Readers who love Mary Cunningham's
Cynthia's
Attic say…
"This is a fantastic time travel fantasy
that middle school children will treasure.
The escapades of Gus and Cynthia grip the audience as the two friends
adapt to their situation with humor and trepidation, but always with fun while
trying to solve an "ancient" mystery that occurred before their
parents were born. Readers will
appreciate time traveling with this dynamic duo starting in THE MISSING LOCKET and continuing in the past on the high seas." –MBR
Bookwatch
"...I
have to admit, I was hooked from the start.
THE MISSING LOCKET is reminiscent of The Magic Tree House books, so I
know the appeal of this series will draw readers in. The characters are enjoyable and the mystery
is not easily solved, so young girls will find plenty of enjoyment with Cynthia
and Gus..." –Tracy Farnsworth, RoundTable
Reviews
"...This is the start of a wonderful and fanciful
series. Ms. Cunningham has spun a
delightful and memorable young adult fantasy!
This has all the qualities of a fantastic chapter book that can be
incorporated into any school system's repertoire… What an enchanting tale! Even though this is a young adult's book,
this over forty-reader thoroughly enjoyed it.
...It is a captivating combination of Nancy Drew meets Harry
Potter... THE MISSING LOCKET is a treasure and,
one that should be on every parent's Christmas list this year…This book comes
highly regarded by this reviewer!"
–Love Romances
"Cynthia's Attic by Mary Cunningham (Echelon Press) is a young adult fantasy with enough intelligence to keep the older reader interested. Cynthia discovers a magical trunk in the attic and her adventures begin." –Swords and Scribes
Cynthia's Attic
Book Two
The Magic Medallion
By
Mary Cunningham
THE MAGIC MEDALLION
An Adventure from Cynthia's Attic
Book Two
First Echelon Press paperback printing / December 2006
All rights Reserved.
Copyright © 2006 by Mary Cunningham
Cover and illustration © Nathalie Moore
2004 Ariana "Best in Category" Award winner
Echelon Press
9735 Country Meadows Lane 1-D
www.echelonpress.com
All rights reserved. No
part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical
articles and reviews. For information
address Echelon Press.
ISBN 978-1-59080-460-5
1-59080-460-0 Paper
1-59080-461-9 E-Book
Library of Congress Control Number: 2006930721
Printed in the
10
9 8 7
6 5 4
3 2 1
Other Books by
Mary Cunningham
The Missing Locket
To my dad.
And special thanks to
My avid fan, reliable critic, and buddy…
my husband, Ken.
With me from the start…my best friend, Diana—Sunflower's "mom." Melinda, whose support never wavered, even through heartache. The WOOFers, Carol, Diana, Dot, and Melinda. John, for usually appreciating your mother's weird sense of humor. Sam, my Florida friend and "spirit guide." My Royal Woods support group. You know who you are! Janna, my Georgia friend, and "unpaid agent!" My editors, Tullye Ralph and Kat Thompson. You've taught me so much about editing. (I thought I knew it all!) Karen Syed and Echelon Press Publishing for your belief and support.
And of course, my life-long friend, Cynthia.
Cynthia had an
attic. Not just an ordinary attic. Cynthia's attic was magic...
Almost a
half-century ago, Cynthia and I came into the world, just three months
apart. We grew up on the same quiet,
sycamore-lined street…our friendship as close as our houses. Fifty years earlier, our grandmothers had
also been best friends.
This is the story of
one of our great adventures…at least the way I remember it.
Chapter One
1934
A pair of cold, deep-set eyes stared out from
under the floppy, black felt hat. The
tall, sinister-looking, weather-beaten man had been waiting for what seemed
like an eternity. If everything went as
planned, the power would be his to control.
The plan had been set in motion. Now,
if only the two girls will fall into my trap.
1964
Ring! "Aarrgh…" It can't be morning already! Ring…ring.
With much effort, I opened one eye and yelled, to no one in particular,
"I'll get it!" Stumbling out
of my bedroom into the hallway, I grabbed the phone, hoping it was Cynthia
telling me our trip was off because she'd contracted bubonic plague overnight
or even something less severe like a painful hangnail.
"So,
are you ready, Gus?" asked the demanding voice on the other end. My heart sank. The message was loud and clear. Cynthia didn't have a hangnail, and the
plague had apparently skipped her house last night.
"Did
you hear me, Gus? Are you ready?"
"Uh…no.
Not really," I mumbled, pulling the extra-long phone cord into my
bedroom, fighting the urge to hang up.
There
was a pause. "Augusta Lee! You're not backing out are you? After all, you're the one who wanted
to follow your grandmother to the circus to keep her out of trouble."
Oh,
there it was. Augusta Lee. She only called me that when she wanted to
get under my skin. Don't get me
wrong. I loved my grandfather,
Augustus Leegrand, but did I have to be named
after him?
"No. I'm not backing out." I grumbled.
"I just overslept."
Well, that wasn't a total fib. I
figured if I didn't get out of bed, I wouldn't have to face the day.
With
a death grip on the phone, I pulled the covers over my head, shutting out the
morning sun as it invaded my room like some alien laser beam trying to snatch
me from my bed. There was still time to
back out, but I didn't want to look like a coward to my best friend. Oh, I knew she'd eventually pester me into
going, but hanging over me was this strange, creepy feeling that we should just
stay home.
Plans
to go to the circus with our grandmothers were made one week earlier, but it
wasn't to be your typical grandmother-granddaughter outing. You see, our grandmothers, Clara and Bess,
were just about the same age as Cynthia and me.
Now, before you think I'm still sound asleep and simply having one doozy of a nightmare, let me explain how our four young
lives became connected.
A few weeks earlier, Cynthia and I had been
ordinary twelve-year-olds, riding bikes, playing softball with our neighborhood
friends, and on occasion getting into our fair share of trouble. We were also blessed with our fair share of
curiosity, which brought us more than we bargained for one rainy, summer
afternoon. That was the day Cynthia and
I discovered the magic.
Bored out of our minds, we had ventured up to
Cynthia's attic. Her three-story house
had been in the family for generations, and was our source of entertainment and
exploration ever since we learned to climb steps. But, it took on a whole new meaning when the
attic became our ticket to adventures, even beyond our wildest imaginations.
Behind the clutter of old furniture, dusty
cardboard boxes, and more cobwebs than in the haunted house at the Harrison
County Fair, we discovered a magic trunk.
A trunk that led us into another time–back more than fifty years–into
the lives of our twelve-year-old grandmothers.
The prospects of yet another adventure into the
unknown with Clara and Bess had sounded like fun a few days ago. Now, it didn't seem like such a great
idea. Mainly because, after we had taken
a couple of routine trips into 1914, our third journey found us as passengers
on a very large cruise ship on the Atlantic Ocean–and we had almost gotten
Cynthia's great-aunt, Belle, not to mention ourselves, killed!
No, I wasn't sure I was ready to risk another
perilous journey into the past. But, how
could I convince Cynthia?
I
sighed. "I'll be ready in fifteen
minutes." Hanging up the phone, I
resigned myself to taking at least one more trip, silently praying that Clara
and Bess didn't cause as much trouble as Belle had. I wasn't in the mood to have to confront
someone as evil as Belle's former fiancé, Andre, who had tried to throw her off
the ship.
I
grabbed yesterday's clothes off the floor, dressed, and quickly gave up on
making my unruly, copper-red hair do anything socially acceptable. Pounding down the stairs, I flew into the
kitchen, crammed a doughnut into my mouth, and ran out the door. "Immf…wemmeeeeng!" I
muffled a powdered sugar explosion 'goodbye' to my mother. The door slammed behind me before she could
ask where I was going.
Cynthia
was waiting on her front porch.
"It's
about time!" She tapped a pink-sneakered foot on the porch bricks. "And don't try to say you spent too much
time choosing the perfect outfit."
She sniffed, giving me a sarcastic once-over.
Perfectly
dressed in crisp white shorts and pink plaid blouse, her shiny ponytail tied
with a matching satin ribbon, she looked as if she had been primping for
hours. "You'd better hope we don't
miss our ride."
Standing there in cut-off jeans, faded T-shirt,
and licking my fingers in a useless effort to plaster down my hair, I said,
"I've…uh…been…thinking about that.
How are we going to get to the circus without being seen? You know the only way we became invisible was
when we took the magic stairway."
A
mysterious stairway had appeared to us twice in the attic–once when we
discovered special clues in a dream about a loud, annoying bell, and again when
we came across an old steamship ticket.
It seemed that the stairway was our ticket to places
beyond the reach of the trunk.
"Yeah,
that could be a problem," Cynthia mused.
"Maybe if Clara and Bess are hiding in the crate with the organ
your great-grandfather's taking to the circus, we can take their place and sit
next to him. He won't know the
difference since we look exactly like the two of them when we go back in
time."
"One
little problem," I reminded her.
"Our grandmothers aren't deaf.
Won't they get suspicious when they hear us talking, especially since
we'll be impersonating them?"
Before she could answer, I added, "Anyway, don't you remember Bess
telling Clara she wasn't allowed to go on these trips with her father? If they have to hide in the crate,
what makes you think he'd let us go?"
Cynthia
chuckled sheepishly. "Oh,
yeah. Good point."
"What? What was that? My ears must be plugged. Did you actually say I had a good
point?" I teased.
Standing
on the porch didn't seem to be giving us any answers, so we walked into
Cynthia's house, up the stairway to the second floor, and opened the attic
door. Although we were beginning to take
time travel for granted, there were still butterflies in our
stomachs–especially mine–as we climbed the dusty stairs.
"Remember
how terrified we were the first time we came up here?" I laughed nervously. "We were sure there were ghosts,
goblins, and giant tarantulas waiting for us, but the real excitement was in
that old trunk."
The attic looked pretty much the same as it had
the last time we were there, complete with the old trunk from the days of
Cynthia's great-grandmother, Anna…except for one thing.
"How'd
this get here?"
Blocking
the trunk was an old train track attached to a large piece of plywood. A small village, surrounded by snow-covered
mountains and blue painted lakes, was still intact, although a long-ago train
wreck had derailed the locomotive and most of the cars. The train, which had once belonged to
Cynthia's great-grandfather, and had been since passed down to her brother,
wasn't an ordinary train…it was a circus train, complete with clowns,
elephants, and canvas tents that were set up just outside the little town.
"Remember
how Kenny would growl at us never to touch it or we'd be sorry?" I blissfully thought about all the times we
had pestered Cynthia's brother.
"Yeah.
Maybe he thought he was one of those stupid toy lions in his
circus."
I shrugged, still wondering why it was there,
then bent down, and pulled the heavy plywood away from the trunk.
"Well,"
I said under my breath, as we stood facing our time machine, "this
is it."
Cautiously opening the trunk, I was relieved to
see the pink satin costume and the white, navy-trimmed sailor dress just where
they had been carefully folded and placed after our trip the week before. Was it just a week ago? Hard to believe.
Our
first trip through the trunk had happened quite by accident. After rooting through all the junk and old
toys in the attic, we found clothes that had been stored in the trunk for
almost fifty years. Cynthia tried on the
ballerina dress we later discovered had belonged to her great-aunt, Belle. Although Cynthia normally danced like an
amateur, she had pirouette'ed and plia'd her way around the attic with more grace than
I'd seen her show in two years of ballet lessons.
Then
she'd persuaded me to try on the old sailor dress that had belonged to
Cynthia's grandmother, Clara. The dress
didn't seem to have any special powers like the ballet dress…until I put on the
hat. Then, without any warning
whatsoever, I took off through the trunk on a journey that took me back in
time…to the childhood days of our grandmothers.
To
my total surprise, I ended up in the home of Cynthia's grandmother, Mama
Clara. After a frightful and confusing
meeting with Clara's mother, Nana Anna, I ran back to the attic and found my
way back to the present through the magic trunk. Wanting very much for Cynthia to meet her
great-grandmother and to find out for herself that I'd really traveled back in
time, we finally figured out how the ballet costume would give her the special
power to travel back with me. Now, here
we were…once again facing another trip to the past.
"Maybe we should think a little longer
about this. My grandmother's skirt and
blouse might not be in the trunk for me to change into when we get back to
Clara's house. Then what would I
do?" I asked, trying to delay the inevitable.
"Oh
me, oh my." Cynthia
smirked. "Gus, stop being such a
coward!"
Although
I hated being called that, my teeth were chattering too much to defend myself.
"Gus,"
she asked in a more thoughtful tone, "do you think that strange looking
card will still be in the pocket?"
I
pictured the card I'd found in the pocket of my grandmother's skirt…the skirt
I'd 'borrowed' from her house to keep from getting into trouble for wearing
Clara's good sailor dress. The card
looked like one that might be used to tell fortunes, and when we overheard Bess
and Clara talking about the circus, Cynthia and I both wondered if there was a
connection.
"Well,
I guess if it's there, we'll figure out whether we need it…if we make it
to the circus, that is." There
didn't seem to be much confidence in my answer.
"Well,
I can see you're full of optimism today," Cynthia loudly sighed. "Let's just get dressed and see where
the trunk takes us."
Her
cheerfulness didn't help my dark mood, but I'd stalled about as long as I
could. I quickly buttoned up the sailor
dress and waited for Cynthia to put on her ballet costume. We then took one last, anxious look at each
other. Cynthia slipped the flowered
headband over her ponytail. I put on the
sailor hat. We were off, for better or
worse, on a journey through the shimmering purple and green lights that had
become so familiar on our previous travels through time.