Tess ran to the closet in her bedroom, pulled her denim dress off the hanger. But the marble wasn’t there—the cat’s eye marble wasn’t in either of the dress pockets. Maybe she’d put it down. That had to be it. Maybe she’d put it on the bedside table, before she took the dress off. She checked both of them. It wasn’t there. She ran back into the living room of the suite in the hope it might be on one of the side tables of the couch. But it wasn’t there either. She knelt on the rug and pulled the edge of the couch up to look under it. But it wasn’t there either. She had to find it.

She realized it wasn’t Max she had to find, it was Colin. Max couldn’t walk through a wall. And the only thing she had that linked her to Colin was the cat’s eye marble that she believed belonged to him and that she thought had powers of its own. She had to get to the other side of the wall. . . .

Then she remembered looking for the remote control. It was so cold in the room. . . . But she was so upset, she couldn’t even feel the cold. She ran over to the table where the TV was and the remotes. But the cat’s eye marble wasn’t there either.

At least the walls seemed solid in The Garden Room. That was something anyway. The chandelier wasn’t swinging. She walked back into the bedroom. Had she gone into the bathroom and she hadn’t remembered? Her mom often left her rings on the sink when she washed her hands. No, there was nothing there either.

She walked over to the bed, uncertain what to do. She thought about lying down, pretending none of it had happened and she would wake up soon. “Maaxx! Maaxx!” But nothing answered her but the wind.

And then she saw something jostle the skirt of the elaborately made bed. And then tap it again. She wasn’t imagining it. And then a paw, an orange paw with white stripes. And then the cat’s eye marble came flying across the floor directly to her, followed by Ginger whose paw it was.

Tess leaned down and picked it up immediately and closed her right hand around it. It was warm, not as warm as it usually was. But it was warm. And she bent down to pet the cat and say, “thank you.” She deposited the marble safely into her front jeans pocket and without even thinking about what danger might lie ahead, ran back through the lobby to head up the stairs again to the library. It was something their Dad always said. “If you get lost, try to get back to where you started, if you can.” He always added that part, “if you can.”

~ CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE ~