teen favorite in paperback

The mouth of the just bringeth forth wisdom: but the froward

tongue shall be cut out.

Proverbs 10:31

9780670786152_AlltheTruth_INT_Final.indd 7 5/14/13 12:29 PM

Before


We came here by ship, you and I.

I was a baby on my mother’s knee, and you were a lisping,

curly-headed boy playing at your mother’s feet all through

that weary voyage.

Watching us, our mothers got on so well together that our

fathers chose adjacent farm plots a mile from town, on the

western fringe of a Roswell Station that was much smaller

then.

I remember my mother telling tales of the trip when I was

young. Now she never speaks of it at all.

She said I spent the whole trip wide-eyed, watching you.


After


Book One


I.

You didn’t come.I waited all evening in the willow tree, with gnats buzzing

in my face and sap sticking in my hair, watching for you to

return from town.

I know you went to town tonight. I heard you ask Mr.

Johnson after church if you could pay a call on him this eve-

ning. You must want to borrow his ox team.

But you were gone so long. You never came. Maybe they

asked you to supper. Or maybe you went home another way.

Mother chided me ragged for missing chores and sup-

per, and said all that was left for me was what had stuck to

the stew pot. Darrel had already scraped the pot bare, but

Mother made me wash it in the stream anyway.

There’s nothing so bright as the stream by day, nothing so

black on a moonless night.

I bent and drank straight from it. It was all I had to fill

my belly. And maybe, I thought, you’d be thirsty, too, after

a scratchy day of haying, and before retiring to bed you’d

dip down into the same stream and drink the water I had

kissed. You’ve cooled off here most summer nights since you

were a boy.

I thought how, in the darkness, I would feel like any other

girl to you. Beneath my dress I have no cause for shame.


All the Truth That’s in Me 1110 Julie Berry

I thought how, if you knew, you might look twice at me,

bend your thoughts my way and see if they snap quickly

back, or linger.

But you don’t know.

And you never will.

For I am forbidden from telling.

II.

This morning I was in the fringe of woods beyond your cabin

long before you were up. I had to circle around a tree so you

wouldn’t see me when you passed by on your way to the

outhouse.

Something occupies your thoughts today. There’s a spring

in your step, and you hum as you walk. You seem in a hurry

to get on with something.

Jip didn’t notice me. He hovered at your ankles and

rubbed his side against your boot. He’s half deaf and blind,

with little left of his sense of smell, but still you keep him.

He’s an old friend.

I watched your cabin as long as I could before I had to

hurry back, lest Mother notice me missing.

III.

Darrel knows. He caught me in the woods outside your house.

He threatens to tell Mother, if I don’t do his chores for him

in the chicken hut and bring him berries and nuts and first

cherries whenever I find them. He and his great mouth need

my constant feeding in order to stop their constant talking.

k



IV.

Tonight the moon came out, and I went out with it, to watch

it rise over the treetops. So silent, the moon.

I remember. Night after night, its silence would comfort

me. How dark the nights when it went away. But it always

came back.

It was my only friend in the years with him.

It is still my consolation.

V.

You are not like him.

No matter what anyone says.

VI.

Father used to say my singing could charm the birds down

from the trees. Loving fathers will say anything, but I used to

dream one day my song would bring you to me.

It was always you. When you gathered nuts in the forest

with the other coltish boys, I liked your smiles and jokes the

best. I swelled with pride when your slingshot brought down

a big tom turkey.

Do you remember me digging worms for you when you

were twelve and I was eight?

I would meet you at the creek with my little sack of soil

and present you with the fattest crawlers I could pluck from

pulling weeds in my mother’s kitchen garden. You called me

“Ladybird.” It was Father’s name for me. He meant “sweet-

heart.” You meant “girl worm-catcher.” I was still pleased.

You’d do somersaults when you knew that only I could see



them. You pretended not to hear me clapping, and we’d both

laugh when you toppled on your rear.

You left a basket of apples for me at my willow tree once.

I saw you sneak away after.

In time, you became a man, and all at once, I became this.

VII.

Do you remember the Aldruses’ logrolling? I can never forget

it, though I suppose it must be just another day to you.

It was four years ago. I was just fourteen, and growing.

It was a hot day in late summer. A young couple had

recently arrived in Roswell Station from Newkirk, up north,

and they wanted to set up housekeeping east of town, where

the last forest overlooks the marshlands. Clyde Aldrus had

staked out a lot and asked the town to come clear away the

timber he’d felled. His young wife, Joan, was near to deliver-

ing her first.

You must remember the day’s work. You left your ripen-

ing wheat fields and toiled under the hot sun all day with

your hatchet and ax, in company with the men and older

boys and the oxen and their chains.

But do you remember the food? And what you said to the

girl who prepared and served the hominy pudding?

I hope you do not remember my hominy pudding. I would

rather forget that. I chose it because I’d heard you say once,

after church, that it was one of your favorite suppers.

Our whole family came: Mother, Father, Darrel, and me.

Father whistled all the way through town, driving Old Ben

hitched to our apple cart. Mother sat beside him and shook



her head, laughing at him. I held on tight to the hominy pud-

ding cradled in my lap.

Mother sat with the women and sewed gowns and bon-

nets for the new baby. The young ladies presided over the

table in their absence. We were all so nervous, we girls, about

presenting our cooking to Roswell Station for the first time.

I stood slicing pears with Abigail Pawling when someone

tugged me aside.

“Can you keep a secret?” Lottie Pratt whispered under

her bonnet brim into my ear.

“Of course I can,” I said. “What’s the matter?”

She led me behind the pile of logs already gathered by

sweating men. Back at the table, Maria Johnson and Eunice

Robinson eyed us. Maria’s new dress was blood red, with

a white scalloped collar and black ribbons on the sleeves

and bodice. Earlier, when Maria was out of hearing, little

Elizabeth Frye said her father thought the dress dipped

dangerously close to vanity. And if beauty wasn’t enough,

while the rest of us girls struggled with our puddings and

hotchpots, Maria Johnson had brought three golden-brown

plum tarts.

Lottie, who’d done all her father’s cooking since her

mother’s death many years ago, had no reason to fear being

outshone by Maria. Her yeasty rolls could rival even Goody

Pruett’s baking. She pulled my ear close to her mouth.

“I’ve got a fella,” she whispered.

I pulled away to see her face. She must be joking. But her

cheeks were flushed, and her eyes were bright.

“Who?” I breathed.



“Sssh! Tell you later,” she said. “Watch me tonight and

guess. But swear you’ll never speak a word of it.”

My head spun with this information. From the corner of

my eye, I saw you fasten a chain around a log and wave to

Leon Cartwright, who led the ox team.

“What do you mean, you’ve got a fella?”

Lottie’s chest swelled with her importance. “Says he’s gonna

marry me,” she said. “He’s given me ever so many kisses.”

“Kisses!” I gasped. Lottie pressed her pink finger over my

lips.

You turned then and saw us whispering there, and

straightened up and grinned. I had to take a deep breath.

Lottie missed nothing. Her eyebrows rose. In a terrible

instant I realized: you might be her fella.

“Is it Lucas, Lottie?”

She giggled. “What if it is?”

Eunice and Maria were openly frowning at us now. Mrs.

Johnson approached the food table, and Maria pointed her

mother’s gaze our way.

“I’ve got to know,” I begged.

“Why, is Lucas your fella?”

I prayed my weakness wouldn’t show. “Don’t tease me,

Lottie,” I said. “Just tell me.”

A shadow passed over us both, and we looked up to see

Mrs. Johnson’s arms folded across her ample bosom. “Hadn’t

you young ladies best get back to your tasks?” she said.

Lottie hurried off, but I trotted meekly back to the table.

“There’s a good girl,” Mrs. Johnson said, and patted my

back. “Lads’ll want food soon, and you’ll want to show off

your pretty face and your pretty dish.”



I turned to Mrs. Johnson in much astonishment, but she

only winked back. Her daughter, Maria, was less patient

with me.

“Run and fill these from the well.” She handed me two

large tin pitchers. I didn’t mind an excuse to step away, so I

headed toward the new well Clyde had dug.

I dropped the bucket down and listened to it splash. When I

was sure it had sunk deep enough to fill, I leaned all my weight

against the crank to pull it up again. This pulley was more

stubborn than some, and I struggled to complete each turn.

“Let me help,” said a voice. Someone beside me took hold

of the crank.

It was you.

I wanted to run, but I had pitchers to fill, and how would

that look if I bolted away? I hesitated with my hands still on

the wooden handle, and you smiled at me.

“Here, we’ll do it together,” you said. With your hands

overlapping mine, you rotated the well-pull effortlessly. My

arms followed the motions to no useful purpose. I was sure

my cheeks must have gone cherry red. You were almost a

man now. It had happened to you so suddenly.

You brought up the bucket and poured water into my

pitchers. Then you offered me a cold drink from the cup

hooked to the bucket rim, and there was your boy smile in a

broader, more angular face. I was so nervous, my arms shook

to hold the pitchers. You took one of them and carried it back

with me to the table.

“You’ve grown taller, Ladybird.”

“That’s what Mother says,” I managed to say. “She’s had

to make me a new dress to fit.”



I wanted to die of shame. Mentioning the fit of my dress

to any young man, and worse, to you!

I floundered for rescue. “She . . . made me do a great deal

of the stitching myself.”

You glanced sideways at my gray dress, then up at me.

“Looks like you’ve made a handy job of it.”

We reached the table and set the water down. Maria

Johnson saw you and twined her bonnet strings between her

thumb and finger.

“Dinner’s not for an hour yet, Mr. Whiting, so you’ll have

to come back then,” she said. “We can see you’re working up

an appetite.”

Your gaze lingered on Maria’s dark curls poking out from

under her starched white bonnet. Then you tipped your

broad hat at all the girls and strode off to the log-pull. Maria

and Eunice both watched you go. I let out a long breath and

leaned against the rough-hewn wall of the Aldruses’ new

home. Lottie caught my eye and smiled, and I sighed in great

relief.

I knew then that you were not her fella.

That was the last conversation you and I had, and the last

time I saw Lottie smile.

VIII.

The first red leaves appear on the maples. The morning air

is cool.

I sit in the willow’s branches and watch the chipmunks

hard at work. A squirrel on a limb just above scolds me,

showing teeth. He waits as if he expects an answer.



Golden light flickers through the pale leaves. In every bit

of beauty, I see you.

You have your mother’s face. Your father’s strength, but

your mother’s face, made masculine and brown.

I remember her. So pretty, she made young girls jealous.

So gentle, old women scolded her for it. So lonely, she suc-

cumbed to the dark-haired traveler your family boarded for

a fortnight, and followed him on his journey west.

Reverend Frye preached the seventh commandment for

half a year after that.

Reverend Frye never could take his eyes off her, either.

IX.

You miss your mother. Her loss made you older overnight,

and the lines have never left your face.

There was one who took her leaving worse, and he is your

greater tragedy.

X.

He never felt like your father to me. I knew he was, of course,

yet never believed it. I never saw the cords of blood binding

his flesh to yours. There were only cords of madness stran-

gling him.

Your father died the night the town believed he did, and

my captor was born from his ashes. Two men, not alike,

strangers to each other.

XI.

The morning after the logrolling, I found something tucked



in a wedge of branches in my willow tree. It was a bunch of

posies, tied together with a wheat straw.

I ran home with them, brimming with delicious hope,

imagining you in every kind of girlish dream.

I knew exactly what those flowers meant to you.

They weren’t the first posies you’d brought me there.

I tried to imagine what I’d do when I saw you next, what I

wouldn’t say, and would; how I’d let you know without say-

ing so that I cherished your gift.

Two years would pass before I’d get my chance, and by

then, there was nothing left to say.

XII.

Lookout duty is yours tonight, so your bed will lie cold while

you sit in a cabin perched on a hillside miles away and watch

the sea. Clouds and storms you’ll see, for the ocean is a rest-

less neighbor, but it is the threat of lights by night and sails

by day that takes farmers from their fields and beds. The

homelanders will not forget the welcome we gave their first

expedition when their ships found our river, and they looked

upon our farms with lustful eyes. Long years we’ve braced

ourselves for their angry retribution.

I’ll sleep poorly knowing you’re so far down the track and

suffering to stay awake.

This is the silent price of vigilance.

At least you’ll have Jip to keep you company.

XIII.

Darrel will have no more of schooling, he said when he came

home this afternoon. The new schoolmaster’s tedious, and



he’s introducing Latin. What use is Latin? If English is good

enough for the Bible, it’s good enough for Darrel. So reasons

my brother, the philosopher, and he cracks his slate over the

hearth to clinch his argument.

Man of the house, he calls himself! The orator dreams

of soldiering. He takes Father’s pistol to train his aim on

rabbits. The rabbits need not fear, but Darrel would fear for

his own hide if he had any sense.

Father wouldn’t have stood for Darrel leaving school—

and Darrel head of his class, no less!—but Father isn’t here

anymore, and Mother needs an extra hand at harvesting.

Father wouldn’t have liked to see us earn our living brew-

ing spirits, either.

XIV.

I kneel in the garden to pull the beets. They burst free on the

first tug, fat and voluptuous, and my basket soon fills. I shake

the beets in clumps and dirt rains down.

Father loved this soil. Mother was the only thing he loved

more, and he loved her fiercely. He made this farm fruitful

and beautiful. While he lived, few farmers in Roswell Station

were as admired.

I feel closest to my father when my arms are caked with

good brown earth. And so I stay to help my mother, as he

would want me to.

XV.

You were not in search of an ox team when you sought to

visit Mr. Johnson. You had a deeper favor to ask.

I heard Maria talking to Eunice Robinson at the well on



the green. They all forget that I have ears. Or they don’t care.

Maria boasts, but her eyes don’t.

You will marry her at the next full moon.

XVI.

Are you proud to wed the village prize? Satisfied to beat out

Leon Cartwright and Jud Mathis?

Do you do this for love, or money? To erase the stain of

your father’s fall?

Or to be rid of me?

XVII.

I flee to my rock in the woods, the place where Father and I

would go to sing. I watch the sun set, the slim moon rise and

fall.

Mother will murder me.

You are to marry.

Night is cold, like the river, who beckons me with her song.

I came back from two years with him as if from the grave,

to a new day among the living, and thought myself happy

to return. But the night and the cold, the dark and dead feel

more like home to me now.

Only the thought of you dispels my darkness. You are the

sun in my world, and how can I endure to watch you set into

another woman’s arms?

XVIII.

Come morning, I enter the house and Mother slaps me so

hard even Darrel pities me.

“You of all people should know better than this,” she says.


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Chapter 1

“You stop fearing the Devil when you’re holding his hand.”

Freddie said this to me, when I was little.Everyone called my grandmother by her nickname,

even my parents, because, as she put it, Freddie, short for Fredrikke was her name. Not Mother, or Grandmother. Just Freddie.

Then she asked me if I loved my brother.“Luke is a damn bully,” I said.I remember I was staring at the pink marble of the

grand old staircase as we walked up together. There were black veins running through it, and they looked like the blue varicose veins on Freddie’s white legs. I remember thinking that the staircase must be getting old, like her.

BetweentheDevilandtheDeepBlueSea_FnlPa3Rev.indd 3 5/1/13 4:06 PM

4

“Don’t say damn, Violet.”“You say damn.” And she did, too. All the time. “Luke

pushed me down this damn staircase once,” I said, still looking at the marble steps. The fall didn’t kill me, if that’s what he’d wanted, but I knocked out two teeth and got a gash in my forehead that bled like hell. “I don’t love my brother,” I said. “And I don’t care what the Devil thinks about it. It’s the truth.”

Freddie gave me a sharp look then, her Dutch eyes a bright, bright blue despite her age. She had given me those blue eyes, and her blond hair as well.

Freddie put her wrinkled hands on mine. “There’s truths and then there’s truths, Violet. And some damn truths shouldn’t be spoken out loud, or the Devil will hear, and then he’ll come for you. Amen.”

When Freddie was young, she used to wear fur and attend parties and drink cocktails and sponsor artists. She’d told me wild stories, full of booze and broads and boys and trouble.

But something happened. Something Freddie never talked about. Something bad. Lots of people have bad sto-ries, and if they wail and sob and tell their story to anyone who’ll listen, it’s crap. Or half crap, at least. The stuff that really hurts people, the stuff that almost breaks them . . . that they won’t talk about. Ever.


5

I caught Freddie writing sometimes, late at night, fast and hard—so hard, I heard the paper tearing underneath her pen . . . but whether it was a diary or letters to friends, I didn’t know.

Maybe it was her daughter drowning so young that made my grandmother turn righteous and religious. Maybe it was something else. Whatever had happened, Freddie went looking to fill the hole that was left. And what she found was God. God, and the Devil. Because one didn’t exist without the other.

Freddie talked about the Devil all the time, almost as if he was her best friend, or an old lover. But for all her Devil talk, I never saw Freddie pray.

I prayed, though.To Freddie. After she died. I’d done it so often over the

past five years that it had become unconscious, like blow-ing on soup when it’s too hot. I prayed to Freddie about my parents being gone. And about the money running out. And being so lonely sometimes that the damn sea wind howling through my window felt closer to me than the brother I had upstairs.

And I prayed to Freddie about the Devil. I asked her to keep my hand out of his. I asked her to keep me safe from evil.

But, for all my praying, the Devil still found me.


Chapter 2

I lived with my twin brother, Luke. And that’s it. We were only seventeen, and it was illegal to be living

alone, but no one did anything about it.Our parents were artists. John and Joelie Iris White.

Painters. They loved us, but they loved art more. They’d gone to Europe last fall, looking for muses in cafés and castles . . . and blowing through the last bit of the family wealth. I hoped they would come home soon, if for no other reason than I wanted there to be enough money left for me to go to a good university. Someplace pretty, with green lawns, and white columns, and cavernous libraries, and professors with elbow patches.

But I wasn’t counting on it.My great-grandparents had been East Coast industri-


7

alists, and they made loads of cash when they were really damn young. They invested in railroads and manufactur-ing—things that everyone was excited about back then. And they handed down all the money to a grandpa I never got to meet.

Freddie and my grandfather had been about the richest people in Echo in their day, as much as being the “est” of anything in Echo mattered. Freddie told me the Glen-ships had been wealthier, but rich was rich, in my mind. Grandpa built a big house right on the edge of a cliff above the crashing waves. He married my wild grandmother, and brought her to live with him and have his babies on the edge of the Atlantic.

Our home was dignified and elegant and great and beautiful.

And also wind-bitten and salt-stained and overgrown and neglected —like an aging ballerina who looked young and supple from far away, but up close had gray at her temples and lines by her eyes and a scar on one cheek.

Freddie called our house Citizen Kane, after the old film with its perfectly framed shots and Orson Welles strutting around and talking in a deep voice. But I thought it was a depressing movie, mostly. Hopeless. Besides, the house was built in 1929, and Citizen Kane didn’t come out until 1941, which meant that Freddie took years to think of a


8

name. Maybe she saw the movie and it meant something to her. I don’t know. No one really knew why Freddie did anything, most of the time. Not even me.

Freddie and my grandfather lived in the Citizen until they died. And after our parents went to Europe, I moved into Freddie’s old bedroom on the second floor. I left everything the way it was. I didn’t even take her dresses out of the walk-in closet.

I loved my bedroom . . . the vanity with the warped mirror, the squat chairs without armrests, the elaborate, oriental dressing screen. I loved curving my body into the velvet sofa, books piled at my feet, the dusty, floor-length curtains pushed back from the windows so I could see the sky. At night the purple-fringed lampshades turned the light a hue somewhere between lilac and dusky plum.

Luke’s bedroom was on the third floor. And I think we both liked having the space between us.

That summer, Luke and I finally ran out of the money our parents had given us when they’d left for Europe all those months ago. Citizen Kane needed a new roof because the ocean wind beat the hell out it, and Luke and I needed food. So I had the brilliant idea to rent out the guesthouse. Yes, the Citizen had a guesthouse, left over from the days when Freddie sponsored starving art-ists. They would move in for a few months, paint her, and


9

then move on to the next town, the next wealthy person, the next gin bottle.

I put up posters in Echo, advertising a guesthouse for rent, and thought nothing would come of it.

But something did.It was an early June day with a balmy breeze that felt

like summer slapping spring. The salt from the sea was thick in the air. I sat on the fat front steps, facing the road that ran along the great big blue. Two stone columns framed the large front door, and the steps spilled down between them. From where I sat, our tangled, forgotten lawn sprawled out to the unpaved road. Beyond it was a sheer drop, ending in pounding waves.

So I was sitting there, taking turns reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories and watching the sky blurring into the far-off waves, when a new-old car turned up my road, went past Sunshine’s house, and pulled into my cir-cular driveway. I say old, because it was from the 1950s, all big and pretty and looking like really bad gas mileage, but it was fixed up as if it was fresh-off-the-block new, and shiny as a kid’s face on Christmas.

The car came to a stop. A boy got out. He was about the same age as me, but still, I couldn’t really call him a man. So yeah, a boy. A boy got out of the car, and looked straight at me as if I had called out his name.


10

But I hadn’t. He didn’t know me. And I didn’t know him. He was not tall—less than six feet, maybe—and he was strong, and lean. He had thick, dark brown hair, which was wavy and parted at the side . . . until the sea wind lifted it and blew it across his forehead and tangled it all up. I liked his face on sight. And his tan, been-in-the-summer-sun-every-day skin. And his brown eyes.

He looked at me, and I looked back.“Are you Violet?” he asked, and didn’t wait for my

answer. “Yeah, I think you are. I’m River. River West.” He swept his hand through the air in front of him. “And this must be Citizen Kane.”

He was looking at my house, so I tilted my head and looked at my house too. In my memory, it was gleam-ing white stone columns and robin’s egg blue trim around the big square windows, and manicured shrubbery and tastefully nude statues in the center of the front fountain. But the fountain I saw now was mossy and dirty, with one nose, one breast, and three fingers broken and missing from its poor, undressed girls. The bright blue paint had turned gray and was chipping off the frames. The shrub-bery was a feral, eight-foot-tall jungle.

I wasn’t embarrassed by the Citizen, because it was still a damn amazing house, but now I wondered if I should have trimmed the bushes down, maybe. Or scrubbed


11

up the naked fountain girls. Or re-painted the window frames.

“It’s kind of a big place for one blond-haired, book-reading girl,” the boy in front of me said, after a long minute of house-looking from the both of us. “Are you alone? Or are your parents around here somewhere?”

I shut my book and got to my feet. “My parents are in Europe.” I paused. “Where are your parents?”

He smiled. “Touché.”Our town was small enough that I never developed a

healthy fear of strangers. To me, they were exciting things, gift-wrapped and full of possibilities, the sweet smell of somewhere else wafting from them like perfume. And so River West, stranger, didn’t stir in me any sort of fear . . . only a rush of excitement, like how I felt right before a really big storm hit, when the air crackled with expecta-tion.

I smiled back. “I live here with my twin brother, Luke. He keeps to the third floor, mostly. When I’m lucky.” I glanced up, but the third-floor windows were blocked by the portico roof. I looked back at the boy. “So how did you know my name?”

“I saw it on the posters in town, stupid,” River said, and smiled. “Guesthouse for rent. See Violet at Citizen Kane. I asked around and some locals directed me here.”


12

He didn’t say “stupid” like how Luke said it, blinking at me with narrow eyes and a condescending smile. River said it like it was an . . . endearment. Which threw me, sort of. I slipped the sandal off my right foot and tapped my toes on the stone step, making my yellow skirt swing against my knees. “So . . . you want to rent the guest-house?”

“Yep.” River put an elbow out and leaned onto his shiny car. He wore black linen pants—the kind I thought only stubble-jawed Spanish men wore in European movies set by the sea—and a white button-down shirt. It might have looked strange on someone else. But it suited him all right.

“Okay. I need the first month’s rent in cash.”He nodded and reached into his back pocket. He

pulled out a leather wallet and opened it. There was a thick stack of green inside it. So thick that, after he counted out the money he needed, he could barely close the wallet again. River West walked up to me, grabbed my hand, and pressed five hundred dollars into my palm.

“Don’t you even want to see the place first?” I asked, not taking my eyes off the green paper. I let my fingers close down on it, tight.

“No.”I grinned. River grinned back at me, and I noticed that

his nose was straight and his mouth was crooked. I liked


13

it. I watched him swagger, yes swagger, with panther hips, over to the trunk of his car, where he pulled out a cou-ple of old-fashioned suitcases, the kind with buckles and straps instead of zippers. I slipped my sandal back onto my right foot and started down the narrow, overgrown path through the bushes, past all the ivy-covered windows, past the plain wooden garage, to the back of Citizen Kane.

I looked behind me, just once. He was following.I led him beyond the crumbling tennis court and the

old greenhouse. They looked worse every time I saw them. Things had gone to hell since Freddie died, and it wasn’t just about our lack of cash. Freddie had kept things up without money somehow. She’d been tireless, fixing things all on her own, teaching herself rudimentary plumbing and carpentry, dusting, sweeping, cleaning, day in day out. But not us. We did nothing. Nothing but paint. Canvases, that is, not walls or fences or window frames.

Dad said that kind of painting was for Tom Sawyer and other unwashed orphans. I hadn’t been sure if he was kid-ding. Probably not.

The tennis court had bright green grass breaking through the cement floor, and the nets were crumpled on the ground and covered with leaves. Who had last played tennis there? I couldn’t remember. The greenhouse’s glass roof had caved in too—broken shards were still on the


14

ground, and exotic plants in shades of blue and green and white grew up the building’s beams and stretched out into the sky. I used to go there to read sometimes. I had many secret reading spots around the Citizen. They’d been painting spots, back before I’d quit painting.

We slowed as we neared the guesthouse. It was a two-bedroom red brick building covered in ivy, like everything else. It had decent plumbing and twitchy electricity, and it stood at a right angle to the Citizen. If the ocean was a mouth, then the Citizen would be the wide white nose; the guesthouse, the right eye; the ratty old maze, the left eye; and the tennis courts and the greenhouse two moles high on the right cheekbone.

We both went inside and looked around. It was dusty, but it was also cozy and sort of sweet. It had a wide-open kitchen, and chipped teacups in yellow cupboards, and church bazaar patchwork blankets on art deco furniture, and no phone.

Luke and I had run out of money to pay the phone bill months ago, so we didn’t have a working phone at the Citizen, either. Which is why I hadn’t put a phone number on the poster.

I couldn’t remember the last person who had stayed in the guesthouse. Some bohemian friends of my parents, long ago. There were dried-out tubes of oil paint lying


15

on windowsills and paintbrushes still in the sink, where they’d been rinsed and then forgotten about. My parents had a studio on the other side of the maze, called the shed, and had always done their art things in there. It was full of half-finished canvases, and it smelled of turpentine—a smell I found both comforting and irritating.

I grabbed the paintbrushes as I walked by, planning to throw them out, but the bristles that hit my palm were damp. So they didn’t belong to old friends of my parents. They’d been used recently.

I noticed River watching me. He didn’t say anything. I set the brushes back down where I’d found them and walked into the main bedroom, moving back so River could throw his suitcases on the bed. I had always liked this room, with the red walls faded almost to pink, and the yellow-and-white-striped curtains. River glanced around and took everything in with his fast brown eyes. He went to the dresser, opened the top drawer, looked in it, and closed it again. He moved to the other side of the room, pushed back the curtains, and opened the two windows to the sea.

A burst of bright, salty ocean air flooded in, and I breathed deep. So did River, his chest flaring out so I could see his ribs press against his shirt.

The guesthouse was farther away from the ocean than


16

the Citizen, but you could still see a thick line of blue-blue-blue through the window. I noticed some big ship, far off on the horizon, and wondered where it was going to, or coming from. Usually, I wanted to be on those ships, sailing away to some place cold and exotic. But that itchy, gypsy feeling wasn’t in me right then.

River went over to the bed, reached up, and took down the black wooden cross that hung above the pillows. He brought it to the dresser, opened the top drawer, set the cross inside, and bumped it closed with his hip.

“My grandfather built Citizen Kane,” I said, “but my grandma Freddie built this cottage. She got religious later on in life.” My eyes were fixed on the dark red shape left on the wall, where the cross had shielded the paint from the fading effects of sunshine. “She probably hung that cross up there decades ago and it’s been there ever since. Are you an atheist? Is that why you took it down? I’m curious. Hence the question.”

I flinched. Hence? My habit of reading more than I socialized made me use odd, awkward words without thinking.

River didn’t seem to notice. And by that, I mean he seemed to be noticing everything about me, and every-thing about the room, so that I couldn’t tell if he noticed my use of hence more than anything else.


17

“No, I’m not an atheist. I’m just somebody who doesn’t like to sleep with a cross over his head.” He looked at me again. “So, what are you . . . seventeen?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Good guess. Because my brother says I still look about twelve.”

“We’re the same age, then.” A pause. “My parents went down to South America a few weeks ago. They’re archeol-ogists. They sent me here in the meantime. I have an uncle who lives in Echo. But I didn’t want to stay with him. So I found your poster and here I am. Sort of strange that both our parents took off and left us, don’t you think?”

I nodded. I wanted to ask him who his uncle was. I wanted to ask him where he came from, and how long he was going to stay in my guesthouse. But he stood there and looked at me in such a way and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

“So where’s this brother of yours?” River brought his fingers up to his hair and gave it a good shake. I stared at him, and his tousled hair, until he stared back at me. And then I stopped.

“He’s in town. You’ll have to meet him later. And I wouldn’t get too excited. He’s not as nice as me.” Luke had walked into Echo after breakfast, intending to track down this girl he knew, and try to grope her in broad daylight at the café where she worked.


18

I pointed out the window. “If you want to walk into town to get groceries, there’s a path that starts back by the apple trees, behind the maze. It hooks up with the old railroad trail and leads right onto the main street. I mean, you can drive if you want to, because you have a car, but the path is really nice if you like walking. It goes by this old train tunnel . . .”

I started to back out of the bedroom. I was beginning to feel stupid, talking on and on like some dumb girl who opens her mouth and lets all her thoughts fall out of it. And feeling stupid made my cheeks blush. And I had no doubt that this observant boy next to me would observe my cheeks turning red, and probably guess why.

“Oh, and there’s no lock on the front door,” I continued as I sunk into the welcoming semi-darkness of the hall-way and put my hands to my face. “You can get one at the hardware store if you want, but no one will steal anything from here.” I paused. “At least, no one ever has.”

I turned and left without waiting for his reply. I walked out of the guesthouse, past the collapsed greenhouse, past the tennis courts, around the Citizen, down the driveway, down the narrow gravel road to the only other house on my street: Sunshine’s.

I had to tell someone that a panther-hipped boy had come to live in my backyard.


Mila is exceptionally good at solving puzzles. She sees clues that no one else notices—in a photograph, a pair of muddy shoes, an abandoned dog.

When she and her father travel from London to New York in search of their missing friend, Mila pieces together a story that everyone else has overlooked.

But as the truth begins to emerge, she discovers more than she wants to know about the one person she trusts most.

DATE: 05/23/14

DESIGNER: KS EDITOR: KG PASS: FINAL INT PAGE COUNT: 256

TITLE: PICTURE ME GONE 5.5 × 8.25 SPINE: 0.6875

SPEAKwww.penguin.com/teens

PUFFIN LOGO 2004

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What happens when you ask a questionand don’t want to know the answer?

meg rosoff

meg rosoff

A National Book Award Finalist

“Elegantly written and suspenseful.”—People magazine

“Laugh-out-loud hilariousness.”—Newsday

AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF HOW I LIVE NOW

Look for Meg Rosoff’sTHERE IS NO DOG

www.megrosoff.co.ukCover photographs © 2013 by Getty Images and Thinkstock.com

Cover design by Kristin Smith

Stepback 1/4” Additional Trim

9780147512260_PictureMeGone_CVR.indd 1 6/3/14 10:49 AM

1

one

The first Mila was a dog. A Bedlington terrier. It helps

if you know these things. I’m not at all resentful at being

named after a dog. In fact, I can imagine the scene exactly.

Mila, my father would have said, that’s a nice name. For-

getting where he’d heard it. And then my mother would

remember the dog and ask if he was absolutely sure, and

when he didn’t answer, she would say, OK, then. Mila.

And then, looking at me, think, Mila, my Mila.

I don’t believe in reincarnation. It seems unlikely that

I’ve inherited the soul of my grandfather’s long-dead dog.

But certain traits make me wonder. Was it entirely coinci-

dence that Mila entered my father’s head on the morning

of my birth? Observing his daughter, one minute old, he

thought first of the dog, Mila? Why?

My father and I have been preparing for a journey

PictureMeGone_int_rev_Nov13.indd 1 11/21/13 11:02 AM

2

to New York, to visit his oldest friend. But yesterday his

friend’s wife phoned to say he’d left home.

Left home? Gil asked. What on earth do you mean?

Disappeared, she said. No note. Nothing.

Gil looked confused. Nothing?

You’ll still come? said the wife.

And when Gil was silent for a moment, thinking it

through, she said, Please.

Yes, of course, Gil said, and slowly replaced the phone

in its cradle.

He’ll be back, Gil tells Marieka. He’s just gone off by

himself to think for a while. You know what he’s like.

But why now? My mother is puzzled. When he knew

you were coming? The timing is . . . peculiar.

Gil shrugs. By this time tomorrow he’ll be back. I’m

certain he will.

Marieka makes a doubtful noise but from where I’m

crouched I can’t see her face. What about Mila? she says.

A few things I know: It is Easter holiday and I am out

of school. My mother is working all week in Holland and

I cannot stay at home alone. My father lives inside his

head and it is better for him to have company when he

travels, to keep him on track. The tickets were bought two

months ago.


3

We will both still go.

I enjoy my father’s company and we make a good pair.

Like my namesake, Mila the dog, I have a keen awareness

of where I am and what I’m doing at all times. I am not

given to dreaminess, have something of a terrier’s determi-

nation. If there is something to notice, I will notice it first.

I am good at solving puzzles.

My packing is nearly finished when Marieka comes to

say that she and Gil have decided I should still go. I am

already arranging clues in my head, thinking through the

possibilities, looking for a theory.

I have met my father’s friend sometime in the distant

past but I don’t remember him. He is a legend in our

family for once saving Gil’s life. Without Matthew there

would be no me. For this, I would like to thank him,

though I never really get the chance.

It seems so long ago that we left London. Back then I

was a child.

I am still, technically speaking, a child.


4

two

I know very little about Mila the dog. She belonged to my

grandfather when he was a boy growing up in Lancashire.

Dogs like Mila were kept for ratting, not pets.

I found a dusty old photo of her in an album my father

kept from childhood. Mostly it contains pictures of people

I don’t know. In the photo, the dog has a crouchy stance,

as if she’d rather be running flat out. The person on the

other side of the camera interests me greatly. Perhaps it is

my grandfather, a boy who took enough pride in his ratting

dog to keep a photo of her. Lots of people take pictures

of their dogs now, but did they then? The dog is looking

straight ahead. If it were his dog, wouldn’t it turn to look?

This picture fills me with a deep sense of longing. Sau-

dade, Gil would say. Portuguese. The longing for some-

thing loved and lost, something gone or unattainable.


5

I cannot explain the feeling of sadness I have looking at

this picture. Mila the dog has been dead for eighty years.

Everyone calls my father Gil. Gil’s childhood friend

has walked out of the house he shared with his wife and

baby. No one knows where he went or why. Matthew’s

wife phoned Gil, in case he wanted to change our plans.

In case he’d heard something.

He hadn’t. Not then.

We will take the train to the airport and it is important

to remember our passports. Marieka tells me to take good

care of myself and kisses me. She smiles and asks if I will

be OK and I nod, because I will. She looks in Gil’s direc-

tion and says, Take care of your father, too. She knows I

will take care of him as best I can. Age is not always the

best measure of competence.

The train doors close and we wave good-bye. I settle

down against my father and breathe the smell of his jacket.

He smells of books, ink, old coffee pushed to the back of

the desk and wool, plus a hint of the cologne Marieka

used to buy him; one he hasn’t worn in years. The smell

of his skin is too familiar to describe. It surprised me to

discover that not everyone can identify people by their

smell. Marieka says this makes me half dog at least.

I’ve seen the way dogs sniff people and other dogs on


6

the street or when they return from another place. They

want to put a picture together based on clues: Where

have you been? Were there cats there? Did you eat meat?

So. A wood fire. Mud. Stew.

If I were a dog and smelled books, coffee and ink in

a slightly tweedy wool jacket, I don’t know whether I’d

think, That man translates books. But that is what he does.

I’ve always wondered why humans developed so many

languages. It complicates things. Makes things interesting,

says Gil.

Today, we are going to America, where we won’t need

any extra languages. Gil ruffles my hair but doesn’t actu-

ally notice that I’m sitting beside him. He is deep in a

book translated by a colleague. Occasionally he nods.

My mother plays the violin in an orchestra. Scrape

scrape scrape, she says when it’s time to practice, and

closes the door. Tomorrow she will set off to Holland.

I narrow my eyes and focus on a point in the distance.

I am subtle, quick and loyal. I would have made a good

ratter.

Saudade. I wonder if Gil is feeling that now for his lost

friend. If he is, he is not showing any sign of it.


7

three

Marieka is from Sweden. Gil’s mother was Portuguese-

French. I need diagrams to keep track of all the nation-

alities in my family but I don’t mind. Mongrels are wily

and healthy and don’t suffer displaced hips or premature

madness.

My parents were over forty when they had me but I

don’t think of them as old, any more than they think of

me as young. We are just us.

The fact that Gil’s friend left home exactly when we

were coming to visit is hard to understand. The police

don’t believe he’s been murdered or kidnapped. I can

imagine Gil wandering out the door and forgetting for

a while to come back, but ties to Marieka and me would

draw him home. Perhaps Matthew’s ties are looser.

Despite being best friends, Gil and Matthew haven’t


8

seen each other in eight years. This makes the timing of

his disappearance quite strange. Impolite, at the very least.

I look forward to seeing his wife and starting to under-

stand what happened. Perhaps that’s why Gil decided to

take me along. Did I mention that I’m good at puzzles?

There is no need to double-check the passports; they

are zipped into the inner pocket of my bag, safe, ready to

be presented at check-in. Gil has put his book down and

is gazing at something inside his head.

Where do you think Matthew went? I ask him.

It takes him a few seconds to return to me. He sighs

and places his hand on my knee. I don’t know, sweetheart.

Do you think we’ll find him?

He looks thoughtful and says, Matthew was a wan-

derer, even as a child.

I wait to hear what he says next about his friend, but

he says nothing. Inside his head he is still talking. Whole

sentences flash across his eyes. I can’t read them.

What? I say.

What, what? But he smiles.

What are you thinking?

Nothing important. About my childhood. I knew Mat-

thew as well as I knew myself. When I think of him he

still looks like a boy, even though he’s quite old.


9

He’s the same age as you I say, a little huffily.

Yes. He laughs, and pulls me close.

Here is the story from Gil’s past:

He and Matthew are twenty-two, hitchhiking to France

in the back of a truck with hardly any money. Then across

France to Switzerland, to climb the Lauteraarhorn. Of the

two, Matthew is the serious climber. It all goes according

to plan until, on the second day, the temperature begins

to rise. Avalanche weather. They watch the snow and ice

thunder down around them. Mist descends toward eve-

ning, wrapping the mountain like a cloak. They burrow

in, hoping the weather will change. Around midnight,

the wind picks up and the rain turns to snow.

I’ve tried to imagine the scene hundreds of times. The

first problem—exposure; the second—altitude. In the

dead of night, in the dark and cold and wind and snow,

Matthew notices the first signs of sickness in his friend

and insists they descend. Gil refuses. Time passes. Head

pounding, dizzy and irrational, Gil shouts, pushes Mat-

thew off him. When at last he slumps, exhausted by the

effort and the thin air, all he wants is to sit down and

sleep in the snow. To die.

Over the next eleven hours, Matthew cajoles and drags

and walks and talks him down the mountain. Over and


10

over he tells Gil that you don’t lie down in the snow. You

keep going, no matter what.

They reach safety and Gil swears never to climb again.

And Matthew?

He was in love with it, says Gil.

He saved your life.

Gil nods.

We both fall silent, and I think, And yet.

And yet. Gil’s life would not have needed saving if it

hadn’t been for Matthew.

The risk-taker and his riskee.

When I think of the way this trip has turned out, I

wonder if we’ve been summoned for some sort of cos-

mic leveling, to help Matthew this time, the one who has

never before required saving.

Perhaps we have been called in to balance out the flow

of energy in the universe.

We reach the airport. Gil picks up my bag and his, and

we leave the train. As the escalator carries us up, a text

pings on to his phone.

My father is no good at texts, so he hands it to me and

I show him: Still nothing it says, and is signed Suzanne.

Matthew’s wife.

We look at each other.


11

Come on, he says, piling our bags onto a cart, and

off we trot for what feels like miles to the terminal. At

the check-in I ask for a window seat. Gil isn’t fussy. We

answer the questions about bombs and sharp objects,

rummage through our carry-on bags for liquids, take our

boarding passes and join the long snake through interna-

tional departures. I pass the time watching other people,

guessing their nationalities and relationships. American

faces, I note, look unguarded. Does this make them more,

or less approachable? I don’t know yet.

Gil buys a newspaper and a bottle of whisky from duty-

free and we go to the gate. As we board the plane I’m still

thinking about that night on the mountain. What does

it take to half drag, half carry a disorientated man the

size of Gil, hour after hour, through freezing snow and

darkness?

He may have other faults, this friend of Gil’s, but he is

not short of determination.


12

four

Suzanne meets us at international arrivals in New York.

We are tired and crumpled. She spots Gil while he is try-

ing to get his phone to work, and I nudge him and point.

She’s not old but looks pinched, as if someone has for-

gotten to water her. There is a buggy beside her and in it

a child sleeps, despite all the bustle and noise. His arms

stick out sideways in his padded suit. He wears a blue

striped hat.

Gil kisses her and says, It’s been too long. He peers

down at the child. Hello, he says.

This is Gabriel, says Suzanne.

Hello, Gabriel, Gil says.

Gabriel squeezes his eyes together but doesn’t wake up.

And Mila, says Suzanne. You’ve changed so much.

She means that I’ve changed since I was four years old,


13

when we last came to visit. That’s when I met Gabriel’s

older brother, Owen. He was seven and I don’t remember

much about him, though we are holding hands in the one

photo Gil has of us.

I touch the side of my finger to Gabriel’s fist and he

opens it and grabs on to me, still asleep. His grip is strong.

I’m sorry it’s turned out like this, she says, and shakes

her head. Not much fun for you. She turns to Gil. Come

on. We can talk in the car.

The car is noisy and they speak in low voices so I can’t

catch most of what they’re saying. Gabriel’s in the back

with me, fast asleep in his car seat. Occasionally he opens

his eyes or stretches out a hand or kicks his feet, but he

doesn’t wake up. I make him grab on to my finger again

and hear Suzanne say, Well, I hope you’ve made the right

decision. She says it in a way that suggests he hasn’t made

the right decision at all, and I’m sure she’s talking about

bringing me along.

It has started to rain.

I fall asleep in the car to the rhythmic whoosh of wind-

screen wipers and the low buzz of Gil and Suzanne talking.

Normally I’d be tuning in to hear what they’re saying, but

I’m too tired to care. Gabriel still hangs on to my finger.

When I awake it’s dark. The road is narrow and quiet,


14

nearly deserted; the rain has stopped. I say nothing at

all, just look out of the window at the woods hoping to

see a deer or a bear peering at me. Gil and Suzanne have

stopped talking and the car is filled with private thoughts.

Suzanne’s are surprisingly clear; Gil’s muffled and soft.

Gil will be thinking about Matthew. It’s a puzzle in his

head and Suzanne’s and mine. Where has Matthew gone?

And why?

Suzanne’s thoughts sound like a CD skipping. Damn

damn damn damn damn.

What I know already is that Matthew and Suzanne

both teach at the university in town. Matthew disap-

peared five days ago, eight months into the academic

year, fourteen months after Gabriel was born. He took

nothing with him, not a change of clothing or a pass-

port or any money. Just left for work in the morning, said

good-bye as usual and never showed up to teach his class.

The actual running away does not strike me as par-

ticularly strange. Most of us are held in place by a kind of

centrifugal force. If for some reason the force stopped, we

might all fly off in different directions. But what about

the not coming back? Staying away is frightening and

painful. And who would leave a baby? Even to me this

seems extreme, a failure of love.


15

I think hard. What would make it feel like the only

thing to do?

Here are the things I come up with:

(A) Desperation (about what?)

(B) Fear (of what?)

(C) Anger (why?)

I know hardly anything about Matthew and Suzanne.

I will try to find out what is what when we arrive. There

are always answers. Sometimes the right answer turns out

to be

(D) All of the above.


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