Long Lost

by Jacqueline West

  Fiona thought of the untied knot in the skate lace. The medal hidden under Arden’s bed. The tiny things she’d done to counter the big thing Arden had done. “What do you mean, since we moved here? I thought you wanted to move here.”

  “Mom and Dad wanted to move,” said Arden. “And yeah, it’s nice to be closer to the rink. But . . . I don’t know.”

  “What?” Fiona pushed.

  “I don’t want to talk about this, okay?” Arden sagged forward on the couch, and a faint beam of moonlight through the latticed windows brushed her face. Her cheeks were wet. Her hair was mussed. “Just leave me alone, Fiona.”

  “But . . . you’re sad,” said Fiona.

  And she had wanted Arden to be sad. She’d wanted Arden to feel a tiny bit of what she felt herself. So why was there a cold, tugging sensation, like a needle with a long steel thread, twisting through her heart right now?

  “But I shouldn’t be sad,” said Arden. “Because it’s my fault. We moved here because of me. To this weird old house in this creepy little town, with some Searcher maybe wandering through the woods, and now everything’s going wrong, but I shouldn’t say anything about it, especially not to you, because it’s my own fault.”

  At least Arden was blaming the right person, Fiona thought. She glanced at the window, wondering what time it was by now. She couldn’t be so late that Charlie gave up on her and scrapped their whole plan. But she couldn’t bolt out the door right in front of her sister, either.

  Her crying sister.

  “Well, it’s like Dad says,” Fiona told Arden. “New things just take some getting used to. I’m sure you’ll feel back to normal soon.”

  “By then it will be too late.” Arden wiped her nose on her sleeve.

  Fiona couldn’t believe that perfect Arden was wiping nose drips on her own clothes. “Too late for what?”

  “Everything.” Arden flung out her hands. “For my whole career.”

  “You’re thirteen,” said Fiona.

  “I know!” Arden burst out. “For a skater, that’s not young. Skaters have a certain number of years. Competitive years. I messed up the Longfellow Open. I’m still not nailing my new program. Even my practice sessions are sloppy. Carolyn thinks—” She stopped, her voice catching. “Carolyn thinks I might not be ready for my next test. But I need to pass that test to move up to junior level, so I can get to senior level, or I’m never going to make it at all.”

  “Make it to what?”

  “To Nationals. To the Olympics. To a career.” Arden swiped the tears from her eyes. “It will all just fall apart.”

  Fiona had seen Arden’s meltdowns many times. She’d seen her scream over ill-fitting skate boots, costumes the wrong color, mean whispers from other skaters. But she’d never seen her sister look so . . . what was it? Defeated. That’s how she looked now.

  Arden, who won everything.

  The tugging in Fiona’s heart pulled harder.

  “Arden, you don’t have to make it to the Olympics.”

  “If I don’t, then what was all of this for? All the years of practicing. All the money Mom and Dad spent. Making everybody move here. Making you hate me.”

  “I don’t hate you,” Fiona murmured.

  Maybe she said it too softly. Because Arden’s face crumpled.

  “I just feel like—” she began. “I feel like everything is piled up on top of me. And I’m dropping it. I’m failing.” Arden buried her wet face in her hands.

  Fiona watched her sister for a moment. Then she stepped forward, placing one hand awkwardly on Arden’s shoulder.

  Arden stiffened. Fiona’s hand fell away.

  “Forget I said anything,” said Arden. “I’m fine. I’m fine.” She sniffled once more, brushing the hair back from her face. She whipped toward Fiona. “You never said what you were doing down here.”

  Fiona stepped backward. “I couldn’t sleep either.”

  “But you had your backpack.” Arden’s eyes narrowed. “Were you going to sneak out again? At night?”

  “No,” said Fiona, futilely.

  “There’s something weird going on with you,” said Arden, holding Fiona with the spear points of her eyes. “Ever since we moved here, you’ve been all secretive and obsessive. Even more than usual, I mean. It has to do with that library, doesn’t it? Tell me the truth, or I’ll tell Mom and Dad about you sneaking out the other day.”

  Fiona rocked on her feet, wishing she could think of any other way out. “If I tell you, you can’t tell them about tonight, either.”

  “I’m not promising. Not until I know what you’re doing.” Arden leaned forward on the cushions. “So tell, or I’m going up to wake Mom and Dad right now.”

  “Okay. Okay.” Fiona swallowed, trying to sort her thoughts into two shareable and secret piles. “I found this book. . . .”

  She gave Arden the short and simple version; the one where Fiona read The Lost One, figured out that it was set in Lost Lake, and began to uncover its missing ending with the help of a new friend. She left out the book’s strange movements, and the pocketknife, and the fact that she and Charlie were hoping more of its pages would inexplicably appear. The less Arden knew, the less she could tell.

  “So,” said Arden, when she’d finished, “you’re going to sneak out of the house after dark, when you’re already in trouble, to break into a closed library?” She stared at Fiona. “That is the worst idea.”

  “We’re not breaking in,” said Fiona.

  “Seriously?” Arden gestured at the darkness outside the windows. “It’s not even safe, with the Searcher, or who knows what, waiting out there in this weird place.”

  “The Searcher isn’t real,” said Fiona, before she could rethink the words.

  Arden blinked. “You said it was.”

  “No, I didn’t. I just said other people said it was,” Fiona answered impatiently. “I was just trying to scare you.”

  Arden frowned. “Why?”

  “Because! Because you made us move here. Because I wanted you to think that maybe there was something wrong with this place. Then you’d at least feel bad for dragging everybody else here along with you.”

  “You think I don’t already feel bad?” Arden stood up. She gazed down at Fiona for a moment. “You’ve been messing up my room, haven’t you?” she asked softly. “So I’d be scared. So I’d think there was something wrong. Did you untie the knot in my lace too?”

  Even in the dimness, Fiona couldn’t meet her sister’s eyes. She looked at the scarred hardwood floor, gray-blue as ice in the moonlight. The two of them might as well have been standing on a frozen lake.

  “You just had to tie it again,” said Fiona, very quietly.

  “I can’t believe . . .” Arden’s voice was quiet too. “Never mind,” she said, more clearly. “It doesn’t even matter. Just leave. Go out in the dark all by yourself. I’m not going to tell.” She stepped past Fiona, into the hallway.

  “Arden.” Fiona still couldn’t meet her sister’s eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Arden again. “You know what? I hope the Searcher finds you.”

  She turned and padded away, her footsteps nearly silent on the ancient wooden floor.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The town of Lost Lake was quiet even in the middle of a sunny weekday. But now, as Fiona pedaled her bike through the deserted nighttime streets, its silence was almost paralyzing.

  It was the kind of silence that comes when you step into a room and everyone in it goes still, so you know they’ve all been whispering about you. It was the kind of silence Fiona had felt inside the library the very first time she’d stepped through its doors. Now it had seeped out and blanketed the entire town.

  She glanced around at the weathered buildings. A few lights glowed behind high windowpanes, but these lights just seemed to make more shadows. And every shadow was a place where something could hide.

  Fiona shivered.

  They were just shadows, she
told herself. There was no Searcher. Even though her sister had wished for the Searcher to find her. Even though something had followed Margaret Chisholm through the narrow old streets of this town a hundred years ago. Even though something dark and tall and quiet had just billowed across the edge of her vision—

  Fiona whipped around, nearly toppling her bike.

  A flag hanging from a nearby porch furled and unfurled in the breeze.

  Fiona swallowed.

  She wouldn’t let Arden scare her.

  Even though she had tried to scare Arden first.

  Fiona pushed this thought aside, straightened her bike, and flew onward, toward the library.

  “I thought you weren’t going to come,” Charlie whispered, opening the front doors wide enough for Fiona to slip inside.

  “My sister almost stopped me,” Fiona whispered back. “Sorry I’m late.”

  Charlie closed the library doors behind her.

  The darkness of the night outside was nothing compared to the moonless black inside the old house. It made every sound seem louder, sharper, the way a black stage curtain sets off a spotlight.

  “Where are the light switches?” Fiona asked, groping for the wall.

  “We can’t turn the lights on,” Charlie answered. “Someone outside could see. But I brought this.”

  There was a click. Something purplish and about the size of a cauliflower flared to life in Charlie’s hands.

  Fiona blinked into the cloud of light. “What is that?”

  “A night-light.” Charlie held up a purple plastic octopus with eight glowing arms and a smiling head. “It lights a wider area than a flashlight does. I don’t use it anymore,” he added, a bit defensively. “And if you just click the button once, it doesn’t play any music.”

  Fiona felt herself start to smile. “I wonder if anybody ever snuck into a library to solve a mystery with a glowing octopus before.”

  The purplish light revealed Charlie smiling back. “I think the odds are low.”

  Fiona looked around the huge central chamber. Armchairs and deserted desks formed shadowy hulks. Doorways to other, even darker, rooms gaped like open mouths. The size of this place, and of the task ahead of them, tumbled down on her all at once. “Ready?” she asked, in a voice that was far more fragile than she wanted it to be.

  Charlie nodded. “Ready.”

  They scurried up the central staircase. As they passed, the night-light’s glow struck the portrait of grown-up Margaret Chisholm. Her painted eyes glittered at them before fading back into the darkness.

  Evelyn’s room was just as they had left it: hushed and eerie, waiting for someone who had never returned. The Lost One and the pocketknife still lay on the bed.

  Fiona dove for the book. “Charlie,” she breathed, opening it. “There’s more of the story.”

  “I knew it.” Charlie set the octopus on the bedside table. “It wants to tell us the truth.”

  “Maybe,” Fiona whispered back, barely able to push the word past her thudding heartbeat.

  They bent over the open book.

  After a small funeral attended by only the immediate family and Mrs. Rawlins, and after a similarly swift and private interment in the family’s cemetery plot, the grand brick house entered a period of mourning.

  One it never left.

  The house stood quietly amid its towering trees as summer’s flowers withered, as oak leaves browned and fell, as frost whitened the surrounding ground. Quiet weeks turned to quiet months, and finally to quiet years.

  The man and woman of the house, always fond of travel, spent increasing spans of time away. Eventually they went abroad by ocean liner, taking so many trunks and cases that it was clear they might never return at all.

  The neighbors tutted with sympathy. Naturally the place bore too many painful reminders. And if Pearl had been less delicate, her parents would surely have taken her along.

  But they did not.

  Pearl remained at home, under the care of Mrs. Rawlins. With Mr. Hobbes and Charlie to maintain the place, and Mrs. Rawlins and Mrs. Fisher to run it, the house managed to keep a faint air of its former elegance, or at least of respectability. And yet only a glance at its curtained windows, its empty lawns, and its dozens of unused, unlit rooms told passersby a fragment of the story concealed inside.

  As for Pearl, she grew up.

  She did it alone but for the paid help that had always surrounded her. She became a young woman, and then a woman who was no longer called young. She left the house less and less, and fewer and fewer guests stepped through its doors.

  Her parents passed away while still abroad and were brought home to rest in the family plot, next to Hazel’s stone. Mr. Hobbes passed on, and Mrs. Fisher, and finally Mrs. Rawlins too, until there was no one left who remembered what Pearl had whispered to Mrs. Rawlins after Hazel’s disappearance.

  Mrs. Rawlins certainly never forgot it; not for as long as she lived. She never forgot Pearl’s pale face and wide, haunted eyes, or the broken sound of her voice as she whispered, “Mrs. Rawlins . . . the Searcher was a lie. I killed her.”

  I killed her. I killed her. I killed her.

  The awful words echoed down the remainder of the page.

  The next page—one of a very small number now—stayed blank.

  Fiona and Charlie sat still.

  The ancient mattress sagged beneath them, pressing their shoulders together. Fiona wasn’t sure if the shaking she felt came from Charlie or from her.

  Fiona clasped her fingers tight together. No. She wouldn’t believe it. It couldn’t really be Margaret’s fault. Evelyn was the one who had started it all. Evelyn was to blame.

  “What do you think it means?” she whispered, glancing at Charlie. “What do you think really happened?”

  Charlie nodded at the pocketknife lying on the bedspread. “Maybe that’s why she buried the knife.”

  Fiona stiffened. No. No. Margaret couldn’t have done that.

  “What about the Searcher?” she asked instead. “She didn’t say it wasn’t real. She said the Searcher was a lie. What do you think she meant?”

  Charlie didn’t answer. Which meant he didn’t know.

  “We must still be missing something,” Fiona whispered.

  Charlie nodded. “Plus, there are still blank pages. This isn’t the end.”

  “So . . . whoever is telling the story . . .” Fiona suppressed a small shiver. “How do we get them to finish it?”

  Again, Charlie didn’t answer.

  “Hey, Charlie?” Fiona asked, after a moment. “Why are we whispering?”

  “Because this is a library,” he whispered back.

  “But there’s nobody else here.”

  Charlie paused for a second before answering, still in a whisper, “We both know that can’t be true.”

  They were quiet for another heartbeat.

  And then, from somewhere far below, there came the thud of a closing door.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Fiona and Charlie darted to the bedroom doorway.

  The third-floor hallway remained deserted and dark. But from a distance there came another sound, like heavy footsteps stalking across a floor.

  Side by side, Charlie gripping the night-light, they padded along the corridor to the stairs.

  They had just reached the second-floor walkway when the lights of the central chamber flashed on. Fiona reeled back into the staircase alcove, half blinded. Charlie nearly lost his grip on the night-light.

  “Charlie?” shouted a voice. “Charlie!”

  “Uh-oh,” Charlie breathed, a look of defeat washing over his face. “Grandma.”

  “Charlie Hobbes!” the voice blared.

  “You’re sure he’s here?” asked another familiar voice.

  Fiona and Charlie crept toward the banister. Below them, in the central chamber, stood Judy Hobbes and Ms. Miranda.

  Fiona’s heart cannonballed into her stomach.

  “Oh, I’m sure.” Judy stalked
across the room toward the grand staircase. “CHARLIE!”

  Charlie whirled toward Fiona. “You should stay here,” he whispered. “Don’t waste our chance.”

  “What if Ms. Miranda guesses I’m here anyway?” Fiona whispered back.

  “Charlie?” Judy’s heavy steps creaked up the stairs. “If you can hear me, you had better answer!”

  Charlie shoved the night-light into Fiona’s hands. “Up here, Grandma!” he shouted back. Before Fiona could argue, he took off toward the staircase.

  Fiona clicked off the light.

  “Charlie Hobbes.” Judy stopped on the third step, her fists on her hips. “Do you know how many rules you’re breaking?”

  “Yes, I know.” Charlie climbed very slowly down the steps.

  “What were you thinking, breaking into the library after hours?”

  “I didn’t break in,” said Charlie. “I just stayed in.”

  Judy huffed like a hot teakettle. “Well, why did you stay in?”

  Fiona glanced from Judy to Ms. Miranda. The librarian’s sharp brown eyes were fixed on Charlie too.

  Charlie reached the foot of the steps before answering. “I’ve been rereading From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, where the main characters hide out in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I wanted to try something like that myself.”

  “No you don’t, Charlie,” said Ms. Miranda, with a dry smile. “You don’t get to blame a book for this.” Her eyes moved past Charlie, up the stairs, along the walkway.

  Fiona huddled lower.

  “Oh, I’m not blaming the book,” said Charlie. “I’m just saying that sometimes it feels like a book is speaking right to you. Remember what you said during the summer reading program last year? That there’s a right book for every reader, and a right reader for every book?”

  Ms. Miranda looked at Charlie, her eyes sharp and bright as a spotlight. “I remember,” she said slowly.