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drawings he had left unfinished. Bran had never had drawing lessons; it just seemed to come naturally to him. However, try as he did, he couldn’t seem to bring the creature out onto the paper. Usually when drawing, he could feel himself forgetting his troubles. But with every line he drew now, he only seemed to feel worse, until he finally crumpled up the whole page and threw it away. He sat in the darkness yet again, wishing it had all been a bad dream.
    Why is this bothering me so much? he asked himself. It was maddening. He could not get his mind off the creature and what he had said.
    He finally scavenged underneath the bed for his bag of things. The bag was from Rosie and was lined with tapestry print colored with a mixture of dark greens and browns and mustard yellows. He kept all his things in it that he didn’t want the Wilomases getting into, like the torn note with his name they had found in the vault. He took the note out, reading the paper over and over. He ran his fingers along the edge, to where it was jagged and torn at the bottom and where the top corner was bent. He had studied it so many times he had every mark emblazoned in his mind.
    Sometimes, as on that night, he liked to wonder about his mother and where she might be, or the reason she had left him in the vault. Had his father made her leave Bran behind? Bran never wondered about his father more than that—he didn’t know why, perhaps because his father was simply a person Bran could blame who wasn’t there to prove otherwise. Bran wondered if his mother might show up at the door one day, or if she was looking for him at that very moment. He knew he could convince her to take him back, if she would only hear him out. And even though the hope seemed like a thread when set against reality, Bran clung to it each day, to the feeling that he might get to see her face even once.
    He had sketched out many things on paper, but the one thing he wished he could draw was his mother—anything that could make him remember her. The oldest memory he had was of waking up in the darkness of the vault, looking up just as Sewey was peering in. It was as if everything that had happened in the first six years of his life was gone: a wall in his mind he could not break through. And the only clue to any of it was the note.
    He tried to go to sleep again, but it was little use.
    Early the next morning, he got started on his usual routine. There were plenty of chores to do, like shining the shoes, starting the laundry, feeding the cat, and as Bran’s name did not end in Wilomas, he was expected to earn his keep by helping Rosie. As it turned out, the most exertion any Wilomas ever did in the morning was a pinky to the snooze button.
    Rosie was rushing around the kitchen—frying eggs, cooking sausages, and making a whole lot of racket—when Bran came in to see if she needed anything.
    "Good morning," she said cheerfully. "What a noisy evening!"
    "What a long evening too," Bran said, yawning as he took plates out. "I hardly slept at all."
    "Me either," Rosie replied, moving the eggs around and turning the stove up under the sausages. "I heard you two chased a gnome, right here in Dunce."
    "Well, we did chase him," Bran said. "But we didn’t catch him."
    "Oh, my!" Rosie said with a gasp. "It’s a shame, burglars coming to a nice city like this one."
    "But why two nights in a row?" Bran asked.
    Rosie just shrugged. She was a small, somewhat chubby woman of thirty-nine years, with brown hair in a bun and a face glowing with a smile most times of the day. For being Mabel’s distant cousin, she hardly bore any resemblance. The Wilomases kept her around because they wouldn’t dream of doing their own housekeeping, and they used her as a tutor because they didn’t trust the Dunce school system. Besides, they enjoyed feeling rich by having a servant and a tutor to boss around—probably the biggest reason of all.
    The alarm clock went off upstairs like the Great Bell of