“When rats fly!” said Juliet dismissively, wishing she had never brought up the subject. She tousled Byron’s hair, then headed for her own room, stopping first to peer at her little sister. Clarice was sleeping soundly, thumb tucked firmly in her mouth.
Juliet sighed. Sometimes she wished she could be a little kid again. Life was so much simpler then!
As she was getting undressed, she found the amulet in her pocket. She had meant to show it to her mother when she first came home, but everything had been all crazy because they had company. She admired the delicate carving again. Then she opened the tiny clasp, put the chain around her neck, and fastened it.
She felt dizzy for an instant. From somewhere came a sound almost like a sigh.
Juliet shook her head and glanced around.
She was alone. Alone and imagining things, she told herself. She grabbed her brush and ran it through her tangled red curls, glancing in the mirror as she did. For once, she was not unhappy with what she saw.
I’m pretty, she thought in surprise.
When Juliet went down to breakfast the next morning, she found her mother making coffee and Margaret standing at the sink, watering her slug.
“How’s Smitty today?” asked Juliet.
Smitty was the name of the slug. Margaret had brought him home from the Venus Harbor Floral Emporium (motto: “We let your love bloom!”), where she had a weekend job. She kept Smitty in a glass container she called the sluggarium and fed him flowers from work. He had been less than an inch long when she first found him. Now he was as big as Margaret’s pinky finger—which was where he happened to be resting at the moment, happily stretching out his eye stalks as she ran a gentle stream of warm water over his back. Margaret had added three snails and another slug to the container over the last few months, but Smitty—who was named for an ex-boyfriend—was still her favorite. She claimed she preferred slugs because they had the courage to travel without a shell.
Margaret’s cat, Queen Baboo de la Roo (usually referred to by Mr. Dove as “that surly pile of fur-covered fat”), was sitting on the counter next to Margaret, watching the entire process with fascination. The cat did not belong there, but Mr. Dove had long since despaired of enforcing that rule.
Every once in a while, Queen Baboo would stretch a tentative paw toward the slug. Fortunately for Smitty, a sharp word from Margaret was enough to make the cat pull back.
Yawning, Juliet went to the table. Her mother had a bowl of cereal already set out for her.
“Good morning, sleepyhead!” said Mrs. Dove cheerfully. Then she stopped what she was doing to stare at Juliet. “You’re looking particularly lovely this morning,” she said at last.
Juliet felt herself blush. “Thank you,” she murmured. Then, taking a deep breath, she said, “Mom, Arturo acted really weird last night.”
“Arturo was born weird,” said Margaret from her place at the sink.
“At least he doesn’t have a pet slug,” shot back Juliet.
“He ought to get one,” replied Margaret calmly. “Might do him some good to have a brother.”
Mrs. Dove sighed. “Acted weird in what way?” she asked, pouring herself a cup of coffee and coming to sit in front of Juliet
“I don’t know. He kept looking at me.”
“That’s weird all right,” said Margaret.
“And he told me my hair was pretty.”
“Weirder and weirder,” said Margaret, nodding her head wisely. “Maybe we should call the men in white coats to come and take him away.”
“That’s not weird, dear,” said Mrs. Dove, ignoring her eldest daughter. “Arturo has just started to notice that you’re a girl.”
“And you don’t think that’s weird?” asked Margaret, who had transferred Smitty back into the sluggarium and was now bathing one of the snails.
“Margaret, don’t you have something else to do?” asked Mrs. Dove.
Margaret shook her head happily. “I’m free as a bird,” she trilled.
“Well, if you can’t keep out of this, I’ll find something for you to do,” said Mrs. Dove sharply.
Margaret made a face. “Come on, kids,” she said, picking up the sluggarium. “I can tell when we’re not wanted!”
Mrs. Dove shook her head. “If that girl wasn’t such good source material, I might have to do something terrible to her.”
Her comic strip, The Sheldons, was set underwater. Even so, it featured a family whose antics sometimes veered too close to the Doves’ real life for the taste of her children.
“It’s all right, Mom,” said Juliet. “You can do something terrible to Margaret if you want.”
Mrs. Dove sighed. “The fans would never forgive me. Now, let’s talk about Arturo. Was he rude to you?”
Juliet thought for a moment. “No, he was just . . . well, kind of mushy.” She made a face at the memory. Then, speaking more slowly, she said, “But that wasn’t the only weird thing that happened last night.”
Speaking quietly, even though there was no one else in the kitchen, she told her mother about the flowers and the mysterious woman in white. Juliet wanted to tell her mother about the amulet, too. But somehow that was harder to talk about, and before she could figure out how to explain it without sounding totally crazy, Mrs. Dove pushed herself away from the table, saying, “Let’s go outside. I want to see the flowers. And I want to take a look at where this woman was standing.”
Juliet followed her mother into the backyard. As they walked toward the flower beds, she saw at once that the tulip buds were tightly closed.
“I swear they were open, Mom,” said Juliet. She knew she sounded a little desperate now.
“I don’t understand how that could be,” said Mrs. Dove gently. She cupped one of the buds in her hand. “Look, Juliet. This won’t be ready to bloom for days yet.” She looked around. “All right, where was this woman standing?”
“Over there.”
Together they went to examine the spot where Juliet had seen the white-clad woman. The ground, moist and muddy from recent rains, was marked by small, light footprints.
“How old do you think she was?” asked Mrs. Dove.
“I couldn’t tell. I didn’t get that close. And it was kind of foggy.”
Mrs. Dove sighed. “I suspect it was Nonny Clark’s great aunt Alvina. Poor Alvie is a little, well, you know . . .” Mrs. Dove shrugged and let the words dangle. “Alvie’s not supposed to be out on her own, but sometimes she wanders at night.”
All the kids in the neighborhood knew about Alvina Clark, of course. They liked to whisper about the crazy things she did—even though only two or three of them had ever actually seen the woman.
Juliet was one of them. Late one night, two summers earlier, she had poked her head out of her window to look at the stars. While she was staring up, she heard a strange voice crooning wordlessly. Looking for it, she spotted an old woman dressed in a white nightgown on the back porch of the Clark house. Like Juliet, Alvina had been staring at the sky. Unlike Juliet, she had had her arms stretched upward, as if she were begging the stars to take her away.
Remembering the moment, which was both beautiful and strange, Juliet said, “I suppose it could have been her.” She paused, then asked, “Is she dangerous?”
“Alvina?” Mrs. Dove laughed. “No, dear. Alvie’s a real sweetheart. She’s just a little odd. I’m sorry if she frightened you.”
Juliet followed her mother back into the house. It was a relief to know that the woman she had seen was only the local oddball.
The problem was she couldn’t quite convince herself that that was who it really had been.
“As for Arturo,” said her mother, when they were back inside, “my advice is to pretend it never happened.” She glanced at her watch. “Your dad’s got an early class. I’ll bet he’d drive you to school if you want.”
Normally Juliet would have walked with Arturo. But since she didn’t want to see him this morning, she welcomed the offer.
The inside of the car seemed too small to contain Mr. Dove’s high spirits. “We’re getting a lot of press coverage for the poetry jam, Juliet. Of course, that’s mostly because we’ve got Scott Willis coming. I’m afraid listening to his drivel is going to drive me slightly nuts.”
“Then why did you invite him?” asked Juliet.
Mr. Dove shrugged. “I figure it’s a small price to pay for all the publicity he’s brought us. Besides, if people come to hear him and then get exposed to real poetry—well, who knows how many people we might turn on to the good stuff?”
“Sneaky, Dad,” said Juliet with a smile.
“I prefer to think of it as a covert strike for art. And it’s working. We’ve got entrants coming in from five states. Even so, we’re still a little weak in the junior division. Sure you don’t want to be part of it?”
“Couldn’t I just poke sticks in my eyes instead?”
“See? You’ve got a wonderful gift for expressive language. Why keep it to yourself?”
Juliet turned and stared out the window. She was starting to wish that she had walked to school after all. What made this really hard was that there was nothing in the world she wanted more than to please her father. But she had tried entering the jam two years ago. It was not an experience she wanted to repeat, not for as long as she lived.
When homeroom started, Juliet tried to follow her mother’s advice about pretending that Arturo’s weird behavior of the night before had never happened. But that was hard to do when he kept staring at her.
To make the situation worse, it seemed as if some of the other boys were staring at her, too.
Stop it, she told herself. You’re imagining things!
What she knew she was not imagining were the glares she was getting from Bambi Quilp and Samantha-the-Leech. But the boys were making her so nervous, she barely had time to worry about Bambi and Samantha. She wished she’d had the nerve to apologize to Bambi first thing that morning. Doing so would have been embarrassing, and painful, but at least it might have ended the situation.
At about ten o’clock, Mindy Wozinski passed Juliet a note. She assumed it was from Mindy herself, who was sort of a friend, so she was surprised to open it and find it was from Gil Jordan—officially the third cutest boy in the class, according to a secret poll taken by the girls earlier that year.
Getting a note from Gil was surprising enough. What it said was even more startling:
Juliet—
Want to sit with me at lunch?
—Gil
Juliet glanced at Gil.
He smiled at her.
She snapped her head back to her desk, hoping her hair would cover the sudden blush that now painted her cheeks.
That was just before they went to music class. When they came back, Juliet found a piece of candy on her desk. Glancing around in puzzlement, she noticed Tyrone Jackson watching her eagerly. He smiled shyly and glanced away.
Things only got worse when the class lined up for lunch. Arturo came to stand next to her. That would have been fine, except that Gil also decided he wanted to stand next to her.
“I was here first!” said Arturo angrily.
Gil tried to push in ahead of him. Moments later they were shoving each other.
Ms. Spradling hurried over to separate them. “Looks like spring is going to be a little early this year,” she said with a sigh. Then she marched the boys, who were glaring murderously at each other, out to the hall.
Juliet felt a wave of guilty relief. At least now she wouldn’t have to figure out what to do about Gil’s invitation to sit with him, an idea that had filled her with both delight and terror.
She sat instead, as she always did, with her best friend, Elizabeth Kennedy. Elizabeth was originally from China, and she was the only kid in the sixth grade other than Arturo whom Juliet felt really comfortable with. They had met when Elizabeth moved to Venus Harbor in second grade and had gotten to be friends because they were both so shy. Except that it had turned out that Elizabeth was only shy because she was new in town, and she got over it pretty quickly. Now she was one of the most popular kids in the class—so popular that sometimes Juliet wondered if the only reason Elizabeth stayed friends with her was out of loyalty, or worse, pity.
“What the heck is going on with Gil and Arturo?” asked Elizabeth once they were sitting down.
“I don’t know,” said Juliet, staring at the hunk of mystery meat on her plate. “But I don’t like it.”
“Are you kidding?” Elizabeth’s dark eyes were sparkling. “It’s like out of a story about knights and chivalry! Two guys fighting over you? What’s not to like? I wish I could get a couple of guys to fight over me.” She paused and looked at Juliet more carefully. “Say, did you do something to your hair? You look really pretty today.”
That did it. Juliet decided that she had to say something about the amulet to Elizabeth. There was only one problem. When she opened her mouth to speak, the words wouldn’t come out.
“Juliet?” asked Elizabeth. “Are you all right?”
Juliet shook her head in panic. Elizabeth leaped from her seat, ran behind Juliet, wrapped her arms around her, and gave her the Heimlich maneuver.
A burst of air shot out of Juliet’s lungs.
“What are you doing?” she cried, when she had caught her breath.
“Saving you,” said Elizabeth.
“From what?”
“Weren’t you choking? That’s what they taught us—that when someone can’t get their words out, there’s something caught in their throat.”
Suddenly Juliet realized what was going on. “Speak of this to no one!” the woman in the shop had commanded.
Juliet had assumed the words to be a simple order. She had not expected that the order would be enforced by magic. With a shudder she remembered when she had started to tell her mother about the amulet that morning. Had she remained silent then out of habit . . . or because she was under a spell?
Juliet put a trembling hand to where the amulet lay hidden beneath her shirt.
What had she gotten herself into?
FOUR
Voices in the Attic
Things didn’t get any better after lunch, mostly because Tyrone began to follow Juliet around the school yard, gazing at her longingly. He didn’t get too close, and every time she stopped to glare at him, he turned away and pretended he was doing something else. Even so, she found it nerve-racking. She was embarrassed to realize that she was glad Gil and Arturo had not been allowed to come outside. She didn’t think she could have coped with them acting strange, too.
“What’s up with all those boys, Juliet?” asked Caitlyn Coulter, who had joined Juliet and Elizabeth at their usual spot near the bus garage. “Did you just buy the world’s greatest perfume or something?”
Juliet shook her head, too confused to say anything.
The silence was filled by a familiar tapping sound. It was Terry Suss’s cane. All the kids knew Mr. Suss, and there were almost as many stories about how he had lost his vision as there were kids in Venus Harbor Middle School. No matter which version you believed, it was pretty much accepted that the old man was strange but harmless. In summer he made money by sitting at a table near the beach and telling fortunes for the tourists.
The girls watched him walk toward them, white cane moving ahead of him as he checked the sidewalk for barriers. The place they were standing was about twenty feet from the sidewalk, and Juliet figured he would pass on by. But when he was directly opposite them he stopped short, then turned and began making his way across the packed dirt to where they stood. When he was a few feet away he said, “Juliet Dove?”
Prickles rose on the back of Juliet’s neck. How could a blind man know where she was standing? And what did he want?
She didn’t speak.
“Juliet Dove?” he asked again, his voice louder, more insistent.
“I’m here, Mr. Suss,” she whispered.
He nodded. Then, in the deep voice he used for te
lling fortunes, he intoned:
“Past field of gold,
The key is hid.
Ignore the child,
And find the kid!
But this alone
Won’t ope’ the door.
The prison holds
Till mouse shall roar!
A mother’s touch,
The final key,
Will break the lock
And set love free.”
Juliet stared at the man in astonishment.
“What the heck is that supposed to mean?” asked Elizabeth.
But Mr. Suss had turned away. Cane tapping ahead of him, he made his way back to the sidewalk.
For a moment, none of the girls spoke. Finally Caitlyn said, “What was that all about?”
Juliet shook her head. “I don’t have any idea,” she muttered, not wanting to explain how generally weird her life had become during the last twenty-four hours—and not daring even to try explaining about the amulet.
Before Caitlyn and Elizabeth could question her further, Samantha-the-Leech came strutting up. “Hey, Killer,” she sneered. “Have you apologized to Bambi for those rotten things you said yesterday?”
Juliet said nothing. She had wanted to apologize to Bambi. She had actually started in Bambi’s direction twice that morning. She might even have been able to manage it if she could have spoken to Bambi in private. But with Samantha in full leech mode, that wasn’t possible.
Having been glued to Bambi’s side all day, Samantha knew very well that Juliet hadn’t apologized, of course. Now she grinned evilly and said, “You’ve got this coming, you little witch!”
Then she raised her hand to slap Juliet’s face.
Samantha moved fast, and Juliet was too astonished to duck. But Tyrone was even faster. Leaping up from behind, he grabbed Samantha’s wrist, crying, “Unhand that woman!”