"Why don't you show me this playground," Lizbeth said, indicating the far side of the Red Chapel.
"Yay!" Ginny squealed. Lizbeth noticed the change in the girl and realized that Ginny had decided everything would be all right now that Lizbeth was here. She held tight to Lizbeth's shirt, leading the three of them past the front of the cabin but giving the entrance a wide berth.
"It's a real place," Marji said, taking Lizbeth's hand. The girl's fingers were cold and clammy, the palm slicked with sweat. "But Thomas says it looks different back home."
"It's called the Red Chapel 'cause it's made out of red trees," Ginny piped up, pleased to be able to share what she'd learned.
"Yeah?" Lizbeth asked, encouraging the girls to keep talking.
"Yeah," Ginny continued. "Thomas says that they cut down big redwood trees to make it-"
"Like the one you can drive through in Northern California," Marji added, still not her normal self but some instinctive part of her not wanting her little sister to hog the conversation.
"It's magic." This came from Ginny, who wore a wide grin, exposing tiny bone-white baby teeth. "See!"
They'd rounded the side of the cabin, and the sight that greeted them took Lizbeth's breath away. This wasn't a traditional playground. It was a fairy garden. Earlier in the summer, she and Dev had helped the girls build a smaller version of this same fairy land in the Montrose backyard-but theirs had been nowhere near as elaborate as this one.
The dreamlands had outdone themselves: There were tall glass spires in a rainbow of colors with brightly colored pinwheels in shimmering gold fabric resting atop them; strings of twinkling lights wrapped themselves around human-sized sunflowers whose faces were like soft brown fur wreathed in a halo of mustard-colored petals. A rose quartz fountain cut into the shape of a dolphin sat in the middle of the garden, a purple waterfall of soap bubbles burbling pleasantly from the creature's nose. A border of blooming hydrangea bushes in shades of baby blue, mauve, and opalescent cream lined the circumference of the garden, walling it in completely-except for a child-sized entrance cut into the shrubbery.
Ginny fit easily, but it took some creative maneuvering-aka crawling-for Lizbeth to get her adult body through the doorway. Marji brought up the rear, only ducking her head slightly to clear the top of the entrance. As soon as they were inside, both girls grabbed for Lizbeth's hand.
"It's just like ours," Ginny said, pulling down the bottom of her T-shirt, the front of which was emblazoned with shiny pink butterflies.
"But it's all real," Marji added.
"Real in a different kind of way," Lizbeth said, letting the girls give her the tour of the garden. "This place is called the dreamlands-"
"We know."
"Oh," Lizbeth said.
"Thomas told us," Marji continued. "He said his brother lives here and that it's like a magical playland. That you can make it change if you use your mind."
"I don't like Thomas, LB," Ginny said with a seven-year-old's bluntness.
"He's not so bad." Marji spoke quickly, blushing bright pink and avoiding Lizbeth's eyes.
Someone thinks Thomas is cute, Lizbeth thought-which made total sense. Marjoram was almost twelve and puberty was about to hit the Montrose family like a hurricane.
And Lizbeth knew exactly why Thomas appealed to the preteen: He greatly resembled the poster of Benedict Cumberbatch hidden on the inside of Marji's closet door-a place she thought was private but obviously was not. At least not with an overcurious kid sister hanging around. Dev had heard all about it-"Sherlock Holmes lives in Marji's closet!"-from motormouth Ginny and, finding the whole thing just "adorable," she'd relayed the story to the rest of the coven. Only Lizbeth, who at eighteen was still in the process of leaving her own teenage years behind, realized how humiliated Marji would be to know her mother's friends had giggled over her crush on the dapper British movie star.
Thomas may have gotten a pass with Marji because of his resemblance to her crush, but Lizbeth had to agree with Ginny. There was definitely something about Thomas that rubbed her the wrong way. He wasn't bad, per se, just full of himself and hard to read.
So unlike Tem.
"So what else did Thomas tell you," Lizbeth asked, as they stopped at the fountain and the girls sat down on the stone bench that curved alongside it.
"That you can drink it 'cause it's grape soda," Ginny said, pointing at the frothing water pouring from the dolphin.