Free The Fairy Ring by Mary Losure Page A

into the sky with Sherlock Holmes chained to his ankles and a cloud of smoke around his head.
    But Sir Arthur would never know he’d been deceived.
    Mr. Gardner would never be heartbroken.
    Elsie’s mother and father would never find out that their daughter had lied.
    Because as long as they lived, Elsie would never, ever tell.
    Elsie had one child, a boy named Glenn.
    Glenn grew up in India with his mother and father and their pet parrot. Outside their windows lay a green courtyard where banana trees grew.
    Glenn’s granny Polly lived with them, too. She had come to India after her husband, Glenn’s grandfather, whom he had never met, died back in England. She was a cheerful, funny old lady. Glenn loved her dearly, almost as though she were his own mother.
    In the long, still afternoons, with the ceiling fans stirring the hot air, she used to tell him stories about life back home in England.
    And one day, when Glenn was ten, his granny told him about the fairies.
    He could tell from the way she talked that his granny believed in fairies, but he didn’t, not for a minute.
    His granny thought the fairies were a thrilling secret. But when Glenn’s mother found out he’d been told, she got so angry that it made Glenn’s granny cry, and he had to put his arms around her to comfort her.
    Glenn’s mother told him never to tell anyone, ever. Reporters would come around! It would be as bad as it was in England!
    She didn’t have to worry, though. Why should he tell anyone? Why would he want people laughing at him about a bunch of stupid fairies?
    Years and years later, when someone asked him if he was named after the fairy glen, he said of course not.
Glen
has only one 
n.
His name had two.
    And fairies were absolute nonsense.
    Glenn and David and Christine grew up and had children of their own. So now Elsie and Frances were grandmothers.
    Frances’s daughter, Christine, still believed in fairies. “She’s never been skeptical — she’s always been thrilled to bits. And she’s talked about it to my grandchildren all the time,” Frances once told someone.
    Frances couldn’t tell her daughter and her grandchildren that she and Elsie had lied.
    So they kept the secret, still.
    One day, Frances was looking out the window when she saw a van pulling up. The letters on its side said BBC , which stood for
British Broadcasting Corporation.
    She knew right away what they’d come for.
    Elsie had moved back to England from India, and somehow, a reporter had learned who she was. Now they were after Frances.
    Frances hated it, just as she always had. But Elsie . . . Elsie rather liked it when reporters came around.
    She still had “a touch of 1920s dash about her,” one journalist who met Elsie when she was an old lady wrote. “She has a dazzling smile and a laugh that — if laughs are really infectious — could lay low half of the county.”
    Elsie stood tall — five feet ten inches — and was still slender. She still kept a parrot for a pet, and she still loved a good costume. She’d wear a big hat with a feather in it and gloves even when she was just waiting for the bus. Every morning, she put on rouge and bright-red lipstick.
    When television reporters interviewed her, she’d watch herself on television later — she once joked that she wanted to see if she looked any better in color than she did in black and white.
    In time, a Yorkshire television station invited her to come back to Cottingley to be interviewed there. On the day of the interview, she wore a red turtleneck, and a coat with a leopard-skin collar. She set her black hat at a jaunty angle, tilted above one eye.
    Frances was invited to Yorkshire, too. It had been years since she’d been to Cottingley, so she said she’d go. She wore a raincoat and sensible shoes.
    When they got to Cottingley, they rode in a television van with a man named Joe Cooper. “Mind if I turn this on?” he asked them, motioning to his tape recorder. “I’m very interested