* * * * *
Claudia cycled faster, sweat dripping from her forehead behind her blue headband. A cool breeze blew past her neck. She made an unusual sight in the old town square, not because her blue ten-speed sport bike nearly crashed into careless pedestrians on the bumpy red brick sidewalk, but because this was Claudia Campbell and Caera was nowhere in sight. Both girls usually came to town on Sunday afternoons to pay a visit to the best ice cream parlor for miles around, but Caera had been called to the phone and was still talking when Claudia left. Claudia had cycled for nearly an hour before she came to the old part of town.
Coming up on her left was the town library and records building, built in the 1800's. The enormous gray stone building had a spacious lawn surrounded by a natural fence of flowering trees. Claudia quickly chained her bike to a nearby rack and ran up the library's winding entranceway. She had to hurry because the library closed in half an hour.
Claudia soon found the computers and began looking up records books of the history of her town like a young and brazen Sherlock Holmes. As it turned out, they were in the back of the left hand corner and looked as though they hadn't been touched for over fifty years.
After a while, Claudia pulled out an old brown book with a complete history of the town up until the eighteenth century and carefully opened the withered cover.
Published 1902, she noticed. "Whew! This is an old book!" She thought.
Campbell... anything out of the ordinary... she looked over the pages in the index and thumbed to a worn yellow page with a black and white photo of her house above a large printed "Campbell" in calligraphic letters.
She flipped through the pages. There were several portraits of people in frilly satin outfits with strange serene eyes. There were also a lot of details about some religious controversy that had happened in Scotland in the time of Charles II, a controversy which had caused many Scots to go to Ireland, then finally to America. Some of them had apparently settled nearby. Claudia glanced through the pages, then stopped abruptly at the solemn portrait of a young girl with long, dark blonde hair and blue eyes. She wore a broad lace collar and a heavy-looking blue silk dress, and her hair was arranged in a strange fashion high on her head, with curls trailing down.
Claudia just stared at her for a minute. Then, glancing down, she squinted to see the tiny nameplate that had been printed along with the painting.
Emma Campbell, 1767. Claudia spent a moment searching for the name on the opposing page. It was near the bottom and continued onto the next page.
"Born 1755, died 1768."
Claudia almost closed the book. This Emma was only thirteen when she died?
“Emma Campbell was born into a wealthy Scottish immigrant family in 1755,” Claudia read in silence. “Her mother, Emma MacArthur, died in 1758. In 1768, the Campbell family ran into debt. James Campbell was murdered on December 27, 1768. Emma Campbell was mysteriously killed the following week, on December 31, 1768.
“Aaron Davenport, a friend and associate of Mr. Campbell, was tried for the murder of James Campbell in 1769 but was found shot in the head during the trial. It was rumored that he committed suicide.”
Davenport? Claudia could hardly believe what she had read. Could it be a coincidence that Alex and Andrew were also named Davenport?
Her heart was racing. She slammed the book shut. Caera, she had to show this to Caera!
She raced to the front of the library to check the book out.
"That's an interesting book." The librarian said as she cast it under the scanner. "Do you have a book report to do?"
"No," Claudia said, shaking her head. "I just wanted to look up some family history."
"Campbell," the librarian said, looking over Claudia's library card. A crease formed between her dark brows. "You wouldn't know anything about the legend of the Campbell murders, would you?"
"My dad used to talk about that," Claudia said, thinking back, "but I guess I wasn't listening carefully enough."
The librarian smiled. "We used to tell ghost stories about it in my day." She said, shaking her head reminiscently.
"What kinds of stories?" Claudia asked, now curious.
"About the Campbell girl who was murdered in town a long time ago. The Campbell murders were the first ever to happen in this town, you know."
"Was the girl's name Emma?" Claudia asked, knowing that it was.
"Could be." The librarian shrugged. "But people from time back said the girl kept a diary. Rumor had it that the diary would tell who murdered the Campbells and why. Another popular myth is that her diary says what happened to the Campbell money. You see, the first Campbells who came here had a lot of money a long time ago, before the Revolutionary War. Then they lost it, no one knows how. Tales about Campbell treasure seemed to grow with every generation, until people from this area started moving away to the cities."
"I never knew that." Claudia said.
"You learn something new every day." The librarian laughed. "If you're living in Argyll House, you'll be distant relations of the Campbells who built it. I'm surprised you haven't gone out looking for the treasure yourself."
"No one ever found the diary?" Claudia asked.
"Not that I know of," the librarian answered.
"Thank you," Claudia said, and let the person behind her in to the counter. The librarian had given her a lot to think about, Claudia reflected as she left the building. In a few minutes, she had freed her bike from the rack and was cycling down the road.
Caera the Brave
School on Monday was terrible. There was a pop quiz in Math, which nearly everybody failed, and Mr. Sudge, more commonly known as "Mr. Smudge" (the name had stuck because whatever he wrote on the chalkboard with his right hand was somehow erased by his left sleeve), decided to give two extra assignments as a good dose of medicine. On her way to history, Claudia heard a familiar voice calling her name.
"Hey, Claudia!"
Claudia groaned. The last person she wanted to talk to right now was Emily Miles, but Emily paraded past and turned to face Claudia.
"Did you finish your Science Fair Project?" Emily asked, her eyes narrowed. Claudia wondered why the image of a boa constrictor suddenly came to mind.
"Why do you ask?" Claudia said, trying not to show her anxiety. Science Fair Project? How, how could she have forgotten? She never forgot these things! Horror of horrors--did this mean she'd fail science, after all of her hard work on the tests and homework, the things that really mattered?
"Well," Emily said smugly, "because I visited the science room this morning to turn in my project and I saw everyone's there except--" she paused in triumph, "except yours."
"That's nice, Emily." Claudia tried to shrug it off. "I guess you didn't look very hard." She turned away and entered the history room. On the way to her seat, she was getting desperate. "What am I going to do?" she sat thinking for a few minutes as everyone came in and took their seats.
Meanwhile, across the room, Caera stifled a yawn. History lectures from Mr. Hoffmeyer were dull. When would teachers ever realize that history would be so much more fun if they spent less time talking about "dates and periods" and more time teaching their students about what life had really been like for ordinary people living long ago? Caera wondered, her mind wandering. What had the people of the past thought about the time they lived in?
Anyway, who could ever remember dates, when they meant nothing just sitting there on a page by themselves? She didn't care except that she had to memorize them for the next history test, and she wouldn't care, not until Mr. Hoffmeyer started giving better lectures.
"And the Babylonian Empire fell around 1595 BC. The Trojan War took place around 1200 BC..." Mr. Hoffmeyer was saying.
"Mr. Hoffmeyer?" Caera interrupted.
"Yes?" he asked, turning around.
"Is it true that Julius Caesar had epilepsy?" she asked, thinking about a scene in the movie Cleopatra. E
veryone in the room stared at her. Mr Hoffmeyer's bushy brows crooked into peaks.
"Well, I don't know for sure," Mr. Hoffmeyer admitted. "But yes, I think so." After that he turned back to his notes on the dates of the Pelopponesian War.
So far, he had only looked around at the class three times, and each time Caera had nodded thoughtfully before letting her gaze wander about the room. After a while, she started to read sections of her history book by herself, interesting parts Mr. Hoffmeyer had skipped in his lesson plan. Then, unexpectedly, she thought she heard Claudia's voice.
"I'm sorry to interrupt you, Mr. Hoffmeyer, but I think I'm going to throw up..." Claudia said.
Caera couldn't believe her ears.
What? she thought. Claudia hadn't been sick this morning. Why would she pretend to be sick? Oh, no! a horrible thought struck her. What if, what if Claudia had forgotten to finish her Science Fair Project?! That had to be it, she concluded. Claudia would never pretend to be sick otherwise.
"I was wondering if I could go to the clinic." Claudia coughed and tried to look ill. Everyone in the room was staring at her but Mr. Hoffmeyer, who was making a correction in his notes on the blackboard.
"If you're sick, you should go home." Mr. Hoffmeyer threw over his shoulder without turning around. It was just as well he didn't, because half of the class weren't writing any notes down. As Claudia hurried from the room, all eyes turned to Caera, as though she knew what was wrong with Claudia.
And lately at least, she had no idea.