Free The Secret of Magic by Deborah Johnson Page A

want to get into or explore. Of course the children all knew about Peach and her pies and her unfortunate sister, Sister. But when Collie heard that Peach Mottley had killed her brother, Luther, with nothing more than words strung together and a bad look, she called the others—Jack and Booker—together. And the three of them set off into the woods.
    A murder,
thought Regina. Just like now there is a murder. For the first time she wondered if there might be a thread between the two. But you couldn’t
assume
this. One of the things Thurgood always reminded them was: “
Assume
makes an ass out of
u
and
me
.”
    When Ida Jane called out that dinner was ready, Regina had to force herself to stop reading. She slipped the book into her purse just as she’d earlier slipped the snapshot into her pocket. Two talismans. Together, they made her feel ready to go.
    • • •
    EARLY THE NEXT MORNING , Regina Mary Robichard started out from Penn Station on the Burlington Southern Star. She had thought of a list of things she should do on the journey and had written them out in her neat, precise hand.
    Go through the letter from M.P.C. again.
    Reread the newspaper clippings.
    Write out questions for Mr. Willie Willie Wilson and for M.P.C.
    Grand jury???
    She’d underlined this last one twice and then starred it. She only had two weeks if she wanted to make this case, three weeks at the outside. Still, with all this to do and a new land before her, the train hadn’t left the station before she’d dug out her copy of M. P. Calhoun’s book.
    This time she started on page one.
    I just know for a sad fact, after the events of last summer, nothing more’s bound to happen to me in this life. Therefore I, Collie Collington, age 11, originally from Mississippi but exiled now to boarding school in Holy Virginia (the very heartbeat of the Confederacy) have decided it’s time to write my memoir. I have chosen, after this brief introduction, to do this in third person because, believe me, I don’t feel like myself anymore. But I swear to heaven—something my poor dear dead mama would kill me for doing—everything you’re going to read about really happened. It all happened. Some of it’s still going on. Yet what I’m putting together right here is a novel.
    It was novel, after all, that someone like her, brought up “ladylike and proper, taught to always keep my knees together and my mouth shut,” should even think about writing a book.
    After that brief introduction and true to her word, Collie Collington hid herself within a change of grammatical voice.
She
did this.
She
did that. But mostly
she
hated Virginia, pined night and day for Mississippi . . . its forests, its fields, its wide-open spaces, its new history, its ancient ways. A place named for a river so mammoth it was known as the Father of Waters.
    Bad as she missed Mississippi, Collie missed her friends more. A boy named Jack and a colored child called Booker. She and Jack the same age, Booker a little younger. Two whites, one black. Two boys, one girl. One rich, two poor. You wouldn’t think they had a thing in common, but they did, and it was, in Collie’s words, a “deepened sensibility” brought on by the fact that all three of their mothers were dead. It was Daddy Lemon who whispered that this made them special. Made them see, he assured them, things that maybe other people might miss.
    And the reason they couldn’t see them was because they didn’t know enough to realize when something wasn’t there. But “his children” did know the ache of missing the missing. Yes, they sure did. “He’s the only one,” wrote Collie, “in my experience, able to make different seem better, or leastwise as good as.”
    That’s what Daddy Lemon always told them, at least he told this to Collie and Booker. It was Collie who went on to tell it to Jack because she told
everything
to Jack. Had a schoolgirl’s crush on him, at least that’s what Regina, a schoolgirl