The Snow (17 page)

“She didn’t tell us much,” said Michael, fighting tears. “She mostly confided in Mrs. Shevvington. Mrs. Shevvington was really her best friend,” he told the police.

Mrs. Shevvington smiled pityingly. “It’s a sad thing when a little girl’s best friend is a strange grown-up, officer. But it is not unusual for unhappy children to seek out the most stable adult. I think you know the recent history of Anya and Christina. What examples to have set for you! Stability is not an island product.” Mrs. Shevvington shook her oatmeal face back and forth. “Poor little Dolly. Perhaps in the morning … you should … drag the pond. Christina made her go there. Poor little Dolly was always drawn back.”

“She was not!” cried Christina. “It wasn’t like that.”

They will redecorate that guest room, thought Christina. The one that was black and cream, lace and gauze, the one that was Anya. They will make it a room of Dolly. Emerald green and full of books.

Mrs. Shevvington began to cry noisily. Her crying was as ugly and solid as her face. Mr. Shevvington put an arm around her to comfort her.

The police officer said quickly, “Nobody blames you. You did your best. Anything could have happened. Going to a friend’s house without calling you. Falling through thin ice.”

Nobody would blame the Shevvingtons.

Why, the Shevvingtons would act as horrified as anybody. They would weep in front of people, saying it was their fault. People would gather around to reassure them. “It wasn’t your fault,” they would tell Mr. and Mrs. Shevvington, adding in a whisper, “Those island girls …. so unstable … so strange. In the end, Dolly was no different.”

If Christina told the police that Evil stood before them, fixing coffee, they would say Christina had gone winter mad. If Christina said, “Guess what almost happened to me skiing,” the police would say to the Shevvingtons, “You people really have all the loonies living here, don’t you?”

“Also,” said Mrs. Shevvington, “the island children, especially Dolly, are fascinated by the fact that exactly one hundred years ago, the wife of the sea captain who built this house flung herself to her death by leaping off the cupola onto the rocks. Dolly asked for the details. I thought it was historical interest, and I encouraged it.” Here Mrs. Shevvington wept a little. “But perhaps Dolly was planning to do the same. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” sobbed Mrs. Shevvington.

“My sister wouldn’t do that,” said Benjamin. He was as stolid and unemotional as ever. “My sister is afraid of heights,” he said. “She was afraid of that ski weekend because she’d have to go downhill face first.” Then he said, “I’m going back out to look for my sister again.”

“But where?” cried Mrs. Shevvington. “Where haven’t you looked already?”

Benjamin shrugged. “I can’t do
nothing
.” He turned to the police. “She’d go to the island if she were going anywhere. Let’s check every boat in the harbor. She might have sneaked aboard a fishing vessel.”

The police thought that was logical. They said Michael and Benj could come with them for the hunt. “Me, too!” cried Christina.

“You’re too little,” said Michael. “And she’s our sister.”

Christina was alone in the mansion with the Shevvingtons.

They smiled at her.

Her skin crawled. She could feel the three colors of her hair separating and shivering. She smiled back.

Mr. Shevvington said, “I will telephone the Jayes now.”

“Now when you know they can’t come,” said Christina. “You know they’ll have to wait for dawn. Nobody can take a boat to the mainland at night during a snowstorm. So you know they’ll sit awake all night, weeping and terrified.”

Mr. Shevvington smiled.

Mrs. Shevvington smiled.

She could not sit in the room with them. Their smiles were too horrible, full of holes and yellow teeth and knowledge.

Christina went up the curling stairs to her cold little room.

She turned on the electric blanket and wrapped it around herself, mummy style. The Shevvingtons can’t hurt me tonight, she thought. It’s not reasonable, not when the whole police force will be back shortly. So I must stay calm and think. Either Dolly is hiding from the Shevvingtons …
or the Shevvingtons are hiding Dolly.

Could they hide Dolly at Schooner Inne?

Christina had often wondered if the giggle who lived in the cellar came up for meals; if when she was asleep on the third floor, the giggle crept up to sit in the chair where Christina sat for supper; to drink from the glass Christina liked; to eat the leftovers Christina had wrapped in aluminum foil and put in the refrigerator.

Now she knew the giggle could ski.

But did she know where he was? Ski resort? School gym? Or back here? With Dolly?

A
T TWO IN THE
morning the policemen brought Michael and Benjamin back with the order to get some rest. They had found no trace of Dolly.

The boys went upstairs. The Shevvingtons followed. The Shevvingtons entered their room on the second floor. Michael and Benj continued up to the third. Christina rushed out to hear the news.

“She’s got to be all right!” said Benjamin desperately. “What could have happened to her? She’s so cautious.”

Michael said, “Remember Anya this fall? How over and over she said the sea wanted one of us?”

How could they forget Anya, in her white gown, hidden by the cloud of her own hair, like an ancient prophetess, murmuring, “The sea wants one of us?”

“I’m calling Anya,” said Benj thickly, turning, pounding back down the stairs. Michael and Christina thudded after him. He dialed the ski resort, and over the phone lines, across the miles, they heard the terror of being wakened by a phone call in the middle of the night. “Dolly’s missing?” cried Anya, her voice breaking and cracking like old ice. “Not Dolly! We’re coming, Blake and I; we’ll drive as fast as we can.”

“There’s no point,” said Benj. “I just wanted to know if you had Dolly, or if she had come to you or talked to you.” He hung up almost with violence, frustrated by another dead end.

They trudged back up the stairs. The endless circling stairs, like an endless circling nightmare. “Benj,” said Christina, “do you think that the Shevvingtons — ”

“Chrissie!” snapped Benjamin, “you’re as crazy as Anya these days. Dolly’s just — I don’t know — lost or something.” His voice broke. Benjamin, too, was lost.

The Shevvingtons will have captured us all, thought Christina.

She shut the door to her room. Michael and Benj’s shut, and down below, the Shevvingtons’ door closed with a
snap
.

Christina looked out the window into the village. In spite of the heavy snow, she could see far more lights than the night she had walked alone to break into the high school. Rotating red-and-blue lights on police cars looking for Dolly Jaye.

She isn’t out there, thought Christina.

Christina was wearing her sweatpants with the jungle parrots. Over it she added an old hooded sweatshirt. She put on two pairs of socks instead of shoes. She checked the batteries of her flashlights. She put one flashlight in the kangaroo pocket of the sweatshirt and held the other in her hand — combination weapon and light.

For two hours she sat on her bed watching the lights go on and off in the town. Mostly they went off.

It was four in the morning.

If people were going to sleep at all, they would be asleep now.

Down the stairs crept Christina in her stocking feet. Nothing creaked to give her away. She reached the bottom and looked up. No moonlight filtered through the ice-caked cupola windows. The banisters rose like bones in the darkness. Nobody’s bedroom door opened. Nobody had seen or heard her.

Through the hall, into the kitchen. She turned on no lights. In the dark she found the bolt on the cellar door. She worked it slowly, controlling the sound of her own breathing until finally, silently, she could open the cellar door. At the top of the stairs, she stood listening.

Silence.

She listened harder and separated the murmur of the furnace and the tick of the water heater.

She listened harder and found the thump of her own heart.

Then she turned on the two flashes, pointed them ahead of her, and tiptoed down into the cellar.

Nothing had changed.

There were old sawhorses and paint cans. Rusting tools and cardboard boxes on shelves.

Into the first room Christina went. She felt the outer stone walls for rocks that moved or drafts that came through cracks. She pushed hard on the inner walls. But there were no hidden rooms where a creature could lie in secret. All the inner walls were moldy paperboard.

Into the second room.

Nothing.

By now the damp in the floor had soaked through both her socks. Her feet were cold and beginning to hurt. This is nothing, Christina told herself. Think how Dolly’s feet must feel, wherever she is.

Into the third room.

It contained some cardboard boxes sitting on shelves and a large trunk half hidden by old rusting tools.

The trunk was large.

Large enough to contain —

Christina tapped on the trunk with the flashlight.

It sounded thick and full.

It was not locked.

She opened it easily.

Ruby red and emerald green — like Dolly’s hair, Dolly’s ski suit — glittered in the shaft of her flashlight. Christina cried out, covering her mouth to stop the noise.

The trunk was full of old, discarded Christmas tree decorations — tarnished bulbs and faded tinsel.

She stuck her hand down through it.

Nothing else was there.

She closed the trunk.

She went into the fourth and final room.

The door creaked behind her.

She whirled, flashing her lights.

Nothing moved.

Her hair prickled.

She crossed the room.

From the room with the trunk came the giggle.

“I knew you were here!” breathed Christina Romney. “I knew when you saw it was me, you would come out.”

Her hair of silver and gold gleamed in the half dark.

She left the fourth room. She held flashlights in each hand, like a gunman in a western going for the final shoot-out.

But nobody stood in the door of the room with the trunk.

She stepped toward it. Her breathing seemed louder than blizzards, her heart slamming against her ribs louder than waves against the rocks.

Nothing giggled.

Nothing moved.

She took another step. With her icy foot, she kicked the door open.

Nothing stood behind the door.

Nothing at all stood in the room.

“Dolly!” whispered Christina. “Are you there?”

Around her ankles she felt cold air.

Somewhere a door had opened, or a window. Cold off the sea was sifting through the cellar.

But there were no doors here, nor any windows.

Christina walked into the room with the trunk.

She moved her two lights around the room, and the shadows of the sawhorses and the paint cans and the trunk leaped and dissolved and leaped up again.

The cold air was almost a wind.

Cold as ghosts, thought Christina.

The sea captain’s wife. Had she come back? Did she consist of cold air?

But Christina did not believe in ghosts. No ghost had tried to crush her in the bleachers.

Now the wind was stronger. It lifted her hair like fingers going for her throat.

Christina walked into the shadows, leaving shadows behind her, making shadows before her.

She could smell the mud flats.

It was the scent of Maine: the scent of low tide, the essence of the sea.

She faced into the scent and followed it, as if it were the smell of chocolate chip cookies at the bakery.

The wall was not the same shape it had been. It had an angle she had not felt when she was in this room before. It now had, in fact, an opening. A passage out to the cliffs.

Legend was correct.

The sea captain had had a reason for building his home on this terrible spot, alone and wind-tormented: private access to Candle Cove. What had he smuggled in or out this grim little rock-bound passage?

It was narrow. The stones on each side were hung with ice.

No wonder the rising tide sounded like advancing cannons when the waves slapped the opening of this passage. But where could the passage come out, except on the exposed ledges and shelves of the cliffs? Nobody could dock a boat there; it was rock, with the most dangerous tides in Maine twice a day.

She could not see the end of the passage.

It was dark out and still snowing.

But wherever the giggle was, and wherever he had Dolly, that, surely, was the end of the passage.

I’ll go wake Michael and Benj, she thought. I won’t mention the Shevvingtons or the giggle; if I do, they won’t listen. I’ll say I found a secret room in the cellar. The three of us together will find out what’s at the end of the passage.

Christina was filled with the image: herself, Michael, and Benj, standing in a hole in the cliff, Dolly reaching her fragile arms up for rescue. Dolly would tell her brothers about the Shevvingtons, and Christina would be free of the lies they had wrapped around her, from burning clothes to tempting Dolly onto thin ice.

Christina turned to go back out, but her cold-as-lead feet betrayed her. She lost her balance, staggered slightly, and slid into the passage.

She caught herself by taking two steps forward … and then she knew the truth. The floor was slanted toward the Cove so the water would run back out. Slick with ice, it was as smooth as the maze in Jonah’s backyard. Christina slid and fell. She could not get up. The walls and floor of the passage were solid ice.

Christina slid toward the black unknown. She dug her feet into the floor, but it was glass ice. She dropped first one flashlight and then the other, but freeing her fingers did not give her anything to grip. She braced her feet against one wall, but her weight carried her relentlessly toward the cliff. Inch by inch, she gathered momentum.

This is what happened to Dolly, Christina thought. She didn’t jump to her death, like the sea captain’s wife. She just slid on through.