Afternoon of the Elves (13 page)

“Sara-Kate was very smart,” Mrs. Lenox had explained. “She knew that if she didn't come to school, the school would come looking for her. So she wrote a note withdrawing herself from classes. She used her mother's handwriting and her mother's signature and completely fooled everyone.

“Then, since she had said they were away on a trip, she was careful to keep them both hidden during the day. She didn't answer the door. She kept the shades drawn. The heat was off, of course, because the furnace was broken, and no one could tell they were there at all. At night, Sara-Kate came out under cover of dark while her mother slept. She went for supplies. She must have gone to different stores so as not to be recognized, and of course she didn't always pay for what she took. The night your father saw her she must have been coming home from one of these trips.”

“Maybe,” Hillary had answered softly. She'd been thinking about Sara-Kate's strange eating habits, about the “delicate stomach” that required hot cereal for school lunch but could suddenly take on large numbers of bologna sandwiches on special occasions. Had Sara-Kate eaten Cream of Wheat because it was the cheapest thing she could get that was hot and filled her up? Perhaps she really didn't like wild berries and mint at all. But-then again, maybe she did. Hillary shrugged and glanced at her mother. Perhaps being hungry and cold and angry and alone didn't mean you couldn't still be an elf. In fact, maybe those were exactly the things elves always were, Hillary had thought, as she stood gazing up into her mother's face.

The village looked fragile, but it had staying power. From the window of the second-floor room, Hillary looked down on it, over the new wooden roofs, over the tidy front yards. The Connollys' house brought Sara-Kate back in stray bits and pieces, but the elf village was where she came back all together in Hillary's mind. More and more, the village seemed the only true thing about her, the only fact that was sure.

Here Hillary had first run into Sara-Kate's tiny eyes and felt the tiny eyes of elves upon her. Here she had watched Sara-Kate work coatless in the cold and learned about thick skins and private languages. Hillary had only to crouch between the little houses to see Sara-Kate flick a strand of wheat-colored hair over her shoulder.

(“It isn't where you look for elves so much as how you look,” she would hear Sara-Kate say. “You can't just stomp around the place expecting to be shown things. Go slowly and quietly, and look deep.”)

Look deep. Every day Hillary looked. If she had not yet seen an elf, if she still couldn't be sure of Sara-Kate, it must be because she was not looking deep enough, she decided. She redoubled her efforts, in the upstairs room, in the yard, on the streets of the town, in the whole world for that matter. There was no place safe from her watchfulness now, and no person either. She felt her eyes turning tiny, like Sara-Kate's. She felt herself turning shrewd.

Out in the Connollys' yard, she hovered protectively over the little well. Its bottlecap bucket was frozen in place, but come spring it would work again, she thought. The Ferris wheel had stayed upright on its metal rod. Every afternoon, Hillary walked to it and turned it with her mittened hand to make sure it still worked. It always did.

The elves' sunken pool looked more like a skating rink. Remembering the power rafts, Hillary leaned over and tried to see special marks of activity. Sometimes there were none, and a dark feeling would come upon her. But more often, strange scratchings appeared on the ice, or a mysterious circular clearing would show up in the snow nearby, and Hillary's heart would beat faster. She would glance toward the Ferris wheel and see again how it had glowed and spun on that extraordinary night, and hear the bird cry that had sounded when it seemed least possible. She would remember how Sara-Kate had trusted her and been betrayed, how she had revealed herself and been hurt, and how every single thing Sara-Kate had taught her about elves had turned out to be true about the thin girl herself. Then Hillary was sure that she had been in the presence of an elf, and that the village was a special, magic place.

“A place that's got to be saved,” she told her mother one day, not long after another rumor had swept the street: a new family wanted to buy the Connolly house; a nice family with a dog and two children.

“Saved?” Mrs. Lenox asked with a frown.

“Moved,” Hillary explained. “I'm going to move it into our yard. That way, when the Connollys' house is sold, the village will still be here in case anyone wants it again. A place like that shouldn't be allowed to fall apart. It needs to have someone taking care of it.”

Mrs. Lenox shook her head in a despairing way.

“Well, I don't know. You'd have to put it somewhere out of sight and out of the way. Your father has the garden laid out so carefully. We wouldn't want the Ferris wheel sticking up in the middle, and those little huts would get caught in the mower if they were put on the lawn.”

“Oh, no. They couldn't possibly go there,” Hillary agreed. “How about behind the garage?”

“But that's not a place at all. It's full of rocks and briers.”

Hillary nodded. “It'll be perfect,” she said. “I was checking it over this afternoon. It looks so terrible that I guess I never thought of it before. It just goes to show.”

“Goes to show what?” Mrs. Lenox asked, but Hillary had gone out the back door into the yard again, and there was no answer.

“It's getting rather dark out there, and cold!” Hillary's mother called to her, opening the storm door a crack so her voice would be heard. “I think you should come in now. Hillary! Where are you?”

Very odd, but there was still no answer, and Hillary seemed to have disappeared.