Cover

Title Page

The

• INNOCENTS •

LILI PELOQUIN

An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright

The Innocents

RAZORBILL

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Young Readers Group

345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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Copyright © 2012 Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

ISBN 978-1-101-58917-5

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Dedication

To Bill and Margie

Contents

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

July First

Chapter One

Two Weeks Earlier

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

Acknowledgments

Special Excerpt

July First

July First

Chapter One

Chapter

• ONE •

Her sister’s last words hung in the air: “You’re just jealous because I belong here and you don’t.” Alice had goaded her into saying them, had pushed and pushed and pushed, but hearing them still hurt. Or would later. Right now Alice was too numb to feel pain. She was staring at Charlie’s face, hot, mad, tear-streaked, and then she was staring at Charlie’s back, smooth, tan, naked except for the thinnest of bikini straps and a Band-Aid just above the low-rise denim cutoffs, the flesh-colored adhesive concealing the angel’s-wing tattoo. Alice closed her eyes. The sound of long hair whipping around, of bare feet clipping fast down wooden steps. When Alice opened her eyes again, she could still see Charlie’s back but not the Band-Aid on it. Charlie was too far away for that, was already halfway down the beach, sand kicking up angrily behind her. She stopped at a towel, a guy and girl—lazy-limbed, drowsy-eyed, enough alike to be brother and sister—lounging on it, smoking cigarettes. Charlie flopped down beside them and started talking, arms waving around wildly. After a bit, they turned to look at Alice, leaning against the railing of the deck. Alice let them look. Then the girl put her hand on Charlie’s shoulder, and the guy passed her a flask. They stood, and started walking down the beach. Alice watched. Three backs moving away from her now, not just one. Three backs wanting to be anywhere she wasn’t.

A minute later they’d disappeared from view, and Alice wondered if there’d ever been a time when she’d felt so alone. She knew it was weird—beyond weird, sick, really—to blame a dead girl for her troubles, but she couldn’t help herself. This was all Camilla’s fault. Camilla, no longer living and yet the most alive person she knew. The most powerful, too. Camilla could come between people even if she wasn’t in this world anymore. Could do it easy, without even breaking a sweat. A ghost who taunted as much as she haunted. And it was as Alice was thinking these thoughts that she heard it: the high, silvery tinkling. It might have been the wind chimes hanging above the sliding glass door, reacting to a breeze coming off the ocean. Might have been but wasn’t, Alice knew. It was Camilla laughing at her from the other side of death, from beyond the grave.

Alice laid a palm flat on either side of her skull, pressed as hard as she could. Blocking her ears, though, didn’t block out the sound. Just made it seem like it was coming from inside her head. She loved her sister; she hated her sister. Her sister hated her; her sister loved her. Alice turned and fled, running into the house so big that in it she felt like a doll in a house for humans, through the kitchen, and up the twisting staircase to her bedroom. The laughter followed her every step of the way.

Two Weeks Earlier

Two Weeks Earlier

Chapter Two

Chapter

• TWO •

Alice felt her stomach doing this horrible churning flip-flop inside her. Motion sickness. She didn’t know if it was from her shiny new stepfather driving his shiny new Mercedes so fast or from his marrying her just-as-shiny-but-not-quite-so-new mother so fast. Sometimes it seemed to Alice as if the relationship had happened in one of those montage things in a movie. It was like they met, fell in love, and got married in a matter of seconds. Go to the bathroom for a quick pee and you missed the whole thing, needed your date to give you a recap. Okay, it was a matter of months, but still. Awfully speedy.

Her stepfather’s eyes behind his wafer-thin sunglasses were pointed straight ahead at the road, so she stared at him without fear of being caught. Richard. Richard Flood. Richard Flood the Third. Alice had never met anyone before who looked so much like his name sounded. He was tall and lean and perpetually tan. Not the tacky kind of tan you got from a bed or a bottle or from laying out—from trying—but the kind you got accidentally, from when you were doing something else, playing tennis or golf or sailing your Alerion Class Sloop (Richard had two of them). His hair was gray in a way that made him appear distinguished rather than old. His face was undeniably handsome, sharp-featured with deep-set blue eyes. There was something cruel about it, though. It was his mouth, Alice decided, the way it turned down at the corners when he was lost in thought.

If Alice didn’t quite like Richard, she had to admit that she found him a romantic figure. Not like sexual romantic. Romantic in the old-fashioned sense, meaning mysterious and poetic. His past was so tragic: his first wife, Martha, dying of cancer, then his only child, Camilla, the same age as Alice, dying in a car accident a few months later. Richard was the man who had everything who finally had nothing—nothing truly important, at least—all of it snatched away by the indifferent hand of fate. And, not surprisingly, there was an air of sadness that hung heavy around him. You could feel it, Alice often thought. You could feel the shadows, too, creeping up on him when he wasn’t looking. Only her mother seemed able to chase them away. Alice had seen the way his face would suddenly go blank in the middle of a conversation or meal, all expression vanishing from it so that it resembled a mask, something cold and hard and dead, and you knew that behind that mask he was remembering. Then her mother would say something to him, or touch his hand, and he would come back. He’d laugh or shake his head, and all at once he looked human again.

Alice watched the two of them. Richard was steering with one hand, holding her mother’s hand with the other. It was still crazy for Alice to think that her funny, spunky mom, who ran around most of the time in jeans and men’s shirts with the tails hanging out, hair in a messy ponytail, who claimed to prefer generic Raisin Bran to the real thing, who would only go to see a movie in a theater before six p.m. when matinee prices were still in effect, who voted for Ralph Nader in every presidential election Alice could remember, who helped start the Boston chapter of Food Not Bombs, driving one of the buses down to New Orleans two days after Hurricane Katrina passed and the Red Cross could barely get through, was now a rich man’s wife. She was already starting to look the part, Alice noticed uncomfortably: linen suit so simple and understated you just knew it had to cost an arm and a leg, a subtle dab of coral lipstick, hair in a sleek bob. Then it occurred to Alice that maybe her mom had always been this way, only pretended to be the other way because there was no money and she was making the best of a bad situation. Alice didn’t know why but this thought disturbed her. It was like she didn’t know her own mom, like her mom had been putting on an act her whole life, like her mom really was a Margaret, as Richard called her, not a Maggie, as Alice’s dad called her.

Her mom had met Richard in April. She was working as a caterer, a part-time job that became full-time when Alice’s dad left the family just after Christmas. The party was for the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. Richard was a guest faculty member that semester. She’d just assumed he was a struggling academic with no permanent post and more brains than money when he wandered into the hectic kitchen area, pinot noir dripping down his front. He asked if she had any club soda. Feeling sorry for him, she convinced a male colleague to swap white button-downs. Little did she know that the absentminded professor standing in front of her looking sheepish in his wine-stained undershirt, the one she was scolding for blocking the bus boys’ path to the dishwasher, was world famous in his field, having designed several of the most well-known silhouettes in New York’s celebrated skyline, not to mention the grandson of one of the richest men in the city’s history.

Apparently getting yelled at was new for Richard, and he liked it. Scratch that. And he loved it. It had been such a whirlwind romance. He was a guy who knew what he wanted and how to get it. His pursuit of Alice’s mom had been swift and relentless. She didn’t stand a chance. She was divorced on a Friday, married on a Saturday. Had left behind the falling-down duplex she’d rented for the past seventeen years in a borderline neighborhood in the working-class section of Cambridge, right on the Somerville border, to head, with her two teenage daughters in tow, to a house—one of three her new husband owned, the others in Aspen and Palm Beach, plus a co-op apartment on Park Avenue—in the toniest town in Connecticut. Well, on the Connecticut shore, at least.

“Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” whispered a voice to Alice’s left.

Alice, realizing that she’d been staring the whole time, felt her cheeks burning up. She turned. It was Charlie, her younger—younger by one year and one day—sister. Charlie had been listening to her iPod, eyes closed. They were open now, though, and sparkling with mischief. She looked more and more like their mom every day. Same slinky brown, almost-black hair and eyes the color of smoke, same impish grin and curvy body. Alice had always been more like their father, light-haired and light-eyed, skinny build, brooding personality. Also like their dad, Alice was an artist, a different kind of artist, true—he was a musician, a horn player, jazz mostly; she was a painter, oil and acrylic her specialty—but an artist just the same. Alice only hoped she had better luck than her dad. It had been a tough road for him: playing too many dives for too little money, sidemanning for bands, mainly rock ones, whose music he didn’t respect, taking any paying job he could get, which meant he was out of town more than he was in it. It really bothered him that he couldn’t support his family even in a modest capacity without Maggie’s help. And though he never said it, Alice knew he regarded himself as a failure.

“Here we are,” Richard said.

Alice glanced up as they approached a set of massive iron gates. As they passed through it, Alice thought of the other set of massive iron gates they’d recently passed through for the first time together: the set belonging to Richard’s beach house.

It was a week and a half ago. They’d arrived at the house late, almost the middle of the night. Richard had insisted on driving straight down from Boston after an evening wedding at City Hall and a fast celebratory dinner following, just the four of them, plus Richard’s lawyer and Richard’s lawyer’s wife. Alice and Charlie had both fallen asleep during the ride, their bodies tangled up in the backseat. Their mom’s soft voice had roused them. “Wake up, you two, we’re home,” she’d said. Still cobwebby with dreams, Alice and Charlie had tumbled out of the backseat, dazedly, disorientedly. Rubbing the sleep from their eyes, they’d looked up. They’d never seen anything like it. Against the black sky Richard’s house resembled nothing so much as a castle in a storybook with its turrets and pikes and high stone walls, a place bought by a man with infinite wealth, the kind of money only a king would possess, a place where a beautiful princess might live, locked up and under the spell of a wicked witch. Standing there, heads tilted nearly all the way back, Alice remembered that she and Charlie had instinctively linked hands, lacing their fingers together, as if they were afraid of getting separated, like children in a fairy tale.

The iron gates they were passing through now led to the Serenity Point Country Club, though no sign said so. Alice guessed it was such a big deal you were just supposed to know. Beyond the gates was a long, winding road made of crushed shells, cutting through a sea of emerald grass that stretched all the way out to the actual sea, the setting sun casting a golden light over everything. A golf course was in the distance. So were tennis courts and a croquet lawn, and a large clapboard house, the clubhouse, Alice was betting. There was a crew of groundskeepers, men in Bermuda shorts and polo shirts, swarming the grass with rakes and hoses and trimmers. Alice looked to Maggie, expecting her to ask Richard if the workers were unionized or provided with healthcare, her voice tight with anger.

But when Alice’s mom spoke, it was to say in a voice that was anything but angry, that was, in fact, filled with awe, “Oh, Richard, it’s so beautiful.” Alice was surprised, and then she wasn’t. Of course that’s what her mom thought, Alice said to herself sourly. Well, lucky Maggie, she’d be seeing a lot of it. Too bad her two daughters had to say the same.

When her mom married Richard, it wasn’t just her mom’s life that changed. It was Alice’s and Charlie’s lives, as well. They’d both be heading to Wolcott Academy, an exclusive boarding school—“Aren’t they all?” Charlie deadpanned when the news was delivered, making Alice laugh even though she was beyond mad—in Vermont in September. Alice would be entering as a senior. The cliques would already be formed, and breaking into one would be next to impossible. Plus, she already had her friends at Rindge and Latin. She and Angela had been inseparable since the second grade. She had her boyfriend, Patrick, too. They’d been on and off since sophomore year, and even though they were technically still on right now, she knew that wouldn’t be for long. Long-distance relationships never worked; all they did was run up your cell phone bill. And then there was her art teacher, Mr. Delgado. It had taken her years to get him to notice her, give her special attention. He’d even agreed to help her put together a portfolio for the Art Institute of Boston, where he knew somebody in the admissions department. All that effort for nothing. What a waste. Charlie bitched about the transfer, too, but Alice suspected that it was out of solidarity more than anything else. Charlie wouldn’t have any trouble making the adjustment. Her new life would be every bit as good as her old life, better probably. Attracting people was easy for her. It was like it didn’t occur to her that it could be difficult, so it wasn’t. Alice would be the one who wouldn’t be able to cut it, to make the grade. She’d be eating her mom and sister’s dust by the time the leaves changed color.

But Alice was getting ahead of herself. Before Richard shipped her and Charlie off to boarding school for a miserable fall, he was corralling them into his beach house for a miserable summer. He was insisting that they all live together for the summer “as a family.” A family. What a joke. She’d known him for all of three months and had spent zero moments alone with him.

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