Bertha lit one of Garth’s cigarettes. “Gonna have to rent a sandblaster,” she said. “Won’t come off without a sandblaster, and it’s brick so I can’t just paint over it.”
“Deputy Chad thinks it was gangs that did it,” Ana said.
Bertha snorted. “Town isn’t big enough for gangs,” she said. “Doesn’t matter anyway. This is just somebody marking their territory. This is colored piss with artistic pretensions.”
Ana took out her notebook, but she didn’t have any guesses to write down yet. “How’s the novel?” she asked Bertha. This was the usual thing to ask. Bertha had always been writing a novel.
“Terrible,” Bertha said.
“Sorry,” said Ana. She wondered if it was better to be a novelist or a traveling actor, and decided it would still be better to be a pirate king.
“What’s with the notebook?” Bertha asked. She flicked her cigarette butt at the graffiti, and it hit the bricks above the paint with a shower of orange sparks.
“I’m going to draw it,” Ana said, “I’ll take it home and figure out what it says, and then… then maybe I’ll know who did it. I’ll solve the mystery.”
“Have fun,” Bertha said. She opened a door in the gym wall with one of the many jingling keys at her belt and went in. The door shut behind her with a loud metal scrape.
Ana drew the graffiti tag. Luckily she had the right colors of magic marker. It took her seven tries to get it right.
The screen door squeaked when Ana opened it. The kitchen lights were on. One cold plateful of food sat on an otherwise bare table. Ana’s mother sat at the other end, face down on her folded arms. She was snoring. Ana hid her backpack under the table, and put the plate of food on a chair and out of sight.
“Wake up, Mama,” she said.
Her mother woke up. “Where have you been, child?” she asked, annoyed but mostly groggy.
“Here,” Ana said. “I’ve been here for hours. Sorry I missed dinner.”
“You should be,” said her mother. “Where—”
Ana pretended to yawn. Her mother couldn’t help yawning, then, and this made Ana yawn for real. “Bedtime,” she said, once she was able to say anything. Her mother nodded, and both of them went upstairs.
Ana snuck back downstairs to throw away her dinner and fetch her backpack. She ate the chocolate granola bars while sitting on the floor of her bedroom and studying the graffiti in her notebook. She thought it might say roozles, rutterkin or rumbustical, but there were always extra letters, or at least extra swoofs and pointy edges to the letters, and the longer she stared at it the less each word fit.
Ana slept. She dreamed that her kitten-backpack climbed snuffling onto the foot of her bed. She woke up when it stepped on her toes, and once she was awake she could see its pointy-eared outline. A car drove by outside and made strange window-shade shadows sweep across the wall and ceiling. Maybe the car had its highbeams on.
Her bag moved. She kicked it and it fell off the edge, landing with more of a soft smacking sound than it should have. Ana wanted to turn on the light, but the light switch was across the room. She would have to touch the floor to get there. She decided that now would be a really excellent time to develop telekinetic powers, and spent the next several minutes concentrating on the light switch.
Another car went by.
She got up, tiptoed across the floor and turned on the light. She turned around.
The backpack was right at her feet. She didn’t scream. She swallowed an almost-scream.
The furry, pointy-eared bag wasn’t moving. She pulled on the edges of the zipper and peeked inside. Her expedition supplies were still there. She poked through them with the capped tip of a magic marker, just in case there was also something else in there. The notebook lay open to the seventh graffiti-covered page. She tried to nudge it aside, but the tip of the marker went through the colored surface. She dropped the pen. It passed through the graffiti and vanished. The page rippled like a pond.
She took another magic marker and used it to close the notebook cover. Then she looked out in the hallway to see if Rico’s bedroom light was on. It was. She took the notebook, tiptoed by her parents’ room, and sped up to pass the stairway. The air felt different at the top of the stairs. It felt like the stairway was holding its breath. It felt like the open space might breathe her in and down and swallow her.
She knocked on Rico’s door. No answer. She knocked again, because she knew it would be locked from the inside so there wasn’t any point in trying to open it herself. He still didn’t answer. She tried the doorknob and it turned.
He wasn’t there. She tread carefully on the few clear and visible parts of the floor, and took a better look around from the middle of the room. He wasn’t standing behind his dresser or lurking behind the armrest of the ratty old couch. He wasn’t hiding in his closet, because it was filled with too much junk already and nothing more would fit. She looked under the bed and he wasn’t there either. She looked at the empty bed and found a rolled up piece of parchment. You play tomorrow night, musician, it said. Be ready.
The parchment crumbled into several brown leaves and drifted to the floor, settling among the socks and books and torn pieces of sheet music.
“He must be rehearsing,” she said to herself. “I’ll try to find him tomorrow.”
She went back to her room, and hung the backpack up on the knob handle of one of her dresser drawers to keep it from wandering, and went to bed. She left the light on. She didn’t see anything move for the rest of the night, including her backpack. She heard things move instead.
Rico wasn’t at breakfast. This wasn’t unusual, because he almost always slept until lunchtime, so their parents didn’t seem worried as they bustled and joked and made coffee and went away to work after kissing Ana on each cheek. Ana went back upstairs as soon as they were gone. Rico wasn’t in his room. Bits of brown leaves crunched and crumbled in the carpet under her feet.
Ana got dressed, and took her backpack down from the knob she’d hung it on.
“Don’t go walking anywhere without me,” she said. She took more granola bars from the kitchen, and refilled her little square canteen, and locked up the house.
It started to rain when she reached the first highway billboard, and Ana’s clothes and backpack were soggy by the time she got to the gym. The bag’s sopping ears lay flat against the zipper.
She stood in front of the graffiti, took a deep breath and wondered if she was supposed to say something out loud. Maybe she was supposed to say whatever the graffiti said, and she still couldn’t read it.
Something snarled in the trees behind her. Ana turned around, took a step backwards and tried to press herself against the wall. It didn’t work. She pressed and passed through it.
“Hello,” said a voice that scraped against the insides of her ears.
Ana faced another painted wall, stone instead of brick. She took a breath. The air was still and it smelled like thick layers of dust. She turned around. An old man, thin and spindly, sat on a stool and polished a carved flute. He had a wispy beard. He tested two notes on the flute and set to polishing again. Behind him were several shelves of similar instruments. Some were plain and a pale yellow-grey. Some were carved with delicate patterns, and others inlaid with metals and lacquered over.
“Hello,” Ana said.
“The Grey Lady brings deliveries every second Tuesday, and today is neither thing. Are you delivered here? Has she changed schedules?”
“I don’t know any grey ladies,” Ana said. “Except math teachers. Do you mean Mrs. Huddle?”
“No huddling things,” the old man said. He set down the flute on a carved wooden stand, picked up a bone from his workbench and took a rasp to the knobby joints. “Tell me your purposes then, if no Lady brought you. Are you here to buy a flute?”