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about ballet? Or horses?”
    Her brothers lost interest. They attacked dessert.
    “I may just have to suspend your library privileges,” Mr. Shevvington teased.
    “I’m going to read in bed,” Dolly said, ignoring all suggestions of athletic activity. She hoisted her stack of books slowly, as if eating supper had exhausted her. “I’ve always thought I would make an excellent invalid,” she told the Shevvingtons. “I like bed. I like sheets and pillows. I’d lie there and read. All I need is enough strength to turn the pages.”
    “Perhaps you could have an accident,” said Mrs. Shevvington softly.
    Christina’s blood seemed to stop flowing. Would the Shevvingtons really go that far?
    “I would be very brave,” Dolly agreed.
    Down the length of the kitchen table, the Shevvingtons smiled at each other.

Chapter 6
    W HEN SCHOONER INNE LAY silent in the night, when the snow had stopped and the tide was out, Christina left her bedroom. She crept in the dark around the tilting balcony with its little forest of white railings. Down the bare, slippery stair she tiptoed, hand sliding on the old bent rail.
    Hardly breathing, she paused on the second floor, where the pretty guest rooms and the Shevvingtons’ beautiful master bedroom surrounded the lower balcony. There was no sound.
    The mansion and its inhabitants slept.
    The next set of stairs was carpeted: rich, soft, toe-tickling carpet.
    At the bottom, Christina knelt and put on her boots and jacket. She checked her house keys, zipped them carefully into her side pocket, and slid out of Schooner Inne.
    The night sky was so clear Christina felt she could taste the stars. If she opened her lips and stuck out her tongue, the stars would fall like snowflakes and taste like bitter lemons.
    It was two o’clock in the morning. The village was silent. No cars stirred. No lights were on in houses. Nothing moved but a small thirteen-year-old girl named Christina Romney.
    She walked one block and turned a corner. Her shadow leapt ahead, like a black giant. The only sound was the light crunch of her own boots in the snow.
    Behind her the snow crunched.
    Christina’s heart crunched with it. She spun on the street, whirling to face the crunch. From the cellar? she thought numbly. No, no, it couldn’t have heard me.
    Headlights wheeled around the corner. The faint roof light of a police car twinkled.
    Christina backed into the doorway of the nearest shop.
    A police car was not reassuring when you were planning to break into a building.
    But the police had not seen her. The men in the car looked straight ahead, cruising by in boredom. When they had vanished, Christina crept on in the dark toward her school.
    In the night the school loomed like a monster with square edges: dark and wicked in the moon-tinted snow. She pulled off her ski cap, letting her tri-colored hair fall free. Nobody had hair like Christina. She counted on her silver and gold locks to protect her from the demons of the dark.
    The winter wind bit through Christina’s heavy coat. Who would have thought she would start the second semester with breaking and entering?
    What if I get caught? Christina thought, flattening herself against an icy brick wall. In the blackness she could not see herself. Her shadow no longer existed: she was a non-person.
    If I get caught, it will be exactly what the Shevvingtons want. But nobody else can stop the Shevvingtons. “Maybe you could have an accident,” they had whispered down the table.
    The Shevvingtons had a grip on the adult community like it was a dog on a leash. No parent, no grown-up, no teacher would save Dolly.
    She knew the Shevvingtons well. Other people might rent a movie or read a library book for weekend entertainment, but the Shevvingtons loved to gloat. Somewhere, someplace lay a stack of papers and photographs of all their previous victims.
    Last fall she had believed any incriminating papers would be in the Guidance Office. There had been no papers there,