The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding (The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding #1)(2)

A chilly breeze suddenly slipped up beneath my school uniform blazer, ruffling the edges of my notebook. I slammed my fist down to keep it from flying away with the fluttering leaves.

I should have sharpened my pencil before I left school. When I tried to sketch the nearby kids tossing rings over pumpkin stems, everyone came out looking like one of those troll dolls. Their parents watched from a short distance away, gathered in front of the white-and-orange-striped tent that the local café, Pilgrim’s Plate, had set up to sell pie, cobbler, and apple-cider doughnuts.

I think that’s why I noticed him then. He wasn’t standing in one of the parental unit clusters, sipping hot cider. Instead, the stranger stood on the opposite side of the street, by the cart selling sugar-sweet-smelling roasted chestnuts. He was broomstick thin, and if I had to draw his face, I would have started first with his long nose. He sneered as someone tried to pass him a piece of paper to use for the growing bonfire at the center of the square.

He was dressed like a Pilgrim, but sad as it was, that wasn’t actually weird. A lot of people in Redhood got dressed up for Founder’s Day, especially the old people. Old people love those big black buckle hats and billowy white shirts, I guess.

I glanced at the wide-brim straw hat he wore, then down at his shoes. Unpolished and missing buckles. He was lucky Grandmother wasn’t around. She would have tossed him into the bonfire, instead of a slip of paper that listed her regrets she was hoping to burn away.

The bonfire was the whole point of the Founder’s Day festival—the time we could let the fire eat up every bad feeling, thought, or secret we had and be free from it. That’s what Grandmother says. I think most people just came to make their s’mores.

The guy, whoever he was, waited until the man running the cart turned to help another customer before snatching some chestnuts for himself. He must have felt me staring, because he turned with a crooked grin and a wink.

Okay, then, I thought, and turned back to my drawing—only to immediately jump up to my feet. “Aw, crap!”

A glob of maple syrup had dripped from my Silence Cake onto the notebook page, and slowly made its way down onto my pants, where it pooled in the worst place imaginable. Awesome.

With a small sigh, I popped the rest of the treat into my mouth and tore out the ruined sheet of paper. A whole hour’s work, reduced to use as a napkin to wipe away sticky pumpkin leaf crumbs.

That’s right. Some towns get caramel apples. Others get a special chocolate treat as their claim to fame. We got fried pumpkin leaves.

Some backstory: way back, and I mean way back, before Redhood was even named Redhood, the small group of settlers that arrived with their terrible hats and frowns experienced an endless string of crop failures. During one particularly bad season, the wife of our town’s founder, Honor Redding, was left with nothing but the leaves of their sad, dying pumpkin field. Her name was Silence, which probably tells you everything you need to know about what was expected of her in life. Anyway, legend has it that she saved our fledgling town from starvation by sharing their pumpkin leaves and finding different ways to prepare them to survive the winter.

Since no one wants to eat a plain pumpkin leaf if they aren’t starving, we now fry them and dunk them in honey, maple syrup, or chocolate and slide a stick through a line of them to munch on. And we call them Silence Cakes in her honor because her husband, actually named Honor, gets credit for just about everything else.

The bong, bong, bong of the bell in the clock tower tolled. I looked up, frantic, checking the time—how was it already five o’clock?

Climbing onto the bench, I searched the heads and hats of the milling crowds, the volunteers who were beginning to light the thousands of candles that would eventually be added to floats or carried by the school choir as they sang during the parade. Prue had been pulled away by her group of friends, each dressed in the Academy’s navy blazer and plaid skirt, and my heart started hammering in my chest, just a little, when I realized I’d been so focused on my own stupid sketch I’d lost track of her completely.

But—there they were, by the haystack maze. I leaped down, charging through the line of tourists waiting for their chance to paint pumpkins.

There was a quartet of string musicians playing some dead composer’s song in the white gazebo, under a banner that read CELEBRATING 325 YEARS OF REDHOOD HISTORY. Just as they finished and people began to applaud, the black iron streetlamps flickered on. I tripped over one of the jack-o’-lanterns lining the sidewalk.

Crap. We’d have to run.

I shoved my way through the crowd around the gazebo, fighting through the sea of elbows and baby strollers.

“Watch it—”

“Hey!”

I ignored them. That is, until a hand gripped the back of my neck and yanked me so hard I dropped my backpack. One whiff was all I needed to know who the hand belonged to. Mr. Wickworth smelled like lemons and dry-erase markers. My stomach turned into a knot of wriggling worms.

“Mr. Redding. Would you care to explain this excessively rude behavior?”

Did you know that human beings can, in fact, cluck? I didn’t, not until Mr. Henry Wickworth found me dozing off in class on the first day of seventh-grade English at the Academy. His face turned a shade of purple not normally found in nature, and me and the rest of the class had to sit through a ten-minute rant about respectful behavior and rudeness, and how he’d be expecting an essay outlining the difference by the end of detention that same afternoon.