The Magic Touch Read Online Free PDF

he could get fifty great cars for that kind of big bucks. Suddenly, he was back on the street on a hot, noisy night, and Rose was watching him.
    “Yeah, I guess I know,” he admitted, with an uncomfortable shrug. He was trying to keep his vulnerable side hidden from Rose, but it didn’t seem to do any good. She read minds.
    “You’re thinking,” Rose said, patting his arm and smiling up at him. “You’re definitely Mrs. Green’s grandson. That’s where these children need our help, in the self-esteem department a lot of the time, but in other ways, too. Of course we really use magic. Otherwise we’d just be godparents, right? Not fairy godparents.”
    “Right.” Ray still felt lost, but he was sure now it was Rose who was missing on half her cylinders, not him.
    “Right,” Rose said emphatically. A thought struck her, and she turned and pointed to the right, up a side street. “Yes! This way, Ray.”
    He hurried along beside her, the flap-flap of his sneakers hitting the pavement in andante accompaniment to the tick-tick-tick rhythm of her low-heeled shoes. Her legs were about half as long as his, but he had to scurry to keep up with her. “Ma’am, uh, Mrs. Feinstein …”
    She reached out and grabbed his hand again. That seemed to be something she did. He’d just have to live with it, or quit and go tell his grandma he couldn’t stand working with an old white lady. “Call me Rose, honey.”
    “Rose. Thank you, ma’am. Uh, where are we going?”
    “First stop of the night.”
    “But where is it?” He looked up the street. Like miles and miles of other residential streets in Chicago, including the one he lived on, this one was full of brick or stucco houses, apartment blocks, and six-flats. Old-fashioned light poles topped by new, hot yellow sodium vapor lights shone at the corner and in the middle of every block, illuminating mail boxes, trees, little squares of grass surrounded by swinging chains, and bumper-to-bumper lines of parked cars on both sides of the street. The overhead El tracks cut through the neighborhood about three blocks away. “What’s the address?”
    “ I don’t know,” Rose said, with a sharp look. She raised her hands to stave off another question. “All right. Lesson one. We go where we’re needed, where a child needs us. How do we find the child?”
    Raymond shrugged. More mysticism. She sounded like she was putting him on, but she was all business.
    “I dunno.”
    “This is how you find out. Take out your wand.”
    “No!”
    Rose looked impatient. “This is lesson one. You’re my apprentice. Take out your wand.”
    Raymond looked around. There were people everywhere, some of them walking up the street between them right now. The wand was a puking, wimp thing, about eight inches long, painted baby blue. The little star on top had rounded points. He wanted to keep it right where it was, deep in his jacket pocket.
    “No, ma’am.”
    Rose sighed. “All right, I’ll do it.” She reached into her handbag and drew forth a slender rod. Ray goggled, watching the thing getting longer and longer and longer. The bag was no more than seven inches deep, but the wand had to be a good foot and a half. In keeping with her name, it was rose-colored, and the star at the top gleamed and glistened silver, gold, and pink. Ray tried to study it, to find out how it made those moving rainbows even though the nearest light was a stationary streetlamp.
    A man pushed by them, briefcase held out ahead of him to clear the way, too busy to say “Excuse me.” Ray stepped in front of Rose to hide the wand.
    “Hey, put that thing away,” he murmured out of the side of his mouth. “People are going to think we’re crazy.”
    “They can’t see it, Ray,” Rose said with a motherly smile, stepping out from behind him. “All they can see is our hands. Wands are invisible while we’re on duty. They probably think I’m asking you for directions. Watch me.” She took the end between