In For a Penny Read Online Free

hidden pool, where he might swim if only he could find it in the darkness. He pictured the pool itself, illuminated by moonlight, and he wandered toward it along shadowed corridors….
    . . .
    He awoke to find that Beth and Nina had gotten home from lunch. Nina had a nondescript gray feather to show him, probably from a pigeon. The thought came to him that he had wasted the entire morning chasing after psychic phantoms. It had been three days since Anthony Collier and Oliver Cromwell and the disappearing possum. Perhaps he had sailed temporarily into some sort of whimsical psychic breeze, which he would never again pick up no matter how much sail he loaded onto the masts.
    The thought was disheartening, and he realized that the experiences of Thursday night were … special in some way. That they somehow made
him
special. They showed beyond all doubt that … He tried to grasp what it was they showed, exactly. They showed … that there were enormous things that were true about the universe, things that he now had a firsthand knowledge of. He recalled the derailed conversation at the bookstore, and he knew there must be a larger picture. There
had
to be. He had a handful of puzzle pieces, but he needed more if ever he were to get a clear view.
    “Can we go feathering?” Nina asked him, coming out of her bedroom with the shoebox.
    “Okay,” he said. “How about around the neighborhood?”
    “But there was that place you said. With the birds.”
    “There’s birds in the neighborhood,” he told her. “We don’t want to ignore them and go to the park, or they might feel bad.”
    “I might go after groceries,” Beth said, coming out of the kitchen.
    Art and Nina went out onto the sidewalk and into a perfect fall day. The wind gusted leaves along the pavement, and again there was the smell of wood smoke, perhaps someone burning tree prunings. The sky was as clear as water, inconceivably deep and blue between brush strokes of cloud drift. Art found that he was distracted though, unable to enjoy the afternoon, constantly anticipating another psychic interlude, reassessing what had been happening to him. He tried to keep his mind on the here and now, but he had to work at it. Several houses down they found a white feather lying forlornly on a clipped lawn, perhaps a seagull feather, and then, at the corner house, they discovered a dead mockingbird beneath a curb tree, torn apart by a cat.
    “Yuck,” Nina said, “what
is
that?”
    “It’s a mockingbird,” Art told her, picking up a long mottled feather.
    “But is it guts?”
    “Yep,” Art said, “it’s guts.”
    “That’s yuck.”
    They walked on, heading up the next block where an acorn woodpecker hammered away at the trunk of a palm tree. The bird stood upside down, defying gravity, showing off. “See his red head?” Art asked.
    “Can we get a
red
feather …? Look!” Nina shouted, pointing at the sky. An airplane blew out a vapor trail off to the east, a skywriter, spelling something out. They waited for it, shading their eyes, naming the letters before the November wind bore them away. “April,” it said, and the plane circled back around and circumscribed it with a heart, although by the time the heart was completed it was blown to tatters, and the whole thing looked like an ill-drawn parallelogram containing ghostly hieroglyphics.
    Art was suddenly overwhelmed with the idea that it
meant
something, that it was a sign, maybe some sort of spirit writing, perhaps intended for him…
    …but just as soon as he conceived the thought, he realized that he was off his rocker, lost inside his own bafflement, confusing an endearment with a ghost. He forced himself to focus on the world around him, the weathered sidewalk, the comical dog that watched them through a picket fence, the wind in his hair. He put his arm on Nina’s shoulder as they walked, and immediately he felt steadier.
    “There’s one!” Nina shouted, and she ran straight to a blue feather