They were still arguing as they entered the building. And then the waiting trio heard Kerri’s voice, soft but firm. “I forgot my handkerchief. I’ll be up in a minute, Mother.”
“Apartment 2-A,” Mrs. Lamont told her, and then the door clicked softly shut.
Kerri didn’t return to the car, however. She stood on the sidewalk, looking toward the shrubbery.
“Over here,” Dale said in a voice like an old-time stage villain, and Kerri obediently came toward them.
She didn’t seem surprised or uneasy, as Katie thought she might have under the circumstances. She looked directly into each face, evaluating first the boys and then Katie. Her voice was quiet and melodious.
“I got your letter. I was trying to figure out how to answer it when your mother called. They found blood in the kitchen, and they’re afraid somebody kidnapped you or something.”
Katie lifted the finger with the Band-Aid on it. “I cut myself on the lid of the tuna fish can, that’s all. I wasn’t kidnapped. They want to arrest me because they think I pushed my grandmother down the stairs.”
Kerri’s glasses rose, hovered, and settled more firmly on her small nose. “No, they don’t. I mean, maybe somebody does, but that’s not why the police are looking for you. Your mother called them because they thought something bad had happened to you. They suspect foul play.”
Foul play? That meant someone had murdered her, didn’t it? Katie felt a pang of regret if that was what Monica had been worrying about. Poor Monica.
“You mean they aren’t going to arrest me?”
“No. They aren’t even looking for you any more, because a Mrs. Jones called the police, so they know you’re all right. That you’ve only run away, instead of being kidnapped.”
“But Mr. C. is still here. That’s his car, over there.” Katie pointed. “And he’s been asking questions about me, and he frightened Mrs. M. He wants me for something; he came here to find out about me. He didn’t just happen to move in and bring nothing to cook in and nothing to eat but yogurt and peanut butter sandwiches.”
Katie was feeling confused, and her words came out that way, too. But it didn’t seem to bother Kerri.
“I don’t know about him. But if you could all send me messages without speaking to me, we should be able to handle Mr. C., whoever he is.”
Dale cleared his throat. “I can read minds, a little. We were thinking of getting close enough to Mr. C. to see if I could sort of listen in on him.”
“He’s up there now, with your mother,” Kerri said. “And my parents. And I think they’ve called Dale’s parents and probably Eric’s mother, too. Whatever Mr. C. is here for, it concerns all of us. Not just Katie.”
Katie stared at her, and then at the boys. Was that true? Had she misinterpreted what she’d overheard? Had Mr. C.’s questions not been a personal attack on Katie but an investigation into anyone who was able to do unusual things?
“I liked Mr. C., when he first came,” she said slowly. “Only he pretended to be something he wasn’t, and he tried to get Mrs. M. to talk about me, and I was afraid.”
“I’m afraid a lot,” Kerri confessed. “It’s so hard to remember not to pick up your pencil without touching it when you’ve dropped it, and to use your hands to do simple things you can do perfectly well without them.”
“Can you read minds?” Eric asked.
“No. But I can see in the dark,” Kerri stated. “My father’s always saying, For heaven’s sake, turn on a light in there! How do you expect to find anything in the dark? And I can only move things without touching them if they’re small.”
“Me, too,” Katie said, the electrical trickle of excitement in her veins making her tingle all over. “Only I’m getting stronger, I think. I moved one of those big rocks around the flower beds. I wonder if we all worked together, if we could move something bigger?”
For a moment they were all caught up in the idea, forgetting the problem with Mr. C. They looked around for a worthy project upon which to combine forces.
Miss K.’s light blue Pinto rolled into the parking lot, and Miss K. got out. By common, unspoken consent, the four crouched lower behind the shielding shrubs. And, unexpectedly, Mr. P. climbed out of the passenger side of the car, struggling with two heavy bags of groceries.
“I sure appreciate the lift,” he told Miss K. “Listen, I’ve got the makings for a steak dinner here, if you’d like to join me.”
“I don’t think so, thanks,” Miss K. said. She started walking briskly toward the front door of the apartment house, almost as if she were anxious to get away from him.
Dale’s freckled face was pressed into the scratchy branches. “She forgot to set her parking brake,” he said under his breath. “I’ll bet all of us together could move her car. We could roll it right forward into the next parking slot.”
“No,” Katie said quickly. “It might roll all the way back out into the street, and I wouldn’t want anything to happen to her car. Miss K.’s a very nice person. But he isn’t.”
“Maybe we could help him get his groceries inside,” Eric suggested. “They look pretty heavy. Maybe he’d appreciate the help.”
Katie didn’t stop to think of all the things that Mr. P. already blamed her for. She never even thought about any possible consequences. It was so exciting to be working with three other kids as a team that she didn’t try to stop them.
What happened next was as much a surprise to them as it was to Mr. Pollard. Well, almost as much, Katie amended, staring so hard she nearly fell through the bushes and out into plain view.
Because the bags that Mr. P. had been clutching as if they were very heavy had seemingly taken on a life and motion of their own. They plunged out of his arms and smashed themselves against the front door, which unfortunately was just closing behind Miss K.
Cans rolled in every direction, and a package of rice broke and spilled out across the sidewalk. A bottle of wine broke, too, sending a spreading stain on the cement. A white-wrapped meat package skidded away to the feet of a passing and astonished St. Bernard.
Mr. P. yelled in frustrated rage, and the St. Bernard, taking advantage of the circumstances, picked up the package and trotted down the street with it.
“Hey, you mangy mutt! Come back with my steak!”
Nobody was sure who, if anyone in particular, had caused one of Mr. P.’s cans to fly up in the air. They all saw it come down, though, and nobody was quick enough to change its path.
It hit Mr. P. squarely in the middle of his bald spot.
“Oh, crumb,” Dale muttered, and began to back away on all fours. “Let’s get out of here.”
Eric said something, too, but it was lost in Mr. P.’s howl of anguish. The others were already following Dale’s lead, but Katie’s shirt front was caught on a rose bush. As she jerked it free, she heard Miss K. ask, “What happened? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to let the door swing shut in your face,” and Mr. P.’s angry retort.
“It’s that blasted kid again! She’s around here somewhere, and even if the police have given up on her, I haven’t! I’ll fix her if it’s the last thing I ever do!”
“Katie, come on!” Eric tugged on her arm. Her blouse came free, and Katie ran. They didn’t rest until they had reached the alley, where they leaned, panting, against a row of garbage cans.
“I think,” Kerri said in a small voice, “that we overdid it.”
“Yeah. But we proved something, too, didn’t we? That if we work together, we’re stronger,” Dale pointed out. “Just think what it would be like if we could all go to the same school.”
“That would probably make it worse,” Eric said. He’d hit his hand on something, and he wiped the blood off on his pants. “I mean, if the kids don’t like one peculiar person, how would they react to four of us?”
Katie looked around at them, the circle of faces that were all different except that each had silver eyes behind thick glasses. “I feel better, though. Knowing I’m not the only one. And there c
ould be more, couldn’t there? Maybe we could find more of us, if we really tried.”
Eric decided his wound wasn’t worth worrying about and stuck the hand in his pocket. “What do you suggest, that we run an ad in the paper? Call this number if you have silver eyes and paranormal powers?”
“No. But there must be something we could do. I don’t want to go back to living the way I did before, feeling all by myself. I wonder,” she speculated wistfully, “if my mother will like me a little bit better if she finds out I’m not the only one?”
Nobody answered that, and she wondered if the others had had the same problem as she had.
After a moment of silence, Katie pushed herself away from the garbage can and put as much strength into her voice as she could. “I guess,” she said, “we’d better go see what we can find out about Mr. C.”
They went up the back stairs, quietly, unwilling to meet Mr. P. or anyone else. Behind the door of apartment 2-A, they could hear voices, many voices, all talking at once and interrupting each other.
Of one accord, the other three stepped aside to let Dale close to the door.
“Can you tell anything?” Kerri whispered.
Dale shook his head. “No. I can’t pick out Mr. C.’s thoughts at all. There are too many people, and they’re too emotional. I think that makes it harder.”
Katie hesitated, swallowed, then spoke with determination. If it was true that she wasn’t wanted by the police, and she had the backing of her new friends, maybe they didn’t need to read anybody’s mind.
“Why don’t we walk in,” she said, touching the unlatched door with her fingertips. “Maybe they’ll tell us what it’s all about.”
And that was what they did.
Monica gave a cry of relief and rushed across the living room to crush Katie in a tight hug.
“Darling! Where have you been? Why did you run away?”
“I didn’t want to go to jail. I didn’t hurt Grandma, really I didn’t, and I thought they were going to put me in jail.”
Monica’s eyes were filled with tears. “We’d never let anyone do that, darling. Never.”
Nathan appeared behind her. “You OK, kid? You aren’t hurt?”
“No. I’m all right.” Katie saw a blur of faces around the room; even Mrs. M. was there in one of her flowered muumuus, looking as if her hair had just barely survived a hurricane. “Are you all mad at me?”
“No, no,” Monica said. “We only called the police because we thought something had happened to you. There was blood in the kitchen, and you aren’t used to cities—little girls get in trouble all the time in cities. So we asked the television stations to run your picture, in case anyone had seen you. Oh, Katie, you scared me half to death!”
Katie looked past her mother to Mr. C., who was running a hand through his hair so that it stood up almost as wildly as Mrs. M.’s.
“He was asking questions about me. He said the Armbrusters thought I hurt Grandma, and I thought he intended to lock me up.”
Mr. C. made a face. “I guess I bungled the whole thing. I didn’t mean to scare you, Katie. I was asking questions, but not because I wanted to lock you up. I was trying to find out the truth so I could protect you. I’m not a policeman, I’m with the Institute of Psychic Phenomena.”
Katie blinked. “What’s that?”
He glanced at her companions, then back at Katie. “It’s a place where we investigate children like you, and teach them. We’re all learning together, actually. I guess I need to learn a lot, myself. About how to handle cases like this without frightening people, the way I did you, Katie.”
She wasn’t sure she liked being referred to as a “case.” Katie shifted her weight uneasily. “You scared Mrs. M., and that scared me. I thought you were going to lock me up.”
Mrs. M. nodded her shaggy head. “Yes, he did. You oughtn’t to go around scaring people. Pretending to be a friend, and then being so nosey everybody guesses you aren’t what you seem. I didn’t tell him a thing, Katie. I didn’t trust him.” Her usually pleasant face was contorted in a scowl. “I still don’t.”
Mr. C. spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “All right. I admit it. I handled this badly. But you see, when there are people—particularly children—who have what we call paranormal powers, the ability to do things ordinary people can’t do . . . well, most of them learn very quickly not to let other people know how different they are. They keep it a secret, hide it. And often the other people around them, parents and neighbors who love them, cover up, too. They’re afraid of what will happen if it gets out that the kids can move things without touching them, create winds, read minds. That kind of thing.”
Monica had a very peculiar expression on her face. “You’ve been telling us that Katie really can move things with the power of her mind. And these other children, they can do things like that, too?”
Katie saw that the other parents present wore similar expressions. Mr. C. had been talking to them, but it didn’t appear that any of them had told him anything about their own children, even though they had all been disturbed about their unusual qualities.
“How did you know anything about me?” Katie asked slowly.
Mr. C. was eager to answer that. “One of your teachers read an article I’d written for a professional magazine, Katie,” he said. “She wrote to tell me she thought you might be like the special children I work with at the Institute. I had a vacation coming, so I went to Delaney to meet you. Only your grandmother had died, and you had left town, so I had to settle for talking to the people who knew you. Some of them, like the Armbrusters, were hostile enough to make accusations against you. That’s not too unusual. Mr. Pollard, right here in this building, has done the same thing. He’s afraid of you, and he’d like to see you taken away from here.”
He had turned so that he was addressing them all, the children, but also the parents, who waited in silence.
“I asked a lot of questions because I had to be sure that Katie was one of the special children. I get a lot of mail about people who are supposed to be able to do unusual things. And, frankly, a lot of them are fakes. Some of them are trying to make money by pretending to be able to talk with someone else’s dead relatives, for instance. It’s a field in which there are a lot of charlatans.”
Nobody asked what a charlatan was. Katie already knew it was a person who pretended to be something he wasn’t, usually in order to cheat someone else.
“Our school is for children who are genuinely blessed with extraordinary powers,” Mr. C. went on. “We want to help them learn how to develop their powers to the greatest extent. Katie was smart enough to figure out that there might be more of you, the ones who are here today, all born to mothers who worked with a dangerous drug. Well, of course all drugs are potentially dangerous; but this one was so dangerous it was discontinued by the manufacturer when he realized it could do real harm to the people who handled it. Sort of like being around when an atom bomb goes off.”
He took a deep breath. “The drug didn’t necessarily cause obvious trouble right then, but tests, even ten years ago, showed that its use could have serious consequences years later. Just the way it has had with these children. But in this case the results were not bad. The four of you have powers the rest of us don’t have, powers that could be of immense value to the human race. We at the institute want to know what these powers are, and how they can be developed to produce the most good for the most people. I know from what Mr. Pollard and the others said that Katie, at least, can do some amazing things.”
Katie stood there, neither denying nor admitting to anything. She still wasn’t sure she trusted Mr. C., any more than Mrs. M. did. Nobody else was admitting anything, either.
“Look,” Mr. C. said. “I know you’ve all had difficulties adjusting to going to school and living with ordinary people. Mrs. Michaelmas thought I should leave you alone to be a normal girl. But the thing is, Katie, you aren’t normal. You’re going to have more than the usual num
ber of problems in growing up, and we think we can guide and help you with them.”
It was true; she had always seemed to have more problems than most kids. Katie was intrigued at the thought that it might be possible to use her abilities openly. It would be nice not to have to watch her step every single minute, the way she’d been doing, or trying to do.
“Are there other kids at your school?” she asked. “Like us?”
“Yes. There are seventeen there now. We think there will be more, but it’s hard to find them. They don’t know about us, or they don’t understand, and they try not to be found.”
“Did their mothers all handle that drug before they were born?” Kerri asked.
“No. Only the mothers of you four children handled that particular drug, as far as we know. Some of the others were born to mothers who worked with other dangerous substances, and some of them are still a mystery to us. We don’t know why those children have special talents. It’s one of the things we’re working to find out.”
Dale spoke slowly. “We wouldn’t be considered freaks at your school, would we?”
“We wouldn’t have to remember not to do things that are perfectly natural to us,” Kerri added, “so that people wouldn’t think we were crazy. Sometimes people think I’m crazy, or a witch, or something.” She sounded wistful.
“I promise you,” Mr. C. said. “At our school nobody would consider you a witch or a freak.”
Eric cleared his throat. “And what is it you want of Katie, and of us? Why were you investigating?”
“Because,” Mr. C. said, “I would like very much for you all to come and live at our school. You’ll like it there, I think.” He smiled, but none of the children smiled back at him. Not yet. Try as she might, Katie could not read anything in his mind, couldn’t tell how sincere he was. Did he want to help them, or only, in some way she didn’t yet understand, to help himself? She didn’t quite see what he would do for himself, but she was still getting used to the idea that he didn’t want to put her in jail.