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There was an awkward silence. Jack and Jaide looked at each other and said nothing. They couldn’t very well explain that the last time they had seen Rennie, she had been possessed by The Evil and trying to kill them.
‘Who was she?’ asked Kyle with a perplexed frown.
‘You know – Rennie,’ said Miralda. ‘Always wore overalls, carried a wrench . . .’
‘Oh, her. Why’s she important?’
‘We are the sum of the people around us,’ Mr Carver said. ‘They shape us and make us who we are. And Rennie, poor Rennie – she did her best to carry on, but it was hard, and we all felt it.’
‘Why “poor” Rennie?’ asked Tara.
‘Such a tragic story,’ said Mr Carver, wiping a tear from his eye. ‘She had two young children – too young for school, I never met them. They drowned in a terrible accident, and now she has drowned too.’
‘Does that mean they found her body?’ asked Jack.
‘Poor Rennie nothing,’ said Miralda. ‘My dad said she was obviously negligent.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Kyle.
‘You know, it was entirely her fault, what happened. She shouldn’t have been on that old jetty when it was clearly marked as dangerous. And it wasn’t the council’s fault the sign had fallen off or that the light had stopped working –’
‘Did they find her body?’ repeated Jaide.
‘Let’s not dwell on the negatives,’ said Mr Carver, putting his index fingers to his temples and breathing deeply through his nose. ‘Let us remember her as the vibrant, living soul she once was and find some fitting way to preserve our memories of her. Miralda, perhaps you could draw her wrench. Kyle, you could draw her van. Jack, Jaide and Tara – you are probably too new to have known her well, but I’d still like you to participate, if you don’t mind. Perhaps you could partner up and come up with something between you. Remember, this is a sensitive time, and we want to be respectful.’
He handed out paper to everyone and put on a particularly mournful tune over the school’s PA system, which he accompanied on a round-bodied guitar that sounded like a depressed banjo.
Tara joined Jack and Jaide at their table and leaned in to whisper, ‘I suppose this beats actually going to the service. Funerals are so boring. Did you ever meet this Jenny or Benny or whoever she was?’
‘Uh, yes,’ said Jaide. ‘We saw her when she was working here, fixing the equipment.’
‘What did she look like?’
‘She was tall.’ Jaide repressed her memories of Rennie with wild, white eyes and rats growing out of her, climbing on spider-web ropes with a cockroach cloak across her shoulders. That image had haunted her dreams for a week.
‘And she was sad,’ said Jack, understanding only now about her kids and why she had seemed so anxious about the twins not hurting themselves when they had first met. He still remembered the look in her eyes. She had seemed both wounded and very alone.
‘I don’t know how to draw sad,’ said Tara, ‘but tall I can do. I’m actually quite good at drawing. Can you tell me anything else about her?’
While Jack searched his memory for something that didn’t involve The Evil, Jaide pulled the page she had stolen from the Compendium from her pocket and went looking for a dictionary. There was just one, and it had been well-thumbed by several generations of children. She brought it back to the table, laid the page out flat and began to translate.
‘Amidst the matrix of contingencies upon which every Warden is beholden to focalise . . .’
‘So,’ Tara said, ‘brown hair, long face, big nose . . . anything else?’
Jack shook his head. He wasn’t sure how much he actually remembered and how much he had made up, but he supposed it didn’t matter. Rennie had fallen from the lighthouse and drowned. She wasn’t going to complain if he got it wrong.
‘Your dad,’ he asked as she got to work drawing. ‘Is his name Martin?’
‘Yes. Oh yeah, that’s right – he said he met you yesterday, at the house. You’ll be seeing a lot more of him there. He’s going to work on renovating that old place while construction is suspended on Riverview House. He said there have been vandals in there so he needs to board up the windows himself, at least until he can find another contractor.’
‘Uh, great,’ Jack said, glancing nervously at Jaide. She hadn’t heard. Her nose was buried in an old book and her face wore a look of furious concentration. ‘Was he at the sawmill building site last night?’
Tara nodded. ‘I think so. He didn’t come home until late. I had to take the train home.’
So it could easily have been Martin McAndrew behind the wheel of the van that had tried to run them down. Jack filed that away for future reference.
‘Has he seemed . . . different . . . lately?’
Tara shrugged. ‘It’s hard to tell with Dad. He’s always so busy. I only really get to talk to him when we’re in the car together. That’s the main reason I wanted to come to this school – apart from the fact that it annoys Mum. She wants me to go to a real school, you know, where they make you actually work rather than draw pictures of someone you never met.’
Jack could feel the conversation being dragged away from what he wanted to know. He wished Jaide would pay attention and help him. She was better at talking to people they didn’t know well.
‘Does your dad ever wear dark glasses?’
‘All the time. He works outside, remember?’ Tara looked up from her half-finished drawing. ‘You’re an odd boy, Jack Shield. Why do you want to know so much about my dad?’
‘I’m, uh, interested in building,’ he stammered. ‘I guess that’s it.’
‘Well, he’d be happy to talk to you about it, I’m sure. It’s all he ever talks about at home. Why don’t you come over one day and meet him properly?’
Jaide saved Jack by suddenly slamming the book closed and putting her head in her hands. ‘It’s no use. The words are too hard and this dictionary is hopeless! It’s for little kids, not –’
She almost said Wardens, but then she noticed Tara staring at her.
‘ . . . not older kids like us,’ she finished rather lamely.
‘You’re not actually working, are you?’ Tara asked her with a playful look in her eye.
‘Mum gives us homework,’ Jaide improvised as she folded up the page. ‘I’m running behind. Is your full name Tara McAndrew?’
‘No,’ said Tara. ‘It’s Tara Lin. I have my mother’s name.’
‘But your father is Martin McAndrew?’
‘Yes. Jack just asked me that. What’s with you two?’
‘Maybe Jaide’s interested in buildings too,’ said Jack, staring at her with a hopeless look.
‘I . . . suppose that’s it,’ J
aide said, although nothing could have been further from the truth. Before she’d discovered about Wardens, she had wanted to be a photographer. Her camera being blown up with her house by The Evil had ended that dream, at least until the insurance money came through. ‘You know, I think your dad knew Rennie. He said she had something of his.’
‘Really?’ Tara looked genuinely mystified. ‘I wonder what it was.’
‘He didn’t tell us.’
‘Well, he’ll be annoyed about it, whatever it is, since she’s dead now and he has no chance of getting it back.’
Mr Carver chose that moment to lean over Jack’s shoulder to see what they had done, and to praise their efforts.
‘I like her hair, although I don’t believe she ever wore it curled like that. It’s quite a good likeness.’
Tara beamed. ‘What colour were her eyes, Mr Carver?’
‘Call me Heath, please. I’m not sure, Tara. Perhaps you could just leave them as they are for now.’
‘They were blue,’ said Jaide, more firmly than she’d intended. She hoped her face wasn’t betraying the sudden, terrible memory of the last time she’d seen Rennie’s eyes, all white and luminous.
Everyone looked at her.
‘That is, I think they were,’ she said. It was a guess, but anything was better than leaving Rennie’s picture the way it was.
‘That will do for now,’ said Mr Carver, patting Jaide on the shoulder. ‘Well done, well done.’
He wandered off as Tara leaned over the portrait to colour the portrait’s blank white orbs a significantly more reassuring sky blue.
The lunchtime tune took forever to come, but finally Mr Carver played it and they were free to stop drawing.
‘Come on,’ said Jaide to Jack, as Tara went to get her lunch box from her bag. ‘We’re going home to eat. We have bikes now. We can do that.’
‘Why? We already have a packed lunch.’
