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went by brought me closer to that baby I remembered—and the family I left behind.
    Would they even want me back? ran through my head over and over, until I did the only thing I could do. I fell asleep and began to dream.
    My bare feet stood on the warm planks of a painted wooden floor. It was a bright, glossy Caribbean blue. A snake slithered slowly toward me out of the creek, but I couldn’t move.
    I only woke when the plane finally began its descent and the fear of what I was doing moved too close. I thought of Cleopatra, and how she killed herself by putting her arms inside baskets full of asps, and then I looked down at my ring.
    Ben? I changed my mind. I’m glad you’re going to meet me down here, because right about now the odds I make it through this thing with my head on straight don’t look too good.

 
    4
    Byrd
    Only the children know what they are looking for.
    â€”The Little Prince
    Jackson had to come lookin’ for me to tell me what I already knew, and I didn’t need a premonition to see it. I’d heard him on the phone. He’d asked Aunt Bronwyn to come take care of me, and he’d come out of his study to tell me: she was on her way.
    He walked onto the wide front lawn, as he always did, and let out his yell. “Byrd! Come on home, Byrd! Fly this way, honey!”
    When he looked for me, and God knows he was always lookin’ ’cause I was always hidin’, he never ventured out to the back of our property. Seein’ as Jackson is best at avoiding what frightens him most, it makes sense, him only lookin’ for me where he wouldn’t find me. I suppose it always occurred to him that I might overcome my fear of Belladonna Bay and skip on over the creek to explore its misty acres. And he couldn’t face that. I told him he didn’t need to worry, that it was the one rule I heeded. But he knew I was lyin’ because it never did have anything to do with the rules.
    I don’t pay no mind to rules. Seems to me, rules are things made up by scared people too afraid to die, so they can’t live. Or too lazy to make their own decisions. Rules are for breakin’, as far as I’m concerned.
    No, it wasn’t because of a silly old rule. I never went over there because I never met a mystery I didn’t like, and Belladonna Bay was the best mystery of all. Jamie and me, we’d grown up believing all sorts of things about that place. None of which were good.
    Anyway, the mystery goes like this: the Old-timers say that those people who came on over from England, the ones at Roanoke that disappeared (and if that ain’t the biggest ambiguity of all time, I don’t know what is), well, the Old-timers reckon those people didn’t go missing after all.
    Nope. They just got cold.
    So they up and moved. And where do you suppose they found themselves? Right here in Magnolia Creek. Well, it wasn’t a creek back then. Back then, it was a wild and raging river. And Belladonna Bay was a tempting piece of forest that sat smack-dab in its center. Why they chose to end up there isn’t known, but the Old-timers say there was already a curse on that place. A beautiful, sad sort of somethin’ that drew people there like moths to flame.
    When the people began to build their new settlement a mighty ruckus started. You see, some of the people wanted to live in the forest like the Indians, all natural like, but some wanted a real village with English houses and rules . They fought, and in the end, part of the colony fled. But it was the wild ones who stayed. And then, after a spell, they just disappeared inside that forest and became shafts of light. Ghosts who never died. And if anyone from the outside comes on over to that place, this mist (or miasma as Jackson likes to call it, always saying it like “my asthma”) creeps in their minds and lungs and right into the bloodstream. Makes it so they can’t tell what they seen or