his shoelaces together.”
Rooster turned and shook a fist at them, as if they’d somehow caused his shorts to fall down.
The fox was gone.
Chapter 7
The Fox and the Box
Penny and Zoe rounded off their day with an exploration of the school grounds, lunch at the little restaurant next to Sullivan’s, and a walk along the Chehalis River. Zoe kept stopping to pluck interesting rocks at the water’s edge.
Later, they walked to Zoe’s house, where her grandmother had fallen asleep on the couch watching her favorite afternoon soap operas. They tiptoed through the small house to Zoe’s room, where she showed off her rock collection and a full shelf of books, all of which she had read at least once.
“We used to move a lot,” she said. “I never got a chance to make many friends, so I read.”
Her reading tastes ranged from Nancy Drew, to Harry Potter, to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Most were fantasy, everything from Lord of the Rings to Discworld. There was even a selection of old geology textbooks, and a few dedicated to nothing but gems and crystals. Some of these had library stickers from towns where Zoe had lived at one time or another.
Penny finally thought to check the clock on Zoe’s nightstand, and panicked. It was five till five.
“Don’t worry, I’ll give you a ride back,” Zoe said, guiding her out through the back door, into the overgrown backyard—where Penny saw a bicycle so old and ugly, she would have almost rather been late than accept a ride on it. It was bulky, with faded yellow paint, rust spots dusting the frame like freckles, a worn banana seat, and long, curving handlebars that would have looked at home on a motorbike.
Zoe seemed to have read Penny’s mind.
“I’ll stay off Main Street,” she said with an apologetic look.
Zoe pumped the bike’s peddles with reckless abandon, shooting blindly across intersections, hopping over curbs; Penny sat behind her, holding on for dear life.
They skidded to a stop in the gravel parking lot behind the bookstore just as Susan stepped from the back door and locked it behind her.
“There you are,” she said upon spotting them. “I thought maybe you forgot about me.”
“I didn’t forget,” Penny lied, climbing down from Zoe’s bike. She felt depressed as she stepped toward the old Falcon. The best day she’d had in weeks was at an end now, and the thought of spending the rest of the evening alone in her room, or watching TV in the living room, was unbearable.
“Susan, can Zoe stay over tonight?”
Penny was sure Susan would say no, and equally sure that Zoe would be tired of her company by then.
Susan gave them a quick look, seemed to be making up her mind, and said, “Sure, why not. Do you think your grandmother will let you, Zoe?”
“Maybe,” Zoe said, but she sounded unsure. “Can I call and let you know?”
“That’s fine. Will you need a ride?”
“No,” Zoe said quickly. “I know where you live. The big house on Clover Hill. I can ride my bike.”
Penny gave Zoe her phone number, which Zoe wrote down on the back of her hand. Then Zoe was off, spraying a rooster tail of dust and gravel as she peddled toward her house.
Susan watched her until she disappeared around a corner a block away, then turned back to Penny. “Isn’t that a long way to ride?”
Penny thought so too, but said, “She does ride pretty fast.”
They stopped at the little video store at the end of town and rented a movie in anticipation of Penny’s first sleepover, then drove home with the windows open in the waning heat, a comfortable
wind blowing through the car.
“Well, what do you think kiddo? Gonna survive out here in the sticks?”
Staring out the window at the blurred countryside, Penny thought she saw something pace them, then disappear into the brush—something furry and red, about the size of a dog.
She smiled.
“It’s weird, but I think I’ll get used to it.”
They were home nearly an hour before Zoe called back.
“I’m coming over, but I have to wait for a little bit.” She sounded anxious.
“We can pick you up if you want.”
“No,” she said at once. “I can ride. Really, I like riding.”
“Okay, sure,” Penny said, a little confused by Zoe’s insistence.
“Um, it’ll be a bit, but please don’t call. Grandma’s going to bed.” After offering a hurried “Good bye,” Zoe hung up.
Is she embarrassed about Susan meeting her grandma?
Is she afraid her grandma won’t like me?
They ignored their grumbling stomachs, deciding to save dinner and the movie for when Zoe arrived. They watched television, and the clock hanging over the hallway entrance.
An hour passed, and still Zoe did not show up.
“I’m going to start dinner now,” Susan said. “If she isn’t here in a half hour, I’m calling.”
As much as Penny wanted to respect Zoe’s wishes and not disturb her grandmother, she was starting to worry.
“She said it’d be a while,” Penny said, but shut up at the look Susan shot her.
A half hour later their dinner of hamburgers and fries was finished, Zoe’s resting on a covered hot plate, as Penny had persuaded Susan to wait until they had eaten.
Fifteen minutes later, Susan searched their phone’s caller ID and redialed Zoe’s number, then frowned and hung up.
“It’s busy,” she said, “or off the hook.”
Penny’s nerves could take no more, and when Susan suggested they go for a drive to look for Zoe, she didn’t argue. However, they hadn’t made it off the front porch, before they saw her in the distance, pedaling up their long driveway.
Penny sighed, and relaxed a little.
“Hi,” Zoe said, and frowned when she saw the keys hanging from Susan’s hands. “Where are you going?”