Magic Elizabeth (8 page)

“Then you really think they did?” cried Sally. “Then maybe she
is
here — but how do you know?” she asked.

“You know things in a family,” said Aunt Sarah, standing up and beginning to clear the table.

Sally, without thinking, began to help her as she did her mother at home, scraping and stacking the dishes upon the sink counter.

“Well,” said Aunt Sarah, “I didn’t think modern children knew how to do things so nicely. Perhaps you are going to be of some help to me after all.”

Sally guessed that this was the closest Aunt Sarah ever came to a real compliment, and despite the odd
way in which it was put, she felt pleased. “Shall I dry the dishes?” she asked.

“You’ll find a towel in that drawer over there.”

Sally opened the drawer. Inside she found a neat pile of folded dish towels and a very old-looking gingerbread-boy cooky cutter.

She lifted it out and looked at it.

“That’s a very old cooky cutter,” said her aunt.

“Yes,” said Sally. “Sometimes my mother lets me help make gingerbread boys at home. We have a cutter too. But not so big or so old.”

“Does she?” said Aunt Sarah, turning on the faucet. “You make gingerbread boys together, do you? You like that, I suppose?”

Sally nodded and dropped the cutter back into the drawer. She took out a towel and began to dry the dishes.

Neither of them spoke until the dishes were all done and put away.

Sally was thinking, however. Thinking about Elizabeth. Thinking about the attic. Maybe there was a clue up there. Maybe if she looked very carefully, she could find
something
.

Summoning up all her bravery, she asked at last, in a rather faltering voice, “I wonder — if I could go back to the attic?”

Her aunt turned from the cupboard into which she was placing the last of the dishes. She looked at
her. “Still dreaming about Elizabeth, are you? Well, perhaps tomorrow. We’ll see. Right now, I think you’d better go outside and get some fresh air and sunshine. You can take Shadow out with you, now that the two of you are such friends.”

Well, thought Sally, as she turned and walked toward the back door, it was better than nothing. Aunt Sarah had said “perhaps.” But it was going to be awfully hard waiting for tomorrow. Her throat was feeling a little sore, but she wasn’t going to mention it.

“Oh, and Sally,” called her aunt as she and Shadow were going down the back steps of the porch to the tangled old garden, “I thought perhaps tomorrow we could, if you like, make some gingerbread cookies.” But before Sally could reply, her aunt had closed the door and disappeared.

“A
unt Sarah’s funny
, isn’t she?” Sally whispered to Shadow. But Shadow was busily cleaning his left ear with a paw and did not bother to reply.

“Was this ever a real garden?” Sally wondered as they began to walk together through the tall weeds and grass. The breeze lifted her hair just as she had imagined it would. The soft fur of the foxtails brushed her knees, and Shadow sneezed as if perhaps they tickled his nose. She could see his tail moving through the grass, even when she lost sight of the rest of him.

The whisper of the moving grass rose all around them. Sally remembered how it had looked to her from her window. Like a green sea. She found that
it was indeed a little like walking through water to make her way through the swaying grass. It flowed smoothly past her and resisted the movement of her legs just as she remembered the water doing at the lake where she sometimes stayed in the summer-time.

She closed her eyes and imagined that she was standing knee-deep in water. In a moment her mother would call to her from the shore. When she opened her eyes, she saw a glitter of white showing through the thrashing grass at her feet. She bent to pick it up. She straightened and looked at the bit of sea shell curling up from the palm of her hand. For a moment it hardly seemed strange at all to find a shell out here. It looked like a broken piece of one of the shells in the parlor cupboard.

She put the bit of shell in her pocket, wondering how it had come to be out here. She walked on, looking at the ground for other shells and attempting at the same time to avoid the tangled bushes that tore at her hair and her clothes. She began to notice, through the reaching branches, the fallen underbrush, and overgrown weeds, faint ghosts of paths that once must have led about the garden.

“The other Sally must have walked here just like this, Shadow,” she said, “with Mrs. Niminy Piminy. She was a black cat just like you, only she was a
lady, of course, and she lived in this very house. Shadow, where are you?”

For the cat had entirely disappeared from view. “Now how could he have done that?” she wondered. She hadn’t even seen him go.

“Here, Shadow,” she called. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.” But there was no sign of Shadow that she could see, anywhere in the garden. The branches of the apple trees stirred, spilling sun bangles through their leaves. Sally watched them tremble on the very tips of the swaying grass, and then blow away to touch lightly on others. For a moment the entire garden shimmered. The pine trees, shaded by the building at the back of the garden, looked very solemn, dipping their dark tops to her as if they were bowing.

The sun felt pleasantly warm on Sally’s head. No one at all seemed to be moving in the apartment houses on either side of the garden. (How strange
they
would have looked to the other Sally.) She looked up at the windows and remembered how the windows of these very buildings had seemed to stare at her only last night. Now they did not look frightening at all. Only empty, as if no one lived behind them. There was no movement, nor any sound either, from Aunt Sarah’s house. Only up at the open windows of her own bedroom, the yellow curtains fluttered in the breeze.

How still it was. She might have been the only person awake in the whole world. The whispering of the grass sounded to Sally like the voices of the children who had played here long ago — the other Sally, and Patience, and little Bub. How nice it would be to have someone to play with! Shadow wasn’t really very satisfactory, even when he was around. She missed her friends at home.

Snap!
The sudden noise made her jump. She looked up at the high wall of the apartment building beneath which she was standing. Just above her head, the cord of a window shade was swaying back and forth, as if the shade had snapped up suddenly. To Sally’s surprise, she saw beneath the shade, and just showing over the edge of the window sill, a red ribbon tied in a neat bow. The bow was trembling. As Sally watched, the bow slowly rose and was followed by a bright yellow head, which was followed in turn by a pair of round blue eyes, a turned-up nose, and a curly mouth rather like Elizabeth’s, which seemed to be trying hard not to tremble.

The girl — for it was a girl — leaned out of the window and looked down at her. Two very long yellow braids slipped forward and hung out of the window against the brick wall. The girl raised her hand and took a bite from a cooky. She continued to stare solemnly down at Sally.

Sally stared back, too surprised to say anything.

“Do you want a cooky?” whispered the girl.

“Yes,” said Sally, and found that she was whispering too.

The girl vanished again beneath the window sill, and shortly reappeared with another cooky in her hand. Leaning farther out of the window, she stretched an arm down to Sally. Sally stood up on her toes, braced herself against the building with one hand and with the other reached up and took the cooky from the girl. The end of one of the dangling braids tickled Sally’s cheek. Her hand brushed against the vines which were growing up the side of the building from Aunt Sarah’s garden.

“Thank you,” she said. She looked at the cooky. It was a round one with crinkled edges and pink frosting. She took a bite. “It’s good,” she said, swallowing and smiling up at the girl.

“My mother made them,” the girl said.

“It’s very good. Your mother must be a good cook.” She ate some more of the cooky.

“Yes, she is.”

They stared at each other while they ate their cookies.

“Would you like another?” offered the girl.

Sally shook her head. “No, thank you,” she said. “I just finished lunch.”

A silence fell between them.

They both looked up while a bird sang briefly from the top of an apple tree.

“What’s your name?” Sally asked at last, shading her eyes against the sun and peering at the girl.

“Emily.”

“Mine’s Sally. Can you come out and play?”

At this, the girl shook her head. Her braids thumped against the brick wall. The end of her pink tongue crept out and nervously touched her upper lip.

“Do you live here?” asked Sally, feeling disappointed. Still, perhaps they could talk for a while.

The girl nodded. “Do you live there?” she asked, pointing at the house with her half-eaten cooky.

“No,” said Sally, “I’m just visiting my Aunt Sarah.”

“Oh,” said Emily. Her tongue darted out again. She leaned forward a little and lowered her voice so that Sally had to move even closer to hear her. “There was no one living in that house for a long, long time.” Her eyes grew very round, and her mouth trembled as she stared at the house. “It was all closed up. It was dark!” To Sally’s surprise, Emily shivered.

“I know,” said Sally, wondering what was wrong with Emily. “I’m almost ten years old. How old are you?”

“Eight,” said Emily. “Eight years and two months.” She was not looking at Sally.

Sally followed the direction of her gaze. Emily was looking up at the yellow curtains billowing at her windows.

“That’s my room up there,” said Sally, pointing. “I have a little green fireplace. It’s very old.”

Emily drew back from the window. Her braids slipped back inside over the sill. “Good-bye,” she whispered. Her hand reached up for the cord of the shade.

“Oh, don’t go!” cried Sally. “Please don’t go. I was just wishing for someone to talk to.”

Emily slowly lowered her hand. Her lips moved as if she were about to speak, but she did not say
anything. Her eyes flicked toward Aunt Sarah’s house, and then turned away.

Sally looked up at her, feeling puzzled. “Why, she’s afraid!” she thought. “Just like I was!” Maybe the house had looked haunted to her all this time, with all those scraggly old bushes, and that loose shutter creaking, and nobody living in it. And then Aunt Sarah had come — maybe she was afraid of Aunt Sarah!

“Guess what?” said Sally. “I came here last night in all that rain, and it was very dark, and I was so afraid! I never saw this house before, or my Aunt Sarah either, and the house looked so spooky to me that I wanted to run away.” She smiled.

“You did?” Emily said. “Really?” The tip of one braid appeared over the sill. “Aren’t you afraid any more?”

“No,” said Sally. “Didn’t you ever think it looked scary here?”

Emily nodded her head vigorously up and down.

“Why, I was even afraid of my aunt! I even thought maybe she was a witch.”