Never To Be Told Read online

  NEVER to be TOLD

  BECKY CITRA

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  Text copyright © 2006 Becky Citra

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Citra, Becky

  Never to be told / Becky Citra.

  ISBN 1-55143-567-5

  I. Title.

  PS8555.I87N49 2006 jC813’.54 C2006-902720-X

  First published in the United States, 2006

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2006927095

  Summary: Twelve-year-old Asia’s world is turned upside down by family

  secrets and ghostly encounters.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Design and typesetting: Christine Toller

  Cover artwork & cover design: Cathy Maclean

  Orca Book Publishers

  PO Box 5626 Station B

  Victoria, BC Canada

  V8R 6s4

  Orca Book Publishers

  PO Box 468

  Custer, WA USA

  98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada

  09 08 07 06 • 6 5 4 3 2 1

  for Janet

  BC

  One crow for sorrow

  Two for joy

  Three for a girl

  Four for a boy

  Five for silver

  Six for gold

  Seven for a secret

  Never to be told.

  English counting rhyme

  Contents

  Cold Creek

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  West Vancouver

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Cold Creek

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Acknowledgments

  Cold Creek

  …from the diary of Miranda Williams

  May 18, 1915

  Today a stranger came to Cold Creek. He rode out of the mountains, mounted on a big black stallion and leading a packhorse. Our farm is remote but we have had visitors before. I don’t know why I feel this sense of foreboding.

  His name is Ridley Blackmore, and he is looking for work. Since George is away until tomorrow buying cattle, I instructed the man to pitch his tent by the creek, where there is plenty of dry wood for a fire, and wait there.

  As he turned to go, a movement on the back of his packhorse caught my eye. For one foolish second I thought I saw Daisy’s face peering from a bundle of furs. My legs turned to jelly, and I am sure my heart stopped beating.

  A little girl wiggled out of the furs, and I saw then that she is not at all like Daisy. Her face is thinner and her hair is straight and dull. Blackmore introduced her, rather indifferently, as his daughter Beatrice.

  I know I was staring. Beatrice looked about three, the same age our Daisy was when the Lord took her away. I said hello to her, but Blackmore informed me abruptly that she doesn’t speak. Doesn’t speak! When I think how well Daisy spoke at that age!

  I am sitting by the window as I write this. I can see Blackmore’s shadow moving between his tent and the fire. I can’t see Beatrice, but of course she must be fast asleep by now. I will never tell George that I mistook the stranger’s little girl for Daisy. He would look at me with that mixture of alarm and pity that I hate so much. He would say it is one more reason that I must consult a doctor.

  Montgomery has just come home, and he is meowing for his supper. I am exhausted, but I know I will not sleep tonight.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Asia found the moth on the kitchen windowsill behind a pot of parsley. Its fragile wings, the color of milk, were tinged pale gray at the tips. She cupped it in her hand and gently touched its furry body.

  “It’s so beautiful!” she breathed, carrying it carefully to the pine table where Maddy was kneading bread.

  Maddy stared at the moth. Her face turned as pale as the moth’s wings. She said quietly, “Put your other hand over it.

  Don’t let it get away.”

  Asia covered the moth. It fluttered in the warm pocket of her hands. Something in Maddy’s voice frightened her.

  Maddy saw signs in everything. She had taught Asia to keep her eyes peeled for four-leaf clovers, to slice the bread from one end only and to tuck a lucky penny in her shoe at night.

  “What’s wrong?” said Asia.

  “I just don’t like it, that’s all.” Maddy opened the screen door and pushed Asia out with a floury hand. “Make sure you take it far away from the house before you let it go.” She closed the door firmly behind her.

  Asia blinked in the bright sunshine. From the porch she gazed across the banks of Cold Creek, over the sloping meadows and pine-covered hills, all the way to the slate-gray peaks of the distant mountains. It was going to be another blazing hot day. Already the sky was a dark hard blue. Maddy’s sheep huddled in the shade of the trees beside the house, and the chickens had disappeared inside their shed.

  On the other side of the creek, a man in faded brown coveralls and a wide-brimmed hat trudged across the meadow toward the log bridge. It was Ira, and he was carrying something in his arms. Something big and bulky. Asia frowned, trying to make out what it was.

  The moth bumped against her fingers. She stepped off the porch and walked through the grass, holding her hands close to her chest. When she thought she was far enough from the house, she opened her fingers and the moth fluttered away like a ghost. She glanced back and saw Maddy at the window, watching her. Then she ran across the bridge to meet Ira.

  His arms were full of yellow and brown fur. It was Dandy, the old dog who had been part of Cold Creek since before Asia came to live with Maddy and Ira. Dandy’s milky eyes stared dully at Asia.

  “I found him over at the gopher hill,” said Ira. He carried Dandy the rest of the way to the house. Her heart pounding with fear, Asia ran ahead. “Maddy!” she yelled. “Maddy!

  Come quickly!”

  Maddy came outside, wiping her hands on her apron, the screen door banging behind her. She glanced at Ira’s
face and then rested her hand on Dandy’s still body. The dog gave a sudden shudder and slumped even deeper into Ira’s arms.

  “He’s gone,” said Maddy. She looked terribly sad, but not shocked. She stroked Dandy’s yellow ear, the one with the tear in it. “Good old fellow,” she murmured. “Good dog.”

  Tears flooded Asia’s cheeks. Maddy drew her close, pressing Asia’s face into her apron. “Oh, my girl.”

  Asia breathed in Maddy’s warm bread scent. “You knew,” she whispered. “How?”

  “It was the moth.” Maddy held Asia tighter. “A white moth in a house is a messenger of death.”

  “Dandy was old. He would’ve died, moth or no moth,” said Ira. “He was…let’s see, ninety-eight in people years.”

  He and Asia were in the workshop, a log building with big windows that faced the creek. Ira was making a cross for Dandy’s grave.

  He glanced sideways at Asia, who sat on a stool beside him, sifting sawdust between her fingers. “Sometimes our Maddy gets carried away with her superstitions.”

  He smoothed the rough edges of the pine boards with a scrap of sandpaper. “You have to set your mind on all the good times in Dandy’s long life. Hunting gophers in the meadow, chewing stew bones, sleeping in his basket by the woodstove.”

  “Going for walks along the creek. Chasing Maddy’s chickens, ” Asia added.

  She felt drained. With a sigh she pushed the sawdust into a tidy pile and slid off the stool. She wandered around the workshop, looking at Ira’s handcrafted boxes.

  The boxes, lined up on long shelves, were ready to be wrapped and mailed to customers, or taken to Cariboo Curios, the gift shop in town. They were all different sizes and had smooth polished sides and lids inlaid with delicate pieces of dark and light wood in the shapes of birds and animals.

  What Asia loved best about the boxes were the secret compartments. Every box had one, tucked under a false bottom or behind a drawer or even in a lid. Asia knew all of Ira’s tricks. For as long as she could remember, she had watched him work. When she was little, while Ira measured and sawed and planed, she had sat on the floor and gathered handfuls of pale wood shavings and dropped them like snowflakes on her hair. Now that she was twelve, she helped Ira, sanding the boxes until they were satiny smooth and polishing the gleaming wood with a soft rag.

  Ira finally put down his tools and held up the finished cross for her approval. “You take this back to the house and put some words on it. Something fitting for a fine dog. And then we’ll get Maddy and say a proper goodbye to Dandy.”

  “The gopher hill was Dandy’s stomping ground,” said Maddy.

  “It’s only right to bury him in the place he loved best.”

  So Ira carried him back across the bridge and through the meadow, this time wrapped in the old wool blanket from his basket. Maddy brought a shovel and Asia carried the cross. She trailed behind, setting the cross down in the long grass from time to time to pick wild daisies and purple fireweed for a funeral bouquet.

  The ground at the gopher hill was hard. Ira was sweating and rubbing his brow by the time he’d dug the hole. He laid Dandy’s body at the bottom and filled the hole in with dirt. Then he dug a smaller hole for the cross, on which Asia had carefully printed Dandy, August 14, 2005. He will be deeply missed.

  Asia placed the flowers beside the cross. For a second, she had an odd prickly feeling that someone other than Maddy was standing beside her. A faint sound brushed her ear, and she heard a voice whisper death. She glanced around, astonished. A gentle breeze had picked up, rippling the long grass in the meadow. She frowned. There was no one else there except Ira and Maddy, and the only sound was the rustling of the aspen leaves by the creek.

  They piled rocks on the grave to keep the coyotes from digging it up. Asia scrambled down the bank to the creek bed for one last look around. She couldn’t escape that peculiar feeling that someone had been standing beside the grave, someone who had said the word death.

  “Come on, Asia,” called Maddy a few minutes later.

  “We’re going back now.”

  Asia tossed a flat stone in the water and then climbed up the bank. On the way home, Ira had to stop for a few minutes, his hands resting on his knees as he took in big breaths.

  “It’s nothing,” he protested when Maddy hovered. “Quit your fussing, woman. I’m just a bit played out from all that digging.”

  Asia gazed back across the meadow, her long black hair blowing away from her face. The tall grass shimmered in the heat. Dandy’s cross stood pale and new against the dark blue sky.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Cold with shock, Miranda slipped into the grove of aspen trees. She hadn’t meant to startle the girl. She hadn’t meant to speak. The words had slipped out at the dog’s grave. Too much death. And the girl had heard her. Miranda Williams had been dead for forty years, and this was the first time since her death that anyone had heard her speak.

  She had been away from Cold Creek for a long time. Something had brought her back. Maybe it was the death of the old dog; she wasn’t sure. She stared at the girl standing beside the grave. The woman had called her Asia. She had seen her from a distance on her other visits to Cold Creek, playing by the water or walking in the meadow, her long black hair blowing every which way in the breeze, but never before had she been this close to her.

  A cat sprang out of the long grass and landed lightly on Miranda’s shoulder. “There you are, Montgomery.” She stroked his sleek gray back. His tail lashed from side to side. “You feel it too,” she whispered. Her excitement grew, swelling inside her. Too much death. Her words hung over the dog’s grave. And Asia had heard. After forty years, Miranda had made contact with a living person.

  She was distressed at the changes in the man called Ira and the woman called Maddy. Ira’s hair was now as white as snow, his face marked with deep lines. And Maddy grimaced when she stooped to pat the old dog one last time. Miranda knew all about growing old. She took one last look at Asia, who was trailing across the meadow behind the old people, and then turned the other way and walked over the hill toward the Old Farm.

  The Old Farm was about half a mile from Maddy and Ira’s house, at the bottom of a hill beside the creek. Miranda had come there as a young bride almost a hundred years ago, before the Great War. She paused at the top of the hill and gazed down at her old home. The roof on the log barn had collapsed, and a few scattered fence rails poked through the long grass. The two-story frame house was surrounded by weeds and nettles, and the porch sagged into the ground. “No,” she whispered angrily. “Not again.”

  It was like this every time she came back, but it was always a shock. Her beloved home in ruins. Every time, it was harder to summon the strength to reverse the destruction. Her face contorted with effort as she shut out the image of the ruined farm and visualized instead lace curtains at the windows and flowers blooming around the porch. The back of her neck and spine tingled. The picture in front of her wavered and blurred like a reflection in a pond. After a few minutes, the tumbled-down buildings disappeared, and in their place nestled a snug, well-kept farm. Her breathing slowed. Everything was right again, and it would stay that way until she left.

  Miranda drew in a breath and started down the hill. As she approached the house, her eyes were drawn reluctantly to the small square window tucked under the peak of the roof, the window in Daisy’s little pink bedroom. Her chest tightened and she felt the familiar urgent need to go to her little girl. She closed her eyes and shuddered. Daisy was dead.

  She had been dead for over ninety years. Shivering, Miranda pulled her shawl around her shoulders. She had one more grave to visit, and then she would go inside her old house to rest. Even on this hot summer day, she was cold.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Maddy always said it didn’t pay to ignore signs. A white moth in a house means business. It was foolish to let Ira take the tractor to the home meadow on a day so hot you could fry eggs on a rock, especially when anyone could see he wasn
’t feeling well. Losing Dandy had distracted her from the real danger.

  “And of course,” she would say later, “you can’t tell a stubborn man like Ira anything. He wanted to finish the haying before the weather broke.” When there were cattle at Cold Creek, Ira had hayed the upper meadow as well, working right through the long hot days of August and early September, until the hay shed was filled with sweet-smelling bales. Now there was only Maddy’s handful of sheep to feed in the winter, and Ira could cut and bale enough hay in the home meadow in a few days.

  Maddy rested in the shade on the porch, and Asia moved into the hammock under the trees with her new book. Asia could lose herself for hours in a good book, but this time her mind kept jumping back to Dandy. She had only read a few pages when Maddy squinted at the sky and then disappeared inside the house. She came back with a thermos of cold tea for Ira. “Go see what’s keeping the old rascal,” she said, with a hint of worry in her voice.

  Asia got her bicycle out of the garage and strapped the thermos onto the back carrier. The road to the home meadow was just two ruts in the grass. She bumped along, missing Dandy’s company. The sun burned through her T-shirt, and her long black hair felt like a heavy blanket on the back of her neck. She stopped once and sneaked a sip from the thermos. She rounded the last bend through the trees and paused at the edge of the meadow. Long rows of pale green cut grass shimmered in the sun.

  Ira and the tractor were halfway down one row. Ira was slumped over the wheel, his hat fallen somewhere in the hay. The only sound was the click of a dragonfly’s wings and the distant tap tap tap of a sapsucker.

  Asia jumped off her bike, letting it topple to the ground, and ran to Ira.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Asia stood beside the tractor and watched Maddy hurry across the field toward them. Maddy could sense trouble, and she must have waited just a few minutes before something told her to follow Asia.

  Maddy took one look at Ira. Her face went white, but she said calmly, “Go back to the house and phone the Hildebrands. And then get the van.”