“Exactly,” Daisy said. “And she must have transformed, or else we’d see the amber lying around nearby.”
“So what are you trying to do?” I asked.
“Well, if she has transformed, her MagiCell will have materialized, and I should be able to get a reading of where she is.”
“High Command couldn’t get through to her, though, remember?”
“I know,” Daisy said distractedly. “They thought it was because she hadn’t transformed, but perhaps it was because they couldn’t communicate across the divide. In which case, we should be able to contact her from here.”
“And?” I asked hopefully. “Have you got anything yet?”
Daisy shook her head. “Nothing — except this.” Daisy held out her MagiCell. “Listen.”
I held it to my ear. Screeching and crackling sounds whirred away through the speaker. “Ouch,” I said, holding the MagiCell away from my ear.
“I just don’t get it. It should work. Unless . . .”
“Unless her MagiCell hasn’t materialized and she’s still a piece of amber,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“But then she should be here.” I looked helplessly around again.
“Unless the thief has taken her somewhere,” Daisy said.
“Oh,” I said. “In which case she could be absolutely anywhere!” Now what? This was starting to feel like a whole different assignment from the apparently quick and simple one the fairies at High Command had described.
Daisy had taken the MagiCell back and was pressing buttons again.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m going to contact High Command,” she said. “We’ll have to tell them what’s going on.”
“What, tell them we’ve failed already? How’s that going to look when they’ve put their faith in us to do this? You heard what they said. We’re the best hope they’ve got — their only hope! We can’t tell them we’ve let them down — not yet. They’ll panic if they know their only option has failed.”
Daisy stopped punching buttons. “Have you got any better ideas?”
I opened my mouth to reply. I was about to say no. Of course I didn’t have any ideas. If Daisy didn’t know how to get us out of this, there wasn’t much chance that I did!
But then I had a thought. “Wait! Actually, yes, I have got an idea,” I said. “Why don’t we go down to the village and see if we can find a local paper or something, or get online? We know exactly when the stone fairy disappeared, and we’re pretty sure someone stole her. Maybe there’ll be something in the news or on the Internet about someone disappearing?”
Daisy stared at me. “Philippa, aren’t you forgetting something?” she asked in the kind of voice that you use when you’re talking to someone very slow on the uptake, but you’re trying to be kind about it.
I stared back at her. What had I forgotten?
“The second the stone fairy came here, time stood still,” Daisy said. “There won’t be anything in any newspapers, because no newspapers have come out here since it happened! And the computers will be frozen in time, just like those birds. Over here, it’s the exact same moment as it was when the stone fairy disappeared!”
Oh, yes. That was what I’d forgotten.
“And anyway, there’s not much chance of the newspapers reporting that a piece of amber no one knew existed has disappeared from a group of stones that hardly anyone ever visits!”
“No! But the thief will have disappeared, too. And somebody must have noticed that! Think about it — someone must be missing their mom or dad or brother or sister. They might be trying to find them.”
Daisy rubbed her lip. “You’re right. But we’ve still got no way of getting that information. We’re going to be really limited in what we can find here. The only things with any life in them around here are going to be the stone fairy herself, the person who stole her, and you and me.”
“And the MagiCell!” I said, suddenly brightening up as I had a new thought. Of course! “Daisy, you know how you’re trying to contact the stone fairy’s MagiCell?”
“Er, yes,” Daisy said uncertainly. “And it’s not working.”
“But you think you can still contact other MagiCells from yours, right?” I asked.
“Yes, but I thought you didn’t want to get in touch with ATC yet.”
“I’m not talking about contacting ATC,” I said.
“Well, what are you —”
“Contact me!” I burst out. “Contact my MagiCell! The one your supervisor gave me!”
Daisy looked at me as though I’d gone crazy. “Philippa, you’re right here, beside me. What’s the point of me contacting you?”
“I don’t have it!” I said. “Robyn does!”
Daisy frowned, pursing her lips together and squinting at me as she tried to catch up with my thinking. Was she angry?
“I gave it to her so we could keep in touch. She might be able to help us,” I said.
Daisy looked at me blankly.
“Look. We know what day the stone fairy disappeared. We even know exactly what time. And we’re pretty sure someone stole her, right?”
“Right,” Daisy agreed.
“And we know that we can’t get access to any of that information here, since there won’t be any newspapers since it happened, and all the computers will almost certainly also be frozen.”
“Ye-e-s.”
“Well, maybe there is something about it online.”
“But I’ve already told you, we can’t. They’ll be —”
“Not us — Robyn!”
Daisy stared at me. And then, finally, I saw her eyes brighten as though someone had switched a light on inside them. “Of course!” she said. “We contact Robyn and get her to go online and see what she can find! Philippa, it’s brilliant!”
I felt my cheeks redden as I smiled at Daisy. “Well, I don’t know if it’s brilliant,” I said, “but it’s got to be worth a try.”
I looked at my watch for the thousandth time. Nearly six o’clock. Where were Philippa and Daisy? What were they doing? Were they in danger?
I couldn’t concentrate on anything except the questions that chased each other around and around in my head — none of which had any answers.
I grabbed the magazine I’d been reading, but I couldn’t concentrate on a word. Just as I was attempting to read the same article for the tenth time, I heard a buzzing noise on the other side of my room.
What was that? It wasn’t my cell phone. A few weeks ago, Dad had decided we needed to get into the Christmas spirit and had changed my ringtone to “Jingle Bells”!
Was it an alarm of some sort?
I put the magazine down and went to investigate.
It seemed to be coming from underneath my beanbag chair. Wait — that was where I’d been sitting when I was last holding . . .
Philippa’s MagiCell!
I grabbed the MagiCell. How did you work one of these things? Why hadn’t I thought to ask?
I pressed frantically at every button that looked as if it might do something until, eventually, I heard a loud crackle, followed by . . .
“Hello?”
Philippa! I gripped the MagiCell tighter and spoke into it. “Philippa, is that you?” I asked.
“Robyn! It’s working!” She sounded fuzzy and crackly and distant, and I couldn’t make out the words all that clearly, but it was her! I’d never been so relieved to hear anyone’s voice!
“Where are you?” I asked. “It’s a really bad connection. Are you out in the middle of nowhere?”
Philippa snorted. “You could say that,” she said. “Listen, we haven’t got much time. I need to ask you a favor.”
“Anything! What do you want?”
“We need information about something that happened ten days ago. That’s Tuesday of last week.”
“OK, what is it? What happened?”
There was a long pause.
“Philippa, are you still there?”
> “Yeah, I’m still here,” she said. “The thing is, we don’t know what happened. That’s what we need to find out.”
“Huh? You need information about something, but you don’t know what you need information about?”
“Something happened last Tuesday,” she went on. “We don’t know exactly what it was, but we think someone might be missing.”
“Someone’s disappeared? Who?”
“That’s just it — we don’t know!”
“Can’t ATC find out?”
“Hang on,” Philippa said. “I’m putting Daisy on.”
Another pause, then I heard Daisy’s voice. “Hi, Robyn,” she said.
“Daisy?”
“Yes. Listen, I know this won’t make much sense to you. We’re not at ATC at the moment. They might have been able to find this person earlier, but they didn’t think they’d need to. They weren’t particularly interested in finding the human, just the —” She broke off. “Listen, it doesn’t matter. We just need to find them now.”
“OK, well, do you know where they live?”
“Probably in your village, or somewhere nearby.”
“You can’t give me anything more than that to go on?”
“I’m sorry. We’re really not allowed to say anything. We shouldn’t even be contacting you, but we can’t think of any other way of getting the information without making things worse.”
“OK, I understand,” I said. Which wasn’t exactly true. I mean, how could I understand when they could only tell me half of the story — and the half they could tell me didn’t make sense? Either way, I did know one thing: if Philippa and Daisy needed help, there was no way I was going to say no. “Just tell me what you need me to do,” I said.
“Get hold of any local newspapers that came out since last Tuesday, and try online, too. See if there’s any mention of someone missing. Or anything out of the ordinary that happened at around that time — possibly near Tidehill Rocks. Can you do that?”
“Of course I can,” I said, crossing over to my desk and switching my computer on. “I’ll get on it now.”
“Great. OK, we’ll see what else we can find out here. If you get anything, press the button you pressed to answer this call and then type my name into the MagiCell. It should put you through to us.”
“What, just type Daisy?” I asked.
“No! My real name. FG32561.”
“Wait!” I grabbed a pencil and some paper from my desk. “OK, tell me again.”
“FG32561,” Daisy repeated. I scribbled it down. “Call as soon as you have anything.”
“I will,” I said. “Good luck.”
“Thanks,” Daisy replied. And as my computer whirred to life and connected to the Internet, she added in a quieter voice, “We’ll need it.”
We walked around the village looking for clues and trying not to be too freaked out by the frozen time thing going on all around us. It was like being in a horror movie. Everywhere we looked, people were rooted to the spot like statues.
There was a man in the process of getting up from a bench. He was balanced halfway between sitting and standing in what looked like an impossible semicrouch. I couldn’t help thinking his knees would ache for a week once he got out of that position. A young couple was poised at the edge of a sidewalk, holding hands and each sticking a foot out into the road. Coming toward them, farther down the road, a bus was frozen with about twenty statue-like passengers. Some of them were looking at each other openmouthed, in the middle of a conversation; others stared out the window with various expressions of boredom and impatience stamped solid on their faces.
“This is spooky,” I whispered. I probably didn’t need to whisper. I mean, it wasn’t as if anyone could hear us or see us, or even as if they knew we were there. But the silence and eeriness of it all made me nervous.
“Look,” Daisy said as we turned a corner onto a new street. A statue dog was perched with his leg up in the air, obviously about to christen the lamppost beside him. I laughed.
“OK,” Daisy said. “We’ve been here over an hour already, and we still haven’t found the stone fairy. We’re just wandering around the town with no idea where to look.”
Daisy’s MagiCell beeped before I had a chance to reply. She grabbed it and looked at the screen. “It’s Robyn!”
“Can you put her on speakerphone?”
Daisy pressed a few buttons, and a moment later I heard Robyn’s voice.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“Not great,” Daisy said. “We don’t know where to start. What about you? Have you got anything for us?”
“I think so. I couldn’t find anything on the Internet,” Robyn said. “I put in the day, the date, and the place, but nothing came up. I’ve tried all sorts of variations.”
“And?” I asked. “Then what? You said you’ve got something.”
“Well, then I went to the newsstands,” she went on. “Mrs. Crowther always keeps at least one copy of each week’s local papers. She makes an annual scrapbook out of them. Anyway, I searched through last week’s and —”
“Robyn, what have you found?” I snapped impatiently.
“It’s a boy,” she said. “He disappeared — last Tuesday.”
“A boy?” I repeated. “Our thief is a kid?”
“Your what?”
Daisy shook her head at me. “Nothing,” she replied. “Tell us more about this boy.”
“He’s twelve, his name is Tommy, and he lives on Greenacre Lane. In fact, as soon as I read about it, I realized it sounded familiar. Some of the locals were talking about a missing boy at the shop last week, but I hadn’t thought anything of it at the time. Apparently, his parents hadn’t wanted to do interviews or anything — they were hoping he’d turn up at any moment.”
“But he hasn’t?” I asked.
“No,” Robyn replied. “Not as far as I know.”
Daisy was punching numbers into her MagiCell.
“Greenacre Lane?” she asked. The screen brought up a map of where we were. There was a blue line that led from us to Greenacre Lane. “It’s not far away,” Daisy said. “Probably about a mile.”
“I don’t know what number,” Robyn went on. “It’s just got the road.”
“OK,” I said. “Let’s go.”
But Robyn stopped me. “Is he in trouble?” she asked. “I mean — if you find him, will anything bad happen to him? Just, well, he’s only twelve. The article says his parents are out of their minds with worry.”
“He’s not going to be in trouble,” I said with a glance at Daisy. She quickly turned away from me, and I wasn’t so sure I was right. But Robyn didn’t need to know that. She had enough to worry about already.
“I’m not even sure he’s going to be the right person,” Robyn went on. “The paper came out on Wednesday; he might have been found since then. But he’s all I’ve got.”
“You’ve done a fantastic job,” Daisy said. “Thank you so much.”
“It’s OK,” Robyn said. “I just hope it helps.”
“Listen, we need to go,” Daisy said.
“We’ll get in touch again,” I added. “Don’t worry about us, OK?”
“OK,” Robyn agreed. Her quaking voice sounded about as unworried as mine.
We got to Greenacre Lane and looked all down the street. There were about twenty houses on each side.
“Where do we start?” I asked.
Daisy pointed across the road. “You take that side; I’ll take this side. Call if you find anything, and I’ll do the same.”
I set off across the road and made my way up the first driveway. But when I got to the door, I stopped. What was I meant to do now? Break in? Rummage through a house that either had people frozen like statues, or a criminal inside?
I decided not to think about it.
“Hello?” I called, letting myself in to the screened porch. I tried the front door. It swung open! I guess people in small villages don’t bother locking their doors in
the daytime — luckily for us.
The house was silent.
“Hello?” I called again, a little more uncertainly this time as I crept through the hallway toward the kitchen.
Slowly opening the kitchen door, I took a step into the room and peered around. It was only when I looked beyond into the dining area that I saw them — a whole family sitting down to eat. All with mouths open, probably all talking at once; each one stopped in the middle of a word, knives and forks held in the air with food speared on the ends of them.
I ran out of the house without even looking upstairs. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was just too spooky.
I took a few deep breaths and moved on to the next house. It was a similar scene, except in this one there was a boy sitting in front of a computer game in one room while the rest of the family was in the kitchen.
By the third house, I was starting to get used to it. This time, the father was outside in his driveway, his car door wide open, briefcase in hand and a smile half formed on his lips. The fourth, fifth, and sixth houses were similar — families settling in after work and school, each held in suspended animation in the middle of their evening activity. It was as if I’d been given a free pass to a wax museum — and I didn’t like it!
I saw Daisy coming out of a house at the same time as I was, and I called over to her. “Find anything?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. What about you?”
“Same,” I said. “We’ve done nearly half of them already. Perhaps he’s not in any of them. Perhaps he isn’t even the right person. We could be on the wrong track altogether.”
“Yeah, we could be,” Daisy agreed. “But it’s the only track we’ve got to go on. We can’t give up now.”
“I know. You’re right,” I said.
Daisy turned toward the next house on her side, and I went back to mine.
This one felt different. The first thing I noticed was that the door was locked. I tried pushing my weight against it in case it was just stiff, but it didn’t budge. Now what?
I noticed a path at the side of the house and followed it around to the backyard. The back door was one of those kind of stable doors with two halves. The top half was locked, but it didn’t seem to be properly joined to the bottom half. It was a rickety old door, and I guessed the joints were probably on the dad’s list of things he’d get around to fixing one day. We have a long list of those — and none of them ever get done.