Chapter 10: Redoak Pin

I stood in the doorway and didn't touch anything.

My grandmother had taught me that, the winter someone broke into her kitchen.

Look first. Then breathe in.

I breathed in.

The room smelled of me, and of the stove, and of the cold coming through the window crack.

Under that, faint and wrong, it smelled of coal smoke and gun oil and oak sap.

Somebody had been here who didn't belong in the west wing.

"Wynne?"

Prue came running along the corridor with her shawl half on.

She stopped dead when she saw the drawer.

"No," she said. "No, no, no."

By the time the breakfast bell stopped ringing, half the ten were crowded in the corridor behind her.

News moved through Highmoor faster than the wind did.

"What was taken?" asked a tall clerk from one of the Council families.

"Papers from the annex," I said. "Records I was working on."

"Treaty papers? In your room?"

"Yes."

The clerk turned and looked at Prue.

She didn't say anything at first. She didn't have to.

The others looked too.

"Prue was in this corridor at dawn," said a Lakewood girl. "I saw her from my window. She was trying your door."

Prue's round face went scarlet.

"I was looking for Wynne. I wanted to go to the gate with her."

"And who else knew those papers were in here?" said the clerk. "Who else was in the annex with you every night this week?"

"Everyone heard you two," said the Lakewood girl. "Whispering till all hours. Locking the door."

"Farm packs," someone muttered at the back. "They'll sell anything to anyone."

Prue's chin came up.

Her eyes were wet, and she was furious about it.

I stepped between her and the corridor.

"Prue sat on the annex floor with me for three nights," I said.

"If she wanted those papers gone, she'd have put them in the stove there and saved herself the stairs."

"That's not proof."

"No," I said. "This is."

I pushed my sleeve back and held my wrist up to my face.

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