Bronze Pen (9781439156650) (4 page)

A
UDREY WAS SHELLING THE LAST FEW
peas and frantically wondering what she should do to keep her mother from calling the police when Hannah Abbott calmly and methodically finished her blouse, put away the ironing board, and headed for the telephone. She was dialing the number when Audrey, still without any plan of action, said, “Mom, she doesn't need to be put in an institution.”

Hannah stopped dialing and turned to look at Audrey without saying anything for a long moment—except with her eyes. “Why do you say that, Audrey?” she finally asked. “Why wouldn't there be something the authorities could do to help an old woman who's trapped in a cave on a steep hillside?”

Audrey shook her head. She didn't know why there was nothing the police could do, but she was sure that it was true. Looking into Hannah's narrowed eyes, she
also knew what her mother was thinking.

“No, I'm not. I'm not making it up. She is there. It's just that she's not trapped or anything. I think she can leave whenever she wants to.”

But now Hannah had turned her back and was dialing again and then saying hello and asking to talk to Captain Banner.

She talked on the phone for a long time, at least several minutes, speaking so softly that Audrey could make out only an occasional word or phrase. Things like “the cave on the hill” and “my daughter, Audrey.” And later, sounding impatient, “I know, Captain Banner. I know.”

At last she hung up the phone and turned to Audrey. “Captain Banner says the squad cars are out on call now, but he thinks someone can get up the hill as far as the cave sometime this evening.” Her eyes narrowed again as she went on. “He promised to let me know what they've done about it.” And there was nothing Audrey could do about it but shrug and hang her head so she wouldn't have to meet her mother's searching eyes.

Fortunately, her parents seemed to have a lot of other things to talk about at the dinner table that night. Mrs. Austin, her mother's boss at the savings and loan, the woman Audrey's father had nicknamed “The Warden,” had been particularly rude and demanding lately, and some of the other clerks had been out sick so Hannah had lots of extra work to do.

And when Hannah had finished complaining about her bad week, it was John's turn, and what he brought up was a phone call they'd gotten from Dr. Richards. “The doc says we'd better just forget about the bypass operation. He says he's looked into it, and he thinks it's an unproven procedure with not a good enough track record.”

Hannah shook her head, sighing. “I know,” she said. “I was hoping so much that…” She sighed again and then lifted her chin and smiled weakly. “Well, we'll just keep on looking. There has to be something more someone can do.”

Now and then Audrey tried to listen to what her parents were saying, but most of the time her mind was elsewhere. An elsewhere that included a steep, difficult climb, an almost hidden cave full of birds and bats, and a strange creature who was…what? Something terribly unusual, maybe something magical. And what would happen to her when the Greendale police tramped up the hill and burst into her cave?

Audrey had been certain all along that there wasn't anything the police could do that would help. But now she was becoming more and more sure that they might cause a lot of harm. As she pictured big old Captain Banner storming up the hill and stomping into the cave waving his baton and shouting, she became increasingly anxious and uneasy. Even when Beowulf put his head in her lap and rolled his eyes sympathetically, it didn't help. At least not as much as usual.

But it wasn't until dinner was finally over, with the table cleared and the dishwasher loaded, that Audrey escaped to her room and really began to fret. Standing at the window and looking up toward the darkening trail to the cave, she was overcome by a need to do something. To at least warn the woman that they would be coming. But how?

Could she get there in time? Before the police arrived? Probably not. And it was getting dark. Could she even find her way up the steep inclines and through the deeply shadowed groves at night? She didn't think so. And what if her mother called or came to her room while she was gone? And her father found out that she was missing? No, she couldn't risk that.

Back at her desk Audrey rested her head on her hands and closed her eyes. She sat that way for several minutes before she reached out and pulled her binder across the desk, then looked for a pencil or a pen. But her pencil tray was empty. She was starting to open another drawer when she suddenly remembered the pen in her pocket.

And then she was writing with the strange pen, writing hurriedly and hopelessly, but somehow feeling that she must. She wrote:

But what? What happened then? Afterward Audrey wasn't exactly sure, except that a while later, maybe only a few minutes, or perhaps longer, she was still sitting right there at her desk with the pen in her hand, but somehow feeling that she had been—where? Somehow she, or at least her mind, had been somewhere else, and now she was back and remembering how worried she had been feeling and how she had started writing….

She sighed.
Yeah,
she thought.
That's me, all right. If I can't do anything that really matters, I just write about it.
She sat up straighter and took her hands off the page where she had been writing. She looked, then looked again. The page was blank and empty.

That was strange. She was sure she'd started writing—something. Something about a warning and the police. She could even remember how the words looked, smooth and dark, on the page of the notebook. But perhaps she had only imagined it.

Picking up the pen, she examined it carefully. The metal was a rusty reddish brown, like the fancy bronze vase that had belonged to her grandmother, and the marks that ran up and down the shaft looked almost like letters, but not any letters she'd ever seen before. Her writing had looked wide and heavy, as if the pen had a broad point, yet it seemed to come to a small roundish tip, like an ordinary ballpoint pen. But she was sure—well, almost sure—that she remembered
seeing wide, dark lines. Pulling the notebook closer, she began to write again, starting with her name:

The writing was easy, the point of the pen gliding smoothly over the paper. And, yes, the lines were wide and dark. She was still staring at the dark flowing letters when she began to feel…what? Something strange. Particularly strange under the circumstances. It was a calm, focused feeling that was somehow comforting even though it made no sense.

She shook her head, sighed, looked around, and then grinned. Of course—that was what, or who, was making her feel better: Beowulf had followed her to her room and was now standing near her chair, his big brown eyes looking at her sympathetically from only an arm's length away. Throwing her arms around his neck, she wrestled him to the floor. As usual, he pretended to growl and bite before he relaxed into a warm, comforting doggy pillow. And with her head on his shaggy back, Audrey collapsed too and, after a while, fell asleep.

Audrey didn't awake until much later, when her bedroom door opened and her mother said, “Well. Look at the two of you there on the floor, at this hour.” She looked at her watch. “It's almost eleven o'clock.” And then, as Audrey
staggered to her feet, “Shall I take Beowulf out, or can you do it?”

“I will. I'll do it,” Audrey said, and shaking her head to clear away the dream shadows, she whispered, “Come, Wulfy. Come.”

As she trudged sleepily down the hall and then waited at the back door for Beowulf to take care of business, it all came back, and once again she was caught up in worry about what had happened or was going to happen at the cave. Had the police gone there? And what had they done when they were there? By the time she was back in her room and ready for bed, she had decided it must not have happened yet. It would be hard even for grown men with flashlights to get there in the dark, and besides, wouldn't her mother have said something if Captain Banner had already called back? She fell asleep still wondering, and it wasn't until she arrived in the kitchen the next morning that she found that she'd guessed correctly.

The police hadn't called the night before because they hadn't yet gone to the cave, but when the phone rang while Audrey was setting the table, it was Captain Banner calling for Hannah Abbott. Audrey gave the phone to her mother and then stood there with her hands full of forks and spoons while her mother talked and mostly listened. When Hannah finally hung up, she looked worried—and angry.

“Audrey,” she said, shaking her head, “it's just what I
was afraid he'd tell me. Captain Banner says there wasn't anyone in the cave.” She sighed, and Audrey knew what the sigh meant. It meant that Hannah Abbott believed that her daughter was either a liar or perhaps something even worse. Like a person who sees things that aren't really there.

Biting her lip and returning her mother's stare, Audrey tried to decide whether to argue. To insist that the woman had been there, so she must have heard the police coming and found a place, or a way, to hide. Or else that Captain Banner was probably just too lazy to make such a long climb and had just guessed at what he'd find. But she knew it would be useless. If Hannah Abbott wanted to believe she had a daughter who was either crazy or a liar, nothing anyone could say would make any difference.

S
O THAT WAS IT. NO ONE SAID ANYTHING
more to Audrey about the woman in the cave, not even her father, although he certainly knew about Captain Banner's call and was worried about it, too. Several times that Monday, Audrey caught him watching her with his heavy, dark eyebrows at an anxious angle.

And what did Audrey do? Nothing. At least nothing that did any good. She thought, more than once, about bringing the subject up when she was alone with her father, but somehow she never did. She came close on Monday and again on Tuesday, after they'd played their usual chess game.

Perhaps she would begin by saying,
Look, Dad. I just want you to know that I didn't make that up about the woman in the cave. She really was there. And there was a duck, too, who came to lead me there. A big white duck. And there were other things in the cave, too. What other things? Oh, some
owls and bats mostly, but also a lot of blackbirds.
She'd tell him all that, and then he might…No, she was afraid not.

When she was a little kid, her father had always been very understanding about her more or less improbable friends, like the closet ghost and the baby dragon. He'd always listened to her tell about them and asked serious questions, but that had been when she was five or six years old. If he did the same thing now it would probably mean that he was just humoring her because he, too, thought she had flipped out. And worrying about your only daughter going crazy certainly couldn't be very good for a person with a bad heart. So the safest thing to do was to go on saying nothing. Nothing at all, to anyone.

There was a brief moment on Wednesday when Audrey thought there might be another person she could talk to about some of the things that had been happening. It was during lunch hour when Audrey had picked up her tray in the cafeteria and was looking for a place to sit. A lot of classes were on field trips, so it wasn't as crowded as usual, and there, all by herself at a big table, was Debra Felton. Debra, sitting there all alone, then looking up and smiling and making a “come here” motion. Audrey turned around to look, but there was no one behind her, so Debra must have meant her. She was—well, surprised, to say the least—definitely surprised, and a little bit suspicious.

There had been a time, not all that long ago, when she might have said that the one person she could talk to about
anything and everything, was Debra Felton. And now at lunch period on a sunny afternoon Debra was motioning for Audrey to sit at her table.

“Hi.” Debra's blond eyebrows were jumping up and down the way they always did when she was really excited about something. “Hey. What's up, dude?”

Audrey returned her smile cautiously. “Nothing much,” she said. “What's up with you?” She knew that the “dude” business and all the long strands of beads that Debra was wearing were because some of her new friends were kind of would-be hippies. Greendale Junior High didn't allow too much far-out stuff, but long necklaces made out of seeds and shells seemed to be all right. They were certainly okay with Audrey. She'd wear some herself if she had any. “I like your necklaces,” she said to Debra. “Especially those seed things. They're sort of like some of the stuff…”

She let the sentence trail off, but Debra picked up on it. “Yeah, I remember. We used to grind up some seeds like this for our magic potions.” The way she grinned and rolled her eyes when she said “magic potions” made it clear that she thought the whole thing had been pretty silly. “We were really weird, weren't we?”

“Yeah. Weird,” Audrey agreed, at the same time thinking how dumb she'd been to think, even for a minute, that Debra would be a good one to tell about the woman in the cave.

“Hey, look.” Debra looked at her watch and then at the
cafeteria door, probably hoping someone she'd rather talk to would come in. But maybe not, because the next thing she said was, “Some of us are planning to go hear the Sons of Champlin at the college tonight. Maybe you could go too?”

“The Sons of Champlin?” Audrey asked.

“Yeah, you know. The rock band. Mindy thinks they're the greatest. I was just thinking maybe you'd like to go too.”

Audrey thought maybe she would, depending on…“When are you going?” she asked.

“Well, Tammy and Julie and their families are coming to my house about four o'clock. My folks are having a barbecue bash on our patio. And after the barbecue Mindy's mom is taking all of us kids to the J.C. Tell your mom that Mindy's mom is going to be there the whole time, so she doesn't have to worry about you running off to be a rock band groupie.” She giggled and then gave Audrey a long look with her head cocked to one side. “You do want to go, don't you?”

Audrey nodded. “Sure, I want to,” she said. “I'll ask.” She did
want
to go, and that moment she was thinking she'd ask her father as soon as she got home. Then she could walk over to the Feltons' for the barbecue and go to the rock concert.

She thought about it all the way home—and by the time she got there, she'd changed her mind. She wasn't
going to ask her father because she was pretty sure he'd say yes. He would say yes, and she would go to hear the Sons of Champlin. And while he was alone all afternoon, her father might…

So that day, like every other, she was home by one o'clock to play chess with her father, and do some homework while he read the papers. Then there was feeding Sputnik and cleaning his cage and a brief backyard trip with Beowulf before her mother came home. And, like always, it was almost eight by the time dinner was over and the kitchen cleaned up and Audrey was free to do—whatever she wanted. Whatever she wanted, that is, as long as it wasn't something that started before eight o'clock. So that pretty much narrowed down her free-time activities to going to her room to read. Or most likely to write, but not in her journal. Not tonight.

Audrey had found that journal writing could be useful. Not the deadly everyday kind where you wound up writing what you had for breakfast, but the kind where you only wrote about special times or feelings, good ones as well as bad. That kind of writing sometimes made good feelings last longer and bad ones seem less important. But for Audrey, the kind of writing that simply shoved everything else out of your mind—everything from a bad grade in math to not getting to go to the Sons of Champlin concert—was writing novels.

Digging down under a lot of old essays and math
papers in the bottom drawer of her desk, she pulled out the secret notebook where she kept all of the things she was still working on. One of the first manuscripts in the notebook was part of a fantasy she had started more than a year ago. A fantasy in which a strange, lily-shaped flower could turn anyone who touched it into an animal. Not any animal, but one who had some kind of relationship to the personality of the person who touched the flower. In some earlier chapters, she'd written about one character being changed into an elegant white swan. And most recently she'd gotten to where another character in the story, a really mean seventh-grade boy, had been transformed into a wild boar with a long, ugly snout and a curly tail.

For a while it had been a fun story to work on, but when she couldn't get it to head toward some more or less sensible ending, she had started a different one. Another mystery, but this time a more realistic one. But that had sputtered out too a few weeks ago, and she had gone on to the one about the girl detective who could solve mysteries by talking to animals.

That story had been going pretty well lately, and it had been during algebra that same morning that she'd just happened to come up with a new idea about how to get Heather out of the dangerous mess she had just gotten herself into.

Reaching into her pencil tray in her top drawer Audrey pulled out…the bronze pen.