The Conjuring Glass (5 page)

“No problem,” Penny said, still keeping her eyes on the boys around them.

“So,” said one of the boys, kneeling down to help Rooster up. “This must be Susan’s orphan.”

“Yeah, so what if I am?” Penny glared at him.

The boy gave her a cold look and jerked Rooster to his feet by his armpit. “You better watch yourself, new girl. Both of you.”

“Or what?” Penny and the other girl said in unison.

He only smiled at them.

“Come on, little bro,” he said to Rooster, and led him back to their makeshift baseball diamond.

Penny threw the bat down and followed the girl back to her tree.

“Thanks. I’m Zoe.”

“Penny,” Penny said, catching up to her.

Already Dogwood was turning out to be more exciting than she had expected.

Penny arrived at the big tree just behind Zoe, who bent to pick up her bag, eyeing the new books in the grass. Penny picked them up and handed one to her.

“From Susan … at the bookstore.”

Zoe regarded the offered book for a moment before taking it. “What’s this for?”

“Susan thought you’d like it,” Penny said—because
It’s a bribe to make you be my friend
, while more accurate perhaps, was too embarrassing to admit out loud.

“Oh … thanks,” Zoe said awkwardly. She tucked it under her arm with the other book and glanced around, as if searching for an escape. “Listen, I gotta get home before my grandma has a fit.”

Zoe dashed across the street without looking, pausing briefly on the center line to regard Penny again. “Tell Susan I said thanks.”

Then she was off again, sprinting down the sidewalk.

Penny stood alone at the edge of the park and watched Zoe disappear around the corner of the block, wondering if she’d done something to offend her.

A new silence made her look around, and she saw Rooster and his older brother watching her.

Time to go back inside.

Penny spent the rest of the afternoon in Susan’s shop reading, and went home that evening feeling a little disappointed. For the few minutes they were together, giving Rooster a taste of his own medicine, it was like having a friend again, something she’d not had since leaving her apartment in the city behind.

She didn’t see the fox at all that evening.

The next day she saw Zoe only briefly as the girl passed the storefront and rushed into the neighboring shop, Golden Arts.

“You should go check the rock shop,” Susan said, noticing Zoe dash inside.

Penny shrugged, then shook her head and went back to her book. She was bored, but not so desperately bored she was going to start stalking the locals.

On Friday morning Zoe turned up about an hour after opening.

Penny watched with muted interest as Zoe approached Susan, her face pointed toward the floor and a cascade of long dark hair covering it.

Susan and Jenny noticed her too.

“Good morning,” Susan said, setting aside the order form she’d been filling out.

Jenny waved, then went back to facing and straightening a shelf of binders.

“Hi, Susan. Thanks for the book.” She glanced over at Penny, who quickly looked back down at her own book but couldn’t pick up the dropped thread of her story.

“I hope it’s one you like. I’ve seen you look at it a few times.”

“Yeah, it’s really good.” She stopped in front of Susan, finally looking up into her face. “I made this for you … to say thanks, you know.”

Penny snuck another surreptitious glance and saw Zoe holding out a small dreamcatcher. About the size of her outstretched hand, a dozen beaded strings crisscrossed a frame of slender willow. In the center, a clear crystal caught and reflected light from the overhead fluorescents.

“That’s beautiful,” Susan exclaimed, turning it back and forth in her hand to watch the reflected light dance in the crystal. “I’ll hang it over the door.”

“Thanks,” Zoe said, and Penny saw a blush creep into her cheeks.

She turned to Penny next, and instead of looking away again Penny forced a smile. “Hi Zoe.”

“Hi … I brought you this.” She held out an old and clearly well-read paperback book, a
Year’s Best Horror Stories
that was older than both of them put together. “I noticed you like scary stories, so …”

“It’s great,” Penny said, and meant it. Not the book—Penny thought this one looked especially cheesy, even for a book of horror stories—but that Zoe had brought it. Maybe what Penny had mistaken for snobbery was just shyness. “Thanks.”

Zoe looked up then, even smiled. “You wanna go hang out for a bit?”

The Fox’s Game

Within the hour, Penny knew as much about Zoe as she ever had about any of her friends from the city.

Zoe had moved to Dogwood at the end of the last school year to live with her grandmother while her mom and dad pursued careers as over-the-road truck drivers.

“It’s just for a few months,” she said. “They’ll get tired of it pretty soon and come back for me.”

Penny couldn’t help but notice that Zoe didn’t seem completely convinced of this. She avoided Penny’s eyes for a second, fiddling with a hole in the knee of her jeans.

“My dad’s an Indian. For a while I stayed with my other grandma on the reservation, but I didn’t like it there much, so they said I could come here.”

“Do you like it here?”

Zoe shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess. I like Sullivan’s and the rock shop, but I don’t have any friends here.”

“Me either,” Penny said. “I just moved in with Susan. She’s cool, but my closest neighbor is that little booger with the mullet.”

Zoe laughed. “Lucky you.”

There was a nervous silence, the kind that grew harder to kill with every second it survived. Then, much to Penny’s relief, Zoe ended it. “Have you seen the rock shop yet?”

“No,” Penny said, glancing back toward the Golden Arts. The display window that had still been dark the only time she’d taken a good look in it, now glowed with bright fluorescent light.

“Let’s go,” Zoe said. “You’ll love it…they’ve got the prettiest rocks in there.”

Penny had to work to keep up with the taller girl’s strides. Crossing the street halfway between intersections, Penny shot nervous looks up and down. The lack of morning rush-hour traffic still unnerved her.

They passed Sullivan’s, and she saw Susan smiling at them through the window. They waved, and she waved back.

The bell over Golden Arts’ door jingled, and she had to rush to catch it before it swung shut again. She found Zoe inside, striding toward an open door set in the far wall.

An old man behind the glass display counter nodded at Zoe and said, “Morning, Zoe.”

Then his eyes fell on Penny, and he flinched as if goosed.

Penny gave a little wave, which he returned, and he watched her all the way through the showroom door as she caught up with Zoe.

Penny found Zoe standing at the end of a long table, pawing through a bin of loose stones. “What’s with that guy?”

“Dunno,” Zoe said, showing zero interest.

While the main floor of the shop looked like any other low-end jewelry store Penny had ever been inside, the smaller back room was a warehouse of rough gemstones, crystals, and strange minerals. Shelves crowded with displays of sparkling stones, opened amethyst geodes, great shining lumps of fool’s gold, and interesting formations of unidentifiable crystals covered the walls. A row of display shelves dissected the room.

“Weird,” Penny said, staring around.

“I want to be a geologist,” Zoe said. “I love minerals and gems.”

“You’ll make a good one too,” said the old man from the doorway.

He reached into the stone bin, plucking a handful of stones at random. “What’r these?”

Zoe grinned, and named them, one by one. “Carnelian, Jasper, Obsidian, and Turquoise.”

“And this one?” He held up a blue crystal, Penny’s favorite of the bunch.

Zoe, however, seemed unimpressed. “Quartz crystal. But someone dyed it to turn it blue, so it’s not
really
blue.”

The man laughed, dropped the stones into a paper bag, and handed it over to Zoe, whose grin returned.

“You win again,” he said dramatically. Then he turned to Penny. “You’re a Sinclair, aren’t you?”

“Uh, yeah,” Penny said, a little surprised.

“I knew it,” the man said, snapping his fingers. “I have an eye for faces. Never was good with names, but I knew I recognized you.”

“I’ve never been here before.”

The man waved her comment away. “Don’t matter. Family resemblance. I near jumped out of my skin when you walked in. You look a lot like your mamma.”

“You knew my mom?”

Zoe quit sifting through the bins of crystals and polished stones, watching Penny and the old shopkeeper with interest.

“Oh, yeah,” he said enthusiastically. “She used to come in here all the time when she was younger. Must have had quite a collection of pretty rocks, all the time she spent here.”

He must have quite a memory
, Penny thought. The excited flutter in her stomach intensified. Would he remember her father too?

“Your mamma, your aunt, and their friends were in here all the time.”

Penny’s hopes sank at once. She didn’t have an aunt. The old guy might have a good memory for faces, but seemed confused about other details.

Still, it was worth asking.

“Do you remember …” but Susan’s voice cut her off as she stepped up behind the old shopkeeper.

“Penny, why don’t you two head back to the shop? I’m sending Jenny out for a late breakfast.”

Penny didn’t know if she’d done anything wrong, but Susan looked irritated. Had Susan guessed what Penny was about to ask the old man?

“Thanks,” Zoe said, grinning as she stepped past Susan into Golden Arts’ showroom. She waved at the shopkeeper and said, “I’ll be back later.”

He nodded, keeping a wary eye on Susan as Penny followed Zoe out.

They waited outside Golden Arts for a few moments, but Susan did not join them.

“Come on,” Zoe said, striding toward Sullivan’s open door.

Penny took a step, and gave a little gasp, freezing on the spot.

The talking fox stood at the other end of the block facing her, unconcerned, as a small group of old women passed it on their way to the senior center, which had a banner over its door advertising All Day Bingo Friday.

A boy on a bicycle passed it a moment later, stopping to scan the street before he continued toward the park.

Could no one else see it?

The fox’s furry snout parted in a sharp-toothed grin, and it winked.

Penny ran to catch up with Zoe, pulling the shop’s door closed behind her.

Penny sat next to Zoe on one of Sullivan’s comfortable reading couches while her new friend cheerily recounted the story of their meeting. Zoe burst out laughing during the retelling of her favorite part, sitting on Rooster’s back and making him apologize.

Susan, for her part, tried not to look too amused as she admonished them both, but wasn’t able to hold the stern look she strived for. The corners of her lips kept quivering with a barely suppressed grin.

Penny, her attention split between the sidewalk past the glass front and Susan, nodded when it seemed appropriate, and promised at the end of Susan’s halfhearted lecture not to beat up any more town boys. She was afraid that weird fox might just trot up the sidewalk and push through Sullivan’s front door.

Slowly, Penny calmed down, silently telling herself that her overactive imagination had shown her the fox where a dog had been. That made sense—the people passing it wouldn’t have made a fuss about a friendly neighborhood mutt—but she remained only half-convinced.

When Jenny returned, her arms loaded with a tray of Styrofoam cups and a box of doughnuts, Penny rushed to open the door.

Jenny caught sight of Zoe. “Welcome back.”

Zoe waved, giving the doughnuts a hungry look as Jenny set them on the table in front of the reading corner couch. “Thanks,” she said, accepting an Italian soda from Susan and grabbing a maple bar.

No sooner had Susan and Jenny gobbled down a doughnut each, chasing them with heavily creamed coffee, the business day started at Sullivan’s. A half-dozen people, young and old, and even an elderly farming couple from out of town, browsed the shelves. The phone rang constantly, local businesses ordering office supplies, which Jenny would deliver later that afternoon.

Penny and Zoe stuffed themselves on doughnuts and headed back outside.

Penny scanned the street and sidewalk again, but there was no sign of a fox, talking or otherwise.

“Come on,” Zoe tugged on Penny’s arm. “There’s an amethyst crystal in there I want to buy.”

Penny had no real interest in spending the day rummaging through boxes of rocks, interesting as Zoe found them, but followed anyway.

The old shopkeeper met them with a wave, and a slightly embarrassed smile. “Welcome back, young ladies.”

Zoe gave him a distracted wave as she honed in on the back room again, but Penny lingered, more interested in his memories than his rocks.

“I’m sorry to hear about your mother, young lady. She was a nice girl. You must miss her a lot.”

Mention of her mom momentarily drove all questions from her mind. Just when she was finally thinking of something besides her mom, when it seemed she was able to go a day without crying, all the sadness crashed back down on her. Penny looked at her feet so he wouldn’t see her burning eyes, so he wouldn’t see how close to tears she was now, and said, “Thank you. I do miss her, but I’m doing okay.”

He made a sound of affirmation, almost a grunt. “Miss Taylor is the nicest person you could have found to stay with. She’ll take care of you.”