As promised, the writer had enclosed an old snapshot.
I held it under the glow of my desk lamp, trying to read some detail in the woman’s silhouetted face, but there was none to find. The image was so strange, and yet it was nothing like my grandfather’s pictures. There were no tricks here. It was just a woman—a woman smoking a pipe. It looked like Sherlock Holmes’s pipe, curved and drooping from her lips. My eyes kept coming back to it.
Was this what my grandfather had meant for me to find? Yes, I thought, it has to be—not the letters of Emerson, but a letter, tucked inside Emerson’s book. But who was this headmistress, this Peregrine woman? I studied the envelope for a return address but found only a fading postmark that read Cairnholm Is., Cymru, UK.
UK—that was Britain. I knew from studying atlases as a kid that Cymru meant Wales. Cairnholm Is had to be the island Miss Peregrine had mentioned in her letter. Could it have been the same island where my grandfather lived as a boy?
Nine months ago he’d told me to “find the bird.” Nine years ago he had sworn that the children’s home where he’d lived was protected by one—by “a bird who smoked a pipe.” At age seven I’d taken this statement literally, but the headmistress in the picture was smoking a pipe, and her name was Peregrine, a kind of hawk. What if the bird my grandfather wanted me to find was actually the woman who’d rescued him—the headmistress of the children’s home? Maybe she was still on the island, after all these years, old as dirt but sustained by a few of her wards, children who’d grown up but never left.
For the first time, my grandfather’s last words began to make a strange kind of sense. He wanted me to go to the island and find this woman, his old headmistress. If anyone knew the secrets of his childhood, it would be her. But the envelope’s postmark was fifteen years old. Was it possible she was still alive? I did some quick calculations in my head: If she’d been running a children’s home in 1939 and was, say, twenty-five at the time, then she’d be in her late nineties today. So it was possible—there were people older than that in Englewood who still lived by themselves and drove—and even if Miss Peregrine had passed away in the time since she’d sent the letter, there might still be people on Cairnholm who could help me, people who had known Grandpa Portman as a kid. People who knew his secrets.
We, she had written. Those few who remain.
* * *
As you can imagine, convincing my parents to let me spend part of my summer on a tiny island off the coast of Wales was no easy task. They—particularly my mother—had many compelling reasons why this was a wretched idea, including the cost, the fact that I was supposed to spend the summer with Uncle Bobby learning how to run a drug empire, and that I had no one to accompany me, since neither of my parents had any interest in going and I certainly couldn’t go alone. I had no effective rebuttals, and my reason for wanting to make the trip—I think I’m supposed to—wasn’t something I could explain without sounding even crazier than they already feared I was. I certainly wasn’t going to tell my parents about Grandpa Portman’s last words or the letter or the photo—they would’ve had me committed. The only sane-sounding arguments I could come up with were things like, “I want to learn more about our family history” and the never-persuasive “Chad Kramer and Josh Bell are going to Europe this summer. Why can’t I?” I brought these up as frequently as possible without seeming desperate (even once resorting to “it’s not like you don’t have the money,” a tactic I instantly regretted), but it looked like it wasn’t going to happen.
Then several things happened that helped my case enormously. First, Uncle Bobby got cold feet about my spending the summer with him—because who wants a nutcase living in their house? So my schedule was suddenly wide open. Next, my dad learned that Cairnholm Island is a super-important bird habitat, and, like, half the world’s population of some bird that gives him a total ornithology boner lives there. He started talking a lot about his hypothetical new bird book, and whenever the subject came up I did my best to encourage him and sound interested. But the most important factor was Dr. Golan. After a surprisingly minimal amount of coaxing by me, he shocked us all by not only signing off on the idea but also encouraging my parents to let me go.
“It could be important for him,” he told my mother after a session one afternoon. “It’s a place that’s been so mythologized by his grandfather that visiting could only serve to demystify it. He’ll see that it’s just as normal and unmagical as anyplace else, and, by extension, his grandfather’s fantasies will lose their power. It could be a highly effective way of combating fantasy with reality.”
“But I thought he already didn’t believe that stuff,” my mother said, turning to me. “Do you, Jake?”
“I don’t,” I assured her.
“Not consciously he doesn’t,” Dr. Golan said. “But it’s his unconscious that’s causing him problems right now. The dreams, the anxiety.”
“And you really think going there could help?” my mother said, narrowing her eyes at him as if readying herself to hear the unvarnished truth. When it came to things I should or should not be doing, Dr. Golan’s word was law.
“I do,” he replied.
And that was all it took.
* * *
After that, things fell into place with astonishing speed. Plane tickets were bought, schedules scheduled, plans laid. My dad and I would go for three weeks in June. I wondered if that was too long, but he claimed he needed at least that much time to make a thorough study of the island’s bird colonies. I thought mom would object—three whole weeks!—but the closer our trip got, the more excited for us she seemed. “My two men,” she would say, beaming, “off on a big adventure!”
I found her enthusiasm kind of touching, actually—until the afternoon I overheard her talking on the phone to a friend, venting about how relieved she’d be to “have her life back” for three weeks and not have “two needy children to worry about.”
I love you too, I wanted to say with as much hurtful sarcasm as I could muster, but she hadn’t seen me, and I kept quiet. I did love her, of course, but mostly just because loving your mom is mandatory, not because she was someone I think I’d like very much if I met her walking down the street. Which she wouldn’t be, anyway; walking is for poor people.
During the three-week window between the end of school and the start of our trip, I did my best to verify that Ms. Alma LeFay Peregrine still resided among the living, but Internet searches turned up nothing. Assuming she was still alive, I had hoped to get her on the phone and at least warn her that I was coming, but I soon discovered that almost no one on Cairnholm even had a phone. I found only one number for the entire island, so that’s the one I dialed.
It took nearly a minute to connect, the line hissing and clicking, going quiet, then hissing again, so that I could feel every mile of the vast distance my call was spanning. Finally I heard that strange European ring—waaap-waaap … waaap-waaap—and a man whom I could only assume was profoundly intoxicated answered the phone.
“Piss hole!” he bellowed. There was an unholy amount of noise in the background, the kind of dull roar you’d expect at the height of a raging frat party. I tried to identify myself, but I don’t think he could hear me.
“Piss hole!” he bellowed again. “Who’s this now?” But before I could say anything he’d pulled the receiver away from his head to shout at someone. “I said shaddap, ya dozy bastards, I’m on the—”
And then the line went dead. I sat with the receiver to my ear for a long, puzzled moment, then hung up. I didn’t bother calling back. If Cairnholm’s only phone connected to some den of iniquity called the “piss hole,” how did that bode for the rest of the island? Would my first trip to Europe be spent evading drunken maniacs and watching birds evacuate their bowels on rocky beaches? Maybe so. But if it meant that I’d finally be able to put my grandfather’s mystery to rest and get on with my unextraordinary life, anything I had to endure would be worth it.