Emily tried to step in the opposite direction. She was determined to move so she wouldn’t be an easy target. But her foot dislodged some pebbles that clattered as they rolled. She had no weapon. Nothing with which to defend herself.
“You aren’t going to escape, so don’t bother trying,” Dr. Anderson said quietly.
I do have a weapon, Emily thought, remembering. Her breath coming in short gasps, her heart racing, she reached for the vial of potion in her pocket. Carefully she pulled out the little stopper and placed her thumb securely over the open top of the vial. Her thumb stung where the liquid touched it.
Suddenly the bright beam of Dr. Anderson’s flashlight was aimed directly at Emily’s face, blinding her.
Instead of ducking or trying to get away, Emily moved forward, toward the light. With her left hand she grabbed the flashlight, shoving it to one side. Now she could see Dr. Anderson’s face, strained with anger, and the hand clutching the rock that was raised high over her head.
Emily twisted to the right just as the rock came down, painfully scraping her left shoulder. Pulling back her thumb, Emily threw the contents of the vial directly into Dr. Anderson’s eyes.
Dr. Anderson screamed, let go of the flashlight, and bent double, clawing at her face.
Suddenly, the recessed lighting flashed on. Haley ran down the path toward Emily, Coach Jinks and Dr. Weil behind her.
“When I realized you weren’t with us, I told Coach—,” Haley began. She gasped. “What happened to Dr. Anderson?”
Emily watched Dr. Anderson, on her knees at the side of the path, scooping water from a little stream and splashing it into her eyes.
“She’ll be all right,” Emily explained. “I had to stop her. She tried to kill me because I saw her push Dr. Foxworth over the stairs near the pool at the educational center.”
“What! Is this true?” Dr. Weil took Dr. Anderson by her shoulders and pulled her to her feet.
Haley gasped again as she saw the empty vial Emily held out to her. “The potion!” she said triumphantly. “You used the potion!”
“It was the only way I had to defend myself.”
Mrs. Comstock and Dr. Hampton appeared, their eyes wide with astonishment. Maxwell pushed forward, along with some of the others.
Dr. Anderson babbled, “Dr. Foxworth knew! I had to stop her! I didn’t mean to kill her! It wasn’t my fault. And Emily saw what happened! She was going to tell!”
To Emily’s relief, Dr. Weil calmly took charge. He soothed Dr. Anderson, trying to quiet her. Then he sent two girls back to the administration building to call the sheriff’s department, and he picked out Maxwell and Coach Jinks to assist Dr. Anderson from the cave.
Before they left, while everyone seemed to be talking at once, Maxwell turned to Emily, pushing the knitted edge of his cap back from his forehead. “You’re right about what I should do,” he said. “I’m going to try my hand at writing. I’ll call it Maxwell McLaren, The Early Years. I’ll be able to write it, won’t I, Emily?”
“Yes,” Emily said. “I think you will.”
As Maxwell and Coach Jinks disappeared around a bend in the path, Haley asked, “Em, do you think there’s a chance Max really will be famous someday?”
Emily shrugged and answered, “Who knows? At least he’s going to find out if he really can write.”
Dr. Hampton stepped forward, Mrs. Comstock elbowing her way to a place beside her.
“Emily, I don’t understand,” Dr. Hampton said. “If you thought you were in trouble, why didn’t you come to me for help?”
“You lied to me about when you came to work at the center,” Emily said. “You were there when it opened, and you said you weren’t.”
Dr. Hampton looked surprised. “I didn’t think it mattered. I was there only the first semester. Then I returned to where I had been employed to finish a project on which I was needed.”
“I needed the truth,” Emily told her. “You didn’t give it to me.”
Mrs. Comstock smiled sympathetically as she moved forward. “You could have come to me, dear,” she said. “I tried to assure you that you could always confide in me.”
“You tried too hard,” Emily said.
The cold, damp walls of the cave seemed to press toward her, and she could hear a scurrying sound coming from the dark shadows. Bats? Mice?
“I want out of this place,” Emily said.
Haley grasped Emily’s arm and steered her back down the path in the direction of the entrance. “I’ll go with you,” she said. “We’ll find Taylor and tell her everything that happened.”
She paused, turning Emily to face her. “I’ll be the one to tell her. After all, it was Loki who warned you, and it was the curandero’s potion that saved you.” Her smile was smug. “All because of me.”
Emily didn’t argue. She knew she’d be repeating the entire story to Dr. Isaacson, to the police, to her parents, and to countless other people before it was over.
Unfortunately, she thought, it will never be over. Nightmares had a way of returning when least expected, and now the old dreams would be joined by a new one: the haunted eyes of a desperate woman in a dark cave.
But Emily realized she was no longer afraid to be Emily. She no longer needed to be invisible. She smiled at Haley. “I can handle it,” she said.
“Well, of course,” Haley said.
Emily followed Haley from the cave up the steps into the late-afternoon sunlight.
JOAN LOWERY NIXON has been called the grande dame of young adult mysteries. She is the author of more than 130 books for young readers and is the only four-time winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Young Adult Novel. She received the award for The Kidnapping of Christina Lattimore, The Séance, The Name of the Game Is Murder, and The Other Side of Dark, which also won the California Young Reader Medal.
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