Once Upon a Toad

  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.”

  There was so much I wanted to ask! “But why … I mean who … what … ,” I stammered as I tried to frame my questions. I sighed. “Did you get toads the first time too?”

  She laughed. “Oh no, it was much worse than that. Let’s just say that I had a close encounter of the feathered kind.”

  “What? Seriously?”

  “Yep. All over.”

  I tried to imagine my mother covered in feathers. It was a bit of a stretch.

  “I was a late bloomer,” she went on to explain. “I was always fretting about my looks. Great-Aunt Aby was trying to teach me a lesson about patience and about not being obsessed with my outward appearance—you know, ‘Beauty is as beauty does’ and all that. Our family’s FG is all about building character, boosting self-reliance, and that sort of thing.”

  I frowned. What the heck was my mother talking about?

  “At any rate,” she continued, “she muddled things up.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “So this muddling-things-up stuff—wait a minute, are you telling me I have a defective fai—FG?”

  “I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call Abyssinia defective,” my mother replied. “She always means well. Occupationally challenged, perhaps.”

  I laughed bitterly, then jumped, startled, as a toad fell onto my lap. It was just my luck to get stuck with an “occupationally challenged” fairy godmother.

  “Abyssinia’s heart is in the right place, Cat,” my mother went on. “She’s just trying to teach you a life lesson, darling.”

  “I thought it was an FG’s job to, you know, wave a wand or something and make all your dreams come true.”

  My mother laughed again. “Sorry, honey, it may work that way in the movies, but not for the MacLeods.”

  “Great,” I said morosely. “And speaking of our family, who exactly are we? And how come we get an FG?”

  My mother’s voice dropped to a whisper. “That part really will have to wait, sweetheart. We’ll have plenty of time to chat when I get back to Houston.”

  I needed answers now, not three months from now. “Can you at least tell me what kind of a life lesson involves toads?”

  “Well, what did you and Great-Aunt Aby discuss that day she came to visit?”

  I shrugged, trying to remember. “Olivia, mostly, I guess.”

  “Ah. And how is your stepsister, anyway?”

  “A whole lot happier with what happened to her than I am with what happened to me,” I said bitterly. “But you should see our front yard! It’s like a zoo out there—the street is crawling with reporters and camera crews!”

  “I see,” she said. “This is escalating quickly. There’s really only one thing to do, and that’s to find Great-Aunt Aby right away.”

  “How the heck am I supposed to do that?” I protested, swatting at the toads that by now threatened to overrun not only my father’s desk, but also the chair and the floor. I’d have to bring Geoffrey and his LEGO bucket in here for cleanup duty. “She doesn’t have a cell phone, and she’s on the loose in some national park someplace.”

  “Hang on a sec, I can help with that,” my mother replied.

  Seconds ticked by. I heard the thump of feet on the floor above me. Iz must be awake.

  “Okay,” said my mother, returning to the phone. “She’s in the redwoods.”

  “How the heck do you know that?”

  “Um, the FGPS. It’s the you-know-who positioning system. I have the transceiver up here with me—I was planning to give it to you on our mystery trip, along with the necklace.”

  “You’re tracking Great-Aunt Aby by satellite?”

  My mother laughed. “It’s the only way to keep tabs on a free spirit like Abyssinia.”

  “Is that how you got through to her before? To send her to see me, I mean?”

  “Uh-huh. It’s a kind of combination GPS tracker and walkie-talkie.”

  “Can’t you just call her again, then, or whatever it is you do —why do I have to go find her?”

  My mother sighe
d. “I tried. The reception doesn’t always work well when the RV’s in remote places.”

  Like national parks? I thought. Great. Not helpful, considering that was where Great-Aunt Aby spent half her time.

  “But it may be that I’m just getting a weak signal because of the space station’s position,” she continued. “You should be able to find her eventually.”

  “How? You’ve got the transceiver! Fat lot of good it’s going to do me up there.”

  My mother hesitated, then dropped her voice to a whisper. “I’ve thought about that, and there might be a way to patch you through from Earth. The only thing is, we’d have to, uh, go around certain protocols—”

  “You mean you don’t want NASA to find out we’re linking their satellite to it.”

  “Uh, exactly.”

  “Let me call A.J. and see what he can do.”

  “Good idea.” My mother knows A.J. almost as well as I do, and certainly well enough to know that if anybody could get her scheme to work, he could. “Just remember, you don’t need to tell him everything. The FG part, I mean. Tell him you need to find your great-aunt and that your mother installed a tracking device on her RV, just in case. Because she’s elderly.”

  “You think he’ll buy that?”

  “Why not? It’s logical. Well, sort of. Listen, Cat, do not tell him—or anyone else, for that matter—about Great-Aunt Abyssinia’s true identity. You’ve got to trust me on this. If you do, people will think the cheese slid off your cracker.”

  She had a point.

  I promised, and she promised to e-mail me all the technical information that A.J. would need, and we hung up. I sat by the computer until her e-mail came through, then forwarded it to A.J., along with the explanation my mother had suggested as to why I needed the satellite link.

  And then I went back upstairs to get dressed and discovered there were worse things than toads.

  Far, far worse.

  CHAPTER 14

  I spotted it the minute I walked through the door of my little brother’s room, looking for my sneakers. How could I have missed it before?

  A sheet of paper was pinned to his pillow. I crossed the room and leaned down for a closer look.

  “Dad!” I screamed, launching a toad halfway across the room.

  The terror in my voice brought him up the stairs at a run. Iz was right behind him. Shaking, I pointed to the note.

  A single sentence had been written in big block letters with one of Geoffrey’s crayons:

  YOU GET YOUR BOY BACK WHEN WE

  GET THE DIAMOND GIRL!

  The color drained from my stepmother’s face.

  Olivia came in just then, blinking sleepily. “What’s going on?”

  “Geoffrey has been kidnapped, that’s what!” I shouted, spraying the room with toads. “It’s all your fault—you should have kept your mouth shut at the talent show!”

  “You were the one sleeping in here with him!” she shouted back, spattering me with a hail of thistles. “You should have stopped them!”

  “I had my earplugs in!” I protested, then sat down on the edge of Geoffrey’s bed, stricken. Olivia was right. It didn’t matter, I still should have heard the intruders.

  “I’m going downstairs to tell the police,” Iz said, and bolted from the room.

  “They must have come through the window,” I told my father. “I left it open last night. It gets stinky in here sometimes, you know?” My voice cracked as I picked up my little brother’s blanket, which the kidnappers had left behind. I gulped back a sob, almost choking on a toad in the process.

  “It’s not your fault, Cat,” he said tersely, crossing the room in two strides. “Yours either, Olivia.”

  I joined him at the window and we both leaned out. There was no trace of my little brother, or anyone else for that matter. Had the kidnappers parachuted in? How had they managed to avoid the media circus out front?

  “Forest Park,” my dad muttered, casting an eye at the thick tangle of undergrowth that bordered our property. There was no path through it, but an ambitious bushwhacker could make his or her way to our backyard from the main trail at the end of our street.

  “They wouldn’t have wanted to be seen, obviously,” he added. “They just went for the first open window. But why take Geoffrey if they were after—”

  “Me?” said Olivia.

  My father and I pulled our heads back in and turned to see tears streaming down my stepsister’s cheeks. My dad was at her side in an instant.

  “Honey, it’s going to be all right,” he said gently.

  Olivia shook her head vehemently, shredding the camellia petals that emerged with her words. “No,” she said. “Cat’s right—it’s my fault. I locked my door last night. To keep her out. They would have taken me otherwise. But they took Geoffrey instead.”

  If there’s a single good thing about Olivia, it’s the fact that, deep down, she loves our little brother as much as I do.

  My father pulled her close. “We’re going to find him,” he said. “You’ll see. Let’s go downstairs to your mother, okay?”

  Iz was just coming back inside. “The sheriff is radioing for backup,” she told us. “He said they’ll be here in a couple of minutes.”

  “Good,” said my father, putting his arms around her. Iz began to cry.

  “What about Great-Aunt Aby?” I blurted out, sending a toad soaring onto the countertop. It had suddenly occurred to me that if my mother was right, and my great-aunt could fix spontaneous toad eruptions, she could probably help us find Geoffrey too.

  Iz looked up, wiping her eyes.

  “What about her?” my father replied, puzzled.

  “I, uh, just thought maybe she could, you know, help… .” My words trailed off as a dejected-looking toad joined its neighbor on the countertop. I realize how crazy this must sound, especially since no one but me knew that Great-Aunt Aby was my fairy godmother.

  My dad and Iz exchanged a glance. One that meant, I think the cheese has slid off Cat’s cracker.

  Before anyone could say anything, though, Olivia started to wail.

  “I want Geoffrey!” she sobbed. “I didn’t mean for this to happen!”

  As my father and Iz rushed to comfort her, I edged my way out of the room and slipped my cell phone out of my pocket.

  Any luck with the link to the space station? I texted to A.J.

  Slight delay, he texted back. Sun spots. Orbital position. Too complicated to explain.

  Hurry, please.

  I’m trying! What’s going on up there in Portland, anyway? You guys are all over the news.

  I tapped furiously on the keypad, telling him about Geoffrey’s disappearance.

  Whaaaaaaaaa? No way!

  Yes way. Please hurry. I really need to find Great-Aunt Aby.

  If A.J. sensed a connection between my urgency and the media flap about the diamonds, he didn’t question it, and I was just as glad that he didn’t. A.J. D’Angelo was my best friend in the whole world, and it was going to be really hard not to confide in him about my great-aunt. But in my heart I knew that my mother was right—the less anyone else knew about the whole fairy godmother thing, the better.

  A couple of minutes later the sheriff knocked on the front door. Iz had managed to calm Olivia down in the meantime, and she and my father paused on their way to answer it.

  “Cat, honey, let’s keep the toads on the down low for now, okay?” said Iz. “Olivia’s, um, condition may be public knowledge at this point, unfortunately, but yours isn’t, and we need to keep it that way, understand?”

  I nodded and mimed zipping my lips.

  The sheriff was quickly joined by a squad car from the Portland police, and within the hour our house was swarming with men and women in uniform. Once they heard what had happened, the police brought in the FBI.

  “We’re always called in on kidnappings,” one of the agents explained to my dad and Iz. “And since this is a rather high-profile case”—he glanced over at Olivia, th
en continued—“we wanted to make sure no, uh, stone was left unturned.”

  “We appreciate that,” said my father.

  “I’ve put in a call to our forensics team,” the agent continued. “They’ll need to examine the house, the grounds outside, and the ransom note. May I see the note, Mr. Starr?”

  My father passed it to him, and the agent read it somberly, then handed it to his female colleague. “Diamond Girl, eh?” he said, looking at Olivia again. “I guess that’s what the media is calling you, right?”

  Olivia nodded. For the first time since this began, though, she didn’t look too happy about it. Geoffrey’s disappearance had really shaken her.

  The two FBI agents stood there expectantly. So did a trio of policemen. Iz glanced over at Olivia and nodded to her.

  My stepsister leaned forward and looked at the closest agent’s badge. “It’s nice to meet you, Agent Salgado,” she said. “I’m Olivia Haggerty.” Fragrant white lilies of the valley tumbled from her lips, along with twin diamonds. They lay on the living-room rug for a moment, twinkling like stars.

  With a pang I thought of Geoffrey’s LEGO castle. He’d been so thrilled with it!

  Iz bent down, picked up the diamonds, and handed one to Agent Salgado, a tall African-American man with glasses and a soft voice, and another to Agent Reynolds, his female colleague. They both had kind faces, and just having them here made me feel a little better already.

  “Wow,” said Agent Salgado weakly.

  Agent Reynolds was speechless.

  “Do you understand now what we’re dealing with?” my father asked them.

  “Not really,” replied Agent Salgado, looking dazed. He tapped out a few notes on his computer tablet. Agent Reynolds and the trio of police officers just stared at Olivia, stunned.

  Iz finally broke the silence. “How can we best help you get our son back?”

  A few minutes later I found myself upstairs in Geoffrey’s bedroom.

  “Did you happen to notice what time it was when you got up?” asked Agent Reynolds, her pen poised over her notepad.

  I scribbled the answer on my own notepad: 5:30 a.m.