Shadowmaker Read Free Page A

you, baby. I don’t know what to think, but I know that we need to be careful.”
    I wanted to reassure her that I was all right and no longer a baby to be worried about, but when I opened my mouth a huge, noisy yawn came out.
    Mom smiled. “We’re both exhausted. Let’s forget all about this craziness and get to bed. Okay?”
    “Okay,” I answered, and walked off toward my room at the back of the house. I held the curtains back so I could stare out the window into the darkness, searching for movement among the shadows, yet terrified that I might see it. I wished Mom had answered my questions. It wasn’t okay.

CHAPTER TWO
    I t was misery waking to the alarm clock, and the chill of the bare wood floor stung my toes. At least the floors were clean—scrubbed and waxed and polished until Mom was satisfied—a huge improvement on the way they’d looked when we’d first arrived at the house and stepped inside.
    The badly worn boards had been gritty with beach sand and dirt and scuffed with a mixture of bare footprints and the intricate design of whirls and whorls from the imprints of sports shoes. Crushed beer and soft drink cans lay in the mess, and a couple of ashtrays filled with butts decorated the tables.
    “I thought we’d find something like this when I discovered the door was unlocked,” Mom had said, making a faceat the room. “It looks like a few beach bums found a free place to flop for the night.”
    I immediately looked over my shoulder, and Mom smiled. “Katie, honey,” she said, “they’re long gone. Look at the dust on that table.”
    It didn’t look any different to me than the dust lying everywhere. What an awful place to have to live! “Maybe we could get a hose and just wash everything down,” I suggested.
    “Better yet,” Mom said, “help me move the furniture out on the porch. Then fill that bucket over there with water and soap, and let’s get to work. This little house is going to look one hundred percent better when we’re through cleaning it.”
    I didn’t believe it, but Mom was right. We scrubbed everything, including the walls, threw out the drapes and curtains, and hung new ones Mom had bought for the bedrooms and bathroom. The other windows she left open to the sea.
    “What about the attic?” As I stood in the short hallway that joined the two bedrooms with a bath between them, I glanced upward at the rectangle in the ceiling with a short rope dangling from it. I knew that meant folding stairs. “Do we have to clean the attic too?”
    “No. We’ve reached the end of our cleaning, thank goodness,” Mom said as she flopped into the nearest kitchen chair. “Uncle Jim wasn’t interested in possessions. He owned very little, and what he didn’t need he gave away. He told me once he only went into the attic when roofrepairs were needed, so we won’t find anything up there except more dust.”
    “And maybe mouse droppings and rabid bats,” I’d added.
    Mom laughed and threw her cleaning rag at me. “Let’s wash up,” she said, “and cook our first meal in our new house.”
    Mom may have been eager to live there, but I wasn’t. For one thing, no matter what we did to it, the house still looked ancient and tired and dried-out, like dead leaves or old paper. It wasn’t anything like our big apartment in Houston.
    And for another thing, I missed the High School for the Performing Arts and my specialty field of dance so much it was like an ache that wouldn’t go away. “You’ve got what it takes, Katie,” the ballet instructor had told me, even though he understood that ballet was not my career goal but just my private love. No matter how high he’d set my goals, I worked with all my strength to meet them.
    Maybe it sounds weird that I never told anyone—even Mom—how much I loved ballet. Each time I practiced, each time I performed, the steps would become part of the music. The music would blend with my mind, and my body would follow with a joy that could have