Broken Dragon (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 3) (8 page)

She picked it up. Absentmindedly she cradled it in the crook of her hand and flipped open the cover. A couple pages fanned into the air and then settled, displaying one of the passages in Mara’s handwriting. She frowned at it. This haiku had not been there before.

Forget all the fears

Preventing you from learning.

Exchange memories.

She flipped forward and found nothing but blank pages. This was the only addition to the book, sitting on the page across from the previous passage about passengers, dragon’s folly and trails of mist.

From the kitchen downstairs, Diana yelled, “Sam, turn on the TV, and see what the weatherman says about this afternoon. If it’s going to be really bad, I may need to take Hannah shopping for something a little more insulated and waterproof than the jacket she has.”

The commotion downstairs snapped Mara back to reality. She closed the book and slid it into the side pocket of her laptop case. Walking down the stairs, she said to no one in particular, “I guess the quiet Monday mornings are gone forever.”

Diana met her at the bottom of the stairs with a cup of coffee and said, “You’re late. If you want something to eat, you’ll need to fix it yourself and make sure you clean up your mess before you go.”

Mara took the cup. “This will do me.”

She followed her mother into the living room and sat next to her on the couch. They glanced at the muted television set for a second, but an oatmeal commercial was on.

Across the room Sam and Hannah sat together wedged into an armchair. He held something between two fingers above the girl’s open mouth, teasing her. “Whattaya say?”

“I promise not to bite?” she said.

“No.”

“Please?”

“There you go.” He dropped a shiny green pellet into her mouth.

She chewed and then pondered for a second. “That was a green jelly bean.”

He tickled her and said, “You’re a green jelly bean.”

“I’m sweet like a green jelly bean.” She laughed.

Sam stood up. “Come on, bean. We can get one more, before I leave for school.”

They ran into the kitchen, where Mara could hear them rummaging in the closet for something. She gave her mother a questioning look.

“Halloween candy. He’s in charge of making sure she doesn’t gorge herself and start bouncing off the walls,” Diana said.

“Who’s going to stop him from eating it all himself?”

Diana laughed. “Sam’s going to be a great dad—you can just see it in the way he interacts with her. He’s a natural.”

“Sure seems like it.” Mara nodded.

Her mother glanced back toward the kitchen. “I am a little concerned though. Obviously he’s not ready for this, and, while she seems well-adjusted, she needs to be with her family, her actual family, not a bunch of relatives from the past.”

“What’s your point, Mom?”

“Well, how long is she going to be here? Should we be thinking of a way to send her back? Is that even possible?”

Mara leaned toward her mother and lowered her voice. “I don’t know. The whole thing makes absolutely no sense to me. It just doesn’t seem like something I would do, sending a child back in time just to save my own skin and to deliver a book with a few cryptic words in it. There has to be something else going on, some other reason for all this.”

Sam and Hannah returned from the kitchen. While she sat in the armchair, he walked over to the end table next to the couch and picked up the television remote to activate the sound. “You guys are missing the weather,” he said, pointing toward the screen.

The weather girl stood next to a map of Oregon dotted with little rain clouds. “So expect heavy winds and rain through this evening, clearing overnight, before the next front comes in tomorrow afternoon. Now back to you, Jim. I hear you’ve got a report of a UFO over at Mount Hood.” She mugged and wiggled her eyebrows for the camera, and walked to the end of the anchor desk.

As she came into the frame, the anchorman grinned and pointed at the camera, a slight joust with his finger. “Not only do we have a report, we have some video as well. Take a look at this!”

A gray grainy image of Mount Hood, its summit hidden in low-hanging clouds, popped up on the screen. At first Mara thought the picture was a still, but then the clouds near the mountain on the left side appeared to ripple, as if stirred from above.

“Watch closely at the left of your screen,” Jim, the anchor, said. “Here it comes.”

Something large and rounded pushed from the clouds, and the video rapidly zoomed in on the object, turning it into a blur, as the camera struggled to focus. Once the camera adjusted, pixels solidified into what appeared to be two taloned feet and a tail, hanging below the cloud line. The feet kicked in the air, and a wing flapped down from the roiling clouds. It soared upward and disappeared.

“See it? See it, Janey?” he said.

The weather girl rolled her eyes. “Oh, I thought you meant like a flying saucer. That looked like it could have been a flock of birds or something. UFO! You almost had me there, Jim.”

They had a good chuckle and went to commercial.

Diana turned to Mara. “Tell me that was a flock of birds.”

With as straight a face as she could muster, she said, “That
was
a flock of birds.”

But she didn’t believe it.

Ping’s contractors had replaced the front window of Mason Fix-It in less than two hours after Mara had gotten to work. By the time they were finished, she had dusted off and assessed the damage done to several of the gadgets on display. There was only one certain fatality, a cuckoo clock with a foot-shaped depression in its face. The antique mechanism inside had been pulverized, not to mention the little birdy. Everything else could be repaired—projects that could be done during the holiday slow period. She decided to wait a couple days before selecting new items and moving them into the window, to give the caulk or epoxy or whatever that held the window in place some time to settle.

The bell above the door jangled, and a man with a dolly walked in, shaking rain off his green uniform. He tipped his ball cap to Mara and said, “I’ve got a pickup for a Mr. Mickleson? That ring a bell for you?”

“Absolutely,” Mara said and walked to the end of the counter. She put her hand on the side of the grandfather clock. “It’s right here. But we’ll need to cover it, before you roll it out into the rain.”

“No problem,” he said, pointing to a stack of quilted blankets piled at the bottom of the dolly. “I came prepared.”

He unfolded several of the quilts, wrapped the tall clock and secured the bundle with small bungee cords. Mara held open the door, and he rolled out the dolly with another tip of his hat. As she closed the door, her heart skipped a beat. It occurred to her that Mr. Mickelson’s clock was the one Hannah had stepped out of, her portal back in time, so to speak.
Hope that isn’t her only way back
.

She returned to the counter and leaned over it, resting her head in her hands. She still had a couple hours before her half day of work was over. She picked up her phone, scrolled through her address book and tapped Detective Bohannon’s name.

He picked up on the first ring. “Mara Lantern. I was planning to check in on you and Mr. Ping this week to see how you are.”

“To be honest with you, I’m surprised we haven’t heard from you before now,” Mara said.

“My sources told me the two of you appeared unharmed after last week’s festivities, so I thought I would leave you alone for a while, considering.”

“Considering what?”

“Whatever it was that happened late Tuesday night. I get the feeling something squirrelly went down. I mean, there were dozens of those shedding victims within a block or two of that little shop where you work, before they all fainted and had a remarkable recovery. And the ones who didn’t get there were headed in that direction. I assume you dispatched Mr. Prado somehow?”

“I wish it were that simple. Let’s just say, it appears I’ve traded one set of challenges for another. At least that’s how it seems at the moment.”

“We got some pretty strange reports from your vicinity that night.”

“I don’t doubt it. Look, are you back on the job this week, now that Denton Proctor healed your leg?” she asked.

“I too wish it were that simple. You’re not the only one who has traded one set of challenges for another.”

“What do you mean?”

“Since I was already scheduled to be off for the next couple weeks, my lieutenant wants to keep me off the books, so I can continue looking into things, you know, unofficially.”

“You mean, checking up on some of the passengers from Flight 559.”

“Yeah, just in case there’s another Prado out there somewhere. Not that there’s much we can do about it, if we find one.”

“What if I go with you?” There was a momentary pause. For a second Mara thought she’d lost the connection. “Detective? Bo?”

“Yeah, I’m here. Why the sudden change in tune? Up until now I’ve had to talk you into helping out, or Mr. Ping has.”

“Let’s just say, I’ve come to a realization that, if I don’t meet these issues head-on, they are just going to keep showing up at my doorstep, one way or the other. If you don’t feel comfortable taking me along, I will understand. I’m still a minor, and you might not want to be responsible for whatever happens. Regardless I’m going to be checking up on the passengers myself. I just thought it would be more efficient, maybe even safer, if we worked together.”

“Just so we are on the same page, we would not actually be ‘working’ in the sense that I work as a cop. The point is to have a few conversations with people, just visit, look around. That’s all I’m doing, like when we went to see the Proctors.”

“That works for me. I’m free in the afternoons until New Year’s, and I can even get away in the mornings, if necessary,” Mara said. “When do we start?”

“I was going to spend this afternoon reading through reports from last week and over Thanksgiving weekend. Maybe that will give us a place to begin. If not, we’ll just go through the list of passengers we haven’t talked to yet. How about I pick you up at one o’clock tomorrow afternoon at the shop?”

“Perfect. See you then.”

* * *

Though the large panes of glass making up the storefront of Ping’s Bakery had been replaced, a large sign was taped to the front door, indicating that the business would not reopen until Thursday. Mara pushed on the front door, but it was locked. Since tape was still along the edges of the glass in the door, she decided to jog around to the back of the building and knock on that door instead. When she got to the back alley, she found the metal door ajar and knocked on it. Ping, dressed in bakery white, pushed open the door and waved her in.

“I just finished making our sandwiches. Have a seat.” He pointed to a small table in the corner of the kitchen across from his office. Two paper plates waited with hoagies stuffed with ham and cheese.

Mara sat her laptop case on the floor next to her chair before sitting. She watched him fetch two soft drinks from the industrial refrigerator against the back wall. He shuffled sideways, grabbed a couple bags of chips off a shelf and sauntered over to her. He seemed to have more spring in his step and more color in his face than the last time she had seen him on Thanksgiving evening.

“You seem like you’re bouncing back,” she said, popping open her soda.

“Nothing like a nice long weekend to recharge the batteries, especially after the adventures of last week.” He took a seat across from her.

“I’m sorry we couldn’t go out for lunch, but Bohannon is stopping by at one to pick me up.”

“No problem, I have plenty to do around here, so it’s probably for the best,” he said. “I’m glad to see that you are following through on the advice from the book. The best strategy, at this point, is to be proactive, learn as much as you can about the passengers who have crossed over.”

Mara placed her sandwich back on the plate and reached into her laptop case. She took out the leather book. “Before I did that, I wanted to talk to you about this, this Chronicle of Continuity. I really didn’t get a chance to finish picking your brain the other night before you … had your episode.”

Ping stopped chewing and stared at her. “Go ahead.”

“We never got to talk about this ‘dragon’s folly’ stuff in the first haiku. I think that’s becoming a little clearer at this point, wouldn’t you say?”

“My travails with the dragon on Thursday could be interpreted as a folly, I suppose. However, for the time being, you should not concern yourself with my problems.”

“Should not concern myself? You were on the news this morning, dipping in and out of the clouds around Mount Hood. That video was taken on Sunday, not Thursday night when you tore the roof off the warehouse. What, are you taking that thing out for a spin whenever the mood strikes?” Mara’s face reddened. “One minute you say I need to be proactive about this passengers-from-other-realms crap, but when it comes to you and that thing inside you—Oh, never mind! Need I remind you that
you’re
one of those passengers, and your fire-breathing buddy is from another realm as well. Why are you two the big exceptions?”

“Need I remind
you
that that book says to ignore the dragon’s folly. So, assuming it’s referring to my current dilemma, your best course of action is to do just that. Ignore it.” He jabbed in the air toward the book. “It’s in your own handwriting. If you can’t follow your own advice, why the hell are you here asking for mine?” A vein popped out on Ping’s forehead, which was now beaded with sweat. He leaned over the table, and his breath grew dry and raspy.

The anger on Mara’s face melted into fear. “No, Ping. Don’t!”

Ping turned his head up to face her. His eyes were red, blazing. With the parched voice of an old crone, he said, “Don’t get in my way, girl.” He slumped out of his chair into the floor.

Mara crouched next to him and wiped his face with a paper napkin. His eyes fluttered open, and he pushed himself up with a start. “What happened?” he said.