The Madrona Heroes Register
Book No. 4: Echoes of the Past
By Hillel Cooperman
Illustrations by Caroline Hadilaksono
Text and Art Copyright © 2015 Hillel Cooperman
THE MADRONA HEROES REGISTER, characters, names, and related indicia are trademarks of and © Hillel Cooperman. All Rights Reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the author.
ISBN 978-0-9899905-4-7
For Bella.
Books by Hillel Cooperman
The Madrona Heroes Register
Book No. 4: Echoes of the Past
Book No. 5: Underneath it All
The author recommends that you read The Madrona
Heroes Register series in the order listed above. When asked “Why start with Book No. 4?” the author invariably responds, “Because Star Wars.”
The Experience of Being Alive
Contents
The Madrona Heroes Register 1
Contents 5
The Missing Mirror 1
The Dumbass Detector 10
The Chocolate Chip Banana Waffles 23
The Girl from Across the Street 32
The Fortress of Solitude 47
The Invisible Girl 59
The Suspicious Phone Call 71
The Demonstration 89
The Broken Typewriter 102
The Stakeout 113
The Soggy Tennis Ball 124
The Unexpected Reunion 131
The Perfect Plan 141
The Records Room 152
The Mutant Mango 165
The Magic Markers 176
The Last Madrona Tree 186
The Announcement 201
The Company Van 216
The Exam Rooms 226
The Renewed Promise 238
The Alarming Signal 248
The Hunters and the Hunted 259
The Way Home 274
The Unanswered Question 288
Epilogue 297
Soundtrack 299
Acknowledgments 301
If you liked this book… 303
About the Author 305
About the Illustrator 305
1
The Missing Mirror
It had been a very long time since a child had exhibited a super power in the small lakeside neighborhood of Madrona. So long, in fact, that it was as if this had never happened at all. Madrona was not crawling with radioactive spiders looking to bite, or littered with crash-landed spaceships containing small boys from distant planets. Signs of normalcy and calm were everywhere.
In fact, as you drove into the old tree-lined section of town, an actual sign read: “Madrona – The peaceable kingdom,” words inspired by an almost two hundred year old painting, currently hanging in a museum three thousand miles to the east. The painting showed a world where sworn enemies, both human and animal, live together in peace. But on this airy summer afternoon, two of the three Jordan siblings were living anything but peaceably.
§
Binny Jordan searched frantically around her room, which had the attendant swirl of strewn-about junk you would expect to find in space occupied by a ten-year-old girl. Binny’s search was impeded by all the clothes on the floor and discarded cups snuck upstairs for beverages to be consumed outside the kitchen (in flagrant violation of Binny’s parents’ rules).
Posters of various skateboarding heroes in daring poses covered the walls. No fewer than three skateboards lay angrily split at the bottom of her closet, halves pointing upward like tombstones. Binny had the vague intention to display these on her wall someday like a hunter would exhibit his quarry: See the lives I’ve taken? Yours may be next!
Peeking out from one spot on the wall Binny’s father’s drawing of his daughter as a skateboarding superhero named “Skate Punk”. He drew Binny and her siblings as comic book heroes periodically. Mostly when he was procrastinating before drawing the technical illustrations he was paid to create.
It has to be here somewhere, she thought to herself. The “it” in question was a small pocket mirror. It was old and covered in ornate swirly decorations and looked like it was made of precious silver. It had a hinged cover that protected the little round mirrored surface from scratches. It was Binny’s mother’s mirror, but Binny had appropriated it for herself. Stolen is such an ugly word. Unlike the used dishes in her room, her parents overlooked this infraction, since possessing the mirror seemed to make Binny happy, and unlike the dirty dishes, the mirror probably wouldn’t lead to an ant infestation.
The mirror usually sat on the shelf next to Binny’s makeup and hair stuff. Binny liked makeup fine, though she had liked it more when she was younger. These days it gave her a shared activity with her seven-year old sister Cassie. Cassie adored make-up, dress-up, and all manner of attention getting activities. At the thought of Cassie, Binny admonished herself silently. When something was missing from Binny’s room, why did she waste time looking anywhere other than Cassie’s thieving little hands?
§
Cassie Jordan was outside at that very moment acting out an entire scene from Snow White using the very mirror Binny was looking for. “Mirror mirror, who’s the prettiest girl in the world? Me? Cassie? Cassie Jordan? Oh really? But I couldn’t agree more,” sang Cassie using the mirror like a microphone. As if that weren’t enough to draw her sister’s ire, she was also mangling the story by pretending to be Snow White, when clearly Snow White’s stepmother was the one that spoke to the mirror. As with most things that enraged Binny, Cassie wasn’t bothered in the least by this inconsistency.
§
Binny marched into Cassie’s room. Binny quickly found all manner of things that were hers and definitely not in their rightful places: a large book on spying, including instructions on making codes for secret messages, a collection of hair bands which Cassie didn’t even need since her hair was much shorter than Binny’s, a suspicious number of socks that Binny knew were hers, admittedly hard to prove since their parents bought her and Cassie the same kind, and some spoons half-covered in peanut butter that Cassie had stuffed between the bed and the wall upon becoming distracted by some other mischief.
Mom and Dad were gonna be super annoyed about this one, Binny thought with a smile. Binny made a mental note to add peanut butter spoons to the ever growing list of Cassie’s transgressions. Binny had been keeping a detailed list in her journal for later disciplinary action. For now though, the mirror was the top priority, and it was still nowhere to be found.
§
Cassie was performing a final encore in her impromptu rock concert. The spotlights shined brightly on her as she swung and swayed, eyes mostly closed, singing snippets of popular songs mixed with nonsense into the mirror.
Throngs of imaginary fans chanted her name. Not her sister’s name. Not her brother’s name. Her name. As far as the fans were concerned, Cassie Jordan was an only child. Singular and special.
When Cassie wasn’t in front of her adoring crowds, she was riding in glittering limousines and being attended to by smartly-dressed servants. This was all part of being the most famous seven-year-old rock star on the planet. Cassie reached out to touch as many of her fans as she could, sharing with each a tiny sliver of herself so they could bask in her specialness.
§
Like Cassie, the man too was in his own world. He’d taken Rembrandt out to walk this route so many times that the dog naturally knew the way to go – right by the Jordan
house. With the dog navigating, the man could dedicate most of his time to organizing his thoughts.
The man was tall and solidly built. He had neatly arranged black hair, with flecks of gray appearing above his ears. His expensive, immaculately kept, but understated clothes were a point of pride, a key part of how he liked to present himself to others. But the man had a secret that was not nearly as neat and tidy as his appearance — the consequence of a loose thread that began to unravel long ago. The thread led him to the very children he was observing now.
The man had no children of his own, but he had a dog. Rembrandt was a Bernese Mountain Dog. Rembrandt was friendly and he was big. These weren’t small dogs to begin with and Rembrandt was large for his breed. Dark brown and shaggy with orangey brown “socks” and a white snout and chest. Rembrandt’s size combined with his enthusiasm sometimes gave people – nervous kids especially – the wrong idea about his intentions.
To date Rembrandt hadn’t bitten into anything he wasn’t supposed to other than the periodic box of fancy sweets absent-mindedly left on a low coffee table, and several pairs of very expensive Italian leather shoes that the man had finally learned to start storing in his closet, out of the shaggy creature’s reach. The man’s closet had special drawers made just for shoes, so this was the perfect excuse to use them.
Rembrandt needed to get outside more often than most dogs. But the man knew well enough to keep Rembrandt away from the kids in the neighborhood, as large dogs and their solo male owners, were pretty much never welcome companions for kids at play. It made the man’s task harder, but the task still needed to be done.
§
Binny’s search through the house exhausted, the only place that remained to look was outside. Since most of the year Madrona was rainy and even on the chilly side, the kids of the neighborhood usually spent as much time as they could outside in the brief window during late summer and early fall when the weather was sweet. The early evening hours were especially nice as it stayed light out and kids could play outside until dinner and even for some time afterwards. It was early evening when Binny went outside to look for her sister.
Binny didn’t see Cassie at first, and yelled her name. If Cassie had heard the unmistakably angry tone in Binny’s voice, she would have known to find a place to hide. But Cassie was totally immersed in her own pink sparkly universe.
The Jordan house was large, tucked away on a steep slope. The hill was so steep that decades earlier the entrance to the yard had been moved to the side of the house so the residents didn’t have to climb so many steps every time they wanted to come and go. As such, when Binny shot out of the front door, she still had a ways to go until she could actually see her sister on the sidewalk.
§
As Rembrandt and his owner walked their familiar path past the Jordan house, the man saw the oblivious jelly bean of a seven-year-old bouncing with the mirror on the sidewalk below the big house. He also saw the determined and angry ten-year-old storming out of the house on her retributive mission. The man could see what would happen next, yet there was nothing he could do to stop it. It was like watching two cars speed towards an inevitable collision at an intersection.
Rembrandt was distinctly less interested in the coming altercation between the girls. Instead, he seemed to have found something worthy of his attention at a telephone pole down the street. Rembrandt started insistently dragging the man towards the pole.
The more the older girl yelled and advanced on her sister, the more interested the man was in seeing how the little drama played out. But Rembrandt was intent on reaching his own destination. He’d already dragged the man halfway to the pole, and now the man was at least fifty feet from where the little girl was standing.
§
Three separate things happened almost simultaneously: 1) the little girl finally heard the older girl yelling, 2) the older girl turned the corner and finally was in a position to see her younger sister, and 3) Rembrandt got sick of waiting for the man to move. Rembrandt jerked his leash and made a break for the telephone pole. The man almost fell over, losing his grip on the leash, catching his balance at the last second before almost ending up with a face full of dirt.
But when the man regained his balance and surveyed the scene, the little girl was nowhere to be found. She had been there one moment, and in the time it took for the man to recover from Rembrandt’s over-enthusiasm, she seemed to have just vanished. Into thin air as they say. But that was ridiculous. She must have heard her sister coming and high-tailed it out of there. And yet, how did she do it so quickly? Where did she go?
The older girl approached the spot where her sister had been. From what the man could tell, the older girl with the deepening scowl had never actually seen that her sister was standing there in the first place. The younger girl seemed to vanish before her big sister caught sight of her. And anyway, the older girl was fixated on a shiny object that was lying on the ground. Abandoned.
§
Binny was triumphant and angry. She knew that Cassie had taken her mirror. It was the object Cassie stole most often from Binny’s room. And sure enough, there it was, lying in the middle of the sidewalk. Cassie had probably gotten sick of playing with it and just dropped it when she got bored, like a spoon half-emptied of its peanut butter. Anyone could have trampled the mirror or just thrown it away. Or even, the thought horrified her, taken it as their own keepsake. Cassie’s carelessness was positively mind-boggling. Binny inspected the mirror – at least it wasn’t cracked and didn’t look too worse for wear. It was already quite old and not in perfect condition, so a tiny scratch here or there, as her mom said, was just part of its “character” at this point.
After the brief inspection, the mirror went into Binny’s pocket. Still angry, but satisfied that she’d recovered her stolen property, Binny now had one more of Cassie’s crimes to document in her journal. Binny marched back up the hill and towards the house. The little mirror thief was still nowhere to be found. She’d deal with her later.
§
Rembrandt was quite satisfied with himself, having made it quite clear to the telephone pole who was in charge. The man, however, was not the least bit satisfied. His eyes were wide. His dog temporarily forgotten. Where was the little rock star? Kids don’t just disappear. People don’t just disappear. His mind was racing. The man was used to being able to explain things, and he couldn’t help thinking he’d made a terrible mistake in letting Rembrandt distract him.
When he’d been told to keep an eye on the children and look for any strange signs he never expected something quite like this. As a man of science, it was altogether too much to believe that a seven-year-old girl had completely vanished before his eyes. There must be a tree behind which she had hidden, or a little alcove in the hill below the house into which she’d folded herself. There was simply no other explanation.
The man collected himself, still considering the possibilities, (could the little girl run that fast?). Lost in thought, he walked a few yards down the hill to collect Rembrandt’s leash. For his part, Rembrandt was patiently waiting, panting, smiling, as if to say, hey, where ya been? When the man bent down to collect the leash, something caught his attention.
Out of the corner of his eye the man saw a brief bright tangle of glowing silver light, and then in a flash, the light was gone. In its place, as if she’d been there all along, was the little girl. Without missing a beat, she was back to her routine. The man didn’t appreciate people who stood around with their mouths open but for the moment he’d become one of them. Usually articulate, even when only conversing silently with himself, the man was now completely without words.
Could he have witnessed some trick of the light? Could something shiny have reflected the sun into his eyes momentarily as the girl came out of her well-concealed hiding place? Could the light he saw be the result of a migraine headache coming on? Or maybe he was having a stroke? An aneurysm? None of these were comforting thoughts.
No num
ber of possible explanations could change what the man already knew in his heart. The man had seen the little girl disappear and then reappear a minute later out of thin air. It should have been impossible.
In the history of humanity, up until this very moment, disappearing had been permanently placed in the column marked “impossible”. And now, not.
This must be what he had been sent to observe. What could be “stranger” than this? The man tried again to persuade himself that he hadn’t actually seen the little girl vanish. He groped for a logical explanation. But none was forthcoming. He wasn’t getting a migraine, and he wasn’t having a stroke. But confronted with the truth of the situation, the man’s head had in fact started to hurt.