The Colors of Madeleine 01: Corner of White (33 page)

13.

K
ala’s family had stopped downtown to pick up coffees for the road.

Now they stood around their open car doors in the frosty afternoon, having one last chat with Elliot and his friends.

“Good time to set off,” Shelby said, glancing up at the darkening sky.

“Isn’t it perfect?” Kala’s father agreed with bitter gusto. He tilted his head toward Kala’s little sisters. “Couldn’t miss their ballet classes, could they?”

At once the little sisters began to dance on the street. Their mother scolded one for not wearing her jacket in this weather, and the other for pirouetting like soap stuck down a drainpipe.

Kala leaned against the car, examining the woven bands on her wrist.

“Sell your jewelry to those rich kids at Demshield,” Gabe advised. “Make yourself a fortune.”

“You’re coming back for the holidays, right?” Cody squinted through his cigarette smoke.

“If you put out that cigarette I will.”

Cody took another drag. “Ah,” he said. “Too cold.”

“We should get going.” Kala’s mother reached her hands toward Elliot, as if she was thinking of hugging him, and then let them fall. She smiled instead. Then she scolded the little girls into the car.

Nikki tugged on the rope that was holding luggage to the roof racks. “Mind if I just retie this for you?” she asked, “Seems a little loose,” and Kala’s dad nodded, “By all means.”

Kala stepped toward Elliot a moment. She tilted her head, and her hair, which was loose, caught the streetlight.

Elliot touched the light in her hair. He took her right hand, turned it upside down, studied it a moment, then let it go — raised his eyebrows, and stood back.

Kala and her family got into the car.

At the intersection down the street, the car stopped behind a pickup truck, and Kala and her sisters lowered their windows, leaning out from either side of the car to wave.

Then the lights changed, the pickup truck gunned it, and the car disappeared in a cloud of exhaust fumes, windows shooting closed.

Shelby wound her arm around Elliot’s neck. “Let’s go blow something up,” she said.

Two blocks east on Broad Street, Jimmy Hawthorn, Deputy Sheriff, was opening his front door.

Isabella held up one hand; with the fingertip of her other hand, she was writing her name in the mist of his front-door glass.

“Done?” he said.

“It’s a long name,” she explained.

Her cheek felt cold when he kissed her.

They were a couple now, Jimmy and Isabella. The Red had brought them together and they’d stayed.

In the living room, the fireplace was glowing, the coffee table scattered with papers.

“You’re working again?” She stood with her back to the fire, holding her hands behind her to warm them.

Jimmy opened a bottle of wine and poured them both a glass.

“It’s those missing persons reports, the ones that Central Intelligence sent.” He gathered the papers together. “Look at this.” He was leafing through them. “There’s a man went missing in Golden Coast. There’s a woman in Golden Coast too. A teenage boy in Nature Strip. A teenage girl, Golden Coast again. And a little boy in the
Magical North. A whole heap of witness statements, and I’ve followed every path I could, but I haven’t got a single one. Five missing people, you’d think I’d have got
one
by now.” He glanced at her. “I’m usually okay at this sort of thing.”

“I know.” Isabella smiled. She sat down, sipped from her wine, closed her eyes. “Well,” she said, “if Central Intelligence sent them to you, it means they can’t figure them out, right? And if
they
can’t do it, maybe they just can’t be solved. How did they end up with Central anyway?”

“That’s the thing.” Jimmy sat beside her, returned the neatened papers to the coffee table. “There’ll be some reason — it’ll be drugs or witness protection or foreign affairs or something. And darn if I can figure why a seven-year-old boy in the Magical North could be connected with any of that.”

“No
wonder
you can’t solve them,” Isabella exclaimed. “You’re missing vital information. The drugs or whatever it is, it’s probably pivotal. They’re wasting your time! Am I allowed to look at them?”

“Go ahead.”

Isabella leafed through the files.

“I see why you keep trying, though,” she murmured. “This is a thirteen-year-old girl — and the seven-year-old boy — I suppose they have parents.”

Jimmy stood. “I’ve got some nice cheese and bread,” he said, heading to the kitchen. “Let me know if you solve them while I’m in here,” he called.

“What I want to know,” Isabella called back, reading fast, “is whether this waitress ever found her earring. And why she thought she should include that in her statement.”

“That’s the seventeen-year-old boy? Went missing from the restaurant in Nature Strip, right? Yeah, and the waitress says something about how the back of her earring fell off, and she was crawling around on her knees looking for it?” Jimmy leaned out of the kitchen door. “They get them to include every little thing ’cause you never
know what might be relevant. But the earring, that’s what you call
ir
relevant.”

He returned to the kitchen, got the breadboard, and started slicing bread. It was soft on the inside, gold and crunchy on the outside, flakes of crust scattering as he sliced.

Then he put the knife down.

He walked into the living room.

“You think it’s going to snow tonight?” Isabella wondered. She was sitting on the couch again, the files high on her lap. “Because if it is, I’ve got this experiment I’m working on at school, and —”

“Wait a moment,” said Jimmy.

He took the files from her.

He flicked through one, stopped, put it back.

He flicked through a second, paused with the same narrowing eyes, then replaced that too.

Then the third.

The fourth.

The fifth — and back to the first one again.

He looked at Isabella.

“I know where they are,” he said.

It was late and cold, and the banks of the Sugarloaf Dam were scattered with cigarette butts; also with the charred remains of explosives. The field nearby was torn up with tire marks from motor-scooter racing.

The others had gone home now, but Elliot and Nikki sat on the darkening grass. They were rolling an empty bottle back and forth between their feet in a slow, idle game, leaning into each other against the cold.

“What’s up with your Butterfly Child anyhow?” Nikki said. “The sycamore bark didn’t cheer her up?”

“Nope,” said Elliot. “She ate it all, though.” He gazed across the water of the dam. “Which is weird enough,” he added.

“It is,” Nikki agreed. “But she’s got to do more than sit around eating bark.”

“Well, she heads out with her insect buddies now and then.”

“Okay, more than that too. She’s gotta fix the situation here in Bonfire, I mean. Get the crops going and so on. Isn’t that her job?”

“That’s what I hear,” Elliot agreed.

“’Cause everyone’s hanging by a thread. You know the bank moved in on the Whittakers last week? And I hear that Marcy Tam’s closing up and moving out.”

“You sure are helping my state of mind here, Nikki,” Elliot said.

Nikki had a giggle that was low and unexpected, rolling across the air between them like marbles.

“Ah,” she said. “It’ll be okay. The farms’ll come good eventually, with or without the Butterfly Child’s help. Maybe crops are not her thing. Who said they all had to have the same tricks?”

Elliot looked at Nikki sideways, blowing on his hands. It was getting colder.

Nikki held her own hands toward him. “Blow on those for me too.”

They shifted closer and Elliot took both her hands into his and rubbed them hard.

“But if she
can
do it,” Nikki added, thoughtful, “but she’s not, because she’s just depressed, well, I guess we’ve got to cheer her up. You tried telling her any jokes?”

He laughed a breath of mist into the air.

“Okay, what’s she need?” Nikki was getting determined. “A self-help audiotape? Or maybe it’s more of a practical problem. It’s school vacation in a couple of weeks — you and I could spend the time renovating her doll’s house. A new coat of paint can do wonders for your mood, is what I hear.”

Elliot wound a finger through Nikki’s hair. It was that pale, it shone like milk under the moonlight.

“Or could it be boyfriend troubles?” She leaned forward, and the hair slipped out of Elliot’s fingers.

“Boyfriend troubles,” Elliot repeated. “You never noticed the ‘child’ in ‘Butterfly Child’?”

“How do we know she’s a child? People just call her that because she’s small, right? Or maybe it’s ’cause she’s supposed to be the
child
of a butterfly? You ever asked her how old she is? Come to think of it, you ever asked her
why
she’s not happy?”

“She doesn’t talk.”

“Well, the time I saw her, she didn’t look like a child. More like a young woman, maybe. Only freakishly tiny. Maybe that’s what’s got her down — her own freakish smallness.” Nikki leaned back again, resting her head on Elliot’s shoulder. “Or, like I said, boyfriend troubles.”

“She does go out a lot,” Elliot said. “Could be she’s got lovers all over the province. Never thought of that.”

“Ah,” Nikki nodded, her hair scraping against Elliot’s jacket with the nod. “Trying to juggle them all. Tricky.”

Their hands were intertwined now, their faces so close their cheeks were touching. An owl murmured nearby, and in the distance there was music. Somebody in Sugarloaf was having a party. Behind the music was the high-pitched sound of an ATV engine, and behind
that
was the sound that Elliot kept hearing, that faint, low fluting. People always shrugged when he mentioned it, so he’d stopped asking. It must be in his head — maybe some residual Color poison in his ear canals.

A stray touch of icy wind, and he and Nikki tried to shift even closer, coats pressing together, and then they were kissing.

It felt so much like a natural part of their shifting, or like the next step in the conversation, like defense against this cold, dark night, that they almost didn’t notice what they were doing. Then they noticed, and it felt so good his hands reached around her waist, rotating her toward him, and she followed the trajectory he’d started, climbing onto his lap, and then, abruptly, she stopped.

She climbed right off him, sat herself a good distance away, and said: “What are we doing? She won’t even be out of the province yet.”

Elliot scratched his head.

“We’re drunk, I guess.”

“We are.” Nikki jumped to her feet, offering her hand to pull him up too, but he stayed. He looked at his watch.

“If they’re not out of the province yet,” he said, “they drive too slow.”

Then she did drag him to his feet, and as he stood, he looked for his own reflection in the water. Couldn’t see it there; the water was too black. Moon must have slipped behind a cloud.