Emma and the Minotaur (5 page)

It was a square, blue card and it had a single word written in the middle of it. “Magic,” it said.

The boy frowned at the card and turned it over and around just as he had done with the envelope. He put the card down on the rock and then climbed on top of it himself. He took out his lunch from his old backpack and started to eat, looking at the new backpack the entire time, seeming to consider it.

Emma watched and waited.

When Jake finished his lunch, he emptied the contents of his old backpack. He stuck his hand through the hole and wiggled his fingers before tossing it aside. The boy took one last look around and then put his things into the new backpack.

Emma imagined a giant box on top of the boy and a big stick holding it up. She pulled the imaginary string and imagined the box falling on him and trapping him.

“Okay, crazy girl,” Jake said. “You can come out now.”

“What?” Emma yelled from behind her hiding place. She stepped out from around the tree. “You knew I was here?”

“I saw you,” Jake said. “Anyway, who else would leave this here?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Emma said. She made her way back across the creek. Jake watched her hop from rock to rock, holding her arms out to the sides to keep her balance.

“This isn’t how the plan was supposed to go,” she said.

“How was it supposed to go?”

“You weren’t supposed to know it was me,” she said. “You were supposed to think it was from a magic school or something. Wizardry.”

“That’s completely insane,” he said. “And then what?”

Emma blinked. “And then… I don’t know. That was as far as I got.”

“You really are crazy,” he said. “But why?”

“I want to be your friend,” Emma said.

“That’s it?”

She nodded.

“Okay, but really. Why?”

“No reason.”

Jake looked from Emma to the backpack and paused as if he was considering her words. He looked back at her and frowned.

“Okay,” he said finally, “I’ll be your friend.”

For the remainder of the lunch period they sat on the big rock together. Emma had a lot of questions for the boy but she tried not to interrogate him. Nevertheless, she found that the boy was eager to talk once his hard exterior had been cracked.

“Then my dad went missing,” he was saying. “I don’t know anyone and my dad is gone. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.”

Emma told him about Bill and how he and Joel had come around to their house. She told him about searching in the forest and even about the music that she thought she had heard, the music of the tree.

“But I think I must have imagined it, right?” she said. “My dad said I have an imagination. Yesterday, I thought I saw a man with horns. Got scared but it was probably just a deer.”

Jake jumped off the rock and went to the edge of the water. He picked up a few stones and tried to skip them. Most of his throws went straight in and sank to the bottom. After several attempts, he flung the rest of the stones at the falling trickles. He came back to the rock wiping his hands on his jeans.

“You think you could find that tree again?” Jake said.

Emma thought about it. She knew the general direction in which they had gone, and she decided that she could probably get close, at least.

“Maybe,” she said. “But why? I mean, it’s kind of silly to think that there was music coming from the tree. I’m probably just going crazy.”

“I think you’re already crazy,” he said. “But can’t we just go look? What do we have to lose? Maybe it’s a mystery or a puzzle.”

“Maybe it’s magic!” she said.

“Yeah, probably is,” he said. “So help me find it?”

“Okay, yeah, I think it’s a good idea!”

The time came for Jake to head back to the school. He asked her why she hadn’t been there that morning and she told him that she hadn’t been feeling well.

“But I’ll see you on Monday,” she said.

“Good,” he said. “Oh, I can’t really keep the backpack.”

“You put your stuff in it already.”

“Yeah, I was just… I don’t know, trying it on or something.”

“You have to keep it now,” she said. “You can’t give presents back.”

“Fine,” he said, “but I’ll get you back.”

He turned to the hill and nodded toward it. They set out on their way and clambered up and back onto the path on the other side, beyond the creek.

“Wait a minute,” Emma said. “But why isn’t your name called during attendance?”

“Oh,” Jake said. “The teacher said I’m not on the attendance sheet yet because I’m new. They print them each week, see, so I’ll be on it starting next week.”

They left the park and Emma waved goodbye as Jake turned back toward the school. She walked in the opposite direction, toward the bus stop at the end of the street.

When Emma arrived back home, she went to her room and put the money that she had left over back into the yellow lunchbox. She also put the note from her father in there. She always kept her correspondence.

She spent the rest of the afternoon filling out workbooks for school. She felt bad about having missed it and she didn’t want to fall behind. Emma had no idea what homework had been assigned for the weekend so she worked ahead as far as she could.

When her father came home, Emma ran out of her room and rushed to him to tell him all about her day and about how she had finally made friends with Jake. She arrived in the living room just as he finished taking his shoes off.

“Dad!” she said and then realized her error. She was supposed to have been resting all morning and if she told him that she had been out and about, he would be angry with her. When she saw the look on his face, she realized that he probably already had some idea about what she had been up to somehow.

“I need to talk to you,” he said.

Dejectedly, she walked over to the kitchen table and sat down. Her father went to the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of orange juice. He sat down across the table from her.

“Emma,” he said. “One of my students talked to me today during class. She was very excited about having met you.”

“Lucy,” Emma blurted out.

“Yes,” he said. “Lucy Leroux. She said that she met you at the bus stop and that the two of you spent the morning at the mall. I told her that she had to be mistaken because you were supposed to be at home resting all day but she was able to describe you very well, Emma. She even talked about the scrapes on your hands.”

“Snitch!” she said in a whisper. Then, “I’m sorry, Dad. I wasn’t thinking.”

“You agreed last night that you were going to rest, Emma. I didn’t let you stay home from school so you could go riding buses around town. Didn’t you see my note? Whatever were you doing, anyway?”

There was nothing Emma could do and no excuse she could make. She just hadn’t thought things through.

“I caught the boy,” Emma said and explained her trap. She told him about Jake and about how she had agreed to help him find the singing tree.

“Absolutely not,” Mr Wilkins said. “I forbid it. I don’t want you going anywhere near that forest anymore, Emma. There has been another disappearance. Another construction worker. Something is happening on that site down the road and I want you to stay away from it and away from the forest.”

“But I promised to help, Dad.”

“I don’t care what you promised,” he said. “You’ve been acting strangely lately and I’m not happy with your behaviour. Consider yourself grounded until further notice.”

Emma didn’t argue because she didn’t know what to say and because she knew that her father was right, anyway.

“Dad, who went missing?” she said instead.

“It was in today’s paper,” he said and took it from the kitchen counter and handed it to Emma. He left and went into his office.

The Saint Martin Guardian had a front page article about a construction worker named Steven Marks. He was a heavy machinery operator. The photograph on the article showed him wearing a hardhat and safety goggles. The article went on to explain that Paigely Builders had hired security guards to patrol the construction site day and night and that they were doing all they could to help the families of the men who were missing.

Emma’s grounding lasted only for the weekend but the ban from the forest was in place indefinitely. This was going to complicate things, but she had made a promise to her new friend and she wasn’t about to let him down.

4

Dinner and a Conspiracy

“Matter has mass and occupies space,” Emma said.

“Good, Emma,” Miss Robins said.

It was Monday morning and the lesson was about the difference between matter and energy. Emma had been answering a lot of questions because she had worked far ahead during the weekend. She hoped to change the opinion of her teacher and maybe even erase her strikes, if that was possible.

She glanced over to Jake and saw that the boy was looking at her. He smiled and then turned back to face the front of the room. Emma couldn’t wait for lunch time.

That morning, just as Jake had predicted, Miss Robins had called out his name during attendance and he had raised his hand and given a quiet, “here.”

During recess, Jake and Emma sat on the swings and he told her about his previous school in Toronto. His family had lived in a small apartment on a busy street next to a shopping plaza. Jake’s old school was within walking distance of the apartment and he’d had plenty of friends. One day, his dad had come home talking about the City of Saint Martin and how it was expanding and there were lots of new jobs there. It wasn’t long after that that Jake had ended up at Briardale.

At lunch time, Emma and Jake snuck away to Wizard Falls. There was enough room on the big rock for the both of them and they sat on top of it under the sunlight with the sound of trickling water providing a backdrop for their conversation.

“How did you find this place?” Emma asked him.

“I just walked down the road trying to get away from the school,” he said. “I found it by accident.”

“But why did you leave the school?”

Jake took a bite of his sandwich before answering. “Some kids made fun of me on the first day. I didn’t feel like being there and didn’t know where to go.”

Emma pulled out an apple and a banana from her backpack.

“You want one, Jake?”

He considered the options and nodded at the banana.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Why would kids make fun of you?” Emma said. “You’re just a plain, average boy.”

“Thanks,” he said and pushed her lightly but she almost tumbled off the rock. “They made fun of my bag. It was old and lousy though.”

“Yeah it was,” she said.

As the days went on, they continued to sneak out of school to have lunch together at Wizard Falls. Slowly, the boy became less and less apprehensive. He told her more about his previous school and about his old friends. He told her about the move to Saint Martin and how he had spent the entire summer doing nothing at all because he didn’t know anyone.

“That’s what I do,” Emma said one day. “I read and I play in the forest with Will and that’s about it. But I guess we won’t be doing that for a while.”

“What do you mean?” Jake said.

“Oh, my dad won’t let me go into the forest now,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t help you find the singing tree. I just have to figure a way to do it.”

“I don’t want you to get in trouble,” he said.

“Nah, I won’t, probably. My dad is a physicist. He’ll probably forget all about the forbidden forest pretty soon.”

“What does your dad do?” Jake asked.

“Oh,” she said, “he thinks a lot and writes stuff down. Mathy stuff, you know. At the University.”

“Sounds complicated,” Jake said. “My mom works at a grocery store.”

When Emma had relayed Jake’s story to her father, the physics professor had taken an interest in him. He’d suggested to Emma that she invite him over for dinner. She was only too happy to comply.

It took some convincing to get Jake to agree.

“Come on,” Emma said. “They don’t bite. We’re not vampires.”

“I don’t know…”

“Why not? They really want to meet you.”

“I… My mom won’t let me.”

“Really?” Emma said. “Well, why don’t I go ask her? I bet I could convince her to let you. We can go after school.”

“She’ll be at work,” he said.

“That’s okay,” she said. “We can go to her work.”

Across the street from the Penhurst Mall there was a shopping plaza. It was dominated by a grocery store but there were a number of smaller stores that huddled around it.

Emma and Jake arrived on a public bus. They made their way across the busy parking lot to the automatic doors of the grocery store. As they entered, Emma looked almost straight up and saw, written in big, colourful letters: “Agostino’s Food Market.”