Free Tales from the Brothers Grimm and the Sisters Weird by Vivian Vande Velde

in the windows to guide the children home, and they left the fire in the hearth to warm the children when they came home.
    But the children didn't come home.
    Isabella wept loudly, telling Siegfried how she had slighted Hansel and Gretel at breakfast. Now she thought of them out alone in the woods, cold and frightened and hungry, not knowing—very obviously not knowing—which berries were good to eat and which were not.
    "There, there," Siegfried said, patting her back awkwardly. "There, there."

    When the sixth morning after Isabella's arrival dawned, Hansel and Gretel still had not returned.
    "One of us needs to be here," Isabella told Siegfried, still hoping the children might find their own way back. "But I would like to go out to search."
    The first place Isabella went was to the stream behind the house. But even in the daylight there was no sign that the children had gone swimming there: no discarded shoes, no footprints in the muddy bank. Isabella went farther and farther into the woods, calling and calling, praying that no hungry animal nor desperate highwayman had come upon the helpless children.
    She found nothing that even hinted the children might have passed by that way.
    Once again at night they left the lights burning in hearth and windows, and once again the children did not come home.

    At dawn of the seventh day after Isabella's arrival, Isabella started out once again. This time she headed in the opposite direction, toward the village. Surely in this direction there was not enough of the woods for the children to get lost in before they came upon the outlying houses, and from there they certainly would have been able to find their way back home. Still, Isabella thought she could enlist the help of the villagers in searching for the poor lost dears.
    But before she got to the village, she got to the house of their neighbor, the baker's widow who had come to call about the stones in her garden. Smoke was pouring merrily from the chimney in the kitchen and also from the large, stone baker's oven in the front yard, and Isabella knocked at the door to inquire if the old woman had seen the children.
    The door opened, and it was Gretel who stood there, with Hansel behind her, neither saying a word, both looking at her with large staring eyes.
    "Gretel!" Isabella cried, throwing herself to her knees and flinging her arms around the young girl. "Hansel!" She tried to bring him into the hug, but he evaded her embrace, and Gretel squirmed away, too.
    Isabella sat back on her heels. "We were so worried," she said. "You must have been so frightened, being lost."
    They didn't look frightened. And they didn't say anything.
    "You must have just found your way back here this morning," Isabella said.
    "No," Hansel said.
    "We've been here all the while," Gretel said.
    Isabella couldn't see why the baker's widow would have let the children stay in her house for two long nights without letting anybody know. She tried to see over the heads of the children into the house. There were half-eaten ginger cakes and pastry treats all over the table, crumbs tracked on the floor, tiny jelly handprints on the walls.
    The old woman couldn't be home, Isabella thought. She must have gone to the village three days ago, and the children just let themselves in. But surely the old woman wouldn't have left the oven going like that. "Where is our neighbor?" Isabella asked, feeling suddenly very small and frightened.
    "Right behind you," Gretel said.
    "In the front yard," Hansel said.
    Isabella turned around, but there was no one there, nothing there, only the oven smoking away.
    And the old woman's cane, lying on the ground before it.
    Isabella scrambled to her feet, telling herself that surely there was a different explanation, surely she misunderstood everything.
    The children looked at her with calm, unblinking eyes.
    "What have you done?" Isabella whispered.
    "She didn't like us," Hansel said.
    "We didn't like her," Gretel said.
    "
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