Prologue
December third 1980 was, if you asked the residents of Chestnut Street (ironically devoid of chestnuts) in Clairsville, Ohio, a very cold and blustery day. Most of the people who lived in the small, neat homes that lined the road were tucked away indoors, writing Christmas cards or watching television. The only people outside were the few men who felt that it was simply not masculine enough to put up their family’s outdoor Christmas decorations in weather that was anything but cold and blustery. Standing on wobbly ladders in the gathering darkness and hanging up strings of colored lights, these men seemed completely dedicated to their daunting tasks.
Had they not been so attentive to their cedar roping and light-hanging activities then they might have noticed the very young woman in a black wool coat and dark red hat who was dragging a very large and overstuffed brown trunk down the cracked sidewalk. If their wives hadn’t been so busy writing Christmas cards to every person they had ever known, they might have looked out their front windows and noticed that, pausing every now and then to yank her heavy load out of piles of dead leaves, the woman was slowly making her way to the yard (marked with a “SOLD” sign) that led to the slightly shabby green front door of number twenty-three.
Heading up the yard and locating a brass key deep within her coat pocket, the woman yanked open the storm door and pushed the key into its hole with a determined gloved hand. After a good amount of jiggling (of both key and doorknob), the door swung silently open. The very young woman (girl, one might actually say) slid inside the house with some banging and scraping of her weighty luggage, and shut the door tightly behind her.
“Lumos!”
A soft glow revealed a small room with plain stucco walls and a simple wooden writing desk. The girl pointed a glowing wand tip towards the trunk that she had deposited on the dusty hardwood floor and that the name “P. A. Bagley” was revealed to have been neatly stamped in brass across one end.
“Alohomora!”
A lock in the trunk clicked very softly. She pulled off her gloves and flung them unceremoniously on the ground before slowly lifting the lid of the trunk with a sort of reverence. Soon, object after object was being carefully taken from the dark confines that had held them during their bumpy ride down the leaf-strewn sidewalks of Chestnut Street. A book with a blank cover, an empty bag labeled “Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans” in curly script, a lonely pink bed-slipper, and a small globe, styled after the moon and covered in rather cramped handwriting, emerged from the suitcase.
Sitting in the dusty room, surrounded by her odd collection, she leaned against the desk and held the pink bed-slipper tightly in her hands as though it might grow legs and try to escape. The pale glow from her wand tip was certainly not flattering, but it revealed a face with a deeply sad, almost tragic, look to it. Dark eyes seemed to glaze over as the girl stared at the slipper and remembered….