Frost (12 page)

“Mostly because we’re working tomorrow.”

I shrugged the hat over my head and exhaled my dissatisfaction.

“At least I can go to the game tonight,” he continued.

The varsity basketball game. Darn it. I reached a hand up into my scalp and scratched, one long, dramatic rake.

“Super Stork flies again?” Jack asked.

I nodded.

“Game’s at seven. Your meeting isn’t until nine, right?”

I shot him a brow-stretcher of a look. “I am not sitting in the bleachers with this thing.” I pointed at my head.

“But I finally have a night off.”

“And I don’t.”

“Can’t we ever just have a normal night?”

Honestly. He, of all people, wanted to have
that
conversation? “I’m going to Afi’s to hide for a while.”

“You want some company?”

“Love some.”

Walking down Main hand in hand, it occurred to me that it didn’t matter where Jack and I were — a basketball game or behind Afi’s cash register — I was happy just being with him. We passed by the bookstore; Paulina, Ofelia’s sister, came to the door.

“I have that book you were looking for, Kat.”

I pulled Jack into the warmth of the store. The floor-to-ceiling books had a slightly musty smell to them, but Paulina, as a counterattack, sold soaps and candles. Today I detected a lemon verbena aroma holding at bay something Twain or possibly Poe. I scratched under my hat. As promised, the condition was finally becoming more tolerable — but, still, a ridiculous way to communicate.

“Here it is,” Paulina said, handing me a spine-cracked copy of
The Snow Queen
from a shelf in the kids’ section.

“A little young for you, isn’t it?” Jack asked.

I’d already read the story off the Internet, but somehow my designs were coming up flat. I was hoping the picture book would inspire me.

“I guess I’m a kid at heart,” I said, running my hand along a display of beautiful children’s books. My palm came to a halt atop a blue train with a smiling face —
Thomas the Tank Engine.
I lifted it and quickly flipped through the pages. The scenes were of a quaint countryside, a busy train yard, and a round-eyed happy engine named Thomas.

On impulse, I placed it on top of my other book and headed for the register.

“I kinda get the first one, but what’s up with the trains?” Jack asked.

“It’s for a friend,” I said, confusing even me.

“No one I need to be jealous of?”

“What? You think I’m two-timing you with a younger man?”

His eyes narrowed.

“And buying my boy toy gifts in your presence?” I continued.

Jack looked away. He seemed genuinely uncomfortable with the conversation. Seriously though “boy toy” was funny. Lighten up already.

Paulina rang up my purchases.

“I’m enjoying getting to know your sister,” I said as I pulled money from my wallet.

“She likes the work,” Paulina said.

I raked at a bothersome patch near the nape of my neck. “It’s been a big help while Afi’s recovering. We were lucky she showed up the very day Afi had decided to hire someone.” I stowed the two books in my satchel and pulled it over my head in an across-the-shoulder fashion.

“Craziest thing,” Paulina said. “I’d just spoken to her a few days before, and she was talking about changes she wanted to make to her garden. Next thing I knew, she was on my doorstep with all her earthly possessions claiming she’d been called home. Called by whom, I’d like to know. It wasn’t me; and there’s only me.” Paulina shook her head. “She always was a free spirit.”

Back out into the cold and bleak afternoon chill, I kept my hands buried deep into my pockets and my head down, fighting more than just a headwind. Words like “earthly” and “spirit” gave me the willies.

Only Afi was at the register when we stamped our snowy boots at the front mat.

“Can you work?” he asked me after I’d untwisted the scarf from my cold cheeks.

“Yeah. Sure. Why don’t you go?” I said, carefully omitting use of the word “home” this time.

“I think I will,” Afi said. “There’s a can of fish chowder and a bottle of beer calling me.”

Again with the “calling” reference.

Afi started toward the coatrack and then stopped, scratching his whiskers. “Of course, the only place to get real chowder is Café Riis.”

“Where’s that?” Jack asked. I knew better.

“Holmavik, of course,” Afi said.

Jack looked at me, confused.

“In Iceland,” I mouthed.

Afi shrugged his coat over his spare shoulders and left, muttering something about Viking beer.

“Are you going to take your hat off?” Jack asked.

“No.”

He took a swipe at my head, but I was too fast for him. “I want to see it.”

“No way.” I clamped a hand on my hat.

Jack’s cell phone rang, distracting him. I listened to his brief replies: “Hello. Good. Now? I can be there in a half hour.”

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Stanley. There’s a big announcement he’s giving to his staff. He wants me to be there.”

“He didn’t say what it’s about?” I asked.

“No. Some big surprise.”

Jack was out the door so quickly I didn’t have a chance to ask him about plans for later — or who else would be present at the meeting.

With a half hour to go until meeting time, I sat at the register removing portions of my scalp with the fingernails of one hand, while flipping through
The Snow Queen
picture book. The first few pages were a prologue, something long and boring. Prologues, if you asked me, were like base coats of nail polish, not worth the time or effort. The book’s illustrations, on the other hand, were beautiful: glittery and silk-spun and all kinds of inspiring. I looked up and got spook-bumps to find Ofelia an arm’s length away. I’d heard nothing, seen nothing.

“You startled me.”

“I’m early,” was all she offered by way of reply.

I noticed the soft brown hat was tucked under her arm; her scalp had no angry lesions; and she appeared torment-free, calm even. So why did her presence now, as on that very first day in Afi’s store, fluster me?

“How do you do it?” I asked.

“Do what?”

“Avoid the cap.”

“Ah.” She turned the Thomas book to face her. “My previous council were renegades in this respect.”

“Renegades?” The word itself had a nice zip to it. “In what way?”

She placed her palm flat on the book, covering the little engine’s body. “What emotion, above all, do you suppose a renegade or maverick — or however you want to term those who effect change — overcomes?”

I was taken aback.

“What is it that grips you the moment the cap appears?” Ofelia asked.

“Pain,” I blurted out.

“But is the pain manageable at first?”

“At first, yes. But, by now, I know what’s coming.” Realization dawned. “Wait, I change my answer to fear,” I said in a choky voice.

“Precisely.” She removed her hand from the book. “Such a sweet story.”

I blinked. She made it seem like she’d absorbed it as we were speaking.

“Do you know the book?”

“I do now.”

I got the willies, one stop past goose bumps on the scare train. And I wasn’t a wait-and-see kinda gal.

“Ofelia, do you have some kind of psychic ability?”

“Ah. You recognize a kindred spirit.”

Kindred? Spirit?
We were now pulling into the heebie-jeebies station. And I didn’t even want to think about a final destination. What was it with her?

“Are you talking about me?” I asked.

“Of course.” Her finger ran the length of the Thomas book’s spine, yet it was my own that felt a cold digit trail from nape to waist. “This book is a medium of sorts, right?”

A medium? Hardly. More like a small, as in a small voice that was telling me to run fast and far.

“Kat, your humor is just one of your many gifts.”

Kind of a compliment, sure, except that the only funny bits had been in my head. And the last time someone — Hulda, to be precise — had talked to me of gifts, I’d ended up at a portal to another realm.

“You must trust yourself and your instincts,” Ofelia continued. “Your youth is significant. Now, more than ever, Fru Hulda would encourage you to explore your gifts.”

“Do you know Fru Hulda?”

“No. Shame. Had I arrived just one day earlier.”

The timing of Ofelia’s arrival — the same day as Hulda’s collapse — had me wondering. And how much of a
shame
was it for her to have the unchaperoned ear of the novice interim leader? “Then how do you know what she would want?”

“I may not
know
Fru Hulda, but I know
of
Fru Hulda. Of her open mind. Of her open heart. I feel it is why I was called home.”

Sure, she said all the right things, had big Bambi peeps, but there was still something that bugged me. And I even knew she could sense my distrust, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that, or about her, for the time being.

The arrival of Grim and then the others put an end to our meeting of the minds. Our Stork powwow got under way a few minutes later.

We began with an update on Hulda, except there really wasn’t anything to report. She was still in a faraway “safe place,” and there’d been no change to her condition. Our next topic was also a bust; Fru Svana had been unable to discover anything about Dorit’s whereabouts.

I moved on to the evening’s business. Ofelia, with a soul to deliver, had prompted the meeting.

“I have been contacted by an essence,” Ofelia began as was customary. “A girl: vivacious and intelligent. For one so smart, I divine either a thirty-year-old doctor or a thirty-five-year-old teacher as the vessel.”

“You divine!” Grim snapped.

“Yes.”

“We do not claim to divine,” Grim said. “We merely recommend, based upon those candidates by whom we are contacted through dreams or physical manifestations. To divine is to pretend some sort of influence upon the nomination of vessels.”

Ofelia held her hand up in defense. “My apologies, Fru Grimilla. It is simply a misunderstanding of verbiage. My old council tossed about the word divine with quite a different meaning than what you describe.”

“It is not a term accepted here,” Grim said.

We managed to get through the rest of the meeting without Ofelia committing any more acts of heresy. I couldn’t help but be a little relieved that there was finally another rogue Stork to take the heat off me. But exactly why had Ofelia called her previous council renegades? And what was up with her sixth sense? And exactly what had she meant by divine? And why did she rile me so?

By the time our meeting was done, despite the whole time-bending thing, I caught only the last minute of the basketball game. Even though the scoreboard showed us ahead by ten points, I could tell that something was wrong.

“What’s up?” I asked, plopping down between Jack and Penny on the bleachers.

Penny narrowed her lids into mere slits, gazing onto the court. I watched as Pedro stole the ball and drove it back for a layup. Pedro, for a little guy, was one tough point guard.

“Did something happen?” I asked, concerned by the boil in Penny’s coloring. Even her hair seemed redder.

Tina dumped an arm over Penny’s shoulder. “Pedro got editor in chief.”

“No way,” I said.

“No shit,” Penny replied.

Jack pretended to watch the game, but I could tell by the way he bit his lip, he was listening.

“What did Mr. Parks say?” I asked.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Penny said. The buzzer sounded, signaling an end to more than the game.

Outdoors and out of the chaos of the mass exodus, Jack and I lingered a few paces behind Penny, Tina, and Matthew. “Did you know about Mr. Parks’s decision?”

“Yes,” Jack said.

“What?”

“That doesn’t mean I had anything to do with it.”

“It’s bogus. She has more experience.”

“But he’s a senior. It’s his last chance.”

“Are you on his side?”

“Since when did an opinion constitute a side?”

“So you are on his side.”

“It wasn’t an election. There are no sides. Mr. Parks made his decision. Can we just change the subject?”

“Fine,” I said. Except it wasn’t. We were both irritated. We walked in silence, the mood just as frosty as the night air.

Jack finally broke the stalemate. “I have news from Stanley’s meeting.”

With my Stork meeting and Penny’s sulk, I’d forgotten that Stanley had called a project meeting. “What is it?”

“I’m going to Greenland.”

“You’re what?”

“You heard me right.” He was suddenly animated, chipper even. “A two-week field study in April. One week will be during Spring Break. The other I’ll have to get excused for. Brigid has invited a small team of us to observe the gathering of the quarterly ice-sheet measurements. It’s a really big honor. She picked me over some of the graduate students.”

I’ll bet she did.

“It’s gonna be awesome,” Jack continued.

“Greenland?”

“And way, way, up there. We’re talking Arctic, baby.”

Forget chipper. The guy was downright gleeful. And only my snowman would consider the frozen roof of the world as a Spring Break destination. “Congratulations, I guess. You sound really excited.”