The moon has disappeared behind the clouds, and I have no idea what time it is. Thunder rumbles distantly. “We’d better hurry.”
We climb over the garden wall and creep along the edge of the house until we reach the tree beneath my room. Will kneels to give me a leg up, and I grab on to the curve of his shoulder. I want time to stretch on so we can stay here, in this perfect night, for longer.
I’m halfway to the first branch when a light twitches on.
My stomach drops, roiling even further when the front door opens.
Dr. Cliffton motions us inside without a word.
“Straight to your rooms,” he says when we’re in the foyer. “And you can expect I’ll be speaking to both of you first thing in the morning.”
Chapter Twenty
A little less than six hours later, the morning sunlight pours through the window onto Dr. Cliffton’s closed door. I wait anxiously outside of it, running my fingertips over my ugly ear, feeling as though I’m five years old again. Wondering just how much trouble I’ve gotten myself into.
And all this time I thought it would be Miles who got us kicked out of Sterling.
I sit down in the chair Will made and feel the paper folded in my trousers pocket. To distract myself, I pull it out.
THE MACKELROY MISFORTUNE
The Mackelroys first arrived in Sterling a quarter century after the town was founded. They were farmers, weavers, and tradesmen, representing the hardworking middle class for generations. In fact, they were the very portrait of the average man—?that is, until Lorna Mackelroy was born.
Lorna Mackelroy was the most beautiful girl of her generation. She had long, golden hair, a complexion as pure as cream, and eyes the color of the sea. When she was sixteen, she became engaged to a young man from Sheffield named Charlton Templeton. Their love was young, passionate, and all-encompassing—?the kind you hear about in fairy tales—?but her parents were firmly against the match. The family’s hope at a better life and elevated status rested solely on Lorna and her chance beauty. They expected her to marry high above her class and bring the rest of the family with her. Lorna was caught between her love for Charlton and her duty to her family’s wishes. She promised to marry Charlton once he set off into the wider world and made his own fortune.
And make a fortune he did—?eventually. But empires, especially those of the shipping trade, are not built in a day. There would be long stretches where Lorna didn’t hear from her fiancé, but her love for him never faltered. Many suitors came to marvel at her beauty and ask for her hand, but she always remained faithful to her one true love.
In the twelfth year after Charlton set off from Sheffield in search of his fortune, Lorna received no news from him for nine months. She had not seen her betrothed in more than three years. Lorna was still a beauty, but the requests for her hand had quietly died down with each passing year. Everyone in the town told her that time had run out; Charlton had given up and was never coming back for her. Her family’s distress mounted with each day that brought no news from him.
An entire year passed. Heartbroken and convinced that Charlton had either forgotten her or been killed at sea, Lorna agreed to marry Lars Cousins, a neighboring farmer from Sterling. When Charlton finally returned, richer than anyone in the town had imagined he could be and ready to claim his bride, it was too late—?she had married Lars just three days earlier. Lorna soon learned that Charlton had been shipwrecked on an island in the Pacific for months before he was finally rescued. When they realized what had happened, both Lorna and Charlton were devastated.
Because memories of Lorna overwhelmed Charlton in Sheffield and Sterling, he retreated to Corrander, married someone else, and promptly died from typhus, leaving his new wife with wealth beyond measure. However, people always said that he haunted Sterling, and there are a number of reasons why the strange Disappearances could be born from this tragedy.
This theory would explain why the Disappearances affect all three towns of Sterling, Corrander, and Sheffield.
When Charlton returned and found Lorna married, a fierce change came over him. He is rumored to have stormed to the Mackelroys’ home and declared that they had, in effect, forced him to “buy” Lorna’s love. In the final hours of fever, he was inconsolable and said that it was “an abomination to put a price on the few things in life that are the free right of every human being.”
Of course, it is this last point that is the most chilling. People believe that Charlton’s revenge was to curse the towns with a punishment that fit his crime: forcing them to buy things that the rest of humankind experiences without cost.
I quickly fold the paper away. I still can’t hear what’s being said behind the thick wood of the door, only the low murmur of voices—?almost entirely Dr. Cliffton’s, with a few interjections from Will. I hear snippets of—?“dangerous . . . you could have been hurt . . . this is her home for now . . . inappropriate . . . out together . . . watch yourself.”
Then the door swings open and Will emerges, looking sheepish.
He raises his eyebrows at me, and his face relaxes. “You look terrified,” he says. “Don’t worry. He knows it’s entirely my fault.”
I walk into the library, my heart skipping, and face Dr. Cliffton.
“Sit down, Aila.”
I sit.
“I am your guardian,” he says. “And I take that very seriously.”
“Yes, sir,” I say miserably. I bite into my lip and wait. I’ve never seen him look so stern.
“I suppose I never explicitly told you that you couldn’t leave the house in the middle of the night. So I do not plan to say anything about this to your father,” he says, “but I don’t want it to ever happen again. So consider this a stiff warning.”
I nod fervently as a wave of relief douses my nerves.
“If anything were to happen to you . . .” He removes his glasses, sets them on the desk, and rubs his eyes. “Just don’t be out at night,” he says finally. “Especially this time of year.”
He looks so concerned for me that I want to pat his hand and assure him that I’m all right and I’ll never do anything dangerous again. I feel so wretched, sneaking out with his son and breaking into his library and stealing his book. I clasp my hands together in my lap and want to do something to make it all up to him.
So I offer him an olive branch in the form of a small confidence.
“Dr. Cliffton?” I say. “There’s something else I think you should know.”
He squints at me. Then he places his glasses back on his face, as if he’s putting on a coat of armor. “Go on.”
“Miles had a dream.”
Dr. Cliffton’s eyebrows shoot upward.
“Did he, now?” He sits back in his chair, and his fingertips meet one another, then separate so that he can pull at one of his eyebrows. He shifts into a different mode, as if changing gear: less paternal, more clinical.