A Girl, a Raccoon, and the Midnight Moon Read online

  To my mother.—K.R.Y.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Karen Romano Young.

  Illustrations copyright © 2019 by Jessixa Bagley.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

  ISBN 978-1-4521-6952-1 (hc)

  ISBN 978-1-4521-6999-6 (epub, mobi)

  Design by Kayla Ferriera.

  Typeset in Poynter.

  Chronicle Books LLC

  680 Second Street

  San Francisco, California 94107

  Chronicle Books—we see things differently.

  Become part of our community at www.chroniclekids.com.

  “‘Heaven bless the babe,’ they said.

  ‘What queer books she must have read.’”

  —“HUMORESQUE”

  BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY1

  1 From the poem “Humoresque,” from The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay (Harper & Brothers, 1923).

  PART ONE: THE TURNING POINT

  “Had I known that you were going

  I would have given you messages for her. . . .”

  —“TO ONE WHO MIGHT HAVE BORNE A MESSAGE”

  BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY 1

  1 From the poem “To One Who Might Have Borne a Message,” from The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay (Harper, 1917).

  BEFORE THE SCREAM

  AUG 28

  The scream was so loud it could have been building up for a lifetime.

  It had sure been brewing inside Pearl even before she woke that late August morning. It heated up as she and Mom waited for their takeout order at the Cozy Soup and Burger on Seventh Avenue. It bubbled and percolated as they walked the damp early sidewalks to the library, Mom in her heels, Pearl in her black-cloth Chinatown shoes with the buckle straps. Unaware of anything unusual, Pearl climbed the steps and leaned the cardboard tray of coffees on the curve of the wrought-iron banister while Mom found the front-door keys and pushed inside. She held the door for Pearl and they stepped into the foyer.

  A cool, dark floor of speckled marble. The waxy smell of old oak. The metallic rhythmic tock of the pendulum in the brass clock on the wall behind the circulation desk. Frosted glass in diamond-shaped panes, soft light from the back hallway that led to the garden.

  The library.

  Mom stepped into the shadows of the stairwell and called up toward the roof. “Anybody home?”

  “Hiya!” came a distant yodeling voice. Bruce Chambers, the library manager, was already up there in his office, toiling over the proposals he was making to the library board. Proposals to fix things up, bring patrons in, make ends meet, and keep the library from looking too worn out compared to the new Knickerbocker branch. Bruce knew his branch’s days were numbered.

  Pearl went to check the book drop, pulling the cart from under the slot. Only six books had been returned in the night. Not surprising, since not that many books went out in a day.

  Pearl carried Bruce’s coffee and cinnamon-swirl doughnut to him. Up the spiral stairs, past the children’s room on the second floor, to the third floor and into Bruce’s rat’s nest of an office.

  It was a tall rat’s nest. The third-floor ceiling of the library was extra high, with edges that Ramón, the reference librarian, said were called dental molding because they looked like square white teeth nibbling at the tasty edges of the walls. The piles of books, papers, magazines, newspapers, journals, catalogs, and mail may as well have been the recycling heaps outside the newsstand on the corner. The highest cabinets towered higher because of the things stored on top: an empty birdcage, rolls and rolls of posters from book conferences, old stacked-up coffee cups, and—most impressive of all—the head of the Ranger Rick raccoon costume that Bruce had brought from Catskills National Park five years ago when Pearl was five, when he’d quit being a park manager and come to manage the library instead. Made of chicken wire and fleece and fake fur, Ranger Rick’s head stood propped eyeless and eerie over an old metal garbage can turned upside down. Below the head, the gray fleece body hung from a cabinet door on a massive hanger, and was still long enough to wrinkle on the floor.

  In the middle of all this, behind a cluttered desk, was Bruce himself. Dark brown skin, with black hair like a wire brush, big glasses, and tall enough to reach the top of the tallest pile atop the cabinet. He called himself inwardly organized, since he could always find what he was looking for in his rat’s nest. Pearl called him outwardly a disaster because, well, what a mess.

  She stepped through—never on—all the junk he said he was going to need “someday,” placed the coffee in his hands, and wended her way to the window.

  “Aren’t you going to sing out with me?” Pearl said, dodging a box of discarded catalog cards.

  Last year Mom had said the office smelled like a rat’s nest as well as looked like one. “Once a day,” she had insisted, “just once, open the window for ten seconds.”

  Bruce had opened the window and sung out, “Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found you!”

  “You’re an idiot,” Mom had said happily, squeezing his arm.

  “Try it, it’s great,” Bruce had said to her and Pearl. The three of them had done it together, just that once. “Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found you!” Their voices swept out over the garden, over the head of the statue down there, over the flowers at her feet, into the tall pine trees where birds and bats nested and raccoons nestled.

  Pearl fell in love with the echo of their voices off the buildings. Since then, it had become part of her and Bruce’s morning routine. But now he didn’t pay any attention to her. He just waved his hand rapidly, distractedly, toward the window and bent his head over the papers.

  So Pearl cleared her throat, looked down into the garden, and opened her mouth to sing out to the world. But when she saw what was down there, she screamed.

  There had never been anything like Pearl’s scream.

  The scream had horror in it. It had shock. It had fear. And it had loss.

  What was lost?

  A head. A stone head. The stone head of the stone statue that stood in the library garden.

  It was a statue of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Vincent for short (as she had referred to herself), the famous poet who used to live right around here.

  Who lost her? The whole city, actually. The taxpayers of New York. They were to whom the statue belonged.

  But most of all, the library had lost her. The whole library, but most of all, the Lancaster Avenue branch. The Lancaster Avenue branch, but most of all, almost-eleven-year-old Pearl Moran. That’s who loved her the most.

  1: THE SCREAM

  STILL AUG 28

  Pearl’s scream blasted from the third-story window at the rear of the Lancaster Avenue branch of the New York City Library and carried out over the late-summer air, over the yew hedge, up the rear wall of the white-brick apartment house that backed up to the garden, through the trash-can alley, across Clancy Street, and on.

  It was a noisy neighborhood in the first place, a city neighborhood on the edge of things, with lots of people in it—people who sometimes screamed.

  Babies screamed for the usual reasons.

  Little kids screamed for the Mister Softee truck or if one of the big kids was pretending to be a coyote or a robber or something else scary.

  Adults screamed sometimes, over a big game, or in frustration with the kids or the job or the language or just the city.

  The city was enough to make anyone scream.

  But among all th
ese screams, Pearl’s scream stood out. It made people stop what they were doing—picking up groceries at violet-haired Rosita’s Rosebud bodega, browsing in Gully’s Buck-a-Buy. Even Mr. Gulliver, Gully himself, paused, right as he was ringing up the two dozen animal-shaped erasers that Alice Patel was buying for story hour in the library’s children’s room. Alice was the children’s librarian, six months pregnant. “That’s Pearl!” said Alice. She grabbed the erasers and ran, her sneakers pounding across Lancaster Avenue.

  A Sidebar About Sidebars

  Say you’re watching a play and the characters are all talking to each other and suddenly one turns and says something to the audience like “Watch this!” or “But he was wrong.” That’s an aside.

  Or, say someone’s telling a story and they pause the action for a second and say, “If she had only known then what she found out later.” That’s another example of an aside.

  But in writing, how do you do an aside? Well, in parentheses, of course. (Here is a third example of an aside.)

  When you put an aside on the side like this, then you call it a sidebar.

  Sidebars have bylines, a line that tells you who wrote them, just like any written piece in a newspaper, magazine, or book. This one was written by

  —M.A.M.

  One girl, stuck alone in her granny’s apartment above the Buck-a-Buy, hung out the window so far her black braids brushed the top of Gully’s sign, but she couldn’t see who was screaming. She broke her granny’s rules and ran out of the apartment.

  People in the shops, at Tallulah’s newsstand, in the apartments on either side of the library and all along Lancaster Avenue, looked out their windows, but they couldn’t see what was causing the scream. For the first time for most of them, they beelined for the library—and barged inside.

  (Of course nobody knew I was there, hidden in the yew bushes.)

  In his third-floor office, Bruce leaped out of his chair, grabbed Pearl by the shoulders, and looked hard into her face. “What is it? What’s got you? Where does it hurt?”

  Pearl didn’t have any wind left. She just pointed.

  “What’s wrong with Pearl?” Alice came tearing up the stairs, her sari held up to her knees to give her speed, Mom hasty and loud in her high heels.

  “What is it?” cried Mom.

  Bruce held up his hands to calm them both. “It’s not Pearl. It’s Vincent.” He pulled Pearl back from the high narrow window so they could look out.

  In the garden, the statue stood headless in the morning light.

  Mom closed her eyes and sighed when she saw. “Oh, rats. Oh, Pearl,” she said. “What’ll we do?”

  Alice thumped her fist on the windowsill so hard the glass in the panes rattled. “Those idiots!”

  “Who?” said Pearl. “Who do you mean? Should we go after them?” She stood with her feet wide, fists clenched, eyes fierce, hair wild, ready for battle.

  Bruce held up his hand. “It’s too late now!” Then he led the mad dash back down the stairs: All of them charged down the one narrow staircase from the third floor to the second, then Mom and Alice ran down the straight back stairs and Bruce and Pearl ran down the spiral stairs to the first floor, where they were met with the entire neighborhood.

  “What’s wrong?” yelled Gully.

  “Who’s screaming?” asked Tallulah, the shuffling, stripeyhaired, bright-eyed woman who ran the newsstand.

  “What’s going on?” asked all the neighborhood people.

  “It was me,” said Pearl fiercely. “Our statue’s head is gone. And I’d like to know why!” She glared around with squinting eyes, suspecting them all.

  2: BEHEADED

  STILL AUG 28

  “This way, everyone,” said Mom, beckoning the crowd of curious neighbors to the garden. Pearl trailed behind, one hand on the doorframe, the other on her stomach, furious and sick. What did everybody need to come here for now, when things were bad? They didn’t come when things were good.

  Vincent’s head was completely gone. Where it had previously been anchored, now there was nothing but a metal spindle coming out of her stone neck. Her stone body looked solemn, shortened, sad. Now her outstretched hand, usually generous or hopeful, seemed truly empty, raised palm up, as if to say, “Give it back!”

  Pearl hung behind. She thought maybe she was going to throw up.

  The cops pulled in, swirling their lights, their siren making hearts jump all over Lancaster Avenue, bringing more people running—including Simon Lo, the library page, showing up late to his job shelving and straightening the library’s 41,134 books, sweating, swearing, his black hair in a ponytail, dismounting his bicycle elegantly. “What’re the cops doing here?”

  The girl who lived across the street over Gully’s turned with a flounce of her sparkly, ruffled shirt and a flop of her braids, and answered. She knew who Simon was from watching him out the window of her apartment. “That library girl’s gone insane,” she said.

  “What’d she do this time?” Simon pushed his way through the people to where Pearl stood beside the statue pedestal, shaking with fury, a hand protectively pressing Vincent’s foot. He put his hand on Pearl’s shoulder to get her attention. “What’s going on, Pearlie?”

  Pearl’s eyes flashed hot at Simon. “Vincent’s head,” she said. He hadn’t even seen!

  He glanced up and gasped, then hooked his arm around Pearl’s shoulders. Pearl loved him for it; even Mom hadn’t thought to hug her. The tears that had been welling in her eyes started coming down her cheeks. “Why would someone hurt Vincent?”

  Simon said softly, “It didn’t hurt.”

  “Punks!” said Gully. “Teenagers! College students!” He always thought anyone under twenty was trying to steal from him.

  “Who says?” said Pearl.

  “You can’t go accusing people just for being a certain age,” said Ramón.

  But the police seemed to accept Gully’s suggestion just fine. “It’s bound to be pranksters,” one of them said.

  What a disappointment the police were! Their main contribution was to stand around looking at the statue and shaking their heads, as if they didn’t know where to begin. Pearl could tell they were already thinking, “Case closed,” and she had to speak up.

  “What makes you think it was more than one person?” she demanded of the three cops—a tall lady with dark curls, a big pink young one, and an older black man with a mustache. They looked at her like she was just a kid and didn’t answer.

  “Just think of it, Pearl,” said Simon. “You’d have to climb up and take the head off that pole on her neck.”

  “That would take a lot of muscle,” said Alice, who was pretty athletic herself.

  “It looks like someone had trouble doing that very thing,” said the mustached cop. He led the way to the side of Vincent’s pedestal and pointed out a deep scrape in the polished stone.

  “And here!” said the girl with the braids. There was a chip in one fold of Vincent’s long skirt.

  “And see here,” said Pearl, glaring at the girl—who was she?— and not wanting to be outdone by some new kid. This was Pearl’s library! She pointed out a sloping rectangular imprint in the soft sand between the paving stones.

  “That’s from the ladder,” said Simon. The ladder always stood leaning against the back library wall, where the window-washer left it. Pearl walked over to look. In the sandy soil at the base of the wall, she saw a few small footprints, as if a miniature human with long hobbit1 toenails had been here.

  “So somebody grabbed your ladder and used it to get the head,” the policewoman said. “Then they must have put it in a car and driven away. How heavy a piece of stone was it?”

  “Piece of stone!” said Pearl indignantly.

  Behind the yew bushes, on the far side of the dumpster, a silent, stealthy intruder pricked up his ears at the mention of stone.

  “What makes you think there was a car?” Mom asked the cops. “Why not just that wheelbarrow?” The lawn-mowing men kept t
he yellow wheelbarrow against the wall beside the ladder.

  “How could you wheel a head away without anyone seeing?” asked Pearl.

  A Sidebar About Police

  When it comes to crime, police have to set priorities about what gets their attention.

  Priority goes to the crime that has the biggest impact—that has the most rich or famous people, that causes the most trouble, that sets records for blood or drama.

  What doesn’t get priority?

  Holdups at doughnut shops.

  Someone’s radio getting stolen.

  Wild animals getting into the garbage.

  Stolen heads of statues in the back gardens of old libraries that nobody visits.

  But the police aren’t the only ones setting priorities. People looking for stories find the kind they’re looking for more easily than the kind they never considered. But some of the best stories come as surprises.

  —M.A.M.

  The police exchanged a glance and couldn’t help smirking. “Head’ll end up somewhere funny,” the mustached man said.

  “Somewhere funny?” Pearl burst out. She stood between them and what was left of Vincent, arms crossed over her middle.

  Bruce said, “Steady, Pearl.”

  “She’s right! It’s not funny. I think it’s scary,” announced the girl from across the street. Pearl stared at her. Why does she think anyone cares what she thinks? (Wish I had long braids like that.) But also, Pearl was a little scared herself.

  Mom stepped forward, too. “What exactly do you mean by funny?” Pearl knew that tone of voice and the judgment it carried; Mom might as well have been talking to someone about incurring fines.

  “I just mean . . . amusing,” said the mustached policeman, with a guilty little shrug. “Like, maybe the head is tucked in with the pineapples in the greenmarket.”

  “Or on the pitcher’s mound at Yankee Stadium,” said the pink one.