I sit there for a moment longer before it suddenly strikes me—?Will stayed after school for a project, Dr. Cliffton isn’t here, and everyone else is distracted. I push back from the table, my chair scraping the floor. There won’t be many better opportunities than this.
The daylight makes it easier to scan the rows of books that line Dr. Cliffton’s walls from floor to ceiling. The shelves even carve around the fireplace mantel and window frames. But just like last night, the book is not there.
I pause over the neat surface of Dr. Cliffton’s desk. It is clear but for a silver case holding fancy pens and a paperweight made of heavy stone. I kneel to shuffle through the drawers, careful to leave everything just the way I found it.
When I reach the final drawer, I lift a neat stack of papers. The silver lettering of the cover gleams at me: Myths, Legends and Lore of Sterling: 35th Commemorative Edition.
“For Council Members Only” is stamped into the leather.
I cautiously lift it out.
Five minutes, I think. Then I’ll put it back.
I scan as quickly as I can through the first pages, which hold genealogies and family trees of what must be the most prominent families in Sterling. Mother’s maiden name of Cummings isn’t listed.
I keep flipping. Each section holds a story marked with the family names of people from the town—?Blythe, Patton, Fitzpatrick. The opening content appears to be a history of the town’s founding and important occasions, such as the inaugural Harvest Fair in the 1850s, but other words pop out at me: guilty and suspicious and probable. There is the occasional photograph and chart peppered throughout and then a slight gap in the pages approximately two-thirds through. I run my fingertips over the sliver of exposed binding. The page numbers jump from 203 to 208.
Someone has ripped them out.
I know I’m taking too much time. My five minutes have come and gone. I glance up, thinking I hear something, then flip to the back. There’s an index. Just as I come to the C’s, I freeze.
There are unmistakable footsteps on the front stairs, the sound of the door handle turning. I tense as the heavy front door slams. I can tell it’s Will by the rhythm of even strides, as opposed to Dr. Cliffton’s shuffle and knock of cane. I shove the Sterling book back into place and shut the drawer.
Then I promptly knock over the silver cup of pens, which clatter to the floor. Will’s footsteps stop. I swear under my breath, grabbing the pens and placing them back on the desk just as Will pokes his head into the library.
“Hello,” he says. His dark eyebrows arch upward in surprise. “What are you doing in here?”
“Hi!” I say, my voice overly bright. “I was just looking for . . . a stamp. To write my father?”
It’s clear from the look on his face that I am not the most skilled liar.
“I think they’re in here,” he says. He finds a roll in the top drawer of his father’s desk and meets my eyes when he hands them to me. “First day okay?”
“Swell,” I say. “But I’m behind on everything. So I should get started.” I clutch the roll of stamps and brush past him.
When I reach my room, I set the stamps on my nightstand, then flop onto my bed, my heart still beating madly. Mother’s Shakespeare book is within reach, and I want to pull it open in my lap.
Instead I make myself turn to my pile of schoolbooks. I have extra assignments in every class so I can catch up with the others.
I settle into the window seat and flip to my biology chapter. But my thoughts keep returning to the Sterling book from Dr. Cliffton’s library. You’re supposed to be learning about osmosis, I tell myself, forcing my eyes back to the words in front of me. Instead, all I can see is the index entry I’d managed to glimpse just before Will walked in.
I’d found my mother in the C heading, listed under her maiden name. It said “Cummings, Juliet—?Possible Catalyst.”
But it was the entry following “Cummings” that made the hair on my arms rise, as if the Disappearances could be part of something much more sinister. It said:
“The Curse.”
Chapter Ten
Date: 10/15/1940
Bird: Hooded Pitohui
The bird’s skin and feathers are laced with a paralyzing neurotoxin gleaned from the beetles in its diet. The poison releases upon contact to kill any enemies that dare to touch it.
The bird ingests so much poison that eventually it becomes poison itself.
When I was eleven, I’d found the hooded pitohui in the pages of an encyclopedia. I’d sketched the bird over and over, filling margins with doodles. My precision sharpened until I had all the details perfect from memory. A daggerlike beak. Head of jet-black feathers that bled into a vibrant red chest. Colors so toxic and yet so bright that they begged to be touched.
I was fascinated by the bird’s powerful and terrible beauty.
It reminded me of the redheaded girl I had loved. They could both stop a beating heart if they lured you close enough.
Before the months with Phineas, those had been the happiest days of my life. Those short, shimmering weeks when I thought that she might love me back.
As it turned out, she never did.
Phineas and I get to know each other while I work odd jobs around his house.
I replace the rotting boards under the porch and learn that he likes planes and the music of Chausson. I scrape lichen from the gutters as he tells me about maps, cigars, and a good bottle of Bordeaux. He talks about soil when he poaches eggs for us in the mornings: mine extra runny, his always as dry as chalk and firm enough to bounce against the wall.
And most of all, I notice his obsessive tidiness. Always, the tidiness.
When I slough off the old paint that curls like hangnails around the door, he joins me and hands me a lukewarm bottle of soda. “What did you want to be when you were young?” he asks.
“An inventor.”
“You like school growing up?”
I blink out at the ocean, gray and churlish, but I am picturing my wheelchair. Seeing myself as a young boy, watching the seasons go by from the window. Sketching birds. I imagine that Phineas and I spent the same years looking at the outside world, dreaming of different kinds of freedom.
“I never went to school. One year, I got far enough to be fitted for a uniform, but then influenza swept through.” I hesitate. “I . . . wasn’t well growing up. My legs haven’t always been so good.”
“What’s wrong with your legs?” he’d said. “They look fine to me.”
“They’re much stronger now. I don’t even limp anymore.”
“Did you have an accident?” he’d asked. “An illness?”
“Just a runt. Born too early.” I’d tried to keep my voice light, but instead I went and made it uncomfortable. Bringing up the day Mother died. I took a long swig of the warm soda, and his gaze slid away from me, the way people’s always do when I realize too late that I’ve said the wrong thing.