I didn’t find Charlie’s clover in the schoolyard, so I kept my eyes on the ground as I walked slowly behind the almost-brand-new rec center, praying that I’d find the charm before I reached the bike stands. Then I heard what can only be called a blood-curdling scream.
The scream was followed almost instantly by a chorus of other, higher-pitched shrieks. At first I thought it was from some ridiculous girl drama. You wouldn’t believe what the girls at my school screech about—everything from a new episode of their favorite TV show to the release of a movie starring the newest, hottest actor. It was pathetic. So when I heard all that yowling, I rolled my eyes.
Until someone shrieked, “Call an ambulance!”
Ambulance equals serious. I ran toward the commotion and found a clutch of girls in cheerleader uniforms, which explained the girly squealing. No one screams louder than a cheerleader. Put a squad of them together, and it’s hyper-banshee time. These cheerleaders were huddled on the pavement behind the rec center, where, I guess, they had decided to practice, given the squishiness of the school athletic field. But the squad wasn’t practising fan-thrilling cheers. Most of them weren’t even moving. Instead, they were frozen to the spot and staring at the ground. At something on the ground. Correction. At someone. I saw his—judging from the size of the shoes—sneakered feet first. The toes pointed to two o’clock and ten o’clock. I couldn’t see his face right away, but from the way some girls were crying and others were moaning ohmygawd, ohmygawd, ohmygawd, it was clear not only that something bad had happened but also that they knew the person to whom it had happened.
The nearest cheerleader must have sensed an outsider, because she turned to me and clutched my arm. “Do you have a phone?”
I reached around to the side pocket of my backpack, extracted my cell phone and elbowed my way to the front of the cluster of girls. I wished I hadn’t.
Ethan Crawford, one of Lyle High’s standout athletes, was spread-eagle face up on the pavement, his thickly lashed hazel eyes staring up at where the breaking clouds were shifting slowly across the sky. He didn’t blink. He couldn’t. He wasn’t breathing. How could he, with all that blood pooled on the ground under his head?
I punched 9-1-1 into my phone. While I waited for an answer, I looked up. Where Ethan was lying—not far from the base of a wall, feet closest to the wall, head farthest from it—as well as how he was lying—on his back, arms and legs outstretched—made me think he had fallen from above. I looked up. The sun chose that moment to break through the thinning cloud. It blinded me, and I raised a hand to shield my eyes. When I did, I caught a glimpse of someone on the roof of the rec center. At least, I thought that was what it was. A head and shoulders. A cheerleader grabbed my arm.
“Ambulance!” she screamed. “He needs an ambulance.”
I looked up again. Whoever had been there was gone.
NORAH McCLINTOCK won the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for crime fiction for young people five times. She wrote more than sixty YA novels, including two other Riley Donovan books, and contributed to the Seven Prequels, Seven (the series), the Seven Sequels and the Secrets series.
Read a sample from the first book in the
Riley Donovan Series
by
Norah McClintock
ONE
“Riley!” Aunt Ginny thundered. “Didn’t I ask you to break down these boxes?”
I poked my head out the kitchen door and found Aunt Ginny in the middle of the veranda. Except for a narrow pathway from the door to the steps, it was filled with empty cardboard boxes and twists of newspaper that I had used to pack fragile items like dishes. In my defense, when it came time to move, I was the one who’d done the packing—all of it, including Aunt Ginny’s bedroom, which, by definition, included Aunt Ginny’s most personal items. She was too busy finishing up the paperwork on her open cases to help me. Then, when we got here, I did most of the unpacking. I hadn’t got rid of the boxes yet, but it was on my list.
“Take care of it before I get back from work, will you?” Aunt Ginny said before trotting across the yard to her car. I surveyed the cardboard graveyard that was the back porch. It had never bothered me. I had spent most of my life moving around, especially when I was living with my dad’s dad, my grandpa Jimmy, we were often on the road with his band. But then Jimmy died and I had to go to live with relatives I’d never even met. My mom died when I was a baby. My dad? He turned into Albert Schweitzer, and if you don’t know who that is, maybe this is a good time to look it up. Dad’s a medical doctor with an international charity, and he spends almost all of his time overseas, usually in places that are too dangerous for a kid. He spent a lot of time in Darfur. Now he’s managed to get funding to set up a hospital in a remote area of Liberia. He emails me when he can.
Going to live with Aunt Ginny (my mom’s sister) after Jimmy died was tough. But it was made a little easier by getting to know Grandpa Dan, Ginny’s dad. The two of them, plus my uncles Ben and Vince, were just starting to feel like a real family to me when Aunt Ginny got a job offer she felt she couldn’t refuse, even though it meant another move for me, this time to a small town.
So now here we were, just the two of us, in a place where we knew no one and no one knew us.
Look on the bright side, Riley, I told myself. There’s always a bright side; it just isn’t always what you expect. That’s what Jimmy used to say. One of the things anyway.
And there was a bright side.
My new room.
So when Aunt Ginny left, even though I’d intended to do what she’d asked, I decided the boxes could wait. Besides, the evening seemed to stretch endlessly ahead of me. There was plenty of time. I would break down the boxes and stack them neatly after I took another look at my room.
I loved it. It was huge—three times larger than Aunt Ginny’s study in our old place, where I’d slept on a pullout bed for more than a year. My new room contained a brand-new actual double bed (with head-and footboards, a huge improvement over the creaky old hide-a-bed in Aunt Ginny’s cramped second-bedroom-office) and offered a spectacular view of the rolling meadows and farmland surrounding the rambling Victorian farmhouse Aunt Ginny had rented. It also had high ceilings and gleaming hardwood floors. I was entranced by everything about it, except the color. The walls were a dull and grimy shade of off-white, like cream left out so long that it had crusted over. I’d cajoled Aunt Ginny into buying me some sunny-yellow paint. My plan was to start painting tonight. Maybe even finish painting tonight. Aunt Ginny wouldn’t be back until morning. And it was summer. There was no school to get up for. I could paint until dawn, if I wanted to.
I pried the lid off one of the paint cans, dipped in a brush and applied a thick streak of yellow. It looked glorious, like the sun at noon, like daffodils, like summer. It didn’t take long for me to forget about the boxes, and begin to transform my poor Cinderella walls into the fair maiden who steals the prince’s heart. I didn’t stop until I had finished one whole wall, and I paused then only because I was dripping with sweat despite the gentle breeze that I felt whenever I stepped in front of my open window. I was thirsty too. I went downstairs to get a drink.
I stood at the kitchen sink, gazing out the window while I ran the water until it got cold. There was an eerie brightness in the sky over Mr. Goran’s place next door. I filled my glass and took it out onto the back porch to see what was going on.
Flames were shooting up into the sky over Mr. Goran’s property. It looked like his barn was on fire.
I raced back into the kitchen, grabbed the phone and dialed 9-1-1. I reported what I had seen and gave the address and location as calmly as I could. “On Route 30, west of Moorebridge.”
I slammed down the phone and raced outside again. Of all the places for a fire to break out, why did it have to be Mr. Goran’s farm?
Mr. Goran! Was he home? Was he awake? Did he even know his barn was on fire? Was he out there now, trying to battle the blaze? Or was he frozen to the s
pot, flooded with memories and nightmares, unable to move?
I ran across the lawn, scrambled over the fence and raced toward the blaze, yelling Mr. Goran’s name the whole way.
Lights were on in his house, but if he heard me shouting, he didn’t answer. When I hammered on his front door, it swung open. I called him again.
No answer.
If the door was unlocked, that had to mean Mr. Goran was somewhere on the property. He had to be at the barn. I ran back to the barnyard and ground to a halt when I heard the scream. It was coming from the barn. I heard something else too. Banging.
“Mr. Goran?” I shouted. “Mr. Goran, where are you?”
“Help! Help me!”
The voice was coming from inside the barn. I raced to the door and tried to pull it open, but the latch handle had been heated to scorching by the fire. I yelped and yanked my hand back. It had been burned. I wound the bottom of my T-shirt around my other hand and tried again. The latch wouldn’t give. It was stuck.
“Help!” Mr. Goran’s voice was high and panicky.
I looked around wildly and saw a pitchfork leaning against the side of a shed. I could use it to pry the door open.
Whenever I think about what happened next, I see it as if I’m watching myself in a movie. I hear screams. I’m halfway across the yard, focused on the barn and the flames and what I am about to do. I’m praying that I’ll be able to do it because I know I’m Mr. Goran’s only hope of escape. I run toward the barn. Then there is a deafening sound—an explosion—and pieces of wood and scraps of other things (I don’t even know what they are) fly past me. Then something wallops me, and I am blown backward off my feet. It’s a weird sensation. I see the barn getting farther from me instead of closer. When I land, the air is knocked out of me, and everything goes black.
I have no idea how long it is before I open my eyes. When I do, everything is blurry, but even so, I realize I am no longer alone. The yard is filled with people. One of them leans over me.
“Are you hurt?”
I try hard to focus. Why is this person shouting at me? And why does it sound like his voice is coming from the end of a long tunnel?
“Mr. Goran,” I manage to say.
“I’m a firefighter. What’s your name?”
“Did you get Mr. Goran out?”
“Mr. Goran? The owner?”
“Did he get out of the barn?”
Then someone else shouts. “There’s someone in there!” At least, I think that’s what he says. The voice sounds like it’s coming from the next county. Everything gets blurrier and then fades to black again.
The next thing I know, someone is poking at me. I hear voices. Someone lifts me. I have a sensation of speed. Then nothing. Then bright lights and someone talking loudly, asking my name. More blurriness. More double vision. More blackness.
Then Aunt Ginny. And a massive headache.
“…concussion.” That was the first word I heard when I woke up again. It didn’t come from Aunt Ginny. It was spoken by a man, probably the doctor in the white coat I saw when I opened my eyes. He was talking to Aunt Ginny against the backdrop of a sunny window. I had slept the night away.
“We’d like to keep her here today,” the doctor said. “When she goes home, she’ll need to be monitored for a few days, just to make sure.”
Just to make sure of what?
Aunt Ginny nodded. “I’ll take care of it.”
The doctor left, and Aunt Ginny sank onto a chair beside my bed. I’d never seen her look so worried.
“You’re lucky to be alive, Riley,” she said in a trembling voice. That surprised me. Aunt Ginny prided herself on being a strong person, and for the most part, that was exactly the image she conveyed. But she didn’t sound so strong now. “Another inch or two and your head would have struck the corner of that cement.” Cement? What cement?
“You could have died, Riley.” Her face was pale. “What happened?”
“I was trying to get into the barn.” I remembered that. But it was hard to recall anything else except why I was trying to get in there. I closed my eyes and tried to think. “There was an explosion. It blew me away like I was a piece of paper.”
When I opened my eyes, Aunt Ginny’s face was somber. And was that a tear gathering in the corner of her eye?
“I should have let you stay with Dan.” She meant Grandpa Dan, her father, but she never referred to him that way. She never called him Dad or Father either. It was a long story. “He’s always around. You wouldn’t have been alone. It’s not too late to go back, Riley. School doesn’t start for a couple of weeks.”
“I’m fine, Aunt Ginny,” I said, even though at that moment it felt like a gang of monkeys was playing Whack-a-Mole inside my skull. “I knew what I was doing when I said I wanted to come with you.” Aunt Ginny had given me a choice: stay with Grandpa Dan and my uncles in the city, or move with her to the rural community where she had finally gotten a job as a police detective. “Mr. Goran was in the barn when I got there, Aunt Ginny. Is he okay?”
“He’s upstairs, in Intensive Care. I’m not sure how he is.”
“Can you find out? He was screaming.” I shuddered when I remembered the terror in his voice. It was the most hideous sound I had ever heard. “He got locked in somehow.”
Aunt Ginny frowned. “What do you mean, locked in?”
I struggled to recall. “The barn door closes from the outside with a latch. The latch was stuck. I was going to get something to try to pry it open with when the explosion happened.”
“I’ll look into it. But right now you need to rest. And I have to find someone to take care of you.”
“I don’t need taking care of. I’m fine.” Except for the fact that suddenly I felt like throwing up.
“You have a concussion,” Aunt Ginny said. “There’s no way I’m leaving you on your own while I’m at work. What if something were to go wrong? What if you fell asleep and didn’t wake up? What if you had a seizure or convulsions? What if…?”
“Aunt Ginny, you’re scaring me.”
“Good. That’s why you need someone with you.” She sounded like her old self again—brisk, in charge, matter-of-fact Aunt Ginny didn’t believe in sugar-coating anything. Not at work or at home. “If anything had happened to you, you’d have been in for big trouble, young lady, and I mean it. Now get some rest. I’ll be back in a while.”
“Find out how Mr. Goran is,” I called after her.
“Rest.”
I tried to, but it wasn’t easy. I kept hearing Mr. Goran’s screams. And I couldn’t shake Aunt Ginny’s words. Another inch or two…
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