She turned around and stuck her scowling face just an inch from his, which always worked in her favor. “Shhh! I can’t hear them.”
Graham called her a troll under his breath, but she’d let that pass this time. If she kicked him, he might holler and give them away. She shifted so she could block her brother with her backside and petticoats, then she turned her head just a bit to better see her father.
He stood with his arm resting easily on the marble fireplace mantel in Harrington Hall’s genteel office, which was filled with skinny-legged tables and oval chairs painted gold on the edges and with ugly feet that curled up like fists warning you to stay away. The cold wood floor had Turkey rugs with some odd dark blue patterns that were supposed to be trees—which made Kirsty wonder if the trees in Turkey were blue—and frail-looking imported porcelains sat everywhere and gave her an uneasy feeling whenever she was in the room. Those china figures looked as if they would crack into little pieces if you spoke too loudly.
Her father looked as out of place in the office of Harrington Hall as Kirsty felt in this school. It was odd to see him standing there. She knew the room; she’d spent many unpleasant moments standing before Miss Harrington’s stiff-looking desk while the schoolmistress lectured her on conduct becoming a proper young lady, especially aHarringtonpupil.
So to see her father standing there with pastel French porcelain figurines next to his thick arm was very odd. In her mind he belonged on the island, riding one of his horses or standing next to that tall hemlock tree where his head almost touched the highest branches. She hadn’t many memories of him, but she remembered how wonderfully her father could ride. She thought perhaps he had taken her for a ride on his horse once, but she wasn’t certain if it had happened when she was barely old enough to remember, or if she just wished it to be.
Her memory seemed real; she could imagine his tanned hands on the thick leather reins of one of his powerful horses, before he had pointed up at the bright pearly ball of a moon and told her the misty ring around it was a sign that rain would come soon. Sometimes, in the middle of the night while the other children were sound asleep, Kirsty would wrap herself in woolen blankets and sit cross-legged beneath the window, looking up at the vast dark sky above her. If there was a ring around the moon, she always thought of her father.
But now she could look at him, see him in person. She wedged her eyeball a little closer to the keyhole. In one of those hands of his, he held a letter which he’d been staring at with a serious and thoughtful look. Kirsty wondered what he was thinking about when he looked at the letter. Did he think about them? Graham and her?
They thought about him and whispered about what they imagined he was doing when they were supposed to be studying geography. Kirsty didn’t give a holy cow where the Himalaya Mountains were or what direction the Ganges River flowed.
She cared where her father was. He was all she and Graham had left. If they could just wake up one day and suddenly have no mother, that meant the same thing could happen to their father. To anyone.
After that realization, Kirsty never slept well and woke up shaking and crying a lot. She hated that weakness about herself and stole pillows and blankets from the other children so she could muffle the sound when she would wake up already crying.
She wondered if her father ever had nightmares. Did he think about their mother sometimes like she did? Did he cry when she left them? She couldn’t imagine her father crying.
The sad truth was that she didn’t really know her father. But she desperately wanted to, so she just stood there with her eye pressed to that brass keyhole and watched him.
It was odd how he looked different to her, and yet the same. His hair had grown longer than the last time she’d seen him and it was darker than her own pale gold hair. Her father’s hair was deep golden, the color that the tops of the puffy clouds turned when the sun set over the western hills. He wore his hair combed back from his broad forehead, which made his face look like the rocky cliffs on Arrant Island with their sharp granite edges.
She could remember trying to mold his likeness from the clay they’d made from wheat flour in art class one day, but she could never form her father’s strong features with her small pudgy fingers. She had needed something sharp like a knife to cut the clay. But knives were against the school rules, even in art class, something which made her so peevish that instead she’d made a likeness of Miss Harrington riding a broomstick, then had to spend the next few hours printing “I will not be disrespectful to my elders” on the blackboard a hundred times.
That was last spring. Now it was the end of summer and she could see the last of the warm season on her father’s face. His skin was tanned from the intense summer sun that crawled over the islands. She was glad her father’s skin was the color of the hickory nuts that fell on the grounds outside and wasn’t the milky pale skin color that made the arithmetic master look so sickly and weak, even when he wasn’t unconscious.
Her father wasn’t sickly or weak. One look at him and anyone could see that. He was an enormous man. The top of her head barely came to his wrist. When she would tilt back her head so she could look up at him, he seemed as tall and straight as those island pine trees, almost as tall and straight as she imagined God Himself must be.
Her father hadn’t been to the school in months, not since the last really bad letter, when she and Graham had dunked Chester Farriday’s head in the mop bucket. Chester’s father was the governor of the state, so there had been a lot of brouhaha over that prank. But Chester was wrong. He was dumb and said stupid, mean things. Her family was not a bunch of spooky ghosts and monsters that scalped men with claymores and wrapped women in their plaids, then rode off in the mist to have their way with them. She wasn’t certain what having-their-way-with-them was, but she knew MacLachlans didn’t do it because Chester Farriday was a big old dummy.
He had to be. MacLachlans didn’t eat small spit-roasted children and boil bat wings and toads for supper. Although she had wished she were really a witch so she could turn Chester Farriday into a toad, then maybe someone else would boil him.
Chester had caused the whole thing anyway. He had tried to get the other boys to pin Kirsty and Graham on the ground and yank off their shoes and stockings to see if they had cloven feet. But Kirsty had pinched him really hard and scrambled away. She had to do something. Graham didn’t fight back with those boys and, besides, it was dumb old Chester who was standing right next to the mop bucket. If he didn’t want to get his head stuck in the bucket, he shouldn’t’ve been dumb enough to stand next to it.
“Lemme see.” Graham was pestering her and poking his finger in her shoulder blade.
“Just a minute.” She turned her head sideways and could see Miss Harrington’s skinny freckled hand twisting a silver letter opener while she spoke. Also on the desktop wasthewooden ruler, the same one that her knuckles knew so well that they cried out “howdy-do” when they met each other. At least in her mind they cried out “howdy-do.” If she pretended something silly like that then it didn’t sting so terribly much and she could keep herself from crying and showing anyone that the cruel smack from that ruler truly did hurt her.
Miss Harrington was jabbing a silver letter opener into the desktop’s green ink blotter over and over again as she spoke. After a minute Kirsty realized she was using the opener to accentuate each of her nouns and pronouns—grammar was Kirsty’s very best subject.
“Your childrenhave a severe discipline problem.”
After the words “your children,” the letter opener stuck in the desk and wiggled like an arrow did when it hit the archery target bull’s-eye.
“Harrington Hall has an exemplary reputation, Mr. MacLachlan. We are known as one of the finest boarding academies in New England. Harrington alumni have become pillars of society. We have never failed to mold even the most headstrong of children into proper young ladies and gentlemen. Our history of success, as I told you when you enrolled your son and daughter, has been one hundred percent.” Miss Harrington cleared her throat and there was absolute silence for so long that Kirsty could barely keep her breath in her chest.
“Until now.” Miss Harrington planted her thin white hands on the desk and stood up stiffly. “The situation has gotten completely out of hand. I’m sorry, Mr. MacLachlan, but I must ask you to withdraw your children from Harrington Hall immediately.”
Kirsty turned back to Graham and whispered excitedly, “We did it!”
“I wanna see!” Graham whispered and tried to shove her aside.
Kirsty ground her heel into his foot and glared at him until he winced. “Not yet,” she said through gritted teeth and looked back through the keyhole. Her father opened his coat pocket and took out a money pouch.
She heard him say, “How much?” Her breath froze in her chest and grew thin like the cold winter air did.
