Deception Read online

  “That’s not funny.”

  “What else would they be?”

  When I saw he was serious, I fell back onto an embroidered silk couch. “How—how do you know?”

  “What?”

  “My parents are—”

  He looked stricken. “No, no! Your parents? No.” He sat beside me. “Emma, I have no idea where they are, but I know they’re not dead.”

  “How? How do you know?”

  After a brief pause, he said, “I just know.”

  His tone was so confident that the tightness in my chest loosened. “Then who did you mean? Who’s dead?”

  He shrugged. “The people who lived here, back in the day. My ancestors, their servants.”

  I glanced around the room, looking for photos, portraits, some evidence of anyone who’d once resided here. There was nothing but paintings of seascapes and schooners. “Why would you think I was talking about them?”

  He stood. “You’re tired.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll show you your room.”

  My new bedroom waited at the end of a wide hallway on the second floor. Behind the thick cherry wooden door I found a surprisingly bright room, even at this time of night, with long paned windows and pale yellow curtains. A teal blue Shaker dresser lined one wall and a matching wardrobe fit snugly in the opposite corner. There was an adorably minuscule fireplace and a raised four-poster bed frame with pineapple carvings and white linens.

  I flopped onto the bed and the room seemed suddenly crowded by the presence of … I don’t know. Of history, I guess. The antique furniture, the nickel doorknob polished by hundreds of hands over hundreds of years. The generations of Bennett’s family who’d slept in the bed.

  But mostly, I was conscious of the proximity of Bennett. He looked as unyielding as his last name—Stern—and unhappy to be here or maybe just unhappy with me.

  “Why pineapples?” I asked, looking at the bed frame.

  “They’re a symbol of hospitality in New England.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “They don’t grow in Massachusetts. They don’t belong here.”

  But I wasn’t really talking about the pineapples.

  Bennett dropped my suitcases inside the door. “They’re expecting you at school tomorrow. There’s a uniform in the wardrobe, I guessed on the size. You’re not due until ten.”

  I nodded, too exhausted to think about starting a new school while wearing some horrible uniform. I did have one question, though. “Bennett, why? Why did you come for me?”

  He leaned in the doorway, his khakis wrinkled and eyes weary. “I don’t know … yet.”

  . . .

  I fell asleep the minute my head hit the pillow. The room was completely dark when I woke to a scraping noise from the corner.

  “Bennett?” I murmured.

  C’est moi. Stoking the fire. Rest easy.

  I sighed back into slumber.

  When I stirred again, hours later, dying embers glowed in the little bedroom fireplace. And I remembered the voice in the middle of the night. It wasn’t Bennett.

  It was a woman.

  7

  Sunlight streaming through the window woke me. I climbed from bed, disoriented. The ormolu clock on the mantel said 9:25 and I couldn’t remember when Bennett said I needed to be at school. Ten o’clock?

  I stumbled down the hall. “Hello? Bennett?”

  No answer. He was probably downstairs, whipping together a breakfast of blueberry pancakes with warm maple syrup, and couldn’t hear me over the sizzling of the pan.

  I found the bathroom and took a freeeezing shower.

  “There’s no hot water!” I yelled downstairs, as I stomped back to my room.

  I put on underwear and raced to the wardrobe. Grabbed the uniform and shivered in front of what was left of the fire. I slipped on the navy plaid skirt—minuscule—and the white button-down and navy wool blazer—snug. My God, Bennett thought I was a preteen. There was a striped tie, but I had no idea how to tie it, so I knotted it around my neck like a scarf. Even with the heat of the banked fire, my legs were goose pimpled. I glanced out the window at the cold, cloudy day, wondering if I’d ever be warm again.

  I found gray thigh-high tights in my suitcase and pulled them on. They stopped an inch below the skirt. I slipped into my boots and examined myself in the wardrobe mirror. I looked like a Catholic school slut. But there was no time to worry about it. My pancakes would be getting cold.

  When I arrived downstairs I found no pancakes. No Bennett. No strange woman attending the kitchen fire.

  Nothing but a note on the table:

  Called away. Didn’t want to wake you. Go to school. Make friends.

  Bennett

  No “love” before the Bennett?

  “Called away.” Everyone in my life got called away, and nobody ever told me why—and then they didn’t return. Just once, I wanted to be the reason someone got called away instead of the person they got called away from.

  I shredded the letter and scattered the pieces over the kitchen table, which made me feel a little better.

  I found a strawberry yogurt in the fridge and snagged a spoon and my wool coat on the way out the door. Last night, Bennett told me the school was only three blocks up the hill. I dug into my yogurt and started walking.

  The neighborhood was sweet. The houses were shuttered Colonials shoved too closely together with wrought-iron fences surrounding little gardens filled with late-blooming pansies and mums. Maple trees shed russet leaves and Indian corn was tacked to front doors. Everything looked picture-perfect New Englandy.

  I stopped to pet a black Lab and asked his owner for directions to the school. The dog slobbered on my spoon and the man told me to keep going. “You’ll know it when you see it.”

  The man moved on, oblivious that his dog now had my yogurt container in his mouth, and I was left alone in the cold with a dog-licked spoon. What was I doing here? My parents gone, my friends gone—losing my mind and stuck three thousand miles from home.

  I wanted to curl into a ball and never unwind myself. But I remembered Bennett saying “I don’t know … yet.”

  That little yet pushed me forward. I’d give him a reason for rescuing me, for keeping me out of a halfway house. I’d go to school. I’d make friends. And I’d live in Bennett’s museum until he knew I was worth saving.

  My newfound resolution didn’t falter until I found myself in front of a tidy blue house at the top of the hill. I reached for the doorbell beside the black lacquer door and stopped.

  What was I doing here? This wasn’t the school. My feet just led me to the door, the way you don’t have to think when you’re walking home. Except I’d never been here before. I’d never even been to Massachusetts. Yet there was something so familiar about it.

  A chill touched me. Maybe there was something really wrong with me. I mean more than nightmares and a too-lively imagination. My parents abandoned me, then Natalie betrayed me, and Bennett took me away. That was enough to throw a sane person, let alone one who was digging into ashes of the dead.

  Maybe I had a brain tumor. That would explain a lot.

  As I debated my sanity, the door opened and a tall woman with short dark hair and a slight smile said, “Emma Vaile?”

  “Oh! Yes. Um … hello.”

  “I’m Dean Grant. Bennett Stern told me to expect you.” She frowned slightly. “Is the doorbell broken?”

  “No, I just—is this the school?” Because it looked more like a cottage than a school. If I was going to be homeschooled, what was I doing in this jailbait uniform?

  “Dean’s office,” she said. “That’s the school.”

  She gestured next door toward a stone wall with a gated entrance. I couldn’t see anything but the tops of trees behind the massive wall, which implied that the school was at least school-sized. From the outside, it looked like the sort of place that required a uniform. And a chauffeured car.

  “My intern will
walk you up,” the dean said.

  She disappeared into the cottage and returned a moment later with a tall dark-haired guy wearing the boy version of my uniform—only his fit—and his wiry frame and deep green eyes made it look good. Bennett used to go here. I wondered if he’d looked as cute.

  “This is Coby Anders,” Dean Grant said. “He’s got your schedule and will make sure you get to class. If you have any questions, you know where to find me.”

  Coby held out his hand to me. “Nice to meet you, Emma. Welcome to Thatcher.”

  “Uh,” I replied, dumbfounded. Guys at home mostly gave me a halfhearted “Hey,” and never a handshake. And Coby wasn’t even performing for the dean’s benefit, since after introducing us, she’d closed the door behind her.

  I took his hand and said, “Pleased to meet you,” feeling like a complete impostor. I followed him to the front gate, wondering if all the kids were going to be like this. If so, I was going to have a hard time with Bennett’s “make friends” request. I’d left my copy of Emily Post back in San Francisco.

  “This is your schedule.” Coby gave me a sheet of paper from a folder he carried. “Thatcher doesn’t offer all the courses you were taking and we have some different requirements, so it may seem a little weird at first.”

  I didn’t respond. Because if we were talking weirdness, I wanted to know why I felt like I’d been here before.

  We walked down the cobblestone drive, past sprawling lawns and crooked apple trees, and I recalled the crisp taste of the low-hanging fruit, the soft patch of grass perfect for a picnic, and a stolen kiss in the shadowed gazebo.

  “Are you all right?” Coby asked. “You look a little flushed.”

  “It’s the gazebo,” I said.

  He turned toward the corner of the lawn. “What gazebo?”

  “Right th—” I looked again, and the gazebo was gone. “There. That looks like a good place for one. Don’t you think?”

  “For a gazebo.” His tone was teasing.

  “Yeah. I think it’d really … um … tie the lawn together.” I giggled, slightly hysterically. “Maybe I’m a little jet-lagged. And hungry. A dog stole my yogurt on the way here.”

  Coby pulled an apple from a branch overhanging the path. “You want an apple? One a day keeps the … Well, my dad’s a doctor. He says it keeps you regular.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t know why I said that.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I took a bite as we rounded a curve and saw the school: pale stone and paneled windows, with marbled steps leading to a grand entrance. Not a cottage, not a house—a mansion.

  We mounted the steps and the crunch of the apple sounded in my ears; the sweet juice flowing in my mouth tasted so familiar. And my feet on the steps were even more so, as though I’d climbed them hundreds of times before. Then there was that great whooshing sound—

  The world spun around me, like a merry-go-round, when everything speeds up and twirls and you can’t see anything except a blur of color and motion. Then everything stopped. I pressed a hand to my cheek and found myself wearing a blue dress with puffy sleeves and a long full skirt. I felt wrong—constricted and short of breath. I couldn’t breathe.

  Panic rising, I began to pant. I fingered my rib cage and discovered a corset. The day was suddenly night, with torches illuminating the path and families in fancy dress stepping from carriages, through a gauntlet of uniformed footmen into the mansion. I’d been transported to the past again, just like I had with the death mask.

  I yanked at the dress, fighting to breathe, desperate to return to myself. I couldn’t tear the thing off. I started at the top button and—

  Whooosh!

  I lay on the ground, with Coby kneeling over me.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I’m back.”

  He nodded. “You fainted. Well, after you started unbuttoning.”

  “Oh God.”

  The blouse I wore under the slutty uniform was undone to my navel. I felt myself blush and clasped the shirt together over my bra, then quickly buttoned up.

  “We should go to the nurse,” Coby said. “Or if you want, I’ll call my dad.”

  I shook my head. “No, I just …” What was I going to tell him? That I was transported back in time? “It’s only jet lag. And I’m a little nervous about starting a new school.”

  “You do look a little …”

  Scared? I was terrified. What was happening to me? Who was I supposed to tell? The dean? Bennett? A psychiatrist?

  “ … pale,” he finished.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Just majorly embarrassed.”

  “Yeah,” he said, pulling me to my feet. “Nobody wants to spend their first day passed out on the front steps. That’s for prom night.”

  “Oh God,” I said. “You think I’m a drug addict.”

  “No, no. Just a drunk.”

  “I’m not!”

  He laughed. “I’m kidding.” He laid a hand over his heart and flashed a boyish grin. “I promise not to tell anyone.”

  For some reason, I trusted him.

  “C’mon,” he said. “I’ll show you to your first class.”

  We stepped into a foyer that rose two stories high, a chandelier illuminating the pale glow of white marble. Two medieval French tapestries hung from the walls, depicting scenes of pastoral countryside with manors in the distance. A grandfather clock stood at the foot of the stairs, grander than I’d ever seen. Off to the left was a reading nook with chairs and settees arranged around a large hearth.

  I was a long way from public school.

  Coby noticed my expression. “Kind of cool, huh?”

  “You could roast a pig in that thing,” I told him, eyeing the hearth.

  “My friend Harry and I tried once.”

  “What? Really?”

  “Didn’t go well.” He sighed. “The pig escaped.”

  My laughter echoed off the walls. “It was alive?”

  “We didn’t have the heart to kill it.”

  “So it was more of a theoretical exercise,” I said.

  “Exactly.” Coby led me toward a hallway. “You know, I think you’ll like it here.”

  “I think you’re right,” I said.

  Because as I trailed Coby through the historic halls of Thatcher, I felt as though I’d come home.

  8

  The feeling didn’t last. Roaming the halls of my new school, I felt as if I’d wandered into a play and was distinctly unprepared for the lead role.

  The setting: Thatcher Academy. Once a grand mansion, the institution still maintained its charming Georgian decor, open rooms, distinguished portraits, and marble floors. The classrooms and corridors were elegant and refined, the student body even more so.

  Enter Emma Vaile, the new kid.

  My mom took me to a play a few years ago, a period piece involving class issues. The lead character, a young maid, always dressed differently from the rest of the cast. If they were done up for dinner, she was in her nightclothes. When she was gowned for a ball, they were in riding costumes.

  That’s how I felt walking into my first Trigonometry class. I was unprepared for the lack of … well, students. There were only ten, in addition to me and Coby, who led me to a quaint wooden desk before finding one himself. Was he going to shadow me all day? I wasn’t exactly an invalid who needed to be wheeled from class to class—although given my fainting spell, I could see why he thought maybe he should stick close.

  “You don’t need to stay,” I whispered to him. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Homework, please,” the teacher, Mr. Sakolsky, said.

  Coby grinned and pulled a notebook from his backpack. He handed his homework to the student in front of him who passed it on.

  “Oh,” I said. He was in the class.

  “And let’s all welcome Emma Vaile,” said Mr. Sakolsky.

  “Oh,” I said, louder, as everyone turned to stare at me.

  Yes, we all wore the same uniform
, but somehow I looked ready for a costume party, dressed as the slutty schoolgirl, while the other girls appeared ready for their close-ups in Elle. And it wasn’t just my minuscule uniform. They were the epitome of chic, with carelessly blown-out hairstyles, artfully knotted ties, eclectic jewelry, and oversized leather bags in place of backpacks. And the guys weren’t all that different—well, less jewelry maybe.

  “Hi!” I said with an idiotic wave. “I’m Emma.”

  “Yeah, we got that,” a petite blonde said with a well-mannered sneer.

  “Britta,” Coby warned. “Don’t bite.”

  “I never bite,” she purred at him. “I only nibble.”

  So I hated her already.

  I inwardly sighed. How come when you started at a new school you couldn’t suddenly become someone else? Smarter or prettier or more popular? Maybe a magnet to cute guys instead of the idiotic waver. I glanced at the clock on the wall. It took me all of twenty minutes to become the same girl I’d always been.

  I actually liked math, so I tried to concentrate, but everything conspired to distract me. How different the kids looked and how few of them there were. It’d be impossible to disappear into a crowd here, which made me nervous. And the classroom itself looked like some fancy English club: walls of dark paneled wood, the ceiling ornately carved, and an Oriental carpet under the teacher’s antique desk.

  As Mr. Sakolsky blabbed on about inverse functions, I tried to take notes, but none of it was making sense. I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened outside. How I had felt like I’d been here before. The gazebo and the vision of a previous time. What was happening to me? I’d rather be boring old me than the new girl who went insane her first week at school.

  I glanced at the equations on the board, and noticed another teacher standing at the front of the room, a tall man in an old-fashioned brown suit, watching me intently. He was thin, a little stooped, and had a dramatically receding hairline. A frown creased his brow when he saw that I’d noticed him, and he greeted me with a little wave.

  I lifted my hand in return.

  “Yes, Emma?” Mr. Sakolsky asked. “You have a question?”