Read The Wishing Thread for Free Online Page B

okay?” Bitty asked.
    “I’m sorry. I have to sit.” With her sisters watching, she put out a hand to steady herself, her fingertips sliding along Meggie’s old collection of movie posters—
Creature from the Black Lagoon
,
The Abominable Snowman
,
The Blob
. Their jagged lines and bold colors made Aubrey want to keel over. She’d never felt so strange before in her life, but she recognized what this was: the prelude to fainting. It was too much, it was all too much, for one day.
    “I’m sorry, Aub,” Meggie said, her voice overly loud, her palms facing the ceiling. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to scare anybody. It’s just that I got this message in some threads, you know? A totally new thing—never happened before. I thought I imagined it. And anyway I just knew that I had to get here ASAP but I didn’t want to wake you up, so I thought I’d see if I could still sneak in, you know, like I used to, up between the walls in the alley …”
    Aubrey leaned on the edge of the mustard-yellow love seat that Meggie had lugged up to the room when she was a teenager. Slowly, she sat down.
    “What is it?” Bitty asked.
    She held up her index finger because she could not speak. She closed her eyes. Once again, the Stitchery had returned to its usual quiet. The danger was gone. Now she trembled deeply—not a superficial shaking of her fingers or limbs, but a quivering so deep that it made her guts rock within her. When she opened her eyes, Nessa and Carson were there besidetheir mother, and Bitty had draped her arms over both their shoulders. Meggie stood near the doorway, her forearms folded and the promontory of her hip thrust to the side.
    “Aubrey?” Meggie said.
    Everyone was looking at her, waiting for her to make some pronouncement. All these people—her family
—here—
finally—but no Mariah among them.
    She tried to speak, to say something that would fix things or at least put everyone at ease. But when she opened her mouth, it wasn’t a word that came out. It was a gasp—and then an awful, primal lowing. She couldn’t even apologize for the sound.
    “Oh,” Bitty said. “Oh, Aubrey.”
    The tears that had been dammed up since Mariah had died now fell grossly and heavily, until Aubrey’s whole body was bent double with sobs. She felt her sisters sit down beside her, their hands on her—her shoulders, her back—the weight of their bodies pushing the old cushions down.
    Meggie’s voice was soft. “Is Mariah … is Mariah gone?”
    Bitty must have nodded. Because then, all at once, Aubrey was no longer crying alone. Her sisters were crying with her, holding her even as she cinched bits of their clothes in her fists, even as their elbows and hip bones pressed into her sides.
    Outside in the east, the first light—barely a light at all—blistered on the horizon.

The problem, as Ruth Ten Eckye put it to her knitting and reading club at the library and to anyone else who would listen, was that Mr. Scott—the new director of this year’s Headless Horseman Extravaganza, who had been brought in from a college theater in Nyack—had no respect for tradition. In the dramatized reading of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” a Ten Eckye man had
always
, since as far back as anyone could remember, played the part of Brom Bones.
    But this year, the upstart director had the audacity to give the part of Brom to Tony Pignatelli, who—even though he was “a burly, roaring, roystering blade” with a fair amount of “waggish good humor”—would never be able to pull off a convincing Brom. A Ten Eckye boy needed to be the hero of the country round. Not a Pignatelli. Who ever heard of a Dutch
Pignatelli
?
    “My poor Todd deserves that part—and Tarrytown deserves for him to have it,” Ruth explained to Aubrey on Saturday morning as they stood together in the yarn shop. The rain from yesterday had cleared and the sun was pumping out the last gold dredges of an Indian summer, but Aubrey’s mood