The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls (31 page)

When it was over, there was no Home, no gardens, no stinking cottages. They stood in an empty, naked-looking clearing in the middle of an empty, lonely woodland. The ground rumbled softly a few times. Dim lights flashed from deep underground like lightning. Then all was silent. The only thing left was a black spot on the ground where Mrs. Cavendish had gone under.

The breeze became nice and cool, and the remaining trees throughout the grounds rustled peacefully. Everyone looked at each other, dazed, shivering, and tried to smile. After all, they were free now, weren’t they?

“Look, Victoria,” said Peter, stepping forward. He kept blinking, like he was waking up, and maybe, Victoria thought, he was. “I’m really sorry about—I mean, it wasn’t
me
—”

“It’s all right,” Victoria said, although she didn’t altogether believe him. It hadn’t always been Mrs. Cavendish making Peter do things. Just like it hadn’t been
only
Mrs. Cavendish doing bad things in Belleville. People had let her. They had
wanted
her to, at first, all those years ago.

Victoria didn’t like thinking about that, but she made herself anyway. It would not do to forget. Luckily, Victoria never forgot anything.

Everyone poked around in the rubbish for a while, but there was not a lot to see—only shriveled bits of garden,
like something had burned all the little twigs and thorns to a crisp.

“What about the gofers?” squeaked little Caroline. “What happened to them?”

Lawrence shifted uncomfortably. Victoria put her hands on her hips and kicked her foot around Mrs. Cavendish’s black spot. Ash flew up, and dirt, and specks of what Victoria dearly hoped was
not
bone.

“Mrs. Cavendish made them,” she said, “so when she went, I guess they did, too.”

Some of the children looked away. Others lowered their heads. Donovan looked as though he might lose whatever Mallow Cakes were left in his stomach.

“So, we can’t forget about them,” Victoria said. She heard her voice sounding bossy, but she didn’t care. Sometimes it was all right to be bossy. “And we can’t let it happen again. Agreed?”

Everyone nodded, their faces suddenly fierce and solemn. The night around them was very quiet and cool and barely silvered with moonlight.

“Well,” said Lawrence at last. He took Victoria’s hand.

“Well,” Victoria agreed. She squeezed Lawrence’s fingers and didn’t let go for a long time.

Gallagher trotted away toward the street, barking happily.
A light bobbed toward them, and when it got closer, Victoria saw that it was Mr. Tibbalt and a flashlight.

“Hello, everyone,” he said. He looked around where the Home once stood, his eyes lingering over the spot where the big, black tree used to be. It was strange to see him out in the real world, outside his house. He looked small beneath the trees, and lost.

“Mr. Tibbalt,” Victoria said, hurrying toward him. She dug around in her pocket until she found the dirty, half-shattered old locket and pressed it into his hand. “This is yours now.”

Mr. Tibbalt’s purple-tinged, wrinkled fingers closed shakily over the locket. He did not look up for a long time. Victoria wondered if she should say something else but decided against it; enough had been said—and done. Mr. Tibbalt would understand.

Finally, he looked up. Beneath his glasses, his eyes shone and his mouth trembled, but he stood a little taller now. He could straighten his hunched-over shoulders. After a moment or two, and for the first time in Victoria’s life, he even managed a smile.

“Would anyone like to come over for hot chocolate while you call your parents?” he said, and they did.

SEVERAL YEARS LATER, VICTORIA HUGGED HER PARENTS
good-bye at the train station five times before they would let her go. They had been excessively affectionate ever since that storming night when twelve-year-old Victoria came home in dirty pajamas they had never seen before. They had even started saying “I love you” on occasion, although not in public. It wasn’t the most dignified of things to say, after all. But for Victoria, it was enough. She knew that they would never again forget her, and she would not let them.

“Well, good-bye,” she said, and then she said, “I love you,” and hugged them one last time, and then she got on the train, took her seat, and pulled out her notebook. Her luggage had already been sent ahead to the city. That’s where
she was going, and all she had to worry about on the train was finishing this postcard to Lawrence.

“Hello, Lawrence,” it began, and then Victoria went on to talk about how she was so excited to go to the city at last, and yes, she’d gotten his letter, and she wanted a tour of his fancy music school this weekend, and she was very much looking forward to his autumn recital.

It had been almost six years to the day since Lawrence had disappeared, when they were twelve and only had each other.

Victoria looked out the window as Belleville sped by in reds and golds. In a moment, the train would pass near the street that took her parents back to Three Silldie Place.

“I’m so glad you’ve found what you want to do, and that you do it so well,” Victoria wrote. “I don’t know what I want to do yet, but I think maybe I’d like to be a professor—a good one, like Professor Alban. Or a journalist, so I could investigate things. Or maybe a detective.” Then she proceeded to list the pros and cons of these and several other potential careers and to write out a few hypothetical scenarios of the rest of her life, depending upon which profession she ended up choosing. When she was finished, her tiny, clean handwriting filled up the entire back of the postcard.

Victoria nodded briskly, stamped the postcard, and smiled, running her fingers over Lawrence’s name. She would send
it to him from the city train station, and he would receive it the next day, right before she showed up to surprise him, and he would pick her up with the force of his hug and whirl her around, and she would scold him to not
do
that, for goodness’ sake, but she would know—and so would he—that she did actually very much want him to do that.

Victoria smiled again. She sat back and watched the trees fly by, too quickly for her to see where they were, and anyway, she was far too busy thinking over the lists she had just made, and of how nice it would feel to be whirled about in the air.

But as a matter of fact, the trees by the train tracks stood at the outermost limits of the old estate at Nine Silldie Place, near the bare, run-down gate of which, at that very moment, stood three people.

One of them was the realtor, with all the proper papers, smiling brightly because he really wanted to make this sale. It was a tremendous property. It would be an extravagant commission.

“Never been developed,” the realtor said, leading his clients through the rickety old gate and down the tree-lined drive. “Real shame, too. Lovely property, don’t you think?”

The woman, who had bright red lips and seemed to be in charge of things, smiled. “It’s perfect. Don’t you think, darling?”

The man, dressed in black gardener’s clothes, said, “It’s perfect, yes, perfect.”

The realtor looked uncomfortably at the man in black, who held a puppet in his hands. He was carving a face into its head, a face that looked somehow familiar. The realtor rubbed his nose. The man in black began carving the puppet’s nose.

Trying to be polite, the realtor said, “So, where are you from?”

“Oh, very far away,” said the woman. “We’ve . . . had a long trip. But it’s time to settle down again.”

“I see,” said the realtor. He narrowed his eyes at the puppet’s face. It was really quite extraordinary, that nose. “Is that a toy, or what?”

The woman smiled wider. “I plan to open a children’s home here. It’s a puppet. For the children, you see. They love to play.”

“Oh,” said the realtor, relieved. “Yes, I see. Well, fantastic. That’s really great. Now if you’ll look this way—”

“No need,” said the woman. Her hair shone, and the realtor suddenly felt very fond of her. She held out her hand for the gate key. “We’ll take it.”

“It’s a puppet. For the children, you see. They love to play.”

SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2012 by Claire Legrand
Illustrations copyright © 2012 by Sarah Watts
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The text for this book is set in Goudy Oldstyle.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Legrand, Claire.

The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls / Claire Legrand.—1st ed.
p. cm.

Summary: Practically-perfect twelve-year-old Victoria Wright must lie, sneak, and break the rules when her investigation of the disappearance of her best—and only—friend, Lawrence, reveals dark secrets about her town and the orphanage run by the reclusive Mrs. Cavendish. ISBN 978-1-4424-4291-7 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4424-4293-1 (eBook)
[1. Fairy tales. 2. Best friends—Fiction. 3. Friendship—Fiction. 4. Perfectionism
(Personality trait)—Fiction. 5. Orphanages—Fiction. 6. Missing children—Fiction.]
I. Title.
PZ8.L4758Cav 2012
[Fic]—dc23
2011028405