Twenty-Seven
Chess
“I’m sorry,” Emma said.
Chess shook his head, unable to choke out any words.
Why is this so hard? he wanted to scream. I just want Mom to be home and everything to be normal. I don’t want to have to think about secret rooms or letters written in code or the fact that we were down to having only one parent, and now she’s gone, too. I just want to be an ordinary sixth grader, with an ordinary life. . . .
He might as well wish that Dad was still alive.
“If we stick together, everything will be fine,” Natalie said, as if she could tell he was about to lose it. But even she had a tense look around her eyes, like she was fighting against squeezing them shut and pretending none of this had happened. “Maybe if we go out to the street, my phone will work. Sometimes there are dead zones in certain houses. Mom says she sees that all the time when she’s selling houses, and sometimes the buyers even ask for lower prices because of that. . . .”
“I wouldn’t buy a house where a phone wouldn’t work!” Finn agreed.
Don’t let Finn see how upset I am, Chess thought. Don’t let Finn see how scared I am. Don’t let Finn see how confused I am, how I don’t understand anything. . . .
“Lead the way,” Chess said to Natalie. He waved his arm out to the side as if he were just being a gentleman, letting her and the others go first.
Really, he just wanted to walk behind Finn and Emma so they couldn’t see his face and Chess wouldn’t have to stiffen it into a confident, cheerful, unconcerned mask. He wasn’t sure he was capable of doing that right now.
Natalie stepped down from the crumbling concrete porch, followed by Finn and Emma together, with Chess bringing up the rear. A short sidewalk led over to the blacktopped driveway, and both the sidewalk and the blacktop were just as crumbly as the porch, with large patches of rocks and dirt showing through.
“What a mess,” Natalie said. She covered her mouth for a moment, as if she’d said something wrong. “I mean, your house is nice, and the other houses on your street are, too, and if this is just one street away, it’s not fair that the people who own this house let things get so run-down. That makes it so you wouldn’t get as much money if you sold your house.”
“We’re not selling our house,” Emma said.
Oh no . . . If Mom really doesn’t come back, would we have to sell our house? Chess wondered. Would we have to be adopted by some family we don’t even know? Would we maybe even be split up, me and Finn and Emma all going separate places?
Chess’s stomach twisted, as if someone had grabbed it and tried to squeeze it down to nothing.
“Mom would never let anyone sell our house!” Finn agreed with a little laugh, as if the whole idea was ridiculous. “Mom . . .”
From behind, Chess saw the exact moment Finn’s shoulders sagged, as if a terrifying idea had just hit him: What could Mom do to prevent someone from selling the house if she wasn’t even there? If she never came back?
“Hey, Finn,” Chess said too loudly. “How long do you think it took to build those huge fences on either side of this house? Do you think they used different-colored boards on purpose? Would you do that, if we decided to build a fence around our house?”
“I don’t like fences,” Finn said sulkily. “They make it so you can’t see.”
Chess caught up to Finn and put his arm around his brother’s shoulder. Ahead of them, Natalie stepped past the corner of the nearest fence. She pulled Emma alongside her and asked, “See anything familiar now?”
“Umm . . . ,” Emma began, turning her head right to left to right again, looking up and down the street.
Natalie dipped her head toward her phone screen once more.
“Searching, searching, searching . . . ,” she muttered.
Chess shepherded Finn out past the fence as well. Chess could have sworn every street in their neighborhood had sidewalks, but there wasn’t one here. He stepped directly from the crumbling blacktopped driveway out into the street. He immediately tightened his grip on Finn’s shoulder and looked both ways for cars.
“Watch out!” he warned Natalie, who was still peering at her phone.
She looked up, but Chess’s caution was unnecessary. There weren’t any cars. The only movement on the street was a group of five boys headed toward them.
Chess squinted, hoping he’d recognize someone from school. Maybe one of them would even be able to tell Chess the name of this street and how to get back home. But these boys all looked older, maybe even high-school age. One or two of them had the beginnings of beards. They all wore matching dark blue and orange, as if they were all on the same elite sports team. They also all moved with the same intimidating swagger. It reminded Chess of certain boys he tried to avoid at school, the ones who went around in packs, challenging other kids to fight.
Only, these boys had a lot more muscles. They looked like they actually could fight. Not just threaten to.
“Don’t say anything to those boys,” he whispered to Finn. “Just . . .” What did Chess know about dealing with menacing older boys? Nothing. He gulped. “Just let them walk on by.”
But the boy at the front—the tallest and most muscular—was looking their way. Even at a distance, Chess could see amazement flow over the boy’s expression.
“Natalie?” the boy called. “Natalie Mayhew?”
“Is that someone you know?” Chess hissed at her.
Natalie squinted toward the older boys.
“I don’t think so,” she whispered back. Then she raised her voice and called back to the boy, “Uh, hi . . .”
The boys came closer.
“It is Natalie,” the guy in the front called out excitedly. Was he the leader? As if on command, all five boys stopped a few paces away. The four behind the leader slouched, seeming not so much menacing now as idling, waiting for their next command.
“Yeah, it’s me,” Natalie said, shrugging. “So what?”
Chess felt oddly proud of her. Of course. She’d been a Lip Gloss Girl; she’d practically run the whole elementary school. She could hold her own even against a group of stupid high school boys.
“So what are you doing in this neighborhood?” the leader asked.
Natalie glanced down at Emma and Finn. Somehow her gaze also took in Chess, making him feel both smaller and younger.
“Babysitting,” she said scornfully.
Chess slid from feeling a little younger than Natalie to feeling like he was practically a baby.
“You babysit?” the leader asked, narrowing his eyes at Natalie. “You?”
Natalie fixed such a withering gaze on the leader that he seemed to shrink an inch or two.
“My mother’s making me,” she said. “Do you know my mom?”
“Yes, yes, of course,” the boy immediately behind the leader began babbling.
The leader shot him an annoyed glance, and the other boy shut up.
“I thought maybe you were helping scope out the neighborhood,” the leader told Natalie. He stood taller, puffing out his muscular chest even more. “Because, you know. This is where the criminal was found. You heard the news, right?”
“What news?” Emma dared to pipe up.
Chess was torn between being proud of her courage and wanting to beg the leader, Please don’t hurt my little sister. Please. She doesn’t know any better. She doesn’t even see that you’re a bunch of bullies, and you probably run this whole street, and . . .
But the leader perked up, like he was excited about getting to tell.
“I don’t know how you could have missed it,” he said. “I thought everybody knew. There are signs up about the criminal on practically every corner. They caught her yesterday. You know she’d been on the run and in hiding for eight years? But the government set a trap. They spread the news that her children had been kidnapped—or maybe they really did kidnap her children. I don’t know. Anyhow, she showed up, thinking she could rescue her kids and—boom! I heard
there was a SWAT squad waiting over there, and there, and there. . . .”
He pointed up and down the street, toward one tall fence or hedgerow after another.
“And there’s going to be a public trial and sentencing this weekend. On Saturday,” the leader continued. “Of course everybody’ll go.”
Chess’s whole body felt tingly and strange. Maybe he was about to faint.
Kidnapped children, he thought.
Had the government kidnapped those kids in Arizona who had the same names and birthdays as Chess, Emma, and Finn? Or had the government pretended to?
And was Mom connected somehow?
Eight years . . . eight years ago was when Dad died. . . .
“What did . . . did . . . ,” he started to stammer out, because he needed to know what the criminal had done, what made her a criminal. He wanted to know her name, too, because he thought that might prove that Mom wasn’t involved, that this really didn’t have anything to do with her.
He didn’t want it to have anything to do with the kidnapped kids from Arizona, either.
But before Chess could say another word, he heard a furious shout behind him.
“Natalie Maria Mayhew! Just what do you think you’re doing?”
Twenty-Eight
Finn
Finn swiveled his head toward the loud voice. A figure loomed in the doorway of the house they’d just left. The open doorway.
“Ms. Morales!” he cried, running back toward her. “You found us! And—you unlocked the door!”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the boys they’d been talking to take off running, as if they were terrified of Natalie’s mother. Or, maybe, of any adult.
A grown-up! A mom! She’ll fix everything, Finn thought. All she had to do was show up, to get rid of those scary boys!
But Ms. Morales’s face was like a storm cloud.
“Natalie! I asked you to explain—”
“Stop it, Mom!” Natalie yelled back. “Why do you always think everything is my fault?”
“Because I left you in charge,” Ms. Morales said. “You were supposed to only go into one house, the Greystones’, and visit a cat for five or ten minutes, and let me know immediately if there was any problem. And then you don’t answer your phone, and nobody answers the door when I go in after half an hour, and I find you’ve led the kids through some secret tunnel, and trespassed in an empty house, and Lord only knows who it belongs to, and—achoo!”
She stopped seeming quite so fierce when her first sneeze was followed by six more.
“Rocket!” Finn burst out, because he saw the cat rubbing against Ms. Morales’s ankles and her high-heeled shoes.
“Get him—achoo!—away from me!” Ms. Morales commanded.
Finn stepped back into the empty house and scooped up Rocket. He held the cat off to the side, away from Ms. Morales.
“I will, I will,” Finn promised. “But listen, nothing about that empty house was Natalie’s fault. We—”
“I saw four sets of footprints in the dust,” Ms. Morales huffed. “Of varying sizes. Don’t try to lie and pretend you weren’t here.”
“No, I mean, yes, we were,” Finn said. “But it was my fault. I’m the one who led everyone else through the empty house.”
“And I’m the one who didn’t want to go back through the, uh, tunnel,” Emma admitted, right behind him.
“And I opened the door to the tunnel,” Chess said, stepping up onto the porch with Emma.
Only Natalie was still out by the street, peering off into the distance.
“Natalie, if you go chasing after those boys, so help me, I’ll—” Ms. Morales began.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Natalie grumbled, turning back toward the house.
Ms. Morales looked down at the cat in Finn’s arms. Rocket waved his paws, struggling to be put down.
“Your cat might run away if we take an outdoor route back to your house, right?” Ms. Morales asked Finn, her voice a little gentler than it had been when she was yelling at Natalie.
“Maybe,” Finn said. “Mom says cats think for themselves. They do whatever they want.”
Ms. Morales sniffed.
“All right, quick,” she said. “Everyone back in this house and we’ll go back through the basement tunnel. But don’t touch anything. You didn’t damage anything already, did you?”
“What’s there to damage?” Natalie asked, catching up to the others.
Ms. Morales didn’t answer. But as soon as everyone was back in the house, she slammed the door hard.
They all made a silent procession back toward the basement stairs, except for Ms. Morales sneezing twice more, and complaining, mostly just to herself, “How could anybody sell a house like this, with that stench everywhere?”
Finn realized that the bad smell he’d noticed in the secret room wasn’t just there; it was in this house and out in the yard, too. He’d just kind of gotten used to it.
It’s like something dead and rotting mixed with lots of dirty stuff and . . .
The words that came into his head were “and with something evil,” but Finn didn’t like those words. Not when Mom was away and Ms. Morales was mad at Natalie.
“You were really smart to find us,” he said to Ms. Morales, because sometimes when Mom was mad, it cheered her up to hear a compliment. “We really didn’t know where we’d ended up.”
“Thank the cat, not me,” Ms. Morales said stiffly. “I followed him.”
They all climbed back down the stairs and went into the little room that was shut off from the rest of the basement the same way the Boring Room was in the Greystones’ basement.
“Did the, um, tunnel spin when you went through it?” Emma asked Ms. Morales.
“Spin? Of course not,” Ms. Morales said. “But I could barely see anything. I had to use the flashlight on my phone. See?”
She switched it back on as they ducked back into the secret room. Or the panic room. Or the tunnel. Finn wasn’t sure what to call it now. Behind them, Chess switched off the light in the empty basement. Somehow the lights that had been on before in the secret room were gone now, so Ms. Morales’s phone flashlight was the only glow around them. Finn stepped a little closer to her.
“At least your phone works,” Natalie said sulkily. “Mine completely blanked out. Honest—I didn’t hear you call. Not once.”
“Really, Natalie? Really?” Ms. Morales said. “Try your flashlight—I bet your phone’s working now.”
A light sprang on behind Finn.
“Uh-huh,” Ms. Morales said.
“You never believe anything I tell you!” Natalie accused. “Even when I’m telling the truth!”
“So you’re admitting that sometimes you lie?” Ms. Morales said. “How am I supposed to know the difference?”
Finn wasn’t used to being around kids fighting with their parents. Or, really, anybody fighting.
“Rocket doesn’t like hearing people yell,” he said, and it was weird how injured his voice sounded.
“Sorry, Finn,” Ms. Morales said. She patted his shoulder and made her voice soft and gentle. “What would you like for dinner tonight? Mac and cheese, maybe?”
But Finn saw the look Ms. Morales shot Natalie. Even in the dim glow of the phone flashlights, he saw the looks Emma and Chess exchanged.
It felt like everyone was keeping secrets from him.
Twenty-Nine
Emma
This doesn’t make sense, Emma thought, silently trudging behind Finn and Ms. Morales.
The secret room that had spun them around and somehow joined the Greystones’ basement with the mysterious house really did feel more like a tunnel now. Emma started counting her steps as soon as they entered the tunnel—right after Chess pulled the door to the empty house’s basement shut tight behind them. She made it up to thirty-two. Then she lost count because she started distractedly thinking, Surely we didn’t walk thirty-two steps before. Surely there wasn’t that much distance between our basem
ent and the empty house. Surely the secret room didn’t spin us that far forward, when I didn’t even feel like we were moving forward at all. . . .
It wasn’t like Emma to lose count of anything. But there was almost a haze in the air, as if the overcast, about-to-storm sensation from outside had seeped down into the tunnel as well. It felt like it had seeped into her mind, too.
Why did it seem like there weren’t even shelves lining the walls anymore?
Science, math, facts, logic, Emma told herself.
Fact: Walking in the narrow glow from a flashlight—or even two flashlights—had the effect of making everything outside that glow seem eerie. Walking with a flashlight worked that way anywhere. If nothing else, it made everything outside the flashlight glow hard to see.
Fact: Emma, Chess, Finn, and Natalie hadn’t exactly explored the secret room thoroughly before Natalie hit the lever, the room spun, and then they fled into the empty house. So there might be huge sections of the secret room that they hadn’t seen. Some of those sections might not have had shelves. Maybe there’d been . . . a bend in the room. An entire corner they hadn’t even seen.
So why weren’t they turning any corners now?
They reached the half doorway that led back into the Boring Room. As Finn, Ms. Morales, and Natalie ducked under and stepped through, Emma caught a glimpse of Mom’s desk. It was all Emma could do not to run over and throw her arms around the desk, because it was finally something familiar, something she recognized.
The desk was there. Mom wasn’t.
Emma didn’t hug the desk.
Mom, we’re going to figure all this out and find you, Emma thought, as if she really believed she could communicate with her mother telepathically. We are. Don’t worry.
Emma caught up to Natalie. Ms. Morales and Finn were already out of the room, headed for the basement stairs. Chess was still a few steps behind.
“Ten o’clock tonight?” Emma whispered to Natalie. “Same place?”
Natalie gave a sharp nod.
Greystone Secrets #1 Page 11