Long Lost, стр. 19
Pearl’s glazed eyes slipped away. “I know what I saw.”
A gust blew through the trees, making Charlie shiver. Pearl’s nightgown billowed, but Pearl herself didn’t stir, as though she couldn’t feel the wind at all.
Charlie put out a hand. “Whatever it was, we should get inside now,” he said, the words somewhere between a command and a plea. “Come on.”
For another moment, Pearl kept still. Then, with one more look into the trees, she turned around and drifted toward the grand brick house.
Charlie followed her all the way to the back door. Only once she was safely inside and he’d heard the bolt hit the lock behind her did he stop to think.
He’d known Pearl most of his life and all of hers. She and Hazel had their secrets, and they were both good at concocting a story when it would save their skins . . . but Pearl had seemed so earnest tonight, and so genuinely afraid. Charlie glanced back toward the trees. What had she been doing out here? And what had she thrown into the woods?
Charlie scrambled back to the carriage house.
Armed with a lighted storm lantern, he retraced the steps he and Pearl had taken, following their footprints in the dewy grass. Then, keeping his eyes on the ground, he headed into the trees.
Something gleamed dully in the bracken to his right. Charlie lunged nearer. Lying on the ground was a small spade, one that his father used in the flowerbeds. This must have been what Pearl threw into the trees. Charlie picked it up. The blade was heavy with mud. What had Pearl dug up? Or what had she buried?
Raising the lantern, Charlie took a sharper look around. Nearby, at the base of the broadest oak of all, there was a disturbed spot in the soil. Charlie set down the lantern and began to dig. The earth had been patted roughly back into place, but it was still loose, and soft with recent rain.
Just inches below the surface, the spade struck something—something as pale and delicate as bone, with a coating that seemed to glimmer softly. Charlie stooped and grabbed it, rubbing away the dirt before lifting the item toward the light.
It was Hazel’s mother-of-pearl-handled knife.
Charlie would have known it anywhere. He’d been there on the day when Hazel bought it, carrying it proudly home from Mason’s Mercantile. He’d seen her use it a hundred times. She never went anywhere without it.
Why had Pearl buried it here? How had Pearl come to have it in the first place?
Charlie stood, wondering, in the flickering dimness.
He was sure of only two things: first, that Hazel would not have willingly gone anywhere without her knife. Second, that he couldn’t keep it. Anyone found with the missing girl’s favorite trinket would naturally become a suspect in her disappearance. He couldn’t bring such a fate upon himself or his father.
Hurriedly, Charlie dropped the knife back into the hole. He buried it with the spade, tamping down the surface of the soil until only the slightest disturbance showed. He put the spade away in the garden shed. Then he returned to the carriage house, snuffed the lantern, and tiptoed back to his own bed, leaving Pearl’s secret buried behind him, feeling strangely as though he was guilty of something far worse.
The chapter stopped there, but Fiona didn’t. She was going to finish this book tonight, even if she had to do it while hiding under the covers with a flashlight.
She turned the page.
Losses never come alone.
Like wool unraveling stitch by stich, one loss brings another, until even the most tightly woven fabric disintegrates into a heap of frayed threads.
So it was in the grand brick house after Hazel disappeared.
The girls’ mother bolted herself in her bedroom, watched over by her maid and dosed by the doctor. In the study, with his telephone and a crystal decanter, their father did the same. Pixie seemed to develop magical powers befitting his name, escaping from knotted ropes and locked rooms to dash into the woods again and again, only to be brought back, whining and muddy, by unsuccessful searchers.
And Pearl became a living ghost.
She floated silently from room to room, occasionally drifting downstairs to appear, pale and mute, in the parlor. Mrs. Rawlins and Mrs. Fisher did their best to keep her fed, tutting over the plates that returned, barely touched, to the kitchen.
Worse still, night after night, long after doors were locked and lights were snuffed, Pearl was found wading along the edges of the river. Sometimes she was returned by Charlie and Mr. Hobbes, sometimes by a neighbor who had seen the nightdress-clad figure slipping through the trees. Afterward, no matter who asked, Pearl was never able to answer questions about what she had been doing in the water at night.
As the days passed, the grand brick house—
Fiona turned the page. But the next one was blank.
So was the one after that. And the one after that. All the way to the book’s back cover.
Fiona flipped back to the middle of the book and pawed through the pages again, just in case she’d been imagining things.
She hadn’t. The story cut off in the middle of a sentence, leaving all its mysteries unsolved.
Fiona riffled the handful of blank pages. She pinched the edge of one empty page and held it up to her bedside lamp. When she narrowed her eyes and leaned close, she thought that she saw something there—something that might have been print, but that was far too faint to read. Maybe it had been left by a typewriter that had run out of ink. Or maybe it had been erased.
Fiona tried rubbing the side of a pencil lead over a teeny part of the page, the way detectives in stories always did. But any impressions on the paper must have been far too small and delicate to uncover. All Fiona made was