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  For our parents

  Chapter 1

  Many stories have happy beginnings. Cordelia King, age nine, and her brother, Connor King, age eleven, knew this because they had often been read those stories by their parents before bed. Stories where little girls run through fields chasing butterflies and stumble on portals to wondrous places. Stories where boys and their fathers go camping in verdant forests. Stories where everyone is happy except that they haven’t fallen in love yet, which never seemed like much to complain about to Connor and Cordelia.

  Sadly, this is not one of those stories.

  This story begins with Cordelia and Connor on a train, going to the town of Woundabout. They were heading there because they were going to live with their aunt Marigold, whom they had never met in person. They were moving in with their aunt Marigold because their parents had died, quite unexpectedly, in a large explosion on their capybara-training ranch. To lose their parents so suddenly and strangely made them feel as though the train didn’t have enough air, and they rolled the windows down to feel the wind, which reminded them that they were still breathing.

  Their parents had trained the capybaras—which are like very large guinea pigs with only slightly better table manners—to sniff for bombs. Capybaras can smell things better than bloodhounds can, and they enjoy having their bellies rubbed. Connor and Cordelia had been in charge of the belly rubbing. The explosion had happened out in the woods on the ranch, where Cordelia and Connor’s parents hid bombs and rewarded the capybaras who sniffed them out first. One of the bombs had been faulty, a policeman had told them afterward. It had gone off when it shouldn’t have. Cordelia and Connor hadn’t really been listening, though. They had been leaning against each other, a scratchy blanket thrown over their shoulders as though they were cold and it was raining, even though it was warm and dry. They had shivered anyway.

  All the capybaras had died as well, except for the runt of the litter, named Kip, whom Connor and Cordelia had been playing Frisbee with far away from the explosion. Kip had nestled between them under the blanket, warm and soft, and both Connor and Cordelia stroked his back without realizing what they were doing. Had they been asked how they felt, Connor would have said he felt as though he were being crushed under a huge weight, and Cordelia would have said she felt as though the world were suddenly empty of everything but a dull tan color. But even if they would have used different words, they felt very much the same, and they knew as much without having to say anything at all.

  They had packed their things, and the police had closed up the house and told them that it was theirs but that they had to stay with an adult, and their aunt was their only living relative. The children had nodded. They hadn’t spoken much. They remembered their aunt Marigold from the phone conversations they had and the presents she sent them every year. But she’d never visited, and they’d never gone to visit her. Once, when their parents thought they were asleep, they’d heard their dad say to their pop that they couldn’t visit Aunt Marigold, because she lived in a weird little town and no one would be friendly there. The town was called Woundabout.

  They took the train to Woundabout a few days later. It was an old train, with peeling wallpaper that had once probably looked fancy.

  Cordelia sat on a bench staring at her photo album. Cordelia loved to take photos because they were a way of keeping a beautiful moment that would be gone the next second.

  She knew that the photo wasn’t really the moment, but it reminded her of the beautiful thing she had seen, and was a way to save it. She had many photos of her parents, which she looked at over and over, wishing that they would do more than just remind her of them. Or at least remind her more—she would look at the pictures and suddenly remember the way her pop smelled and then she’d feel sad because that meant she’d forgotten it. The photos weren’t enough to remember everything about them. And she didn’t want to lose any part of them.

  Connor sometimes looked across at her photos, but mostly, he stared out the window, watching the trees and towns and factories with tall smokestacks go by. Kip stared out the window with him. Sometimes, Cordelia would look up and take a picture with her camera. Ever since her parents died, she always wore it around her neck, except when she went to sleep.

  They arrived at the Woundabout train station at the end of a midsummer day, the kind when the sun is low and golden over the horizon, or it would have been, except that it was raining. They stood under the awning on the train platform to stay dry.

  Kip ran out into the rain and splashed in the puddles.

  Cordelia and Connor let him play, because capybaras usually spend lots of their day playing in the water, and the train, for some reason, had not had a capybara-class swimming pool.

  It was dark and cloudy, but they could see Woundabout, glowing from streetlamps and the light that came through the clouds. The rain highlighted the edges of it, pouring down the sides of buildings in silvery lines. It looked to them to be a very peculiar town.

  It was on a cliff that went higher and higher as it also became narrower and narrower, as if it were built on the wing of an origami crane. Streets winded and wound about as though someone had dropped a bag of them on the floor, and the buildings all seemed old, but different kinds of old, from different centuries, and no one had bothered to keep them up very well.

  Connor thought it looked like a city he might have built out of blocks years ago, as a child, with things just plopped down wherever there was room. Cordelia picked up her camera and took a photo.

  “Those roads don’t look like they make much sense,” Connor said. “They’re not well planned.” Connor wanted to be an architect or interior designer, or maybe a city planner; he wasn’t sure. He liked how shapes made from wood and brick could come together to create a place people would think of as home. He liked how homes and streets, when organized right, could make a community. He played games on his smartphone where he built houses and cities, and had to manage pollution levels and power plants and monitor the water supply. He even had to make sure that the streets were well laid out so there wasn’t too much traffic and people wouldn’t get lost. But he could tell that many people would get lost in Woundabout. He thought that he would have to see a map. He had an app on his smartphone for that, too. He took his phone out and looked at it. The picture on the screen was of their ranch. It looked sunny and hot in the picture. He looked back up at Woundabout, all rain and shadow, and frowned.

  He looked away from Woundabout and down at his phone.

  He opened his map program. It should have created a map right away. But all the map of Woundabout showed was a big green triangle—the cliff. No roads, no landmarks. Connor furrowed his brow. He thought maybe it was just taking a long time to load, but as the seconds passed, it didn’t change.

  “Look at this,” he said to Cordelia. She looked over.

  “Weird,” she said.

  Luckily, Connor had a program for making maps from scratch, too, so he opened that, and tried to start a map of Woundabout, from what he could see of it.

  “Cordelia and Connor King?” asked a man with an umbrella who appeared out of the rain. Connor thought he looked as straight and narrow as a support beam. His umbrella dripped rain like a veil, so they couldn’t see his
expression. Cordelia wanted to take a photo of the rain coming off the umbrella, but she knew it was rude to take someone’s photo without asking, so she just looked up at him.

  “We are,” said Connor.

  “Who are you?” asked Cordelia.

  “I’m Gray, Miss Marigold’s butler. I’m to bring you to her home. Here, let me help you with your luggage.”

  Cordelia and Connor knew they weren’t supposed to talk to strangers, but now everyone but each other was a stranger to them, and so they decided without speaking to go with the man called Gray, because it was better than standing in the rain all night. They followed him and got into his old-fashioned black car and let him put their luggage in the trunk. Kip sat on the seat between them, still dripping.

  “I hope you’ll like Woundabout,” said Gray, getting into the car. “It’s a very special place.”

  Chapter 2

  Gray drove them around the city in silence, and both children stared out the window, seeing more and more of the town—each part weirder than the last.

  There were statues of hippopotami perched on the corners of buildings and reaching up like dancers.

  Some even had wings, like angels.

  There was a broken glass house in the middle of a cobblestone square. There were several construction lots, empty, their half-built buildings glistening in the rain. There was a park with a sign that said CRUMBLES PARK, but it looked like an overgrown jungle, with dead vines and bare bushes everywhere, so they couldn’t see past the fence. There was a statue of a woman in a mask, with her hands out as though she were holding something, but she wasn’t. There was a store that sold nothing but veiled hats. There was an old movie theater that wasn’t playing anything. But strangest of all, there were no people.

  “Maybe it’s the rain,” Connor said to his sister. He knew she was wondering about the lack of people as well. They stared at the roads—water poured down the steep hill like small rivers.

  “Yeah,” Cordelia said, “no one wants to go out in the rain.”

  “The streets are very slippery in the rain,” Gray said to them as he drove. “If you lose your footing, you can slide all the way to the edge of town, and then you’d have to walk all the way back up. So no one goes out in the rain.” Cordelia’s eyes went wide as she imagined sliding down the winding streets like they were a waterslide.

  “That would be fun,” she said.

  Connor shook his head. “Stone is too rough,” he said. “You’d get cut up.”

  “Oh,” Cordelia said, disappointed. Kip reached his head over Cordelia’s lap and sniffed at the window, but she pushed his head back toward Connor and crossed her arms.

  “I’m sorry you had to arrive on such a rainy night,” Gray said. “We do get rain from time to time, but when the air is clear, it’s really wonderful. People come from all over to take a breath of our air. They say it’s curative.”

  “Curative?” Cordelia asked.

  “Healing,” Connor said. “But they say that about lots of places. It doesn’t really mean anything except that the air is clean and smells nice.”

  “Maybe so,” Gray said. “But we are a special town. I promise you that.”

  They rode in the car for twenty minutes as it went farther and farther up the hill. When they were about halfway up, they turned left and drove toward the edge of town, until they were nearly cliffside. Gray stopped the car in front of a large house with a very tall wall. It was dark, but the house looked white in the car’s headlights. The house seemed to tilt forward as if examining the children, deciding if it wanted to eat them. Gray helped them out of the car and walked them under his umbrella to the front door of the house. It opened as they approached, and a woman stood there. They’d always thought she was younger than their parents, and looking at her face, they could tell she was, but she seemed older, frail and delicate like dried leaves or somebody’s grandmother. She had loopy golden curls and arms as thin as sticks.

  “Oh, you’re here!” she said, clasping her hands together. “I’m so glad. I’m your aunt Marigold.”

  “Hello,” said Cordelia, extending her hand to shake Aunt Marigold’s. She’d been taught this was the proper way to introduce herself. But Aunt Marigold wrapped her arms around both of them. She felt as fragile as she looked, and as she hugged them she also seemed to back as far away from them as possible, as if she were really doing some sort of yoga pose and hugging them was just an accident.

  “I’m so happy to meet both of you. Oh!” she said, noticing Kip. “Is this your pet?”

  “This is Kip,” Connor said. “He’s our parents’ last capybara. Now he’s our pet.”

  “That is… interesting,” Aunt Marigold said, her voice high and tinkling like broken glass. “I’ve never seen a happy parrot before. He doesn’t look like a bird.”

  “Capybara,” Cordelia corrected.

  Aunt Marigold stared down at Kip a moment longer, and Kip smiled up at her. “Well, as long as he’s house-trained, I suppose, then you should all come in!”

  She walked into the house, and Cordelia and Connor followed. It was a big house, all white and shiny. The front room had white marble floors and a white marble staircase. There was a vase on a pedestal in the corner. The vase was white and gold.

  “This is a well-made house,” Connor said. He admired the ornate art nouveau details on the ceiling and above the doorframes. Art nouveau is an old style of design that Connor had read about in one of his books—it made everything seem as though it had grown into place, instead of being put there by an artist.

  “It’s been the same forever,” Aunt Marigold said. “I’ll never change it.”

  “Shall I put their things in the guest rooms?” Gray asked from behind Cordelia and Connor. Neither of them had heard him follow them in.

  “Not the guest rooms, Gray,” Aunt Marigold said. “Their rooms.”

  “Of course, miss,” Gray said neutrally. In the light, the children got their first good look at him, but they found him hard to describe. He was a neutral man. He wore a neutral-colored suit and he had eyes and hair the color of which would best be described as “in between.”

  “They’re just up the stairs.

  Cordelia, yours is on the right. Connor, yours is on the left.” As the children headed up the stairs, they heard Aunt Marigold say in a low, half-whispered voice, “I think I’m going to make a very good aunt, don’t you, Gray?”

  “Yes,” Gray said. The children noticed he said this very neutrally.

  Chapter 3

  Upstairs, Cordelia and Connor looked at their new rooms. They were almost mirror images of each other, but Cordelia’s had little flowers on the wallpaper, and Connor’s had little birds on the wallpaper. After they’d examined their new rooms, they explored the rest of the upstairs.

  Connor studied the architectural features, including the crown molding and the parquet floors. Cordelia got out her camera and started taking photos of things she found: there was a tree outside her window, the bathroom down the hall had blue and white tiles in the pattern of snowflakes, there was a ladder in the closet with flowers drawn on it, and Connor’s room had an old metal vent in the floor.

  They went back to Cordelia’s room and sighed. There was excitement in exploring a new place, but it was starting to fade, and underneath was a familiar sadness.

  “These sheets are soft,” Cordelia said, sitting on her bed.

  “They’re very old,” Gray said, appearing suddenly in the hall between the two rooms. He brought the luggage into Cordelia’s room and started to unpack, putting her things away for her.

  “I can do that myself,” Cordelia said.

  “Nonsense,” Gray said, smiling very slightly. “This is my job. Now that you have seen your rooms, perhaps you would like to go downstairs for dinner. Your aunt is waiting in the dining room. It is just off the main foyer.”

  The children walked downstairs and through the foyer. The dining room they found themselves in was huge, but it seemed sm
all because of the even huger chandelier that hung over the table. There was a fireplace off to one side, but no fire in it, which was strange because the house was chilly. Aunt Marigold sat at one end of the table, the top of her head obscured by the chandelier.

  “Come and sit,” she said. “Dinner is getting cold.” The children sat on either side of her, where bowls had been laid out. Kip lay down underneath the table, waiting for the children to feed him scraps.

  “What is this?” Connor asked, staring at the contents of his bowl.

  “Crème de carottes jaunes,” Aunt Marigold said.

  Cordelia looked at Connor, as he knew a little French from studying architecture books.

  “Carrot soup,” he said. Neither of the children had any objection to trying new food, but somehow, being so far away from home, with an aunt they’d never met before, in a house they’d never seen before, made them want the simple grilled cheese sandwiches and avocado that their parents used to make. They looked down at the soup and felt very alone.

  “Could we light a fire in the fireplace?” asked Cordelia. She thought the roar and crackle of a fire might remind her of home, where they had a fire in the fireplace every night it got cold. The smell of woodsmoke always made her feel better.

  “Oh, no,” Aunt Marigold said. “It wouldn’t work.”

  “We know how to use a fireplace,” Connor said. “And how to clean the flue, if you need us to.”

  “No, no,” Aunt Marigold said. “It’s not that. It’s just that fire is so difficult here. We use electric heat. Is it cold?” She looked past the children. They turned to find Gray at the other end of the table. They weren’t sure how long he had been standing there. “Would you mind turning the heat up a little?”