Once Upon a Toad (14 page)

“The news van is still parked at the foot of the driveway!” she fretted. “They're not going away.”

“They'll get bored soon enough,” my father assured her. “Especially when all they get from us is ‘No comment.'”

But the news media wasn't ready to let up, and the phones rang off the hook the whole time Olivia and Geoffrey and I were getting ready for bed. Finally my dad called the police to complain, then unplugged the phones and shut off all the cell phones too.

By the time the ten o'clock news came on, the story had gone national. The stone that the little kid had picked up in the cafeteria had been verified as a diamond, and Olivia was a sensation, her school picture plastered over all the channels.

“I hate that picture,” she grumbled as a narcissus fell from her lips to the living-room coffee table. “My hair is awful. I look stupid.”

“That's because you are stupid,” I told her as she scooched down the sofa away from me—and the inevitable toads. I moved closer, just to spite her. “Don't you get it? This is not a good thing, Olivia. Somebody's going to want those diamonds, just like that guy at the hospital. They're going to come for you.”

“That's enough of that,” Iz said sternly, swatting at the toads with an afghan. “Time for bed.”

But I noticed she made sure to lock all the windows and doors before following us upstairs.

There was another uproar, though, when Olivia flat-out refused to share a bedroom with me.

“Be reasonable, sweetheart,” said Iz. She looked exhausted; it had been a very long day.

“What if Cat talks in her sleep?” Olivia protested amid a fretful flurry of forsythia. “I hate toads!”

“It's not like I'm doing it on purpose!” I retorted, but I couldn't help smirking as the resulting toad hopped down from my bed and over to her side of the room.

Olivia shrieked and flung one of her pillows at it and the other at me. “I hate you!”

“I hate you, too!” I shouted back.

“Girls!” said Iz. Our fight had woken Geoffrey, who trailed into
our room rubbing his eyes. He lit up when he saw the toad-covered floor.

“Frog!” he shouted happily, chasing after them.

“Tim!” called Iz. “Some help in here, please?”

While my dad put the toads outside and Geoffrey back to bed, Iz tried to calm Olivia down. It wasn't any use. The end result was that I slept on a sleeping bag in my little brother's room, which was fine with me. I was as glad to be away from Olivia for the night as she was to be away from me. And as for Geoffrey's snoring, well, that's what earplugs were for, right?

CHAPTER 13

I woke up the next morning feeling cold and soggy. The window was wide open and it was pouring rain outside. My sleeping bag was soaked.

It was my own fault that I'd gotten wet; I'd opened the window last night to get some fresh air before crawling into my sleeping bag. Geoffrey's room can turn into a smelly little bear den sometimes, what with the snoring and the diaper and the blanket and all.

I wriggled free and splashed across the rain-spattered floor, shivering as I shut the window. I stood there for a moment, watching Connor Dixon—he was huddled on his back lawn under an umbrella, waiting for Peanut to hurry up and go—then turned around, frowning. The room was oddly quiet.

“Geoffrey?” I said, popping out my earplugs and a toad. There was no response. Picking up the toad, I squinted at the clock across the room on his bedside table. It was 5:30 a.m.—way early for my little brother to be up. Like Iz, he isn't a morning person, and
Robo Rooster
didn't
start for a while yet. Still, he must have gotten up for some reason, as the covers on the bed were thrown back. He was probably downstairs, waiting in front of the TV.

I figured I'd go downstairs and check on him, then check to see if my mother had e-mailed me back. I pulled on my robe and slippers—dry, fortunately, since I'd thrown them on the armchair over by the bookcase, away from the window—then went downstairs, pausing on the landing to peer out the stained-glass window. A sheriff's car was parked in our driveway, and the single news van from last night had grown to an entire fleet. The whole street, in fact, was clogged with reporters and cameras.

I glanced down at the creature that was struggling in my hand. This news story was not going away, any more than my toads were.

I needed to talk to my mother.

The smell of coffee and bacon wafted up from the kitchen, where my early-bird dad was rattling around making breakfast. Geoffrey was probably in there with him; bacon is his favorite food, and the aroma would have drawn him like a magnet. My stomach rumbled; I was hungry too. I wanted to check my e-mail first, though, so I crossed the front hall to my father's study, closing the door behind me.

My mother had gotten my message. Her reply was short and sweet:

Look for the envelope inside the lining of your suitcase, and call me after you read the letter it contains.

I sat there staring at the computer screen for a moment, surprised and intrigued by her response. Then I tiptoed back
upstairs to find that Olivia had locked our bedroom door. This was nothing new—she used to do it all the time when we were little. Fortunately, being a 1912 bungalow, Dad and Iz's Northwest Honeymoon Cottage has the original doors, with the original old-fashioned keyholes under the handles. I'd squirreled away a spare key years ago, when my stepsister had tried this trick before. I crept down the hall to the bathroom and lifted a loose corner of wallpaper in the bottom cupboard, behind where Iz stored the toilet paper.

Yep, the key was still there.

Unlocking the door as quietly as I could, I slipped into our bedroom, squelched the urge to pop a toad under my still-sleeping stepsister's covers, and knelt on the floor by my bed. I slid my suitcase from underneath it, pulled out the clothes still piled inside, and started prodding at the lining.

Top? Nothing. Sides? Nothing there, either, nor on the bottom. Hmmm. Had I understood my mother's instruction correctly? My fingers worked across the surface of the bottom lining again and stumbled over an almost-imperceptible thickness. That had to be it. I tugged at a small zipper tucked beneath a pleat in the lining and slid my fingers inside. They closed on an envelope.

Pulling it out, I sat back on my heels and looked at it. There were words emblazoned in bright red marker across the front:

OPEN ONLY IN CASE OF EMERGENCY!

This whole thing was getting more bizarre by the moment. But if anything qualified as an emergency, this did.

I stuffed my clothes into the suitcase again and shoved it back under my bed, then left the room, shutting the door quietly behind me. I relocked it and returned the spare key to its
hiding place, then started downstairs. When I reached the landing, I hesitated. I wasn't ready for anyone else to know about the envelope yet. My instincts told me the contents were important, and I wanted to be alone when I read whatever was inside.

There was only one place to go: the attic. I spun around and ran back up the steps, then on to the door at the far end of the hall. By the time I reached the top of the attic stairs, my heart was pounding like crazy. What could possibly be in this envelope that had caused my mother to hide it so carefully?

I crossed to the trunk by the front window, tugging it slightly to one side so as not to be seen by the reporters below. I peeked out at the street to check on them; they were still there, of course. People were starting to emerge from their cars and vans, yawning and stretching. It would stink to work for a magazine or newspaper that made you sleep in your car outside someone's house, hoping to snag a story.

I sat down and slid my fingernail under the envelope's flap. Then I took out the letter and began to read:

 

Dear Cat,

If you're reading this, then something odd has happened in your life.

 

You can say that again,
I thought, and continued:

 

There's something I've been meaning to tell you, but my assignment came up so quickly that I didn't get the chance. I'd planned to talk to you
about it during our special birthday trip. Normally, the way it works in our family is that this information is passed along to the eldest daughter when she turns 12. I decided it would be okay to wait until my return, but if you're reading this now, that's probably not the case, and I miscalculated. There's no way to prepare you for this, so I'll just say it bluntly: Great-Aunt Abyssinia isn't really your great-aunt.

 

My forehead wrinkled. What did Great-Aunt Aby have to do with any of this?

 

She's your fairy godmother.

 

My mouth dropped open. “No way,” I whispered, heedless of the toad that popped out. It squatted next to me, blinking in surprise.

 

She was mine when I was your age, and my mother's before me, and her mother's before her. In fact, Abyssinia has been with our family for several centuries now. She's a most faithful servant, but she does get in a muddle sometimes. And occasionally more than a muddle, sometimes a downright mess. I hope you're not in the middle of a muddly mess, sweetheart, but if you're reading this, you probably are, so you need to find Abyssinia right away and see if she can set things to rights again.

All my love,

Mom

 

I stared at the letter. Great-Aunt Abyssinia was a
fairy godmother
? And more specifically,
my
fairy godmother?

Yeah, right
.

It was a joke, obviously. I laughed out loud at the absurdity of the idea. Then I looked at the toad that had just plunked down on the trunk beside the other one, and my laughter faded.

The toads were just as absurd, and they were real. Could my mother be telling me the truth?

No way. Fairy godmothers didn't exist. And even if they did, they belonged to princesses in fairy tales, not to girls like me.

I stood up and jammed the letter and envelope into the pocket of my bathrobe. I didn't care what time it was on the space station, my mother and I needed to talk. She had some major explaining to do.

I sped back downstairs into my father's study and fished around in the bottom drawer of his desk, where I'd seen Iz stash our cell phones last night. The second I had a dial tone, I punched in the same emergency number I'd called last week.

My mother must have left word with the operator at NASA to expect a call from me, because this time they put me straight through without any chitchat.

“Cat?” My mother's voice was all echoey and distant, like she was at the bottom of a deep well.

“Mom!” I burst out. “What's going on? Is this true?”

There was a long pause.

“Toads, huh?” she said finally.

“Everywhere!” I replied miserably, looking at the trio that stared back at me from my father's desk.

“Well, I suppose it could have been worse.”

“What do you mean, ‘it could have been worse'?” I demanded, fighting back angry tears. “And what do you mean about Great-Aunt Abyssinia being my—”

“Your FG?” my mother quickly said. “Let's just use that for now, shall we? Never know who may be listening.” Her deep sigh drifted to me from deep space. “Honestly, Cat, I planned to tell you the minute I came home. I realize now that I should have stuck to the usual schedule.”

“You mean my birthday?”

“Uh-huh.”

I was quiet for a few seconds, thinking back to the birthday party the D'Angelos had thrown for me the day after my mother blasted off. There'd been no mention of a fairy godmother. Just a trip to Splashworld and a cake. Well, that and a pile of presents, including the iPod from Dad and Iz and the necklace from my mother. “So this is for real, then?”

“'Fraid so.”

“Does Dad know?”

“Not really. I mean, he knows there's something a little odd about Abyssinia. But has her actual, uh, title ever crossed my lips when we discussed her? No.”