WHEN SCHOONER INNE LAY silent in the night, when the snow had stopped and the tide was out, Christina left her bedroom. She crept in the dark around the tilting balcony with its little forest of white railings. Down the bare, slippery stair she tiptoed, hand sliding on the old bent rail.
Hardly breathing, she paused on the second floor, where the pretty guest rooms and the Shevvingtons’ beautiful master bedroom surrounded the lower balcony. There was no sound.
The mansion and its inhabitants slept.
The next set of stairs was carpeted: rich, soft, toe-tickling carpet.
At the bottom, Christina knelt and put on her boots and jacket. She checked her house keys, zipped them carefully into her side pocket, and slid out of Schooner Inne.
The night sky was so clear Christina felt she could taste the stars. If she opened her lips and stuck out her tongue, the stars would fall like snowflakes and taste like bitter lemons.
It was two o’clock in the morning. The village was silent. No cars stirred. No lights were on in houses. Nothing moved but a small thirteen-year-old girl named Christina Romney.
She walked one block and turned a corner. Her shadow leapt ahead, like a black giant. The only sound was the light crunch of her own boots in the snow.
Behind her the snow crunched.
Christina’s heart crunched with it. She spun on the street, whirling to face the crunch. From the cellar? she thought numbly. No, no, it couldn’t have heard me.
Headlights wheeled around the corner. The faint roof light of a police car twinkled.
Christina backed into the doorway of the nearest shop.
A police car was not reassuring when you were planning to break into a building.
But the police had not seen her. The men in the car looked straight ahead, cruising by in boredom. When they had vanished, Christina crept on in the dark toward her school.
In the night the school loomed like a monster with square edges: dark and wicked in the moon-tinted snow. She pulled off her ski cap, letting her tri-colored hair fall free. Nobody had hair like Christina. She counted on her silver and gold locks to protect her from the demons of the dark.
The winter wind bit through Christina’s heavy coat. Who would have thought she would start the second semester with breaking and entering?
What if I get caught? Christina thought, flattening herself against an icy brick wall. In the blackness she could not see herself. Her shadow no longer existed: she was a non-person.
If I get caught, it will be exactly what the Shevvingtons want. But nobody else can stop the Shevvingtons. “Maybe you could have an accident,” they had whispered down the table.
The Shevvingtons had a grip on the adult community like it was a dog on a leash. No parent, no grown-up, no teacher would save Dolly.
She knew the Shevvingtons well. Other people might rent a movie or read a library book for weekend entertainment, but the Shevvingtons loved to gloat. Somewhere, someplace lay a stack of papers and photographs of all their previous victims.
Last fall she had believed any incriminating papers would be in the Guidance Office. There had been no papers there, though, only computer disks, and she had gotten caught trying to find the right disk.
Then she had searched every inch of Schooner Inne. She had even looked and measured for secret compartments and hidden backs on cabinets and bookcases.
But there was nothing at Schooner Inne except the weird whistle of the wind off the Atlantic Ocean crying, “Fffffffffffff!” until Christina grew dizzy and sick trying not to hear it.
But now she knew about the briefcase. A container Mr. Shevvington stroked like a pet.
Christina could imagine Mr. Shevvington … the office door locked … his secretary told to hold telephone calls … she could see his fine suit, his gleaming vest, the dashing little scarf he liked to wear … taking a beloved file from the deep, dark leather. How well she knew that private, gloating smile.
The power of adults! How they could humiliate a child in class. How easily they could manipulate and frighten. How they could control a child’s future by vicious rumor or carefully planned coincidence.
Anya had been the hope and pride of Burning Fog Isle. And now, thanks to hard work on the Shevvingtons’ part, Anya was a high school dropout who worked at the laundromat, folding other people’s clothing … if she remembered how. And the Shevvingtons were so clever! They convinced everybody that it was Anya’s fault. “Poor Anya has a weak character,” they said.
Before Anya, the victim had been Robbie’s sister Val. Christina would always remember Robbie’s warning, when school started last fall. “You’re new here, Christina. You’ve been out on that island, protected from things. You don’t know. Be careful of the Shevvingtons.”
And Christina had said, “Why?”
“I had an older sister,” he replied, giving the sister no name, no description, as if she were truly not a person, just a thing. Robbie’s eyes were sad and dark.
But later Christina found out. Her name was Val. She was even worse than Anya. She’d been stuck in an institution. Was still there. “Why don’t your parents do something about the Shevvingtons?” Christina had cried.
Robbie raised his eyebrows. “They are grateful to the Shevvingtons,” he said quietly. “For trying so hard to help Val. For finding her a counselor, and when that didn’t work, for helping them put Val away.”
So among the files Mr. Shevvington would smile over would be Val’s. He had truly triumphed with Val. There was nothing at all left of her.
Before Val, Christina had no knowledge. The Shevvingtons had not been in Maine before that.
I will find out, Christina thought. I will get the truth. I will stop the Shevvingtons before they can fill any folders full of Dolly or me.
A pink overhead light in the parking lot buzzed like a swarm of hornets. Christina gripped a wire trash basket and rolled it over the ice-pocked snow. She stood it up under the girls’ bathroom window.
What if Mr. Shevvington had gone into the bathroom to check, once he’d spotted her coming out? What if he knew her errand? What if he had heard her sneaking out of Schooner Inne and gotten here ahead of her?
The rhythm of her breathing was frantic. Her lungs slammed against her ribs. She climbed on top of the garbage can. With cold fingers she felt the window sill.
Neither the janitors nor Mr. Shevvington had found her folded paper towel. She forced her fingers under the crack and opened the window.
Swinging one foot in, Christina rested her stomach on the sill and then lowered herself sideways inside the school. Her heart was pounding so hard her chest hurt. She took the flashlight out of her inside jacket pocket and turned it on.
The compartments and sinks of the girls’ bathroom glittered cold and metallic. The dozen mirrors threw Christina’s reflection back and forth. She crept out of the bathroom. The door shut silently and slowly behind her.
There were no windows in the halls.
The darkness was complete. As sick, as abnormal as the Shevvingtons.
The thin circle of light from her flash was pitiful. Her hand shook with fear, and the light shivered with her wrist.
Somebody in the blackness was breathing.
Christina froze like an icicle. She could not think.
The breathing was heavy and irregular and thick. It —it —
— it’s me, she thought. I’m so scared I’m panting.
She leaned against the wall for a moment, remembering gym exercises. Three deep breaths, she told herself. She sucked air into her lungs, held it, heaved it out. Three times.
It actually worked. She was calmer. She moved her feet again. Left. Right. Left.
She was strong with purpose, as strong as the island granite from which she had come. They can’t stop me, Christina thought proudly.
She forgot how many girls they had stopped before her. Girls who were older, stronger, smarter.