But she didn’t look at him. The way she was sitting there, she might as well have been a stranger. She might as well have been someone who had nothing to do with him, someone who wasn’t connected to him at all.

Then she said, “I’m sorry, Wunder, but I’m not sure I can handle this.” She turned to him finally, and her eyes were red. “It’s hard to—this is a lot for me right now.”

Now Wunder knew what his father had felt like yesterday, knocking on the door and apologizing to his mother. He couldn’t remember ever making her cry before. It was a horrible feeling. “You don’t have to worry,” he said. “Everything’s fine.”

Then he ran outside.

“Officer Soto!” he called. “When I was walking home—I saw—in an alley near the town hall. There was a binder there. Maybe—maybe that’s what you’re looking for.”

Officer Soto studied him for a minute, his brow furrowed. He looked like he was going to say something, but not something angry. Then he nodded.

“Okay, Wunder,” he said. “I’ll check it out. Thanks for letting me know.”

When Wunder came back into the house, his mother was gone. His parents’ door was shut.

Chapter 19

That night Wunder sat at his desk in his bare room and tried to sort through what had happened that day. Everything was so jumbled though, so twisted and distorted, like the hallway of the DoorWay House.

There were no answers.

Just questions, more and more questions.

Why did the witch have The Miraculous? Why had she been looking at the obituaries? Why had she ordered the cemetery stone?

And other questions, questions that had to do with the way the DoorWay House made him feel and how the witch’s eyes reminded him of his sister.

“Now I have a black-eyed baby,” his mother had whispered to him on the night his sister was born, “to go with my blue-eyed baby.” She had hugged him tight there in the hospital room as they stood watch over Milagros’s incubator, as they watched her sleep in a nest of wires and tubes, both still believing that a miracle was on its way no matter what the doctors said.

Wunder jumped out of his chair and paced his room. He should never have gone to the DoorWay House. He should never have broken into the town hall. He had hurt his mother even more and for what? Questions with no answers.

He shoved his hands into his pockets—and there it was. An answer.

The envelope from the witch.

The envelope was cream-colored with darker, discolored edges, as if it had sat somewhere for a long time. It was held shut by a wax seal. The wax was black and imprinted with the shape of a tree, a mostly bare tree with deep, spread-out roots and a few flowers on its long-reaching limbs.

Wunder ran his fingers over the seal, tracing from roots to branches and back again. Then he turned the envelope over.