Page 16 of The Whispering Night
Katie made me swear I wouldn’t tell anyone. Guess I’m already breaking that swear!
I’m going to try to find Isaac. Maybe those pictures will give us clues. Rumor is he eats lunch every day at the Daughter, so I’ll try that tomorrow.
Thank you for going back over your dad’s clues, but you’re right that there doesn’t seem to be anything missing.YARGH.I am getting so frustrated. I hope that book about secret messages arrives soon from Italy. Although at this rate, it’ll just be another dead end.Because of course that’s my
I’ll be busy with all the Luminaries visiting, so I’ll have to write less, I suspect. But I’ll keep checking to see if you’ve left any updates.
Winnie reads Erica’s letter twice. Writing in honey water means the words are big and sloppy, with only a few paragraphs fitting to each page. But despite the mess of their “invisible ink,” it’s still Erica’s handwriting. Familiar after four years.
It used to be that Erica would write Winnie notes all the time. They’d trade letters in class, finding fun ways to fold the pages and secret moments to slide them to each other. No one else could write in cursive, but Ericaalwaysused it—like she was some nineteenth-century heiress. She would even end every note withYours sincerely, Erica Antonia Thursday.
She has not ended this particular letter that way.
Winnie homes in on the part that Erica scratched through. She canjustmake out the wordsBecause of course that’s my. And although that’s all Winnie can decipher, she can fill in the blank:Because of course that’s my luck.
Erica’s old letters used to be part confessional, part diary. As if only by writing her feelings down could she extract their meaning. Her half sister Jenna wrote songs. Erica wrote letters. And Winnie… well, she drew. Her responses to Erica’s letters would always be just a line or two of text, then she would draw. Cartoons of their teachers. A portrait of Erica’s latest crush (which,gross,was briefly Peter Sunday). A crude diagram of a particularly juicy event in third period. All of it got sketched onto the page—and not only because Winnie enjoyed doing it but because her doodlesalwaysmade her best friend laugh.
Winnie used to save all of Erica’s notes. She had a giant, family-sized canister that smelled of its first life as an Earl Grey can (Address me as “my lord.”). By the time Winnie was twelve, that thing was crammed completely with folded notes. Always, they were addressed toWinona,because Erica loved calling her that.
Dear Winona, guess what Peter said to me today in algebra!
But then Winnie’s world collapsed, Erica walked away, and Winnie threw every single one of Erica’s cursive confessionals into the trash.
Which is where she throws this latest one too. She is a human paper shredder, tearing the pages into smaller and smaller strips as she aims for the back door. Her mind whirls and spins. Isaac Tuesday took a picture, which is both super surprising and absolutely not surprising at all. It’s human nature to want to cling to things—to stuff them into a canister for perusal at a later date. But Erica was also right: that sort of infraction could get him expelled from the Luminaries, a fate which Winnie would rate one out of five stars, thank you.
After a careful pause at the back door to ensure there are no stirrings from upstairs, Winnie eases up the lock. Then eases the doorknob sideways. The hinges creak, the wood resists, but she has done this enough times in the past week to recognize the door’s rhythms. Here, if she lifts just a little on the knob, it’ll squeal less. Here, if she goes a bit slower—
CAW.
Winnie jumps, flinging her shredded letter like confetti at the crow. It still waits atop the garbage, blinking as if to say,Where the hell have you been?
“Shoo,” Winnie hisses at it. “Shoo, shoo. Dammit,shoo!” The crow does not shoo. It just watches Winnie gather up fallen pieces of paper and then toss them in the blue recycling bin. Then it continues its vigil as she returns to the back door.
“Donotcaw at me again.” Winnie waggles her fingers. “If you wake my mom, I will make sure she never gives you another hamburger, do you understand?”
Its eyes glitter—the only part of it that doesn’t absorb light from the kitchen—and Winnie can’t help but think of thecornixin the forest, with her crow-shaped mask and anatomically incorrect golden beak. Winnie’s fingers close around the doorknob. It’s cold from the night and still wet from the earlier rain.
“I’m going to find him, you know.” Winnie isn’t sure why she feels the need to say this out loud. Only that speaking to this crow sort of feels like speaking to the witch from the forest. “If I have to go over every one of Dad’s clues a hundred times or stalk Isaac Tuesday or… or track down every Diana who ever lived, I amgoingto find my dad. Just you wait. Soon enough, he’ll be the one standing here giving you hamburgers.”
The crow doesn’t respond to this. It just continues to stare with such unblinking creepiness, it looks more nightmare than natural. Winnie’s hand suddenly aches to draw it, from the gray feathers around its orbital sockets to the tip of its black beak.
Address me as “my lord.”
Winnie pushes back into her house. The crow doesn’t caw again.
CHAPTER
7
Winnie learned her lesson after Erica broke into her house: never keep your musings in physical form. Handwritten thoughts can be stolen; sketched-out ideas can be used against you. So last week, after their meeting in the cabin, Winnie acquired a small marker board and as fine-tipped a dry-erase pen as she could find. Now, she sits at her desk in her bedroom, a lamp her only illumination against the night’s shadows outside, and she draws out what she knows. Literally, shedrawsit as if she were writing back to Erica.
Her eyelids hang heavy. Her desk wobbles, a sign she needs to shove a new napkin under the left leg. And she desperately misses the feel of ink or graphite against paper; a marker is just too slippery against this laminate coating.
Still: safety first.
Winnie sketches out a scorpion. It might represent Isaac Tuesday or might represent Jeremiah. She hasn’t decided yet.
Next, she draws nodding wakerobins,Trillium flexipes,fashioning each petal into the circle of a Venn diagram. Starting with the outer circles, she adds words:Witches, Winnie, Spell. Then she moves to the overlap sections:Source, Sadhuzag, Dad. Finally, she lands on the heart of it. The pistil.
