The Humming Room (4 page)

Even from a distance, Roo could see that the figure was a boy. He stood on the bank for a moment, looking around. Then he grew perfectly still. It seemed to Roo that he was staring right at her, though at this distance she couldn't be certain. The boy turned abruptly and bounded up the terraced lawn, climbing the ledges rather than the stairs, and disappeared around the backside of the house.

Roo hurried back over the footbridge, skirted the lagoon, and ran around the edge of the island, trying to catch another glimpse of the boy. At first she saw nothing. But after a few seconds she spotted him again. Astonishingly, he was now standing on one of the lower roofs of the house. Suddenly he raised one arm. Was he waving to her?

The very next minute, the water darkened and became opaque. The sky seemed to drop closer to the earth, as though the river had yanked it down. A torrent of fine icy rain began to lash at the ground and peck at Roo's face. She shoved the mail beneath her shirt and pulled up her sweatshirt's hood, but the thin cotton was already soaked through. Squinting through the curtain of rain, she watched the shadowy form on the roof. Suddenly, the wind changed directions, as though someone had summoned it. It drove into her face so violently that it felt like an assault, forcing her to run. Roo refused. She turned her back to the wind, twisting her head to keep her eyes on the boy. The river grew frantic, crashing against the island's banks. Then the wind whipped around yet again, even more fiercely now, and this time Roo surrendered, running back to the house while the river thrashed and hissed triumphantly at her back.

Roo burst through the door, very nearly colliding with Ms. Valentine, who was heading out, dressed in a long black raincoat and a leopard-spotted, brimmed rain hat tied under her chin. Her hand flew to her midsection in surprise. But in a blink she composed herself, taking in Roo's dripping hair and sodden clothing.

“If you are hell-bent in playing outside in bad weather, no one here will stop you. But when you get sick, there'll be no one to take care of you either.”

“I won't get sick,” Roo said. “I've never been sick in my life.”

“This house was built for sick people,” Ms. Valentine warned. “People don't tend to stay healthy here for very long.” Her eyes lowered suddenly and stared at Roo's hand, which was cradling the mail beneath her sweatshirt. “Where did you get that ring?” she asked suspiciously. “I don't remember you wearing it before.”

Roo looked at the thin silver ring that she had pilfered from the girls' dormitory and then lied without any hesitation. “My father gave it to me for my twelfth birthday.”

“Hmm.” Ms. Valentine's lips pressed together skeptically. “And what have you got under your shirt? You look like you're hiding something.”

With a deft flick of her fingers, Roo tucked the padded envelope into her waistband while she extracted the stack of envelopes from beneath her sweatshirt.

“The mailman came,” she said, handing the stack to Ms. Valentine.

Ms. Valentine took the letters and quickly shuffled through them. Her expression lost some of its harshness, perhaps because now she did not have to run out for the mail in the bad weather.

“Go upstairs, Roo. Change into dry clothes. And don't play in the rain.” Then Ms. Valentine started back toward the other end of the house, untying her rain hat as she went.

But Roo didn't go upstairs, not right away. She waited until Ms. Valentine had disappeared across the lobby and through a small threshold at the far end of it. Roo followed, waiting until she was sure Ms. Valentine was well ahead of her. Passing through the vaulted threshold, Roo found herself in a short foyer that led to yet another lobby, this one far larger than the first. Here, the ceiling was so tall, Roo had to tilt her head back to see it. Covering the walls were dozens of masks, some very wild looking, made from woven fibers and strung with seeds. Others were carved out of wood or gourds, with faces that peered out with alert round eyes, as though she had just startled them. One mask had a curled tongue that stuck out of its mouth.

Opposite the front door was a staircase, this one much wider and grander than the other. Its banister was carved and it twisted up and around to the second floor. Roo thought she could hear voices coming from above, so she ducked into a corridor off the lobby. There were many doors along the corridor, every one of them shut. Roo tried them all. There was a cozy-looking parlor in one, with a fireplace and two plush maroon armchairs facing each other across a little round table. In another was a tremendously long dining table with a dozen high-backed chairs poised around it. There was even what looked to be a ballroom, with a piano in the corner and wide windows that overlooked the river. Yet every room looked too still. Each time she opened a door, the room seemed to startle, like the faces on the masks.

All the rooms were on one side of the hall, just as they had been in the other corridor, only here they were on the right-hand side instead of the left. This detail had struck her as odd when she first saw it, but so many new things were happening that she hadn't had time to wonder about it. Now Roo began to consider this more carefully. The corridor turned gently as she followed it. It seemed to form a large circle, and indeed, after a few minutes she found herself back at her uncle's office.

She remembered her first glimpse of the house from Ms. Valentine's boat. It had looked huge. Yet from the inside it did not seem nearly as big. Maybe it was a trick. Maybe the house was built to impress people with its size when it was really a shell with nothing in the middle. Still, the doorless wall looked newer than the rest of the house, and there were no moldings along the bottom or top. It looked as though the wall were an afterthought, something that was built in a hurry and forgotten. The mystery of the wall nudged at Roo's thoughts, but she could find no good solution to it.

Back in her room she pulled the stolen package from under her shirt and put it on the vanity, then peeled off her wet clothes. She changed into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt from her Hefty bag, then sat by the window and picked at a cheese sandwich that Violet had left for her. She stared out at the rain and the river and the hummocks of grayish green islands. She looked for the island where she had seen the boy on the ice floe, but it wasn't visible from the window. The sky was uniformly gray, with no hint of a break in the storm.

After she finished eating, she examined the stolen envelope. It was addressed to P. Fanshaw and was marked F
RAGILE.
H
ANDLE WITH
C
ARE
.

Who was P. Fanshaw?

The return address, stamped in dark blue letters, said it was from Taylor-Baines in Philadelphia. Roo tore open the envelope and looked inside. There was something hard and rectangular, swathed in bubble wrap. She pulled it out, picked off the tape at the seams, and unwrapped it. Inside was a plastic box and in the box was a small bone. It might have come from anything—a dog, a cat. Maybe even the bone of a finger? She shoved it back in the envelope, walked down the hall, and put the envelope in the wooden box under the floorboards in the girls' dormitory.

There, she lay on the chilly floor. The silence in the house had a sound of its own. Thick, pulsing. Waiting. She listened hard for the humming, but it never came.

It was the loneliest afternoon Roo had ever spent.

True, she had never felt the need for other people's company, but she now realized that she had never
ever
been absolutely alone. Even in the trailer's crawlspace, there were living things all around her. Field mice, ants, spiders. There was even a pretty garter snake that would, if she kept very still, slide right onto her sneakers and rest on them. And in the Burrows' woods there were wildflowers and foxes darting past and chipmunks weaving in and out of the underbrush.

But here, in this huge house, life seemed to be hiding from her.

She closed her eyes and thought about the mystery of the walls again. She must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she heard was Violet laughing.

“There you are!” Violet said. She was holding the empty tray from Roo's lunch and staring down at her with an amused expression on her face. “You're a strange little person. Have you been sitting here all afternoon?”

Roo scrambled to her feet.

“Why are there no doors along one side of all the corridors?” The question sprang from her mind as though she had just been dreaming about it.

“I don't know,” Violet answered, looking surprised. “I guess it was just built like that.” She turned and started back up the hall, and Roo followed, jogging to keep up with Violet's long-legged stride.

“But there's all this space in the middle of the house, just sitting there,” Roo persisted. “Why would someone waste it?”

Violet shrugged. “I guess rich people don't think about things like that. The Summer People around here seem to live by their own rules.”

“But my uncle isn't Summer People. He lives here in the winter too,” Roo said.

“He didn't always. He only started living here year-round after he was married.” Violet blushed, the deep, ruddy blush of a dark-haired girl who has said too much.

“Uncle Emmett is married?” Roo asked, stunned.

After a hesitation, Violet admitted, “Was.”

“Are they divorced now?” Roo asked.

“Listen, Roo.” She stopped by Roo's bedroom door. “It's not my place to tell you this stuff. Why don't you ask your uncle?”

“How can I ask him anything when he'll barely speak to me?” Roo cried.

Violet's eyes locked onto Roo's. “My mother says that poking around at people's private lives is like rummaging through their bedroom closets. You might find a few interesting knickknacks, but eventually you'll discover something in an old shoebox that you'll wish you hadn't seen.”

“I've seen everything,” Roo replied evenly.

Violet looked at her with pity—a thing that Roo generally detested but somehow with Violet she didn't mind so much.

“I guess you have.” She sighed and then quickly glanced at the stairs, then back at Roo. “Your uncle was married. For a short time. His wife died two years ago.”

“How?”

Violet twisted her lips to the left and considered. Outside, the wind must have changed direction because now it rattled the windows as the rain clicked furiously against the glass.

“It was sudden. That's all I know. I didn't work here back then.”

“What was her name?” Roo asked, thinking of the package addressed to P. Fanshaw.

“Ana.”

That was no good.

“Does anyone else live here?” Roo asked. “Besides my uncle and you and Ms. Valentine?”

Violet cocked her head and blew a puff of exasperation. “I'm beginning to think they've switched the real Roo Fanshaw for you! Your foster mother told us that you were quiet as a cup, but here you are yammering away with all your questions.”

“I have a lot of questions,” Roo said, “because everything here is so strange.”

“That's just because it's new,” Violet said dismissively.

“It
is
strange here!” Roo insisted. “This morning I saw a boy floating down the river on a piece of ice.”

Now Violet smiled and shook her head in wonder. “Your first day on Cough Rock and already you've caught a glimpse of the Faigne! People can live here for years and never spot him.”

“The Faigne?”

“That's what they call him around here. I think it's an old term from Guernsey. Most of us Donkey Island people have ancestors that come from Guernsey, an island off the coast of England. We still keep a lot of the Guernsey ways and one thing we love is stories of the supernatural. Ghosts, fairies. Sea people.”

“I think he made the storm come,” Roo said. It popped out of her mouth, and it sounded silly to her own ears as she said it.

“That's not the first time I've heard something like that. There's a fisherman who swears he saw the Faigne flying over Wiggle Room Island on the back of a heron. But then, that particular fisherman is known for sucking down home brew for breakfast. Do you want to know what the Donkey grannies say?”

Roo nodded.

“They say the Faignes are water creatures, not human at all. There's an old story they tell. Many years ago, the water around Guernsey Island had been stormy and violent for months on end. Few local fishermen dared to go out on it, and those who did never came back. So the fishermen got together and thought up a plan. They would send the prettiest girls in the village out on the banks at dusk to try to lure the Faigne to shore, and when he stepped on land, they would capture him and keep him until he promised to quiet the sea. But the Faigne was as cunning as a cat. Every evening he saw one of the girls pacing along the bank. And every evening he just laughed and swam away. One night, though, he saw a girl sitting on a rock in a quiet cove. She was as pretty as the other girls but so odd that the people in the village would have nothing to do with her. Yet she fascinated the Faigne. Night after night they met in this secret cove, talking and laughing, until one day the girl's brother spied on them and told. The next night the fishermen hid, and when the Faigne came on shore to talk to the girl they swooped in and ambushed him. But the Faigne was faster. He and the girl jumped into the water, hand in hand, and the girl was never seen again. But after that, for years and years, whenever someone spotted the Faigne, there was always a lovely snow-white dolphin swimming by his side.”

Roo rolled her eyes.

“Yes, well.” Violet shrugged. “It's a nice story anyway. My mother says
our
Faigne is probably just some poor boy without a decent family. I've heard that in the winter he breaks into the homes of the Summer People, and squats there. And in the summer, he camps out on some of the islands. The grannies, heaven love them, fill their hats with food and leave them by the shore when they want the river to stay calm for a ride across to Clayton.”

There were quick footsteps on the stairs, and in a moment Ms. Valentine appeared on the landing, looking agitated.

“We need you,” she said to Violet in a pinched voice.

Violet glanced quickly at Roo, as if to gauge her reaction, then without a word she hurried downstairs, with Ms. Valentine behind her.

Roo waited a moment. Then she quietly crept downstairs, stopping midway when she had a view of the lobby. Crouching down, she peered through the railing in time to see Violet and Ms. Valentine rushing toward the east wing. Roo padded down the rest of the stairs, then paused to listen. Voices were coming from down the hall in the west wing. The lobby was empty, so Roo scurried across it and headed down the hall, stopping before she came to her uncle's office. Peering around the doorjamb she saw her uncle slumped in an armchair. Dr. Oulette was standing over him, patting the left side of her uncle's face with a cloth.

“It's getting worse,” Mr. Fanshaw muttered.

“I told you that it might,” Dr. Oulette replied calmly. “Perhaps it's time for a decision—”

“I'll decide when I'm ready,” Mr. Fanshaw interrupted.

“Of course you will.” Dr. Oulette did not sound at all offended. “Hold still. You're bleeding on your shirt.”

“Just let it be, for heaven's sake! I'm fine.” Mr. Fanshaw jerked his head away from the cloth, revealing a jagged bite mark on the side of his cheek. “Go tell Ms. Valentine to give you a ride back over to Clayton. We're done for now, I believe.”