Chapter 11
It took Ru a while to understand what was bothering her about the park. She walked along the edge just as the sun sank behind the trees, staining everything a weak orange that reminded her more of a lone streetlamp than a star. The trees still had full leaves; only a few were beginning to decay into yellow and red. Her shoes scraped the graying asphalt. A long shadow echoed her movements.
As she passed the main park entrance, it finally clicked. It was two days until October, the biggest month for tourism in Quarterhill, and Tanager Park was deserted. The parking lot was devoid of cars. Empty swings hung as straight as the poles that held them up. Picnic tables were scattered about like cards, isolated from each other. Dust blew off the baseball diamonds, chalk lines fading. Ru stared into the trees beyond.
This could have been exactly what it was like when her father disappeared. No witnesses. From what she’d heard, he’d never come home from his maintenance job at the park. He’d known the paths and the woods better than anyone. It helped a great deal when another kid went missing.
Vince Tesla’s father had been friends with him. Ru pried a little more information out one day at the arcade. “Your brother looks just like him,” Mr. Tesla said, “except for the eyes. You have his eyes.”
“I know,” Ru said. “I’ve seen the pictures.”
“Did you mother tell you he was studying to be an astronomer?”
Ru shifted and fastened her eyes on the prize counter. “I don’t like asking Mom about Dad very much. It makes her cry when she talks about him.”
“She misses him,” Mr. Tesla said gently. “People ask her too many questions about him, I think. Do you still get strangers at the door asking about the Blue Star?”
“Not that I know of,” Ru said, surprised. “People really did that?”
Mr. Tesla nodded, frowning. “When your father disappeared, the city council wanted to use the case to bring in more tourists. I think Eric would have loved it, but your mother was against it entirely. It didn’t stop people from catching on by reading the regular news, though. You almost grew up in another city, they were bothering her so much.”
Ru wondered if the old man that lived across from the park went through something similar. Maybe his wife had disappeared into the park. He did shout about the tourism board a lot.
“Do you believe the Blue Star exists?” she asked.
Mr. Tesla laughed, then moved to the counter to take a fistful of tickets from a younger child. “The Star? I can’t tell you. But the fact is, people have actually disappeared around the woods, so you’d better be careful. Don’t go alone, all right?”
Earlier that day, Ru had gone to the park with Nathan and Kenna. Now she wished they were still around. She was just about to move on when a flicker of light caught her eye. She squinted and shielded her eyes. An afterimage of the sun, probably.
No. There it was again, a blue spark, like a firework lighting. North, not west.
Ru shook her head, blinking rapidly. It could have been anything. A camera. Someone playing with a flashlight. Despite her mind throwing out solution after rational solution, she soon found herself standing at the edge of the trees, peering in. She could return with Kenna after dinner, but by then whatever had caused the light could be gone. She compromised with her curiosity and conscience, and decided to stick with a woodchip path.
The air dampened under the trees, though the leaves across the path were dry. They crackled and scuffled in the woods. Ru started, then noticed a puffy gray tail wind out of sight behind the trunk of a tree. She kept her head up and her ears open, taking note of everything that moved.
She imagined what it was like for her father. He’d last been seen near the woods, along with Colleen’s parents. It had been a strain on the girls’ friendship a few years ago. Joe Ackerman, whose father was a police officer, said that the Amundsens kidnapped Eric Hadley, or possibly killed him. It was “obvious,” Joe said, because Colleen’s parents had arranged for her to be cared for at Breckenridge, but Ru’s mother had no clue as to what happened to Eric. It had taken Ru a few weeks and a teacher to understand that even if it was true, none of that was Colleen’s fault.
Ru took another step and felt something yank on her foot. She tumbled, landing face down in the mulch. Whatever had tripped her was still on her, digging into her leg. She rolled over and groped at her ankle. Her fingers caught under a loop of blue string. She wrangled it away from her foot, and followed it to where it was buried in the ground under the chips. Confused, she brushed the chips away, down to the dirt. A few scrapes of her fingers freed the string from the ground.
The string’s anchor was a crystalline pendant. It was deep cobalt blue, in the shape of a soaring eagle. It looked like a Skaeya pendant. Someone must have dropped it, Ru thought, but it seemed in good shape for something that had been buried deep enough to trip her. There was no fading and hardly any dirt left on it at all. She brushed the last crumbs off its wings.
A head rush nearly knocked her back to the ground. Static flew in front of her eyes. She staggered to her feet and nearly froze in place. This was a different kind of head rush. She knew this feeling. She’d had it in her dreams, before those aliens arrived. Her head swiveled, quick as a bird. Was she dreaming now? She didn’t think so.
Intuition nudged her again, but this time it wasn’t telling her to run. Her feet moved on their own, up the path. She barely had the mind to pocket the eagle pendant before it slipped out of her fingers.
It was not long before the woodchip path ended in grass. Light shined over a hedge fence and tunnel. And, at last, there was another person. It was a man in a navy polo shirt and khakis, the uniform of the parks department. He caught sight of her and smiled, a kindly smile that was a stark contrast to the energy that had drawn Ru there. “Hello,” he said. “Here to see the Quarterstone? The garden closes in fifteen minutes.”
She nodded. Despite being one of the most solid pieces of oddity in Quarterhill, it wasn’t very popular. There were symbols or pictures engraved on the top of it. It they were part of a language, no one had recognized them yet. Strangely enough, there was relatively little mythology attached to it. Some people believed good luck came from the stone, but there were no amazing stories to go with that. It was more a place for historians than thrill-seekers, much like Breckenridge Mansion.
The Quarterstone sat at the end of the tunnel, under a large, leafy dome. What was exceptional about the stone was its size. The round, flat stone could easily fit a pair of cars on its ivory surface. There were no other stones nearby that matched its composition. It seemed luminescent in the twilight, the symbols barely noticeable shadows.
This wasn’t specifically where she was being drawn. It was west of the stone, off into the woods where there was no path. Ru began to resist now. It was getting harder to see, she had no flashlight, and no one to help her in case it was the windsock aliens. Her pulse reached a new height as she pressed on. The gatekeeper eyed her with concern as her feet carried her out, but he said nothing, no matter how she wished he would. The force guiding her was almost tangible now, almost like the current of a river. She left the path and wove her way through the trees.
Her crunching footsteps echoed. She stopped. She heard a rapid shuffle. She was not alone, and whatever it was did not want to be seen. Her eyes went wide, searching among the dim trunks.
“YAHH!”
Ru screamed right along with the figure that had jumped out from behind a tree. Then laughter rang out, and Ru recognized a thorny head of red hair. “Randy!” she screeched.
Jayson was behind him, doubled over with laughter. “You should have seen your face,” he howled.
“What are you doing here?” Ru said angrily.
“Could ask you the same thing,” Jayson said. “You aren’t supposed to come out here by yourself.”
“She wasn’t alone,” a grating voice said. It had come from above.
