into town when she saw Kathy Burton walking ahead of her.
“Kathy?” she yelled. The girl ahead of her stopped and turned around. “Wait up,” Elizabeth called. She ran until she caught up with her friend.
“What are you doing out here?” she said when she was abreast of Kathy.
“I was baby-sitting last night,” Kathy said. “At the Nortons’.”
Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “They’re weird,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“He’s so much older than she is …” Elizabeth trailed off, mulling the peculiarities of her elders. Then another thought occurred to her.
“Your mother lets you baby-sit there?”
“Sure,” Kathy said curiously. “Why wouldn’t she?”
“I mean after what happened to Aune Forager …”
“Oh, that,” Kathy shrugged. “My mother says nothing happened to her at all. She says she’s a liar.”
Elizabeth nodded. “That’s what my dad thinks, too. But I’m not sure he believes it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “He’s just acting strange.” She looked around, and pointed to a bird that swooped from a nearby tree. “Look,” she said, “a jay.”
Kathy followed her gesture, but missed the bird. “You sure are lucky, living out here,” she said. “That’s why I like to sit for the Nortons. I can stay over and walk back in the morning.”
“I wish there was a bus,” Elizabeth said. “It gets boring after a while.”
“I wouldn’t get tired of it if I lived out here,” Kathy said confidently. “It must be fun to be able to go exploring any time you want to.”
Elizabeth nodded, but her attention was no longer on Kathy.
A rabbit had flashed across the road ahead of the girls, and as Elizabeth watched it a strange expression crossed her face. She stopped, and seemed to be grasping at an elusive thought.
“There’s a place,” she whispered.
“What?” Kathy asked.
“A secret place,” Elizabeth went on. She turned to Kathy and stared intensely into her eyes. “Would you like to go there sometime?”
Kathy’s eyes widened. “What kind of place?”
“If I told you it wouldn’t be secret any more, would it?
If I take you there, you have to promise never to tell anybody about it.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t,” Kathy said, the excitement of sharing a secret bringing a quiver to her voice. “It would be just ours.”
Elizabeth seemed on the verge of saying something more when she heard the sound of a vehicle approaching from behind them. She pulled Kathy off the road, and the two of them waited while the White Oaks van passed them. George Diller waved and tooted the horn as he passed. From the back of the van the girls could see Sarah, her face pressed against the rear window of the vehicle, until the bus took a curve in the road, moving out of sight When the van was gone, Elizabeth stopped waving, and she and Kathy once again began walking.
“What’s wrong with her?” Kathy asked.
“Who?”
“Sarah,” Kathy said.
“Who said something’s the matter with her?” Elizabeth said defensively. It upset her to be asked questions about her sister.
“My mother,” Kathy said matter-of-factly. “She said Sarah’s crazy.”
Elizabeth stared at the ground for a while before she spoke again.
“I don’t think you should talk that way about Sarah.”
“Well, is she crazy?” Kathy pressed.
“No,” Elizabeth said.
“Then why does she go to White Oaks? That’s a place for crazy kids. They come from all over the country to go there.”
“And they live there, don’t they?” Elizabeth pointed out. “If Sarah was crazy, wouldn’t she have to live there too?”
Kathy thought it over. “Well, if she’s not crazy, why does she go there at all?”
Elizabeth shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. Something happened to her about a year ago. She was in the woods, and she fell or something. And now she can’t talk. If she went to school in town, everybody would laugh at her. But she’ll be all right, as soon as she starts talking again.”
The two girls walked in silence for a while, and it wasn’t until they were into town that either of them spoke again.
“Does Sarah know about the secret place?” Kathy said suddenly.
Elizabeth shook her head. “And you won’t either, if you don’t stop asking questions about it. It’s a place you have to be. You can’t talk about it.”
“Will you show me?” Kathy asked defiantly.
“If you stop talking about it,” Elizabeth countered. “It’s a very special place, just for me. But I suppose I could take you there, since you’re a friend of mine.”
“When?”
But Elizabeth didn’t answer. Instead, she gave her friend a mysterious look, then disappeared into the school.
Mrs. Goodrich spent nearly an hour in the attic,