Spyhole Secrets (2 page)

A
t the top of the narrow attic stairs, Hallie stopped for a minute, but it was only to let her eyes adjust to the lack of light. She stopped once again a few steps farther on, so the rest of her could adjust to the attic itself. It seemed, somehow, quite different from when she’d been there with her mother. Almost as if she’d never been there before.

It was hotter, for one thing, and dustier. It had been a very warm day, and the sun beating down on the sloping roof had turned the attic into a stifling oven. When she breathed deeply, she could feel the heat burning its way down into her lungs. The long, narrow space with its slanting, cross-beamed ceiling seemed larger, and the light—what there was of it-was dim and shadow-haunted. Seeping through the colored-glass panes of the small dormer windows, its rays stained the rough wood floor with blurry splotches of blue, red, and green.

The silence was different too, so deep she could
almost feel it, like a thick, enveloping wall. She stood still, listening and breathing hard. At last she shrugged away a shiver and moved on.

Not far from the stairwell she came to a familiar stack of heavily taped boxes. Boxes she recognized as the ones she’d helped pack with things like her mother’s art supplies and her fancy china that had been used only when company came. Hallie shrugged. The oil paints and the china might as well be stored away; it wasn’t as if they’d be using them much here in Irvington. Her mother wouldn’t have time to do much painting anymore now that she had to work full time. And the friends who used to come to dinner all lived a long way from Irvington.

Hallie was still reading the labels on the storage boxes when she came to one that really got to her. Her fists clenched and she felt her face flush with anger as she read the label. In big capital letters it said
SLEEPING BASKET
and
LITTER BOX.
There they were, wrapped up and hidden in a forgotten attic when they shouldn’t have had to be stored away at all—and wouldn’t have been, if it weren’t for that very first rule on the Warwick lease papers. The most important rule, according to Mrs. Crowley. The one that said NO
PETS
(in capital letters).

As Hallie moved on, she passed a couple of other smallish collections of crates and boxes, no doubt the belongings of other Warwick tenants. But nothing more, except for a procession of wide brick chimney
flues. The rest of the long stretch of shadowy space seemed to be entirely empty—empty and silent. No moans or sighs, not even any drifting white mists or patches of icy air.

Curling up one side of her mouth, the way her father always did when someone was being particularly ridiculous, Hallie tried to make her voice sound like his as she whispered, “What’s this, Mrs. Tombstone? Don’t tell me your ghost friends are out to lunch.”

“Yeah, out to lunch,” she agreed in her own voice. She was almost disappointed. As a ghost hangout, the Warwick attic left a lot to the imagination. There at least ought to be a few mysterious-looking objects lying around. Like a puppet with a sinister face. Or perhaps a huge antique desk that might have a secret drawer or two. As a matter of fact, in the whole poor excuse for a haunted attic there wasn’t anything a ghost, or a person, might hide behind. Or even sit down on comfortably.

She was walking past another stack of boxes when she became aware of a circular alcove in the farthest corner of the room. Another tower room. Of course there would be one in the attic, just as there was on each of the other floors. In fact, now that she thought of it, she remembered noticing the attic’s tower room from the sidewalk below. Remembered looking way up to where the tower’s highest level tapered to a cone-shaped roof topped by a thin, pointed spire.

As she cautiously moved toward it through deepening shadows, Hallie wondered why the light was so dim. The other tower rooms had circular window-panes, with colored-glass panels at eye level and clear glass up above. The one in the Tilsons’ second-floor apartment also had curving built-in seats. But this one seemed to have no windows and no window seats. Nothing much to sit on or hide behind, except for a dim shape that turned out to be a small metal trunk.

When Hallie walked into the deeply shadowed tower room, it wasn’t because she was thinking of it as a possible hiding place. The metal trunk just happened to be the best place, practically the only place, to sit down. And as for the window, she hadn’t even noticed there was one. Not yet.

It wasn’t until she’d been sitting on the trunk for a minute or two that Hallie began to really think about the lack of windows. The windows in the Tilsons’ second-floor apartment, for instance, had large flower-shaped stained-glass panes that looked directly into the shops and offices on the lower floors of the building next door. There were greens that turned the people in the shops and offices across the air well into a bunch of green-skinned extraterrestrial creatures. Even on the third floor, where the tower alcove made up most of the Merediths’ tiny living room, there was a small circular window of stained glass that looked out into an architect’s studio.

But here in the attic’s tower room there seemed, at first, to be no windows at all. Yet as she sat on the old trunk, Hallie became aware of a strip of bluish light that oozed out of a slit in the tower wall.

So there had been windows after all, but they’d been covered over with … Reaching out, she touched what seemed to be a thin panel of rough wood or plasterboard. Something had been nailed over the entire window area, except for that one place where a small slice of paneling had fallen away, allowing a band of light to shine through. Blue light. Forgetting the heat, the stifling air, and even Mrs. Crowley’s ghosts, Hallie leaned forward.

It wasn’t until her cheek was almost touching the paneling that she was able to see. Out through wavy blue glass, across a very narrow air well, and right into some other people’s lives.

T
he window on the other side of the air well was large and uncurtained, and the room beyond it was long and narrow. And all of it, everything Hallie could see, appeared to be swimming in ripples of blue light. It took her a moment to realize that the color didn’t come from the room itself, but from the stained glass in her spyhole. And another few seconds to realize that the wavy underwater look probably came from the imperfections in the old glass. By moving her head up and down, she could set off waves of blue light that turned the room into a scene from a mermaid movie, or maybe an underwater lounge for scuba divers.

Except for the blue light, however, the room she was looking into seemed strangely uninteresting. There was a large, heavy blob-shaped couch with a matching love seat at one end of the room, and at the other, a dining table and chairs. But other than a stack of newspapers on one of the couches and a coat
or jacket draped over the back of a chair, nothing even hinted at living occupants. There were no pictures on the walls, no vases or candles, nothing the least bit decorative sitting around on shelves or sideboards. The whole scene, Hallie decided, was more like a furniture store arrangement than a home where real people lived.

She wrinkled her nose. Having been raised by an artistic mother and a father who liked his surroundings to be lively and original, she couldn’t help wondering what kind of people would live in such a dull, impersonal environment. There was nothing interesting about any of it, except, of course, for the strange blue light. That and the fact that she was able to observe the whole scene without being seen, like a magical, four-stories-tall Peeping Tom.

She was beginning to understand why this window had been covered over. The tower rooms on the lower levels were just as close to the new building, but their windows only looked into public places like stores and offices. But up here, where the high-rise apartments began, no one would want a neighboring window so close to the big picture window in their fourth-floor apartment. It was an easy guess that the apartment owner had complained and the window had been boarded up. So their privacy problem had been solved, or so they thought.

Hallie leaned over again to peer through the slit in the paneling and the pane of blue glass. This time, on
closer inspection, she did notice one interesting object in the living room area. It was sitting high up on the mantel over the fireplace, and it appeared to be some kind of mask. A very large mask with a feathery headdress, big bushy eyebrows, and a wide, crooked mouth full of jagged teeth. But even that, and the fact that it was there, had an accidental feel to it, as if it had been left there by mistake.

Hallie was still staring at the mask when she suddenly realized that someone was in the room. She hadn’t noticed a door opening, but then, without any warning, someone was walking across the room. It was a woman—no, a girl, a teenager maybe, not much older than Hallie herself.

The first thing she noticed about the girl, the one thing no one could help noticing, was her hair. A pale blond streaked with darker shades of gold, it hung straight down below her waist. She was wearing a white T-shirt and a long denim jumper, but mostly what she seemed to be wearing was a thick, sleek shawl of shimmering hair.

She came slowly across the room with her lips and eyebrows scrunched into what seemed to be a frown. She looked angry, or sad, or maybe a little of both. Stopping once to look around, she dropped a backpack on the dining room table and came directly toward the window. Right to the window that opened on the air well, so close that for a moment Hallie ducked away, certain she would be seen. But when
she cautiously put her eye back to the opening, the girl was still looking away from her, out the window and down toward Warwick Avenue.

She had an unusual face, Hallie thought. Not just cute in the ordinary teenage girl way, with a pug nose and lots of eyelashes. And not the kind of face you can describe the best features of, like sexy eyes or movie-star lips. But the whole face, eyes and nose and mouth, was put together in an interesting way so that it somehow resembled a face from an old painting, or maybe from a fairy tale or an ancient myth.

But it was mostly the hair that was so extraordinary. Long, straight, and heavy, its blondness tinged to a greenish shimmer by the blue light, it looked like the hair of some kind of supernatural being. A mermaid, maybe. Or that princess who let her hair down from the tower so her boyfriend, the prince, could use it as a ladder. Rapunzel, that was it. It definitely did look like the hair of a Rapunzel-type fairy-tale princess.

The Rapunzel girl stayed at the window for a long time and, across the air well, so did Hallie, even though she definitely felt uncomfortable about what she was doing. At first only physically uncomfortable, from the sweltering heat, but as time passed there was another kind of discomfort that got stronger the longer she went on watching. She didn’t know why exactly, except that staring right into the face of someone who didn’t know you were there was
definitely a weird sensation. Kind of nightmarish, actually, almost like being invisible.

Several long, fascinating but uneasy minutes passed before the girl suddenly turned away, went to where she’d left her backpack, and then came back, holding a piece of paper in both hands. Back at the window, she went on looking first at the paper and then out toward Warwick Avenue while her expression changed and changed again, from quivering-lip tragic to happy anticipation—and back to tragic. And Hallie went on watching her and wondering who she was and what she was doing and why.

At last the girl shook her head hard, flipped a long sheaf of hair back over her shoulder, turned slowly away, and left the room.

Nothing more happened. Nothing moved in the blue-lit room except when Hallie moved her head enough to set waves of blue light rippling across the striped wallpaper and klutzy furniture. But she stayed at the spyhole until her watch reminded her that it was time to leave. Her mother would be home soon.

Making her way back across the attic, Hallie thought about the girl with the Rapunzel hair even while she was keeping one eye out for Mrs. Crowley’s ghosts. Other frustrating things were crowding back into her mind, like the snobby kids at Irvington Middle School and the unbelievable lie she’d just told
Erin. But the Rapunzel girl and the secret spyhole were there too, at least until she was in her own apartment again.

By five o’clock, however, everything was back to normal. At least back to what had been more or less normal lately, which meant that by the time her mother came home, Hallie was curled up in the old leather chair that had been her dad’s, with her eyes closed and an unopened book in her lap.

Paula Meredith put a bag of groceries away in the kitchen before she stuck her head around the corner and said, “There you are, sweetie. So, how was school today? Better than yesterday, I hope.”

Hallie opened her eyes and shrugged and, in a tone of voice that made it mean just the opposite, said, “School? Oh, great. Absolutely fabulous.”

“Oh? Absolutely fabulous, huh?” Her mother knew she didn’t mean it. Her savings-and-loan smile, the kind she put on every day like a uniform, faded a little. Hallie was glad to see it go. She hated it when her mother’s cheerfulness obviously said “See how brave I’m being, and it’s all for your sake.”

Hallie sighed and looked away, hiding her eyes. She hated her mother’s phony smiles, but… She shrugged and shook her head, trying not to remember that she hated it even more when it felt as if the smiles were starting to be real. As if maybe her mother already was starting to forgive God for what
had happened to the Merediths only three months before, on that awful tenth day of June.

Hallie’s anger flared up again and then soured into a feeling of guilt. Guilt for wanting her mother to go on feeling the way they both did that day when the policeman came to the door to ask Hallie’s mother if she was Mrs. Meredith. To ask that one question and then to say “I’m afraid I have bad news, Mrs. Meredith.”

“Yeah, fabulous,” Hallie said again, trying this time to sound as if she really meant it. Then she clenched her teeth, shut her eyes, and kept them shut until her mother went back into the kitchen.

Dinner that night was, as usual, mostly microwave stuff. Hallie didn’t blame her mother for that, at least not very much. She could remember how she and her father used to kid her mother about being a gourmet cook, or at least a very adventuresome one, always trying out new recipes. But that was another thing that had changed a lot since Bloomfield. Oh, it was probably true, as her mother kept reminding her, that it was hard to switch over to recipe books when you’ve been reading financial statements all day. Still, microwave lasagna for the third time in a week and grocery-store cookies for dessert didn’t do a whole lot to improve a less-than-perfect day. Even though she was pretty hungry, Hallie hardly ate anything.

The cookies were still waiting on the table and
Hallie’s mind was wandering when her mother reached over to pat her on the arm. “Hallie,” she said, “did you hear me? You seem to be a million miles away.”

“Hear you? Oh, I guess not.” Hallie shook her head. “Was it something about…” A word or two floated back. “Was it something about the Tilsons?”

Her mother sighed and shook her head. “What I said was, I forgot to drop off the Tilsons’ yogurt. Could you run it down for me?”

The Tilsons, who lived in one of the halfway-nice apartments on the second floor, were always having her mother pick up things for them at the store. Especially yogurt. The Tilsons ate a lot of yogurt.

“Not again,” Hallie said. Getting the big carton out of the refrigerator, she reluctantly started downstairs. Reluctantly because the Tilsons were too …
Yeah, too what?
Hallie asked herself. The Tilsons were a really old couple who had been superhelpful when the Merediths arrived at the Warwick Mansion, clueing them in on important information like where to pick up their mail and how to keep the ancient coin-operated washing machine from flooding the whole basement. They’d even gone so far as to send up some cherry pie on that first day. And not just two pieces—a whole freshly baked cherry pie.

So they were too what? Too friendly? Or maybe too sympathetic? Or too nosy? Yeah, that was it. The
Tilsons were too nosy, Hallie decided as she rang their doorbell.

“Well, Hallie, my girl,” Mr. Tilson said as he opened the door and peered out, “how good to see you again.” Under his close-cropped white hair his small, sharp eyes positively glowed with curiosity. “Do come in.”

“Yes, yes.” His wife, whose name was Annette, was right behind him. “So good to see you. We’ve been wondering about how you’re getting along now that school has started.” Her eyes had the same super-snoopy glow. The Tilsons, who’d been married practically forever, looked a lot alike—small, pale, and furry, like the same kind of little animal. Rabbits, maybe, but with small round ears instead of big floppy ones. Two small, round-eared, nosy rabbits.

Hallie said hello, and as she quickly handed over the carton, she managed to change the subject from Irvington Middle School to yogurt and whether her mother had remembered to buy the right flavor. She had. It figured; Paula Meredith usually didn’t make that kind of mistake. And then Mrs. Tilson was saying, “Hallie dear. We were about to have a piece of cherry pie. Wouldn’t you like to join us?”

Hallie wouldn’t like to. At least she wouldn’t have, if it hadn’t been for the pie. But she remembered Annette Tilson’s cherry pie, or at least her taste buds certainly did. So much so that she had to swallow quickly before she said, “Hey great.” She swallowed
again and added, “But I can’t stay long. Homework, you know.”

At the Tilsons’ kitchen table there were thick slabs of luscious pie, cups of tea for the Tilsons, and a glass of milk for Hallie. And, just as she’d feared, a lot of nosy questions. The questions and comments about her school were bad enough. Questions like “Are you finding your classes interesting?”

“Yeah.” Hallie shrugged. “Some of them.” But what she wanted to say was,
Yeah, really interesting, if you don’t mind being around a lot of people who hate you and make sure you know it.

And then “I suppose you’re making lots of new friends?”
Yeah, really good friends. The kind who just act like they think you’re already dead, instead of actually trying to kill you.

But the questions about her mother were the worst. After a lot of comments about what a lovely lady Paula Meredith was and how she reminded them of their own dear daughter who lived far away in Massachusetts, Mrs. Tilson said, “We’ve been worrying about your mother, dear. She’s been looking so tired lately. Working such long hours and with all the household duties to handle by herself. I hope you’re doing all you can to help.”

That did it. The throat-swelling, eye-burning rage flared up like an erupting volcano.

“Yeah, I try to help her.” Hallie pushed away her pie plate and got to her feet. The Tilsons were staring
up at her, looking more than ever like a pair of nervous rabbits. “At least I don’t send her to the store all the time to buy yogurt for me.”