Chapter One

The Magician

Well, here it is, folks — the first chapter of The Last Rite. I’ll be releasing the audiobook version on the paid subscriber channel, but you can read for free!

In this chapter, we meet Maggie, our heroine, and a few of the other major characters, as they attend Westbrook Elementary School in the fictional Toronto suburb of Westbrook. Think Etobicoke with fewer strip malls…

✪

Maggie Stuart is flying again, far above the street lights and night traffic. Below, Toronto is laid out like a Mondrian painting, all blocks and straight lines.

She banks and glides, savouring the bite of the cool spring air, and flies west, deep into the suburbs, toward home. She swoops lower, letting her fingertips brush the young leaves of the apple trees, their white blossoms luminous in the semi-dark, dodging the branches with a giddy joy at her own freedom.

Over to her left, Maggie glimpses the tarred roof and yellow bricks of her own school, Westbrook Elementary, and banks toward it through the canopy of trees.

Then suddenly, with a strange transition of the sort that can only seem logical in dreams, she is walking through the subdivision, her footsteps hollow on the asphalt. Although she is still in her night clothes, it is day now and she knows she is going home after school. It is so quiet her ears buzz; it seems like she must be the only person in the whole world.

She feels more than hears something behind her, approaching, slowing down, a dark, lumbering presence. Without turning, Maggie knows it is a black car. A heavy sense of dread descends on her, making the air go almost solid around her. Helpless to continue, she stops and waits for it…

And everything goes dark, like a flame winking out. From the blackness comes a deep voice—I have to talk to you, it says. Then her own voice in reply, heavy with foreknowledge: catch me, I’m going to faint…

Even as she struggles to put a name, a face, to the familiar voice of the other, everything is silent again. She stands now in the hall of Westbrook Elementary, while people flow by her like ghosts, their mouths opening and closing silently. Information barrages her, but it comes in fragments and none of it makes sense. Third period is … cancelled. It’s cancelled. There’s going to be an auditorium instead. She hears her own voice again, disembodied: catch me, I’m going to faint…

But she doesn’t, doesn’t truly feel faint at all, feels weightless in fact. Instead of fainting, she flies straight up, through the tarred roof of the school. It vanishes around her, insubstantial, and she’s soon high above it. In the distance, she can make out the roof of her own house.

Intrigued, she rises like a hot air balloon. Twilight charges the horizon with fire, then darkness descends and the world below spreads out, a vast landscape of black dotted with firefly light.

She can’t see her house any more. Straining to make sense of her position, she thinks she can make out something in the northern sky, somewhere far off where the lights of the city give way to farmland…

Then a series of images swirl between herself and the safety of the earth, becoming more disjointed as they flash around her…

A candle flame, jumping and flickering; by its light she makes out a huge room, a cathedral, a cave, a design painted on the floor… But she can’t make it out, and shapes blossom around her. There are other people flying now, wearing horrible red masks, silent, coming at her first from below then from all sides. The mouths of the masks gape, and teeth glisten within the hollow openings.

Maggie looks down, desperately seeking an escape, and sees, far, far below, the roof of her own house. She raises her arms above her head, and her nightgown billows up around her face—and she plummets down to earth.

✪

I woke with a start, lying on the carpet about to strangle myself with the sheet. A ray of sunlight streamed through the crack in the curtain, right onto my face.

How opportune, I thought, pulling my leg off the bed—the only part of me which had had the decency to stay where it belonged—and rolled my head out of the light.

I stood, one foot at a time, and went to the mirror, the most self-loathing part of my morning ritual. Morning, and she reflects. Here, I thought disgustedly, is a girl who deserves to have a low opinion of herself.

My brown hair was not the worst colour in the world, but when it was long, like now, it was always stringy, and I could never seem to keep it from looking greasy. I thought my face was too small and didn’t suit my body, which seemed proportioned correctly in the shoulders, but too thick in the legs. Not that I was overweight, just as self-conscious as any barely teen-aged girl was as an absolute birthright of being North American and alive—as I told myself repeatedly.

Saying that didn’t seem to make much difference. It didn’t help, naturally, to have a mother who was constantly dieting while preaching the gospel of “love thyself,” as if I didn’t get the irony.

My mother’s voice floated up from the kitchen downstairs. “Maggie! Marguerite, unless you hurry, you won’t have time for breakfast. And you know how important it is to start to your day with a proper meal!”

That was the content, even if I couldn’t actually catch her actual words, but it was the same every morning. I knew the routine.

Something was up with Mom lately, with Jan as I was more likely to call in inside my own head. Normally, she was all business, as if her habit of throwing herself night and day into her job as a sales rep for a technologies firm wasn’t about hiding from herself, and me. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know when your Mom is unhappy. And lately, lately she wasn’t.

She was—well, bubbly. I was embarrassed to admit that was a situation I found marginally worse. I kept meaning to ask if she was dating someone, but it never seemed like the right time.

Since I’d turned thirteen and got my babysitter training, she figured I was old enough to stay home by myself, and “I’ll be out this evening” really didn’t tell me much. Musing over this, I pulled on jeans and a concealing green sweatshirt, combed my hair back into a ponytail, and covered a couple of pimples with skin-tone cream. I lined my eyes with the black pencil, a task I neglected about fifty percent of the time as fairly pointless, and threw a couple of reading books into the old backpack.

Then I left the room, closing the door after me, and went downstairs to the kitchen, while the fading memories of flying over Westbrook continued to resonate in my mind. It had been beautiful—at first. The fear, the sudden, sickening lurch I’d felt as I fell, those things were acrid in my memory.

Somehow, in the few minutes it took me to get ready and come downstairs, Mom had gone. My lunch bag was sitting on the neat white counter. I snuck a half cup of coffee from what Jan had brewed that morning for herself, pulled on tennis shoes, locked the door, and left for school. I wouldn’t be asking Jan about her love life this morning.

✪

The lunch-time schoolyard was busy. There was a baseball game on the diamond and ball hockey on the smaller tarmac: the grade seven house league was an integral part of the lunch hour. Most of my fellow grade eights were playing basketball on the court in the centre of the asphalt tarmac or hanging out around the school walls waiting for classes to get back in.

Westbrook Elementary had a rule that you couldn’t go home for lunch without written permission, and for most kids, that was just too much of a bother. For me, I couldn’t work up the energy to get Jan to write a note; it was simpler just to bring something to read, and a little less depressing than spending my lunch hour alone in an empty house.

I was thirteen, the average age for a grade eight. I didn’t feel average. Looking around, it seemed that I was the only kid on the whole tarmac who had a book and no friends. I didn’t know what it was about me that made it so hard to make friends, but this year, as in many years before, I hadn’t found anyone. It was nearly the end of the school year, and honestly, I’d given up well before Christmas. Maybe next year, when I got to high school, things would be different. Sighing, I dropped down on the concrete steps of the equipment shed, and opened my bag to retrieve the novel I was reading.

It had rained quite a bit in the last two days, and the grassy field was dotted with patches of mud. The grade seven ball-players all seemed to want to practice sliding-into-base today, and the infield was turning into a giant mud-bath. I had a private chuckle as my imagination conjured the image of thirty shivering twelve year-olds being hosed down by the janitor while pudgy Mr. Grady, the principal, watched to make sure it was done right. No mud in his clean school.

The hollows in the surface of the tarmac were filled with rain water, making little round pools reflecting the sky in silver-yellow. Like the scrys of the ancient druids, I thought, reflecting the past and the future. The book I was currently working my way through, about Cuchulain, Irish hero of legend, was full of stuff like that.

Intrigued by this notion, and fairly certain that any odd behaviour on my part would go unnoticed, I stood and walked over to the nearest circlet of rain water. I crouched low by it and tried to stare past its plate-glass surface.

It stared back, daring me to see more than my own reflection. My face and the sky beyond lay reproduced at a bizarre angle.

And then, something seemed to happen. The pool’s surface clouded. Looking up, I saw the sun was behind a cloud and the stubby noon shadows had been replaced by a uniform sullenness. Back to the pool, I thought I saw, in the depths, a flicker like fire down past my own faint reflection.

I smiled, just a little. Wishful thinking, Mags, I told myself sternly. You really want something strange to happen, don’t you? It was probably, I thought, a hold-over from the dream I’d woken from that morning, a feeling of otherworldliness that had never fully receded through the early part of the day. What I wouldn’t give to be … I don’t know. Magical. Special.

Then, in the back of my mind, I could swear I heard the sweet voice of a boy, singing to me. The pool swirled and brightened at my feet, and then—

And then, a body came hurtling into me and twisted me around to land seat first beside the puddle. The boy who had knocked me down picked up the basketball he’d been chasing, and stood with his jaw moving up and down slightly as if he couldn’t decide what to say.

Ever the diplomat, I spoke first. “Jason,” I said. “Don’t sweat it. It was an accident.”

His relief was obvious, so I continued, pulling myself back up when no hand was offered. Boys. Seriously. “You doing okay on that assignment for Mrs. Donaldson?”

Jason Lawson, fourteen and struggling in grade eight mathematics as I well knew, was on comfortable ground. He hitched the basketball up under his arm. “Not so great, Mags. In fact, if you have a minute after school …”

I shrugged. This was something new, but I didn’t put much weight on it. I hadn’t said two words to Jason Lawson all year, although we’d been in the same class since kindergarten. Funny how you can have so much basic experience in common with someone, and absolutely nothing to say. Jason at least had never been one of the people to make fun of me. He’d never deliberately avoided me either, just seemed to understand that we had no points of connection.

“Sure. I’ll look it over during fourth and see what I can do. We can go over it in the computer lab after last class.”

Jason grinned, saluted, and ran back to re-join the basketball game. I caught Scott Saunders, Jason’s best friend, staring at me for a second before returning his attention to the game. Unlike Jason, he had been a bully toward me, although not for a few years now. I could almost hear his thoughts. Maggie Stuart is weird. She freaks me out.

Or maybe I’m being uncharitable. Whatever he was thinking, as soon as the game started up again, I was not on Scott’s radar anymore, or anyone else’s.

I went back to my examination of the puddle, but the instant had passed. The pool was a pool. I doubted it had ever been anything more.

And Jason, the secret crush of several embarrassed years of my life, went back to his world, and out of mine, like some sci-fi alien who briefly penetrates to a dimension other than his own. Only, in this case, I knew when he would be returning to mine. With a mixture of dread and longing, I realized I could hardly wait.

✪

“To get blood out of your fingertip,” said Mr. Hunt, “you can either press steadily on the pad of your finger with the tip of the lancet, or use one quick, sharp strike. Personally, I recommend the fast method. In technical circles, we call it the Band-Aid Paradigm. You may think that the steady pressure method will hurt less, but I can guarantee you’ll be wrong. Slow and steady does not win the race.”

Mr. Hunt moved through the aisles between desks, passing out the sterile lancets. He was a man of no great height, but his dark hair and quick, precise movements had always made me think of some kind of wild animal. A leopard, maybe. He was a little frightening. He was my favourite teacher at Westbrook Elementary by far, but he made me consistently nervous. Maybe because he was the one teacher I actually wanted to impress.

I took my lancet and slid it out of the paper wrapping as Mr. Hunt set down two glass specimen slides on the desk in front of me. “Two slides, Maggie May,” he said. “Careful not to lose too much blood.”

To the class, he announced, “Now, all you who think you might pass out at the sight of blood, think again. I’ve never had a student faint on me in this or any other experiment, and I will brook no excuses.”

“Why do we have to prepare two slides, Mr. Hunt?” asked Tiffany from the front of the room, a place she had actually requested to sit. The top student in the class, she was one of the reasons I used to forgive myself for not caring about achieving in school. I didn’t want to be like Tiffany, under any circumstances.

“Darlin’, trust me. I’m the boss, right?” Mr. Hunt chuckled, obviously finding humour in the consternation this particular experiment was causing. “No pain, no gain, Miss Johnston.” He tapped his signature meter stick on the corner of her desk. My teacher is a sadist, I thought, watching him with a certain grim amusement. Huffing audibly, Tiffany returned to the delicate probing of her red-nailed finger.

I heard Jason Lawson say, holding his lancet gingerly between two fingers. “Ee-ew, this is going to be gross.” He mimed an elaborate blood spurt rising from his as-yet unpierced finger.

Jason had been banished to a seat next to Tiffany’s from his chosen place at the back of the class for exactly the sort of disruption he was causing with his current dramatics. Me, I chose three-quarters of the way back, right by the window, not too far back to look like I was trying to hide out, but not close enough to be an easy target for questions. In any class but Hunt’s, it was a place that guaranteed my being as unnoticed as possible. In Mr. Hunt’s—well, you were never exactly safe.

“Moron!” someone behind Jason said, another jock called Brian. “Use that steady pressure thing. Then you’re pushing the blood back and only a little comes out.” Genius. I couldn’t help smiling.

Then, picking up my own lancet, I braced myself. One quick jab. Easy.

I bit my lip as the point of the blade went in. A drop of red welled out in the wake of the steel triangle. Easy as pie. I tapped my finger in the centre of each of the two slides to make a pair of crimson smears. When I was done, I stuck my finger into my mouth, tasting stale copper.

I was suddenly aware of Mr. Hunt beside me.

“Going native?” he said, and I smiled wanly, feeling a bit nauseous after all.

“Not a cannibal yet,” I replied.

“Good,” he told me. “Blood is not a thing to be taken lightly.” To the class, louder, he said, “Here’s a fact for you, kiddies. Ingest too much blood and your body will work to throw it up. Please feel free not to test that out. Yes, Mr. Lawson?”

“Can I get sent home if I do?” Jason asked, and the class erupted in laughter, all tension gone.

“Bit too smart, that kid,” I heard Hunt say under his breath.

After the inevitable chaos and complaints, the experiment progressed reasonably smoothly. Mr. Hunt always seemed to be trying to make me laugh, include me in his sense of humour and irony, which was nice because some days it felt like no one else in the class even knew I existed. I put that down to the fact that, for the most part, I would rather read a book than try to converse. Someday, I supposed, I should try to make friends with someone in the class. It was just hard when I felt like I had nothing to say, not the least little bit of common ground.

Usually, I was content to feel like an anthropologist in a foreign, unfathomable culture, detached and slightly bemused. That was my idea, at least, to pretend as much as possible that I was okay and didn’t care that no one wanted to be my friend. I could usually cope with the loneliness, or at least suppress it.

But today, all I could really concentrate on was trying to keep my eyes from straying to the back of Jason’s head. Of course, all we were going to do was spend a couple of minutes going over a math problem, and it wasn’t like he would even have done that except for what happened on the playground. How ridiculous was it that I was grateful for him knocking me over? My heart was all jumpy and I could almost believe the blood that I collected from my finger was ten degrees warmer than usual.

At the end of class, I packed up my belongings slowly, careful to place everything in my bag so that neither the fat paperback copy of The Lord of the Rings trilogy I had taken out of the library nor my Cuchulain book would get bruised. Jason hadn’t looked my way through the entire class, not, of course, that I was checking… It was like we’d never spoken on the playground.

Not wanting to seem too eager to meet up with him, I was the last one out of the room.

✪

After fifteen minutes waiting slouched against the wall outside Mr. Hunt’s classroom, I was pretty sure I’d been stood up. It made me sadder than I wanted to admit; it also gave me other, even less pleasant feelings, like the desire to rip his head off with my bare hands if he did deign to show up after making me wait so long.

It’s amazing how much anger you can feel when you want something you refuse to admit you want. It would have been nice if Jason had really come. Maybe could have found something in common. It wasn’t wholly impossible to imagine.

It also wasn’t about to happen. Not to Maggie Stuart, not today. Time to go home, then, and give up the fantasy of becoming accepted through the attentions of one of the popular set. Give up the fantasy, more importantly, of Jason liking me.

I could even pretend to myself that it was a new fantasy, and as such easy to give up. Pretend, in other words, that I’d hadn’t had something of an embarrassed crush on him for most of the past three years.

Mr. Sterling, our boyish, round-faced French teacher, came out of his room, next down from Mr. Hunt’s, locking it behind him. His eyes widened in mock surprise as he passed me. “Maggie Stuart,” he said, “are you planning on moving in? There’s a cot in the nurse’s office, I think.

I laughed, because it’s what he expected. It also saved me the hassle of answering him. Mr. Sterling continued on toward the parking lot, and I weighed my depressing options. A lonely and futile wait for a guy that wasn’t coming, or several hours home alone wondering when Jan was going to show. With nothing for it but to admit disappointment either way, I hitched up my book bag and began the walk home, oblivious, thinking in my innocence that being ignored by Jason was the worst thing that could possible happen that day, toward the utter unmooring of my life.

✪

The trees above me swayed, all long arms and fingers against the dimming sky. I walked quickly, book bag thumping against my back. My ankles were sore with the extra effort I was putting in to getting home, to putting as much distance as I could between myself and the school.

The humiliation of being stood up, I had realized, did feel far worse than my solitary loneliness at home. At least at the house, no one had held out the possibility of a respite. Jason was probably already home by now: I pictured an oh-so-normal family with two parents, siblings, pets, dinner on the table by six. I knew I was working myself into a state, but it was impossible to stop.

Nothing about today had felt right. It wouldn’t have surprised me to discover that I had never even woken that morning, and that the whole cruddy day had just been a dream. Too much to hope for, naturally. Just another miserable twenty-four hours in the pathetic existence of Maggie Stuart.

I shivered as I walked, avoiding the puddles that I might have, on another day, splashed right through. Puddles brought me back to the tarmac, and the pseudo-scry, and Jason.

No puddles. It was cool for mid-April, and the sky was oppressive, as if deliberately denying me the warmth of the coming summer. The rain had sucked the heat out of the pavement and the air was heavy.

It was only my fancy, of course, but it felt to me as if something was hanging over Westbrook, like a thunder-head just about to break. I could almost smell it in the air.

Thinking that maybe those were storm clouds above, I stepped up my pace. It felt like I couldn’t take much more of this before I broke into a real run, and running was not a forte of mine.

Then I sensed, more than heard, the black car slowing down behind me. Suddenly, I thought that I’d been right all along, that I’d never woken up today and I was still in fact dreaming. The memory came to me, images pressing into the spaces behind my eyes.

It was day, after school. She was on her way home, imagining she was the only person in the whole world. Her ears buzzed with the silence. Suddenly she sensed more than heard something behind her approaching, slowing down. Without turning, Maggie knew it was a black car. She stopped and waited for it…

The car passed me, drew to the curb, and stopped. A black car. I froze. I had stopped in the dream, I remembered that, and it’s not a good idea to tempt fate. I had a ferocious headache. I told myself, maybe it’s just someone I know who wants to give me a lift home. I pushed away the knowledge that, short of it being Jan, there was no one in the neighbourhood who fit that description. And Jan did not drive a sleek black sedan.

The passenger window whirred down softly. “Excuse me,” said a voice, and a hand motioned.

I came right up to the car now, and looked in. It was very dark inside, the windows heavily tinted, and I couldn’t see anyone beyond the person who’d addressed me. The speaker was a young guy, maybe university age. He had dark hair and a very pleasant face. I could go as far as cute, although an impossible gap in our ages made me stop there.

He smiled brightly, and I smiled back, even though I felt strangely discomfited. Easy. It was just a car. He was just some guy.

“Hi,” he said, “I wondered, maybe if you could direct me to Castledown Place?”

Before I could reply, he continued, “If it’s on your way, we could drop you.”

I closed my mouth sharply. I’d almost said yes. Castledown Place was my street, a little court tucked away from the main roads through the subdivision. My aching ankles told me I wanted badly to accept the ride, but the offer had been made a little hastily. I couldn’t even see the driver, and who knew who was in the back seat?

Besides, oversimplified and slightly hysterical or not, the message had been drilled into my head from a dozen sources from the time I was little: Don’t accept candy or rides from strangers. More importantly, the world of Maggie Stuart did not accept the existence of coincidences. Too much like hope to be borne casually.

“Sorry, miss?” He sounded a little worried.

Ah, I thought, feeling suddenly like I was in a spy novel, outsmarting the bad guy with my superior wits, realized you made a mistake now.

I gave myself a mental slap for being so suspicious and turning everything into some kind of intrigue. Still, I’d made my choice and planned on playing my part to the hilt.

So I smiled glowingly. “Yes, I do know where it is. Just up the way you were going, past Patton Circle, right onto Castledown Crescent, then first left, and you’re there.”

“Can we give you a lift? You’ve been helpful.” The expression was too concerned, I thought. There was something strange going on here.

“Botany project,” I said, dropping my knapsack to the curb. “Leaf sketching and stuff. Look, if you get lost, come back here and I’ll see if I can help more.”

The pleasant features hardened. In an instant, he had stopped looking like a handsome university student, and instead made me think of a young gangster. A gangsta. In the suburbs. It was too bizarre to be believed.

“Look, why don’t you get into the car?” The door on the passenger side opened and quicker than I would have believed, he was half out of the car and reaching for me. As he straightened up, I could see he was about a foot taller than I was, slender but strong-looking. This was no friendly lost guy looking for directions. This was… this was…

I jumped back, hoisting my knapsack onto my shoulder, and ran.

I turned off Dunsinene, and before the car could cut me off, slipped between the first and second houses on the left side of the street, the shortcut to my own backyard.

Behind me, the car had stopped, and I heard the nice-faced man yelling, “Just tell your mother that no way is Nick Marino finished with either of you!”

I hopped the fence, crying now. Nikolas Marino was my father.

✪

Sometime later, Jason finished the pick-up basketball game he’d begun with Scott Saunders after the bell, and remembered that Maggie Stuart had been waiting to help him with his homework.

“See you guys!” he called and trotted back across the tarmac to the school.

The spring sun was weakening already, faint as if saving its energy for the approaching summer. The cloud cover of the earlier rains was grey like dirty cotton and still blanketed much of the sky. Was it the dullness of the day, the depression of it, that made him hesitate as he bent to look in at the window of Mr. Hunt’s room?

The blinds all along the classroom were pulled down to an inch above the sills. Although everything seemed dark and still at first, and Maggie was certainly long gone, he waited to let his eyes adjust.

But there was movement inside, far off to the left of where he stood, near the front of the class. He moved to the next window, and then the third and final one for a closer look.

There was light after all, but it was as thin and unhealthy as the jaundiced daylight. “What the …” he breathed, and crouched frozen in place.

In the gloom of the classroom, his very own home-room, a man stood with his back to the window. His arms moved slightly, involved in some delicate and unknown task. Beside him, on the corner of Mr. Hunt’s desk, was a rack containing the slides to which, earlier that very day, each student had added a drop of his or her own blood.

As Jason watched, the shadowed figure lifted one shimmering bit of glass over his head—and then, in the other hand, a long knife with a thin, wicked blade flashed, glistening in the sickly purple light which came from a guttering black candle.

The light was wrong: the wrong colour, the wrong intensity, wrong every way. And it was certainly wrong that something like this, whatever it was, could be happening in a place where he spent so much time every day, where he joked and laughed and acted up. Utterly wrong.

The knife descended, and Jason fled. Heart beating in his throat, he raced across the tarmac and over the playing field toward the fence, his long legs tearing up the distance.

But there was more, because he’d known the identity of the figure inside the classroom from the first moment he’d been able to make out the man’s outline, and because there had always been something a bit strange about him.

What had Mr. Hunt been doing? That was a question to which Jason didn’t want to learn the answer—but his whole sense of security was already shaken to its foundations.

Jason ran like he’d never run before, his lanky too-tall body covering the ground like he was trying to pound the pavement even flatter. Mr. Hunt hadn’t seen him: he was sure of that. But still, he was stunned by his own fear, the way his heart beat faster even now, just thinking of it.

Maybe it was the visceral element of what he’d witnessed, that blood was involved. He’d seen enough horror movies. He knew what could have been going on there, even though, somewhere more rational than his gut, he believed none of it. People didn’t summon demons, or work magic. There were no such things as ghosts. It only stood to reason.

But there was no denying what he had seen, even if he couldn’t possibly interpret. The one thing he knew was that he had to talk to someone about it, and as quickly as he could get inside and to the phone.

He ran up his driveway and stopped to gain back his breath and a certain amount of his composure. His legs were shaking as he stretched them out. Scott was never going to believe this.

“Jason, dinner!” his mother called as he crossed the threshold and thundered up the stairs.

“I’m not hungry,” he yelled as he hit his room, and it was the truth. His appetite was completely gone. Blood. Mr. Hunt. Bloody heck.

Scott’s number was on the speed dial, but the beeps gave way to a busy signal. Would Scott even have made it home yet after the game?

Frustrated, he hung up and immediately punched the redial button.

“Don’t let this become a habit,” Mrs. Lawson’s voice floated up, peeved he could tell. “The least you can do when you’re actually home is eat a meal with your family.”

“When have I ever done this before?” He was a little ticked himself now. He pressed redial again and waited while the electronics clicked over.

The phone at Scott’s house rang. “Hello, Saunders residence.” Pert and obnoxious, Scott’s little sister Emily.

Be polite and be patient, Jason told himself. If she figures out it’s you, she’ll hang up.

He affected a deeper voice. “Yes, could I speak with Mr. Scott Saunders please?”

Emily giggled. “No, I’m very sorry but he’s out for the evening. Could I please take a message?”

He hung up without giving her a reply. There was no one else he could really think of to call, and now no way to get to Scott until school tomorrow.

With the options all taken away, his appetite was beginning to creep back—or maybe the pain in his gut was something else altogether.

Slowly, thoughtfully, he went down to dinner.

✪

I watched the deepening twilight and lights of Toronto in the distance beyond Westbrook through Janice’s big picture window, the one that looked out over the driveway and Castledown Place.

It had to be later than I thought, maybe as late as eight, judging by the sky. My finger was on the last “1” of the 9-1-1 I had partially dialed hours before, and the doors were double locked.

Jan was never this late, not without telling me she would be first. My legs were cramped. I had been in a state of hyperactive observation since bursting through the back door after my flight from the black car.

So far, not a single vehicle had turned into Castledown Place since I began my vigil. Of course not. They were after Jan now. And the only thing keeping me from calling the police was the hope, the fervent hope, that somehow I was wrong, and my father hadn’t just tried to kidnap me.

Why now? Why after so many years? I had no memory of Nick Marino at all, and only the admittedly one-sided account from my mother and maternal grandparents of the huge mess that had been the first year of my life.

Since the trial, and the papers Jan had signed absolving him forever of any formal responsibility for my upkeep—just to get him completely out of our lives, as she put it—there had been little contact with my birth father. He’d sent me a paint set for my ninth birthday, which Mom had reluctantly admitted when she could bring herself to let me have it, and a gift certificate for Indigo Books another year. I gathered he was not particularly well-off, but as to what he was doing now or where he was, I had no idea.

When my mother was with him, I gathered he was a bit of a gypsy, living wherever he chose in Europe and moving on when he’d exhausted his current prospects for eking out a living by painting signs or portraits. I hadn’t even seen a picture of him, although I knew he must have dark hair and brown eyes, both of which he’d given to me, overriding Jan’s blond and blue-eyed looks.

I couldn’t help having given a lot of thought to my father over the years, although the particulars of Nick’s existence were yet another subject I figured were off limits for me and Jan to discuss.

I only knew about the events of my first year when I’d overheard my grandparents telling the story to some friends when Mom was out and I was supposed to be in bed. It was strange to have a secret that no one admitted to knowing, and that I couldn’t speak of despite having accidentally become party to it. Kind of like how both adults and kids swear sometimes, but try to avoid doing it in front of each other.

A pair of headlights swung their way into the court, and a sporty red car appeared behind them. My finger itched through the air above the “1” on the telephone keypad. Wow, I thought, shivering, what a wonderful selection of expensive cars my father has managed to obtain.

I edged back into the shadows behind the curtain, awkwardly because one of my legs was now completely asleep. The car pulled into our driveway, as I knew it would. I dropped to my knees and peered around the edge of the drape.

A man got out of the driver’s side door. It was too dark to see much, but he looked about the right height and build for the dark-haired guy in the car. I even imagined I could see some of his smooth manner in the walk.

The man went around the car and opened the passenger door. Mom got out, no mistaking her. Jan’s blond hair was perfect as usual, luminous in the light from the front porch.

I tensed. Everything was just like I’d thought.

Except it wasn’t, not really. Jan didn’t look under duress. She looked calm and … yes, bubbly.

The two figures disappeared under the eaves, and I heard the silvery trickle of Jan’s laughter.

This was not going as I’d expected. I stumbled back from the window, almost tripping on the phone. Now what? Hide? Call the police? Frozen in indecision, my finger wavered over the face of the telephone.

Then, incredibly, I caught movement outside the window, and tiptoed back to the window in time to see the man get back into the car, and drive away. From the front door came the rattle of the key in the lock, then Janice’s happy greeting, “Maggie!” I hurtled down the stairs into my mother’s arms.

“So, that was Harrison,” said Jan into my hair as we embraced. She was a little stiff, probably because she wasn’t used to such an exuberant welcome. “He’s really nice, Maggie. I think I like him a lot.”

I pulled back. Harrison. “Didn’t you listen to the messages?” asked Jan.

My blank look seemed to give her all the answer she needed. “Honey, I’m sorry. You must have been worried. I had a date …”

“Oh, Mama,” was all I could get out. What about Nick? What about the kidnapping attempt? Tell Jan, or let her bask in what seemed to be the happiest mood I’d ever seen her in?

It seemed like the mature thing to wait until a more appropriate time to tell her about my encounter that afternoon. After all, we had an alarm, and no one had followed me home as far as I could tell.

And I hadn’t checked the messages, so maybe there was something on the machine from my father as well. For all I knew, what had happened on the way hope hadn’t really been an attempt to snatch me off the street, but just Nick trying less than tactfully to make contact. What did I really know about how adults think, when complicated legal and emotional matters are concerned? I got into enough trouble acting on my own thoughts, without those impenetrables thrown in.

So, feeling safe enough for now, I said nothing.