Hold Tight

“No, sorry. I’m not the romantic type.” His nose crinkled. “I don’t woo girls with flowers and chocolates.”

“Woo?” I repeated with a chuckle. I couldn’t help it. It was such an odd word choice for someone our age.

He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his dark green pea coat. “She didn’t have any idea who he might be?”

“If she did, she didn’t tell us. Don’t tell Natalie I told you this, but she was hoping it was you.”

His eyebrows shot upward, disappearing under russet-brown hair. “I just met her that day.”

I shrugged, easily able to see how Natalie might have suspected him. Caden could have seen Natalie when he’d been waiting outside the school for his friend, decided to send her the gifts, and then found a way to bump into her. Natalie would have had no way of knowing he wasn’t “the romantic type,” as he’d put it.

At the entrance to the store, Mark and Kaylee stood huddled around Sarah, who was looking intently at her cell phone.

“I’ve got to go,” I said to Caden. “You’ll call Ben if you see her?”

“Of course.”

By the time I reached my friends, Mark was holding Sarah in his arms; her whole body trembled. I looked into Kaylee’s tear-filled eyes and waited for an explanation.

She wiped her cheeks. “Lauren texted. They found Natalie’s car.”

Tears blurred my vision. I had to force the next words out of my mouth. “And Natalie?”

“She wasn’t in it.”

We hugged each other.

“That has to be good, right?” I said.

Kaylee sniffed. “Yeah.”

The walk back to Lauren’s house was solemn. We barely talked. The time with my inner thoughts had me wondering if magic could help. Maybe canvassing the neighborhood wasn’t the answer.

“We need to talk to the guys,” I whispered to Kaylee. “Maybe there’s something the four of us can do.”

My fingers flew over the small keys on my phone as I typed Isaac a message: What kind of spell do we need to find a missing person?

I hit send.

A minute later, I received his reply: We scry. Meet? My house in 30.

A few seconds later, I got a second text: Bring something that belonged to Natalie.

I showed Kaylee the messages and then replied we’d be there.

Kaylee and I arrived at Isaac’s at the same time he and his dad got home. Josh showed up five minutes later, and we headed down to Isaac’s room.

“What does scry mean?” I asked as Isaac dragged a large box from the depths of his closet.

Kaylee, Josh, and I moved to get a closer look.

“It’s a form of divination. Like a crystal ball, only with water.” Isaac opened the box and began to empty it. One black and one white cloth came out first. They had been neatly folded, but I could still make out the gold point of a pentagram on each. A miniature broom maybe two feet in length (for sweeping away negative energy, Isaac informed us when Kaylee called him Broom-Hilda), two black statues, and several quart-sized baggies containing dried green plants were next to be removed.

“Dude!” Kaylee said, examining one of the bags. “Is this what I think it is?”

Isaac gave her an Are you for real? look. “They’re herbs.”

She opened one and sniffed. “Oh, it stinks!”

Josh snatched the baggie from her. “It’s wolfsbane, and it’s deadly.”

“Good to know.” She grabbed a pillow from the chair behind her and hugged it.

“The police don’t have any leads?” Isaac asked as he spread the black three-foot by three-foot cloth on the stone floor.

“They found her car near Wingaersheek Beach,” Kaylee said, “with her purse and keys still inside.”

Ben Taylor’s search team had found the car, which left the screaming question: What had Natalie been doing on a dark beach in the middle of the night? I was willing to bet she hadn’t been there alone. I had begged Dad to call his friend at the police station to find out if there was any news. It had been good and bad.

“Police brought in a K-9 unit. The dogs didn’t find anything,” I said.

“Maybe she met up with someone,” Josh suggested.

I shook my head. “There was only one set of tire tracks.”

“It’s like she vanished into thin air,” Kaylee said.

“People don’t vanish into thin air,” Isaac replied.

No, but they did get abducted, and the perpetrator could have still been out there, waiting for a chance to snatch another girl.

“She could have been forced to drive to the beach,” Josh pointed out, pulling me out of my bleak thoughts and into his.

“Police said there was no sign of a struggle,” I said.

Kaylee’s eyes widened with worry. “What if it was this secret admirer of hers?”

“You think her secret admirer followed her home from the party?” Isaac asked. “How is that not a stalker?”

“It is, dude.” Josh cleared off the sphere chair and sat down. “Girls are too blinded by the gifts to see it.”

“Shut up!” Kaylee threw the pillow at him. She leaned closer to me and whispered, “He’s just upset that I find getting flowers and candy from a guy sweet.”

“I’ve gotten you flowers,” Josh declared. “I’ll get you more if it’ll make you happy.”

She rolled her eyes and spouted a reply, but I’d stopped listening. I thought about the possibility of Natalie going off with her secret admirer. If this were the case, the guy might not have followed Natalie home. He could have been waiting for her. And he would have had to be someone Natalie knew for her to willingly sneak off with him. Unless he’d had a gun. I played out the latter scenario in my head: a guy sneaks up on Natalie, forces her to drive to the beach, knocks her out with chloroform, and then carries her to his car. He could have left his car on the side of the road. That theory would explain why the police only found one set of tire tracks.

I tossed three pillows on the floor around the cloth, eager to see what our magic uncovered.

Kaylee grabbed the pillow she’d thrown at Josh and sat on it. She leaned in to me and said, “He’s a total romantic. He just doesn’t want his friends finding out.”

I already knew that about Josh, but I was too busy hearing the word romantic echo in my brain to comment on that.

“I didn’t tell him about the flowers and chocolate,” I said.

“Tell who?” Isaac asked.

“Caden. We ran into him at the gas station. I asked him if he was Natalie’s secret admirer, and he said he doesn’t do flowers and chocolates.”

Josh’s brow pulled together. “So?”

“I didn’t tell him that Natalie had gotten anything from the guy. How would he know?”

Isaac looked at Josh. “He’s the guy I met when we got back with the chips. Ben’s brother’s friend?”

“Yeah. Dan’s at college. Caden stops by every now and then. I think he’s keeping an eye on Ben while Dan’s away, making sure he doesn’t get into trouble.” Josh directed his next comment at me. “I don’t think he’s going to keep Ben on the straight and narrow and then go abduct someone else.”

Isaac set a midnight-blue bowl over the star. “We’ll know in a minute if she’s with him.”

We sat on pillows, boy-girl-boy-girl, forming a circle.

“What are we doing again?” Kaylee asked.