Page 11 of Her Wonderful Wonder Bell
Rosa looks at me silently for a moment.
“Did you spill anything on the card? Did you say anything? Any spell words?”
“No, I didn’t spill anything. I don’t even know any spells.”
“Did you say anything at all?”
My face heats to about a zillion degrees as I look briefly at Pearl and find her watching me intently. I look back at Rosa and swallow thickly.
“Um. I just said I wished I had a girlfriend that likes baseball as much as I do.”
Pearl’s face lights up.
Rosa nods. “That’ll do it.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
She ignores me entirely and turns to Pearl. “Honey, what do you remember about how you got here?”
Pearl’s gaze drops to her folded hands. “At first, I didn’t remember anything. Then last night while I was sleeping it all came back to me.”
She tells Rosa about Brigley, how he started off kind, then turned cruel. She then tells her everything she told me last night. Everything about the disappearing girls and Valentina hiding them. Even about accidentally swallowing her gum and hiding the fact. When she’s done, Rosa sits quietly for a moment in thought, pink pen tapping her chin, before she speaks.
“Why was Brigley making the girls disappear?” she asks.
Pearl pauses for a moment to think. Just when it seems like she isn’t going to remember, she gasps.
“He was mad that we were more popular than the Wonder Balls. He owned their team, but not the stadium, and he wanted both. The Wonder Belles all lived in Ghostlight Falls full-time, did tons of charity work, and we packed the stands every game. We were making so much money for the town, that they weren’t in any hurry to put the Balls back in, or to kick us out. Don’t get me wrong, everyone loved the Balls, and they would have been back in eventually, I’m sure! Things were just going real well for the Belles at the time and there was only one stadium.” Pearl looks back and forth between Rosa and I, eyes pleading for understanding. “You get it, right? We weren’t being selfish. We only wanted our chance to play.”
I look her deep in the eyes and take both her hands. “Pearl, you really don’t have to worry about that. You didn’t do anything wrong. This is not your fault.”
“Keep going, honey,” Rosa says with a consoling nod.
Now more confident, Pearl continues.
“Brigley had closed his gum factory shortly after returning from overseas and announced he was focusing entirely on baseball. He tried and tried to buy out the Belles, but we were self-owned and determined to stay that way. It wasn’t what anyone else was doing at the time, but with the problems some of the ladies had with men, we knew we were better off keeping our money and power to ourselves. Besides, it was clear Brigley just wanted to shut us down and put his Balls back in. Well, rather than trying to figure out a way for both teams to play, or using diplomacy to get us out, I guess Brigley took a different route.”
“What a piece of shit,” Sharon says from a shadowy corner on the opposite side of the room. Pearl and I both startle, only now aware of the fact that she was lurking there.
“That’s for sure,” Rosa says, twirling her pink pen between her fingers. “Alright, let’s break it down. Piece of Caca Brigley went to war, and either he was infected with some nasty creature, or something else entirely came back pretending to be him. He startedmaking women disappear. My beautiful grandmother, may her soul rest peacefully, saved some of them using a strange cobbled together spell I’ve never seen. Brigley erases all memory of the women’s team from history. He gets everything he wants.”
Rosa stands up and begins to pace back and forth in front of her desk, still twirling her pen. “Many decades later, Delia trips over a brick, finds one of the spelled boxes, wishes for love, and out comes Pearl. Unfortunately for Pearl, she is two-dimensional, probably because she did not spit out the gum like my grandmother told her to.”
“It was an accident!” Pearl mumbles.
“Rules are rules!” Rosa says sternly, pen pointed at Pearl, before returning to her pacing. “According to Pearl, some of the women may still be hidden in boxes in the stadium. Is that everything?”
She stops and looks at the two of us. We nod.
“We’ll have to get rid of Brigley—you know that, right? He’s not going to let witnesses come back to out him.” Rosa taps her pen on her chin again as it dawns on me that she means itisthe Brigley I know. Not his grandpa.Yikes.She sighs. “It’s unfortunate that it took this long to get you out, Pearl, but love is like that sometimes.”
“Love?” Pearl says at the same time I say, “Get rid of Mr. Brigley?”
Though, to be honest, the love part is first on my mind too.
Rosa holds her hands up.
“I’ll answer what I can. Brigley has been around since I was a child, and he looked the same then. As far as I know, he was the same before I was born. I don’t know anything about what he was like before that.”
