The Bone Flute by Patricia Bow Read Free Book Online

about houses.”
    An hour later, Camrose stood in the cool limestone lobby of the town hall. They kept the archives in the clerk’s office, which was closed on a Saturday, but Mrs. Shoemaker was right, there was something worth seeing here. Just opposite the public washrooms, in a glass case set against the stone wall, was a display called Lynx Landing in Bygone Days , including things like books and photos and yellowed newspaper ads for corsets and draft horses.
    She spotted the house in the hollow right away. The photo was old and brown, but she had no doubt about it. There were the stone lintels with leaf shapes cut into them over the windows. There was the S-shaped door handle and the brass plate across the bottom of the door. Ivy clung to the walls between the windows. The house stood on a smooth green lawn with trees behind it.
    And it had a name, which surprised her. It was the first time she’d ever heard that houses in Canada could have names. “Ennismor,” they called it.
    Next to the picture of the house was a photo of a bearded man in a heavily carved chair with a woman standing behind him, her hand on his shoulder. Two young girls leaned against the chair, one on each side. They wore long white dresses below their knees, their Sunday best, Camrose guessed. All four gazed out at her with water-pale eyes. None was smiling.
    How glum they looked! They couldn’t have known, could they? Of course not. Camrose pushed the thought aside. People in old photos always looked as if getting your picture taken was a terribly serious business.
    A typed label was stuck up under the picture. It said:
    Robert Kilpatrick, his wife Lillian, and daughters Olivia (left) and Gilda. Tragically, Ennismor burned down in 1914, with the entire household except for Gilda, then twelve. Gilda Kilpatrick Ferguson later became Lynx Landing’s longest serving mayor.
    â€œSo that’s what the letter meant,” Camrose muttered as she turned away. “Gilda became the ‘Keeper’ of this heirloom, what–ever that means, when she turned twelve, and then this awful thing happened. And now I’m twelve and she says I’m it .”

9
The truth about Terence
    C amrose kept her eyes open, hoping the crowd at the soccer game would bring the busker, the way it brought the ice cream cart and the Chip Queen truck, but there was no sign of him. She wondered if he’d left town.
    Almost everybody else was there, though. Th ere were no bleachers, but parents and grandparents brought folding lawn chairs and sat along the side lines with pop cans propped askew in the grass and folded newspapers to wave off the gnats and mosquitoes.
    Junior soccer was popular in Lynx Landing. Probably, Camrose thought, because the local team almost always won. One big reason they won, everybody agreed, was the goalie, Mark Shoemaker. The ball never surprised him, and he moved faster than you’d think anybody that solid could move.
    She followed the action with her eyes without really watching. Every few minutes the people around her would jump up and down and yell. In a faraway space inside her head, that buried memory was working its way up through layers of fuzz. Something about Terence … Germany … that phone call …
    Something cold and wet nuzzled her arm. She yelped. Krystal stood there laughing at her, with Nadia giggling beside her, a dripping can of cola in hand.
    â€œOff in dreamland again?” Krystal inquired.
    â€œWhy? What’s happened?”
    â€œMark stopped another goal, that’s all,” Nadia said.
    â€œAnd,” Krystal added sweetly, “best news of all, we’ve just voted you class dork for next year.”
    Any other time that would have had Camrose groping for a cutting answer. This time she just shook her head. Don’t try too hard, she told herself. Let it come by itself. Terence, Aunt Alicia … Dad with his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone, his