The Stepsister (15 page)

Those nights that Jessie had sneaked out of the house—had she sneaked out to see Josh?

Suddenly Emily felt sick.

I can't spend another night in this room with her, she thought. She jumped to her feet.

I can't spend another minute in the same room with an enemy.

I'll sleep downstairs in the den, Emily thought.

Her heart was pounding. Her temples throbbed. She knew she wasn't thinking clearly. But she knew she had to get out of that room.

Without realizing it, she was pacing back and forth, her arms crossed tightly over her chest.

Jessie and Josh.

Jessie and Josh.

Jessie and Josh.

“Hey, Em—” Nancy poked her head into the room. “Everything okay? Why are you pacing back and forth like that?”

“I really don't want to talk right now,” Emily said, not meaning to sound as harsh as she did.

“Well, excuuuuuuse me!” Nancy exclaimed with exaggerated outrage.

“I—I really need to be left alone,” Emily said.

“Good night, Em.” Nancy disappeared as quickly as she had appeared.

Emily paced a little more, thinking of Jessie and Josh. Then she walked over to the dresser and began searching for her flannel nightgown. It was chilly in the den. The flannel nightgown would keep her warm.

I'll take my pillow and a blanket, she thought. I'll be perfectly comfortable.

But she couldn't find the nightgown.

Maybe it's in one of Jessie's drawers, she thought.

She searched through Jessie's top drawer without success. Jessie's second drawer was jammed to the top with clothes. Searching quickly, Emily pulled up a pile of brightly colored scarves, all folded perfectly into squares.

Beneath the scarves was a knife.

A large kitchen knife.

The blade of the knife was covered with dried blood.

Emily knew at once what it was. It was the knife that had killed Tiger.

In Grave Condition

“A
camping trip? I can't go on a camping trip!” Nancy cried, dropping her soup spoon into her tomato soup. The splash sent a red splotch onto the place mat.

Everyone around the dinner table reacted to Mr. Wallner's suggestion with equal horror.

“I'm really busy this weekend,” Jessie said.

“I have so much homework, I can't go anywhere!” Nancy cried.

Mr. Wallner smiled patiently, as if expecting this negative reaction. “It's just for the weekend.” He looked over to Emily's mom, who smiled back at him.

“It'll be fun,” she said.

“No, it won't,” Rich said glumly. “I hate camping out.”

“How do you know?” Mr. Wallner snapped, quickly losing his cool. “You've never done it. This is a beautiful spot. At least, it was when I was a boy.”

“We're going to South Carolina just for a weekend?” Emily asked, still not believing it.

“It's too cold to camp up here,” Mr. Wallner said, slurping his tomato soup.

“Hugh got a special bonus this week,” Mrs. Wallner said proudly, as if he had won the Medal of Honor.

“But why do we have to go camping?” Nancy whined.

“Because we're all stir crazy,” Mr. Wallner said, wiping his chin with a paper napkin. “Everyone is at everyone else's throat. We all have cabin fever, and winter hasn't really even begun yet.”

“But why camping?” Rich asked, making a face.

“It'll be good for us to have to work together, outdoors on our own, as a family,” Mr. Wallner said.

“We're going to fly all the way to South Carolina to do that?” Nancy asked, saying South Carolina as if it were on the moon.

“That's how eager Hugh is for us to start acting like a family,” Emily's mother said, blowing on her soup spoon, then sipping carefully.

Boy, is
he
in for a major disappointment, Emily thought. She and Nancy were just waiting for the right moment to expose Jessie to the whole family. After showing the bloodstained knife to Nancy, Emily had hidden it in a safe place. Now she and Nancy were going to organize their evidence, get their story completely straight so that no one would doubt her accusations.

There's no way this family is ever going to act like a real family, Emily thought. Not until my psycho stepsister is out of here.

The argument over whether or not to go camping continued through the soup, through the tuna casserole and salad, and on into the banana-cream pie. By this time Jessie had completely turned around. She was now wildly in favor of the trip. “It'll be great fun. We'll be like a pioneer family,” she said with great enthusiasm, looking across the table at Emily for some reason.

Uh-oh, thought Emily. What has she got in her sick, devious mind? Why has she changed her tune about this camping trip? And why is she looking at me like that, like a hungry shark closing in on a little minnow?

Jessie's smile filled her with dread.

“The woods there are beautiful,” Mr. Wallner was saying, his voice taking on a dreamy quality Emily had never heard from him before. “You'll see trees and amazing wildflowers they don't have up north here.”

“Yay.” Rich sneered sarcastically. He still hadn't touched his dessert.

Emily found herself thinking about her father. He had loved camping. Emily remembered how much fun camping trips with him had been, all the joking around, the constant laughing, the excitement of daring to try new things, the fun of staying up really late under a starry sky, talking and singing.

How warm, how comfortable, her family had been then.

Emily realized she had tears in her eyes. She quickly wiped them away with her napkin and forced herself to think of something else.

Voices around the table drifted in and out of
Emily's consciousness. “Well, I just can't go,” Nancy was saying.

“Oh, come on, Nancy,” Jessie urged. “Don't be such a spoilsport. It'll be great!”

Nancy rolled her eyes in disgust.

Finally Mr. Wallner stood up, indicating the end of dinner and the discussion. “I've already made the plane reservations,” he said. “We're all going. And we're all going to
enjoy
it. That's an order.” He laughed as he headed toward the den and his newspaper. That was a really good joke for him.

The after-dinner cleanup went quickly and quietly. Jessie tried to talk up the camping trip, but Nancy and Emily just ignored her. Finally she gave up trying and left the room.

“I'm going to flunk out because of this!” Nancy wailed.

“At least we'll be a real family,” Emily said sarcastically.

Nancy stared at her, suddenly concerned. “Bitter, bitter,” she said, as if thinking aloud.

“What?” Emily asked.

“Nothing. Are you okay?”

“Nancy, how can I be okay? I'm sharing a room with a deranged person!”

“Not for much longer,” Nancy said, staring into Emily's eyes.

Their mother came back into the kitchen, ending the discussion.

♦ ♦ ♦

“How come I have to carry the tent?” Rich whined, bending over in exaggerated fashion and staggering
along the path as if he were about to topple over on his face.

“Because it's the lightest thing we have,” Mr. Wallner said impatiently, giving Rich a dirty look. “Stand up. Stop goofing around like that. This is a no-whining weekend—remember?”

“Did anyone bring the mosquito repellant?” Nancy asked, adjusting the heavy backpack on her back.

“There aren't any mosquitoes this time of year,” Mr. Wallner said, leading the way through the trees. The sun had been high above them in a clear blue sky. Now it was lowering behind the trees. Shadows played over the path. The grass, still bathed in sunlight, sparkled like emeralds. Evening crept in with the shadows.

“Those are beech trees,” Mr. Wallner said, pointing. “And those are poplars.”

“Very interesting,” Nancy said, unable to go a minute without being sarcastic.

Mr. Wallner ignored her and kept pointing out trees and shrubs. We all look very authentic, Emily thought, in our down vests and hiking boots. She shifted her pack to her other shoulder, suddenly remembering the knife, the bloodstained knife, that she had packed at the last minute.

Would she and Nancy confront Jessie with it during the camping trip?

They might.

If Jessie tried to pull something. If Jessie menaced her in any way.

“Hey, look—” Rich called, pointing, the first words he had said since they'd started their hike into the
woods. A rabbit followed by two fluffy little baby rabbits scampered over the trail. But that wasn't what Rich was pointing at.

He had discovered an old cemetery just off the trail, its small, rounded gravestones leaning in all directions. A dirt road led up to the cemetery from the other side.

They hiked a little ways past the cemetery, then entered a small, grassy clearing. “The perfect camping spot,” Mr. Wallner said, grinning and scratching his head. “Actually, I seem to remember this clearing. I may have camped in this very spot when I was a boy.”

“Big deal,” Nancy whispered to Emily, pulling off her pack and letting it drop to the ground.

Emily was a little surprised by Nancy's openly hostile attitude. She was usually better at keeping her real feelings hidden from Hugh and their mother.

Nancy used to be a great camper, Emily remembered. She used to be just about the most enthusiastic camper in the family . . . when Daddy was around.

“Hey, what's with all the glum pusses?” Mr. Wallner asked, looking at each of them. “Come on, gang. How can I get my harem into an up mood?”

His harem?

I'm going to be sick, Emily thought.

“I'm
in an up mood,” Jessie said, helping pull the rolled-up tent off Rich's back. “I'm loving this, Dad. It's really great.”

“Me too,” Mrs. Wallner said, although she looked tired and glad to be unloading the equipment from her shoulders.

Birds all around began to chatter as if announcing
the end of the day. The sun was sinking quickly behind the trees. The shadows brought a damp coolness to the clearing. The grass smelled fresh and dewy.

“We'd better hurry and gather firewood,” Mr. Wallner said, his eyes trailing a broad-winged hawk across the sky. “Tell you what—you three girls go collect wood. Rich, Mom, and I will pitch the tent.”

Nancy groaned. Jessie shouted her approval of the plan. Emily silently followed Nancy.

It was dark under the trees, and much cooler than in the clearing. “What will we carry the wood in?” Nancy asked, kicking at a clump of tall weeds.

“We'll just make a pile on the ground here,” Jessie said. “Then we'll make several trips to carry it all to the clearing.”

“I guess we'll need a lot of wood,” Emily said, stepping into a marshy spot, slipping, but catching her balance.

“It's going to be a cool night,” Jessie said. “It's pretty cold already.”

They started to collect sticks, gathering an armload, then depositing it onto a big pile. A lot of the wood, they discovered, was wet, too wet to burn. They had to wander farther into the woods to find drier wood.

Stepping through clumps of tall, slender reeds, Emily bent down to examine a branch that had fallen. Maybe I can break it into smaller pieces, she thought, turning it over. She tried to crack it, but it was too thick. She broke off smaller pieces, but they were wet.

When she stood up, she couldn't see Nancy.

“Hey—Nancy?”

No reply.

“We should've brought flashlights,” Emily said to Jessie, who was standing a few yards away with an armload of gray sticks.

“It got dark so quickly,” Jessie said, turning her back on Emily and searching the ground for more wood. They walked together along the path.

“Where's Nancy?” Emily asked, suddenly a little worried.

Jessie didn't answer for a while, just kept walking. “I dunno,” she said finally. She dropped her pile of sticks beside the path. “Let's start a new pile here.”

Emily dropped her sticks onto the pile and looked for Nancy. She couldn't find her. She suddenly realized that she had lost her sense of direction.

Which way was the clearing? Were they walking toward it or away from it? Emily wasn't sure.

Something bit at her arm, a bug. She jumped, startled, and then slapped at it. She suddenly felt nervous. Jessie was a few yards away, pulling up more sticks.

Here I am in the middle of the woods, alone with her, Emily thought. She looked for Nancy, making a complete circle. But Nancy was not in view.

Jessie's been trying to kill me, first with fire, then by pushing me down the auditorium balcony. And now here we are, far away from the camp, out in the dark woods. Just the two of us.

She looked up to see Jessie staring at her strangely, intensely.

I've got to get away from her, Emily thought, suddenly overcome with fear.