On Shadowed Wings (An Ash Grove Short Story) Page 3

  “You know boarding students at Ash Grove can’t have cars, Mom. It’s no problem for me to drive myself.”

  Her mother gave Gail’s hair another spritz of hairspray and stood back to gauge the effect. “It just doesn’t seem very gentlemanly of him to make you arrange for your own ride,” she said. Gail’s librarian mother was a petite blonde, and at the best of times Gail felt like she loomed over her. In her high-heeled evening shoes she felt more than ever like a hulking monster next to her dainty mother.

  But she’d done all she could reasonably be expected to do with what she had to work with. She made one last dab with the mascara wand and turned resolutely away from the mirror. “What do you think? Do I look okay?”

  Her mother beamed. “You look beautiful, hon. Let’s get your dad to take some pictures of you before you leave.”

  Her father had to ooh and aah over her too, so it was already well after eight by the time Gail set out for Ash Grove. Her dad had offered the use of his car, but Gail didn’t see any reason not to take her own. Fortunately her mother had lacquered her hair so securely that the wind through the half-open window didn’t disarrange it in the slightest.

  She parked in the visitors’ lot and walked over to the gym, where the thud of bass was emerging from. The Ash Grove campus was one of the most picturesque places Gail knew of. After a short bridge that crossed the river, the road extended through gentle meadows up to a cluster of old-fashioned stone buildings that looked like an English village. Behind them rose a wooded ridge, its trees lush in new green, and elsewhere the view was framed by the gentle slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Tonight they were the color of slate against the yellow-coral sky, and the long meadow grasses stirred under the breeze with a peaceful sound. There was still plenty of light in the sky, and the spring air was soft against her bare arms and neck.

  Her steps slowed. It was too lovely an evening to spend indoors, dance or no dance. It looked like it would be a clear night with a nearly full moon, a perfect night for moth watching. She thought suddenly of sitting in a moonlit clearing with Jim, listening to him talk in that melted-chocolate voice about the life cycle of butterflies—

  “There you are.” Darryl was standing outside the gym waiting for her, hands in his pants pockets. He wore his tuxedo as casually as if it were denim, which somehow irritated her. Maybe because all the boning in her bodice wouldn’t let her stand anything but perfectly straight. “You look fantastic,” he said. “See? All it takes is a little effort. That dress is awesome on you.”

  “I’m glad you like it.” She knew Darryl preferred distinctive clothes that were different from what everyone else was wearing, and she’d been thrilled to find the vintage ink-blue dress, which had a full skirt made of layers of tulle. She just hoped she wouldn’t regret the strapless style: she didn’t have a whole lot of chest for it to hold onto, and she’d already caught herself tugging it back into place more than once.

  “Who did your hair?” he added, continuing to look her over. “It’s a really sexy look for you.”

  “Mom’ll take that as a compliment.” It was awkward being the subject of conversation, and she hurried to steer it somewhere else. “You look very handsome,” she told him. “Like Cary Grant.”

  He grinned. “Maybe I should get my chin done, have a divot like his installed. That might be just what I need to stand out in Hollywood.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t say things like that. You don’t need plastic surgery.” Every time he criticized his own looks, she wondered uneasily what he thought of hers. She didn’t have any glaring faults, but she was definitely no Angelina Jolie.

  “You know what a competitive business it is,” he said, steering her indoors with a hand at the small of her back. “I can’t afford to rule out anything that might help me get ahead.”

  It was a conversation they’d had plenty of times before. “Let’s not talk about it tonight, okay? Tonight is for fun, not work.”

  But Darryl wasn’t one to be easily derailed when he wanted to get to the bottom of something. “So have you made a decision about UCLA?” he asked during the first slow song, when the music was quiet enough for them to talk.

  “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.

  As soon as they had climbed to a relatively clear space near the top of the ridge, they stopped to get their bearings. As she had hoped, from that elevation they had a good view of much of the campus. The light-spangled windows of the gym, the dark shapes that were the other buildings. The dusky expanse of field stretching out like a starless sky.