“I hope no one ever overhears us. We’ll be locked away for life,” Leo muttered.
“Here is my girl’s scarf,” Mrs. Tompkins said, reappearing in her front door. She handed it to Leo while Ellen tried to recall everything she’d seen in her vision.
“Thank you, and we will start looking now. You say this Barney Forge lives on Smiley Street?”
She nodded. “I went to see them Forges again. My Bob is searching with his friends, but I thought to see if Barney was there, but he wasn’t.”
“Sally, no!” Mr. Douglas said. “Them’s bad, those three boys and their father.”
“I don’t care, Pa. We have to find Penny! Bob has been out there for two days looking. He’s not eaten or slept.”
“Did anyone answer when you called to see Barney Forge, Mrs. Tompkins?” Leo asked her.
“No.” She sniffed back tears. “We can’t lose Penny too, not after Sydney, passed.”
“We will do our best to find your daughter, Mrs. Tompkins,” Leo said.
“Pa and me will keep searching too.” Mrs. Tompkins grabbed Leo’s hand and squeezed. “Please bring her home.”
“We will find her,” Leo promised, and Ellen hoped he was right.
“Mrs. Tompkins, does your daughter wear any jewelry?” Leo said.
If she was surprised by the question, it didn’t show on her tear-blotched face.
“My ma’s pin. It’s in her coat and has a small bird on the top of it. No jewels but shaped into a bird by my da when they were courting. I have one too.”
“Could I see it?”
No one spoke as she ran back into the house. When she returned, she handed him the small pin. Leo studied it before handing it back.
“We shall find your daughter, I promise.”
Leo then took Ellen’s arm, and they started along the street. They reached the corner and stopped under a lamp.
“Sydney,” Alex said. “Perhaps I need to meet Mrs. Tompkins’s son.”
The siblings all stood close, shoulders touching, and Mungo slightly back, watching them and their surroundings. A big silent presence who had simply accepted the lost and broken Nightingale children into his life and that they now needed him as much as their aunt and uncle.
“Focus,” Leo said.
When Uncle Bram had first asked them if they had visions three months after he’d taken them to his home in the country, they’d been shocked.
Ellen had been the first to speak on the matter. Alex had later admitted that he felt like people were trying to communicate with him who were dead.
Leo, however, was still in complete denial about what he could do. He had learned to fight with Uncle Bram and the rest of them and was lethal with his cane. But he had never acknowledged his uncanny ability to locate missing things.
“Sydney Tompkins,” Alex said. “I’d like to speak with you if you’re about.”
Ellen snickered. It always amused her when he spoke this way, as if Sydney Tompkins would be lurking on a street corner.
Beside her, Leo was running the scarf through his fingers.
“Lungs,” Alex said, rubbing his chest. “He died of something to do with his lungs. Young. He was a boy when he passed. I’m seeing a pin of some kind. It has something on the end. A flower,” he added.
“Like a pin you’d wear in your hair, do you mean?” Ellen asked him.
Alex opened his eyes. “I have no idea. I just saw a sharp pointy end and a flower.”
