Long Lost Read online

  “You frightened me,” she told him. Her voice was faint.

  “I’m sorry.” Charlie glanced around for lurking figures in the dark, but he and Pearl were alone, as far as he could tell. “What are you doing out here by yourself?”

  Pearl kept mum. Her eyes flickered away from Charlie’s, catching glints of moonlight in their depths. Again, Charlie wondered if she might have been walking in her sleep, or if shock had clouded her mind.

  “It’s not safe,” said Charlie at last. “In the morning, the crews will come back and search some more. I’m sure they’ll find something. But for now, we should get you back to the house.”

  Pearl didn’t move. Perhaps she could hear the uncertainty in his voice.

  “It’s my fault,” she whispered at last, so softly that Charlie scarcely heard her.

  “What’s your fault?”

  “That the Searcher took her. If we hadn’t been arguing . . . if I hadn’t turned away . . .”

  “No,” said Charlie. “It’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault except for—for whoever did it.”

  Pearl gazed straight at him. “You don’t believe in the Searcher anymore?”

  “Well . . .” Charlie had told more than his share of Searcher stories. And he was nearly certain that he had seen a dark figure drifting through the trees last night. That hadn’t been merely a campfire tale.

  “You’ve seen it too, haven’t you?” Pearl asked, almost as though she wanted the answer to be yes. As though that might reassure her. “In the trees?”

  “I’ve seen something,” Charlie admitted. But he needed to behave like a grown-up now, with Pearl looking so frail and strange. “I don’t know what it was, though. It could have been just a shadow. And folks are saying there might be a tramp hiding out in the woods, or maybe an animal. . . .”

  Pearl’s glazed eyes slipped away. “I know what I saw.”

  A gust blew through the trees, making Charlie shiver. Pearl’s nightgown billowed, but Pearl herself didn’t stir, as though she couldn’t feel the wind at all.

  Charlie put out a hand. “Whatever it was, we should get inside now,” he said, the words somewhere between a command and a plea. “Come on.”

  For another moment, Pearl kept still. Then, with one more look into the trees, she turned around and drifted toward the grand brick house.

  Charlie followed her all the way to the back door. Only once she was safely inside and he’d heard the bolt hit the lock behind her did he stop to think.

  He’d known Pearl most of his life and all of hers. She and Hazel had their secrets, and they were both good at concocting a story when it would save their skins . . . but Pearl had seemed so earnest tonight, and so genuinely afraid. Charlie glanced back toward the trees. What had she been doing out here? And what had she thrown into the woods?

  Charlie scrambled back to the carriage house.

  Armed with a lighted storm lantern, he retraced the steps he and Pearl had taken, following their footprints in the dewy grass. Then, keeping his eyes on the ground, he headed into the trees.

  Something gleamed dully in the bracken to his right. Charlie lunged nearer. Lying on the ground was a small spade, one that his father used in the flowerbeds. This must have been what Pearl threw into the trees. Charlie picked it up. The blade was heavy with mud. What had Pearl dug up? Or what had she buried?

  Raising the lantern, Charlie took a sharper look around. Nearby, at the base of the broadest oak of all, there was a disturbed spot in the soil. Charlie set down the lantern and began to dig. The earth had been patted roughly back into place, but it was still loose, and soft with recent rain.

  Just inches below the surface, the spade struck something—something as pale and delicate as bone, with a coating that seemed to glimmer softly. Charlie stooped and grabbed it, rubbing away the dirt before lifting the item toward the light.

  It was Hazel’s mother-of-pearl-handled knife.

  Charlie would have known it anywhere. He’d been there on the day when Hazel bought it, carrying it proudly home from Mason’s Mercantile. He’d seen her use it a hundred times. She never went anywhere without it.

  Why had Pearl buried it here? How had Pearl come to have it in the first place?

  Charlie stood, wondering, in the flickering dimness.

  He was sure of only two things: first, that Hazel would not have willingly gone anywhere without her knife. Second, that he couldn’t keep it. Anyone found with the missing girl’s favorite trinket would naturally become a suspect in her disappearance. He couldn’t bring such a fate upon himself or his father.

  Hurriedly, Charlie dropped the knife back into the hole. He buried it with the spade, tamping down the surface of the soil until only the slightest disturbance showed. He put the spade away in the garden shed. Then he returned to the carriage house, snuffed the lantern, and tiptoed back to his own bed, leaving Pearl’s secret buried behind him, feeling strangely as though he was guilty of something far worse.

  The chapter stopped there, but Fiona didn’t. She was going to finish this book tonight, even if she had to do it while hiding under the covers with a flashlight.

  She turned the page.

  Losses never come alone.

  Like wool unraveling stitch by stich, one loss brings another, until even the most tightly woven fabric disintegrates into a heap of frayed threads.

  So it was in the grand brick house after Hazel disappeared.

  The girls’ mother bolted herself in her bedroom, watched over by her maid and dosed by the doctor. In the study, with his telephone and a crystal decanter, their father did the same. Pixie seemed to develop magical powers befitting his name, escaping from knotted ropes and locked rooms to dash into the woods again and again, only to be brought back, whining and muddy, by unsuccessful searchers.

  And Pearl became a living ghost.

  She floated silently from room to room, occasionally drifting downstairs to appear, pale and mute, in the parlor. Mrs. Rawlins and Mrs. Fisher did their best to keep her fed, tutting over the plates that returned, barely touched, to the kitchen.

  Worse still, night after night, long after doors were locked and lights were snuffed, Pearl was found wading along the edges of the river. Sometimes she was returned by Charlie and Mr. Hobbes, sometimes by a neighbor who had seen the nightdress-clad figure slipping through the trees. Afterward, no matter who asked, Pearl was never able to answer questions about what she had been doing in the water at night.

  As the days passed, the grand brick house—

  Fiona turned the page. But the next one was blank.

  So was the one after that. And the one after that. All the way to the book’s back cover.

  Fiona flipped back to the middle of the book and pawed through the pages again, just in case she’d been imagining things.

  She hadn’t. The story cut off in the middle of a sentence, leaving all its mysteries unsolved.

  Fiona riffled the handful of blank pages. She pinched the edge of one empty page and held it up to her bedside lamp. When she narrowed her eyes and leaned close, she thought that she saw something there—something that might have been print, but that was far too faint to read. Maybe it had been left by a typewriter that had run out of ink. Or maybe it had been erased.

  Fiona tried rubbing the side of a pencil lead over a teeny part of the page, the way detectives in stories always did. But any impressions on the paper must have been far too small and delicate to uncover. All Fiona made was a smudge.

  She slumped back on the bed, head spinning, frustration surging.

  What was going on here? Was The Lost One so messed up and infuriating and STUPID that she would never learn the end of the story at all? Had she just stolen a book from a library and lied to a librarian—possibly the worst things Fiona had ever done—for this?

  Fiona almost threw the book across the room, which might have been the third worst thing she had ever done, but she was interrupted by a tap at her bedroom door.

  “Com
e in!” she growled.

  Instead of her mom or dad telling her that it was time for dinner, the opening door revealed Arden, standing in the hall.

  “Hi,” said her sister.

  Fiona shoved the book beneath her blankets. If there was anyone who wouldn’t understand what was going on, it was Arden.

  “What?” Fiona demanded. “Do you need something?”

  “No.” Arden seemed unfazed by her tone. “I was just . . .” She stepped into the room, leaving the sentence unfinished.

  Fiona sat very still. Her sister hadn’t set foot inside Fiona’s bedroom since they’d moved. It felt strange having her there now, like an exotic animal had just opened the door and let itself in.

  Arden gazed around, taking in the poster of Egypt’s Valley of the Kings and the map of Sherlock Holmes’s London, the bookshelves packed with mythology and history books.

  “Your room looks nice,” she said.

  Fiona blinked. “Nice?”

  “Like it did back home. I mean, it’s nice to see all the same stuff here.”

  “It doesn’t look like my room back home,” said Fiona. “It’s completely different.”

  Arden leaned against the bookshelf. She swept one pointed toe across the floor in an absent-minded ballet move. “I know. This whole house is different. That’s why I like it that some things didn’t change.”

  Fiona scowled.

  Some things hadn’t changed for Arden. She was still going to the same skating club she’d belonged to for years, seeing the same friends, doing the same things. But for the rest of the family—including the one whose room she’d sashayed into—there was nothing but loss.

  “Everything has changed,” she told her sister.

  “I guess.” Apparently, for once Arden didn’t feel like arguing. She switched feet, now making floor circles with the other. “Hey. Does this house feel weird to you too?”

  Fiona could have just said yes. Instead she asked cautiously, “What do you mean?”

  “Just . . . this town, and everything in it—it’s so old. I keep thinking about all the people who lived here before. Most of them must be dead by now, but . . . maybe their houses remember them.” Arden stopped, running fingers through her glossy ponytail. “Never mind. It’s silly.”

  Fiona studied her sister’s face.

  Arden was scared. This didn’t happen often—mostly because Arden avoided anything that might scare her. She didn’t like ghost stories or mystery novels. She refused to watch creepy movies. Of course, she had no problem leaping into the air on a pair of blades above a giant frozen floor in front of a huge crowd of strangers, but that was because Arden was a weirdo.

  Seeing Arden looking jumpy and anxious was a rarity. It sent a pleased little ripple through Fiona’s body.

  Arden was scared? Good. It was her own fault.

  “You’re right.” Fiona spoke up before Arden could back out. “I think places do remember things. I think this whole old town remembers things.”

  An idea flashed through Fiona’s mind. She crossed her legs, settling back against the pillows. She was going to enjoy this.

  “I’ve been researching the history of this town,” she went on, placing her words like paint strokes. “There are stories about something that used to live in the woods nearby. Everyone called it the Searcher.”

  Arden folded her arms across her chest. “The Searcher?”

  “Yeah. It was this tall, cloaked figure that lurked in the shadows. Every now and then, if somebody was out in the woods alone, the Searcher would grab them. And they would never be seen again.”

  Arden held herself tighter, as if she’d felt a sudden chill. “So it’s, like, an old ghost story?”

  “Nobody knows if the Searcher was a ghost, exactly. It might have just been a person in disguise. Or it might never have been human at all. It might have been . . . something else.” Fiona let her words hang in the air, enjoying their whispery sound. And the look on her sister’s face.

  But Arden straightened up, tapping her fingers on the edge of Fiona’s bookcase. “You know how stories like that get started, don’t you?” she asked, her tone hardening into Big Sister Voice. “Somebody makes it up, because they need an excuse for something, or because they were confused or scared or stupid, and then they tell other people, and then all those people’s imaginations start running away with them too. It’s like when you learn a new word, and suddenly you start seeing that word everywhere.” Arden gave a little smile, like she and Fiona shared a joke. “The word isn’t actually following you everywhere. You’re just noticing it.”

  “Right,” said Fiona. “People notice things, once they know what to look for.” She gave Arden a little smile back. “If you weren’t noticing it, the Searcher would look like just another shadow in the woods.”

  Arden’s smile wavered like a reflection on water. “Anyway . . . ,” she said abruptly, turning toward the door. “I just wanted to see what you’d done with your room. If you want to come look at mine, you can.”

  “Maybe some other time.” Fiona leaned farther back against the pillows. “I’m in the middle of a book.”

  “Sure,” said Arden. “Whatever.”

  She glided out into the hallway.

  Fiona grinned to herself. She could imagine Arden looking worriedly at the woods all around town from now on, keeping far away from any clusters of trees.

  She pulled The Lost One out from under the covers and flipped through its ending one last time. The pages were as infuriatingly empty as ever, but there had to be more clues about this book to uncover. Maybe she would find them at the library tomorrow.

  When Fiona fell asleep that night, it was with the book placed safely on the nightstand beside her.

  And when she woke up in the morning, it was gone.

  Chapter Eleven

  After finding that The Lost One had disappeared from her nightstand, Fiona did what any calm, rational, future archeologist-historian would do.

  She ransacked her bedroom.

  Then, standing amid the mess of blankets and moved furniture and spilled clothes, with no sign of the book anywhere, she forced herself to stop and think.

  It took two seconds to realize who the culprit must be. Someone who had access to her room. Someone who had glimpsed the missing book on Fiona’s bed last night. Someone who might try to scare Fiona, like Fiona had tried to scare her. Someone who could move so softly and gracefully that she didn’t even make the floorboards creak.

  Fiona burst out into the hall. “Arden!”

  No answer.

  Fiona pounded along the hallway.

  Arden’s room was empty, the bed neatly made. She must have been at practice already. But her dozens of photos hanging on the walls seemed to be watching Fiona with smug, secretive smiles.

  Fiona threw open her sister’s closet door. She shoved the dangling costumes and dresses aside and rummaged through the boxes below. She threw back the perfect bedcovers. She yanked open the dresser and vanity drawers, spilling socks and leggings and hair ribbons and lip gloss and—

  “Fiona?” Her dad’s voice called from the staircase. “I’m heading to campus in ten minutes! Do you still want a ride to the library?”

  Fiona froze, staring at the chaos she’d created. If Arden had hidden The Lost One somewhere in this room, she’d done a very crafty job. Then again, she might have taken the book to the rink with her, which would be even craftier. And crueler. And now, without even finding the book, Fiona had ten minutes to fix everything.

  “I’ll be right down!” she shouted back.

  “All right. Ten minutes!” The stairs squeaked as her dad stepped away.

  As fast as she could, Fiona threw the covers over the bed, rearranged toppled pillows, and stuffed wrinkled clothes back into drawers. Why did it always take four times as long to clean something up as it took to make a mess of it in the first place? It seemed like this must break one of the laws of physics. And unless Fiona took eight times as long, Ard
en would definitely notice that things were out of place.

  But there wasn’t time to be perfect. Not without missing her ride to the library. Besides, Fiona thought, looking at the wrinkly covers and not-quite-shut drawers, Arden deserved to have her perfect bedroom be a bit less perfect. A few small changes, like an untied boot lace and a hidden medal, could be creepier than something obvious. Maybe the room was perfect after all.

  Leaving Arden’s things almost—but not quite—repaired, Fiona hurried away.

  Half an hour later, Fiona was hunched in an armchair in the central room of Chisholm Memorial Library, pretending to read National Geographic while glowering over the edge of the magazine at the circulation desk. She had planned to keep watch over Ms. Miranda today, to see if she could figure out what secrets the librarian was hiding, and why. But Ms. Miranda wasn’t even there. Mrs. Brewer and a youngish man with dark skin and a blue bow tie were working behind the circulation desk. How much more frustrating could one morning get?

  If only she had someone to sympathize. Someone who’d understand.

  Fiona pulled the phone out of her backpack pocket.

  Can’t wait to see u all tomorrow, she texted Cy. So much weird stuff to tell u about!!!

  She waited. There was no answer.

  Sighing, she dropped the phone back into her bag. As she straightened up, her eyes coasted across the room, snagging on the portrait of Margaret Chisholm. Fiona frowned up at her regal little smile. OUR STORIES ARE WHAT BIND US TOGETHER—M.C. Sure. If you ever got to finish those stories.

  “Hey,” whispered a voice, so suddenly that Fiona wondered for a split second if the portrait was talking to her.

  She jerked backward.

  The blond-haired, round-faced boy was perched on the nearest armchair, staring at her.

  “Oh. Hi,” Fiona whispered back.

  “Your name’s Fiona Crane, right?”

  Fiona blinked. “How did you know that?”

  “It’s a small town.” The boy shrugged. “When somebody new moves here, everybody knows. And my family has lived here for generations, practically since Lost Lake was founded. So we know everything about everybody.”