The Year of Shadows (30 page)

The next day, I got to school early and headed straight for the library.

Henry was already there, holed away at a table in a corner with a bunch of textbooks.

“Olivia!” he whispered, waving me over.

“Sorry, Henry. Can’t talk.”

I found a free computer, opened a search engine, and typed the word “Cara.”

A bunch of suggestions popped up for me to try, most of them names, and most of them Italian, and none of them Mom’s. A sour knot twisted my stomach.

When Mom first left, I searched for her everywhere. I liked to pretend that she had had to leave us for some noble purpose, like she was a spy who had to go away on some urgent mission, or she was secretly a scientist and one of her experiments had gone wrong.

That was a long time ago, though. Then I realized she’d left because of the Maestro. And then I stopped looking for her, period. It gets depressing after a while, trying to track down your own mom.

So why I was searching for her now? She obviously didn’t want to be found. She hadn’t said good-bye, she
hadn’t answered the Maestro’s letters, nothing. She might have even changed her name, for all I knew.

The word “Cara” stared at me in that harsh computer-screen light. The first bell rang, but I didn’t move.

If Mom didn’t want to be found, then I wouldn’t look for her. That weird-looking shade the night before didn’t mean a thing. Probably the shades just wanted to trick me, make me think things that weren’t true.

“Olivia?” Henry had snuck up behind me, arms full of books. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

Henry peered at the screen. “Cara. Your mom?”

“No.” I turned the monitor off. “She’s nobody.”

T
OWARD THE END
of January, we started to feel pretty desperate. We were no closer to finding Tillie and Jax’s bracelets, and soon it would be February.

Only about a month to go until the Hall would close.

Or, as I liked to think of it, the end of everything.

“That’s pretty dramatic,” Henry said. We were at lunch, and it was a Wednesday.

“Pretty dramatic?” I slammed down my lunch tray. “Yeah. It is. Because I’ll be
homeless
.”

“Maybe the Barskys will let you live with them. Or one of the musicians.”

“Yeah. Maybe Richard Ashley.” I fluttered my eyelashes. “He’s dreamy.”

“He is?” Henry looked at me kind of funny. “Do you think he’s dreamy?”

“Sure. Who cares?”

“So you
do
think he’s dreamy?”

“Henry, focus. Besides, I can’t just go live with someone.
I have Nonnie. Whoever takes me in has to take her in too.”

“Oh.” Joan, at the end of our table, slammed down her lunch tray. “
Oh
. Don’t even get me
started
about how we treat the elderly in this society.”

Henry sighed. “Nobody asked you that, Joan.”

“Yes, well. If you
did
ask me, I’d have a lot to say on the subject.” Then Joan turned back to her food. I noticed she sat closer to us these days, scooting closer an inch at a time.

For the rest of lunch, Henry and I went back over our map of the Hall for the hundredth time, trying to figure out where we hadn’t looked for Tillie and Jax’s anchors. I could feel Joan watching us anyway, stealth-like. You could tell she was thinking really hard about something, but I didn’t pay much attention at the time. Joan was always thinking really hard about something.

For the second series of January concerts, the orchestra was playing
The Pines of Rome
by Ottorino Respighi. The Maestro had always loved Respighi because they shared first names.

Henry loved Respighi because he said his music sounded like flying.

“Close your eyes and imagine it,” he whispered to me. We were in the floor seats during a Tuesday night rehearsal, the map spread out on our laps. “Come on, the third movement’s the best one.”

“Henry, get real. We’ve got anchors to find.”

Henry made a pouty face. “Please, Olivia?”

I rolled my eyes, but that face was pretty cute. “Fine.” I closed my eyes, leaned my head back against the cushion, and listened.

It wasn’t good because, well, it
was
our orchestra. And the Maestro had been out every night, visiting donors and City Council members, so he was cranky and had ticked off pretty much every musician onstage. But after a couple of minutes, I felt the music take over anyway. Each of the movements of
The Pines of Rome
is supposed to take place in a different section of pine trees in Rome. The third movement happens near a temple at night. And as I listened, I could feel nighttime soaring over me—sunsets and the first stars twinkling, and maybe a cool river nearby. Even nightingales singing. And yes, just like Henry said, it felt like flying. I was in a forest, a dark, cool forest of pines, drifting lazily through the branches like a bird, like the wind, like a ghost . . .

I bolted upright. My brain wobbled at the edge of something important.

“What is it?” Henry said.

Images raced through my head. Ghosts. Bracelets. The tree by Jax’s hiding spot, with the bark scraped off. Henry’s mom’s jewelry.

“Henry,” I whispered. “That jewelry your mom wore . . .”

“Yeah?”

“It was made out of rocks and wood and stuff like that, right? It came from stones and trees.”

“Sure . . .”

“And Tillie’s and Jax’s bracelets were made out of bark . . .” The orchestra’s music soared over our heads, out of tune and lifeless. I laughed, feeling a little crazy. “Maybe even from a pine?”

Henry’s eyes widened. His binder crashed to the floor. “It’s . . .”

“. . . a tree.” The Maestro was glaring at us over his shoulder. “That’s why we haven’t been able to find those bracelets. It’s because their anchor is a tree.”

Pure adrenaline zipped through me from head to toe, and Henry and I laughed like idiots all the way backstage. I knew the musicians could hear us, but I didn’t care.

But when we got Tillie and Jax outside and told them to touch every tree on the grounds until they found the right one, the tree that held their anchor, they couldn’t.

They floated up through every branch, just like I’d imagined when listening to
The Pines of Rome
. They wrapped themselves around every trunk and swam underground through every tangle of roots.

“Nothing.” Jax slumped glumly next to me, and I tried my best to put my arm around him, even though it made my arm crackle up like ice.

“Stupid!” Tillie screamed, zipping through the trees like an angry shade. “Stupid, stupid!”

“I was so sure that was right.” Henry slumped against a trash can. “It made total sense!”

Jax hid his face in my arm and started to cry.

I forced myself to sound cheerful. “Well, we’ll just have to come up with something else, won’t we? We’ll figure it out.”

But
, a little voice whispered in my head,
what if we don’t?

I couldn’t eat lunch the next day. Henry couldn’t either. He just sat across from me with his head propped up in one hand, making mountains out of his mashed potatoes.

I pounded the table with my fist. “I want to smash something.”

Henry tossed his chicken patty at me. “Here, take this. I’m not gonna eat it.”

Before I could grab it, Joan rushed up out of nowhere and slammed a big notebook down on top of it.

“I,” she declared breathlessly, “have a brilliant idea. It’s so brilliant that sometimes I can’t even stand it.”

“Whoa, Joan,” Henry said. “Your eyes are lit up kind of weird. Are you sick?”

“Sick with
brilliance
.” Joan put her hands on top of ours. “Don’t despair, friends. Like my historical namesake, I’ve come to your aid, to defend the innocent and weak against the injustice of the corrupt.”

Henry blinked. “The what?”

“Joan, spill it already,” I snapped.

“I know how to save Emerson Hall.”

“You . . . what?”

“It’s simple, really.” Joan slammed open her notebook.
“We just need some fliers, a petition or something. A
message
. I’ve been doing this my whole life, you know. People just need to know what’s going on. What the
issue
is. We need to make ourselves
visible
to the public.”

“ ‘We’?” I asked. “You know, I don’t remember telling you about any of this. Were you eavesdropping?”

Joan stared at me. “Well, of course I was eavesdropping. I sit at your table, don’t I? Besides, what does it matter? I’m going to help you. Let’s look at”—she paused to draw a box in the air—“
the bigger picture
.”

“She has a point,” Henry said.

I blew my hair out of my face. “Fine. What’s this about a petition?”

“Well, I was thinking we make a petition and get lots of signatures. Then we can show Mr. Rue and your dad and Mayor Pitter and everyone how many people really care about the Hall.” Joan slid some papers out of her notebook and shoved them at me. “See? Here are some sample ones.”

“
Petition for Putting Seat Belts on All School Buses
?” I read. “Really?”

“It hasn’t worked yet, but I won’t give up.” Joan grabbed the papers back. “So, we get all these signatures. Then we make fliers. You can do that, Olivia.” She smiled shyly. “Since you’re such a good artist.”

Henry kicked me under the table. “See? What’d I tell you?”

“Ow.” I kicked him back. “Jerk.”

“We’ll put them up all over town, and I mean everywhere,” Joan was saying. “All the telephone poles, every building we can find. The libraries. The only problem is, it has to be something more than just saving the Hall. People have to feel like they’re getting something out of it too.”

“Something to make them buy tickets.” Henry was getting excited, flipping through Joan’s sample petitions like they were sheets of gold. “That’s the important thing. We need the money, the numbers.”

As they kept talking, I started doodling fliers on my sketchpad to help me think. I halfway listened to them and my mind wandered, and so did my pencil. After a few minutes, I looked down and saw that I had doodled ghosts. Four of them. Even Frederick.

Bingo.

I had to stand up and walk around and then come sit back down. The inspiration that had just hit me was too big for me to sit still.