I look up at the big heavy moon hanging over the house, so close that it might land on the roof. Mr. Rutledge could be inside the house right now, and Mama always tells me to stay away from him. But I know the saints have led me here to do something important, and they wouldn’t have given me a sign to follow if it wasn’t going to lead to the right place.
So what are you waiting for?
Teddy!
When I turn around, he’s right behind me, and he’s back to being my Teddy, a bear again, which makes me very happy.
“Teddy, you scared me!” I say. “Why did you look like a little boy before? Were you playing a trick? Why did you go away?”
I promise I’ll explain everything later, Teddy says. We need to go inside now.
Teddy is right. The moon is already sinking into the house, and we might not have a lot of time to learn whatever it is the saints want to tell me. But I’m still upset at Teddy for being so mysterious, and for disappearing and leaving me all alone.
Aoife, don’t be mad. I’m sorry.
“But why can’t you tell me what’s going on?”
I’m trying to tell you. But you have to trust me. You want to solve the mystery, don’t you?
“Of course I do!”
Well, come on, then, says Teddy.
So Teddy leads the way, and I follow him, down the street to the front walk. The kitty waits until we sink into the shadows, and then she walks away down the street without us, without looking back. Kitties aren’t as loyal as bears.
This is it, says Teddy, looking at Mr. Rutledge’s house. We’re home.
“You’re silly, Teddy. This is Mr. Rutledge’s house, not ours.”
But of course Teddy doesn’t listen to me—he never does. He creeps down the sidewalk to the front door, but then instead of knocking, he follows the line of bushes around the side of the house. I think about saying we shouldn’t go in, but I don’t say it, just follow Teddy into the shadows.
He’s kneeling down in some spiky plants, trying to open a low window. I wouldn’t have even known that it was there—we don’t have windows there in our house—but somehow Teddy knew. It’s just a little window, too small for anyone bigger than me to fit through, but there’s no way to see what’s inside. It looks like it’s stuck shut, or maybe locked.
It takes both of us together to lift the window, and now I can see that the metal piece that should be holding it closed is rusted straight through, so the window opens slowly when we pull at just the right angle. It makes a low screech like an animal, and we both freeze—but nobody comes to see what it is, so after a minute we relax again.
I look up again. The moon is setting over the house. It looks like an angel has landed up there on the roof, just like on top of a Christmas tree. “Let’s go,” I say.
Teddy should be too big to squeeze through the window, but luckily he can be any size, so he says it won’t be hard for him to fit. Both of us slip feetfirst through the window and into a dark basement—Teddy first, and then me, taking a deep breath and sliding in behind him. For a minute I hang from the window frame, my legs kicking out into nothing.
Let go, Aoife, says Teddy.
And once I’ve got my breath, I do, and drop.
The window must be higher up than I thought, because for a second I’m falling in the blackness, and I almost make a noise, but I bite down hard and keep in everything except a loud breath. Then my feet hit what feels like carpet and my knees go out, so I fall forward hard, catching myself on my hands. My palms are stinging, but I shake them off and don’t let myself think about that.
Here in the basement it’s another kind of dark, way worse than outside on the street. I’m afraid to take even one step forward, in case I run straight into something or step off a cliff. I don’t know why there would be a cliff in the basement, but it feels like that’s what could happen. It’s damp down here, and smells bad—an old, moldy smell, like the fridge before Uncle Donny cleared it out.
There’s a quiet click, and then Teddy holds up Mac’s lighter. I thought I was holding it, but it’s not in my hand anymore. The light from one lighter isn’t much to go on, but at least it’s enough to see that I’m just standing in a square of empty carpet. The basement is full up with stuff, and Teddy and I are in a far corner next to a big shelf of boxes. I don’t know why this house has a basement when ours doesn’t, but it must be nice to have somewhere to keep all the extra boxes.
Teddy walks back to the window and gives it a really hard tug, and it slides shut with another rusty creak.
“Teddy, how are we going to get out?” I ask, but he doesn’t answer. He just holds up the lighter so we can see better.
Mr. Rutledge has a dog, I remember suddenly—Roo, the pink-eyed poodle that walks past us without knowing we’re there. Even a blind dog will bark if people come into his house, right? But there’s no barking. Mama always says that Roo looks ready to drop, and I wonder if maybe he died, which would be good for me, but I’d feel bad, too.
“Do you see the door?” I ask Teddy. Because if nobody’s barking, then we might as well keep going.
He points across the room, and I start walking in that direction even though I don’t see much—bears can probably see better in the low light than I can. I try to be real quiet and so does Teddy, and we squeeze around the shelves in the dark. I don’t know why the saints brought us here, but it seems like we should try to keep from being loud until we figure it out.
Just like Teddy said, there’s a metal door in the wall right where he pointed, half hidden in the dark. I move boxes out of the way as Teddy cracks it open slowly, afraid it will creak. Then he holds the lighter up so we can see what’s behind it. If it were me, I’d have burned my fingers by now, but Teddy’s fingers don’t ever get hurt.
We’re looking at a flight of wooden stairs and, at the top, another door. This time I go first, trying to keep on the outside of each step because the middle part of the stair is the loudest. I don’t want to go creak, creak like Uncle Donny in the middle of the night.
At the top of the stairs, I put my hand on the knob and turn it. But the door doesn’t open. All of a sudden I can imagine us trapped in the dark like this, with both the door ahead of us and the door behind us locked. Teddy and I would starve to death.
Push harder, says Teddy. I take a deep breath and do as he says, and Teddy comes next to me and puts his bear weight against the door and pushes, too, and very slowly the door starts to move. There’s something pushed in front of it, but Teddy and I together are strong enough to move it.
The moonlight pours in the windows on the other side of the door—just like our house, all the windows face the street and the light comes in from outside—and Teddy lets the lighter go out. We’re in a hallway just like the one that leads to our living room from the front door. It smells a little like dog. There’s a big box pushed into the middle of the hallway, and that’s what was blocking the door. I can see the black writing on the outside.
Except for all the noise I’m making, the house is silent, and I’m pretty sure there’s nobody home—anyway, the saints wouldn’t have led me here if Mr. Rutledge was waiting to catch me.
“Teddy, where do you think we should go?” I whisper.
Upstairs, says Teddy.
Upstairs is probably where the bedrooms are, or at least that’s how it is in our house. It’s also closer to the moon, so I guess that makes sense. The two of us creep down the hallway, making a little-girl-and-a-big-bear-shaped shadow against the wall. It’s weird that Mr. Rutledge’s house is kind of like ours and kind of not. We have carpet on the main floor and Mr. Rutledge has wood, which feels smooth and cold under my sore feet. Our walls are painted white, but his are covered in wallpaper that might be dark red, but looks gray in this light. It’s like stepping inside a mirror world, like the house we could have lived in.
Hurry, says Teddy.
“I don’t know what you’re in such a hurry for,” I say. It’s not like we even know what we
’re looking for yet, so how can we get there any faster?
But Teddy pushes ahead of me and puts his front paws on the first step of the stairs. This way.
More stairs. At least these have a wide piece of carpet that runs up the middle. Although the little strings brushing against the underside of my feet just make them hurt worse.
Don’t make a sound, says Teddy, although I’m not. Teddy just likes to tell me what to do.
Mr. Rutledge has photographs over the stairs just like we do. Most of ours are pictures of Theo. I can’t see who these are of until we get high enough to get light through the window from the streetlight across the street. Then I see an old brown-colored picture of two people getting married, even if I can’t see their faces exactly in the dark.
“These are cool,” I tell Teddy. “They must be from a long time ago. Do you think this is Mr. Rutledge?”
Keep up, says Teddy. It’s this way.
I climb the next stair and look at the next picture. It’s of a smiling woman with a fat baby (or maybe a puppy?) in her arms. Her husband—it must be her husband—is standing behind her with his arm around her. They look like a real nice family, and for just a second, I miss Mama so bad that it makes me feel like I’m going to be sick.
Aoife, come on!
Teddy has gotten to the top of the stairs now, and he’s waiting for me, standing up on his back legs the way he does when he gets excited. I climb up the next two stairs and look at a big picture in a round frame at the very top of the staircase, right where Theo’s last picture is hanging in our house. Just then a car comes around the corner and the headlights come in through all the windows, and suddenly I’m looking straight into the face of a little boy just about Theo’s age. He’s got curly hair and thick, beetle-y eyebrows, and a very round brown face.
“But—Teddy,” I say, forgetting to be quiet. “Teddy, this picture … it’s of you.”
When I turn back around to look at Teddy again—bear-Teddy, my Teddy—he’s not standing where he was.
“Teddy?” I call, remembering to be quiet again, although it’s sort of too late for that now. He doesn’t answer. But I hear a sound down the hall that could be bear-feet, walking over the wood floors, so I think he must have gone on up ahead. He’s probably looking for clues.
I climb the rest of the way up the stairs. “Teddy?”
If Mr. Rutledge’s house is just like ours, the first room after the stairs will be my bedroom. I open the door and turn on the light, almost expecting to see my own pink walls and butterfly pillows. But this room is boring looking, pale-tan wallpaper and a dark-blue carpet and a big desk with a desktop computer. That makes sense, I guess, because Mr. Rutledge is old, so he uses the kind of giant monitor they have at school, not a cool thin screen like Hannah’s family has.
There’s not going to be anything about Theo’s murder in this room. It doesn’t even look like anybody’s been in here for a long time, because there’s dust on the computer monitor and all the papers. I turn the light off and pull the door closed.
The next room along the hall is the bathroom, and I have to use it by now, so I do real quick and make sure to wash my hands extra good even though there’s no soap. No toilet paper, either, so I have to drip dry like we do at our house when Mama hasn’t felt up to going to the store. You just do a little shimmy over the bowl before you pull up your underwear, and it’s not that bad. But this bathroom smells funny, not like ours, which smells like pine trees, or Hannah’s mom’s, which smells like apples because of the apple candle (at least, it used to, before Teddy took the candle and I broke it. Maybe it won’t smell that way anymore?). Mr. Rutledge’s bathroom smells like moss.
The next door down the hall is what would be our guest room, except that we don’t have a basement, so actually it’s full of stuff—the computer, wrapped up in a box and taped shut so that the demons can’t get out, and the old sofa bed that Mama moved up there when Hannah’s mom gave us a new one with springs that don’t stick out. So I’m not all that excited to look inside here, but right away I know that this room is what the saints brought me here to see, because the moonlight is filling up the window.
It’s a little boy’s room, with dark-blue painted walls and framed pictures of race cars. There’s a bed shaped like a rocket ship—way better than my bed, which is little and square and not shaped like anything—and the sheets and the pillows are all decorated with moons and stars.
I walk all the way into the room, closing the door behind me. It smells dusty and I wish I could open the window. What it reminds me of really is Theo’s room, back in our house, even though it’s in the wrong place, because Theo’s room is the next one down. But it smells like that, dried up and sad.
I’ve never seen Mr. Rutledge with a little boy. Mr. Rutledge is always alone except for Roo. I don’t know why he would have a room like this in his house, but he does have that picture of the boy who looks like Teddy at the top of the stairs.
I walk to the desk in the corner, which is full of books. I wish I had some nice books like this. All of ours are chewed up before we even get them because Mama picks them up from the church book sale. I open the front cover of one that is about crayons in a crayon box—I love crayons—and inside, someone has written in blue marker, NED SLATER. Lots of my books have names written in the front of them, too—names that aren’t mine, I mean, from the other kids that had them first. But I open another book (it’s called Free to a Good Home, and it looks like someone finds a box of puppies by the side of the road), and the inside says NED SLATER, too. The same person wrote it both times in block letters. I put the books back, but I know it’s a clue.
There’s a teddy bear on the bed. A big tan-colored one that’s bigger than the pillow, with a chewed-up ear. I like teddy bears, too. Part of me wants to climb into that rocket-ship bed and go to sleep like Goldilocks, except she also got to eat a lot of porridge. I do understand that story a little better now, because it makes a lot more sense why she would get into the little bear’s bed and fall asleep after a whole night walking around.
There are two pairs of sneakers in the closet—one blue, one yellow—each with white stripes around the edge, and white laces. I don’t like to look at those shoes. I close my eyes.
I shouldn’t have thought about porridge, because it reminds me I’m hungry, too. But eating any of Mr. Rutledge’s food would be stealing—not just borrowing his bed, which might be okay with Jesus. So I try not to think about being hungry and I just keep looking at the little-boy things in the room.
I’m not sure why the saints brought me here to learn about Theo when all I keep finding is more about Ned Slater. There must be a part of the mystery that I’m missing. The saints are trying to tell me something, but I don’t know what it is.
I sit on the bed. That’s okay. I lean against the wall and I’m not lying down, I’m not under the covers, I’m just sitting. My eyes hurt, though. And I feel kind of dizzy, and kind of sick to my stomach, I guess because I’m hungry maybe. And even though the bed is full of dust, it’s very soft. I wish Teddy would stop playing around and come back to tell me what to do.
Those shoes are watching me.
* * *
Then I’m back at the Secret Place. It’s raining and the raindrops are like glass beads, they shine in the light, falling real slow. There’s two boys on the rock, a little one and a bigger one. I can’t hear what they’re saying, and their faces are blurry, like ghosts. I can see right through them to the big trunks of trees behind them. I feel like I’ve seen them before, though, both of them. They’re older than me by a lot, and they don’t like it when I follow them around, but Mama says they have to let me come if I want and they have to keep an eye on me. And if I can’t keep up, they have to wait for me, because I’m little and they’re big.
But now they both have angry voices, and I’m scared, even though they’re ignoring me. I scoot up the rock on my bottom, away from the edge.
* * *
Aoife,
wake up!
I open my eyes and I’m still in the rocket-ship bed. But there are lights swinging across the wall, coming through the curtains on the window, and I realize it’s a truck, pulling into the driveway. Mr. Rutledge is home!
I get up off the bed, my heart thumping bum, bum, bum. My hands are shaking as I pull the blanket straight where I crumpled it. I don’t know when I fell asleep, but it can’t have been long, because it’s still not even morning yet. I don’t know what Mr. Rutledge does all night, when he should be home in bed asleep like everybody else, but he’s home now. And I have to go, right now.
I keep well away from the window and run back to the door. I can hear a car door slamming and a little dog barking. Dogs always know when people are in the house, I think, and I couldn’t hide under the bed or behind the curtains from Roo even if I could hide from Mr. Rutledge. So I have to try and get out of the house without him seeing me.
“Teddy, come on,” I whisper as quiet as I can. “We have to go!” I’m going to be in big, big trouble if Mr. Rutledge finds me in his house.
But Teddy doesn’t answer.
All I can think is that the saints—even though I haven’t solved the whole mystery yet—probably brought me here because Mr. Rutledge killed Theo. Maybe he was driving around in his black truck just like he is now, and he found Theo and killed him. That’s why Mama says not to play in front of his house. And now I’m all alone in Mr. Rutledge’s house late at night and he’s going to kill me, too.
I have to get out.
I creep out the door and back down the hallway, still trying to keep to the edges and not make noise. I hear the key in the front door, so loud in the quiet, and then I hear the door opening. The dog runs in first, barking, and then I hear the heavy feet of Mr. Rutledge. “Can it, Roo,” he grumbles. His voice makes the hair on my arms stand up.
I duck down low in the hallway, leaning against the railing and trying to hold my breath so he won’t hear me. I hear him putting stuff down and slamming the door. If he comes up the stairs, I’ll never get away.
All That's Bright and Gone (ARC) Page 15