There were twenty-eight of them, and I actually meant to stop reading after two or three to make them last, but the things she wrote fascinated and puzzled me. When I finished one, I found myself automatically reaching for another.
Her first letters were short, merely one or two page notes signed only with the letter R, as if she were afraid someone might find them. Because none of the envelopes were addressed or stamped I knew she hadn’t mailed them; maybe she had passed them to someone to give to my father. Then, in the fifth letter, I discovered how my parents had been communicating.
Every morning I ride out to the old mill hoping that I’ll see you, but you’re never there. You must leave for work very early. I’ve been tempted to come back in the afternoon, but I’m afraid one of the farm hands working in Rucker’s orchards might see me there (Mr. Rucker is nice but his wife is a busybody, and I know she’d mention it to my mother). That’s why I go as soon as I’ve left my letter for you in your saddlebag. The only safe time for us to see each other is after dark.
“So that’s why I like to sneak out at night,” I muttered as I turned the page. “It’s in the chromosomes.”
My mother didn’t say much about her life at home, but some of the things she mentioned here and there made me think that she was unhappy. She didn’t like being homeschooled, and often disappointed her parents with her lack of interest in her studies. She loved to read, but hated the books that her tutor assigned, all of which sounded pretty dull to me, too.
My tutor wants me to finished four chapters of my political history book tonight. Four chapters on medieval European law, Thomas! I can barely keep awake long enough to read one. Yes, you are to blame for some of that, but I don’t mind. I’d rather yawn my way through my lessons than give up the few happy hours we spend together.
I didn’t understand everything Rose wrote, and some of the references she made completely mystified me. She kept going on overnight and weekend hunting trips with her parents, during which they forced her to do something she hated. She called it being a “finder” but never explained what that meant.
I can’t come by tonight. My parents are taking me away on a hunting trip for the whole weekend. I told my mother I don’t want to be a finder but she says it’s our heritage and my duty to the family. My father isn’t taking his dogs this time so it shouldn’t be too bad, but I still hate it. I can never focus and then my father gets angry with me. I expect this weekend will be no different than the rest.
I thought I was misreading her handwriting until she mentioned it again in another letter that sounded far more glum:
Father said being a finder is essential, but Thomas, I can’t stand it. It’s supposed to make me feel better; mother promised it would, but it never does. It makes me want to scream. One night I’m afraid I will, and then Father will never forgive me for ruining the search.
Rose also never said what she and her parents hunted, but by the middle of the bundle she stopped talking about them. That was when I could tell that she had fallen in love with my father. She wrote about him, and being with him, and thinking about him to the exclusion of everything else. In her fourteenth letter she confessed her feelings outright:
I know you said that we can’t be together, that I’m too young and you’re too old. But Thomas, I know what I see when I look in your eyes. I hear it in your voice. You love me as much as I love you. That is the truth. That is our truth.
Nothing can change how I feel about you. No one else will ever take your place. If you go away, and I never see you again, I’ll be lonely for the rest of my life. But Thomas, so will you.
I hurried to open the next envelope, but found only a short, hurriedly scrawled note inside:
I don’t know what to do. After last night I’m so miserable, all I can do is cry.
It’s not your fault. I’m the finder, aren’t I? I don’t want to lose you, not ever, but it’s too dangerous now.
I’m so sorry, Thomas.
I knew my parents hadn’t broken up, because Trick and Gray and I wouldn’t be here if they had. Plus there were fourteen more letters. But what had made her write such a sad, frightened note? Had my grandfather caught her with my Dad? Had someone seen them together?
I almost tore the flap off as I opened the next envelope. Some thin, dark ovals fell out into my lap like oversize confetti, and I carefully picked up one, which turned out to be a dried, pressed rose petal. More of the same filled the envelope, along with another short note.
You are absolutely insane, Thomas. How did you get into the house? Where did you find all these flowers? Do you know what my father would have done if he caught you decorating my bedroom with every rose in Fanelsen county? Lucky for you I have a big closet and I always wear rose perfume, or I think my mother would have called the police.
You make me wish for things that are not possible … or maybe they are. Meet me in the meadow tonight.
I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. I didn’t my father had been such a wild romantic, or that he’d used flowers (along with breaking and entering) to patch things up with my mother. I knew why she’d saved some of the rose petals; so that she’d always remember what he did.
No boy had ever given me so much as a daisy … until Jesse Raven. I touched my hair in the spot where he had tucked the moonflower, and a funny ache twisted in my chest.
I’m not going to see him again, I reminded myself. It would be easier if I could stop seeing his face and hearing his voice. I needed to reduce Jesse Raven to something unimportant and finished, something I could forget, like an algebra problem I’d solved: X = dark boy.
I didn’t feel like reading any more of my mother’s letters, so I gathered them up, tied them together with the ribbon and wedged the bundle back under my mattress. When I turned off the light and climbed under the covers, I felt the little lump the letters made under the mattress, next to my hip, like the pea that kept the thin-skinned princess awake all night.
Life would be a lot easier if everything worked out the way they did in fairytales. But my mother and father were gone, my brothers had been lying to me, and I had to forget about (X = dark boy). No prince would ever come and take me away to live happily ever after. All I had were some old letters I’d stolen and this nagging emptiness in my heart from wishing for things that I knew would never be.
X = dark boy . Y = nothing.
I rolled away from the lump, buried my face in my pillow, and cried myself to sleep.
After the dismal events of the weekend I was glad to go back to school, so I was the only one who didn’t groan out loud when Mrs. Newsom passed around an outline handout and assigned us to write our first research paper of the year.
“All right, settle down,” she said, frowning until the sounds stopped. “Since last year’s freshman class had difficulty with appropriate research subjects for their papers, I’ve assigned them this time. You’ll find them noted at the top of your handout.”
I glanced at mine, which read “Lost Lake town history.” Not the most riveting of subjects, but at least I might actually learn something about the town.
“We’ll be spending the rest of the period in the media center,” Mrs. Newsom continued, “so gather up your things, and pick a study partner so you can share a computer.” She stared straight past me. “In the event some of you are thinking of getting lost on the way there, Mr. Boone, Mr. Chatham, Mr. Crowley, be advised that I will be performing a head count once we’ve arrived.”
Barb joined me out in the hall and showed me her handout. “I got ‘Central Florida indigenous wildlife,’ if you can believe it. I hate Nature more than therapy sessions. And wildlife in Central Florida, come on. That’s like a contradiction or something, isn’t it?”
“An oxymoron.” I felt someone following me so close I could feel their breath against the top of my head, and quickened my step. “She gave me town history.”
“Good luck with that.” She glanced over her shoulder and then leaned clos
e to whisper. “Oh. Em. Gee. Aaron is right behind us.”
I should have guessed that Boone was the heavy breather. “Good, then he shouldn’t get lost.”
Three old classrooms had been converted into Tanglewood’s media center, with fiction and nonfiction sections separated by the center study area which contained a dozen old cafeteria tables surrounded by chairs. Barb and I left our backpacks in two seats at the end of one table before we went over to the long row of computer terminals set up by the windows.
I let Barb run her search of the library’s digital catalog first while I thought of how I wanted to write my paper. Reciting important historic events seemed boring; I was much more interested in people. Like the circus people who had founded the town.
X = dark boy.
Barb jotted down some references before she got up from the chair. “All yours.”
I sat down, typed in Lost Lake in the keyword search box, and waited. After a few seconds, the library catalog returned zero results. I tried narrowing the search with a few other phrases—town history, important local figures, and timeline—but still came up with no results.
“How can you have a town with no recorded history?” I muttered as I broadened the search to books on the history of Central Florida and picked up a few titles. I wrote down the list and went back to the nonfiction section, but after I checked the index of each one I found that Lost Lake wasn’t listed in any of them.
“Great.” I only had thirty minutes left before we had to change classes, so I went back to the computer terminals for another try. This time I accessed the remote internet link and tried a few search engines, but I didn’t have any more luck than I’d had back at the library in Chicago.
On impulse I switched to an image search to see if there were any online archives with historic photographs of the town, hoping they’d also have some information or reference links. I got one old, sepia-tinted shot of a man hand standing on the back of a white horse, but the photo was too small to make out any details. I clicked on the link and waited for the website to load.
Step Right Up!
Welcome to the largest online archive devoted to the history of nineteenth-century circuses in America and Europe! From facts to artifacts, playbills to photographs, if it happened under the big top, you’ll find it here.
I smiled at some of the old but still-colorful images adorning the home page before I scrolled down and found a line of links: Essays ~ Maps ~ Timelines ~ Images. I clicked on the last link, which took me to a searchable archive of all the images on the site, where I typed in Lost Lake.
A page titled Circus History’s Mysteries appeared on the screen, along with some odd photographs and several dense paragraphs on unexpected calamities and other weird things that had happened to the circus performers and their audiences. The first section covered bizarre tragedies, but I skipped past the sensational parts until I found the photo of the trick rider on the white horse.
The caption under the photo read, Geza Ravenov in performance, 1873.
I sat back in my seat. The rider was a boy, not a man, and he looked exactly like Jesse Raven. It wasn’t Jesse, of course; Geza Ravenov must have been his great-great-grandfather. I scrolled down to the paragraph under the photo and began to read.
Individual circus performers frequently immigrated from Europe to America, but one of the first shows to cross the Atlantic was The Ravenov Circus. A small but influential traveling show that originated in Brasov, Romania, the Ravenovs were a tightly knit group of acrobats, clowns and trick riders who performed exclusively on horseback. At the peak of the circus’s popularity, the Ravenovs’ snow-white horses were among the most highly prized in Europe, but the leader of the troop refused to sell or breed any of their stock. Escaping harassment from avaricious military leaders, local officials and other high-ranking horse enthusiasts is thought to be what drove the Ravenovs to cut short their performances during their last season.
While making a mountain crossing into Romania, the circus caravan was attacked by outlaws, who stole their horses and killed most of the performers during the night. This tragedy forced the survivors to finally disband their show. Shortly after the surviving members of the Ravenov family left Romania for America and disappeared into the far south, where they bought land to breed horses and cattle, and establish a community for other retired circus performers.
The snow-white horses and stunning performances of the Ravenov Circus now exist only in the memories captured by a few precious photographs, most residing in the private archives of circus memorabilia collectors. All that survives of the Ravenov family today is Lost Lake, the town they founded, which still exists in a remote area of Central Florida.
I forgot about my research paper as I scrolled back up to look once more at the photo of Geza Ravenov. He had dark eyes like Jesse, but because the photo was black-and-white I couldn’t tell what color they were. They could be brown or even dark blue. I squinted at a tiny dark spot on the rider’s right hand. The smudge lay at the base of the ring finger of his right hand.
Was he wearing the same ring?
Stop it. I made myself get up and walk toward the front desk. I’d ask the librarian to help me with finding my references, and get back to work on my paper, and stop thinking about him.
“Mrs. Newsom? Mrs. Newsom.”
Tiffany Beck’s shrill voice made me glance back, and what I saw made me freeze in my tracks. The cheerleader was standing next to the computer terminal I’d just used, and the edge of the table under it was dripping. A can of soda lay on its side, still dribbling its contents directly onto the keyboard.
My English teacher marched over to the terminal. “Do you want to explain what happened here, Ms. Beck?”
“I didn’t do it,” Tiffany said quickly. “It was her. That new girl.” She gave me an ugly look. “She’s always spilling things.”
The librarian hurried past me, a roll of paper towels in her hands. “This is exactly why students are not permitted to bring beverages inside the media center,” she snapped at Mrs. Newsom.
“Ms. Youngblood,” my teacher said. “Come over here. Now.” When I went to her, she pointed at the keyboard. “How could you be so careless?”
“It’s not my soda, Mrs. Newsom, and I didn’t knock it over.” I knew who had, judging by Tiffany’s satisfied smirk, but I hadn’t seen her do it so I couldn’t accuse her of anything.
As the librarian blotted up the spilled soda, Mrs. Newsom looked around at the rest of the class, who were watching from a safe, I’m-not-involved distance. “Did any of you see who was responsible for this mess?”
No one was going to contradict the most popular girl in school, not in front of her face. I saw Boone take a step forward and, after glancing at me, raise his hand. That’s when I knew I was headed for the dean’s office; naturally Boone would back up Tiffany’s lie.
“Mrs. Newsom?” When she turned toward him, Boone dropped his hand. “I bought that soda for Tiffany. She brought it in here, and she knocked it over after Cat left the computer.”
No one moved, or made a sound. Everyone stared at Boone as if he’d gone crazy, including me.
“Aaron.” His girlfriend’s eyes went as wide as her mouth hung open before she turned to the teacher and started sputtering. “He’s—he’s lying, Mrs. Newsom. I didn’t have a soda. I wouldn’t—I mean, I’d never—”
The bell rang, making all of us jump.
“All right, class. Get your things and go to your next period,” Mrs. Newsom said. “Not you, Ms. Beck.” When Tiffany began to protest, she added, “You and I have some detentions to discuss.” She didn’t give the cheerleader a chance to say anything more as she gestured at Boone. “Aaron, I’d like a word with you as well.”
Boone caught my eye and gave me a nod, as if he were trying to reassure me.
I grabbed my backpack and kept my head down as I followed everyone else out. Whispers hissed around me as if I were walking through a nest of snakes. Barb caught up with
me halfway down the hall.
“I can’t believe Boone just did that. I wouldn’t, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Unbelievable.” When I didn’t say anything, she bumped my arm with hers. “Cat? Are you in shock, or what? Aaron just totally trashed his girlfriend for you.”
“I didn’t ask him to do anything.” Nor did I understand why he’d done it. Nor did I want to.
“Well, he did. That was … whew.” She fanned her face with her hand as if she were hot. “The way he charged to your rescue was so romantic. God, every girl in this school will want to be you now, especially when you go to thank him.” She wiggled her eyebrows up and down. “Have any particular reward in mind?”
I stopped outside the door to my next class. “I’m not going to thank him, or reward him. He told the truth. That’s all.”
“Whatever you say.” Barb’s braces glinted. “But after this, Cat, you’re going to be legendary. The girl who broke up Boone and Tiffany.”
“I didn’t do that.” I saw some kids hovering near us, trying to eavesdrop, and lowered my voice. “I am not interested in Aaron Boone. Not now, not ever.” Before she could start gushing over him again I stalked into class.
Boone arrived at class a few minutes late, but handed a pass slip to the teacher before walking back to his seat. I pretended to read my textbook so I didn’t have to look at him, and focused my attention on the teacher to block out the murmurs and snickers all around me.
When the lunch bell rang I had to move fast to get out of the classroom ahead of Boone. Instead of going directly to the cafeteria, the way I always did, I went in the opposite direction toward my locker. I was too upset to eat, and I didn’t want to sit and give myself a headache listening to Barb gush over her hero. I didn’t want to risk running into Tiffany and her cheerleader posse, either. I’d drop off my books and go spend lunch period in Guidance, getting my classes changed.
When I got to the hall where my locker was, I saw something wet and dark on the door, and slowed my step as I smelled aerosol paint. Since everyone was at lunch the hall was completely empty, but someone had sprayed the front of my locker with black paint in a diagonal row of splotches that ran from the top to bottom vents. I unlocked the padlock and opened the door to find everything inside my locker wet and spattered with the black paint that had been sprayed into the vents. Nothing had escaped; all my paper, pens, and textbooks were ruined.