Matchbox Girls (2 page)

Marley wanted to examine the bookshelves, but that was the curiosity of a bibliophile more than anything else, and she knew it. Instead, she went to Zachariah’s desk. There was a slim, curved computer screen to one side, so elegant and subtle that, at first, she thought he didn’t have a computer. Since it was turned off, it wasn't nearly as interesting as the cellphone lying on its side in the center of the desk. She picked it up as she continued looking around. Other than the computer and the phone, there were books neatly arranged between stone bookends on one side of the desk and ordinary mail and writing supplies on the other side. The books were a mix of economic studies and paperback science books, with one collection of fairy tales at the end.

The cellphone was a sleek black bar that lit up when she touched it, displaying a picture of a lightning storm. “Did you call me from this?”

“No, we have our own phones!” Kari came into the room, fishing a bright green flip phone out of her pocket.

Marley raised her eyebrows. It was smaller than an adult phone, and when she opened it, it only had five buttons other than the arrow keys: a silhouette of a house, a man, a woman, and two keys to start and end calls. The house button had been inexpertly colored pink with a marker. The branding on the phone announced it as the Senyaza Beacon. “How did you dial my number?”

“Uncle Zach put your number in here, see?” Kari pressed the “woman” button and Marley’s name and number flashed on the screen.

That startled Marley. Until now, she hadn’t really wondered about why the twins had called her in particular—she’d been too busy trying not to panic. The twins seemed very attached to her, even though they mostly saw each other at the park or on lunch dates. But surely Zachariah had other, more important people to program into a dedicated button on the twins’ phones. Surely?

She didn’t really know what her relationship with Zachariah was, other than one of the few bright spots in her life. While they’d flirted some, they’d never been on a date without the kids. Sometimes he looked at her with such intensity that she shivered. But the girls had teachers, and knew other parents—people with a much better idea of how to take care of children in an emergency. Marley could barely take care of a kitten.

She bit her lip and scowled down at Zachariah’s phone, searching out the contacts list. It was as long as she would have expected, full of names and businesses. None of them shouted out Very Important. She flipped over to the recently called list, and scrolled through the shorter list of names. Today: Corbin. Grendel. Yesterday: Annalise. Tia. The day before: herself. A number without a name.

The missed calls list was even more opaque. A call from Senyaza Corp. A call from an unlisted number. A call from—what? Instead of a number, a strange black and white image flickered on the screen. It reminded her of animated tribal art, and after only a few seconds, it made her eyes water. She looked away.

She thought she should call some of the numbers, and find out if anybody knew what happened to Zachariah. Perhaps somebody had called him away, and picked him up. But she couldn’t call strangers and ask about Zachariah with the twins staring at her expectantly.

“Does anything seem out of place to you guys?” Kari's mouth opened and Marley quickly added, “Other than Zachariah being gone.” Kari's mouth closed again.

“That.” Lissa pointed across the room, to the small round table beside the armchair. “Book's out of place and the ball is new. We're supposed to put books away.” A large book was on the table, and on top of the book were a thick golden candle and an iridescent glass ball the size of Marley’s fist. The positioning was very strange; surely the candle would damage the book if it was ever lit. And something about the ball bothered Marley; it seemed no more substantial than a soap bubble. In the relentlessly tidy home, the odd arrangement seemed both deliberate and out of character. The back of Marley’s neck prickled.

“Pretty ball. Can I play with it?” Kari moved closer to the tableau.

Marley snapped, “Stop, Kari. I’ll look at it.” Then she closed her mouth tightly. She hadn’t meant to sound so harsh. The words had just slipped out, before she'd even thought them. But the little girl froze obediently. Marley moved past her. The orb looked like it might roll off the table and pop from an unwary breath. As she stepped closer, the hairs on her arm rose. There was a barely audible sizzle.

She lifted the candle off the book. That was enough to knock the ball off as well, and she caught it in one hand, or tried to. As soon as her fingers touched it, it burst into a puff of dust. There was a bright light and a flash of heat near her hand.

Marley blinked. She blinked again. Between blinks, the room changed. For just a heartbeat, she saw the table knocked over, the computer thrown off the desk, the rug askew and crumpled on the floor. A voice whispered, “Come and play.” And everywhere, there were the dried leaves of autumn.

She blinked once more. Everything was tidy and straight, just as it had been when she entered.

Almost everything. The candle in her hand was burned halfway down, and the book on the table was gone.

-two-

M
arley stared from the candle to the table and then looked at the twins. They stood close to each other, both looking at Marley with interest, their fear apparently forgotten. Carefully she put the candle down and rubbed at her eyes. “Where did the book go?” She might have mistaken the state of the candle but the presence of the book? Never.

Kari looked around as if trying to spot it, while Lissa cocked her head, staring at the floor. Then she said, “Somebody put it away?”

Marley blinked down at her. “Who? When?” Lissa just shrugged, staring back up at her with big blue eyes.

Marley blew out her breath. The kids were cute when telling her about their toys or an adventure, but trying to get useful information out of them was like deciphering a language last studied in junior high. She examined the bookshelves, trying to extract the title of the missing book from the image in her memory. She was good at noticing books. There'd been a curlicue font on the spine. “Something Tales,” she thought.

Books filled every shelf, edge to edge. Apparently Zachariah didn’t ever leave books out when he was reading them.
Or he never read them
, a cynical little voice suggested.

Out of the corner of her eye, Marley saw something move. She stared hard at Zachariah’s desk and at last decided it must have been the screensaver on the computer, just barely visible from this angle. It hadn't been off after all. She looked away and spotted the single gap in the rows of books.

Or perhaps he only uses one book at a time
, she continued the argument with herself, walking over to the gap. It was at least as wide as the large book had been. Near the back, something pale glimmered.

The shelf was just above eye-level, so she rose on her toes and reached in. Dust puffed out. A tube of paper was tucked into the back, tied with a silver ribbon. It seemed like pages torn from a book, with that heavy, solid paper found in commercial journals. It was covered in the same dust—or was it ash? She caught a whiff of wood smoke.

Marley stared at the roll of paper for a long moment. The feeling stole over her that she was standing on the edge of a vast ocean, a strange surf washing her toes. What had just happened?

Come and play.

Something moved at the corner of her vision again, dark and low to the ground. She glanced up, her skin prickling, and saw only bookshelves.

At the door to the study, the twins stood holding hands again. “Marley? What’s that roll?” asked Kari.

Marley shivered. She wanted to get out of this house with its strange shadows and the strange thoughts they inspired. She crossed to the desk and put Zachariah’s cellphone into her purse. “I don’t know. Let’s go back to my place and I’ll call some people and we’ll find your uncle.”

Lissa brightened. “A slumber party?”

“
Uh,” said Marley. “Sure.”

“
Okay! I’ll go pack!” Lissa ran out of sight.

Kari lingered in the doorframe, though, watching Marley. Marley turned the rolled pages over in her hand. If she was imagining the moving shadows, then it was probably nothing more meaningful than a lost collection of laundry bills. It was certainly too dusty to be anything recently handled by Zachariah. 

Marley put the roll down. She
wanted
it to be laundry bills. And she wanted to get away from this windowless room with its moving darkness. She wanted to find somebody else, somebody who knew what was going on.  Zachariah must have been insane to make her a point of contact for the kids. He
knew
the state her life was in. She liked the kids, but she wasn't in any position to look after them.

“Where’s your mother, Kari?” Zachariah had never said anything direct about the twins’ mother. She’d picked up the impression that she was away rather than dead, though.

Kari shrugged. “Dunno.”

“If I can’t find your uncle, is there somebody else I should call? A neighbor? A teacher? Another uncle?”

Kari gave her a confused look. “There’s just Uncle Zach. He said to push the lady button for you if we couldn’t find him.”

Marley mulled that over. The thing was, Zachariah
wasn't
insane. He was one of the most practical and prepared people she'd ever met. So what was he thinking? “What sorts of things does he say about me?”

“He says you're very pretty and very special and he wishes you weren't so sad all the time.”

Marley said, “Oh,” then mumbled, “That started off well, but now I wonder if maybe he's been talking to my mother.”

Kari frowned. “What?”

“Never mind!” Marley said quickly. “Let’s go see what your sister is packing.” She followed the tiny girl upstairs to the bedroom the twins shared.

Lissa had pulled out a backpack as large as she was and was stuffing it full of toys. Marley found herself attempting to convince both children that toys weren’t the only component of a slumber party. Eventually, she found it was easier to just explore the room and pack for the girls herself, judiciously choosing from among the girls’ many suggestions.

Partway through stuffing a favorite blanket into a miniature duffel bag, something else occurred to Marley: Had Zachariah, always so prepared,
expected
to vanish? He'd warned them to call her. She wished she could get answers from the children on the matter. Yet it was clear they barely understood the situation as anything more than a new and semi-frightening game.

It was that question, though, that made her stop by the study on the way out of the house and pick up the rolled sheaf of papers again. A very quick glance showed her that it wasn’t a laundry list; the pages were densely filled with handwriting that was incomprehensible at first glance. She rolled them up again. The bundle was weird, and so was Zachariah's disappearance. Even if it was creepy, she couldn't ignore it.

She also took a sheet of stationery and wrote a note to Zachariah, explaining that the children had called her and where to find them. She left the note on the table in the entryway and went outside, leaving the door unlocked behind her.

As she was loading the girl’s stuff into the back of her hatchback, the girls peeked in the windows of her car. Kari said, “You don’t have seats in your car!”

At first, Marley was puzzled. Of course she had seats. Then she remembered that babies and small children were supposed to ride around in special booster seats.

“Nope. You can ride in the grown-up seats, though.”

The twins exchanged looks. Lissa shook her head. “No, Marley. Have to have carseats.” She sounded absolutely convinced of this. “Can’t ride in a car without carseats.”

Kari said, “
We
have carseats. They buckle in.” She pointed at Zachariah’s SUV. Marley peered in the window and saw a matching pair of miniature bucket seats installed on the back bench. She tried the door.

“It’s locked. Do you know where the keys are?”

The twins exchanged another wide-eyed look. “In Uncle’s Zach's pocket,” Lissa said.

Marley pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose. She hadn’t had a chance for breakfast and she was starting to miss it. Eyeing the house, she wondered if she could convince the kids to come along without the carseats. She really didn’t want to stay here; whatever had happened to Zachariah could happen again. She pushed that thought away reflexively. But she did want to go home, where it was safe, and where she had breakfast and her medication.

She tried all the other doors of the SUV, just in case. They were all locked. So she leaned on the hood and looked at the tiny girls. They were whispering to each other, arguing.

Lissa raised her voice. “If you don’t, Kari, she’ll leave us, too!” There was a touch of hysteria to Lissa’s childish syllables, and Kari looked frightened and guilty.

I burned the kitchen down. Will you leave now, too?
Marley flushed at the surge of memory and shook her head. “Never,” she said fiercely. “I’d never do that to you.” She'd spent too much of her own adolescence dreading the same thing.

Lissa gave her a frustrated look. “But we need our carseats.”

Kari gave a little shriek and turned to face the SUV door. “All right!” She gave Marley a sulky look and added, “It’s a secret. Uncle Zach doesn’t know.”

Then she touched the door. The click of the internal latch unlocking was very loud. Kari hauled on the door handle and the door popped open. With a defiant look, she scrambled up into one of the carseats and sat in it, arms crossed.

Marley opened her mouth. She closed her mouth. Finally, she unglued her tongue from the roof of her mouth. “Can you hotwire the engine, too?” At the girl’s blank look, she rephrased. “Can you start the car, too?”

“No!” said Kari. She looked like she was about to cry.

Marley peered at the door. It didn't seem to have any high-tech sensors. “Can you unlock other doors? Like the door to the house?”

“She can,” whispered Lissa. Kari shot her an ugly look.