On Shadowed Wings (An Ash Grove Short Story) (4 page)

“Not yet,” she said reluctantly. “I’m still
thinking.”

“You’d better make up your mind soon, or
it’ll be too late to enroll. And we’ll need to find a place to
live. We should be looking at apartment listings.”

“You mean move in together?” she said, and
could have kicked herself for sounding so apprehensive.

He shook his head at her in exasperation.
“What did you think I meant?” But then he smiled and tightened his
arms around her. “Doesn’t it sound fun?” he murmured, his mouth
close to her ear. “Living in sin?”

She should have been in shivers of
excitement, but instead she muttered, “My parents would have
kittens.” It was a cowardly excuse. But she needed a chance to get
her head around the idea.

At this lukewarm response, Darryl eased his
hold on her and drew back enough to look her in the face again.
“You don’t like the idea?”

She fell back on evasion. “I just hadn’t
planned on moving to California so soon. I thought—”

“You thought you’d spend the summer here
babysitting for Dr. Sumner.” When she didn’t deny it, he gave a
dramatic sigh. “Gail, come on, they’re going to have to learn to
get along without you. It’s not like there aren’t plenty of other
sitters, even if they’re not right next door. You can’t arrange
your whole life around that kid.”

“I’m not,” she protested. “But they’re still
getting their feet under them. And she’s lonely.”

“Your folks will still be here,” said Darryl
firmly. “And all their other friends. It’s time for you to get out
of this town and start seeing the world.”

She didn’t have an answer for that. Maybe he
was right. But that didn’t mean she was wrong.

As the song came to an end and the students
applauded dutifully for the band, Ash Grove’s principal, Dr.
Michael Fellowes, took the stage. With his prematurely silver hair,
he looked particularly distinguished in his tuxedo. “I have a few
announcements,” he said into the mike. “First of all, is a Gail
Emerson here? If so, someone’s looking for you at the east
entrance.”

“Something wrong?” Darryl asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said, perplexed. “I’d
better find out.”

He followed her from the dance floor without
her asking him to. When they neared the double doors at the east
entrance she could see a tall, broad-shouldered young man standing
there—or rather pacing. He looked up at their approach, and when
the light glanced off his glasses she realized it was Jim. Clearly
he hadn’t come for the dance, though; he was wearing jeans, and his
expression was tense.

When she reached him he looked at her blankly
for a second before recognition widened his eyes. “Oh, it’s you,”
he said, surprised. “I didn’t recognize you at first.”

It didn’t exactly sound like a compliment.
“You wanted to talk to me?”

“Yeah. Have you seen Joy?”

“Joy?” she repeated, confused. “Not since I
took her home this afternoon. Why, should I have? Dr. Sumner knows
I’m not sitting for her tonight.”

“Well, that’s the thing. Apparently he didn’t
remember, and she left the house saying she was going over to your
place. That was almost”—he checked the wall clock—“two hours
ago.”

Cold apprehension pooled in Gail’s stomach.
“You mean she just walked out of the house and hasn’t come
back?”

“That’s what it looks like. Your folks
haven’t seen her. Do you have any idea where she would have
gone?”

“Gail’s been here for the last hour,”
interrupted Darryl. “She doesn’t have any idea.”

“I can answer for myself, Darryl.” He wasn’t
usually so Neanderthal. “Did she say anything to him before he
noticed she was missing? Anything that might give us a clue?”

“Hold on, I’ll ask him.”

While Jim got his phone out and made the
call, Darryl drew her aside. “You don’t need to get mixed up in
this,” he said. “Come on and let’s dance some more.”

“But Joy is missing! I can’t just sit by
while she’s lost.”

“Gail, she’s probably just fallen asleep in
the attic or something. It’s no reason to spoil our night.”

Jim was putting his phone away. “You were
right,” he reported. “Dr. Sumner says that at supper she was
talking about wanting to see the Anna butterfly. You don’t
think—the Anna Eighty-eight is in
Mexico,
Gail.” His voice
tightened with urgency. “When I said she couldn’t come with me to
the hatching tonight, if she decided instead to go after the
Eighty-eight—”

Gail’s stomach lurched, and she took a deep
breath to fight down the queasy anxiety. “Hold on,” she said.
“Let’s start closer to home. She wanted to go with you tonight, and
then she mentioned the Eighty-eight. So there must be some
connection in her mind between the two.” She tried to ignore
Darryl’s fidgeting. He was growing impatient.

Jim rubbed his hand over his face as if it
would help clear his mind. “She didn’t say the Eighty-eight
specifically, I don’t think. Dr. Sumner said she just called it the
Anna butterfly. If that matters.”

With sudden clarity she guessed what Joy had
been thinking—and if she was right, the little girl might have
gotten badly lost. “Maybe she didn’t mean the Eighty-eight at all,”
she said. And then they said at the same time: “Maybe she meant her
mother.”

“We were talking the other day about souls
taking the form of butterflies,” Gail remembered.

In Jim’s face she saw the same apprehension
she was feeling. “So she tried somehow to get to Ash Grove on her
own to find the butterfly hatching,” he said. “She’s got to be
somewhere between her house and here. But Dr. Sumner’s been driving
all over the area looking for her; he should have found her by
now.”

And Joy’s short legs wouldn’t have taken her
far, certainly not as far as Ash Grove. “Oh no,” Gail exclaimed in
dismay as the realization struck her. “She could have hidden in the
back seat of my car—I can’t lock it because of the busted window.
If she hitched a ride without me even knowing, by now she could be
anywhere on campus.” On the wooded ridge, where the forest extended
for miles, where there were steep hills where a child might turn an
ankle and deep gullies where she might lie injured and hidden. In
the long grass of the meadow, disoriented and invisible; if she was
asleep or unconscious, they could sift the fields for hours without
finding her, even if they came within feet of where she lay. “I’ll
help you look,” she said.

“Gail, wait a second!” Darryl’s voice halted
her. “You’re not seriously going to ditch me on a night we’ve
planned for months and run off with this guy on some crazy
search.”

“It’s not crazy,” she said, startled. “I’ve
got to help. I’m sorry about tonight, but I’ll make it up to
you.”

“For the record, I’m not trying to mess up
your evening,” Jim told Darryl. “Dr. Sumner and I wouldn’t be
bothering Gail if it wasn’t an emergency.”

But Darryl’s jaw was set. “Gail, this is
exactly what I was saying earlier,” he said, lowering his voice to
a furious whisper. “You need to stop jumping whenever Dr. Sumner
says. Let him and Sherlock freakin’ Holmes here find the kid. They
can call the cops, get the search dogs if they need to. What good
are you going to be?”

“I know how Joy thinks,” she returned. “Which
is more than the police can say.”

“I’m telling you, they don’t need you.
Tonight is supposed to be about us. Or do I have to compete now
with some seven-year-old kid for your attention?”

She stared at him in shock. “It may be news
to you, Darryl, but the purpose of my existence is not just to tag
along with you. If you’re so incredibly selfish that you care more
about me being your arm candy than you do about finding a lost
little girl who may be hurt or in danger, then you can go to
hell.”

Shaking his hand off her arm, she stalked
past them both to the door. “Come on,” she ordered Jim. “We’re
wasting time.”

In a few quick strides he had caught up with
her. Once outside the gym he switched on a flashlight, but the glow
it cast was red, making everything it touched look like a horror
movie. Gail saw that a piece of red cellophane had been secured
over the business end. “What on earth is that for?”

“Moth watching. When the light’s red it
doesn’t attract them.”

“Aren’t you missing the hatching?” she
realized. This was what had brought him here, after all. “Why
aren’t you staked out somewhere with your camera?”

“Finding Joy’s more important,” he said
simply, and she couldn’t help staring at him. He hadn’t even known
the Sumners a week ago, and here he was giving up this incredible
event to help them.

And Darryl not only hadn’t offered to help;
he’d tried to talk Gail out of helping.
Darryl doesn’t know
kids,
she reminded herself.
He doesn’t get how fragile they
are.
But the thought of him huffing at her for joining Jim made
her lips tighten with anger.

Her long gauzy skirt snagged on bushes and
branches as they entered the woods, and her high heels slowed her
progress until she stopped to tug them off. Struggling along
holding a shoe in each hand and also a swathe of skirt, to try to
keep it clear of the undergrowth, she thought about what else she
had learned from Dr. Sumner about Beltane. Next to Samhain—what
Americans celebrated as Halloween—Beltane was the night when the
veil between this world and the next was thinnest. It wasn’t as
dangerous as Samhain, when all kinds of scary things supposedly
walked the earth, but there were all those stories of human
children stolen by fairies. It was ridiculous, but she suddenly
realized there was a possibility that they wouldn’t find Joy at
all.

She bit her lip and forced down the panic
that threatened to rise in her. She wasn’t superstitious, but on a
night so threaded through with legends and superstitions, in a wood
that seemed crowded with creatures both earthly and unearthly, so
busy with eyes watching, feet pattering, voices whispering… she
could almost picture strange, spindly creatures with pointed ears
and greedy eyes luring an innocent child away from her home, away
from her family, into some strange unknown world. Beckoning,
whispering… she shivered.

“Here, take my jacket,” said Jim, and stopped
to pull it off and drape it around her. When his hands brushed her
bare shoulders, she shivered again, but this time it wasn’t from
the cold. That brief warm touch of his fingers was somehow more
intimate than Darryl’s arms around her waist when they danced.

“You must be chilly,” said Jim, oblivious to
her reaction. “That dress doesn’t cover much of… I mean, it’s not
really designed for this.”

Despite herself, she found that she wanted to
hear what Jim thought of her spruced-up appearance. “What do you
think of it otherwise? The dress?”

He hesitated. “It doesn’t look very
comfortable.”

“Well, that’s not really the point,” she
said, taken aback.

“Why not? If I was going to be dancing all
night, I’d want to do it in something that doesn’t make me
miserable.”

Gail wondered in dismay if she looked
miserable. From what Darryl had said, she’d thought she looked
pretty great.

“I guess I just don’t see the point,” Jim
continued. “If getting dressed up means not having any fun, why do
it? The high heels you can’t walk in, the dress you have to keep
hitching up.”

Her cheeks smarting, she hastily drew her
hand away from her bodice. “I thought guys liked it when we got
gussied up. Darryl won’t even go into town with me if I’m not
wearing makeup.”

He shrugged again. “I liked you without all
that stuff on your face. When I first saw you working in Dr.
Sumner’s yard, I thought you were the prettiest girl I’d ever
seen.”

That silenced her. Darryl had been
embarrassed at how grubby she was in her gardening jeans and
sneakers, with her hair all anyhow. Yet Jim had thought she looked
good.

How nice it would be, came the unwanted
thought, to have a boyfriend she could relax with—a guy who wasn’t
always pointing out ways she could dress better or style her hair
differently or lose a few pounds. Someone she wasn’t always trying
to impress.

But her more immediate concern was that now
she was stuck, immobilized. Holding a shoe in each hand, she
couldn’t draw her skirt away from the underbrush, and with her hair
trapped under the jacket she couldn’t turn her head at all to see.
She reached up to pull her hair back and almost stabbed herself in
the eye with a spiked heel.
Crap.
She could drop the shoes
and… “Uh, I could use some help here,” she said.

“So I see,” said Jim, and he took her shoes
from her and crammed each one toe first into a side pocket of his
jacket, so that the sharp heels stuck out at either side. Then he
held the jacket for her so that she could put her arms through the
sleeves and gather her hair up and out of the way, wishing she had
an elastic to secure it with.

“The invasion of Normandy was simple compared
to this,” she muttered in embarrassment, and saw him smile.

“It’s not that complicated. But if Darryl
decides to cuddle up to you, he’ll get gouged by one of your
shoes.”

She snorted. “He should be so lucky.”

Maybe it was a trick of the moonlight, but
she thought she saw a grin pass over his face. But that was
foolish. He wouldn’t care one way or another if she and Darryl got
cuddly, would he?

Almost without intention, her mind summoned
up a surprising—and surprisingly delicious—scenario. Jim holding
her close, so close that she could feel his heart beating even
through the stiff taffeta bodice of her dress. Those strong capable
hands smoothing her hair back from her face as he…

Keep your mind on the mission, you
dope.
What kind of a friend to the Sumners was she? All she
should be thinking about was Joy and making sure she was safe. Not
making out with college guys, no matter how geeky-hot.