Kitewell Read online

  “What’s that, Beanie? I can’t hear you? Speak up,” Mrs. Somerset said sardonically.

  Beanie continued to mumble. Her mouth refused to cooperate. The class watched in fascination, then glee. Soon, they broke out in laughter.

  “I’m sorry, Beanie, but your time is up. Do you know the answer, Katie?”

  “Yes. It’s s … a … p … p … h … i … r … e. Sapphire.”

  “Excellent! Bravo!” Mrs. Somerset clapped. “One point for Katie, Greg.”

  He wrote the line on the board under her name whimsically.

  Beanie protested and pointed at her mouth as if that was the culprit, but no words issued forth. She mumbled in spite of her sealed lips.

  “Beanie,” Mrs. Somerset snapped, “If you can’t speak with your mouth open, then don’t speak at all.”

  Beanie protested again, but this time with groans.

  “Stop it, Beanie, or you’ll forfeit your title.”

  Beanie narrowed her eyes at Mrs. Somerset.

  “Okay, girls, ready?” Mrs. Somerset said.

  “Ready,” Katie said.

  Beanie glared at Mrs. Somerset.

  “Next question. What is the capital of Delaware?”

  Beanie hit the buzzer a second before Katie.

  “What’s the answer, Katie?” Mrs. Somerset asked.

  “But Beanie pressed it first,” Ariel blurted.

  Mrs. Somerset craned her neck. “That’s it, go out to the hallway! If you can’t follow the rules, then you don’t belong in this class.”

  “But—”

  “Now!”

  “Yeah, get out,” Katie chimed in. “Stop getting in the way of the game.”

  “Yeah!” the other kids chorused.

  Ariel tucked her head low and silently left the classroom.

  Mrs. Somerset said, “Where was I? Oh, Katie, what was the answer to the question?”

  “What was the question again Mrs. Somerset?”

  “What is the capital of Delaware?”

  “Oh … um … ”

  She thought for a moment as the kids leaned forward in their desks, watching her keenly.

  Beanie grunted in protest, but Mrs. Somerset shushed her. With Katie taking too much time to answer, Mrs. Somerset mouthed the word for her. It took Katie a moment to catch on.

  “Dooh … ” Katie said.

  Mrs. Somerset mouthed the last syllable for her.

  “Ver … ” Katie pronounced. “Dover?”

  “Excellent! Well done!” Mrs. Somerset exclaimed.

  Beanie tried to peel her lips apart with her hands, but it was useless. She knew Mrs. Somerset was behind this somehow, but she didn’t know what to do.

  “Stop that,” Mrs. Somerset cried. “I will not have you making faces at me.”

  Beanie pointed at her mouth, trying to tell Mrs. Somerset that she couldn’t speak.

  “Do you want to be sent out of class like Ariel, Beanie?”

  Beanie felt her blood boil. Her ruby matched it with a bright red glow. Suddenly, the index cards in Mrs. Somerset’s hands started to smoke like it had caught on fire. Mrs. Somerset gasped and dropped the index cards on the floor. She began stomping on them to put out the smoke. The kids jumped out of their seats and watched as she stomped on them. When she finished, ashes and burnt pieces remained.

  “What happened?” Katie said.

  “Spontaneous combustion,” Mrs. Somerset panted.

  “Spontaneous combustion?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Somerset said. “Someone in class caused the cards to catch fire in a pitiful attempt to sabotage the game.”

  Mrs. Somerset eyed Beanie with a vicious glare.

  “Don’t worry,” Mrs. Somerset said. “I have everything under control. Have a seat everyone. We’ll resume”

  The kids sat in their seats.

  “What this arsonist doesn’t know is that I have plenty of more cards.”

  She opened a drawer and drew out another deck of index cards.

  “Are your girls ready?”

  “Ready,” Katie said, looking at Beanie in disgust.

  Beanie simply nodded, knowing that she was about to lose the game.

  “What is 13 times 14?”

  Beanie knew the answer, but she didn’t hit the buzzer. There was no point. Katie continued to work out the problem in her head.

  “Come on, Katie,” Mrs. Somerset said under her breath. “Come on … you know it.”

  At that instant, the door flew open and the principal, Mrs. Lightwood, entered the room with Ariel right behind her.

  “Excuse me, but what’s the meaning of this?” Mrs. Somerset demanded.

  Mrs. Lightwood crossed her arms. “This young girl told me that you kicked her out of your class.”

  “I did, Mrs. Lightwood.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this foolish girl cannot follow the rules.”

  “Foolish girl?” Mrs. Lightwood gasped.

  “She’s been misbehaving and disrupting the class ever since school started.”

  Mrs. Somerset and Mrs. Lightwood went back and forth as the kids watched in befuddlement. Things got personal and Mrs. Somerset began criticizing the way Mrs. Lightwood ran the school. Beanie looked around the room for something that could peel her lips apart. Then she noticed a glint flash off the top of Mrs. Somerset’s desk.

  A wand!

  Mrs. Somerset is a witch? Beanie thought. She was stunned.

  “I want to see you in my office right now,” Mrs. Lightwood demanded.

  “I will gladly see you in your office after school. Now if you’d excuse me, I have a class to teach.”

  “Right now,” Mrs. Lightwood repeated. “I will get a cover for your class while I speak to you in private.”

  Mrs. Somerset went over to Mrs. Lightwood, standing face to face with her.

  “How could you defend this foolish girl? Do you know how much trouble she gets in every day? She’s always finding a reason to get out of class. She doesn’t take school seriously. She obviously belongs in a school for—”

  “The way you’ve been speaking to the students is downright disrespectful and rude,” Mrs. Lightwood retorted. “Why do you continue to put this student down in front of her peers? What sort of example are you setting for them?”

  Beanie saw her chance as the two adults continued going at it. She stole away to Mrs. Somerset’s desk while no one was watching. All eyes were on the heated argument between Mrs. Somerset and Mrs. Lightwood. Beanie took the wand from atop the desk and then hurried back to the podium.

  When Beanie returned, Katie saw the wand. At once, Katie shouted, “Mrs. Somerset! Beanie took something from your desk!”

  Mrs. Somerset spun around in midsentence. Beanie waved the wand at Mrs. Somerset as if to beckon her.

  “Give that back!” Mrs. Somerset cried. She stormed up to Beanie from halfway across the room.

  Beanie cracked the wand in half over her knee. A cloud of glitter dusted the air. The kids gasped in shock.

  The spell that sealed Beanie’s lips was broken.

  “I broke her spell,” Beanie said in awe. “I can speak!”

  “No!” Mrs. Somerset cried. “You fool!”

  In that instant, Mrs. Somerset covered her face and dashed out of the room and down the hallway.

  “No!” she cried. “This can’t be!”

  Mrs. Lightwood peered down the hallway as Mrs. Somerset raced out of the building. Once she was gone, Mrs. Lightwood returned to the classroom with the kids looking at her confusedly. For a moment, no one said a thing.

  “All right, kids,” Mrs. Lightwood began, thinking on her feet. “We’re … we’re going to have silent reading.”

  “Silent reading?” Katie said sullenly.

 
; “But what about the game?” Beanie said.

  “What game?”

  “Who Knows it All?”

  “I don’t know that game,” Mrs. Lightwood said.

  “We were on the last question,” Beanie said.

  “What was the last question?”

  “What is 13 times 14?”

  Mrs. Lightwood raised an eyebrow. She didn’t know the answer herself. “Do you know it?”

  “Yes. It’s 182.”

  “Is that correct?” she addressed the class.

  They shrugged.

  “It’s not!” Katie said. “She’s wrong. I win.”

  “Let’s see about that,” Mrs. Lightwood said. She nabbed a calculator from Mrs. Somerset’s desk and punched in the numbers.

  “Congratulations. You’re the winner!” Mrs. Lightwood said. “What’s your name young lady?”

  “Beanie.”

  Mrs. Lightwood went over to Beanie and hoisted her arm up in the air. “Beanie is the winner!”

  The kids gave a halfhearted cheer.

  “I’m supposed to get a prize,” Beanie said.

  Mrs. Lightwood said, “So what did Mrs. Somerset say you would win?”

  “I get to have all the lollipops I want,” Beanie said.

  “No,” Katie said. “She can only get one.”

  “Yeah,” Greg chimed in. “Mrs. Somerset said she only gets one.”

  The kids blurted out the same thing.

  Ariel snuck up behind Mrs. Lightwood and tugged the sleeve of her blouse. Mrs. Lightwood looked down at her. Ariel spoke so softly that Mrs. Lightwood couldn’t hear through the noise.

  “Quiet down, children. Quiet down.”

  The noise died down slowly.

  “What did you say, Ariel?”

  The class listened closely.

  Ariel cleared her throat. “Mrs. Somerset said we could go outside for recess for an hour if Beanie won.”

  All the kids, including Beanie, gawked at her.

  “Really? Is that true?” Mrs. Lightwood asked the class.

  “Yes!” the kids said altogether.

  “That’s exactly what Mrs. Somerset said,” Greg added.

  Mrs. Lightwood clapped her thighs. “Well, then. Grab some things to play with and we’ll go outside for recess.”

  The class went berserk.

  Chapter 10

  After the school bus dropped Beanie and Ariel off, they went to Mrs. Kantor’s house to see if she was there. They had decided that Mrs. Kantor might know what’s going on with all the strange things that had been happening. If Mrs. Somerset had a wand, then wouldn’t that mean she was a witch? And wouldn’t Mrs. Kantor know about it? Maybe they were in cahoots. It seemed obvious enough.

  But when they went to Mrs. Kantor’s house, they saw a “For Sale” sign on the lawn. They went up to the porch and noticed that the porch swing was broken. They peeked in through the windows and saw that the furniture inside had cobwebs strewn across them. Some of the floorboards were missing, and the cuckoo clock was disheveled and broken. Even the velvet couch they had sat on was torn and faded.

  They couldn’t believe that the house had been abandoned. They were just there on Friday. Had Mrs. Kantor left town? Had she packed up and moved?

  They decided to go to the pawn and jewelry shop where Mrs. Kantor worked. It took them about ten minutes to get there from her house. They went inside and the door jingled with a chime.

  Shiny jewelry and watches glistened in the display cases. Antiques and collectibles surrounded the walls of the store. A woman with glasses stood behind the counter and greeted the girls with a customary smile.

  “How may I help you girls?” the woman asked.

  “We’re looking for Mrs. Kantor,” Ariel said.

  “Mrs. Kantor? Who’s that?”

  Ariel’s jaw dropped. “You don’t know Mrs. Kantor?”

  The woman shook her head confusedly. “I’ve never heard of a woman named Mrs. Kantor, young lady. Maybe you got her mixed up with someone else.”

  “No. She works here. I saw her here when I came with my mom. She fixed my great grandmother’s watch.”

  “I’m sorry, young lady,” the woman said. She had a grin that bore impatience. “There’s no Mrs. Kantor here. Was there something I can help you find?”

  “Let’s go,” Beanie said to Ariel, knowing there was no point to press on.

  “Thanks anyway,” Ariel said to the woman.

  The woman nodded pleasingly as they made for the door. “Have a wonderful day.”

  Outside of the shop, Ariel said, “None of this makes sense. Mrs. Kantor’s not here, and the woman doesn’t know who she is.”

  “There is something different about this Kitewell,” Beanie said.

  “What do you mean by this Kitewell?”

  “It’s like Mrs. Kantor doesn’t exist in this Kitewell. It’s like she disappeared.”

  Chapter 11

  Mark’s legs poked out from underneath the car as he lay on the creeper. The wrench cranked as he worked on the drain plug. An oily stream ran downhill toward the weeds.

  “What are you doing, Daddy?”

  Mark bumped his head with a thud on the bottom frame of the car. He slid out with a groan, his face smudged with grimy oil. He wiped his hands on a rag and said, “You scared me, honey.”

  “Sorry. I was just asking what you’re doing,” Beanie said.

  “I’m changing the oil, honey,” he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

  “Do you know a woman named Mrs. Kantor?”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Kantor. She lives … used to live on Lilac Drive.”

  Mark shook his head confusedly. “Never heard of that name.”

  “You’ve never heard of Mrs. Kantor? The woman that moved into that abandoned house?”

  “Honey, that house hasn’t been lived in for years. Why are you asking? Did you see someone inside it?”

  “No. I just … Um … I just thought someone lived there.”

  “Oh.” Mark shrugged. He felt like he needed to change the subject. “So how was school today?”

  “It was great! I had so much fun.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, honey. What did you do at school?”

  “We got Mrs. Somerset in trouble.”

  Mark’s eyes widened with a, what did she do? look. He felt a wave of trepidation course through his bones.

  “What?”

  “And then Mrs. Somerset got in trouble with the principal.”

  “With Mrs. Lightwood? Are you telling the truth, Beanie?” he said in a grave tone.

  “Yes. Do you want to hear what happened?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Mrs. Somerset was trying to make me lose at Who Knows it All? by sealing my lips with magic, but I found her wand and broke it in half. The spell was broken, and then I could speak again. After that, she ran out of the classroom like a scaredy-cat. Then Mrs. Lightwood told us we could go outside for recess for an hour, but she lost track of time and it lasted until school was over.”

  Mark’s face was blank. He swallowed dryly. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, honey. Please tell me exactly what happened. Okay? No make-believe.”

  “It’s the truth, Daddy. Mrs. Somerset was really mean to Ariel and me. She tried to make me lose at Who Knows it All?”

  Mark’s forehead creased into valleys of frustration. He couldn’t grasp a thing she was saying. It sounded like she was pulling his leg. He started to get irritated.

  “Beanie … honey … go inside.”

  “You don’t believe me?” she said.

  “We’ll talk about it later.”

  He lay on the creeper and slid underneath the car. He bumped his head again and grunted. Beanie scurrie
d inside the house feeling hurt that her father didn’t believe her.

  …

  “Ahhhhh!”

  Mark slid out from under the car and dashed into the house. He ran upstairs and swung the bedroom door open so fast that the wind whisked the curtains aside.

  “Beanie!”

  She sat on the bed weeping.

  Mark scoped her bedroom for an intruder, but there was no one inside but Beanie.

  “Beanie, what happened?” he panted.

  “It’s Nighthawk,” she sniffled.

  The white cotton stuffing of her doll horse, Nighthawk, speckled the bed. Its innards and limbs hung by threads as she cradled Nighthawk in her arms.

  “Bram did this,” she cried. “I know he did it.”

  The fear and panic that Mark felt started to subside. He motioned to her and sat on the edge of the bed. With his oil-greased hands, he picked up a frizzy chunk of Nighthawk from the mattress. It was like holding a cotton ball.

  “It’s all right,” Mark assured. “I can get you another doll horse.”

  “You can’t replace her,” she said. “Nighthawk was one-of-a-kind.”

  “But, honey, I can buy you a new one.”

  “You don’t understand. Nighthawk was special to me. She was like family … ”

  Mark sighed. “I’ll talk to Bram about this when he gets home from baseball practice. I’ll straighten things out.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll talk to him—don’t you worry. There’ll be a consequence for him.”

  “Make him pay,” Beanie said between clenched teeth. “Make him sorry he ever hurt Nighthawk.”

  Beanie made a fist so tight that her knuckles turned white. The ruby on her ring began to turn scarlet red. Mark noticed it and gasped. He heard it make a hissing sound.

  “What kind of ring is that?” Mark said.

  “Oh,” Beanie said, relaxing her hand. The scarlet color faded from the ruby and it looked dull again. “It was a gift from Ariel. It’s … it’s kind of like a toy ring, like the kind that lights up.”

  “I see. I’ll talk with Bram, honey. He will say he’s sorry.”

  Mark got up and started for the door.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes, honey?”

  “If you don’t make him pay, I’ll make Bram pay,” she said darkly.