Towering

the word dead sounded like a door slamming.
    “You know about Danielle?” I asked. “You know what happened to her?”
    “I don’t know, but Suzie does. She said she couldn’t tell me, though. If she told anyone, they’d kill her, and they’d probably kill me too.”
    “Who are they?” The game felt suddenly heavy in my arms. I put it down, the hairbrush on top of it.
    “The people with the rhapsody.”
    “Rhapsody? What’s rhapsody?”
    “A leaf. A drug, actually. It grows somewhere, maybe deep in the woods, and people will kill for it.”
    “Is that why they killed Danielle?”
    “I told you Suzie didn’t tell me anything !” He stomped his foot. “Don’t you think I’d remember if she had?”
    He was shaking. I placed my hand on his arm, to calm him. It was rigid, but under my touch, he relaxed. “I’m sorry. Of course that’s true.”
    He looked into my eyes, pleading.
    “Do you know where Suzie is? Do you?”
    “What? No. You said she was missing.”
    “Missing? Suzie?” His face crumpled, and he began to cry.
    “Wait. I could be wrong. If you tell me more about it, I could help you find her, maybe.”
    “I told you I can’t talk to you. Leave me alone!” He was flailing his arms now, beating his fists into me, the shelves, everything, and all the while, sobbing. “I can’t tell! I shouldn’t have told! Now, Suzie will be lost forever!”
    I heard footsteps, Josh’s footsteps running toward me. He grabbed the old man. “Jerry. Jerry, it’s okay. He won’t tell anyone. Look, we got some new stuff in. I saved it behind the counter, old clocks like you like.”
    “It’s no use,” the old man was sobbing. “Suzie’s gone. He’s right. She’s dead.”
    “No, it’s okay. We’ll find her. There’s a box on the counter over there. There are cameras too.”
    “Cameras? Do they have any pictures in them?”
    Josh nodded. “Some might.”
    Finally, Jerry calmed down enough that Josh could escort him to a new box of old junk. He was still looking at it when I left with the Battleship game, the old hairbrush, and more confusion than I’d felt before.

Rachel
    For hours after Wyatt left, I could do nothing but stare at the photograph he had shown me and read the diary he had left. My mother’s diary. Her photo. Up until today, I had known I’d had a mother, and yet, she had never seemed quite real. Now, I looked at her picture, and I saw a girl like me, but not like me, a girl who had attended school as I hadn’t, who’d had a true love, as I had.
    What had happened to her?
    It was so sad that, though I could see her, we would never touch. I would never hear her voice.
    I gazed upon the photo again. That’s when I realized she was wearing a coat. But not just any coat—the same coat I’d had on yesterday. I shivered, realizing it. The coat must have been in the closet where Wyatt was staying.
    Now, it was here, under my bed!
    I checked the clock. It was seven, an hour, still, before I’d planned to speak to Wyatt, longer still before Mama would arrive. I glanced out the window to make sure she was nowhere in sight. No. Nothing but trees. Even Wyatt’s footprints had already been covered by a fresh layer of snow, like they had never existed. He might almost have been a product of my desperate imagination.
    I looked at the object he had given me, the telephone. No, I could never have imagined that. He was real, and he loved me. He would take me away with him if I only asked.
    But, for now, he had given me this token of my mother’s existence.
    I reached under the bed and drew out the coat. It was the first object I had ever owned that Mama had not given me. That made it the most precious as well, even more so because I knew it belonged to my mother, my real mother.
    I lifted it to my face, sniffing it, trying to find a scent, a sign of her. I wondered what she had done when she wore this coat. Who had purchased it for her? What had she been like?
    But I smelled nothing but the odor of age. Mama’s clothes smelled like this too, as if they were coated with a thin layer of dust.
    Perhaps, I detected the slight smell of something else. Cinnamon.
    Of course, that might simply be from the house where Wyatt lived, a smell of something baked yesterday, not when my mother was alive. But I preferred to think otherwise, that my mother had smelled of cinnamon, perhaps from a spiced cider she had drunk when wearing this coat, so many years ago.
    I shivered at the thought of