The Thief

you guys have a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales up here?”

Confusion bends her eyebrows. “We have two or three downstairs.”

“No, up here, on this floor.”

“She was very specific,” Destin says.

“She?”

I want to smack him. “A woman outside told us there was a special copy of it on this floor. We were just wondering if it was true,” I say quickly. No sense in getting Dez in trouble if the book doesn’t even exist.

Suddenly, Ms. Bea’s gaze sharpens. “What woman? What did she look like?”

I’m taken aback by her intensity. “Really messy, all in leather, tattoos – ”

Then the old lady swears, and Destin and I rock back. I didn’t think little old ladies did that. “You didn’t take anything from her, did you?”

“No, why would we steal from a random creepy lady?”

Destin swallows. “She gave me a twenty.”

Bea grabs him by the shoulder and gives him a little shake. “Did you bring it in the building?”

“I – I – I paid my book fines with it,” he stammers.

She speeds away and down the stairs with the pace of someone much younger. We blink at each other for a beat, and then rush after her. What the hell is going on?

By the time we get to the front desk, Bea is breaking into the cash register with a manager’s key. As she opens it, one of the bills on top starts to sizzle. She swears again, snatching it out of the drawer and stomping it out on the ground. Cinders waft around her shoe and die.

“Beatrix?” Edna the Troll gasps.

Ms. Bea lifts her shoe with apprehension. Nothing remains but a small amount of ash on the tile. She lets out a big sigh, seeming to collapse back into herself. “It’s fine. For now, it’s fine. I got her mark before it spread. I don’t think she’s serious, yet.”

Destin and I trade a look. Something is totally going on around here, and it’s starting to feel like all the adults are in on it.

Ms. Bea picks up the telephone on the desk and dials. “Hello Abbey? Bea Graham. Did you leave the boys at the library? I’d like you to come back and pick them up. No, they haven’t done anything,” she says into the phone to my mother, but her expression facing us says the opposite. “There’s just been a small security incident here and I’d feel better if they were elsewhere for the time being. Yes. Yes, of course. Thank you.” She hangs up the phone and glares at us directly. She points at the chairs behind the front desk. “Sit. There,” she says, “Until your mother comes to get you.”

“What did we do wrong?” I ask. “I don’t understand.”

“You listen to me boys,” she says gravely. “For God’s sake, don’t ever talk to that woman again. Don’t take anything from her, and don’t let her touch anything of yours. Mothers tell their children not to talk to strangers for a reason,” she states. With an order to the Troll to not let us move until claimed, she begins her slow, arthritic climb back up the stairs, an old lady once more.

Maybe if they told us why, it would stick, I think.

Chapter 9

Jul

earlier that day

“I’m working at the library this afternoon, so dinner may be a bit late,” Bea said.

It was Saturday, and I was curled up on the couch with my history book, earmarking passages for the paper due Monday. I didn’t like the Civil War era. Or any of the war eras, really. I wanted to get to the parts of history where people were inventing things and improving lives, not mowing them down.

Bea shrugged into a light jacket. It was finally getting cool enough for that, and I was glad. November had no business being flip-flop weather, as it had been last week. “If you need anything, call the library,” she said.

“I remember,” I said. She seemed reluctant when she had to leave me alone. I wasn’t sure if that meant she was worried about me, or if she was worried I’d break her house. “I’m just working on a paper,” I said.

“Good.” She went to the front door, and hesitated. “...How are your grades?”

This was the one thing I could be positive about, so I smiled. “Great. I should make the honor roll. Ms. Miller thinks I could take AP chemistry next year.”

“Oh,” she said. “That’s good. Well...keep up the good work.”

The instant she left the house I pulled my mother’s journal out from under my textbook. I’d treated all the pages with ammonia, and I’d been poring over it every night, trying to decipher it. There was very little in it that was actually written down - most of it was drawn out. I flipped through pages of sketches of castles, thrones, and elaborate jewelry. There were sketches of people, with bewildering notes. Young drawings of my father, carefully inked. He was smiling, which I had never seen him do much of. One of Charlotte, haphazardly penned in a corner, noted boring. Several tagged John, drawn in harsh, jagged lines, as if in anger. Problem or solution? was noted on the page.

The one that particularly stood out - the one I kept coming back to - seemed to be a map of the orchard out back. There were very realistic sketches of apples in the margin, so I was assuming it wasn’t just a random piece of forest. On the facing page was an even more beautiful drawing of an apple tree, that mirrored one in miniature on the map. With Bea out of the house for several hours, I’d decided now was the time to try to find it. I had considered going out at night, but the forest in the dark was more than a little terrifying to me, so that impulse had quickly died.

Nevertheless, it was a grey day, overcast and with a hint of a coming chill. I pulled the hood of my jacket up around my ears and held open the journal. There was a structure marked Graham House on the bottom edge of the map. Supposedly I just went forward in a straight line, and I would find the tree. I steeled myself and started the trek through the grove. The trees closest to the house were tame and orderly, if a little overgrown, and mostly bore pecans. As I progressed deeper into the treeline, though, it began to look as if the forest were trying to reclaim the land, grafting onto the orchard with resolution.

A raindrop hit the side of my nose. I looked up. The sky had turned a deeper grey and I hadn’t even noticed. I zipped the journal into the interior of my jacket. The leaves above me took up a chorus I could almost hear words to.

I hurried between the gnarled tree trunks, hoping to not get caught in a sudden downpour. You would think a New Yorker would always have an umbrella handy, but someone had told me the south wasn’t like that and so mine was buried at the bottom of a bag in my closet. I felt exposed without it. Dead leaves crunched under my feet and I heard what might have been a squirrel leaping across branches overhead. I caught my breath for a moment under what appeared to be another of my grandmother’s pecan trees, judging by the shell casings scattered around the base. I’d seen pecans before, but never in their shells. I was surprised by how pretty they were – smooth and pale with little stripes.

Then came a whoosh that usually preceded a subway train – but this time it was followed by a downpour. I pushed away from the pecan tree, going further into the orchard. My new goal was to find something with a large enough canopy to shelter me.

In the early twilight that the clouds brought, I could no longer see very far into the distance. Not that I’d been able to see terribly far through the trees to begin with. The rain was beginning to disorient me, but I didn’t want to pull out the journal for fear of the rain blurring the drawings.

Then I saw it, looming ahead of me – a huge tree with apples still clinging to its boughs. I hurried forward and huddled against the trunk and breathed a sigh of relief. It was almost completely dry here. I tried to peer in the direction of the house, but saw only a haze. The earth was still warm from the past few days, so it had