The Day Of Reckoning
(Monday)
"Have you got the list ready yet?" Mary inquired merrily.
Mattie sighed, having been made to write out the punishment ideas for Mary, Lily, and Alice to choose from. "I finished it last night, it`s over on Lily`s nightstand."
Alice leaned over and snagged the list, scanning the contents.
Lily sighed. "I`m going to do a punishment too."
"Why? You completed the bet."
"Yeah, but not in the way I should have. I didn`t deserve to win it."
"Are you sure?" Alice said, looking up from the list. "Some of these are pretty brutal."
"I can take it."
"Alrighty then."
"If you guys are going to decide now, I`m leaving." Mattie said, getting up. "It was bad enough writing my own death sentences, I don`t want to have to listen to you debate which one I should get."
Melody followed her out. "Call us back in when you`re done."
"How bad are they?" Lily asked Mattie as they descended into the common room.
Mattie winced at the thought. "Pretty bad. Especially the raw egg one…"
"Don`t tell me one of us has to eat a raw egg?!"
"Well, not eat…"
"Do you think it`s too late for me to go back and tell them I changed my mind?"
"Changed your mind about what?" Remus said, sauntering over.
"You know that bet that you weren't supposed to find out about?" Melody said. Remus nodded. "Alice and Mary are upstairs deciding what to do to those of us who lost the bet.
"Lils didn`t lose."
"I chose to stand among the losers."
"Can I go suggest some things?"
Mattie gestured to the stairs they`d just come down. "Go ahead."
"I can`t get into the girls dorms."
"I thought all the Marauders knew a way around it…"
"It only works for the other three."
"Well, then I guess you can`t help them decide…" Lily sang cheerfully.
"Speaking of help, Peter, James and Sirius are in the library looking for that secret passage you guys mentioned the other day. I was just on my way down to help look for it, do you want to come?
"I bet it`s in the 'Muggles' section."
"Obviously, nobody ever goes over there." James said, fiddling a scrap piece of parchment.
"I go into that section all the time!"
James folded his paper into an airplane, and then launched it at Remus` head. "Moony, no offense, but you wouldn`t notice a secret passage if it was lit up with neon lights."
Remus grumbled to himself and Lily pressed on the spines of the books.
"Lils, what are you doing?"
"In cheesy muggle movies, the red-haired girl who fiddles with the bookcase always finds the secret door."
"But doesn`t the ginger girl who finds the passage wind up being a damsel in distress?" Melody asked
"When have you ever watched muggle TV?
"In Muggle Studies we had to watch some movies for an 'intro to muggle culture' or something like that. I only paid attention during the cartoons."
"Of course you would." Lily`s foot bumped against a large book on the bottom shelf, and the patch of floor under her gave out. Before anyone could react, their red-haired friend had fallen down through the trapdoor, a rabbit hole of sorts, and disappeared from sight. The floor closed behind her with a click.
"Merlin, what did she do? Look around, there`s got to be a lever or button or something…"
"I hope she`s alright…"
Melody shook her head, rolling her eyes in disbelief. "I Soo called it."
"What else happens in the muggle cartoons?" Mattie asked, her eyes wide.
"Well, the bad guy is either the butler, gardener, or the quiet-but-loveable friend whom everybody underestimates."
They all turned to Peter.
"It wasn`t me!" he squeaked.
Sirius raised an eyebrow. "What wasn`t you?"
"I don`t know, whatever Mel`s saying I did!"
"Guilty conscience…" Mattie whispered. "Maybe it was him after all!"
"What did I supposedly do?"
"Everything! Anything!"
"Maybe he pulled the lever that made Lily fall through the floor!"
"Yeah!"
"He`s going to get us next!" Sirius jumped out between Peter and James, as if to block his mate from the wrath of Peter. In doing so, he forcibly banging into the shelf, kicking the book that Lily had hit minutes ago.
Behind him, James shot down through the trapdoor, a look of pure shock on his face before the darkness swallowed him up.
"BLACKKKKK!" He called as the light from the library disappeared when the floor slid back.
After falling for what felt like forever, Lily finally hit the cold stone ground.
Everything was pitch black. Even when she got her bearings, Lily`s eye couldn't adjust to this darkness.
She got up and felt around, finding only three walls, two parallel to each other and the third only a few feet from where she had landed. Lily cursed herself for leaving her wand in her dorm.
Suddenly, there was a flash of light from above and a loud yell. Lily jumped back as something fell and hit the ground with a moan.
"I think I hit something." Lily reignited James` voice instantly out of the darkness.
"No kidding."
"No, I mean with my arm as I was coming down. No need to be snide, Evans."
"Why did you come after me?"
"Believe me, it wasn`t by choice. Black accidently shoved me."
"Where are yo-oh. I think I found your foot."
"That`s my hand."
Lily jumped away, dropping the thing she`d been holding. "Sorry."
"It`s fine. Where are we?"
"I don`t know. The passage continues down that way a bit." Lily pointed in the direction of the space without a wall, forgetting he couldn`t see her hand.
"Which way?"
"Oh, um…" She lifted his hand and gestured in the direction with it. "Have you got your wand on you?"
James responded by lighting up the room with a flick of his wand. Lily and James` faces had been inches apart. They pulled back abruptly.
"Potter."
"Evans."
"I`m sorry I snogged your best mate."
"I wasn`t aware you snogged Sirius."
"Ha ha, you`re hilarious. Twat."
"Nice apology, Evans. The insult is a nice touch. I don`t really see why you`re apologizing, though."
"I just told you why."
"So you`re apologizing to Wormy and Pads too?"
"No… I wasn`t going to, anyway…"
"Then why in Merlin`s name are you apologizing to me?" He said icily, and farther down the passage ahead of her.
Even though he was far from earshot, Lily whispered back, "I don`t know."
But she did.
"Great, now we`ve got two people trapped in a passage."
"What would the people in the cartoons do, Mel?"
"Um….They would split up and look for clues. Also, they would have a dog that would stumble upon answers all the time."
Remus` eyes lit up. "I can get a dog! Would that help?"
"Where are you going to get a dog?"
"I live on a dog farm; I know how to call them to me."
"You live in Surrey, Moons. Besides, there`s no such thing as a dog farm."
"Still! I can get us a dog. Come on, Padfoot, let`s go get the dog."
"Oh. Oh! Okay!" Sirius and Remus disappeared among the stacks. When Remus emerged, there was a large shaggy dog at his side.
"Where`s Sirius?" Melody questioned.
"I had to sacrifice him to the dog gods in exchange for this wonderful mutt. Come on, let`s look for clues!"
"This is ridiculous. This is what they do in muggle movies?" Mattie laughed, peering under a table.
Melody shrugged. "More or less."
Peter scrunched his nose. "Are you sure this will help us find James and Lily?"
"Silence, evil fiend! We will unmask you soon enough!" Melody announced, throwing her hands up and spinning on Peter, who jumped back in fright.
At this point, almost everyone in the library was staring at them.
"Back to your books, all of you! We are launching an investigation!" Mattie shouted at all of them, producing a magnifying lens from her robes. Madam Prince gave the four and their dog a withering glance, and they quickly stopped shouting.
"Look, James…"
"I don`t care, Evans."
"I know ab-"
"I honestly don`t care."
"James."
"Not at all."
"I do."
"And I don`t care about that, either."
"Great. Wonderful for you, but it looks like we`re gonna be stuck in here for a while, and I just want to say-"
"Why look, a rock. I do like rocks, Evans. Especially rocks I can use to bash in the heads of chatty gingers."
"I hate you, Potter."
"The feeling is, as I`ve mentioned, mutual."
Lily let out an angry hiss of air.
"Let it out. Go on."
"Ug. I`m not going to take this anymore."
Lily took off sprinting down the passage.
"Evans!" James ran after her.
"What should we do now?" Remus said. The group was sitting at a table in the library, the evidence they`d found spread out in front of them.
"Let`s go over what we`ve got so far. Mattie, what did you find?"
"I have a piece of string I found on the floor near the restricted section."
"Terrific. Peter?"
"I have the paper air plane James threw at Moony before he was sucked through the floor. Also, a written confession from a third year that says he kidnapped Lily and James."
Mattie and Remus laughed, but Melody stayed serious.
"That could mean anything. Remy?"
"I found a pen under a bookcase."
"Excellent!"
"What should we do now?"
"Hmm…" Melody tried to remember the movie. "Now we feed the dog and the guy with the longest hair, and the monster-slash-bad guy will reveal itself to us."
"But Sirius isn`t here!"
"Then we`ll just feed the dog. To the kitchens!"
The gang scrambled off, with their shaggy black dog in the lead.
Eventually, Lily reached a dead end. There was a large rock blocking the tunnel.
After kicking the boulder for several minutes, she slumped down until James caught up with her.
"Do you know any rock-moving spells?" She asked.
James smirked, remembering she didn`t have a wand. "One."
He tapped the giant rock with his wand, softly whispering the spell, and the boulder shrunk to the size of a pebble.
"Oh."
James looked around the new passage they`d entered. The walls were no longer made of cold stone, and there were two trails now, leading in opposite direction. "Hey, hey, I think I know where we are! Come on!"
He grabbed her wrist and pulled her down the left path at an alarming speed. After many twist and turns in the passage, James led her thought a small opening and into an actual Hogwarts corridor.
"B-but that`s the one eyed witch statue! Potter, that was brilliant!"
"I try. Well, no I don`t, but I know my secret tunnels well."
"Come on, let`s find the others before they tear up the library looking for us."
Peter, Mattie, Remus, Sirius, and Melody were not in the library. Nor were they in the kitchens, Great Hall, any of the classrooms, Astronomy Tower, Owlery, anywhere outside on the grounds, or in a broom cupboard.
After nearly forty minutes of searching, James and Lily went upstairs to the common rooms, defeated.
As they stepped inside, a loud voice caused them to freeze.
"Now let`s see who the villain really is!" The voice, clearly Melody`s declared.
"How will we know that?" Peter`s voice called nervously.
"By connecting the clues of course!"
"Go on…"
"First, we have James` paper air plane. If you recall, he threw it at Remus. So clearly he was trying to tell Remus something." There was a pause and a crinkling of paper. "Remus, can you read aloud what the paper air plane contains?"
"A smiley face."
"A smiley face?"
"Yes, that is what I said."
"So then James was happy before he was kidnapped."
"Kidnapped? I thought he just fell into a trapdoor?"
"No, he was kidnapped, by one of us! Otherwise, he would have found his way out by now, because James knows every passage in the school."
"It`s true." James whispered to Lily.
"This means that James was not aware of the danger that was about to befall him! Which means James could not have been in on the kidnapping! So this eliminates Sirius from the suspect list, even if he did bump James down the tunnel."
"Why does it eliminate Sirius?"
"Because he has a big mouth, and would not be able to keep this to himself, even if he was trying to get Lily and James alone together."
There was a loud bark, and some shushing.
"This brings me to the pen Remus found on the shelf. James must have used this to draw his smiley face, and then put it down on the shelf. But where could he have gotten a pen from? The only people among us who carry pens are Lily, Remus, and Peter, and Lily wouldn`t give James a pen, because she thinks he is a prick. James didn`t get it from Remus, because Remus is very stern lending out pens, and would not let James leave it on the shelf. This leads us to Peter."
"I DID IT! I CONFESS, IT WAS ME!" Peter cried.
"No you didn`t. I was just about to explain why this means you didn`t do it."
"Oh. Yeah. Okay."
"Unless you did do it…?" inquired Remus.
"I didn`t actually do it. It was just so much pressure; I wanted her to stop staring at me like that…."
"Like I was saying, this leads us to Peter. If this is in fact Peter`s pen-"
"It is."
"Then if he was the kidnapper, he would want the pen back, in case he needed a pointy object to threaten James and Lily with. The confession he found was probably written by a younger student as a favor because he was scared we were going to burn him at the stake or something because I said the bad guy is always the quiet on. Also, he ate three sandwiches and a pie in the kitchen, and no guilty kidnapper could eat that much."
"Now Mr. Lupin here has been in the Muggle section of the library before, which might lead us to believe he was the villain and he had known of the passage. But, as James pointed out before he was so cruelly taken from us, Remus could not find a secret passage on his own if his pitiful life depended on it."
"Hey!"
"…So it could not be he who kidnapped our friends. Now, this brings us to our dear friend Matilda."
"Ooh. This is gonna be good."
"As we all know, Mattie is the cleverest out of all of us when it comes to making secretive and elaborate plans. It is thanks to her that I am able to be so good at deduction, because any best friend of hers has to be able to hold her own in a battle of wits."
"Do you want me to interject here and prove my own innocence, or are you getting there?"
"Patience. Mattie is the most likely suspect, because of her extensive knowledge of passageways and plotting skills. But Mattie will never pick up a book or walk into the library for enjoyment, unless she is going to hurt someone with the book. So Mattie wouldn`t wander around the 'Muggle' section, and wouldn`t know of the trapdoor that resided there. Also, she was not fully focused at the time of Lily`s kidnapping, because she and I were whispering about what punishments she had put on the list that Mary and Alice are looking over. So she is also in the clear."
"This leaves one person!" Mattie shouted. "You, Mels!"
"That is very true. For one thing, the string Mattie found on the floor is the same color of my robes, but it is also the standard color of all of our robes! I take Muggle Studies, so I have visited the 'Muggle' section frequently to research things. And lastly, but most blatantly, I knew Lily was going to get kidnapped! So clearly, the kidnapper must be me!"
There was crash, and Peter yelled "Get her!"
James and Lily took the opportunity to step out into full view of the room, and they saw the chaos that had broken out.
Peter, Remus, and a dog were chasing after Melody, who was running towards the fire, as Mattie pulled out a packet of emergency floo powder from her robes and threw it into the fire, shouting "Go! They`ll never catch you if you flee now! You`re too young to go to Azkaban!"
Mary and Alice, who had been coming down the stairs to tell their friends what they`d decided upon, were swept down the stair as it became a ramp, because Remus had accidentally hit the bottom step with his foot in the chase for Melody. The girls landed in the common room and were sent skidding across the floor. In the process, Mary`s glasses flew off her face and landed under a table.
"My glasses!" Mary cried, although nobody could hear her over the madness. "I can`t see without my glasses!"
"Hey! Hey, people, we`re right here." James said, although nobody paid any attention to him.
"EVERYBODY, BE COOL!" Lily shouted.
All Gryffindors and dogs in the common room froze.
Nobody spoke.
Nobody blinked.
Nobody breathed.
Everybody stared at the two supposedly kidnapped students standing before them.
"Lily-of-the-flowers! You`re alive!" Sirius shouted and hugged Lily, lifting her into the air (the dog had mysteriously disappeared when Lily had screamed and made everyone look at her).
"Love you too, Padfoot." James said as the mob descended upon them.
Peter joined the hug. "LILY! YOU`RE UN-KIDNAPPED!"
Remus butted in, shouting, "WE SAVED YOU! YESSSS!"
"We saved ourselves." Lily said, but the boys didn`t seem to hear her.
Well, except for James, who remarked, "Actually, I saved us."
The others didn`t seem to hear that either.
"So you didn`t kidnap them after all?"
"I wasn`t sure, actually. I thought I might have modified my memory to avoid suspicion, but I wasn`t positive."
"I knew you didn`t do it." Mattie laughed. "If you`d found a trapdoor that cool, you would have shown me ages ago."
"Good point."
"That`s why I`m the elaborate plotting one."
"How did you guys get out?"
"We landed in a tunnel that was behind the big rock in the one eyed witch passage."
"Oooh… that`s pretty brilliant."
Meanwhile, Alice had found Mary`s glasses and was helping her up.
"Excuse me." Mary said.
"I know right! This is the-"James was saying.
"Excuse me."
"-beginning of a-"
"Excuse her!" Alice shouted.
They stopped talking, and Remus, Sirius, and Peter let go of Lily.
"Can we talk to Mattie, Lily, and Mels please?"
