CHAPTER EIGHT
Adie and Elsie
’m starting to get worried,” Mama said.
Adie shrugged, a gesture that was lost on her mother since Adie was lying on the couch, idly flipping through a magazine while watching some boy band on the music-video channel with Laurel and Bess.
“Oh, you know Janey,” she said. “She’ll jump at any chance she can get to be up at that old woman’s place.”
“She didn’t say she was staying overnight. I’m going to have words with that girl when you bring her back.”
Adie sat up straight. “When I bring her back? Why do I have to go? Elsie’s our nature girl. She loves chances to go into the woods.”
“I’m sure she does. And you can certainly take Elsie or any of the other girls with you. But you’re the oldest and if something happened to Sarah Jane on the way back from Lily’s place, I’d feel better knowing you were there to deal with the problem.”
Adie had to smile. That was Mama for you. Always making you feel like something you didn’t much care to do was actually something special that only you could do for her. Even knowing this trick of Mama’s, Adie couldn’t quell the flicker of pride that rose up in her.
Closing her magazine, she got up to find her running shoes.
“And take this with you,” Mama said when Adie had her shoes and coat on and was making for the door. “You can put it in a knapsack.”
Adie sighed when she saw the jar of preserves and bag of muffins Mama was holding out to her. It seemed like you couldn’t say hello to someone on the road around here without exchanging some kind of food or other. But she dutifully fetched a knapsack and loaded it up.
“And no dawdling,” Mama said. “You tell Sarah Jane she’s to come straight home.”
Adie rolled her eyes. “There’s nothing to dawdle over between here and Aunt Lillian’s.”
“See, this is why we need a cell phone. If we had one right now, we could just call Janey and tell her to get her butt back home.”
Mama smiled. “And you’d be happy with her taking it with her whenever she goes to see Lily?”
Adie thought about how often her sister went to the old woman’s place and shook her head.
“I’ll just go get her,” she said.
She found Elsie in the pasture, carefully drawing a study of some little animal’s skull she’d discovered in the grass. Mouse, vole—Adie couldn’t tell. Elsie was still like a kid about this. She’d just get all excited about finding a nest or a feather or some animal’s skeleton. But she knew more about what went on in the fields and woods around the farm than any of them. Adie supposed there was something to say about paying the kind of attention Elsie did to every little thing she came across in her wanderings.
“Come on, skinny knees,” she said. “Mama says we’ve got to go look for Janey.”
She waited while Elsie finished her drawing, made a notation under it, and dated it, then carefully stowed away her pencil and journal in her own knapsack.
“How come we have to get her?” Elsie asked.
She stood up, brushing grass and dirt from the knees of her jeans.
“She never came home last night and Mama’s worried.”
“I just thought she was staying over.”
“Well, she forgot to tell Mama that, so we’re stuck fetching her back.”
“You don’t think anything’s happened to her, do you?”
Adie thought of teasing her, but then realized that she felt a little nag of worry herself.
“What could happen to her between here and there?” she asked.
She held up her hand as Elsie was about to answer. Elsie, being the family expert on everything that grew or lived in these hills, could probably come up with a hundred things that might have gone wrong.
“No,” she said quickly. “I don’t need to know. Everything’s going to be fine. We’ll find her and Aunt Lillian hoeing the garden or shucking peas or whatever it is that they do up at that place to keep themselves busy.”
But they didn’t.
It was strangely quiet around the Kindred homestead an hour or so later, when they came into the last meadow and started up the hill to the house. The little nagging feeling in Adie’s chest blossomed into real worry as they called out ahead and got no answer. It grew stronger still when they heard Root barking from the barn. There was a frantic quality to his voice that made Adie’s pulse beat way too fast.
The two girls ran to the barn, fumbling to unbar the door. When they finally got the bar off and the door open, Root bounded by them and took off up the hill, running into the orchard. Adie and Elsie exchanged worried glances, then hurried after him. They found him whining by an old apple tree half choked with thornbushes, lying with his head on his paws as he stared at the tree.
“What is it, boy?” Adie asked. “What’s wrong?”
“That’s the Apple Tree Man,” Elsie said.
“The what?”
“The Apple Tree Man. It’s what Aunt Lillian calls the oldest tree in the orchard.”
“And that means?”
Elsie shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just what she calls it.”
Adie looked away from the tree, back to the house. She didn’t come up here very often. It wasn’t that she disliked Aunt Lillian. She just found it too weird up here. You couldn’t even use the bathroom to have a pee, because there wasn’t one. There was only the outhouse, where you knew there was a spider getting ready to climb onto your butt as soon as you sat down. Adie couldn’t imagine living without electricity or running water—especially not on purpose.
“It’s too quiet,” she said.
“It’s always quiet up here,” Elsie said, but she sounded doubtful.
Adie knew just what she was thinking. There was something wrong, but neither of them wanted to say it aloud.
“I guess we should check the house,” she said.
Elsie nodded.
Adie remembered what Mama’d said to get her to come up here.
You’re the oldest and if something happened to Sarah Jane on the way back from Lily’s place, I’d feel better knowing you were there to deal with the problem.
Maybe she was the oldest, but she didn’t know where to start right now. She didn’t feel at all capable. All she felt was panic.
She swallowed hard.
“They’re just inside, where they can’t hear us,” she said.
“Then why did they lock Root up in the barn?”
“I don’t know, okay?”
Elsie looked like she was about to burst into tears.
“I’m sorry,” Adie said quickly. “I’m worried, too.”
She took her sister’s hand and started off toward the house.
“Come on, Root,” she called over her shoulder.
But the dog wouldn’t budge. All he did was stare at that stupid old tree and whine.
“Everything’s going to be fine,” she assured Elsie as they approached the house. “They’re probably just gone off hunting berries or something.”
Elsie nodded. “That’s right. Janey said they were going out after ’sang yesterday. Maybe they went today instead.”
“There. You see? There’s nothing for us to worry about.”
They both jumped at a sudden loud, moaning sound, then laughed when they saw it was just Aunt Lillian’s cow having followed them up from the barn. Henny lowed again, long and mournfully.
“She sounds like she wants something,” Adie said.
“Maybe she needs to be milked.”
“But they would have done that before they left.”
Elsie nodded.
They were on the porch now.
“Hello!” Adie called inside. “Is anybody home?”
They went inside, nervous again. They found no one on the ground floor, and neither of them wanted to check the upstairs.
“This looks like last night’s dinner dishes,” Elsie said as they looked around the kitchen.
Adie dropped her knapsack by the door and nodded. “I guess we need to look upstairs.”
Reluctantly, they went up the stairs, wincing at every creak the old wood made under their feet. The stairs took them into an open loft of a room. This had been where Aunt Lillian slept until her own aunt Em passed away. Now it was just used for storage, though there was little enough of it. Some old books. Winter clothes hanging on a pole and draped in plastic. By the window there was a large trunk.
“There,” Adie said, only barely keeping the relief out of her voice. “You see? There’s no one here.”
“What about the trunk?”
“You think someone’s hiding in the trunk?”
Elsie shook her head. “But you could put a… you know…”
She didn’t need to say the word. It sprang readily to Adie’s mind. Yes, the trunk was big enough to hold a body.
Crossing the floor, Adie went over to it, hesitated only a moment, then flung it open.
“Still nothing,” she said. “And nobody, either. There’s just a mess of drawings.”
Elsie joined her by the open trunk and looked inside. She picked up the top drawings.
“These are really good. Who do you think did them?”
Adie shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe Aunt Lillian.”
“I didn’t know she could draw.”
Elsie continued to explore the trunk while Adie used the vantage of a second-floor window to see if she could spy any sign of Aunt Lillian or their missing sister.
Under the loose drawings Elsie found numerous sketchbooks, each page filled with sketches of the hills around the house. They were like what Elsie did in her own journal, cataloging the flora and fauna, only the drawings were so much better than hers. Further in, she found stacks of oil paintings on wood panels—color studies done in the field in preparation for work that would be realized more fully in a studio. Under them were still more drawings and sketchbooks. Many of these had a childlike quality to them and were done on scraps of brown paper and cardboard.
She looked at the paintings again. There was something familiar about them. When she came to one depicting a black bear in a meadow clearing, she caught a sharp breath.
“What is it?” Adie asked.
“I’ve seen the finished painting this was done for. Or at least I’ve seen a picture of it in a magazine. The original’s hanging in the Newford Museum of Art. But that means…”
She started looking more carefully through the paintings and drawings and began to recognize more of the sketches as studies for paintings she’d seen in various books and magazines. Finally she found what she was looking for inside one of the earlier sketchbooks.
“Look at this,” she said.
Adie gave the pages a quick study. From what she could tell, somebody had been doodling various ways to write their initials.
“L.M.,” she read. “What does that stand for do you think?”
“Lily McGlure.”
“And she is?”
“Apparently the name that Aunt Lillian painted under,” Elsie said.
“I thought she was a Kindred.”
“I don’t know about that. Maybe she changed her name. Maybe it’s just a pen name. But this is amazing.”
“Why?”
“Why?” Elsie repeated. “The Aunt Lillian we know is really Lily McGlure. What could be more amazing than that?”
“So?”
“So she’s famous. They often talk about her like she was one of the Newford Naturalists, even though her work was done a few decades after their heyday. But you can see why, when you look at her paintings.”
Adie couldn’t, really, but she didn’t want to seem more ignorant than she probably already did, so she said nothing.
“She’s supposed to have studied with both Milo Johnson and Frank Spain,” Elsie went on, “though there’s some dispute about that, considering how they disappeared at least twenty years before she started to paint seriously.”
“How do you know all this stuff?”
“I don’t know,” Elsie said. “I like to read about art and watch the Discovery Channel. I just find it interesting, I guess.”
Adie gave the trunk a thoughtful look.
“When you said these two artists disappeared,” she said, “what did you mean?”
“Oh, it’s one of the big mysteries of the Newford art world. They were out painting in the hills around here and they just vanished.…” Elsie’s voice trailed off and she gave her sister an anguished look.
“We don’t know that anything happened to Janey or Aunt Lillian,” Adie said. “I’m sure it’s just like we thought, they’re out hunting ’sang.” She took the sketchbook from Elsie’s hands and put it back in the trunk. “Come on. Let’s close this up and go back outside.”
Elsie nodded. She placed the drawings and paintings back on top of the sketchbooks. Closing the trunk lid, she stood up and followed Adie back to the stairs.
“What do we do now?” she asked. “Do we stay? Do we go looking for them? Do we go home?”
“See, this is why we really need a cell phone,” Adie said. “Or even two. We could call Mama right now and ask her what to do.”
“But we can’t.”
“I know. Let me think a minute.”
They stood out on the porch, looking out across the garden to the orchard, where Root still kept his vigil by the old apple tree.
“We should put the cow back in the barn,” Elsie said. “Or at least in the pasture.”
Right now the cow was in the garden, munching on the runner beans that grew up a pair of homemade cedar trellises on the far side of the corn.
Adie nodded and fell in step beside her sister. “There sure seem to be a lot of bees around here today,” she said as they reached the garden.
Elsie grabbed the cow’s halter and drew her away from the beans.
“They’re gathering the last of the nectar,” she explained, “so that they’ll have enough honey to get them through the winter.”
“I suppose,” Adie said. “But these don’t seem to be collecting much nectar. It looks to me like they’re just flying around.”
Elsie studied the bees. Adie was right. The bees were ignoring the last of the asters and such and seemed… well, they seemed to be searching for something, but for what, Elsie couldn’t tell.
“That’s just weird,” she said.
“Everything about this morning is weird,” Adie said. “From the way Root’s acting and these bees, to how there’s just nobody around.”
Elsie nodded. “I think we should put Henny back into the barn and go home. Mama will know what to do.”
“I suppose.”
Adie hated the idea of having to turn to their mother for help. She liked the idea that Mama was there if they should need her, but she much preferred to solve her problems on her own.
They were halfway back to the barn when Adie suddenly put her hand on Elsie’s arm.
“Do you hear that?” she asked.
She needn’t have bothered. Elsie had already stopped and turned to look at the woods beyond the orchard herself.
“It sounds like bells,” she said.
Adie nodded. Bells and the jingle of bridles. And now that they and the cow had stopped moving, they could also hear the faint hollow sound of hooves on the ground. Many hooves. Adie reached for Elsie’s hand, to take comfort as well as give it, when the riders came into view.
They were like knights and great ladies out of some medieval storybook. The men weren’t wearing armor, but they still had the look of knights in their yellow-and-black livery, with their plumed helmets and silvery shields. The women didn’t ride sidesaddle, but they wore long, flowing dresses that streamed down the flanks of their horses and trailed on the ground behind them. On either side of the riders ranged long-legged, golden-haired dogs with black markings—some cross between greyhounds and wolves.
Neither the riders nor their animals seemed quite right. They were all too tall, too lean, their features too sharp. A nimbus of shining golden light hung about them, unearthly and bright. The whole company—men and women, their mounts and all—were so handsome it was hard to look at them and not feel diminished. Adie and Elsie felt like poor country cousins invited to a palatial ballroom, standing awkwardly in the doorway, not wanting to come in.
“This can’t be real,” Adie said.
Elsie made no reply except to squeeze her hand.
The riders came down from the meadow, footmen running along behind, and encircled the two girls. The footmen notched arrows in their bows, aiming at Adie and Elsie.
“Well, that was easy enough,” said the woman who appeared to be leading them.