Magic Elizabeth (13 page)

“Well,” said Aunt Sarah at last, “maybe after dinner and a good night’s sleep, you’ll think of something.”

“May we look again tomorrow?” Sally asked her aunt as Emily was leaving.

“Of course,” said Aunt Sarah. “And Emily’s invited to come again and stay for lunch.”

Emily uttered a little crow of delight and leaped from the top porch step to the path, her braids flying. This reminded Sally of the famous leap of the hoptoad into the teacup, and made her laugh. She and Aunt Sarah stood companionably watching Emily skip down the path to the gate.

“Thank you, Aunt Sarah,” said Sally when the gate had closed behind Emily.

“You’re very welcome, Sally. Look, doesn’t Shadow look happy?” said her aunt, pointing to where he was sitting on the hall rug. “I think he likes having children in the house. They liven it up. Yes, it does seem as if this old house is coming alive again.”

Sally remembered how she had felt in the attic, as if the house were alive. “Do you really think houses can come alive?” she asked.

“I do,” said Aunt Sarah, “when there are people in them who care for one another.” And to Sally’s
immense surprise, Aunt Sarah bent down and kissed her on the cheek! Sally was too dumfounded to do anything but stand there, fingering the little bonnet in her pocket and feeling, for some reason, completely happy.

She went to sleep that night, the bonnet on the night table next to her bed, feeling sure somehow that the next day she and Emily would find Elizabeth at last.

But it was not to be.

N
ext morning Sally woke
feeling extremely strange. Her throat was now very sore, and she felt hot and cold by turns and quite horribly weak besides. When her aunt came in to say good morning, Sally found to her surprise that her own voice came out as a hoarse croak.

“My goodness,” said Aunt Sarah, peering down at her. “You look terrible, Sally — all flushed and odd.” She placed a gentle hand on Sally’s forehead. “Why, you’re simply burning up. You stay right here in bed. I’ll call the doctor right away, and then I’ll bring your breakfast up to you.”

Sally felt as if she could not possibly do anything but stay there in bed. It was an effort even to move a
finger, which she tried to do by way of greeting Shadow, who stood up, when Aunt Sarah had bustled out, from where he had been curled at her feet. He came and sat on her pillow, and licked her hot cheek with his rough tongue.

“Hi, Shadow,” she croaked. “That feels good.”

Sally ate scarcely any breakfast at all, and her aunt looked worried as she carried the tray away.

Sally looked sleepily and fondly at Shadow, who was now sitting on her stomach, cleaning industriously between the toes of his paw.

“Shadow!” she cried, and she would have raised her head if had not made her dizzy even to think of it.

Was she dreaming? For it looked to her as if Shadow had a tiny golden thread caught between the curving ivory claws of his paw — a golden thread that looked as if it must be, as if it could only be — a strand of Elizabeth’s own hair! Her eyes flickered over to the bonnet on the night table, but she was sure that it had not been disturbed. The frayed ribbons still lay in the patterns she remembered from the night before.

“Shadow, let me see!” she begged, reaching a hand toward him. But Shadow stood up, stretched, and flowed smoothly as a spill of water to the floor and disappeared beneath the bed.

When Sally tried to sit up, she found that she was
indeed too dizzy and exhausted to do anything but call, in a plaintive, trembling whisper, “Here, Shadow, here, kitty, kitty, nice Shadow —”

She could hear him busily licking himself beneath the bed.

When Aunt Sarah returned to say that the doctor would be coming soon, Sally told her in a weak voice, which shook with excitement, about her discovery.

Aunt Sarah, listening, touched her forehead. “You’re very hot,” she said. “Are you sure you weren’t dreaming?”

Sally tiredly shook her head from side to side. “Please, Aunt Sarah, look at Shadow’s paw. He’s under the bed. He
knows
where Elizabeth is!”

Aunt Sarah sighed and shook her head. She looked very worried, and did not seem to be taking Sally’s story seriously at all.

“Please,” begged Sally.

“All right, Sal,” she said, “if it’ll make you feel better. Shadow!” she ordered sharply. “Come here!”

Shadow appeared, blinking, from beneath the bed. Aunt Sarah, with some difficulty, stooped to pick him up. She placed him on the bed.

“There,” she said. “Where is this thread now?” Breathing hard from her exertions, she sat down on the bed next to Sally.

“On that paw,” said Sally, weakly pointing.

Aunt Sarah gently lifted Shadow’s right paw and peered at it. “I can’t see anything,” she said.

Sally stared at the paw, at the black velvety pads, at the tips of the ivory claws just showing. “Neither can I,” she said. “Maybe it was the other paw.”

But as Sally had feared, there was nothing on the other paw either.

“Now Sal,” said Aunt Sarah after a long silence, during which they did not look at each other. “I
want you to rest. Forget about Elizabeth and just concentrate on getting better. You’re sick, and all this excitement about the doll — I blame myself. I ought never to have let you start it.”

“But I
know
it was there,” Sally said. “I wasn’t dreaming. He could have pulled it off when he was cleaning his paw—” Her voice trailed off into a tired mumble. Her eyes closed with weariness, and she felt a tear slip from beneath the lid of one of them and slide down her cheek.

“Sal, Sal,” whispered her aunt, stroking her forehead. “Go to sleep, dear. Rest.”

Aunt Sarah’s cool hand felt good on her forehead, and Sally could feel herself drifting into sleep … slowly, slowly … she seemed to be sinking deeper and deeper into the soft bed. From somewhere far away, the grandfather clock whispered. Tick … a long pause … tock. Tick … tock.

Aunt Sarah was tiptoeing away from her bed.

But Sally was not quite asleep. “She doesn’t believe me,” she thought.

“Does … n’t,” echoed the clock.

Her thoughts followed Aunt Sarah’s footsteps along the hall.

“She thinks … I … dreaming … tick … tock … but I wasn’t.”

“Was … n’t.”

“Saw … thread.”

“Saw …”

But Sally was asleep and did not hear the clock whisper “thread” to the empty hall.

She woke to see what at first looked like a faraway round moon hovering over her bed. But it was, after all, Dr. Green, who turned out to be a pleasant red-faced man. He sat on her bed and petted Shadow while Sally held the thermometer in her mouth.

“Now, young lady,” he said, winking at her. “You’re going to be right here in bed for a few days, it seems. You have a touch of the flu that’s going around, and you’re not going to feel like doing much else.”

“A few days! What about Elizabeth?” she wondered in anguish. Would she have time to find her? What about the last entry in the diary? A few days could mean a week, and then she’d probably be going home, and Aunt Sarah would sell the house, and she’d never find Elizabeth!

The doctor took the thermometer from her mouth and looked at it. He nodded. “Feverish all right,” he said. “But there’s no need for your aunt to get in touch with your parents. No need at all to worry them. You’ll get along just fine. Just a few days in bed, and take your medicine regularly, and you’ll
be up and hopping around again.” He stood up. “And you’ve done your aunt a world of good being here. She’s a new person,” he said.

“I feel like a new person,” said Aunt Sarah. “I feel quite young again.”

“Well, to make sure we keep you that way,” said Dr. Green, “I’ll send over a woman my wife knows to do a little of the heavy work while this girl’s in bed.”

And he and Aunt Sarah left the room.

For a day or so, Sally slept a good deal of the time. Aunt Sarah brought medicine to her and notes from Emily, who had come to look for Elizabeth and been told that Sally was sick.

Emily’s notes were truly bright spots in Sally’s days. They were decorated with crayon pictures of Elizabeth, and of Sally herself holding Elizabeth and showing her to Emily, who had braids that reached to her toes, upraised hands, and a round “o” for a mouth. There was also a large one of Shadow. Aunt Sarah thought it looked just like him. She pinned all the pictures up on the wall where Sally could look at them.

Dr. Green kept his promise to send someone to help Aunt Sarah. Mrs. Binneky was a brisk, happy little person who called Sally “love” and sang as she dusted her bedroom. One day she brought her
a pink cupcake with a sugar bird on top in a crinkled green paper cup.

When Sally grew a little stronger and was able to sit up, Aunt Sarah brought her books to read and paper dolls to cut out. Sometimes they just talked together, mostly about California, which Sally had never seen. Aunt Sarah told her about the palm trees that grew along the street where she lived. “Sometimes,” she said, “when you’re walking along, a date will fall right on your head.” And she could pick oranges and bananas from trees in her back yard. “I just reach out the window in the morning,” said Aunt Sarah.

“You must like California a lot,” said Sally rather wistfully.

“It’s a very interesting place to live,” agreed Aunt Sarah.

“I suppose you want to go back as soon as you can,” said Sally.

“Well, I only came here to sell the house.”

“I wonder,” said Sally, “if another girl will live here.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Aunt Sarah. “It’s the apartment owners who are interested in buying the house, for expansion.”

“Expansion?” asked Sally. The word felt strange to her tongue. She didn’t like the way it felt at all. “What do you mean?”

“Well, they want to make the apartment buildings larger, you see.”

“You mean,” cried Sally, “they’d tear the house down?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Aunt Sarah.

Sally’s lips began to tremble. Her eyes filled with tears.

“Why, Sally,” said her aunt, taking her hand. “Do you like this old house so much?”

Sally gulped and nodded.

“I wish you didn’t have to sell it,” she whispered.

But her aunt only patted her hand and said nothing.

Then one day Emily was allowed to come in and sit by her bed in the little blue chair, and they talked about everything — about Elizabeth, and Emily’s little brother Richard, who was only a baby. “I take care of him,” said Emily proudly, and Sally told her about Bub and how funny he was. Aunt Sarah, to their delight, brought up the little tea set, including the broken-handled cup, and they had a tea party like the one in the long-ago garden, with sugar water for tea.

Emily said that when Sally was better her mother wanted her to come over to her house and play, and then she could see Richard, and they made plans to visit each other after Sally had gone home.

“But I won’t be staying here,” said Sally unhappily,
looking around the pretty room and thinking how much she had grown to love it. She told Emily about how the house would be torn down.

“They
can’t
do that!” gasped Emily, and her eyes filled with tears just as Sally’s had.

“But don’t worry,” she said kindly at last, wiping her eyes. “We’ll play at my house. We’ll play with Elizabeth.”

But Sally shook her head sadly. “I don’t think I’m going to find her,” she said. “I’m not going to have time. I’ll be going back to school, and Aunt Sarah will go back to California, and the house will be — gone.”

“Oh, but you
will
find her!” cried Emily, looking up at the picture. “I just know you will. I’d feel awful if you didn’t.”

“So would I,” Sally agreed.

But at last the day came when she was well enough to get out of bed and go downstairs for breakfast.

“It’s so good to have you up and about,” said her aunt, smiling at her.

“It’s good to be up,” said Sally. Then, “Aunt Sarah,” she said, “do you think I could go up to the attic today?”