The Bone Flute (4 page)

Too tired even to yawn, she sat on the edge of her bed and kicked off her sandals. Pawed at the bedside lamp until it switched off. Slumped sideways, curled up, and fell asleep on top of the white chenille coverlet.

Camrose dreamed of wandering lost through dark streets. It was still dark when she woke. Unlike her usual slow waken–ing, clinging to dreams, she snapped wide awake with the sure and certain knowledge that she was not alone in her room. Someone was standing there watching her.

5
Moonlit shadows

C
amrose lay still with her heart drumming in her ears. Only her eyes moved, straining to see.

Moonlight turned the window into a silver rectangle. Another silver patch stretched across the floor to the left of her bed. The rest of the room was blacker than black.

She held her breath, but that only made her heart thump fit to deafen her. Just when she was ready to tell herself she'd been dreaming, something slid toward her across a corner of the patch of moonlight. She stared at it, unable to shout or move or blink.

Then an angry chittering cry ripped through the night. Th e sound sprung her loose. She threw herself off the right side of the bed onto the floor.

A moment of silence. Then a faint, irregular pattering: click-ety–pause–click. Th e door swung open, then closed. Th en slowly opened again, as it always did.

Camrose fumbled at the bedside table, found the lamp and switched it on. Nothing was in the doorway. Just a gap of darkness that could have hidden an army of demons.

Before anything could leap out at her she scrambled across the bed to the door, closed it and shoved a sandal between the bottom of the door and the floor. The sandal wasn't quite thick enough, but when she pushed it toward the hinge side where the floor was closer to the door, the sandal wedged in tight.

There. If anyone tried to open that, they'd make a noise she couldn't miss.

Remembering the sudden animal cry from outside, she crossed to the window and looked out. The shed roof was deserted, but a scrabbling noise from the chestnut tree said something had just left.

“Thanks,” she whispered to the night.

Still with the light on, Camrose crawled into bed and tried to think about what had just happened in her room. It had to be a dream, of course. Already that sense of
someone there
was fading.

Or I could've been awake and imagined it, she thought. I've imagined worse things in the middle of the night.

And yet, it seemed to her that this was the worst of all, worse than all the rabid tigers and vampires and ghouls she'd ever brewed up from shadows.

Whatever it was that started to cross that patch of moonlight had not been man-high. Dog-high, maybe. And that clickety sound, like toenails, something odd about its rhythm. Like the sound she'd heard on the street this evening.

She shook her head. “It wasn't real. Just one more weird thing. There's an answer to everything weird, so go to sleep!”

After a long time of lying still and listening, Camrose sat up again, pushed her pillow against the headboard, and leaned back. The clock radio on her desk said 3:22 a.m. From the drawer in the bedside table she took a small, spiral-bound notebook and a purple gel pen.

“Some people think better with a pen in their hand,” her father told her once. “You and I are like that. If you write things down, often they make better sense.”

She opened the notebook to a fresh page and printed
Weird
Things—July 26
across the top. Underneath that she drew a line down the page, dividing it into two columns. The left column she headed,
What Happened
, and the right,
Why
.

She worked over it for half an hour, crossing things out, adding words here and there, brooding over what she'd writ–ten. Once she nearly tore up the whole thing, then changed her mind and kept working.

Even if it doesn't help, she thought, it might keep me busy until the sun's up. Because I sure won't be sleeping anymore tonight.

When she was finished, the page looked like this:

Weird Things - July 26

Camrose frowned over the result. It wasn't very useful. There were too many question marks. And there was something else that should be on the list: something Terence said, only she couldn't remember. Funny how many things about him were hard to remember.

Suddenly she threw down the notebook and twisted side–ways to get at the pocket of her shorts. All this thinking and writing about Gilda's letter and she'd forgotten all about it! At least two of the pages were safe, and she'd only read one.

Camrose flattened the crumpled pages on the notebook. There was the first page, and there was the last. The middle page was missing. Page three began in the middle of a sentence.

...
all this my old friend and helpmate Miranda will be of use, if
not much of a comfort. Ask her to tell you the story of how it all
began. That will make a great deal clear to you and will help you
come to a decision.

Remember, Camrose, you must be absolutely certain that the
claimant is the right one. If you make the same mistake I did …

The next two lines were heavily inked out. No matter which way she turned the page, she couldn't make out the words underneath.

Never mind,
the letter ended.
There's no point in frightening
you out of your wits. I'm sure you'll do well.

Your loving great-grandmother,
Gilda Kilpatrick Ferguson

Well, if I believed any of this, I'd be so scared I wouldn't have any wits left at all! Camrose thought.

As she was folding up the two pages of the letter, the last strange thing surfaced from the depths of her mind where it had been hiding. She thought about it, then picked up the notebook, drew an arrow to the space between point 7 and point 8, and wrote at the bottom, “How did Terence know there were three pages?”

And then Camrose realized how scared she really was. More scared than she'd ever been in her life before. “I wish Dad was here,” she whispered.

Never mind, he'd be back soon. He'd help her figure it out. Until then, there was one thing she could do. She picked up the pen again and printed in large purple letters across the top of the page:
FIND MIRANDA.

6
Music and silence

A
t half past noon the next day Camrose and Mark were eating ice cream and following the swirl of the crowd around the town square. It would have been hot if not for a gusty wind that snapped the flags beside the war memorial.

“Listen! There it is again!” Camrose stopped short. From some-where across the square came a scrap of music, someone playing some kind of reedy instrument. It danced above the noise of the crowd like a red rose petal blown above a stormy sea.

“It's just some busker, Cam, playing for money.” Mark pulled at her arm. People were piling up behind them. A baby stroller jabbed her in the back of the knees. She pushed on.

“But it's not like anything I've ever heard before.” Another scrap of that windblown music turned her head. “I think it comes from near the war memorial.” She went up on tiptoes to try to see over the crowd. But there was no use looking. Th is was Saturday, market day, and there were twice as many people in Lynx Landing as usual.

And it looked like they were all right here in the square, picking up quart baskets of tomatoes, sniffing bunches of dried thyme and admiring cookie jars shaped like Holstein cows.

The ice cream (chocolate mint for Camrose, honey walnut for Mark, in waffle cones made on a hot iron) was Camrose's treat, paid for with almost the last of her birthday money.

“It just about makes up for spending the whole morning looking for that letter,” Mark said. “I don't know why you're so anxious to get it back.”

“I just can't stand not knowing the rest. I wish I knew who Miranda is!”

“If she was Gilda's helper, she probably worked at the town hall. You could ask there.”

“But they're closed today. I'll have to wait till Monday.”

Then the wind died and a dip came in the crowd noise, and the piping sounded clearly, long rippling swaths of it. Camrose started toward it, zigzagging around the knots of people, following the voice that called and called.

In the center of the square the crowd thinned out. A man was sitting by himself on the steps of the war memorial. He was playing something that looked like a small bagpipe but had a sweeter, wilder sound.

A thicket of pipes lay across his knees, and he seemed to be playing them all at once, while pumping air with his arm into a leather bag strapped to his elbow. A little crescent of six or seven people stood around him. Camrose couldn't understand why everybody wasn't over here, listening. Were they deaf?

The piping changed, no longer a dance but a lament. She sat down on the steps around the other side of the war memo–rial and closed her eyes, the better to hear. In the solitary place behind her eyelids, a landscape took shape.

The skyline at the top of the rocky hillside looked like the edge of the world. Low bushes covered with tiny yellow and purple flowers blanketed the slope and snagged her feet, but there wasn't a tree in sight.

She climbed and climbed. The music pulled her like a rope. On the crest she stopped and looked down. Below lay a valley full of moving cloud-shadows, with a cupful of iron-dark lake at its heart, and in the lake a rocky island, and on the island a gigantic heap of stone.

A thread of smoke rose from one of the pinnacles on the heap of stone, which, Camrose now realized, was a house. And beyond the house and island and lake were more hills—green-purple, violet, blue—and beyond them again the silver line of the sea.

Home, lamented the music of the pipe. So that was what it was, Camrose thought, and why it was pulling her heart into pieces. It's about longing for home, for a home lost forever.

Or was it that simple? For there was someone on that island. Camrose squinted against the sun. She shouldn't have been able to see anything at this distance, but there it was, a tiny figure on the roof of the huge stone house. Its lifted face was a pale speck.

The piping rose to a wail and died away.

Camrose opened her eyes. Mark was clapping, and so were the people around the musician. They were dropping money, loonies and toonies and even a five-dollar bill, into a canvas backpack on the ground.

The piper unstrapped the bag from his arm and bent to slide his pipes into the pack. Then he straightened up and turned around, and Camrose got a good look at him.

Her first thought was surprise that he should be so small and young. Not even as old as Bronwyn, or so he looked, and only a couple of inches taller. What was somebody that age doing on the street, busking for money?

He looked poor too. His jeans were tattered at the heels and worn to holes on the knees. His gray sweatshirt had once been white with printing on it. The only bright, new-looking thing about him was his hair. It was long and pale gold and streamed like silk floss in the wind. Where it caught the sun it shone like glass.

She met his eyes, gray as a November sky in his thin face, and they were old.

Then they lit up. “You!” He took a step toward her.