Even so, as we picked our way back to the start, I kept my eyes open for the first flutter of a ribbon, or the glimmer of an earring on the forest floor. I peered for footprints in the squelchy mud—little feet; recent prints—or a cell phone, or a house key, or a shiny dime. Hansel and Gretel; Scooby-Doo; Tintin in Tibet; Picnic at Hanging Rock; always, always, there was a sign. Of Cassie, at the quarry, there was no sign.
Peter walked me home—it was past dusk by then, and I was late for supper—and he then called his mother to come pick him up. With my parents, he was strained—both super-polite and awkward—and although the obvious reason was that he was holding up our meal, I figured he didn’t want them to get the wrong idea, to think that there was anything between us. He stayed standing in the front hall—“My mom’s just on her way”—and made stilted, bright conversation about the track team and how he dreamed of going to UPenn one day, if he could get in. His mother had gone there. We didn’t mention Cassie, but she stood in the front hall with us. When his mother pulled up, she honked from the street and he darted out the door. “Sorry to have kept you from your dinner,” he said to my parents. “We shouldn’t have lost track of time.” And to me, without looking back, “See you in school.”
I raised a hand, a sort of wave, but he wouldn’t have seen.
Over dinner, my mother asked if there’d been any announcements about Cassie at school. My father said that one of his patients, Rose Bremner, said she’d heard on the police scanner that they had some leads up near Newburyport. I nodded and shifted my mashed potatoes around on the plate, flattening them with my fork. A lot of time had gone by now; she could be anywhere. She could even be back in Bangor, although I assumed the police had already thought to look there. We didn’t talk about it, about her, very long. There wasn’t much to say. My mother asked about speech team, what I was preparing for the next tournament. I sensed she wanted to ask me about Peter—she knew I still liked him—but she didn’t.
After dinner, when the dishes were done and I was heading upstairs, she came and put her arms around me and held me to her. Then she pulled back and stroked my cheek, tucked my hair behind my ear. Her eyes were sad. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.
I WOKE before dawn. Although the air in my bedroom was cold, I was sweating under the covers. Saturday morning: no call to get up. But my heart was on alert, my dream still with me in the room. Cassie: of course. As she was, yes, but not with the sense that this was the past. It was now. We were playing a game, the kind of pretend game that we’d played for years: You be the monster, I’ll be the knight. You be the pilot, I’ll be the Resistance fighter. You be the fugitive, and I’ll find you. You be the dark wizard, and I’ll be the centurion of light. You be the returned soldier, I’ll be your wife. In the dream, Cassie, with her white-blond hair, put on a black feathered cloak—a bird cloak, a Nancy cloak—that promised to hide her, fugitive, wizard, teenage girl, and to enable her to fly. Only, within seconds, it burned into her skin, grafted itself, became exquisitely, agonizingly, irremovable. Hers was poisoned, a poisoned cloak. She shrieked in pain, her eyes white-edged, bulging, her arms reaching for me. And there was nothing I could do but stand there and watch, a reluctant but unwavering witness. Her shrieks woke me into the frigid dark, but I couldn’t figure out to what waking sound they might correspond—a bat? A cat in heat? And even with my eyes open, I could still see her, my Cassie, enveloped in the fronded, feathery blackness, all but her white head and hands, withering under the dark mantle.
Where was she? Where were we playing? What was our illfated game? I knew it, I could smell it, the site hovered on the cusp of my consciousness, just out of reach. I closed my eyes again, listened to the way her voice echoed, reverberating off the walls. In the darkness behind my lids, I saw the glimmering fragments of stained glass, and felt the smooth heft of the banister under my hand. I looked up. And then I realized what I had to do, in the early spring predawn darkness. Worried, of course, I was suddenly certain too, precisely because this wasn’t a kids’ game or an imaginary scenario, because with every minute the cloak burned further into Cassie’s flesh, and if I didn’t hurry, she would never fly, she wouldn’t even survive. There would be no way ever to get it off.
I only fleetingly considered waking my parents. They wouldn’t have understood: like Peter, they would have thought I was making things up. “You have an overactive imagination,” my mother liked to say. I needed an ally who believed the way I did in premonitions and auguries, in instincts rather than logic. Like a kid, or a prophet—or like a Hagrid. It took me only a minute to recall Bessie and the derecho; and that too came to me not as a thought but like something I knew in my deepest self, like in a dream. I looked up the number I still had in my contacts from when I did my speech team monologue in seventh grade, and even though I could see all too clearly that the clock’s green light read 4:43 a.m., I called Rudy Molinaro.
Did I waken him? Hard to say. Was he surprised? I’d guess so, extremely even; but he’s not a man of many words, nor one to show emotion. Flat affect, my mother would call it.
I told him it was about the little blond girl. The angel, I reminded him. Her name is Cassie, I said. She needs me, I said. She needs our help. As I spoke to him, I could picture those jelly-bean eyes shining dully in their pouchy sockets. It was still night, early on a Saturday morning. I was a kid calling him—less than half his age. But he listened to me, and reacted as if I were the mayor of Royston, as if it were perfectly understood that if I asked him to do something so unusual, it was only because it simply needed to be done. Because it was essential.
Would my parents, would Peter, have accused Rudy of being a stupid guy (not the brightest light, not the sharpest knife)? Sure. But that morning I was grateful, because I needed someone who could help me, who wouldn’t tell me I was just a kid, or irrational, or wrong before we even set out. He knew how important feelings were, having a sense or an intuition for something. He was the guy who trusted his dog Bessie over everyone else.