I shook my head and tried to look calm, even though I wasn’t feeling it.
“I reckon he thought she was casting some kind of spell on him, don’t you? Did you see her finger? Maybe Jake knows something because he lives next door to her and he’s seen something we haven’t. Do you think she’s a witch?”
Her flip-flops slapped again as she walked back and forth.
“A witch?”
Melody was grinning at me, thrilled from the excitement of seeing Jake beaten for once. I must admit it did feel good seeing him scared, but at that moment I was more concerned about the tiny pieces of black fluff from Melody’s cardigan slowly appearing on our carpet. My heart was pounding. The girl in my hallway—the girl who hung out in graveyards—needed to leave immediately.
“And what about that lamp in her window? What’s that all about? I’ve never ever seen it turned off.” Melody was jumping up and down, and she clapped her hands together. “Maybe it’s some kind of beacon! Like a symbol to other witches that a real witch lives there! What do you think?”
I watched her for a second as she practically bounced off the walls, but when she saw my face she stopped.
“Matthew? What? What is it?”
I risked her seeing me use my shirt as protection and opened the front door widely as she stared at me.
“I’m sorry, Melody, but I’m really busy at the moment. Can you go?”
She looked outside, then back at me.
“What?”
“I said, can you go?”
Lots of little lines crinkled across her forehead and her bottom lip protruded over her top lip as she took in what I’d said.
“But … but we’ve got things to talk about. Don’t you want to discuss Old Nina?”
I shook my head.
She blinked at me a few times and took a step toward the door.
“But you let me in. You let me in when Jake was being mean!”
I could feel the germs from her cardigan nipping at my ankles, burrowing their way under my skin. The feeling brought tears to my eyes.
“I didn’t mean to. I made a mistake.”
She pressed her lips together and glared at me before stomping out of the house and across the street.
I quickly slammed the door and ran upstairs.
The Wallpaper Lion woke me up.
In my dream I’d asked him a question: How does it feel being stuck up there all day, Lion? Just watching the world go by?
Sounding a bit nervous, like he knew he shouldn’t be talking but really couldn’t help himself, he said: Surely you know how that feels … don’t you, Matthew?
I jumped when he spoke and woke up. My heart raced and for a moment I felt disoriented, like I always did when I fell asleep in the daytime.
I was facing my floor, my head at an angle on the edge of my pillow. A yellow rectangle of sunlight stretched across my carpet from my desk to the bookshelves. I listened, waiting to see if he was going to carry on, but all I could hear was the drone of a distant lawn mower. Rolling onto my back, I watched the small area of wallpaper that resembled a lion’s face. His eye still drooped downward, his matted mane circling his head like a blazing sun, his nose flat and wide, and his mouth now, thankfully, tightly shut.
My clock said 12:45 p.m. I’d been asleep for over an hour. It was weird; the less I did, the more tired I felt. I got up and stretched.
Outside, a sagging blue wading pool, filled with a summer soup of water, grass, and dead flies, sat in the middle of Mr. Charles’s backyard. Casey and Teddy were nowhere to be seen. Our yard was also deserted. Mum’s empty lounge chair crisped in the baking sun, and behind it Dad’s gardening wigwams were all dark and shriveled.
Taking my notebook with me, I crossed the landing into the office to see if anything was going on outside at the front.
Monday, July 28th. 12:47 p.m. Office/nursery. Very hot.
Teddy is in the front yard next door. He’s wearing a pull-up diaper and a white T-shirt with a cartoon ice-cream cone on the front. He doesn’t have any shoes on. There is no sign of Casey or Mr. Charles. The gate is shut, the small lever on the latch in place.
Reaching toward some bright pink roses, Teddy picked a fistful of petals and scattered them onto the path, dancing as they tickled his sunburnt feet. A trowel and a green kneeling pad lay next to him. Mr. Charles must be in the middle of some gardening. When he reappeared he wasn’t going to be happy with what Teddy was doing, not after all the hours he spent fiddling with those flowers.
In his left hand Teddy clutched the little square, blue blanket he’d been holding when he first arrived in the big, posh car with Casey. He let the blanket fall to the ground, then grabbed more petals and watched as they rained down on top of it. When the last petal had dropped he stretched toward a large rose but caught his forearm on a thorn.
“Owwww!” he said and he did a little jig as his face crumpled into a scowl.
For a moment I thought he was going to go and get Mr. Charles, but instead he just squatted down and inspected the cut on his arm, dabbing at it with the blanket.
I heard a door bang open, and Mr. Jenkins appeared from next door wearing his running gear and studying his iPod as he looped some white headphones around his neck. His teeth shined bright against his tanned skin as he smiled to himself. Fortunately there was no sign of Hannah or her swollen belly. Mr. Jenkins turned left out of his driveway and then broke into a jog, oblivious to the toddler crouching down in the garden next to him.
Teddy stood up. There was a tiny trickle of blood running down his arm, but it didn’t seem to bother him; he reached for more petals and then stopped. Something out of the corner of his eye had distracted him.
Me.
He turned and pointed a chubby arm toward my window as he gasped:
“Fishy!”
I watched him bounce up and down, clearly ecstatic that he’d spotted the Goldfish Boy all on his own. He looked around for someone to tell.
“Fishy, Casey! Look! Fishy! Granda!”
But nobody came.
I turned away from the window and glanced at the time in the corner of the computer screen.
12:55 p.m.
That time was important.
I don’t know why it stuck in my mind but it did, even without writing it down.
At some point after 12:55 p.m. on that bright, scorching day, Teddy Dawson went missing.
Mr. Charles hadn’t been gardening after all. The trowel and kneeling pad I’d seen had just been left over from the previous day, forgotten in the madness of trying to look after two young kids. While Teddy was picking the petals, Mr. Charles was inside having an afternoon nap in his armchair. I was cleaning my room when, at 2:37 p.m., I heard a shout from the garden.
“Teddy! Teddy, where are you? Don’t hide from Granddad now.”
I looked outside and saw the top of Mr. Charles’s red head as he stood on his patio, his hands on his hips.
“Something’s going on,” I said to the Wallpaper Lion.
“Teddy? Teddy! You come out here this instant, young man!”
He walked around the side of the house and I ran to the office. Claudia, Melody’s mum, was just reversing her old car out of their driveway, and as she drove past number eleven, she put her hand up and waved at Mr. Charles, unaware of the panic he was in. The old man ignored her and trotted down his path, his head darting this way and that. I took some notes.
“Teddy! Teddy! Stop hiding and get back here—now!”
A few pastel pink petals fluttered along the path toward the front gate, which was now wide open. Mr. Charles walked quickly around the semicircle of the cul-de-sac, looking over garden fences and into car windows.
“Where are you, Teddy? Teddy!”
His voice sounded different. It was much higher than usual and it was shaking. As he walked past number five, Jake’s mum, Sue, appeared in her supermarket uniform.
“Everything all right, Mr. Charles?” she called.