by Patricia Bow
5
Moonlit shadows
Camrose lay still with her heart drumming in her ears. Only her eyes moved, straining to see.
Moonlight turned the window into a silver rectangle. Another silver patch stretched across the floor to the left of her bed. The rest of the room was blacker than black.
She held her breath, but that only made her heart thump fit to deafen her. Just when she was ready to tell herself she’d been dreaming, something slid toward her across a corner of the patch of moonlight. She stared at it, unable to shout or move or blink.
Then an angry chittering cry ripped through the night. Th e sound sprung her loose. She threw herself off the right side of the bed onto the floor.
A moment of silence. Then a faint, irregular pattering: click-ety–pause–click. Th e door swung open, then closed. Th en slowly opened again, as it always did.
Camrose fumbled at the bedside table, found the lamp and switched it on. Nothing was in the doorway. Just a gap of darkness that could have hidden an army of demons.
Before anything could leap out at her she scrambled across the bed to the door, closed it and shoved a sandal between the bottom of the door and the floor. The sandal wasn’t quite thick enough, but when she pushed it toward the hinge side where the floor was closer to the door, the sandal wedged in tight.
There. If anyone tried to open that, they’d make a noise she couldn’t miss.
Remembering the sudden animal cry from outside, she crossed to the window and looked out. The shed roof was deserted, but a scrabbling noise from the chestnut tree said something had just left.
“Thanks,” she whispered to the night.
Still with the light on, Camrose crawled into bed and tried to think about what had just happened in her room. It had to be a dream, of course. Already that sense of someone there was fading.
Or I could’ve been awake and imagined it, she thought. I’ve imagined worse things in the middle of the night.
And yet, it seemed to her that this was the worst of all, worse than all the rabid tigers and vampires and ghouls she’d ever brewed up from shadows.
Whatever it was that started to cross that patch of moonlight had not been man-high. Dog-high, maybe. And that clickety sound, like toenails, something odd about its rhythm. Like the sound she’d heard on the street this evening.
She shook her head. “It wasn’t real. Just one more weird thing. There’s an answer to everything weird, so go to sleep!”
After a long time of lying still and listening, Camrose sat up again, pushed her pillow against the headboard, and leaned back. The clock radio on her desk said 3:22 a.m. From the drawer in the bedside table she took a small, spiral-bound notebook and a purple gel pen.
“Some people think better with a pen in their hand,” her father told her once. “You and I are like that. If you write things down, often they make better sense.”
She opened the notebook to a fresh page and printed Weird Things—July 26 across the top. Underneath that she drew a line down the page, dividing it into two columns. The left column she headed, What Happened, and the right, Why.
She worked over it for half an hour, crossing things out, adding words here and there, brooding over what she’d writ–ten. Once she nearly tore up the whole thing, then changed her mind and kept working.
Even if it doesn’t help, she thought, it might keep me busy until the sun’s up. Because I sure won’t be sleeping anymore tonight.
When she was finished, the page looked like this:
Weird Things - July 26
What Happened Why
1. Voice on the ledge Echo?
2. Burning house Fog? Imagination?
3. Man and dog under tree So what?
4. Laughing at me No wonder--looked like idiot
5. How Gilda knew my name Good guess?
6. Weird stuff in letter Crazy? Joke?
7. Wind that grabbed letter Just wind
8. T. clearing bugs Science, not magic
9. Something in my room Dream or imagination
Camrose frowned over the result. It wasn’t very useful. There were too many question marks. And there was something else that should be on the list: something Terence said, only she couldn’t remember. Funny how many things about him were hard to remember.
Suddenly she threw down the notebook and twisted side–ways to get at the pocket of her shorts. All this thinking and writing about Gilda’s letter and she’d forgotten all about it! At least two of the pages were safe, and she’d only read one.
Camrose flattened the crumpled pages on the notebook. There was the first page, and there was the last. The middle page was missing. Page three began in the middle of a sentence.
...all this my old friend and helpmate Miranda will be of use, if not much of a comfort. Ask her to tell you the story of how it all began. That will make a great deal clear to you and will help you come to a decision.
Remember, Camrose, you must be absolutely certain that the claimant is the right one. If you make the same mistake I did …
The next two lines were heavily inked out. No matter which way she turned the page, she couldn’t make out the words underneath.
Never mind, the letter ended. There’s no point in frightening you out of your wits. I’m sure you’ll do well.
Your loving great-grandmother,
Gilda Kilpatrick Ferguson
Well, if I believed any of this, I’d be so scared I wouldn’t have any wits left at all! Camrose thought.
As she was folding up the two pages of the letter, the last strange thing surfaced from the depths of her mind where it had been hiding. She thought about it, then picked up the notebook, drew an arrow to the space between point 7 and point 8, and wrote at the bottom, “How did Terence know there were three pages?”
And then Camrose realized how scared she really was. More scared than she’d ever been in her life before. “I wish Dad was here,” she whispered.
Never mind, he’d be back soon. He’d help her figure it out. Until then, there was one thing she could do. She picked up the pen again and printed in large purple letters across the top of the page: FIND MIRANDA.
6
Music and silence
At half past noon the next day Camrose and Mark were eating ice cream and following the swirl of the crowd around the town square. It would have been hot if not for a gusty wind that snapped the flags beside the war memorial.
“Listen! There it is again!” Camrose stopped short. From some-where across the square came a scrap of music, someone playing some kind of reedy instrument. It danced above the noise of the crowd like a red rose petal blown above a stormy sea.
“It’s just some busker, Cam, playing for money.” Mark pulled at her arm. People were piling up behind them. A baby stroller jabbed her in the back of the knees. She pushed on.
“But it’s not like anything I’ve ever heard before.” Another scrap of that windblown music turned her head. “I think it comes from near the war memorial.” She went up on tiptoes to try to see over the crowd. But there was no use looking. Th is was Saturday, market day, and there were twice as many people in Lynx Landing as usual.
And it looked like they were all right here in the square, picking up quart baskets of tomatoes, sniffing bunches of dried thyme and admiring cookie jars shaped like Holstein cows.
The ice cream (chocolate mint for Camrose, honey walnut for Mark, in waffle cones made on a hot iron) was Camrose’s treat, paid for with almost the last of her birthday money.
“It just about makes up for spending the whole morning looking for that letter,” Mark said. “I don’t know why you’re so anxious to get it back.”
“I just can’t stand not knowing the rest. I wish I knew who Miranda is!”
“If she was Gilda’s helper, she probably worked at the town hall. You could ask there.”
“But they’re closed today. I’ll have to wait till Monday.”
Then the wind died and a dip came in the crowd
noise, and the piping sounded clearly, long rippling swaths of it. Camrose started toward it, zigzagging around the knots of people, following the voice that called and called.
In the center of the square the crowd thinned out. A man was sitting by himself on the steps of the war memorial. He was playing something that looked like a small bagpipe but had a sweeter, wilder sound.
A thicket of pipes lay across his knees, and he seemed to be playing them all at once, while pumping air with his arm into a leather bag strapped to his elbow. A little crescent of six or seven people stood around him. Camrose couldn’t understand why everybody wasn’t over here, listening. Were they deaf?
The piping changed, no longer a dance but a lament. She sat down on the steps around the other side of the war memo–rial and closed her eyes, the better to hear. In the solitary place behind her eyelids, a landscape took shape.
The skyline at the top of the rocky hillside looked like the edge of the world. Low bushes covered with tiny yellow and purple flowers blanketed the slope and snagged her feet, but there wasn’t a tree in sight.
She climbed and climbed. The music pulled her like a rope. On the crest she stopped and looked down. Below lay a valley full of moving cloud-shadows, with a cupful of iron-dark lake at its heart, and in the lake a rocky island, and on the island a gigantic heap of stone.
A thread of smoke rose from one of the pinnacles on the heap of stone, which, Camrose now realized, was a house. And beyond the house and island and lake were more hills—green-purple, violet, blue—and beyond them again the silver line of the sea.
Home, lamented the music of the pipe. So that was what it was, Camrose thought, and why it was pulling her heart into pieces. It’s about longing for home, for a home lost forever.
Or was it that simple? For there was someone on that island. Camrose squinted against the sun. She shouldn’t have been able to see anything at this distance, but there it was, a tiny figure on the roof of the huge stone house. Its lifted face was a pale speck.
The piping rose to a wail and died away.
Camrose opened her eyes. Mark was clapping, and so were the people around the musician. They were dropping money, loonies and toonies and even a five-dollar bill, into a canvas backpack on the ground.
The piper unstrapped the bag from his arm and bent to slide his pipes into the pack. Then he straightened up and turned around, and Camrose got a good look at him.
Her first thought was surprise that he should be so small and young. Not even as old as Bronwyn, or so he looked, and only a couple of inches taller. What was somebody that age doing on the street, busking for money?
He looked poor too. His jeans were tattered at the heels and worn to holes on the knees. His gray sweatshirt had once been white with printing on it. The only bright, new-looking thing about him was his hair. It was long and pale gold and streamed like silk floss in the wind. Where it caught the sun it shone like glass.
She met his eyes, gray as a November sky in his thin face, and they were old.
Then they lit up. “You!” He took a step toward her.
Camrose wasn’t sure, when she thought back, what she would have done if left to herself. But she wasn’t left to herself, for a heavy hand pinned her shoulder and Terence stepped in front of her.
“Leave it to me.” He gave her one fierce look. “Don’t say anything.” And turned to face the piper. A policeman stood beside him, hands on hips. The two of them made a wall she couldn’t see through.
Mark caught her arm and she turned his way, opening her mouth to say something, but no words came out. He stood with his mouth open and a desperate look on his face. I can’t talk, Camrose wanted to say, but couldn’t.
Then she realized what was happening in front of her: Terence had got hold of the wrong idea. “I saw him harassing these kids for money,” he was saying.
“Aggressive panhandling, eh?” said the policeman. “We’ve got zero tolerance for that kind of thing in this town.”
But he didn’t, Camrose shouted silently. She pulled at Terence’s red leather sleeve, then quickly let go, hating the fleshy feel of it.
“I’ll have to move you on,” the policeman was saying. The piper wasn’t making a sound.
Mark dodged out of sight and reappeared in front, beside the piper, making urgent signs with his hands.
“What the— Kid, what’re you doing?”
“He’s pointing at the busker,” Terence said. “Obviously he’s accusing him.”
Camrose took a firm hold of the policeman’s arm. He turned and frowned down at her. “What is it?”
He wasn’t … She strained to get it out, … bothering us!
“What? Speak up!”
Leave him alone! Her throat ached. Tears of frustration started in her eyes.
Terence laughed softly. “Cat’s got her tongue.”
The policeman turned away. He pointed a finger. “Now, you, mister … ”
No! No! She grabbed at Terence’s jacket again. Sharp steel raked her knuckles. “Ow!” popped out of her like a cork out of a bottle and a shriek poured out after it.
“LEAVE HIM ALONE!”
“Hey, easy!” said the policeman.
Everybody was looking at her. She hid her bleeding fist in the other hand. “He wasn’t bothering us at all,” she said firmly. “My cousin made a mistake.”
“You sure?”
“Sure!”
“Okay. All right, then.” After giving the piper a stern look, the policeman mixed himself into the crowd. The piper shouldered his bag and set off, almost running. He didn’t look back.
Terence smiled at the piper’s vanishing back. Then he looked at Camrose and his smile faded. “You know, you can’t be too careful. It’s so easy to make a mistake about strangers.”
“Is it your business who I speak to?”
The moment the words popped out they sounded dangerous. Terence’s face went still and dark. Camrose held her breath.
Mark eased in beside her. “Besides, you sure made a mistake about a stranger just now, didn’t you?”
“Well, well. The stones speak!” Terence raked him with a stare, as if seeing him for the first time. Then he straightened up and squared his shoulders. “No, I don’t think I’ve made a mistake. Not about that one.” He sketched a wave and swag–gered off across the square, with the sunlight flashing from the studs and zippers of his jacket.
Camrose found a tissue in her pocket and wrapped it around her grazed knuckles. “I didn’t like that,” Mark said quietly.
“Neither did I.”
“What happened to us?”
“Well … ,” She didn’t like to say it, but there it was, “he said, ‘Don’t say anything.’ And he gave me a look. And after that I … I couldn’t … ”
“Me too. When’s he leaving?”
“I don’t know. This morning Bronwyn invited him to stay till Dad gets back, and he said he would.”
“I don’t like to think of you stuck in the house with him.”
“Bronwyn’s there. What’s he going to do?”
It took them five minutes to struggle through the crowd to the corner of Market Square and McKirdy Street. Camrose stopped and looked back. “It’s funny, how he ran off so quick.”
“Who, the busker? I wouldn’t have stuck around either, with the cops giving me dirty looks.”
“Yes, but he knew me, I’m sure he did.” The way his whole face lit up, as if he’d been waiting all his life to meet her. “He knew me, and he wanted to say something, and then he just ran off.”
“Well, did you know him?”
She shook her head and started down McKirdy Street. “Never saw him before in my life.”
And that was strange, because somewhere in her mind a voice was rejoicing. The long wait is over, it chanted, the task is done; the burden will soon be laid down. She hadn’t the faintest idea what it meant.
7
Miranda
They didn’t say anything more until they were a
block away from Market Square and walking across the park.
It was peaceful here, away from the crowds, though not quiet.
Small kids played on the swings and splashed in the wading pool, while their parents or grandparents watched from wood-en benches near the street.
When they reached the hollow in the patch of woods, Camrose stopped with her foot on a lip of broken stone that nuzzled up through the grass. The burning house fl ickered in her memory like an old silent movie.
There was nothing to see here now. Th e hollow was just a green cup of quiet with a big old maple tree growing in the center. Th e sounds of the children shouting and splashing and the cars rolling by on McKirdy Street had faded away.
The trees kept it quiet by sheltering it from the rest of the park, Camrose guessed. A ragged hedge of purple phlox and lilac bushes ran around the inner edge of the rampart of trees. The loudest thing here would be a blue jay or a cicada.
“I’ll bet there was a house here once.” She kicked the lip of stone. “I’ll bet this was part of it. This could’ve been the front step.”
Mark nodded, squinting from under his hand. “You can see where it used to be, if you look.”
He pointed at a shape like a giant footprint in the hollow, a big square dip in the ground twenty long strides across each way. In the dip the silvery seed heads of the grass stood six inches lower than anywhere else.
“You see,” Camrose said, though she was just guessing, “they filled in the basement with earth and stuff, but then it settled. I wonder how long ago that was?”
“Oh, fifty years. Probably more.”
“How could you know?”
“There’s that silver maple in the middle of where the house used to be.” He nodded at it. “It took at least that long to get that size.”
Camrose accepted that. Ask Mark anything about wood, trees or soccer, and he’d give you the right answer.