Shadowmaker

by Joan Lowery Nixon

  Books by Joan Lowery Nixon

  FICTION

  A Candidate for Murder

  The Dark and Deadly Pool

  Don’t Scream

  The Ghosts of Now

  Ghost Town: Seven Ghostly Stories

  The Haunting

  In the Face of Danger

  The Island of Dangerous Dreams

  The Kidnapping of Christina Lattimore

  Laugh Till You Cry

  Murdered, My Sweet

  The Name of the Game Was Murder

  Nightmare

  Nobody’s There

  The Other Side of Dark

  Playing for Keeps

  Search for the Shadowman

  Secret, Silent Screams

  Shadowmaker

  The Specter

  Spirit Seeker

  The Stalker

  The Trap

  The Weekend Was Murder!

  Whispers from the Dead

  Who Are You?

  NONFICTION

  The Making of a Writer

  No one said there would be trouble here too …

  “Mom! Come with me! You can’t go out there! What if someone really did leave a bomb?”

  Panicked, I pulled on her arm, but she pulled back, and our struggle swung us out of the little hallway into the kitchen. Mom suddenly stopped tugging, and I stumbled into her.

  “Look,” she said, pointing at the floor just inside the kitchen door. “It’s not a bomb. It’s a letter.”

  Neither of us moved to pick it up, watching the small envelope as though it might suddenly slither across the floor and strike.

  “It’s only a letter,” Mom finally said, and before I could stop her she broke away from me and picked it up, slipping a single sheet of paper from the open envelope. “Short and to the point,” she said, and read aloud, “ ‘Get out of Kluney before it’s too late.’ ”

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 1994 by Joan Lowery Nixon

  Cover illustration copyright © by Tim Barrall

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company. Originally published in hardcover by Delacorte Press, New York, in 1994.

  Laurel-Leaf Books with the colophon is a registered trademark of Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82350-2

  First Delacorte Press Ebook Edition 2013

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  With love to Hershell Nixon,

  the number one inspiration in my life

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  I woke when the German shepherd barked, his sharp warning slicing through my dream. Without streetlights or moonlight my room was so dark I was disoriented, and I fought to kick off the sheet that was tangled around my legs.

  This wasn’t our apartment in Houston. Where was I?

  As I struggled from sleep I recognized the excited bay of the yellow Labrador far down the road and the snarling slathering of the rottweiler on the nearby Emery place. As my head cleared I remembered that I was in the old beach house that Mom and I had moved to a few days before. I knew, from just my limited experience with that row of hyper, fenced-in dogs, that not only had someone just walked down the road that dead-ended at our house, but whoever had come this way was still out there. We didn’t have a dog, but we didn’t need one. Those three were watchdogs for everyone on the road.

  The illuminated numbers on my bedside clock glowed one-twenty. No one had any reason to be on our road at that time of night. Quietly, I moved inch by inch toward the glass French doors that overlooked the north side of the house, trying not to stub my toes on the books and shoes and other things I’d scattered across the floor. Before I’d climbed into bed I opened one of the doors a few inches so I could enjoy the sound of the wavelets that slapped the shore and the salty-sour dampness of the night air, but now I felt an urgent need to close and lock the door.

  Just as my fingertips touched the cool metal knob, a voice whispered in my ear, “Katie! Hurry!”

  I jumped and squealed at the same time, and the door banged shut.

  Mom reached across to turn the key in the lock. “Don’t make so much noise,” she cautioned. “Someone’s out there.”

  We pressed our faces against the glass, trying to peer through the blackness, but the pale light from the thin slice of new moon was too faint to penetrate the shadows. The dogs, having given their warnings, began to lose interest, but they kept up an insistent barking, as though they weren’t sure when they were supposed to stop.

  My heart jumped, and I grabbed Mom’s shoulder as near the road a dark shadow shifted. “Something just moved over by the gate,” I whispered. “See … under that twisted oak tree? I think there’s a person standing there.”

  The muscles in Mom’s shoulder tensed. “Yes. And over there … next to the garage … There’s more than one of them.”

  “More than one of who?” I asked. “Who’s out there and why are they here in the middle of the night? What are they doing?”

  Mom suddenly reached up and pulled the heavy cotton drapes across the glass doors. She flipped on my bedroom light and picked up the phone on the table next to my bed. “That’s for the sheriff to find out,” she said, and jabbed at the buttons on the phone.

  The dogs suddenly went into action again—this time with the rottweiler working himself into a frenzy, the shepherd joining in, and the Lab in the distance picking up the pace. The shadowmakers who’d been outside our house were heading away.

  “The sheriff will be here in about fifteen minutes,” Mom told me as she hung up the phone. “I’m going to make some coffee. Do you want a cup?”

  “Sure,” I said, and reached for my T-shirt and jeans, but Mom stopped me by wrapping me in a quick hug.

  “I thought Kluney would be safe and quiet. I’m sorry, Katie,” she said apologetically.

  “Why are you apologizing?” I tried to keep resentment from my voice. I hadn’t wanted to come to Kluney in the first place, but I didn’t have a choice. “We don’t know who was out there or why. What makes you think they’d have something to do with you?”

  “The letters …” she began, and let her words drift into silence.

  I knew what letters she meant—insulting, ugly things, some even with veiled threats, all of them anonymous, of course. It wasn’t the first time Mom had received angry letters after one of her newspaper exposés had been published.

  After a record number of
Brownsville babies had been born with serious birth defects, Mom had questioned the activities of the factories in the Brownsville area. Had toxic wastes been dumped into the water that fed the resacas? Or had pesticides used on the large farms upstream seeped their poisons into the water? She’d been accused of fabricating charges in an attack against big business.

  Mom demanded answers and urged the local people to demand a government study. The residents were promised the study, but were told that it would take at least two years in order for it to be accurate. Mom is, was, and always will be a crusader. She couldn’t ignore the plight of those babies born without brain stems, and their heartbroken parents, and she also couldn’t ignore the suspected toxic contamination that might have caused it. She had to make it public through her national column.

  “You’ve told me yourself that most people who write angry, mean letters never follow through,” I said. “And if they really wanted to hurt us, wouldn’t they think of something better to do to us than hide by our fence and stare at the house?”

  “You’re right, Katie,” Mom answered, and tried a smile that was more wobbly than reassuring. “Better get dressed. The sheriff should be here soon.”

  As I pulled on my jeans and a T-shirt, then sat waiting for the coffee to finish dripping into the glass pot, I thought about Mom’s work and her achievements.

  A few years ago a man was sentenced to death in Huntsville, but he maintained he was innocent. Mom believed him when he said evidence in the case was first withheld, then “lost.” Mom covered the situation, and her columns—added to other newspaper stories and television coverage—helped people get angry enough that legal steps were taken. The man was freed, and rightly so.

  Then there was a businessman who tried to murder his wife and incriminated someone else. Mom’s columns helped bring about the just outcome in that situation too. National and regional magazines feature her articles, and because of the investigative coverage, lots of people know her byline. She hasn’t won a Pulitzer prize yet, but Mom never stops until she gets the story.

  As she put a cup of steaming coffee and a small pitcher of milk in front of me, we heard a car pull up in front of our gate. Heavy footsteps thumped across the cement walk that led past the French doors in my bedroom around to the kitchen door.

  This house, which Mom inherited from her uncle Jim, is a compact, one-story wooden structure without a real front door. The front room and the covered porch beyond it overlook a broad stretch of dunes and sea grass rolling down to the sea, so everyone who comes to the house has to enter through the kitchen.

  That didn’t seem to bother the sheriff. He was a large, paunchy, beef-red man who more than filled out his uniform. “Everett J. Granger,” he growled, after Mom introduced us to him. He shook her hand. “I remember you from when you used to come to see your uncle. Last time you were in town was at his funeral.”

  Mom pulled out one of the rickety wooden kitchen chairs for him, and I winced as he lowered his stocky frame into it. The chair shuddered, but it held tight.

  He took a sip of the hot coffee, then looked around the kitchen before he spoke. “It’s been a while since I was sittin’ here with your uncle Jim. This house stood vacant so long, I wondered if Jim’s kin would ever come around to make use of it.”

  Mom nodded. There was no reason she had to explain why we were here, but Sheriff Granger didn’t see it that way. “So how come, after all these years, you show up now?” he asked.

  Not many people get Mom flustered, but the sheriff managed to do so, maybe because in this case Mom wasn’t too sure of herself.

  “You make it sound like such a long time,” she said. She stirred her coffee vigorously, then dropped her spoon with a clatter. “My uncle died only four years ago.”

  “And …?” One of Sheriff Granger’s eyebrows was poised higher than the other, like a bushy question mark. He waited for Mom’s answer.

  She took a deep breath and straightened her shoulders. “I’m a writer,” she said. “I write a syndicated newspaper column.”

  His eyebrow came down and he said, “That’s common knowledge. So’s the fact that you’re used to pokin’ around courthouses, pryin’ into private records, and makin’ people mad.”

  Mom was caught by surprise. “The investigations I do are perfectly legal!”

  The sheriff looked unconvinced. “Legal or not, let’s get one thing straight. I hope you’re not fixin’ to do any of your investigations around Kluney. A number of folks have been wonderin’ just what it is you’re lookin’ for. Whatever it is, they don’t like it.”

  Mom actually blushed. “I’m here to write a novel.”

  He took a long swig of coffee, then asked, “Yeah? What kind of a novel does a reporter write?”

  His question came out like a challenge, and after a moment’s confusion Mom reacted defensively. “What kind? Mainstream, not nonfiction investigative reporting. You do understand the difference?”

  I winced, but the sheriff just turned to Mom and said, “As Francis Bacon wrote, ‘Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.’ ”

  Mom’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. Bacon, Francis Bacon, I thought. Wasn’t he some British writer back in the early sixteen hundreds?

  “A smart lady like you must have read Francis Bacon, haven’t you?” Sheriff Granger asked.

  “Touché,” Mom replied. “I just wasn’t expecting you to quote someone like Francis Bacon.”

  “Because I’m a sheriff? Or because I’m small-town?” He shifted a bit and his chair wobbled. “I helped organize the local Classical Reading Society in Kluney.”

  Mom’s cheeks flushed even pinker, so I interrupted. “Aren’t you supposed to be questioning us about why we called you?” I asked.

  “I’ll be gettin’ around to that,” he said. “Your mama invited me to a cup of coffee first, and there’s no need not to be sociable.” His glance at me intensified, and he asked, “You registered in our high school, Katherine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sophomore? Junior?”

  “Sophomore.”

  He nodded, satisfied. “It’s hard to come to a new school in the middle of the spring semester. Makin’ friends?”

  “Sure.” I suddenly became interested in the bottom of my coffee cup. I wondered if he could possibly know that what I’d told him was a lie. It had taken a couple of days to scrub down this house before we could move into it, so I’d only been at Kluney High on Thursday and Friday. During those two days I’d been looked over and talked about—the kids made that obvious—but only a couple of them had said so much as hello to me. Lana Jean Willis, a skinny girl with bad skin and dirty blond hair, was the only one who’d tried to be friendly.

  “You sure favor your mama with that red hair and blue eyes,” Sheriff Granger told me. “I don’t know of any other redheads in these parts, except for Sally, who’s a waitress in Denny’s over on the highway, but Sally was a blonde before she became a redhead, so I don’t guess we can count her.”

  The sheriff bent back his head, draining the coffee from his cup. “Let’s get down to business,” he said, and pulled out a notebook and pencil. Turning each page by licking his thumb, he finally found an empty page and began to write. “Eve Gillian,” he said to Mom. “Two l’s in Gillian?”

  “That’s right,” Mom answered. “Now, what happened was—”

  “Hold on,” he said. “I’m writin’ down your address. Give me your telephone number too.”

  Finally, he raised his head and said, “Okay. Now, according to Doris, our dispatcher, some folks were on the road out beyond your place around one-fifteen this mornin’, and after a few minutes they left.”

  “There’s more to it than that!” Mom’s eyes flashed.

  “Like what? Did they come onto your property?”

  “No. At least, I don’t think so. They were at the gate and next to the garage.”

  “Any threats? Did they call o
ut? Use obscenities or anything like that?”

  “No! They were just … just there.”

  “You told Doris you’d been asleep. How did you know anybody was there?”

  “Because of the dogs in those yards that back onto the road. They woke us with their barking.”

  The sheriff smiled. “Yeah. I can see how those three dogs would wake anybody, livin’ or dead, exceptin’ their owners.” He studied his notebook for a moment, then asked, “Were any of the folk you saw out there armed?”

  “I don’t know. It was too dark to tell.”

  “Too dark? But you said you saw them.”

  Mom couldn’t take any more. She rested her elbows on the table and leaned forward, her forehead in the palms of her hands.

  I stepped in again. “Their shadows moved. That’s how we knew there was more than one person.”

  “Okay,” Sheriff Granger said, and wrote something. “How many people were out there?”

  “Uh … at least two.”

  “Just two?”

  “There might have been more.”

  “Male or female?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “But they didn’t do anything or say anything?”

  “They frightened us.”

  “How?”

  Mom dropped her arms and slapped the table in exasperation. “By just being there!”

  Sheriff Granger slowly and deliberately closed his notebook and tucked it away with his pencil. “Miz Gillian,” he said, “that’s a public road. Far as I can see, no one did anything except walk down that road.”

  “But the road ends at our gate! No one would have any reason for being there unless they had business with us.”

  “Coulda been folks out for a stroll, maybe a young couple lookin’ for a quiet place. There’s nothin’ to show us it was anythin’ more threatenin’ than that.” His lips turned up in a bare suggestion of a smile. “Remember what Sir James Matthew Barrie said? ‘A house is never still in darkness to those who listen intently.… Ghosts were created when the first man woke in the night.’ ”

  “The Little Minister,” Mom mumbled, and I almost expected her to add “show off,” but instead she said, “I didn’t call you about a ghost. I called about prowlers.”