Brave Warrior

BY
NEW YORK TIMES
BEST-SELLING AUTHOR

ANN HOOD

Grosset & Dunlap
An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

For Delila Dot

Chapter 1: Weeping Willows

Chapter 2: Lemonade M

Chapter 3: Penelope Merriweather

Chapter 4: March Madness

Chapter 5: Buffalo

Chapter 6: Attacked!

Chapter 7: Touching the Enemy

Chapter 8: Vision Quest

Chapter 9: Brave Warrior

Chapter 10: Crazy Horse

Chapter 11: Losing The Treasure Chest

Crazy Horse: 1841–September 5, 1877

I
f it can be said that a house mourns, then Elm Medona itself was as sad as Maisie and Felix. Without Great-Aunt Maisie, the rooms seemed darker and duller. The hallways yawned long and forlorn. Even the grounds, which should have been bursting with the first crocuses and daffodils of spring, refused to have the tight purple and yellow buds blossom. Ever since the funeral, it had rained. Hard.

“It’s like the sky is crying,” Felix had said, and even though Maisie had rolled her eyes and muttered, “Now he’s a poet,” she secretly agreed that everything around them was mourning.

Great-Uncle Thorne took to his room and refused
to come out. In the two weeks since Great-Aunt Maisie’s funeral, he had taken all his meals in his room and kept his door firmly shut.

“I know what would make him feel better,” Maisie said one night as she and Felix watched the maid carry a silver tray with his dinner out of the Kitchen. Three times a day the cook made Great-Uncle Thorne the exact same thing:
croque-monsieur
, which was really just a fancy ham-and-cheese sandwich; sliced cucumbers in sour cream; warm potato salad with bacon and mustard; and a single scoop of lemon sorbet with raspberry sauce.

Maisie and Felix were eating grilled cheese-and-tomato sandwiches at the big wooden table that was mostly used for preparing their meals. Since Great-Aunt Maisie died, it had felt too weird to resume eating in the Dining Room. Instead, they wandered in and out of the enormous basement kitchen, leaving half-eaten apples and toast crumbs on the counters.

Felix knew what Maisie meant: a visit to The Treasure Chest. When they went into The Treasure Chest and picked up an object, they traveled back in time. He and Maisie had met Clara Barton, Alexander Hamilton, and Pearl Buck—all of them
children, too. But the last time they did it, Great-Uncle Thorne and Great-Aunt Maisie had gone with them. They’d landed in Coney Island at the turn of the twentieth century and met a young Harry Houdini. What Maisie and Felix didn’t know was that their aunt had masterminded the trip, and that she intended to stay there. Staying back in time, they learned, meant dying in the present. And to Felix, that was enough time traveling for the rest of his life. He couldn’t help but feel somewhat responsible for what had happened, and now there was no way to fix it. Great-Aunt Maisie was gone forever.

“You know,” Maisie said, narrowing her eyes at him, “if we go to The Treasure Chest and go back in time, it makes Great-Uncle Thorne healthier. If we don’t…”

She let her voice trail off so that Felix could fill in the blanks himself.

“He’ll get older and frailer,” Felix said. “Which is exactly what’s supposed to happen.”

“But it doesn’t
have
to happen,” Maisie said. She had a new, annoying habit of dipping her grilled cheese sandwich into mayonnaise, which she did before every bite.

“I don’t think we should mess with the natural order of things,” Felix said, averting his eyes. Mayonnaise made him queasy, and he couldn’t watch his sister eating it on the outside of her sandwich like that.

Maisie dipped the final triangle of her sandwich into the crystal bowl of mayo, licking the drips from it before popping it into her mouth.

“Natural order of things?” she repeated with her mouth full. “Ever since you won class president you talk like a politician.”

“Really? I thought I sounded like a poet,” Felix said.

“Maybe you just sound like a dope,” Maisie said, getting up from the tall stool with a loud scrape against the tiled floor.

Felix watched his sister stomp away. In the past, Maisie somehow had convinced him to do just about anything she wanted, including going into The Treasure Chest that very first time back in the summer. But he was not going to let her talk him into another trip there. He was, after all, president of the class, leading home-run hitter, and in general, a normal, ordinary person. That was good enough for him.

“Must you slam doors all the time?” her mother asked Maisie that night.

The answer was yes. Maisie wanted to stomp, slam, rattle, pound, clank, clump, jangle, crash, smash. Maisie wanted to be heard. But no one was listening.

Her mother stood in a black dress and high heels, wearing too much makeup and holding a shiny black clutch purse, ready to go out yet again with Bruce Fishbaum, the lawyer she worked for and the person whom she spent more and more time with.

“Really, Maisie,” her mother said, “I don’t know why you have to be so noisy.”

“I don’t know why you have to go out with Bruce Fishbaum practically every night,” Maisie said, glaring.

But her mother had already walked to the window, and she peered out expectantly, as if at any minute Bruce Fishbaum would drive up and take her away.

“It’s business,” her mother said unconvincingly. “You know that. I’m lucky the Fishbaums like me enough to have me go to these client dinners.”

Frustrated, Maisie stomped out of the room, across the foyer, and up the Grand Staircase. One good thing about living in a mansion was that when you made a lot of noise, it echoed.

Upstairs, she walked slowly past Felix’s room, which was, of course, empty. Ever since he won the class-president election, he always had somewhere to be: after-school meetings, evening planning committees, socializing with his cabinet. And when he wasn’t doing that, he had baseball practice or pizza parties or a million other dumb things. The phone seemed to always be ringing these days, and the person on the other end was always looking for Felix.
Got to run!
he’d say to Maisie, and indeed he would run—right past her, his backpack straps flying as he ran out the door into a waiting car filled with friends.

All while Maisie stood and watched.

Maisie could not remember a time when she had been so alone. When they lived in New York just last year (though sometimes it felt to her like that had been a million years ago) they did almost everything together. Their little group of friends had been just that:
their
friends. No one would have invited Felix
over without Maisie; no one would have asked Maisie to do something without Felix. They were a team, a pair, inseparable. One name was never even uttered without the other.
MaisieandFelix
. As if they were one person.

But somehow, here in terrible Newport, Rhode Island, Maisie had turned invisible. To her class-mates. To her mother. And worst of all, to Felix.

In the distance, Maisie heard Bruce Fishbaum’s BMW pull up. She went into her room, the overly colorful Princess Room, which had been designed for Princess Annabelle of Nanuh, and threw herself onto the bed so hard that it groaned and creaked under her weight. Maisie stared up at the canopy that stretched from one ornately carved post to the other and longed for her twin bed back on Bethune Street with Felix in his matching one on the other side of the scrim.

Their father was an artist who had met their mother when he painted the sets one summer for a theater company in the Berkshires in Massachusetts where she performed. Maisie could list all of the plays:
The Sound of Music, The Music Man, My Fair Lady, Hello, Dolly!
, and
The Odd Couple
. She used to
look at the programs, proud to see her mother’s name on the cast lists. Her mother had played Marian the Librarian and Liesl and Cecily Pigeon. Starring roles. In her picture in those programs, she looks beautiful, all wide-eyed, her hair tumbling to her shoulders.

Now the sound of voices—Bruce Fishbaum’s deep one and her mother’s fake trill—floated up and Maisie grimaced. How had her mother gone from that fresh-faced, beautiful woman in love with a burly artist to this person? A lawyer in wrinkled suits and kitten heels? Dating someone who wore nautical ties and drove a fancy car?