The Madrona Heroes Register: Echoes of the Past

Book No. 4: Echoes of the
Past

By Hillel
Cooperman

Illustrations by Caroline
Hadilaksono

Text and Art Copyright © 2013 Hillel
Cooperman

THE MADRONA HEROES REGISTER,
characters, names, and related indicia are trademarks of and ©
Hillel Cooperman. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information
storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing
from the author.

ISBN 978-0-9899905-4-7

For Bella.

1

It had been a very long time since a
child had exhibited a super power in the small lakeside
neighborhood of Madrona. So long, in fact, that it was as if this
had never happened at all. Madrona was not crawling with
radioactive spiders looking to bite, or littered with crash-landed
spaceships containing small boys from distant planets. Signs of
normalcy and calm were everywhere.

In fact, as you drove into the old
tree-lined section of town, an actual sign read: “Madrona – The
peaceable kingdom,” words inspired by an almost two hundred year
old painting, currently hanging in a museum three thousand miles to
the east. The painting showed a world where sworn enemies, both
human and animal, live together in peace. But on this airy summer
afternoon, two of the three Jordan siblings were living anything
but peaceably.

§

Binny Jordan searched frantically
around her room, which had the attendant swirl of strewn-about junk
you would expect to find in the room of a ten-year-old girl.
Binny’s search was impeded by all the clothes on the floor and
discarded cups snuck upstairs for beverages to be consumed outside
the kitchen (in flagrant violation of Binny’s parents’
rules).

Posters of various skateboarding
heroes in daring poses covered the walls. No fewer than three
skateboards lay angrily split at the bottom of her closet, halves
pointing upward like tombstones. Binny had the vague intention to
display these on her wall someday like a hunter would exhibit his
quarry: “See the lives I’ve taken? Yours may be next!”

Peeking out from one spot on the wall
Binny’s father’s drawing of his daughter as a skateboarding
superhero named “Skate Punk”. He drew Binny and her siblings as
comic book heroes periodically. Mostly when he was procrastinating
before drawing the illustrations he was actually paid to
create.

It has to be here somewhere, she
thought to herself. The “it” in question was a small pocket mirror.
It was old and covered in ornate swirly decorations and looked like
it was made of precious silver. It had a hinged cover that
protected the little round mirrored surface from scratches. It was
Binny’s mother’s mirror, but Binny had “appropriated” it for
herself. “Stolen” is such an ugly word. Unlike the used dishes in
her room, her parents overlooked this infraction, since possessing
the mirror seemed to make Binny happy, and unlike the dirty dishes,
the mirror probably wouldn’t lead to an ant infestation.

The mirror usually sat on the shelf
next to Binny’s makeup and hair stuff. Binny liked makeup fine,
though she had liked it more when she was younger. These days it
seemed to give her a shared activity with her seven-year old sister
Cassie. Cassie adored make-up, dress-up, and all manner of
attention getting activities. At the thought of Cassie, Binny
admonished herself silently. When something was missing from her
room, why did she waste time looking anywhere but in her sister’s
thieving little hands?

§

Cassie Jordan was outside at that very
moment acting out an entire scene from Snow White using the very
mirror Binny was trying to locate. “Mirror mirror, who’s the
prettiest girl in the world? Me? Cassie? Cassie Jordan? Oh really?
But I couldn’t agree more,” sang Cassie using the mirror like a
microphone. As if that weren’t enough to draw her sister’s ire, she
was also mangling the story by pretending to be Snow White, when
clearly Snow White’s stepmother was the one that spoke to the
mirror. As with most things that enraged Binny, Cassie wasn’t
bothered in the least by this inconsistency.

§

With Cassie’s street performance in
full swing, Binny marched into Cassie’s room, examining all the
things she owned that were not in their rightful places: a large
book on spying, including instructions on making codes for secret
messages, a collection of hair bands which Cassie didn’t even need
since her hair was much shorter than Binny’s, a suspicious number
of socks that Binny knew were hers, admittedly hard to prove since
their parents bought her and Cassie the same kind, and some spoons
half-covered in peanut butter Cassie stuffed between the bed and
the wall upon becoming distracted with some other
mischief.

Mom and Dad were gonna be super
annoyed about this one, Binny thought with a smile. Binny made a
mental note to add it to the ever growing list of Cassie’s
transgressions that she’d been keeping in her journal for later
disciplinary action. For now though, the mirror was the top
priority, and it was still nowhere to be found.

§

Cassie was now performing final
encores in her impromptu rock concert. The spotlights shined
brightly on her as she swung and swayed, eyes mostly closed,
singing snippets of popular songs mixed with nonsense into the
mirror.

Throngs of imaginary fans
chanted her name. Not her sister’s name. Not her brother’s
name.
Her
name.
As far as the fans were concerned, Cassie Jordan was an only child.
Singular and special.

When Cassie wasn’t in front of her
adoring crowds, she was riding in glittering limousines and being
attended by smartly-dressed servants, all part of being the most
famous seven-year-old rock star on the planet. But now Cassie
reached out to touch as many fans as she could, sharing with each a
tiny sliver of herself so they could bask in her
specialness.

§

Like Cassie, the man was also in his
own world. He’d taken Rembrandt out to walk this route so many
times that the dog naturally knew the way to go – right by the
Jordan house. With the dog navigating, the man could dedicate most
of his time to organizing his thoughts.

The man was tall and solidly built. He
had neatly arranged black hair, with flecks of gray appearing above
his ears. His expensive, immaculately kept, but understated clothes
were a point of pride, a key part of how he liked to present
himself to others. But the man had a secret not nearly as neat and
tidy as his appearance — the consequence of a loose thread that
began to unravel long ago, leading him to the very children he was
observing now.

The man had no children of his own,
but he had a dog. Rembrandt was a Bernese Mountain Dog. He was
friendly and he was big. These weren’t small dogs to begin with and
Rembrandt was large for his breed. Dark brown and shaggy with
orangey brown “socks” and a white snout and chest. His size
combined with his enthusiasm sometimes gave people – nervous kids
especially – the wrong idea about his intentions.

To date Rembrandt hadn’t bitten into
anything he wasn’t supposed to other than the periodic box of fancy
sweets absent-mindedly left on a low coffee table. And several
pairs of very expensive Italian leather shoes that the man had
finally learned to start storing in his closet, out of the shaggy
creature’s reach. His closet had special drawers made just for
shoes, so this was the perfect excuse to use them.

Rembrandt needed to get outside more
often than most dogs. But the man knew well enough to keep
Rembrandt away from the kids in the neighborhood, as large dogs
giving out mixed signals as to their intentions, together with
their solo male owners, were pretty much never welcome companions
for kids at play. That made the man’s task harder, but the task
still needed to be done.

§

Binny’s search through the house
exhausted, the only place that remained to look was outside. Since
most of the year Madrona was rainy and even on the chilly side, the
kids of the neighborhood usually spent as much time as they could
outside in the brief window during late summer and early fall when
the weather was sweet. The early evening hours, as it was right
now, were especially nice as it stayed light out and the kids could
play until dinner and even for some time afterwards.

Binny didn’t see Cassie at first, and
yelled her name. If Cassie had heard her, the unmistakably angry
tone in Binny’s voice would have served as a warning, not an
invitation. But Cassie was totally immersed in her own pink sparkly
universe.