Legacy (2 page)

I’d lived with my father, who did his level best to turn me into the biggest geek in Palm Beach. His main contribution to my discovering myself was to ditch me in a boarding school fifteen hundred miles from everything I knew.
Thanks.

I brought my hands to my face and tried to warm them with my breath as I waited for the hired car that was to pick me up at Boston’s Logan Airport.

I was being sent away because my dad didn’t want me anymore.

That’s what he always did when he felt uncomfortable about something. He just stopped thinking about it. He’d done that with my mother after she died. And maybe before. By the time
I was old enough to ask questions, he’d already banished her from his memory.

I’d only ever seen one picture of her. It was a sticky, worn photo that I saved from the trash after my dad had tried to throw it out. I reached for the photo in the front pocket of my purse. We had the same eyes. Strange eyes, everyone says, although I don’t think they’re so weird. I held the picture and waited for the familiar flood of feelings to wash over me. It was like I could feel everything she felt that day—how she was crazy in love with my father. And torn about leaving her family to be with him. And afraid of fire . . .

Beeep beep beeeeep
. The blare of a horn tore me from my thoughts. Whitfield Airport Limo had arrived.
Classy.
I slouched into the backseat of the decades-old Crown Vic.

“You ever been to Whitfield before, Miss?”

“Huh?” I looked up to see the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. They were a piercing blue beneath wild, shaggy white brows. He looked as if he’d spent the past fifty years facing down nor’easters. “Whitfield,” he repeated. “Guess it’ll take a little getting used to, after New York City.”

“I’m not from New York,” I said glumly. “My father got a job there.”

The skin around the old man’s eyes crinkled into a kind smile. “So you’re heading out on your own, is it?”

I turned away. I wasn’t heading out on my own. I was being discarded. There was a difference.

“But you could look at it that way, couldn’t you?”

My head snapped up in irritation. “Excuse me?

“Whitfield may not seem like a very exciting place at first,
but you’d be surprised at how much we’ve got going on here.” He winked.

Right, I thought. Whitfield, Massachusetts, the fun capital of the western hemisphere.

“Have you heard of Wonderland?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’ve heard of it.” Wonderland was only the biggest retail chain in the world. My dad’s loathsome girlfriend was their VP of Public Relations. I heard
nothing but
Wonderland at home.

“We’re going to be getting a new one in town,” he said as if I were a child and he was holding out a puppy.

“That’s a thrill,” I said. As if every podunk town in America didn’t have a Wonderland. Or a Kmart, Wal-Mart, or, more likely, all three.

He laughed. “I thought everybody loved Wonderland,” he said. “Least, that’s what their commercials tell us.”

“I’m not much of a shopper,” I said.

“And then, we’ve got the fog,” he went on cheerfully, undeterred by my obvious hostility toward his hometown.

“Fog?” I couldn’t believe he was telling me that watching fog counted as an activity, second only to shopping at discount department stores in terms of excitement.

“Our fog’s been in every edition of Ripley’s
Believe It or Not
since 1929, when Mr. Ripley started writing it.”

He was looking at me expectantly in the rearview mirror, so I took the bait. “What’s so special about it?” I asked with a sigh.

“Depends on what you call special.” He chuckled. “But it’s unusual, that’s for sure. Only comes to one spot, in a place we call the Meadow, right in the middle of Old Town. It shows up
eight times a year, like clockwork, and always in time for the first day of school. You’re going to Ainsworth School, aren’t you?”

I took the packet the school had sent me out of my jacket pocket. “Yes, Ainsworth,” I said, reading the return address.

“Forget the name?” He was grinning broadly.

“I guess,” I said, confused now. So he wasn’t joking. They really did watch the fog come in.

“The public schools are already open. But Ainsworth has a tradition. It waits for the fog.”

Perfect. I was entrusting my education to an institution that based its academic schedule, as well as its entertainment, on weather phenomena.

“We’re coming into Whitfield’s Old Town now,” the driver said.

Old was right. Whitfield was a village straight out of Nathaniel Hawthorne, with rows of meticulously maintained stone buildings and three-story frame houses with candles in the windows. The town square was lined with quaint-looking shops selling books and tools and kitchen wares; a combination candy store and café called Choco-Latte; two rustic-but-tasteful eateries; and a storefront with
APOTHECARY
written across the window.

“The town was founded in 1691 by colonists who’d had it with the Puritans,” he announced as if he were a tour guide. “Run off from Salem to the wild tidal waters here, off Whitfield Bay. If you squint, maybe you can see Shaw Island off to your right.”

“Er . . .” I interrupted. “Is the school nearby?”

“Coming right up to it,” he said. “By the way, that’s the Meadow.” He nodded toward the left.

I gasped out loud. Ripley had been right—it was one of the
strangest things I’d ever seen, acres of vacant land blanketed by dense fog at least two feet deep, right in the middle of the village square.

“Why is it only in that one place?” I asked.

“If you figure that out, you’ll be the first,” he said, grinning. “Like I said, Whitfield’s more interesting than you might think.”

The car stopped in front of a grim-looking building with a discreet sign above the doorway reading,
AINSWORTH
PREPARATORY
SCHOOL
,
FOUNDED
1691.

“I guess this is the place,” I said, as I got out of the car. The driver got my bag from the trunk. I tried to give him a tip, but he refused.

“Not from our own,” he said.

“Um, thanks,” I replied.

He tipped his hat. “Good luck to you, Miss Ainsworth,” he said as he got back in behind the wheel.

“I’m not—” I began, but he was already driving away.

Oh, well.
It didn’t make any difference. Hell was hell. Whatever they called you there didn’t matter much. I picked up my bag and headed toward the doorway.

The wind was high, and smelled like the sea. September was only half over, but this far north, the air was already chilly. I pulled my jacket more tightly around me. It was the heaviest piece of clothing I’d ever owned, but on that blustery New England afternoon it was about as warm as a sheet of wax paper.

I stood there for a moment, blinking away tears as I took in the depressing façade of that dreary brick building. At that moment I felt more cold, lost, and alone than I ever had in my life.

“Welcome home,” I whispered before letting myself in.

Inside, I stood at the bottom of an enormous stairway whose white marble steps were so worn with use that they appeared to bow in the middle.

“Gar,” I grunted as my suitcase thumped over the mountainous flight, echoing hollowly through the empty halls. The building was a lot bigger than it looked from the outside. “Anyone here?”

“Indeed,” a woman’s voice called. I looked around. There was no one on the stairway except me. Then she popped up from behind the railing at the top of the stairs with a tinkling laugh.

She looked like a fairy, slim and slight, with big eyes and a chiseled nose.

“Welcome,” she said, darting toward me with the quick, quirky motions of a hummingbird. She was young and friendly looking, even though she wore her hair in an old-ladyish bun. “I am Penelope Bean, assistant to the headmistress. You
may call me Miss P, if you like.” She smiled. “And you are Serenity?”

“I go by Katy,” I said quickly.

“Katy?” Miss P mused.

“Yes. Katy Jessevar.”

“Jesse—” She looked puzzled. “But you’re Serenity Katherine Ainsworth, aren’t you?”

“Excuse me?” My father had said something about my ancestors founding the school, but I thought he said they were my mother’s relations, not his.

“Well, no matter,” Miss P went on. “Come with me.” She led me toward an old-fashioned door made of oak and old glass with the word
OFFICE
printed in an arc on it. “By the way, perhaps you’ve noticed that the school year starts much later here at Ainsworth than at most other institutions.”

“Er . . . That’s okay with me,” I said stupidly.

“We begin each year on September twenty-first to commemorate the opening of the school—which was founded by your ancestor, Serenity Ainsworth. The townspeople here in Whitfield tend to keep old customs. To balance things out, however, our classes also continue later than other schools—until June twenty-first.”

I nodded.

“Well, then,” she said brightly. “Let’s take care of your paperwork, and then I’ll show you around.”

Every room at Ainsworth was a little different from every other, whether it was the configuration of the walls, or the view from the large, wavy-paned windows, or the polished wooden floors.

“Here is our chapel,” Miss P said, pointing out a plain but
restful room with wooden pews and fresh flowers on a stand. “And over here is the library.” This was the first room I’d been in that was inhabited. A lot of students were in here, lounging on the overstuffed chairs or reading at the study tables.

“Students,” Miss P announced, “I’d like you to meet our new enrollee, Miss Katy Ains—” She broke off. “I’m so sorry.”

“Jessevar,” I reminded her.

“Yes, of course.” She blushed. “Katy Jessevar, everyone.”

It was the moment I’d been dreading, when I’d be introduced as the new kid and everyone would look me over. A few people smiled. Two or three held up their hands in greeting. A few girls huddled around the September issue of
Vogue
looked up momentarily to examine me inch by inch, assessing how much I’d paid for my jeans, rolling their eyes at my Converse sneakers.

Then I saw him. Tall and lean, with honey-colored hair that flopped in a wave over deep-set, intense eyes. His arms were crossed over his chest, and he was staring at me. I felt my cheeks burning. Working up my courage, I smiled.

The boy kept staring. He raised his chin a fraction, and I saw now that his smoky eyes weren’t friendly. Not even a little bit.

“Ainsworth,” he hissed. He said it softly, but I heard it. Afterward, the only sound in the room was the crackle of the fire.

“Would you like to stay in here for a while, Katy?” Miss P asked.

She might as well have asked if I’d wanted to sit on a lit firecracker. “No,” I said, probably too quickly. “I . . . I mean, I think I ought to see the rest of the place first.”

“Of course. What was I thinking? We haven’t even been to the dorms yet.” She smiled. “Katy will see you all again at dinner. I trust you’ll invite her to sit with you.”

Someone laughed. Not a good sign. Miss P put her hand on my back to show me out. As we left, I saw her glare at the boy in the corner. He glared right back.

Once we were outside the library, a hum of whispers followed us.

“She shouldn’t be allowed to come here,” someone snarled.

“Are you going to be the one to stop her?” another voice countered. “Or do you want to keep both your nuts?”

Some girls giggled at that, while others shushed him.

“She didn’t look so bad.”

“She looked like an Ainsworth,” someone else said. I recognized the voice. It was him.

I inhaled sharply.
Ainsworth.
That was what the driver of the car that had picked me up at the airport had called me. The same name. The name of the school.

I turned to Miss P. “Why . . .” I began, feeling my cheeks redden. “Why are they—”

Before I could get the rest of the words out, she touched my shoulder. “Don’t worry about things you can’t control,” she said softly.

Then she smiled at me so sweetly that I almost believed her.

The closer we got to the dorms, the more students I saw. Fortunately, Miss P didn’t introduce me to any of them. “Forgive me, but I’m running a little short on time, and I want to get you settled into your room.”

“My room?” I was expecting an orphanage-type ward with
twenty cots lined up next to each other, like the drawings in the
Madeline
books.

“At Ainsworth, all the rooms are singles,” she said. We turned down a short hallway and into a vacant space, where she turned on the light. “Here it is, Katy,” she said, opening a pair of wooden shutters over a window with a tiny stained glass panel at the top.

I was stunned. Outside was a breathtaking view of a lake with a weeping willow on the far bank. Nearby was a small rowboat shaded by big trees whose leaves were beginning to color. It was like a scene from a postcard.

“The change of seasons is lovely here,” Miss P said wistfully. “You’ll be able to see it all.”

The only items inside the room were a small dresser, a desk, and a bed covered by a down comforter. “I understand you have no bedding with you, so that will be provided,” she said. “You may decorate it however you like, so long as you damage no surfaces. However, the décor must be reasonably tasteful and inoffensive to the common sensibility.”

“I understand,” I said.

“The lavatory and showers are shared, and you’ll find them down the hall to the right. Mealtimes are at seven in the morning, twelve noon, and six in the evening, in the main dining room.”

I nodded.

“Speaking of meals, all new students are invited to lunch tomorrow at Hattie’s Kitchen. Have you heard of it?”

I shook my head.

“Then you’re in for a treat,” she said, smiling. “Hattie’s is a little restaurant in the Meadow.”

“The Meadow? Is that the place that’s covered in fog?”

“Exactly. Whitfield’s claim to fame.”

“I didn’t see a building on it.”