15. The fairy's missing

        The fairy’s gone.  I can’t find her anywhere.  I’ve searched the house and she's not here.  I think its Brian’s fault.  She might have overheard him suggesting we sell her for money.  It might have scared her and caused her to run away.  I wish I knew where she was.  She might be in some kind of trouble or danger.  I’ve got to find her.
        Last night we were playing a game with ping pong balls.  The fairy was hovering in front of my bedroom window and I was trying to toss ping pong balls past her to bounce off the window panes.  Her goal was to try and block my throws, and she was proving very nimble.  She can move fast for her size and would laugh merrily every time she got one before it bounced off the window.  Any balls I tossed at or below her position, she would swoop over and bat them away with no trouble.  It was only the ones that I tried to throw over her head that sometimes got through.  Gravity makes it harder for her to climb than to dive.
        Then we stumbled upon something suspicious.  I threw one lazy toss at the extreme upper right corner of the window.  She got there with great exertion and batted at it with both hands, knocking the ping pong ball further up and onto my bookshelves.  Laughing, she flew after the ball to retrieve it, and that’s when we noticed something new on the bookshelves.  “What this, Michael?” the fairy pointed to a small gray device with a flashing red LED, which had been covered by a small strip of black electrical tape, but through which you could still see a faint red glow.
        I jumped up on a chair to take a closer look.  It was a small PC camera, like what you might attach via a USB cord to laptops or PC monitors that don’t have built in cameras.  It was round, gray, had an oval lens in the front, the taped over LED power-on light, and a thin, gray, round cord.  “What in the world?” I marveled, as I pulled the cord out from under some books where it had been strung out of view.  The cord ran along the length of the shelf, behind more books, to a spot where it was spliced into a second longer cord, which extended up the corner of my room and disappeared into a tiny hole in the ceiling.  I jerked the two cords apart, disconnecting the camera from its source.  It had to be Brian.      To read all this post go to Page 15 in the Table of Contents on your right
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