A Tangle of Knots

Toby leaves with Cady before the Owner can stop him. He feels “frustrated, but not worried” (161) about this development because he is certain that he will obtain her Talent eventually. The Owner’s phone rings, and a “meek, kind” (162) voice introduces herself as Jennifer Mallory and asks if Toby and Cady have left for the convention center.

Will boards a train to New York because he hears a distinctive “click-click-clack!” (164) that reminds him of his ferret. By the time he realizes that the sound is coming from the conductor’s hole punch, it’s too late for him to get off the train. Will curls into a ball in the luggage rack, feeling lost “[f]or the first time in his life” (165).

Cady and Toby arrive at the packed event center in New York, where the Annual Sunshine Bakeoff is being held. She overhears some fans of hers: “‘There she is, that’s the little orphan!’ ‘Look, it’s Cadence! She’ll win again this year for sure’” (167). Although there is no sign of Miss Mallory, Cady tries to assure herself that she will come and declare the adoption official. The girl is extremely nervous and wonders if everyone feels that way “right before they got everything they’d ever wanted” (167).

Marigold goes to a wooded area near the highway to test out different possible Talents. She is interrupted by Zane, who is on a stolen bicycle laden with four powder blue suitcases. She correctly infers that he is on his way to Louie’s pawn shop to sell stolen objects and accuses him of taking her Talent bracelet. Zane denies stealing the bracelet, but Marigold doesn’t believe him. When she says that he should go to boarding school, he calls her “Mari the Middling” (170). Marigold is filled with “a rage that welled up from deep inside her” (170), and she pushes her brother and the bicycle into the path of an oncoming car.

V hides in Toby’s truck bed. Although she doesn’t have much of a plan, she wants to confront him because he is a chameleon, like the man who “charmed her Caroline right out from underneath her” (171). She clutches the photograph she tore from Marigold’s book, which depicts a mother and a father with their infant daughter. She disembarks at the convention center, which she recognizes from the many talks she’s given there. She drops the photograph as she squeezes past a man who is rolling a barrel of flour and reading one of her novels.

Mrs. Asher rolls down her window, and Sally jumps onto her face. When she disentangles herself from the frightened ferret, she sympathetically observes that Sally must miss Will, too. She speculates that the ferret would know where to look because she accompanies the boy on all of his adventures. This gives her an idea, and she gets back on the highway.

The Owner hits Zane’s bicycle with his car, scattering the suitcases’ contents and sending the boy careening face first into the dirt. Marigold apologizes profusely to her brother. A gray mist rises from the shattered jars, and squirrels absorb the released Talents. The Owner curses at the children and throws the bicycle at Marigold. Zane shouts, “You leave my sister alone!” (177) and lunges at him. Zane feels a sudden and sharp chill, and then the Owner is holding “a small rock of ice” (177).

A woman informs Cady that there will be five judges at the bakeoff this year rather than one. She frets over this news, and the woman tells her, “You’re never going to be able to please every person every time” (179). The woman advises Cady to bake her favorite cake, but the girl has never given the question much thought because she didn’t plan to bake her own perfect cake until she was adopted. Cady is so distracted by her anxious thoughts that she doesn’t notice the “fist-size slip of paper that had found its way into her flour bin” (180).

Marigold attacks the Owner for hurting Zane. In the scuffle, the ice cube in the Owner’s hand slips under Marigold’s Talent bracelet and melts into her skin. The Owner throws the girl to the ground and drives away. Zane realizes that his sister now has his Talent. Marigold suggests they go to the police, and, to her astonishment, Zane agrees. As the children wonder how they are going to get to the police station, “a thick length of rope with knots tied into it, expertly” (183) suddenly falls from the sky. Looking up, they see the red and blue hot air balloon that crashed into their apartment. A man in a gray suit asks, “You kids need a lift?” (183).

Toby sees the man distributing flour while reading Victoria Valence’s mystery novel about a chameleon and frets: “What if someone figured out the truth about Toby before he had a chance to explain it to Cady for himself?” (184). After the chapter, there’s a recipe for Zane’s Garlic Cake, “a cake that’s not as terrible as it seems, on the surface, to be” (185).

Watching the man in the gray suit steer the balloon, Zane feels as though he shouldn’t have had any difficulty evading “a spit attack from an eleven-year-old boy out a twelfth-floor window” (188). Zane feels as though he’s been ruining things all his life, and this dismal self-belief is reinforced when the man tells him that the shattered jars contained Talents. Zane explains that he planned to sell the stolen jars but didn’t know what they contained. The man knows about Zane’s involvement in the hot air balloon accident, but he isn’t angry with the boy. The man compares Zane’s well-intentioned nature to spitting, which he says is healthy but “can sometimes take a bad direction” (191). Zane apologizes. To the children’s surprise, the man lowers the hot air balloon at Cady’s bakeoff, not the police station. He explains that they may be needed there. Even though Zane didn’t mention where he went to school, the man assures him that his next year at McDermott Elementary will be much smoother because there will be a new principal.