Afternoon of the Elves (11 page)

Hillary moved toward her. “Are you an elf?” she asked Sara-Kate, who brought her head up with a jerk. “An elf,” the younger girl repeated, longingly. “You can say it if you are. I'd never tell, I swear. I'll help you with your mother. I'll do anything you say.”

Sara-Kate's little eyes had opened wider than Hillary had ever seen them. They looked surprised and puzzled, eager but undecided, and clearly Sara-Kate had something to say. She moistened her lips with her tongue. She pushed her hair off her forehead with the flat of one hand. She kept her eyes trustingly on Hillary and, in a minute no doubt, she would have spoken. She would have explained everything, allowed it to fall into Hillary's lap like a special present, the kind of present that is so precious one is tempted to keep it and not give it to anyone. But Sara-Kate was ready to give, Hillary knew. She was ready to tell at last and they were both leaning forward in their chairs, beginning to smile at each other, when the interruption came. It was a muffled shout:

“Hillary, are you here?”

And then again, from outside, while Hillary and Sara-Kate continued to stare at each other but with changing expressions: “Hillary! Hill ... a ... ry!”

“It's my mother. She's in the yard.” Hillary jumped out of her chair.

Sara-Kate leapt up, too. “Go and meet her, quick. Keep her away. She can't come in here.”

“Where's my coat?” Hillary wailed. She looked around wildly.

“Hurry up! Get going!” Sara-Kate's hands had rolled themselves into fists. “She's coming to the door. I can hear her coming!”

Hillary found her coat on the floor between the chairs. She stuffed her feet into her boots and ran for the door.

“I'll come back later,” was all she had time to whisper. Sara-Kate was waving her away frantically.

“Go on! Go on!”

“Hillary? Are you in there?” Mrs. Lenox's unmistakable voice came through the door, followed by the sound of knocking.

It seemed so odd to be answering the knock of her own mother, to be opening a door that neither had met through before, that Hillary hardly knew what to say when Mrs. Lenox's familiar face appeared across the threshold.

“Good heavens! Here you are,” her mother exclaimed. “I've been calling and calling. You've been here for hours. I really do think it's time to come home.”

She gazed anxiously at Hillary, then looked past her into the room beyond.

“Goodbye and thank you!” Hillary cried loudly, on cue. She gave the door a yank to pull it closed, but it struck the side of her boot and bounced open wider than ever.

“Good heavens!” Mrs. Lenox said again, looking through the opening. “Is that you, Sara-Kate?”

Sara-Kate said nothing. She stood as if frozen against the side of the white stove in the inner room.

“What's going on here?” Mrs. Lenox asked, in a more determined tone. “What's happened to this room?”

“It's nothing!” Hillary cried. “It's just Sara-Kate. Come on, let's go!”

“Wait a minute,” Mrs. Lenox said, with an ominous note of concern in her voice. She stepped around Hillary and through the door.

“This place looks like some kind of fort,” she said, addressing Sara-Kate. “What have you been doing? Where is your mother?”

There was a moment's pause, just long enough for a single, swift intake of breath. Then Sara-Kate moved forward with a practiced, gliding motion. Her tiny eyes zeroed in on Hillary's mother and her face composed itself into a mask of perfect politeness, an expression that Hillary had never seen on it before. Sara-Kate met Mrs. Lenox halfway across the room. She shook her hand in a most courteous and charming way.

“Hello, Mrs. Lenox. I'm so glad to see you again. I guess it's been a while. My mother is fine, but she's upstairs having a nap. I know this room looks terrible. We're having it fixed up so we had to move everything around. I'm sorry you had to come looking for Hillary.”

“I did try to telephone,” Hillary's mother put in.

“Well, the phone's been off since this morning, as you probably found out,” Sara-Kate said smoothly. Hillary stood to one side, marveling at the ease with which Sara-Kate was inventing.

“It's the snowstorm, I guess,” she went on. “There's a man who's coming soon to fix it.”

Mrs. Lenox looked around helplessly. Something was wrong, but she could not put her finger on what it was that so alarmed her about the house.

“Is the heat off, too?” she asked. “This room is so cold.”

“They had to turn it off, just for an hour or two, so they could work on some pipes,” Sara-Kate explained.

“‘They'?”

“You know, the workmen who are fixing up the house,” said the thin elf-girl with the ragged wheaten hair. There was just a hint of irritation in her polite voice to let Mrs. Lenox know that she was imposing, that she would do well, now, to stop and go home. Hillary knew that Sara-Kate had put the irritation in on purpose, to trick her mother. It was an ingenious performance.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Lenox had scented something poisonous in the Connollys' house. Perhaps Sara-Kate was a bit too thin. Perhaps her hair was a trifle too ragged. Perhaps it was her boots, after all, that were her undoing. They looked so black and so shabby laced up on the end of her twig-like legs, as if she had stolen them off some drunken bum in the park, which perhaps she had.

“I believe I would like to speak to your mother anyway, if you don't mind,” Mrs. Lenox said to Sara-Kate, cutting straight to the middle of things.

“I don't think she wants to be bothered,” Sara-Kate replied evenly. “I'll have her give you a call when the telephone's fixed.”

“No, thank you.” Mrs. Lenox became more polite the more insistent she was. “Now, if you'll just tell her I'm here—or even better, show me where she is,” Mrs. Lenox said, for she had seen a strange light flash in Sara-Kate's eyes.

“Please go away,” said the thin girl. She stood directly in front of Hillary's mother.

“I don't know what you think you're up to,” Mrs. Lenox said angrily, “but I am now going to speak to your mother.”

“Mother!” Hillary cried. “Please don't! Please come!” She tried to pull her back by the arm, but how can a child pull an angry grown-up away from something she is determined to do? Mrs. Lenox walked forward despite the arms dragging her back, and the body blocking her.

Hillary let go when she saw how strong her mother was. She looked at Sara-Kate to see what she would do next. She hoped Sara-Kate had something up her sleeve, some further trick for escaping this predicament. If ever there was a need for magic, it was now. Mrs. Lenox walked across the Connollys' empty dining room, glancing around as though she had landed on an alien planet.

Hillary waited for the bird's sharp cry. She waited for a blast of wind, a streak of light, for an elf's miracle. Nothing happened. Her mother entered the front hall.

“What are you going to do?” Hillary whispered to Sara-Kate as her mother began to climb the stairs. Sara-Kate seemed not to hear. She pushed her hair out of her eyes with one hand.

“Sara-Kate! Do something! She's going to find out,” Hillary cried when Mrs. Lenox turned left at the top of the staircase. They were standing side by side at the bottom, and Sara-Kate didn't answer. She stared toward the second floor.

Hillary heard the sound of a door opening up above. Then she heard her mother's voice:

“Good heavens! May I come in? I'm Helen Lenox from up the hill. Is everything all right?”

Sara-Kate turned her face slowly toward Hillary. She beamed her two tiny eyes straight into Hillary's eyes for one flash of a moment. Then she turned herself around and sat down on the bottom step.

“Don't be afraid,” Hillary heard her mother saying gently in the second-floor room. “Don't be frightened. I'm here to help.”

Sitting on that stair was how Hillary last saw Sara-Kate Connolly “in person” as she later thought of it. It was the last chance she had to say anything to Sara-Kate. But right then was when it was least possible to say anything, so there were no final questions, no good-byes.

Upstairs, Hillary's mother was speaking to Sara-Kate's mother in quiet, grown-up tones, and raising shades to let in the winter sun. Downstairs, Sara-Kate sat silent on the step, and even if one could believe that there were elves in the world, and that she once had been one, Hillary saw there was no magic in her now. There was no thick skin and no uncanny quickness. She was the same frightened child that any child would be whose family was in trouble. She was waiting on the step the way every child would wait to see what would happen next, what the grown-ups would decide.

Hillary's legs felt shaky, so she turned and sat beside Sara-Kate on the stairs, and they were so much the same size that their shoulders met exactly. Their bent knees rose to the same height. Their arms lay side by side in the same angles and attitudes. There Mrs. Lenox found them when she came back downstairs. She leaned over the girls and hugged them both at once. She told them everything would be all right now. She was going to get help.

Mrs. Lenox told Sara-Kate to stay with her mother until she came back with the help, and she told Hillary to come home with her, please. So Hillary got up and looked down at Sara-Kate.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered, but Sara-Kate turned her face to the wall. Then Mrs. Lenox drew Hillary gently away and they walked toward the back door together.

Never again would Hillary see a house change as fast as the Connollys' house did in the days that followed. Almost from the hour of “the awful discovery,” as people were soon describing the event, the place was transformed. Where it had been silent and empty, now it rang with noise: the clatter of feet, the chatter of voices, the snap of shades being raised. Where it had been dark, it was lit up like a stage. The house had been nearly invisible before, unnoticed in its drab and boring decay. Now the eyes of the neighborhood were upon it night and day and the smallest movements were cause for comment. Who was going in? What was coming out? Was that a light in the kitchen? Was that a squirrel on the roof?

Strange bits of information floated about. At least they were strange to Hillary, who, having lately been at the center of the Connollys' world now listened like a spy at the gossipy edges of groups. She listened to her mother speaking softly on the telephone.

Sara-Kate Connolly was in an orphanage and her mother was crazy.

Mrs. Connolly was in a hospital and Sara-Kate was crazy.

Sara-Kate's father could not be traced and relatives were being sought.

Then: Relatives had been found! They were coming.

Then: The relatives were here! From Michigan or Kansas or Montana. They were taking charge of everything.

“And thank goodness for that!” Mrs. Lenox exclaimed. “Now this town can stop worrying and get back to ordinary life. I've never seen such an array of prying eyes and nosy noses. Do you know that a newspaper reporter came by and tried to interview me this morning?” She put her arm around Hillary's shoulder as if to shield her from such attacks, but Hillary stepped away.

“What's going to happen to Sara-Kate?” she asked.

“I suppose she'll go to live with her relatives, poor thing. ”

“Poor thing! Sara-Kate isn't poor. She won't go anywhere she doesn't want to, I bet.”

“She won't have much choice, I'm afraid,” Mrs. Lenox said, smoothing her daughter's hair. “You mustn't worry anymore about either Sara-Kate or her mother. They are getting wonderful care and every sort of attention.”

“Is it true that the house is going to be fixed up and sold?”

“You sound so angry! Of course it's true. The family needs the money and what else could they do with a house like that?”

“They could leave it alone and let Sara-Kate keep on taking care of her mother there.”

“Hillary, that's ridiculous.”

“She was doing okay by herself except for running out of money sometimes. And that wasn't her fault. That was because her father didn't send enough and she didn't dare ask anyone for help. She knew people didn't like her, that they wouldn't care. She was right, too,” Hillary told her mother. “You should see what's happening down at her house. They're changing everything as fast as they can. They want to make it look as if Sara-Kate never lived there.”

“I wish you'd stop going to the Connollys' house,” Mrs. Lenox replied.

“I can't stop,” Hillary said. “How can I stop? The elf village is there.”

“Elf village! Hillary, after all that's happened I hope you still don't think...”