“Suppose we are,” I said gloomily. “Or we’re the biggest chumps in the world on a wild-goose chase.”
“Take heart, banshee. Fortune favors the chump. We just have to be patient.”
“Bear and four bears?”
“Think we’re facing about ten bears at this point, sadly.”
But only one I cared about, and that was my father. Now that we were here, standing in the middle of this fairy-tale town, I felt the thousand and one reasons I had to be angry at him fall to the wayside, and taking their place were the thousand and one reasons I had to worry about his current safety. I mean, sure,Iwanted to kill him. I just didn’t want anyone else to do it.
My relationship with my father had always been complicated. Guess a whirlwind trip through Romania hadn’t changed that.
“We’ll find him,” Huck said softly, giving me a supportive smile.
I nodded, a little embarrassed that he’d read my thoughts so easily.
Huck looked around the snowy streets, rubbing his hands together rapidly to stave off the cold. “Where should we go? Sun will be setting soon.”
“I think we need to figure out where the Zissu brothers’ shop is and try to make it there before it closes. I have their business card, but it doesn’t have an exact address. Maybe we can find it on a public map?”
“Or we could ask someone?” Huck suggested.
“Maybe there?” I pointed a gloved finger toward a charming-looking building across the street from our train station. A sign outside read:CENTRUL DE INFORMARE TURISTICA.
“Looks promising,” he agreed. “Let’s hurry.”
After making our way across the wintry street, we were greeted enthusiastically by a cheerful man behind a tiny information window. He was initially confused by the Zissu business card and insisted it wasn’t listed in the well-worn telephone book on his desk, turning it around so that we could see. No Zissu. No shop. How could that be? But after he made a trip to find someone else in the center, he returned and said, “My manager knows of one antiques shop that may go by this name. It is near an old coffeehouse on a street called Porta Schei. Not far from here.”
That was something, I supposed. Feeling hopeful, we exited the welcome center and followed the man’s directions to a destination a few blocks away in the old part of town, where narrow streets connected to a bustling, openpia?a, Council Square. There, tourists were snapping photographs of horse-pulled carts and a stately European fountain. We headed past them toward a grand, cross-topped cathedral that towered over one corner of the town square: the Black Church, the largest Gothic cathedral between Istanbul and Vienna. I remembered my mother telling me about it. It garnered its name after a seventeenth-century siege, when an enormous fire blackened its walls.
I craned my neck and stared up at the church in awe. Would have been better if my mother were here to share the moment. I slipped fingers inside my coat and curled them around my Byzantine coin necklace.I made it here, I told her inside my head, and it gave me a little peace in a day filled with tumult.
Beyond the imposing church, we found a narrow, one-waystradawhere the crowds dwindled. Renaissance-style corniced buildings bordered the street for several blocks, their facades crumbling and cracking. In one of these, near a sad, dark coffeehouse, Huck spied an old shopfront. Hanging in a lone window was a glazed blue palm that I recognized immediately: ahamsatalisman, to ward away evil. The sign above the window plainly said:
ZISSU BROTHERS
RARE JEWELRY AND ANTIQUES
“Appears to be the place,” I said as I peered through the window. “Looks empty. Maybe they’re about to close.” A little tremor skittered down the back of my neck, and I wasn’t sure if it was excitement or apprehension.
Had Father come here? Inside, I could find everything I wanted, or it could be another dead end.
Steel spine, chin up.
Huck sniffled and rubbed his nose, looking a bit apprehensive himself. “Don’t get your expectations too high,” he told me. “Fox isn’t going to miraculously be inside here.”
“No worries there,” I said, pushing open the shop’s wooden door. “I’ve never once associated Richard Damn Fox with a miracle.”
A bell above the door tinkled as we entered the small shop. Old floorboards creaked and groaned under our feet. Huck was right, of course: Father wasn’t here. No one was. Were the owners even here? We made our way past walls lined with old oil paintings in elaborate frames. Low shelves and display cases held anything and everything—antique clocks, ivory brushes, candlesticks. Beautiful old globes. Even a golden harp in the corner. But as I took in the potpourri of antiques, I realized something: I couldn’t “hear” anything. No heartbeats. No weird buzzing. No nausea. Nothing I’d felt in the Sighi?oara museum around the bone band in the glass case. Did that mean that the third bone band wasn’t here?
I couldn’t decide if that was a good or a bad thing.
Honestly, after everything that had happened over the last twenty-four hours, I wasn’t entirely convinced I hadn’t imagined some of it.
In myBatterman’s Field Guide, Dr. Lydia Batterman wrote an entire foreword titled “Believing in the Unbelievable.” She said that sometimes, when things are too hard to comprehend, the mind makes excuses for them. Tries to match them up with logical reasons even when they don’t quite fit—that wasn’t a ghost; it was the wind rustling the curtain. A trick of light. The house settling.
And at that moment my father’s skeptical gene reared its head, and I tried to tell myself that I hadn’t “heard” the bone band. I was only exhausted. It was the cold weather clogging up my ears. I’d eaten bad food. For that matter, maybe Dr. Mitu had been wrong about his research. My mother would have known she was related to Vlad Dracula.
Right?
