Blindfold (14 page)

There was obvious admiration in Whit's brown eyes as he returned her gaze. "You don't scare easily, do you?"

"I'm not sure," Maggie answered honestly. "I haven't had any reason to be scared since I was four and a huge, black spider crawled across my pillow when I was getting ready to go to sleep. I screamed the house down. My poor parents probably thought I was being ripped limb from limb by a serial killer who'd crawled in my bedroom window." She sipped the drink in her hand and then said, "I guess I don't need to be scared now, do I? I mean, if it's all over. I still think Beckwith was behind the gavel and the scales, because of the peer jury, but maybe Donovan will take care of her."

"I don't know if you should be scared or not. But I hope not." Whit smiled at her, then surprised her by pulling her to him so that her head rested

against his chest. He smelled of autumn air and mint, and when he put his arms around her, Maggie closed her eyes and let herself relax for the first time that day. "I don't especially want to think of you afraid," he said quietly into her hair. "I couldn't say why. Just don't like the idea."

She didn't, either. The image of herself cowering in a quiet corner somewhere stiffened her spine. "I'm not. I'm not afraid," she murmured into his chest. And she wasn't, not at that moment. But she couldn't stay in his arms forever, could she? Too bad.

Pulling slightly away, she looked up at him to ask, "Are you still going to the ceremony next Saturday?"

"Sure. Why not? I haven't had any nasty messages on my porches."

Maggie smiled. "Do you have porches?"

"Several." He grinned. "And I'd like you to see them. My folks are giving a party at Picadilly next Friday night. We'd be the only two people there under the age of forty, but we could keep each other company. Interested?"

Maggie wasn't in the mood for a party. But . . . she might be by next Friday night. And she'd get to see what Picadilly looked like inside.

Scout would not be happy. Neither would Lane. But was she going to live her entire life worrying about how Scout and Lane felt? I don't think so, she told herself emphatically.

"Interested," she answered, smiling. "Definitely interested. I'd love to go."

Whit hesitated, then added, "You and Scout... you're friends, right? Like you're friends with Lane and Helen and Goodman?"

Maggie decided on honesty. "More than that," she admitted, then added quickly, "but not a lot more than that." Although Scout might not feel the same way.

He nodded. "Great!" Then he bent his head and kissed her thoroughly, as if they were sealing some kind of bargain.

Maybe they were, she thought later as she got ready for bed.

Sunday was a quiet day. Although the news had indeed spread that renovation plans for the old courthouse had been canceled, Maggie's friends were too drained physically and emotionally to celebrate the probability.of a recreation center. They talked on the phone off and on all day, but made no plans. That was fine with Maggie, whose injured arm was hurting. And she wasn't eager to appear in public with a bandage on her cheek.

She had only one brief conversation with her mother about the cancellation. "You never gave up before," Maggie said as she was setting the table for dinner. She had tried to keep her tone from sounding accusatory, but she was pretty sure she'd failed.

"I never came so close to losing my daughter before." Her mother paused, then added, "I'll make a deal with you, Maggie. If the sheriff comes up with proof of your theory, that all of this has to do with someone angry at the peer jury, and the courthouse

isn't involved, I'll think about the renovation plans again. But keep that to yourself, okay? Just in case ..."

Maggie was satisfied with that. But she was impatient for Sheriff Donovan to come up with something. When she called his office, she got an answering machine and his pager number, but decided the call could wait. If he'd found out anything, he'd have come to the house to tell her mother.

By the end of that week, Maggie had to admit that the atmosphere in Felicity had lightened considerably. Talk at school was excited and anticipatory, centered around the new rec center, which gossip claimed might be available to all as early as next spring. There were no more ugly incidents. Even the students "sentenced" by the peer jury that week seemed to take their punishments in stride, without ugly threats or dire looks.

And Maggie saw Whit every single night that week.

Monday, he arrived at her house unexpectedly, with a book on architecture, saying he thought she might like to read it. Unlike Alex, Maggie had not the slightest interest in architecture, and in fact, the very mention of the word '"building" still tightened her jaw.

But there he was, standing on her porch in his suede jacket, his light brown hair a little windblown, smiling down at her as if he hoped she might think of the book as a dozen, long-stemmed red roses.

"Thanks," she said, "this is great," and invited him in.

Before he left, he pressed his advantage by asking her to take in a movie with him the following night. "If we're going to spend a whole evening at Picadilly on Friday, with only each other to talk to, we should get to know each other better, right?"

"Urn, I don't know," she teased. "Maybe I don't have that much to say. If I say it all tomorrow night, I might bore you to death Friday night."

He laughed. "Oh, I think you probably have a lot to say. And you, boring? I don't think so."

Wednesday morning, Scout was waiting for Maggie when she pulled into the school parking lot. "So," he began awkwardly as she jumped out of the van to join him, "I guess you're busy this weekend, right?" There was pain in his face and in his voice, and Maggie felt it as if the knife were in her own heart. Although Scout had money, like Whit, he hadn't had it as easy as Whit... as far as she knew. Still didn't.

"Yeah, I am. But I'll see you at the ceremony on Saturday. When they take the statue down."

He nodded, and fell silent, although they walked into school together.

Her parents had heard nothing from the sheriff. Maggie saw James Keith in the halls several times at school, but there was no sign of Chantilly Beckwith. Maggie hoped fiercely that she'd dropped out of high school and run away to join the circus.

Wednesday night, Whit and Maggie took a long walk in the woods behind her house, and made plans to attend the Thursday night pep rally at

Bransom High for the upcoming Friday night game.

"Helen's going to freak," Maggie told Whit as they sat on the cool ground beneath a huge old oak tree, surrounded by underbrush and the skittering nighttime noises of small animals. A nearly full moon lit their faces, and a mild autumn breeze toyed with Maggie's hair. An owl somewhere above them hooted in its husky voice. "When she finds out I'm not going to the game, she'll freak. We always go together."

"Well," Whit said, putting an arm around her shoulders and gently turning her head so that she faced him, "tell Helen we'll go to the game next week. But not this week. You tell Helen that on this Friday night, I'm taking you out to Picadilly to show my parents why I haven't been home one night this week. When they meet you, they'll get it. Now quit worrying about Helen, because I'm about to kiss you and I don't want you distracted."

"Helen who?" she murmured during the brief interval between the first and second kiss.

At lunch on Thursday, Helen shrieked, "You're not going? Maggie, you traitor!"

Lane, who had seen the way Whit and Maggie looked at each other and had accepted the truth in her usual cool, okay-I-get-it-and-so-what attitude, said, "Helen, you don't really expect Maggie to turn down an invitation to Picadilly for a dumb high school football game, do you?" If there was envy in her voice, it was well-disguised. "Do you think she's insane?"

i

"But..."

Maggie interrupted Helen. "We'll all go next week, Helen, and watch Scout play. Whit's decided not to go out for the team, but he wants to go to all the games, so we'll all go together, okay? But this Friday night," she added firmly, "I am going to Picadilly. Now forget the game and help me figure out what I'm going to do with this hair. I'm up for anything that doesn't involve purple dye or shaving my head."

Thursday afternoon after classes, Lane and Helen helped Maggie find exactly the right dress at the mall, a deceptively simple black sleeveless sheath with a matching cropped jacket.

"Only a size six could wear that dress and get away with it," Helen said wistfully.

Lane commented on the price tag, but admitted that the dress looked fantastic on Maggie.

They all attended the pep rally Thursday night together. Maggie almost opted out, thinking of how much she had to do to get ready for the party at Picadilly, but she felt guilty about spending so little time with her Mends all week, especially Helen. And she was glad, later, that she'd gone. Everyone seemed to like Whit. He had fit in right from the start. And Lane was being such a good sport about things.

She had good friends. And maybe, just maybe, more than that in Whit.

Thursday night when she got home, the sheriffs car was parked in front of her house.

He had more questions for her about the renovation plans. Her parents sat by silently while Maggie answered as honestly as she could. "I don't think anyone saw them," she said, "but I can't be sure." And she explained that she hadn't delivered the plans first thing in the morning as her mother had asked, and that she hadn't had the backpack with her every single second.

Her mother was annoyed, Maggie could see that. She should have told her the truth sooner. "This is about the beam, isn't it?" Maggie asked the sheriff. "You still don't think it just collapsed, do you?"

"Doesn't look that way," was all he would say. "We're workin' on it. Let you know what we come up with."

Her mother was too distracted to lecture Maggie about not delivering the plans as she'd been asked.

Friday afternoon after PE, Maggie dashed through her shower, dressing hurriedly because she still had so much to do . . . her hair . . . finding the missing black heel . . . her nails . . . she would never be ready by eight when Whit came to pick her up.

Shouting a good-bye to Lane and Helen, she snatched up her backpack and ran from the locker room and up the stairs, thinking, Shoes ... hair ... nails ... what am I forgetting?

She reached the top of the stairs in record time, only to be stopped in her tracks by a voice saying coldly, "Going somewhere, are we? I don't think so."

Maggie's head shot up. She was staring directly into a pale, bony face topped by very black, spiked

hair standing straight up in the air as if something had frightened it half to death. The eyes she was looking into were cold, black, and expressionless, the scarlet mouth opened slightly to reveal unevenly spaced lower teeth. The voice that came out of the mouth was low and harsh. "You sicced the sheriff on me, you little creep!"

Maggie was staring into the face of Alice Ann "Chantilly" Beckwith. True to the sheriffs prediction, she clearly was not happy.

And the person she was not happy with was Maggie Keene.

nothing but flat, smooth walls on both sides of her. She kept the backpack. It was heavy. If she had to, she could slug Chantilly with it. Knock her silly.

Chantilly's voice rose. "James is right. You all let that dumb peer jury go to your heads. You see yourselves as caped crusaders, sitting in that gym dispensing justice! You're crazy, you know that, Keene? Just like that mother of yours. They should lock up both of you and throw away the key, instead of locking me up." Her bone-white face was ugly in its anger. And what struck Maggie as odd was that as angry as the girl was, there was still no life at all in her eyes. They were black, empty orbs, like lumps of coal in a snowman's face.

"Maggie?" Helen's voice, from the foot of the stairs. "Maggie, what's happening up there? Something wrong?" And Lane called, "Who is that? Is that Alice Ann Beckwith?"

Reinforcements. Better yet, witnesses. When Maggie went to the sheriff this time, she would take witnesses with her. Then he'd have to listen.

Feeling braver now that she was no longer alone, Maggie said heatedly, "That was your car in front of my house that day. If you weren't in it, you don't have anything to worry about. But I have a right to tell the sheriff what I saw."

Chantilly's index finger hung in the air between them, as if it were uncertain about its next move. "You can't prove that was my car." Her eyes narrowed. "Just stay out of my way and out of my business, you got that?" Jab. Maggie came close to losing her balance, regaining it at the last moment.

"You go to the sheriff about me again, and that peer jury of yours could be minus a foreperson."

Maggie fumed. This unpleasant girl was ruining what was supposed to be a really good day in her life, spoiling her excitement about the party at Picadilly. "I am just so scared," she said defiantly. She held up a hand, steady as a rock. "See? Look how I'm trembling. Go find your grungy little friends, and tell them to stay away from my house. The sheriff is going to be watching all of you."

"You'll be sorry," Chantilly hissed. Then she turned and ran down the corridor, disappearing around a corner in a blur of black.

Helen and Lane ran to the top of the stairs. "Gotta hand it to you, Maggie. You made it sound as if the sheriff intends to spend his every waking moment following that girl and her cohorts in crime all over town. You don't really think that, do you?"

Maggie leaned against the wall, her knees weak. That girl had been so angry. "Maybe he will when we tell him what she just did. How she threatened me. You heard her. Three people saying the same thing is better than one person saying it, right? But," Maggie added hastily, "I can't do it right now. I have got to get home and pull myself together. Tomorrow morning, okay? It's Saturday. Donovan should be in his office. We'll go then. Meet me in front of the old courthouse. Does either of you need a ride?"

They said they'd let her know, told her to have a great time that night, and Maggie rushed off to get ready for the party.