The Dance in the Dark

Chapter Nine

IVY

Scarlet flung open the door of room thirteen and strode in.

She found me sitting on the bed, arms folded. “Where have you been?” I demanded.

She looked at me crossly. “I was ill, remember? I went to the sick bay.”

I stood up. “Except you didn’t. Ariadne and I hurried up there as soon as we could to see if you were all right! Nurse Gladys said she hadn’t even seen you!”

My twin just glared at me. She hated being caught out in a lie. “It doesn’t matter,” was all she said.

“It does matter,” I shot back. I wanted to tell her that I was afraid something had happened to her again. The things I’d been seeing and hearing around school had only made it worse.

“Leave it,” she warned, throwing herself on her bed.

Suddenly, I noticed something strange. “You weren’t wearing your ballet outfit before!”

Her face was in her pillow, but she tipped it towards me. “I said, it doesn’t matter. I just wanted to do some ballet, alone, all right?”

“Fine,” I said. “Well, I’m going to tell Ariadne that you’re not sick, and then I’m going to have a bath and brush my teeth, alone.”

“I don’t need to know every detail of your life,” she grumbled.

Hmmph. I got up, picked up my things and headed towards Ariadne’s new dorm. It was some way down the corridor, in the section with the larger dorms for first years.

Unfortunately, I forgot that visiting Ariadne also meant going past Penny’s door.

I shut my eyes and held my breath as I walked, as if this would somehow protect me. But as soon as I approached, Penny’s door was yanked open. “So is your sister terribly ill, or do I need to tell everyone that she’s just pretending? I don’t know which I’d prefer.”

“Shut up, Penny,” I said, and kept on walking.

“So she’s fine?” Penny put on a mock expression of horror. “And she lied to a teacher?” She pulled out her prefect book and waved it at me. “I’ll be writing that one down.”

I dug my shoes into the threadbare hall carpet. “Mr Bartholomew’s gone. You’re not his stupid prefect any more.”

“I’m still a prefect, Grey,” she snapped back. “Which means I can do no wrong.” She smiled sweetly, the sweetness of eating too many chocolates that leads to you being sick. “See you soon.” She slammed the door.

I gritted my teeth. Ignore her, I told myself as I walked on. Count to ten.

Thankfully, once I got to my tenth step, Ariadne came out of her dorm, carrying her Rookwood regulation towel, toothbrush and soap. Relieved, I hurried over.

“Ariadne!” I called out. “Scarlet’s fine. She’s in a complete huff, but otherwise unharmed.”

“Oh, phew,” my friend said, tucking a lock of mousy hair behind her ear. “Where did she go?”

“No idea,” I said. “Something to do with ballet. She won’t say.”

Ariadne shrugged, nearly dropping her towel in the process. “Are you coming to the bathrooms too?”

I nodded. “Let’s go together. I don’t want to run into … anyone. Else.”

Ariadne looked at me strangely, but she didn’t say anything.

I stepped out of the chilly little room with the bath in it, shivering in my nightgown. Ariadne came out of the one next door, but she somehow looked a lot better than I did.

“Aren’t you cold?” I asked. “Those lukewarm baths are awful.”

“Oh, Daddy used to make me take cold baths for my ‘health’,” she said disdainfully. “I find these much more pleasant.”

I laughed, and she grinned.

We headed back to room thirteen. I knocked politely on the door, just in case Scarlet was changing. “Go away,” came the muffled voice from within.

Hmmph. Well, if we weren’t being polite, so be it. I pushed open the door and went in, Ariadne trailing behind me.

Scarlet was writing something in her new notebook. As soon as she saw us, she shoved it under her sheets.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “I’m fed up with all the secrecy.” Hypocrite, my mind said. Yes, well, I told myself. You can’t tell her about Penny, for her own good. “What’s going on? Why are you so cross all of a sudden?”

Ariadne peered around me. “What’s up, Scarlet?” she asked a bit more diplomatically. “Are you still ill? In your ballet clothes?”

Scarlet finally seemed to give in. “All right,” she snapped. “But promise you won’t tell anyone? I don’t want Penny the Slug hearing about this.”

“Promise,” said Ariadne eagerly.

“Miss Finch was supposed to give me extra ballet lessons, okay?” She looked really embarrassed.

“Why?” I asked. Scarlet had always been so wonderful at ballet, I didn’t think she needed extra help.

“Because I didn’t think I was good enough,” she mumbled at the carpet.

I frowned and sat on my bed. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”

“I didn’t want anyone knowing,” she snapped. “But that’s not the problem.”

“Then what is?” Ariadne asked, plaiting her damp hair with fumbling fingers. It always made her nervous when Scarlet was angry.

“After I pretended to be sick – sorry – I went down to the ballet studio. All that effort and Miss Finch wasn’t even there!” She punched her mattress. “I can’t believe she’s let me down. I waited and waited. She obviously doesn’t care.”

“I’m sure she didn’t mean to let you down,” said Ariadne, trying to be cheerful.

I agreed. “Something important probably came up. Perhaps she had a meeting or a doctor’s appointment.”

“Hmmph,” said Scarlet. “She should’ve told me.”

“It wasn’t a proper lesson, though,” Ariadne pointed out. “And if she came to tell you, wouldn’t that mean everyone would know she was tutoring you?” Ariadne was always the wise one.

“I suppose,” said Scarlet.

“Let’s just forget about it and … and … read a nice book or something,” my friend said with a smile. “I’m sure she’ll explain what happened the next time you see her.”

But something about this wasn’t sitting right with me. I didn’t know if it was the mysterious things I’d been noticing, or the dark dreams, but I had this gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach. “There wasn’t anything … unusual, was there? In the studio, I mean?”

Scarlet sighed, picking at her bedsheets. “Well, her stool was knocked over. And her stick was on the floor. I thought perhaps she’d hurt herself and gone into the office to sit down, but I knocked and there was no one there.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Scarlet, she can’t … she can’t get up the stairs without her stick, can she? And if she wasn’t down there …”

Ariadne’s face paled. “Do you think something’s happened to her?”

I didn’t want to say what was on my mind. “We need to tell someone, just in case. This doesn’t feel right.”

“No, said Scarlet. “We can’t, we …”

“We have to,” said Ariadne, suddenly taking charge. She puffed out her chest. “Let’s find Mrs Knight.”

Scarlet looked distraught. “I can’t say why I was meeting her! Nobody can know about it!”

“Scarlet, this isn’t the time to worry about saving your own skin,” I said angrily.

“Ssh!” said Ariadne, waving a finger at me. “Ssh ssh ssh! No more arguing. If we can’t tell Mrs Knight about Scarlet’s extra lessons, we’ll have to tell her something else. Why don’t we tell her we were all supposed to be meeting Miss Finch, to, um … talk about the ballet? We’ll say we were going to paint the scenery or something.”

I bit my lip. None of us had an ounce of set-painting talent, but Mrs Knight didn’t know that.

“But I already told her I was sick,” said Scarlet. She certainly looked sick now.

“We’ll say Ivy and I were the ones looking for her,” Ariadne explained. “And you just came back to your room for a rest, and now you feel better. Anyway, won’t she be more concerned about what’s happened to Miss Finch?”

Of course, that was the important thing. My twin and I would have to put our differences behind us.

“Right,” I said, and got shakily back to my feet. “Let’s go.”

I just hoped we weren’t too late.

Chapter Ten

SCARLET

We were too late.

By the time we got down to her office, Mrs Knight must have already gone home. She lived in accommodation near the school, but I couldn’t say where.

I kicked the door and just about restrained myself from cursing.

“What are we going to do now?” Ariadne wailed.

“We could call the police,” I said.

Ivy gave me a look that said she thought I was being ridiculous. “How exactly are we going to call them? The offices are locked. And even if we could get to a telephone, what would we say? A teacher’s been missing for an hour? They’ll laugh at us!”

She was right, and I hated it. Our only hope was to talk to the teachers. But most of them had gone home, with the exception of the few staff that stayed overnight. I swallowed. In the past, that had included Miss Finch, when she’d had nowhere else to go. I tried my hardest not to picture her walking stick lying there in the middle of the floor.

“We can try and tell Matron,” I said finally. “But I doubt she’ll be any use.”

We went to the door of Matron’s room, only for her to bustle straight into us in her housecoat.

“Oof! Girls,” she said, narrowing her neatly plucked eyebrows. “You’re supposed to be getting ready for bed. It’s lights-out soon, you know!”

“We know, Miss,” said Ivy. “We’ve got a … problem …”

“If you’re here to tell me that Josephine Wilcox has been running laps of the corridor in her swimsuit, I already know. That’s what I was just on the way to sort out.”

“No!” I said quickly, before she could push past us. “It’s Miss Finch. We’re worried something’s happened to her.”

Matron stopped in her tracks and looked down at us – or, more accurately, across, because she wasn’t very tall. “Whatever makes you say that? She’s gone home to bed, I’m sure.”

I glanced at Ariadne, hoping she remembered her part of the plan. She took a deep breath and then gave her explanation without, it seemed, taking another one. “Well, Miss, we were on our way to visit Miss Finch, Miss, because she asked us to, you see, it was about the ballet recital, and we were going to paint the scenery, a lovely castle and some trees, you know, that sort of thing, and so we’d arranged a time to meet her this evening, so we went down there, Miss, and—”

At this point Ivy had the sense to push Ariadne out of the way before she dropped dead from forgetting how her lungs worked. “Miss Finch wasn’t there,” she said simply.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.