Cobwebs by Karen Romano Young Page B

She thumped the door with her fist. Furious. Curious. It opened. Grandpa Joke was there, nobody else. Nancy reached for his hand and he stepped out. The door shut behind him. “What’s taking so long?” she demanded. “Granny wants to come up.”
    “Hush, Nancy.” He gripped her shoulder. “I’m trying to guess if he saw your face. It’s bad enough he’ll know your voice.”
    Nancy didn’t ask who. She didn’t ask why. She said, “I’m bringing her.” Her voice shook now.
    “Stay hidden,” he said.
    She whirled and dashed down the steps to pull open Granny’s car door. Grandpa Joke came to walk on the other side of Granny and help her up the steps. The front door swung open onto a hallway with a dim light.Now there was another face in the doorway: a girl with long black hair.
Josie,
thought Nancy irrationally.
    “You come, too.” The girl took Nancy’s hand.
    Nancy stopped in the doorway and bent down. “What’s your name?”
    “Wilhemina,” the child said.
    “You have wings.” Red ones, made out of a clothes hanger or some other piece of wire, covered with sheer red material (maybe from a sexy nightie or ballet costume) and, on one wing, a sleek layer of red feathers. “How did you—”
    “Hot glue.” Wilhemina pulled Nancy into the hall and said, “You’ve got angels on your tights.”
    They were cupids, left over from Valentine’s Day. Rachel had sent Ned to buy them at Ricky’s. There was a commotion down the hall. “Where’s Mina?” called a woman’s voice. “I found the other bag of feathers—”
    “That’s my mom!” The girl seemed surprised. She turned and ran toward a door at the end of the hall.
    Just then a man came out. Nancy dropped back onto the stoop, eased the door almost shut. “Mina,” the man said, “Mama’s too sick to do more feathers now.”
    “It’s already taken a week to do that one,” Mina said.Nancy thought she sounded sympathetic, not snotty.
    “Where’s your brother?”
    “How am I supposed to know? Nobody tells me anything.”
    Nancy could still feel Mina’s hand pulling her in. A warm hand. Good she wasn’t the sick one. Then who was? Her mother?
    Nancy stayed outside, hidden like a spider under a tree. There was not a soul on the sidewalk to see her.
This is why we waited until dark. This is why they don’t tell me anything. So I won’t know.

12
    T he stories said it was hard to watch for the Angel if you didn’t know what you were looking for. It was easy to miss the Angel if you were looking somewhere else.
    Dion stood at the front edge of the roof of his house, watching Nancy go down the steps and disappear under the trees. Whether or not his father knew Nancy’s voice, Dion already knew it, recognized the girl from the Promenade in his bones and veins the instant he heard her on the front stoop.
    He sped down from the roof. From the shelter of an alley near the corner, he watched the doctor’s car drive away under the trees and around the curve, theold man and woman and the girl inside it. It was definitely the girl from the Promenade.
    Not that he hadn’t known she might be there. Hadn’t he seen her from this very roof, watching the doctor this afternoon? They had both heard the same intercom-to-stoop conversation. Dion wondered what it meant that the doctor hadn’t gone inside right then to see his mother. Money, that was it. The doctor hadn’t had enough money. Wasn’t that what his father had asked for on the intercom?
    Dion rubbed his sore hands together. Shouldn’t
Dad
be paying the doctor? Maybe there was some special medicine the doctor needed to buy; maybe he had come back this evening to bring it. But it had sounded like the doctor owed Niko money.
    Dion shivered, and it wasn’t from the cold wind on his hairless head. Why should there be a girl involved with the Wound Healer—and why should it be the girl he’d seen on the Promenade, the girl he’d been goofing on and flirting with from the playground dome?