Read Magic or Madness for Free Online

but if you get hungry before that, help yourself to anything in the kitchen.
    She’d signed it with love. I tried not to gag. I wondered if Rita was another freak who liked to hurt animals and people and used magic as her excuse. On the counter were two wooden blocks full of knives.
    I turned the handle on the back door, but it resisted stubbornly. I tried to rattle it, but it wouldn’t budge. Turned it the other way. Nothing. But I’d just heard Esmeralda open it. It didn’t feel like it was sticking—it was locked.
    I lifted the raincoat from the hook on the back of the door. No key hung behind it. The coat was heavy and damp. Weird. It hadn’t rained. I touched the lining. It felt like fur. But it was January, the middle of summer. Why on earth would a winter coat be hanging there? It was 7:30 AM and already boiling.
    I searched through the pockets, finding no key but plenty of coins. I dug them out, hoping for lots of two-dollar ones. But they were wrong: not heavy enough, too thin. None of them had the queen on them. United States of America, they said. Useless.
    I looked in the large fruit bowl, but it held only fruit: sugar bananas, a big juicy-looking mango, and some weird kinds of fruit I’d never seen before, including three that were red and hairy.
    I loved mango. I looked at it longingly. Surely Esmeralda couldn’t tamper with a mango? But Sarafina had warned me not to touch any of Esmeralda’s food. Best not to risk it.
    Why would anyone lock the door but leave the windows open? Was Esmeralda hoping for stupid thieves or ones who were too short to climb in?
    I climbed onto the counter, unlatched the window over the sink, and pushed it as wide as it would go. I sat on the sill, surveying the yard.
    I remembered the infinity key; maybe it unlocked the back door. It was the right size. Didn’t matter, though, more fun getting into the yard this way—quieter too. Trees and bushes were crowded thick along the fence; the neighbours couldn’t possibly see me. Perfect.

7
    Treetop
    Tom watched as the girl dropped softly to the balcony and looked around. If she was a thief, whatever she’d taken was small enough to fit in her pockets. Not that she had many pockets. She wore only a T-shirt and shorts. Her feet were bare.
    Moving about the backyard slowly, peering at everything, she wasn’t acting like a thief. Was she looking for gaps in the fence? Or did she think there might be buried treasure in Mere’s backyard? Tom would’ve thought a thief would be in way more of a hurry.
    He couldn’t see perfectly from up in Filomena—too many branches and leaves. The girl kept popping in and out of sight. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself by moving about too much. If she’d stolen something from Mere, he would stop her.
    Then he lost sight of the girl altogether. He was sure she hadn’t climbed the fence—he’d have heard. And Mere’s garage door was the noisiest in Newtown. He closed his eyes, listening, feeling for her, seeing the world around him through his eyelids, divided into its integral shapes: triangles, diamonds, circles, rectangles, and squares. She was so quiet.
    Ah, Tom almost said out loud. Climbing up toward me.
    He climbed down several branches, shifting as quick and quiet as a lizard to the top of the fence between Mere’s and his father’s place, arranging the bottlebrush so the girl wouldn’t be able to see him, but he could still see her.
    The top of the fence was far more precarious than the solid, wide branches of the tree. He couldn’t lean on the bottlebrush for support. Too noisy. He had to keep perfectly still, both his hands clinging to the narrow fence.
    Though he knew he shouldn’t, Tom closed his eyes again, feeling for her—following her angular but graceful lines as she eased herself up the tree trunk. Filomena wasn’t an easy climb. Well, once you were up into the branches, it was dead easy. Getting up was the tricky part. The trunk was huge; even the