Long Lost, стр. 18
“Did you know her?” Fiona asked. “Margaret Chisholm?”
“I never met her. But I think she’s one of my best friends.” Ms. Miranda gave Fiona a grin. “Margaret Chisholm died before I was even born, but spending every day in her house, handling her things, thinking about her wishes . . . it makes me feel like I know her. You know what I mean?”
The librarian’s eyes coasted around the room, coming to rest once again on the stacks on her desk. When they returned to Fiona, her eyes seemed to carry something with them—something that might have been an accusation, if it had been said aloud. But Ms. Miranda didn’t say it.
Fiona took another step toward the door. “So would this room have been a pantry or something?”
“Exactly,” said Ms. Miranda. “This was the butler’s pantry. And the big storage room next door was the kitchen.”
“Well . . . thank you.” Fiona took three more sidling steps. She clutched her backpack, keeping it out of sight. “And I didn’t mean to break the rules. I was just curious.”
“Oh, I know,” said Ms. Miranda. But her eyes were still sharp.
Fiona could feel them against her back as she blurted, “Goodbye,” wheeled around, and bolted out the office door.
An hour later, shut safely inside her own bedroom, Fiona sat on her rumpled bedspread and pulled The Lost One out of her backpack.
She had never had a librarian stop her from reading before. There must have been a reason, something inside this book that Ms. Miranda didn’t want her to see. And now Fiona would find it.
She riffled desperately through the pages to the spot where she’d left off.
Very, very late that night, the grand house and its grounds were quiet.
Quiet, but not asleep.
Lights still burned upstairs and down. Hazel’s parents remained shut in the parlor with Father Carson. Mrs. Rawlins paced between the front and back doors like an aproned sentry. In her bedroom, Pearl lay with eyes closed, checked by the doctor and covered in soft blankets.
Charlie Hobbes had likewise been sent to bed. Although he’d climbed obediently up the steps of the carriage house, once again, he found it impossible to sleep. Instead, he lay staring at the ceiling, where a moth fluttered back and forth among the rafters, catching hints of the window’s moonlight on its papery wings.
Gradually, the lights in the house went out, except in the parlor, where the adults kept their vigil. The sky darkened to inky black, strewn with a silver spray of stars. Charlie heard his father tread slowly up the stairs and throw himself into his own bed, his body heavy with the exhaustion of someone who hasn’t found what he was searching for.
Still Charlie could not sleep.
He rolled toward the window. For a moment, he wondered whether he might be having the same dream as the night before.
Again, he spied a figure moving through the trees. But tonight the sky was clear, and a bright half-moon cast its glow over the lawn. By that glow, Charlie could see that the figure belonged to a girl in a trailing white nightdress.
Pearl.
Charlie sat up straight.
Pearl was far enough from the house to be concealed from its sight, surrounded by a knot of the largest oaks on the property. She moved strangely, bending and disappearing from his view again and again, as if she was struggling with something on the ground. Even from a distance, he could see her trembling. What could she be doing outside, alone, in the black of night?
Without disturbing his father, Charlie padded downstairs, slipped his feet into his boots, and hurried out the carriage-house door.
He headed toward the white glow of Pearl’s nightgown. It fluttered in the distance, pallid and limp, like a broken-winged moth.
Could Pearl be sleepwalking? Charlie wondered as he approached. Had she wandered out here to search for her sister when everyone else had given up?
“Pearl!” he called softly.
His voice, muffled as it was, split the quiet of the night like a crack in glass.
Pearl spun around, her face stricken with terror.
Her feet were daubed with mud. The hem of her nightgown was heavy with dew. Before Charlie could get a look at what it held, her hand shot out from her side, flinging a small, dark object deeper into the trees.
“Pearl, what are you doing?”
Pearl stood as if frozen, her eyes wide, until he stepped closer.
“You frightened me,” she told him. Her voice was faint.
“I’m sorry.” Charlie glanced around for lurking figures in the dark, but he and Pearl were alone, as far as he could tell. “What are you doing out here by yourself?”
Pearl kept mum. Her eyes flickered away from Charlie’s, catching glints of moonlight in their depths. Again, Charlie wondered if she might have been walking in her sleep, or if shock had clouded her mind.
“It’s not safe,” said Charlie at last. “In the morning, the crews will come back and search some more. I’m sure they’ll find something. But for now, we should get you back to the house.”
Pearl didn’t move. Perhaps she could hear the uncertainty in his voice.
“It’s my fault,” she whispered at last, so softly that Charlie scarcely heard her.
“What’s your fault?”
“That the Searcher took her. If we hadn’t been arguing . . . if I hadn’t turned away . . .”
“No,” said Charlie. “It’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault except for—for whoever did it.”
Pearl gazed straight at him. “You don’t believe in the Searcher anymore?”
“Well . . .” Charlie had told more than his share of Searcher stories. And he was nearly certain that he had seen a dark figure drifting through the trees last night. That hadn’t been merely a campfire tale.
“You’ve seen it too, haven’t you?” Pearl asked, almost as though she wanted the answer to be yes. As though that might reassure her. “In the trees?”
“I’ve seen something,” Charlie admitted. But he needed to behave like a grown-up now, with Pearl looking so frail and strange. “I don’t know what it was, though. It could have