Evelyn glanced past her, through the open doorway, where strips of painted cardboard and aluminum framework leaned against the hallway wall.
“Did it come with a little silver drive?” she asked.
“Maybe.”
“Do not plug it into a computer.”
That warning, delivered with such precise terror, made Mara forget her coffee-stained wrist.
“Why?”
Evelyn looked toward the end of Juniper Lane. Parked beneath the distant maple trees was a long white delivery van with no lettering. It had been there for three days, waiting for the neighborhood’s annual Lantern Walk. That alone wasn’t strange. The company operating this year’s attraction had been unloading supplies since Monday.
But Evelyn watched the van as if she expected it to move.
“Because,” she said, “somebody has spent twenty years waiting for that little drive to show up.”
Before Mara could reply, a side door on the van slid open. A man in a mustard-yellow jacket stepped out and raised a phone to his ear.
Evelyn thrust the paint can into Mara’s hands.
“Put the ladder away,” she whispered. “And whatever you do, don’t tell anyone you found the blue key.”
Then she walked down the path so quickly that she left her red ladder standing against Mara’s house.
***
There were two versions of the Lantern Walk in Alderbrook.
The public one involved paper lanterns, warm cider, children carrying homemade stars, and a loop through six residential streets. The private one had existed in Evelyn Rusk’s garage for twenty-three years: a sprawling, extraordinary collection of moving shadow figures, mirror wheels, collapsible arches, and handmade mechanisms that could transform an ordinary cul-de-sac into an enchanted city for exactly eighteen minutes.
When Mara was nine, Evelyn had been the undisputed master of that city. She’d built clockwork fish that appeared to swim through windows. She’d made a cardboard moon split into four silver petals. Every fall, children crowded around her workbench to watch her make something impossible from springs, hinges, and scrap wood.
Then, fourteen years earlier, the mechanical parade stopped. Nobody knew why. Evelyn closed the garage. The Lantern Walk continued with ordinary decorations, and people eventually forgot what they’d lost.
Now a regional entertainment company, Brightline Experiences, had offered to revive the old parade for Alderbrook’s centennial celebration. The council accepted before anyone could object. Brightline’s creative director, Julian Pike, circulated glossy pictures of illuminated puppets, moving arches, and an enormous walking swan. The concept looked uncannily like Evelyn’s old work.
Mara had been hired for a modest fee to help with structural checks and to train the volunteer operators. It was her first paid community project after returning to town. Her father, Gabriel, had quietly slipped her the old theater tool case, insisting it contained useful spare fasteners. Mara suspected he was mostly trying to get her to spend time out of her apartment.
