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“I’m looking for Catherine. You saw her last with Earl.”
“Aunt Catherine?” Lillibeth repeated, blinking. “Yes . . . she went out to meet him.”
“Did you see her come back?” Ravinia asked with forced patience.
“No . . . I went to my room. It was getting late.” She eyed her younger sister. “You weren’t around.”
“No, I wasn’t,” Ravinia said tightly. “We can’t find Catherine anywhere. Did she say anything to you?”
“I knew Earl was at the gate. . . .” She glanced past Ravinia. “He wanted to talk to her.”
“How did you know it was Earl? You saw him?”
Lillibeth shrugged. “I just knew.”
Ravinia wasn’t sure what to make of that. Lillibeth didn’t have Cassandra’s ability to see things. Lillibeth didn’t have any gift as far as Ravinia could tell. She’d had a difficult birth that had done something to her spine, according to Catherine, and had left her crippled. It had always been assumed that the injury had also stripped her of whatever gift she might have had. Or maybe she just didn’t have one. Lillibeth was still very much a little girl. Whatever had happened to her had stunted her emotionally—or so said Catherine—and Lillibeth’s slow maturation seemed to bear that out.
“She went out to meet Earl at the gate,” Ravinia said, hoping for more information.
Lillibeth bobbed her head, worry beginning to crowd her expression.
“How long was she out there? Did she leave with him?”
“I don’t knnnooowww,” Lillibeth wailed.
“We need a phone,” Ravinia said aloud, more to the room at large or the heavens or the fates than to Lillibeth. She’d said it and said it and said it for years, but no one ever listened. She wondered if Earl had a phone or if he was as antiquated in his thinking as her aunt.
Suddenly anxious, Ravinia left Lillibeth’s room, snapping off the light switch and shutting her door on the way out. Sometimes her sister annoyed her, and she felt guilty about it, but Lillibeth was just so immature. It was hard to believe she was older than Ravinia.
She stood in the main room for long moments, thinking hard. Had Catherine left? What had transpired between Catherine and Earl? Something that had sent her away? Because she sure wasn’t at the house, as far as Ravinia could tell.
Briefly, she thought back to her latest foray beyond the walls of the lodge. She’d met someone. A boy. A man, actually. And she’d looked into his heart and found, to her surprise, the way had been blocked. That was unsettling. She’d always been able to see to a being’s core, except with people who knew how to block her, like Catherine, sometimes, although it wasn’t hard to see what she was really like—ice and fortitude—and then Lillibeth was a mystery she couldn’t quite penetrate, probably because her mind was full of childlike things.
Ravinia was even able to see into the hearts of animals sometimes. Once she’d met a wolf down from the hills, and its core had been full of instinct: bonding and a fierce connection to the pack. It looked at her through yellow eyes, and she sensed that it was including her, so as much as she knew how, she filled her own center with a responding “I’m with you” kind of message, which might or might not hav
e gotten through. The wolf turned and left, padding away softly, its gray fur fluttering in the breeze. She couldn’t tell anyone of the encounter other than to say she’d seen a wolf, and even that was resoundingly pooh-poohed. There were no true wolves in these mountains, she was told by one of the Foothillers, who all thought they knew everything about everything. Ravinia’s answer was that maybe it was a fake one, then, but it was a wolf.
But the man . . . his eyes were gray and his hair was dark and he reminded her of the wolf, sort of. He was the first actual human being she’d wanted to spend any time with, and she’d gone looking for him tonight, but she couldn’t find him anywhere around Deception Bay or the beach, where she’d first seen him. In the back of her mind she found herself wanting to leave with him, wherever he would go. She’d come back to the lodge tonight, intending to tell Catherine that she would be leaving soon. Forever. Just like Catherine had ordained.
Only now she wasn’t sure she wanted to go.
“She’s not in the house,” Ophelia declared. Ravinia looked up to see Ophelia now hastening down the stairs again. “I went into our mother’s bedroom,” she said, in answer to Ravinia’s unspoken question. “Aunt Catherine’s not there. She’s nowhere. As if she just vanished.”
“Maybe she left with Earl,” Ravinia suggested.
“Without telling us?”
Ravinia frowned. That wasn’t like Catherine at all. Floorboards creaked, and a door opened. Startled, Ravinia and Ophelia both looked over to see Lillibeth, in her nightgown, rolling out of her room toward them, looking scared. Her skin was ashen, and she worried her lip with her teeth. “I . . . I couldn’t sleep.”
“You woke her,” Ophelia accused Ravinia, as Isadora, who’d gone back upstairs for another check of the second-floor bedrooms, returned to the main floor, where they were now all congregated in front of the fire, shadows flickering across their faces from the leaping flames. Despite the heat and growing embers, the large room felt chilly and without warmth.
“Ask Cassandra,” Lillibeth implored.
“We’re not waking her up, too, unless we have to,” Isadora said.
“We have to!” Lillibeth cried.
“Cassandra doesn’t operate that way,” Isadora reminded her tersely. “You can’t just ask her. She has to tell you.”
