Long Lost, стр. 49

One corner of Margaret’s mouth curled upward. “Like a half-plucked chicken?”

Evelyn’s mouth started to curl. Suddenly, like someone pulling a cork from a bottle, she let out a laugh. “Exactly like a half-plucked chicken.”

Margaret began to smile back. Pixie’s tail wagged wildly.

Fiona glanced over at Arden, who was watching everything with wide eyes. Having her sister beside her in this impossible moment made the moment feel even more impossible. And at the same time, it made her feel something else—something like certainty. Because if Arden was here, Fiona belonged here too.

“Evelyn,” said Margaret, her voice dwindling to a whisper again. “I’m so sorry.”

“Oh, stop it.” Evelyn placed a hand on Pixie, who was wriggling against her side. “You didn’t make me take that shortcut. And you couldn’t have stopped me, either.”

“I should have tried harder. I should have told the whole truth. Not pretended that you could come back.”

“I told you to stop, Margaret.” Evelyn pulled the knife from Margaret’s hand. “Besides, you were right. In a way.” She folded the blade into its handle. “I did come back.”

Then she slipped the knife into her own pocket, where it belonged.

Both pairs of sisters stepped through the library’s back door. It must have been past midnight, Fiona realized. The night was dark and far from over, but the clouds above the lawn had thinned, letting moonlight reach the woods below. The river glimmered through the trees.

Evelyn and Margaret led the way. They walked arm in arm, their old-fashioned shoes stepping in matching rhythm. Margaret’s hair, suddenly long and smooth again, drifted in the breeze. Evelyn’s long black cloak had disappeared, and her dress, pale linen like her sister’s, billowed gently behind her. Pixie bounded beside them.

Fiona and Arden followed, side by side.

“Hey, Arden?” Fiona asked softly, as they climbed down toward the bank. “How did you know?”

Arden’s eyes flicked toward her. “How did I know to come and get you? I didn’t.” She shrugged. “After you left, I just couldn’t sleep. I sat by the windows in my room, waiting for you to come home. Finally it had been so long, I started to think—” She halted. “I thought maybe what I’d said had come true. So I grabbed my bike and rode to the library.”

“You could have just told Mom and Dad,” said Fiona, climbing over a fallen tree. “You didn’t have to come out by yourself in the middle of the night.”

“That would have taken more time, waking them and explaining everything. And you would have gotten into huge trouble. And I just . . .” Arden paused again. “I had to make sure you were okay. Myself.”

They reached the riverbank. For a moment, the muddy smell of the water made Fiona’s steps falter. The waves closing over her face in the old cistern had smelled just the same. But here, there was moonlight and wind and the scent of fresh leaves. And Arden was beside her.

Margaret and Evelyn started across Parson’s Bridge, Pixie pattering ahead. Their feet made only the softest sounds on the wooden boards.

Fiona and Arden tagged after. The two of them were walking fast, but somehow they were falling farther behind.

“When you got to the library,” Fiona asked, “how did you find me? How did you know where to look?”

Arden’s profile was silvery in the moonlight. “When I got there, the front doors were wide open. I ran inside, but everything was dark, and while I was trying to find the lights, that dog came running up to me, barking its head off. And then I saw that girl, running down a hallway. . . .” She pointed toward Margaret, ahead of them. “I followed her to the basement. Even though you know I hate basements. And even though I could tell she wasn’t . . . she wasn’t really . . .”

Fiona met her sister’s eyes. “They’ve both been gone for a long time.”

“Well, at least . . .” Arden broke off with a little shudder in her voice. “At least they found each other again.”

Fiona looked down. Arden’s steps were shaky too. She hadn’t noticed it before, with the darkness and uneven ground, but Arden was limping.

“Hey,” she said. “Are you hurt?”

“No. Not really.” Arden shook her head. “I just landed wrong on one ankle when I jumped out of that water tank. I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?”

Arden hesitated for a split second. “I don’t know. But that’s okay. You’re here, and I’m here, and we’re okay.”

“If you need to lean on me or anything,” said Fiona, “you can.”

“Thanks,” said Arden. “If I need to.”

They had reached the denser woods on the far side of the bridge. The Chisholm sisters were many steps ahead of them now, their dresses just pale spots between the thick trees.

“Where are we going, anyway?” Arden asked.

“To the Enchanted Forest, I think. It’s part of the woods where the sisters used to go. They named all the trees and decorated them and made up stories and stuff. It was their special place.”

“Hey, Fifi,” said Arden. “Do you remember the Hidden Cavern?”

Fiona hadn’t remembered. But Arden’s words brought it back: the low, crooked nook underneath the staircase at Grandma Crane’s house, where she and Arden had played during every summer visit.

“The Hidden Cavern,” Fiona breathed. “I haven’t thought about that in forever.”

“Well, you were only five when Grandma moved out of that house,” said Arden. “I wanted to imagine that it was a secret room full of jewels in an old castle, but you wanted to say it was a hole full of dinosaur bones.”

“So we pretended it had both.” Fiona smiled. “Jewels and dinosaur bones.”

The ground sloped beneath them, guiding them down into a patch of ferns. The surrounding trees, tall as church steeples, whispered softly. Fiona gazed around. Even in the middle of the night, this grove looked green. It smelled and felt green too, full of things that would always be alive and growing, even when they were hard to see.

“Where did they go?” Arden asked.

Fiona pulled her eyes back to the ground.

The sisters had vanished.

She scanned the trees in