The Peculiar Night of the Blue Heart Page 2

  The cold wind filled the house as she opened the door, splattering the floorboards with rain. Marybeth moved quickly, pulling the door shut tight behind her and hoping the sound wouldn’t wake Mrs. Mannerd in her bed. She was a light sleeper as it was.

  This was not the first time she had snuck out of the house; she had chased after Lionel on his odd adventures, and she had sought sanctuary in the woods so that she might catch up on her reading. But never at night and in such horrible weather. She would have waited until morning if she thought the blue creature would show itself.

  She held the lantern ahead of her and tried to see beyond its dull light. She was sure the flash of blue came from along the river, somewhere near the big rock where she and Lionel would lie on their stomachs to watch the fish as he tried to charm them to the surface.

  “Are you here?” she said, her soft voice drowned in the wind and rain. No answer. She tried to imitate Lionel’s confidence when he spoke to his animals. “Come on out,” she said. “There’s no one here to hurt you.”

  If she found this blue light, this fox—or whatever it was—she knew that she would at last understand Lionel the way that she wanted to understand him. For years she had tagged along and tried to be a part of his hidden world, but all she could ever do was watch from the outside.

  She stood still for a long time, the rain making its way under her hood and plastering her hair to her neck. Nothing came of it, and her heart sank. The blue creature was gone, if it had ever been there at all. It could have been a dream, or some trick of the light.

  She was just about to turn back for the house when she saw it again—a flash of blue rushing past her. She spun around to follow it, slipping on the leaves and grasping at tree trunks to steady herself.

  “Wait!” she said, for she could see it racing ahead of her. She thought she could hear its breathing, and she could see that it truly was glowing like a light. If only it slowed down she would be able to get a better look at the sort of animal it was.

  Something pulled her back, and with a wince she realized that her sleeve had caught on a branch and ripped halfway off its seam. Mrs. Mannerd would be furious; she made that slicker herself when the old one finally wore beyond all use. It was the only new article of clothing any of the children had been given this year.

  Perhaps she could repair it before the morning and not be caught, Marybeth thought. Water seeping in through the tear, she ran on, her lungs burning in her chest. Lightning made the woods bright as day for an instant.

  “Wait!” Too late, she felt the ground disappear from under her feet and realized that she had run into the river. The lantern flew from her hand, the candle extinguished the moment before she hit the water.

  The darkness was so absolute, so silent, that at first Marybeth thought she was dead. It was the ache in her lungs that assured her she was still living, and she thrashed blindly for the surface, but there was no telling the surface from the depths in all that black.

  And then she saw the blue light, and forgot her own hunger for air. She forgot to panic. Forgot that death was a possibility at all.

  The light circled around her, long and soft like a tail. Its face came close to hers. It had a pointed snout like the foxes that ran through the woods, but its eyes were big and white, as though they were completely blank. Only when she stared harder did Marybeth see that there were faint silver pupils. The blue creature was studying her; was it trying to help?

  She felt her eyes closing, her body floating off somewhere. Out of the river, away from the trees and the little red house, into a sky without stars in it.

  Something hit her chest, hard. Warmth surged through her blood and, with it, the strength and the mind to kick herself up to the surface.

  She broke through the water with a gasp.

  The blue creature was gone.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Lionel descended the stairs for breakfast ten minutes late, with his sandy brown hair not brushed and his shirt missing, as usual. The consequence was that he would miss out on a fresh bowl of oatmeal and toast, which he hardly minded. He would crawl about under the table looking for crusts the older ones dropped so Mrs. Mannerd would think them eaten. Sometimes there was still jam on them.

  This morning, though, Mrs. Mannerd stood at the head of the table, wringing her apron and frowning.

  “Tell the truth,” she said, and Lionel could hear the worry in her voice. She didn’t sound angry, which made the worry even louder. “Did you and Marybeth sneak out to play one of your games last night?”

  Only then did Lionel realize that Marybeth’s seat at the table was empty. Her bowl had been scraped clean, her toast snatched away by the older ones.

  Lionel was not one to answer Mrs. Mannerd’s questions, and he especially hated talking in the morning, when his voice cracked and his head was still filled with sleep. But he could feel Marybeth’s absence. He could sense that she had left some trail that led out of this house and then disappeared.

  “No,” he said. His cracked voice sounded like it belonged to a little boy, and he hated how human it was.

  Mrs. Mannerd knelt down before him. She took his hands—something she had never done. Lionel felt cornered, and he resisted the instinct to growl. “I need to know the truth,” she said. Her eyes were small and startled. She was not an old woman anymore, but a bird that had lost one of her young and needed to find it before the weasel ate it for lunch.

  Her grip on Lionel’s hands tightened. His breathing became shallow; his pupils dilated; he could hear the older ones scraping the porridge from their bowls, the sounds they made becoming louder and closer, their chatter reduced to the grunting of pigs at a trough.

  He saw that Marybeth’s yellow slicker was missing from its hook.

  “Please,” Mrs. Mannerd said. Her entire face became the face of a bird.

  Lionel ripped his hands from her grasp and ran for the door.

  “Lionel!” Mrs. Mannerd cried. “For heaven’s sake, this is important! I need you to be a rational child for once.”

  He was already out the door by then. Barefoot, he ran down the path that led into the woods. Marybeth had gone this way hours earlier. He followed the imprint of her boots.

  The autumn air was cold and sharp against his bare skin. He paid the cold no mind, though, and imagined that he had grown a thick layer of fur like the coyotes that lived here even when there was snow.

  He found a mark in the mud where Marybeth’s heel had skidded. A flash of yellow caught his eye—thread from her slicker caught on a branch and fluttering.

  Lionel willed his ear canals to expand so that he could listen for her. If she was hurt, she would be calling for help, and he would find her. He had to.

  There was no sound. Lionel crawled on all fours, his ear close to the ground, listening.

  The smell of rust caused his nostrils to flare. There in a bed of wet leaves, at the river’s edge, was the lantern from the hall closet. Panicked, Lionel scrambled toward the water and looked inside. The water was so clear that he could see all the way down to the pebbles and roots at the bottom.

  Marybeth’s trail had come to a stop.

  “Lionel!” He became aware that Mrs. Mannerd had been calling after him the whole time. Her voice was a screech. As she approached he heard the flutter of her bird wings.

  But when she finally caught up to him, panting, he looked up and saw that she was human. “For heaven’s sake,” she wheezed, “I can’t have you out here catching your death and—”

  She saw the lantern resting on the ground beside where Lionel was crouched. Splatters of fresh wax were on its glass door. She looked at the river. “Oh,” she breathed. “Lionel, come away from there. Get back inside the house.”

  He shook his head. This was the spot where Marybeth disappeared, and he could not leave until he knew what had happened to her. He was the only one who ever heard her gentle voice over all the commotion in the red house. He had found her in the summer when o
ne of the older ones locked her in the closet, because he was the only one listening. He had smelled the salt of her tears even from several rooms away. If he left now, she would just disappear. No one would find her.

  “Come on, Lionel.”

  His fingers and toes bore into the mud like claws.

  Mrs. Mannerd grabbed the lantern with one hand and Lionel’s wrist with the other. He screamed. She pulled him away from the river, and his frenzied kicks disturbed Marybeth’s trail. The path she had taken last night was covered over with wet leaves. Gone. She was just gone.

  The police came. Lionel was huddled in Marybeth’s bed, his face pressed to the window, watching them. They ran through the trees with their bloodhounds on leashes.

  Lionel’s breath fogged the glass. He was trapped in a terrarium. This window was painted shut. Mrs. Mannerd had barricaded the door with a chair and told him to stay put. She couldn’t have another child running off into the great unknown.

  Downstairs, the older ones were chattering as they cleaned the house, stepping on every creaky floorboard and slamming the cabinet doors as they put away the dishes. Sunday was chore day, and Lionel could smell the soapy mop water. Whatever had happened the night before, all traces of it were gone from the house now.

  He didn’t think that something had come into the house to take Marybeth away. He would have known. He knew everything that came into the house. He knew where the mice nested in the walls because he could hear them skittering. But he wouldn’t tell Mrs. Mannerd about them because she would try to kill them.

  Before the police came and Mrs. Mannerd barricaded him in this room (it was the only one with a window that didn’t open), he had crawled through the house, sniffing the floorboards and looking for bits of fur or strange footprints. But he was now very sure that she had left the house on her own, and that no one had been with her.

  In the distance, he saw the bloodhounds investigating the water’s edge. The bloodhounds were as perplexed as Lionel. They paced the river and pawed at the dirt.

  When the police returned to the house, Lionel climbed from the bed and pressed his ear to the vent in the floor. He heard Mrs. Mannerd saying, “Not like her, not at all.”

  “These types of children run away sometimes, ma’am. They always turn up.” The policeman’s voice was like a growling dog. Lionel could imagine his yellowed teeth, could smell his hot breath.

  “I know my children,” Mrs. Mannerd said, still squawking like a frightened bird. “Marybeth wouldn’t run away. Not her.”

  “Does she have any family? Any relations she may have been in contact with?”

  “The girl lost her mother when she was born, and her father died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium four—n-no—five, it was five years ago now. She’s been with us since then.”

  It was the first time Lionel had ever heard Marybeth’s story. She had arrived at the little red house one soft, snowy afternoon without explanation, as if she had fallen from the sky.

  More muffled words were spoken downstairs, and then the police had gone.

  Mrs. Mannerd came upstairs with a bowl of potato stew and a slice of bread, which she set on the floor before Lionel. She sat on the floor across from him, groaning as she eased herself onto the boards.

  Lionel hugged his knees and watched her. She still looked worried, which perplexed him. Since Mr. Mannerd’s passing, Mrs. Mannerd spent a great deal of time griping about all the mouths she was left to feed alone, all the footprints she had to wipe, the banging on the bathroom door when the bathwater had been running for too long. Lionel did not expect that she would care especially that one of her charges was missing.

  “Listen to me,” she said. “I didn’t want to lock you in this room, but I can’t have you out there looking for her. The police will look for her instead. You understand that, don’t you? If there’s something dangerous out there, I want you in here so you don’t get hurt.”

  “The animals won’t hurt me,” Lionel said. They never had. He had even begun to earn the trust of the coyotes. They didn’t come out for him yet, but he could feel them watching him when he crept out on the nights he was able to steal some meat from the refrigerator.

  “I’m not talking about the animals,” Mrs. Mannerd said, and her eyes turned watery and she clasped her hand over her mouth, as if she could stuff the words back onto her tongue and swallow them down.

  But it was too late for that. Lionel already understood. He could make the chickens lay eggs and he could reason with the most stubborn of foxes. But he had learned years ago that humans were more dangerous than the things that stalked about in the wilderness.

  CHAPTER

  4

  The sun had begun to set when the policeman knocked on the door. Mrs. Mannerd was scolding the older ones about their squabbling as she made her way to the door. When she opened it, the smell of baked beans and boiled potatoes wafted out into the chilly air.

  Marybeth stood at the policeman’s side, lilting sleepily and wearing a wool blanket over her slicker. Her hair was tangled and full of bits of leaves.

  Mrs. Mannerd let out a cry.

  “A woman up the road found her sleeping in their barn this afternoon. Would have returned her sooner, but she wouldn’t tell us where she lived.”

  “Marybeth!” Mrs. Mannerd said, and knelt before her. “Why on earth not?”

  “I couldn’t remember,” Marybeth said.

  “Come in, come in, before you freeze. I can’t thank you enough, Officer, really.”

  Mrs. Mannerd and the policeman were still talking when Marybeth kicked out of her boots and moved into the house. She walked as though she were floating, past the kitchen where the older ones were playing cards and betting their chores, up the stairs to where Lionel had been watching her from between the rungs of the bannister.

  His face was splashed with freckles that came from his countless hours spent in the sun, his eyes wide and dark. As she climbed the steps, he crawled out of the shadows and sat on the landing to greet her.

  He was waiting for an explanation, Marybeth supposed. But all she said was, “You ought to be wearing a shirt. It’s cold.” She knelt beside him and wrapped the wool blanket around his shoulders. The gesture was so very like her, and so familiar, that Lionel felt an aching in his chest. This was still Marybeth, but something had changed. Something she wasn’t telling him.

  He didn’t know how to ask her what was different. He had never had to ask her anything. Marybeth was uncomplicated on the surface. Predictable. But Lionel knew when anything was amiss, and he had always known how to fix it.

  When she was sad, he could bring her to the river and lure the fish to the surface to dance for them. When she was angry, he raced her, until they had run so far from the little red house and were so out of breath that they collapsed into the grass and laughed.

  But for once, he didn’t know where she had been, or what had changed, or how to fix it.

  As she moved to stand, he said, “Wait.”

  She stayed in place, and he leaned forward, squinting at her gnarled brown hair and then at her face. “Where are your spectacles?”

  She blinked. “Aren’t I wearing them?”

  Lionel shook his head.

  Marybeth brought her hands to her temples. “Oh. I suppose I don’t need them anymore.” She stood, and as she walked toward her room, she did not look back to see his perplexed eyes blinking after her. She did not see that he was gnawing on his lip.

  Marybeth did not come downstairs for supper. Still wearing her yellow slicker, she climbed up to her bunk and slept until Mrs. Mannerd opened the door and filled the dark room with light from the hallway. She was carrying a tray of stew and bread, which she set on the desk the children used for their schoolwork.

  “Are you asleep? Didn’t you get enough sleep in the barn?” She was being facetious, of course.

  Marybeth raised her head sleepily from the pillow. She was finding it difficult to keep her eyes open.

  Mrs. Manner
d didn’t see Lionel lurking behind her and peering at Marybeth from behind her faded gingham dress. Marybeth saw him, but only for a moment before Mrs. Mannerd came in and closed the door behind her.

  “Come down now and eat something,” Mrs. Mannerd said, and it occurred to Marybeth that she was hungry. She felt as though she hadn’t eaten in years.

  She sat at the desk and began spooning the stew into her mouth greedily, as Mrs. Mannerd plucked the leaves from her hair.

  “Are you ready to talk about what happened?” Mrs. Mannerd said.

  “  ‘What happened’?” Marybeth asked.

  “What happened that led to you falling asleep in a barn. Was one of the children mean to you again?”

  Marybeth continued eating her stew, giving no care to stop the splatters from getting on her sleeves. She shrugged. It was most unlike her, and Mrs. Mannerd wrung her hands and fretted. She noticed the torn sleeve but didn’t remark on it. She would mend it later.

  “Marybeth, has someone hurt you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re certain?”

  Marybeth didn’t answer. She was too busy eating the stew, pausing only to take bites from the bread.

  Most unlike her, Mrs. Mannerd thought.

  When Mrs. Mannerd left the room, she saw Lionel crouched by the door. She thought that he might do something wild, but he didn’t. He looked up at her, and in his wide eyes Mrs. Mannerd saw only sorrow.

  “There now, it’s all right,” she told him. “Have you eaten? There’s some extra bread and butter in the kitchen.”

  She held out her hand, and for once he took it. It was rare that he let her stand this close, much less reached out to touch her. In her pity, and in his fear, for once they had some common ground.

  Marybeth had always been a child who blended into the wallpaper and the wood grain, but without her red spectacles, she became even more invisible. The older ones shoved past her on their way downstairs to the breakfast table, jostling her about. Marybeth didn’t seem to mind this either. She walked with an eerie poise, as though she were carrying something breakable on her head.