Just as I was about to creep back to bed, I thought I saw something move in the shadows on the road. Curious, I watched until I saw a person step out into the moonlight almost directly beneath my window.
Drawing back, I stared at the old woman, afraid that she might see me. She lifted her face toward me and seemed to study the house, her eyes moving from window to window and stopping when they reached mine. For what seemed like a very long time, we stood staring at each other. Just when I thought I couldn't stand it anymore, she raised her hand in a strange gesture and turned away, leaning heavily on a tall walking stick.
For a few seconds, I stood still and watched her bent figure slowly disappear again into the shadows. Then I ran back to bed, shivering with cold.
As I pulled the covers over me, Jason stirred and mumbled, and I snuggled up against him, grateful for the warmth of his body. I tried to forget about the old woman, tried not to think about what she might have been doing wandering around in the night, tried not to worry about the doors that Aunt Grace never locked.
Chapter 3
When I woke up, I had the bed to myself. I could hear Jason prattling away to Aunt Grace in the kitchen, but I just lay there staring at the wall, not hungry enough to drag myself downstairs.
The wallpaper was very old-fashioned, a blue design on a beige background, repeating its patterns endlessly, and I liked looking for things in it. People, animals, birds; as in clouds, you could see all sorts of interesting things in the swirling, geometric shapes. This morning, though, it seemed to be full of old women. They stared at me from all sides, wrinkled and ugly, shaking their fists, leaning on walking sticks, making it impossible for me to enjoy staying in bed.
Not sure if I'd really seen the old woman outside the house, I got up and walked to the window. Like last night, the road was empty. Not a car, not a truck, not even a bicycle passed by, and it seemed highly unlikely that I'd really seen anyone there. After all, the nearest house was a mile away. Where could she have come from? It didn't make sense.
Opening a bureau drawer, I pulled out a T-shirt and a pair of running shorts. As I was combing my hair, I heard Jason bellowing up the stairs.
"Laurie, breakfast is ready!"
"I'm not hungry!" I shouted back. I could smell bacon and pancakes, but it was already hot, too hot to eat anything.
By the time I sat down at the table, Aunt Grace and Jason were up to their ears in pancakes. "At last!" Aunt Grace smiled at me and started piling some onto a plate for me. "What would you like to drink? A big glass full of cold milk?"
My stomach lurched at the sight of all that food and the thought of milk. "I told Jason I wasn't hungry. All I want is a glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee." The pancakes were perfect, golden brown and lacy at the edges, but I shoved them across the table at Jason. "Here, you want them?"
He grinned, his mouth so full that syrup dribbled out the corners and ran down his chin. "Sure, I love pancakes."
Aunt Grace handed me the juice and coffee. "How about some cereal or toast?"
I shook my head. "This is all I ever eat for breakfast." I drank my juice and then my coffee, trying to ignore Jason. He was making faces at me, opening his mouth and shoving a mash of pancakes and syrup through his teeth, deliberately trying to make me sick. As I swallowed the last of my coffee, I pushed my chair away from the table and started to leave the kitchen.
"Laura, take your things to the sink and rinse them, please." Aunt Grace looked up at me from her drawing table. She said it pleasantly and she was smiling, but I knew she meant it.
Without a word, I picked up my mug and glass and ran water over them.
"What's written on the front of your T-shirt?" Aunt Grace peered at me, trying to read the fancy sparkly decal.
"It says, I don't get mad, I get even." I looked down at my shirt and remembered the day I bought it. I'd gone to the mall with Kim, my best friend. We both had our baby-sitting money and we'd picked out T-shirts in a store where the salesgirl ironed any decal you wanted onto your shirt. Kim had picked out one that said. Love is something special, even though I'd told her it was sappy, and I'd gotten this one. Mom wanted to make me take it back, but they don't allow you to return things after they put on the decal, so I kept it. After all, I spent my own money on it. And I liked it.
"Is that your philosophy?" Aunt Grace looked at me curiously, as if she were trying to figure out what kind of person I was.
I shrugged. "Maybe." I was halfway to the door when I remembered the old woman. "I saw somebody in the road last night," I said. "An old lady. She was staring at the house. Do you know who she is?"
Aunt Grace dropped her eyes, a sure sign she wasn't going to be completely truthful. "It must have been Maude Blackthorne. She's the town eccentric. Perfectly harmless but a little crazy, you know? Every town has one."
"Not Stoneleigh. I've never seen anybody like that walk by our house."
"Oh, well, Stoneleigh." Aunt Grace shrugged, dismissing Stoneleigh. "It's too new to have a town eccentric."
"Does she live in Blue Hollow?" Blue Hollow, the nearest town, was at least five miles away. I couldn't imagine a woman that old walking five miles on a lonely road in the middle of the night.
"No, she lives up in the hills somewhere." Aunt Grace gestured vaguely toward the woods behind her house.
"Is she a total maniac or what?" I was getting more and more interested. Imagine living in a place where lunatics walked the roads at night. I could hardly wait to write a long letter to Kim, telling her all about the danger I was in. "She made weird gestures." I waved my fist, imitating the old woman.
"No, she's not a maniac, just a little eccentric like I said. Kind of nasty and spiteful, too. I'd steer clear of her if I were you."
I nodded and stole a glance at Jason. Just as I thought, he was sitting there, his fork halfway to his mouth, staring wide-eyed at Aunt Grace. "She's probably a witch who lures little kids to her house and eats them for dinner," I said, looking at Jason out of the corner of my eye.
"Don't be ridiculous, Laura!" Aunt Grace spoke so crossly that I stared at her in surprise. "She's just a pitiful, lonely old woman."
Jason slid off his chair and ran to Aunt Grace's side, his face worried. "There's no such thing as witches, is there?" he asked.
"Of course not, Jason. Laura was joking." Aunt Grace frowned at me over Jason's head. "Just forget about Maude," she said to me.
See what I mean? I'm always getting bawled out and blamed for every little thing. Without a word to either of them, I went out on the back porch, letting the screen door slam shut behind me.
But I didn't get to enjoy my privacy long. A couple of minutes later, the screen door slammed again and Jason sat down next to me, smiling and smelling as if he'd taken a bath in maple syrup. "What are you doing, Laurie?" he asked.
"Nothing." I stared at the mountains rising in the distance like a wall between me and Stoneleigh.
"Want to go down to the creek? Aunt Grace said we can."
I shrugged.
"It's cooler there." Jason scratched a mosquito bite on his leg. "We could build sand castles again."
Before I could say anything, I heard the screen door open. Aunt Grace smiled down at me. "That sounds like a great idea," she said. "It's supposed to go up to ninety this afternoon, and if I didn't have a picture to finish, I'd go with you and build a castle or two myself."
"Come on, Laurie." Jason tugged at my hand, anxious to go. Slowly I got up and allowed him to pull me across the lawn. Going to the creek with Jason was better than sitting around the house with Aunt Grace. Not much better, but still, as Jason said, it was cooler there.
"Don't forget what I told you," Aunt Grace called after us. "Stay on this side of the creek. The woods on the other side are tricky and you could get lost."
"We won't go in the woods," I promised, more to placate her than anything else. For some reason those woods looked interesting to me, and I planned to explore them someday. I was sure I woul
dn't get lost. After all, I'd earned a woodcraft badge in Girl Scouts last year.
By the time we got to the creek, we were hot and sweaty from walking across the field in the sun. Taking off our shoes, we waded out into the water and splashed around, up to our knees in the deepest places.
"Look, Laurie." Jason held up a handful of dripping stones. "Don't they look pretty? They're like jewels, all shiny and bright and pink and yellow and silvery white. But when they're dry, they're just dull and tan and not pretty at all." He opened his fingers and let the stones fall in a glittering shower back into the water.
"I know. Seashells are like that too," I said. "Remember last summer when we went to Ocean City? We filled our buckets with shells, but when we took them back to the motel, they dried out, just like those stones, and they weren't pretty at all. Just broken pieces of old oyster shells, that's all they were."
"Daddy lived with us then, and he got mad at me because I was scared of the waves." Jason swirled one foot around in the water.
"Daddy just wanted you to be brave, Jasie."
Jason turned his back and walked farther downstream, kicking up a spray of water in front of him. When he was several yards away, he turned around, tears running down his face. "If I hadn't been scared of the waves and the deep end of the swimming pool and if I'd learned to play football and if I hadn't cried so much, Daddy would still live with us, Laurie!"
"It wasn't because of those things, Jason, it wasn't!" He looked so pitiful, I felt terrible. "Don't you remember that book from the library? It said children always think it's their fault, but it isn't. The divorce was between Mom and Dad, not us, Jason!"
"Books are wrong sometimes," he said. "I wasn't tough like Daddy wanted me to be and that's why he left."
I shook my head. "Come on, let's build a sand castle, okay?"
"Okay," he mumbled, wiping his eyes on the sleeve of his T-shirt. He waded slowly back to the strip of sandy gravel we called our beach and squatted down next to me. "Do you really mean that?" he asked, still looking pretty weepy.
I nodded. "You didn't have anything to do with it." I patted his arm in a motherly way and smiled at him. "Now come on, let's see how big a castle you can make."
For a long time, we squatted side by side shaping castles out of damp sand. All around us, birds sang in the woods. The shadows from the trees stretched over-us, dappling everything with greenish light, and the creek chattered away to itself as it ran over the stones, sparkling in the sunlight. It was so peaceful that I forgot about everything except my castle.
I was just finishing up my third tower, when I started getting a funny feeling. Looking over my shoulder, I expected to see Aunt Grace standing behind me watching me, but I didn't see anyone. Just the creek and the trees and the clouds in the sky.
"What's the matter?" Jason looked up at me. "Are you finished?"
I didn't want to scare him, so I didn't say anything about my feeling that someone was watching us. "It's getting awfully hot," I said. And it was. The sun had moved overhead, chasing the shade back into the woods. My T-shirt was sticking to my back and my hair was a hot weight on the nape of my neck. On top of the heat, every mosquito for miles around had decided I was a gourmet's delight. "Let's go for a walk or something, wade up the creek where it's shady."
"I want to stay here," Jason said.
Jumping up, I shoved my foot through my castle. My towers crumbled and fell, and I smoothed the rest of it flat with my foot.
"Why did you do that?" Jason asked.
"It was a dumb castle and I was tired of it. Come on, let's do something else."
"No, I want to finish my castle." Jason squatted next to his castle, pouting.
I shoved my foot toward his walls. "Rummm, rummm, rummm," I said, making a rumbling engine sound. "Here comes the urban renewal bulldozer."
"No, Laurie!" Scuttling sidewise like a little crab, Jason thrust himself between me and his castle. "Stop it, Laurie! Don't wreck it!"
"Rummm, rummm, rummm." My foot grazed Jason's leg, gritty with sand. "Rummm, rummm, rummm!"
"Please, Laurie, please, it's my best castle!" Tears started spouting out of Jason's eyes the way they do in cartoons.
Feeling like a rotten bully, I stared down at him. "If I promise not to wreck your castle, will you go for a walk with me?"
"That's not fair. I don't want to go for a walk."
"Urban renewal is never fair," I said, remembering hearing Dad tell Mom something like that during an argument. "Life's never fair." I wiggled my foot under his leg, heading toward the castle again.
"Okay, okay!" Jason crouched next to his castle, his face red with anger. "But you better promise not to wreck it."
"I promise, Jasie. When we get back, I'll even help you dig a moat around it. How about that?"
Jason got up slowly, brushing his sandy hands on the seat of his shorts. "Which way are we going?"
"How about this way?" I pointed downstream and Jason followed me into the water, avoiding fallen branches and ducking under low-hanging bushes.
Picking up a leaf, I dropped it into the water. I watched the current snatch it up, whirl it around, and carry it away, whisking it past stones and hurrying it around snags. "Just think, Jason, if we were tiny, like Thumbelina, we could ride that leaf all the way to Washington, D.C."
"How do you know where this creek goes?" Jason scowled at me, still angry for being forced to leave his castle.
"Well, this creek dumps into a bigger stream and then a bigger one till it finally dumps into the Potomac River and the Potomac River goes right through Washington. You can see it from the top floor of Daddy's office building."
"I bet not many leaves get all the way to Washington." Jason pointed to a bunch of sticks jammed between two rocks. "See? Your leaf's already stuck."
I shrugged. "So? If we were riding on it, we'd steer around things like that."
Stepping over the snag, I splashed ahead of him, trying to ignore his whiny little voice complaining that I was walking too fast, that sharp stones were hurting his feet, that he wanted to go home. All of a sudden, I wanted to get away from him, from Aunt Grace, from all the safe sunny places where we usually played. I wanted to plunge into the wilderness and experience something strange; I wanted something to happen.
A movement in the leaves over my head caught my attention. Looking up, I saw a crow perched on a limb curving over the water, his head turned toward me. He stared at me fearlessly, and I stopped, ankle deep in the creek, afraid to move until he flew away.
After a few seconds, the crow cawed loudly, still looking at me, and launched himself into the air. Without knowing why, I splashed after him, trying to keep his dark shape in sight.
Chapter 4
"It's getting too deep, Laurie," Jason whimpered. "I'm scared I'll slip and fall."
Up to my own knees in swirling brown water, I looked back at Jason. The creek had narrowed. On one side, a wall of rocks rose up steeply and on the other the bank was much higher than it had been. The jolly sound the water had made as it ran rapidly over pebbles in the sunlight had deepened into a melancholy gurgle.
"Let's go back," Jason pleaded. "I don't like it here. It's scary."
I looked across the stream. At the top of the bank I could see a path. "Why don't we climb up there and follow that path back? I'm tired of wading."
Jason looked worried. "Aunt Grace said we weren't supposed to cross the creek."
"So? She isn't here to see us, is she? And, anyway, she's not our mother. We don't have to do everything she tells us."
"But we might get lost." By now Jason was standing next to me, plucking at my shorts with one hand.
"How can we get lost? The path follows the creek. Come on, Jason, my feet feel absolutely waterlogged. Look, they're all wrinkly, the way they get if you stay in the bathtub too long." I held up one foot and almost lost my balance. "Besides, this water is freezing cold."
To my relief, he followed me across the creek and I helped him clim
b up the bank. Just as I thought, the path wound along the creek, curving around tall pines and outcroppings of rock, barely wide enough for one person to walk on. With Jason behind me, I felt like an Indian scout creeping through the forest.
"This is a scary place," Jason whispered, stepping on my heels in his eagerness to keep up with me. "It makes me think of Hansel and Gretel. Are you sure we won't get lost?"
"Of course we won't get lost. Look, the creek's right there." I looked down at the water frothing along between the rocks and I felt uneasy, just the way I had when we were building our castles.
All around us, the pines rose tall and straight toward the sky, blocking out the sunlight, carpeting the ground with a cushion of brown needles. Here and there, between the trees, rocks shoved their way out of the earth, towering over our heads. Like trolls turned to stone, the rocks had a watchful quality, as if they were silently waiting for someone or something to bring them back to life.
I looked all around, trying to see if anyone was following us, but all I saw was a crow, perched on the limb of a pine tree over my head. His yellow eyes reminded me of Aunt Grace's painting and I made a shooing motion at him, willing him to fly away.
"What was that?" Jason grabbed my arm and I jumped, startled.
"What?" I stood so still I could hear my heart pounding.
"I thought I heard something behind us." Jason clung to my hand, staring over his shoulder.
"It was probably a squirrel or a bird." I looked around, hoping I'd see a squirrel dash up a tree trunk. "Where did you hear it?"
"Over there." He pointed off into the woods behind us, at a boulder rising out of a bed of fern, its face bearded with moss and spotted with lichen.
"Come on." I grabbed his hand and yanked him along behind me. I wanted to get back to Aunt Grace's house.
"Well, well, well, who have we here?" An old woman wearing a strange assortment of mismatched clothing stepped out of the woods ahead, blocking the path. Like a cat ready to pounce, she stared at us, leaning her weight on a walking stick that was almost as tall as she was.