Free The Madrona Heroes Register: Echoes of the Past by Hillel Cooperman Page A

It’s
ok.”
    Zach mercifully changed the subject by
turning his attention back to Cassie’s transgression. “She was
talking to that scary man and his scary dog again. You shouldn’t
have told her to break the rules.”
    Binny now started
screaming through her tears. “Break the rules? Break the rules? You
were the one who told me that she was fine on her own. And knew how
to use her brain .
I told you about that man who was talking to her, but you didn’t
listen. Neither of you would LISTEN to me.” Binny’s anger was
rising even further and now it was Zach’s turn to be
defensive.
    “ I’m not the one who told
her to go wherever she wanted. If something had happened, this
would have been YOUR fault!” Zach was yelling too now.
    The yelling and pointing escalated
back and forth between Binny and Zach. It had started out heated
and now it was growing out of control. The kids were name-calling
and trading shouts back and forth. Each was blaming the other for
what might have happened to their sister. Cassie, standing between
them, tried to shield herself from their verbal blows.
    First her hands went to her ears, and
then she lowered herself into a half crouch. And then, the thing
that the man had suspected, the thing the man hadn’t actually seen,
the very thing the man was deep down certain had happened – did
actually happen.
    Bright silver tendrils of light snaked
their way around Cassie’s limbs, body, and head. They looked like
ivy made of white lightning. The ivy grew quickly to form a loose
web around the little girl. Suddenly, Cassie herself appeared to go
out of focus, like they were looking at her through a camera where
the lens had been zoomed in too far.
    Zach and Binny’s argument halted
abruptly mid-sentence as they both stared at Cassie. The two
children froze – and then, before they could say or think anything
at all, their baby sister, curls and all, winked out of
existence.

7

The
Suspicious Phone Call

    Jay and Julie Jordan would have been
hard pressed to remember a time when anything could have gotten
both of their eldest children to instantaneously stop yelling at
each other in the middle of a heated argument. But neither parent
had ever tried turning invisible.
    Time had not actually stopped, but it
might as well have for Zach and Binny. Their sister had been there
one moment, and was gone the next. What had just happened? What had
they just seen? WHERE WAS CASSIE?
    It happened so quickly. Zach was just
about to launch into a bout of nervous upset laughter and Binny was
on the verge of a fresh round of tears, both thinking their sister
was gone forever. But at the last possible moment, before her
siblings could do anything, Cassie reappeared.
    First there was a fuzzy, partly
transparent image of a little girl, then shiny white tendrils
reappearing, this time shrinking back into her, reversing their
previous paths. Then all of a sudden Cassie was there – peering
tenuously over the hands she had up to her face as if to gauge her
siblings’ reaction.
    Their faces seemed to indicate sheer
terror. Her siblings’ expressions scared Cassie. Badly. She
crumpled, sobbing, curled in a ball on the sidewalk.
    Binny was the first to reach out.
“Cassie, Cassie, it’s ok.” Binny crouched down and took her shaking
sister in her arms.
    Zach followed quickly. “Don’t worry,
it’s all right.” he repeated, trying to soothe Cassie and probably
himself a little as well.
    As Cassie started to catch her breath,
Zach, who was still crouching, looked at Cassie earnestly and asked
the question that was darting around in his mind, “Where did you
go?”
    Cassie’s eyes got wide for a moment.
Then she broke into a toothy grin and laughed, still wiping the
tears from her cheeks. “Huh? Nowhere!” Cassie looked at Binny as if
to assert that their brother might be a little crazy.
    Binny smiled at her sister sweetly but
with a note of concern. “You… you,” Binny didn’t quite know how to
phrase