The Pearl Earring
Page 9
“We did,” Emily agreed.
“Thank you,” Lily told them.
And a thunderous banging came from the other side of the roof door.
AUDREEN AND Amy burst through the door the moment Lily opened it. “Lily!” Amy cried. “Are you all right?”
Only then did Lily understand that she was finally safe and begin to cry. She buried her head in Amy’s shoulder and let the tears fall. “Yes! Yes! I’m all right. She made me really old and then she was going to throw me off the roof.”
“Where’d she go?” Audreen asked.
Lily pointed at the pile of ashes.
“Who — are they?” Amy asked, glancing at the girls in beautiful antique costumes.
“I know,” Audreen said. “This is Ashlynne and Emily and Rosalie and Anne and Julia. And these girls must be other victims.”
Once more, Lily was aware of the beating of hearts, but now the air was warm again.
“The spirits were trying to warn me,” Lily now understood. “They knew what Daniella would do to me.”
“You saved them,” Audreen said. “When you touched Julia’s portrait, you awakened her at just the same moment Daniella was growing old. What was left of her spirit was trapped in her portrait. Even though her youth and vitality had been sucked out of her and trapped in those awful earrings, your touch enabled her to get free. And she, in turn, freed the rest of the girls who had suffered the same fate.”
“Well, we saved Lily, too,” Julia said. “If we hadn’t shown up when we did, she would have also been trapped in a portrait.”
Audreen pulled the sage from her back pocket and lit it with a lighter. She began a gentle chant. “This is a chant used by the Algonquin people for the passing of the spirits into the next world,” she explained as she walked around the roof waving the smokey sage. “Spirits, join hands.”
At Audreen’s words, the ghost girls clasped hands.
Audreen spoke the Native American language, which Lily couldn’t understand, but the words didn’t seem important. The meaning was clear. Audreen was easing the girls over to their next experience.
In the next ten minutes, every spirit had lifted into the sky and disappeared.
“I’m so glad you’re safe,” Amy said, once the three of them were alone on the roof once more.
“How did you two know to come here?” Lily asked.
“One of the spirits wrote a note to me on my wall,” Audreen said. “She wrote ‘Save Lily’ in blood. It definitely got my attention, and I called Amy to try to find where you had gone.”
“You didn’t need us though,” Amy said. “You handled it yourself.”
Lily nodded. “I did — with a lot of help from five friends.”
SUZANNE WEYN lives in a valley in New York State. She’s the author of The Haunted Museum series, The Bar Code series, and the novels Distant Waves, Dr. Frankenstein’s Daughters, and Faces of the Dead for older readers, and the Breyer Stablemates books Diamond and Snowflake for younger readers.
Copyright © 2015 by Suzanne Weyn. All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
First printing, January 2015
Cover Art by Mike Heath | Magnus Creative
e-ISBN 978-0-545-58848-5
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