What Emma Left Behind
By Anne and Carolyne Spackman
Copyright 2012 by Anne and Carolyne Spackman
All Rights Reserved.
Spunky identical twins Caera and Claudia Campbell will argue about a lot of things, like who forgot to screw the lid back on the toothpaste tube and whose socks are the ones with holes in the toes or who finished off the absolute last of the peanut butter, but they agree on how it all happened. What was "it?"
How they, with the help of their best friend, Ana, solved the age-old mystery of Emma Campbell's murder. Neither of the girls expected to have the scary dreams that took them back in time, or to find Emma Campbells' diary. Emma Campbell had been dead for two hundred years, and the Campbell treasure had been missing for just as long. And neither of the girls ever expected to let the Davenport twins in on their adventure. After all, Alex and Andrew had been their greatest enemies since pre-school!
But a lot happened that year to change everything!
Before the Storm
“You?!” she cried as the darkened figure stepped nearer. “You?!” She couldn’t hide her surprise. Because she knew who he was, the man who had been trying to kill her. He had found her at last.
She turned and ran. The pier was cold and wet, and she felt the chill seeping into her feet. Into her thin silk shoes, with big buckles and heels too high to really run in.
She was alone, crying her terror into the night. Only he was just behind her.
The fog was such a thick vapor, she couldn’t even see the shore.
She heard breathing behind her, close behind her.
Help me! She thought in fear. It couldn’t end this way!
Suddenly she shrieked as hands clasped around her throat. She was dragged backwards a few feet as she struggled desperately against the huge hands cutting off air.
Her head shook and convulsed as she tried to gasp for breath. There was none. The world was going dark. She felt a small sting on her neck, like a hard little stone pressing into her flesh.
No!!... the world was spinning. She could no longer see. But as her thoughts began to fail, she felt creeping cold around her, the creeping cold of icy water filling up her lungs.
It can’t end this way! I will not rest.
And then all went black.
* * * * *
"Claudia Campbell, will you please pay attention and answer the question!" Mrs. Smith cried, glaring hard at the not quite thirteen year-old girl sitting at a desk by the window.
Uh-oh. Caera Campbell winced.
Claudia was looking outside at a white birch tree in the school courtyard, but now she looked back at her teacher. Mrs. Smith was what the students of her seventh grade English class called scary. Her crafty, ice-blue eyes peered at Claudia above thick, silver-rimmed glasses, and her unruly steel-gray hair was tied in a loose bun on the back of her head with wispy tufts framing her round, red face. A face that grew redder the more irritated Mrs. Smith became.
"It's a gerund?" Claudia guessed. Was it possible no one else could hear how fast her heart was racing?
"Correct." Mrs. Smith said in disappointment. Then, her eyes slowly narrowed in irritation. Her face got redder. There was nothing the old woman despised more than daydreaming or the person she caught doing it.
Mrs. Smith was a very stern old lady who liked to feel in control of her students, and she had been known to say, "I run a tight ship," on the first day of classes.
Today, Mrs. Smith appeared to be in one of her "the problem with kids today" moods, or at least that was what Claudia and Caera called them. Mrs. Smith could become downright preachy about what was specifically wrong with whatever unfortunate victim--oops, student, she chose on any given day. Claudia knew she really shouldn't have let her attention wander or she was bound to become the focal point at which Mrs. Smith could unleash her frustrations. Frustrations about the ills of modern society and the growing perniciousness (one of their weekly vocabulary words) of youth.
Caera Campbell was sitting in safety at the back of the classroom, but she was still afraid of Mrs. Smith. Of course, she wasn't afraid for her own sake. She was worried about her sister Claudia, her identical twin sister Claudia.
Claudia had started staring out the window again. Mrs. Smith had noticed and was headed her way. There was nothing Caera could do to save her!
"Claudia, is there something interesting you want to share with the rest of us?" Mrs. Smith asked icily.
"Me?" Claudia asked, whitening. If you have ever had a teacher like Mrs. Smith, you can guess how she felt. She had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.
"Of course you, dear."
Claudia sat a moment, uncomfortable.
“Well, actually—no.” Claudia said.
“No?”
“It’s—I was thinking of a story for our writing assignment.”
“Claudia Campbell, do you expect me to believe—” Mrs. Smith began.
Then the bell rang and drowned out the rest.
“See you tomorrow, Mrs. Smith?” Claudia asked.
“Yes, Claudia, more than likely.” Mrs. Smith sighed and retreated reluctantly, as though it wasn't worth the effort to pursue Claudia's humiliation. As Mrs. Smith returned to man her post at the blackboard, Claudia picked up her blue and green bookbag and hurried to the door. Caera was already waiting outside in the hallway, where the coast was clear.
The Campbell twins headed down the middle school hallway, dodging this way and that as students rushed by eating, laughing, scattering papers onto the already littered floor, and squirting water into each other's faces out of little plastic water-guns. Claudia often wondered if there were a single middle school in the country that was known for being clean and orderly.
Caera and Claudia Campbell looked exactly alike but never wore the same outfit at the same time if they could help it. Both girls had light blue eyes and bone-straight, dark blond hair with reddish streaks, which is a nice way of saying dishwater blond. They were both tall for their age, athletic, spunky, and smart when they wanted to be (which really meant that they could be lazy if not challenged hard enough). Of course, as twins, they liked a lot of the same things, especially in music, books, and movies, though they had slightly different personalities.
More than anything, both girls despised questions like, "So which one is the smart twin?" and "Which one is the fun twin?" Asking these kinds of questions was the worst way of annoying real twins, as far as they were concerned. Honestly, who wanted to be branded the dumb twin or the boring twin? Caera and Claudia thought they were both pretty much equal, but other people seemed to relish the opportunity to make comparisons. Other twin questions were okay, though, Caera and Claudia admitted. Sometimes people asked them, "So what's it like being a twin?"
Caera and Claudia always answered this with a question of their own.
"So what's it like not being a twin?" they wondered.
Still, in general they were pretty glad they had each other, even though worrying about each other could be a drag now and again. After all, how many other people had to put up with their family members hanging around them during the day? Most teachers tried to keep Caera and Claudia apart whenever they could by putting the twins in different classrooms for the same subjects. But the only thing more annoying to the twins than being stuck with each other whether they liked it or not was being forcefully kept apart. Which their parents did to them sometimes, especially when the girls started arguing.
Caera and Claudia argued a lot, about silly things like who forgot to screw the lid on the toothpaste tube or whose turn it was to take out the trash. And when Caera and Claudia fought, they really fought. But they made up fast, too,
and when they made up, they forgot all about the argument they'd just had, no matter how nasty they had just been to each other. Their mother sometimes called them "an old married couple", whatever that meant. Caera and Claudia suspected this comment was meant to be an insult, but they hadn't quite figured out how yet.
Finally, they reached their lockers, which were, of course, arranged alphabetically and right next to each other's. Caera made a mental note of her homework assignments, took out her world cultures history book from her locker with its tattered paper cover and tossed it irreverently into the mess of papers in her backpack. She slammed the locker shut with a loud bang and pushed it once again to make sure it was closed.
Meanwhile Claudia packed away the English book in her pretty pegasus bookbag. History, French, science, and English were classes the girls shared at the same time, but they took all the same subjects, so they kept a copy of the math book and the music book permanently at home. In fact, the twins thought the system they had devised was ingenious, truly ingenious. Who needed to lug home more heavy books than absolutely necessary? So, every day during lunch they just made sure to swap the math and music books they kept at school.
"Claudia, you've got to stop doing that." Caera said suddenly as she waited for Claudia to finish rummaging through her locker.
"What?" Claudia asked, completely baffled, now closing her locker door gingerly.
Caera sighed. Wasn't it obvious? "Daydreaming in class, especially this early in the school year." She said. "You know how—"
"People can never remember which one of us does what." Claudia finished. It was very easy for them to finish each other’s sentences. It was almost as if they could read each other's minds sometimes. People always asked them, too, if being twins meant they had ESP or something, or if they could cheat on tests by talking to each other telepathically. They were still waiting to see if they ever could.
"Right." Caera nodded. "Everyone will say, 'there goes Claudia Campbell'. She and her sister always look like they're someplace else! So if you're not going to pay attention, then at least look like you're listening."
"I'll try to remember." Claudia's eyes drifted toward the hallway.
"Are you okay?" Caera asked.
"Sure." Claudia said. "Hey, Caera?"
"What?"
"Have you ever imagined what it would have been like if we'd been born a hundred years ago? I mean, can you imagine what this place must have looked like back then?"
So this was what she'd been daydreaming about?!
"Not really." Caera said sarcastically and shot her sister a skeptical look. "There was just a field here, anyway." Honestly, Claudia always asks the strangest questions at the strangest times, Caera thought.
"I bet it was interesting living way back when." Claudia continued. "Hey, Caera, how come nothing interesting ever seems to happen to us?"
"Because absolutely nothing interesting ever happens in this little town." Caera said knowingly. And it was true. They went to school in a tiny seaside town in New England so undistinguished that even other people in the small state of Massachusetts had rarely heard of it. (We won't mention the name, though, so as not to offend anyone living there.)
"You mean nothing ever happens to stupid girls." A mocking voice interrupted.
Laughter sounded behind the twins at an uncomfortable volume.
Caera and Claudia turned around and came face to face with the Davenport duo, Alex and Andrew, the only other set of twins in the seventh grade. The girls glared at them defiantly. Alex and Andrew just smiled in an irritating way.
Both boys had feathered black hair and sky blue eyes, so the only way to tell them apart unless you really knew them was that Alex wore a brown leather watch on his left arm. Andrew never seemed to care about what time it was, or anything much for that matter, and was always late wherever he went.
Alex (he was wearing a watch) was grinning fiendishly now. He broke away suddenly, with a triumphant call of "Twinkies!" Both boys danced away but kept strategically within range close enough to hurl further insults.
It was a well-known fact to everyone in the seventh grade that the Davenports and the Campbells disliked each other. Their rivalry dated clear back to Rockport pre-school, when they had been forced to share the same sandbox. Claudia could just imagine how it must have happened—
“Oh look, two sets of twins—one boys and one girls! My my, how cute! Let's let them play together!”
Well, that idea had worked all right for a while, until one afternoon, Andrew had stuck a wad of chewing gum on top of Caera's head, and her mother had had to cut nearly a third of her hair to get it all out. Caera had been miserable for years waiting for her hair to grow even, and she and Claudia had never forgotten the incident. Or how the girls had been teased by the Davenports ever since.
The rivalry had developed and continued over the years, and even though the girls had recently noticed that the Davenports were kind of clever and maybe even cute, Caera and Claudia would never admit they thought so. Caera still said she'd rather drink rat poison than ever admit this to another soul, but that was just Caera being dramatic. Claudia had thought that now they were all too old for name-calling and holding grudges.
Apparently, however, Alex and Andrew didn't agree.
"Shut up, Alex-ander!" Claudia put emphasis on the last syllables of his name, because she knew that he preferred to be called Alex and because she couldn't think of any other comeback. At the beginning of every school year, he always made it a point to his teachers that he hated his full legal name. Alex winced and turned to leave, but Andrew had a sudden inspiration.
"Ah man, I'm afraid!" he said, in a way that suggested he was anything but. "Alex, we'd better watch out, or else we'll be in double trouble!" The boys laughed, with the kind of laugh that really let you know your place, somewhere on a scale between laundry lint and toenail clippings. The boys were still laughing as they continued down the hallway and disappeared through a door. Claudia watched them leave, steaming.
Double trouble?! When would those Davenports ever come up with some original insults? she wondered.
"Were they trying to be funny?" Claudia asked with a shrug. "I suppose it hasn't occurred to them that they're twins, too. We could just as easily make fun of the fact that they've been sharing one brain since birth—"
"Not if you don't want them to use that against us later." Caera sighed in resignation. "Come on, Claudia, let's just go home."
She and Claudia agreed and headed toward the main hallway where lots of students stood in large groups to talk, effectively blocking the hallway while waiting for friends who were coming to meet them.
"Excuse me." Caera directed at the crowd that blocked her exit, a crowd mostly made of eighth graders. She waited for them to move, but they kept on talking. No one even turned around as she shoved her way through. She and Claudia walked out of the low, squat school building and across the close-cut front lawn, the hot early autumn sun beating down on them.
Huffing and puffing and trying to catch her breath, the twins' best friend, Ana, ran across the gravelly parking lot to join them. Ana Robinson was shorter than them by an inch or two and had fawn brown hair and hazel eyes that sometimes turned green. They were all as close as sisters. After all, Caera and Claudia were the only ones in school who knew Ana's most dreadful secret, that Mrs. Robinson had named her daughter "Annika" after a character in Pippi Longstocking. Ana was just what everyone called her. She was also what adults called excitable and idealistic, and maybe not as sarcastic as Caera and Claudia were yet, but she was getting there, with a lot of practice.
"Hey guys! I thought you'd already be gone by now." Ana called.
"We got sidetracked." Claudia made a face.
"Alex? or Andrew? or was it both of them?" Ana asked with a laugh.
"How'd you guess?" Caera wondered.
"I didn't." Ana admitted. "Actually, I saw
you two just as they were leaving, but I got stopped by Marie Summit, who wanted to talk to me about the school's new newspaper. She thinks she's a real reporter now just like her mother and won't stop interviewing people."
"Hey, I just had a brilliant idea!" Caera interrupted.
"What?" They turned to her.
"Maybe you could spend the night this Friday, Ana. It's the thirteenth!"
"We could stay up all night. Have a movie marathon." Ana suggested.
"As long as you don't fall asleep this time, Ana." Claudia teased. "If you do, we'll just have to freeze your training bra."
"No you won't!" Ana cried. "But the rest of it sounds like fun. Are you guys gonna get pizza?"
"Are you kidding? What else does Caera eat?" Claudia said.
"Shut up!" Caera cried in mock-injured tones. "At least I don't talk about boys every third minute." This was directed at Claudia, but Ana thought Caera was referring to her.
"And so what are you saying—that I do?"
"I don't have to say anything, Ana. You just said it yourself." Ana mocked a hurt look, and Claudia said consolingly,
"Caera doesn't understand, Ana. She'll never be able to love anyone as much as Mr. Pizza."
"That's not funny!'' Caera sniffed. "You guys always team up against me!" Caera had a flair for drama. Of course, the other two didn't always team up against her, but it was sure a lot of fun to see what would happen when they did.
"We're sorry, Caera." Claudia said after a moment.
"Yeah, we're sorry." Ana agreed. Caera brightened.
"Okay, I've got another brilliant idea." Caera said mysteriously.
"What?" Ana asked.
"We could make up a tent on the lawn." Caera said, with an air of excitement.
"Nah, Mom won't let us use the good sheets for that anymore." Claudia reminded her.
"Besides, it's supposed to rain this Friday." Ana said.
"Oh." Caera's face fell.
"Hey, Ana, your mom's here." Claudia said, pointing ahead. Sure enough, Mrs. Robinson's red Oldsmobile had turned into the parking lot with the screech of new tires.
"Well, we'll figure out the details later, okay? Bye Caera, bye Claudia!" Ana said, hurrying away, her green backpack bouncing as she went. She turned back with a wave as her mother's car pulled up beside the curb. The car behind Mrs. Robinson honked for her to get a move on, so Ana rushed inside.
Caera and Claudia waved, feeling less excited by themselves, as the red car sped away. Who wanted to do things with just a twin sister, anyway? they sometimes thought. Everything was so much more fun when Ana was with them. Ana was their third musketeer. Without her, they were just Caera and Claudia.
Sometimes, though, that could be a lot of fun, too.