“Girls?” Mrs. Nash was calling from the bottom of the stairs. She sounded so…sweet.
“Maybe she’s had a stroke,” Jess said, cracking up Amanda.
Standing to the side of the stairs and sneaking a peek down, the girls saw a tall woman standing inside the front door. She was a woman of thirty, properly attired, hair perfectly coifed. She was too well dressed, too pretty, to be from Social Services.
“Oh, no,” Amanda gasped. She grabbed for the banister to steady herself.
“Amanda?” Jess said. “What is it?”
“It’s her. I mean she was way far away, so I suppose I can’t be sure, but I am sure. It’s the woman who was watching the school. The woman Finn said was following around the Kingdom Keepers. She’d been at Maybeck’s before.”
“You’re sure?”
“Pretty sure. And what’s Mrs. Nash doing accepting a visitor this late? Curfew’s in twenty minutes.”
“We can’t just hide up here,” Jess said.
“Girls?” Some of the sweetness was gone.
Jess took Amanda’s hand and the two descended the stairs together.
“You have a visitor,” Mrs. Nash said. “This is Ms. Alcott, from the Timmerand School in Charlottesville, Virginia.” She introduced both girls by first name only, and led the three into the small public room. She was just about to sit down when Ms. Alcott spoke for the first time.
“If I could visit with the girls in private…”
Mrs. Nash looked as if she’d been slapped in the face.
“Of course,” she said.
“The four of us can have a discussion just as soon as I’ve met the girls and had a chance to visit.”
“That’s fine,” Mrs. Nash said, clearly upset by the rebuke. She pulled the pocket doors separating the parlor from the hallway shut on her way out.
The woman calling herself Ms. Alcott looked over both girls carefully.
“You look terrified, child,” she said to Amanda. “Is it me scaring you? I promise you there’s nothing to fear.” She lowered her voice. “I’m not from Timmerand, though I am on their board of trustees, and I did go there, years ago. I find the telling of small lies is most convenient, though I do not advocate the practice as it’s an extremely delicate matter, an art form of sorts. Bending the truth is like pulling back a spring—more often than not it snaps back and hits you. Stings like the dickens when it does.”
“Why have you been following my friend?” Amanda asked, careful not to give Finn’s name, but also wanting this woman to know that she, Amanda, was aware of her recent actions.
“For the same reason I’ve come here,” Ms. Alcott answered. “Because I need your help. And you need mine.”
“I don’t understand.”
Jess looked on, saying nothing. Amanda expected her to join in, and was disappointed when Jess did not.
“Wayne,” she said, surprising both girls.
“What about him?” Amanda asked.
“Your friends are his only hope.”
Amanda said nothing. She had no way of knowing if this woman was an Overtaker posing as a friend, or an honest friend of Wayne’s desperate to find him.
“The Kingdom Keepers,” Ms. Alcott said. “Finn Whitman, Terry May—”
“We call him Donnie, by the way, not Terry, but we know who our friends are,” Amanda said.
“You have something of Wayne’s,” Jess said quietly. Her sudden participation surprised Amanda.
Ms. Alcott took a deep breath and sat back in her chair. “How could you possibly know that?”
“What is it?” Jess said.
“It’s something I need to get to Finn or one of the others. I’ve tried several times to make contact, but it hasn’t worked out.”
“You’ve been stalking them,” Amanda said.
“I’m an adult. You all are not. That makes things…difficult sometimes. Furthermore, I had to make sure the Overtakers were not following either of us—me or them—and I could never be absolutely sure.”
“Are there Overtakers outside the parks?” Amanda said.
“Wayne has always believed so. But he tends toward the paranoid when it comes to his enemies. I have no proof either way. But he warned me, and I’ve always taken his warnings seriously.”
“You’ve known him a long time,” Amanda said.
“You might say that,” she said. “I’m his daughter. Wanda. Get it? Like Mickey’s wand?”
“Aha,” Amanda said.
“What is it?” Jess repeated. “This thing you’ve brought?”
“My father has a very active imagination. It’s why he’s been such a successful Imagineer. That includes…well, I don’t know how to put this exactly, but he can ‘see’ things. Or he thinks he can. He claims it’s an extension of his imagination. Most of the time it’s little things: he’ll mention someone’s name and within a matter of minutes that person calls him—I’ve seen that happen a lot with him. Or he’ll know, five minutes before it happens, that all the lights are going to go out, that there’s going to be a power failure. It’s not that he talks about these things. But he’ll go get a flashlight out of the garage, and right then all the lights go out. That sort of thing. As a child I always considered these things coincidences. As I grew older I saw them more for what they were: prescient moments. Prescient, meaning—”