The Cinderella Hour (3 page)

Snow already wanted her path to cross with Luke’s.

“Why?”

“They’re trouble, Snow. Father
and
son. A woman doesn’t
leave her child without a compelling reason. My guess is Luke’s every bit his
father’s son, as arrogant as Jared—and as mean.”

“Arrogant and mean? How do you know?”

“About Jared? Because the charmers usually are. And his wife
left him, remember? Without a backward glance. Mark my words, Snow. Jared
Kilcannon is not a nice man. And you can bet his son isn’t, either. Pay
attention to me on this. When it comes to men, I’m an expert.”

Snow hadn’t seen Luke since that
day, a week ago, when he walked by. She hadn’t even seen him emerge from the
woods later that afternoon. Had he stayed until nightfall? Had something
happened to him?

No, she told herself. There would have been a search. Mrs.
Evans and Mr. Kilcannon would have sounded the alarm.

Snow chose Christmas afternoon to explore the ravine. Luke
would be doing something Christmassy with his father, and Leigh was in her
bedroom talking on the phone with someone she met at a reception.

Snow didn’t listen to Leigh’s words, but she heard her mother’s
tone. There had been nastiness, at times, toward the men who called for
Scarlett, Melanie, and Tara. But Leigh was never nasty to her male callers in
Quail Ridge.

Snow grabbed a handful of Mrs. Evans’s cookies before
venturing out into the falling snow.

Neighborhood children frolicked in the distance. Snow could
have joined the fun.

But this was her chance to explore the ravine.

She understood why Luke came here, she thought as she slid
down its snowy slope. And why he remained after dark. The woods felt safe, not
scary, and warm—a pine-scented cocoon of heat despite the chilly day.

There was a brightness, too, as if snow crystals were like
diamonds, alight with the inner fire she had heard Leigh describe.

Or maybe the forest was enchanted. Once she entertained the
notion, Snow felt certain it was true. She believed in enchanted places and
that she was as likely as anyone to come upon one. She had read about ordinary
girls being caught up in extraordinary adventures.

Scarlett O’Hara might be Leigh’s favorite heroine.

Wendy Darling was Snow’s. She loved the story of the girl who
sewed Peter Pan’s missing shadow back in place and then flew with him to
Neverland.

Here was her own Neverland. Luke’s Neverland. Its snowflakes
were fairies, not diamonds, an infinity of Tinkerbells.

No Captain Hook would terrorize this Neverland. And there
would be no ticking crocodiles. Snow couldn’t imagine danger here—until she was
forced to imagine it by the horrible sound.

It was such an alien sound in this place. In any place. No
living creature should have to endure such pain, and what kind of monster would
inflict it?

Snow ran toward the sound, her only concern to end the
torment. The forest became foe, not friend. She tripped over fallen branches,
lost her footing in the snow.

She could go for help. She needed merely to retrace her
footsteps—which couldn’t be retraced. Like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumb path,
her trail was gone, obliterated by snow.

You could get lost in the ravine, Mrs. Evans had warned. And
never be found.

The memory came too late. She was already lost, committed to
her mission, and just ahead, in a clearing in the forest, stood Luke.

Luke . . . who was monster and victim in one.

And the rhythmic sound? Snowballs battering a tree. There was
no joy in Luke’s scooping of snow, packing it into a ball, and hurling it as
hard as he could. He wasn’t envisioning a future World Series with himself as
its star.

Punishment, not joy, traveled with every powerful throw.
Punishment for himself, the snow, the tree.

Yet, despite the torment, Snow saw grace. It was familiar. A
ballet she had seen on TV, perhaps. No, that wasn’t right. It was something
else, something horrible, a disturbing movie about slaves.

The setting was ancient Egypt, not the Civil War. The slaves
were building a tomb for a pharaoh, their toiling bodies whipped and whipped as
they lugged stone upon stone up the pyramid walls.

“Stop it!”

He spun, and lest there be any doubt that Leigh’s assessment
of the Kilcannon son was absolutely correct, an expression of pure arrogance
greeted Snow. The woods were his. No trespassing allowed.

Luke Kilcannon was mean as well. His voice was. “Who the hell
are you?”

“You swore!” The words, vestiges of the mother-daughter game,
were reflexive—and regretted before Luke’s lips curved into a disdainful snarl.
Snow had programmed herself to call foul whenever she heard “hell,” and now
Luke thought she was an idiot. He wasn’t her Peter, and she wasn’t his Wendy.
He hadn’t invited her to join him in his enchanted world. But it bothered her
that he would think she was a dumb little kid. Snow was tempted to recite Leigh’s
entire list of verboten words. She had memorized it, in the order she had transcribed
it, the same order the words had popped into Leigh’s head. But who knew what
meaning there might be when words she didn’t comprehend were strung together in
a sentence?
Who
knew? Something in his green eyes said Luke would
understand every dirty word. He would even know, and understand,
sex
.
Snow stood her ground, met his snarl. “Who the hell are
you?”

A faint smile touched his arrogant face. “Luke.”

“Pleased to meet you, I’m sure. I’m Snow.”

“Snow?” Luke squeezed a snowball in his fist, shattering its crystals,
dousing their fire. “What kind of name is that?”

“A romantic one.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes. Do you want to know why?”

She was sure he would decline. She saw “No” coming to his
lips as reflexively as “You swore!” had come to hers. At the last instant, he
surprised them both. “Why not?”

“Okay, then. It was snowing when my parents . . . made me. My
daddy died before I was born. He was a brave policeman. He loved the snow.”
That was what Leigh had told her. All she had told her. But Snow added
something she had always believed. “He loved my mother, and he would have loved
me, and he really
would have loved my name.”

“How old are you, Snow?”

She didn’t answer. The way he said her name this time, as if
he understood how beautiful and important it was, took her breath away.

She couldn’t speak, but she could move. She was at the edge
of the clearing, protected from the falling snow by pine-scented limbs. Luke
was at its center. She wanted to be where he was. Inside the snow globe, too.

She stopped an arm’s length away. His arm, not hers. “I’ll be
nine on Valentine’s Day.”

“Congratulations. Happy Birthday. Go away.”

She felt the snowflakes melting on her face. “Why were you
hurting the tree?”

And she saw the snowflakes melting on his. “I wasn’t.”

“Hurting the snow, then.”
Hurting yourself.

“I don’t hurt things, Snow.”

“Oh. Well. That’s good. Neither do I. Do you want a cookie?”

“Don’t you want it?”

“No. I have a bunch. You can have them all. I just brought
them in case I got lost and needed food until I found my way out.”

“Or until you were rescued.”

Her shrug sent snowflakes from her small shoulders onto the
ground.

“I think I’d have to find my own way out.” She dug in her
parka pocket and handed him the fistful of cookies. “Now you can show me.”

Snow bribed him with food that
first day. The girl with cookies, the starving boy. What beckoned him after
that, what bribed his heart, was the girl herself.

He was starving for her friendship, her fairy tales,
her
.

Theirs was a secret friendship.

Snow wasn’t to cast so much as a fleeting glance at him in
the hallways of Pinewood Elementary. That was how it had to be, Luke said,
without saying why.

Snow didn’t ask him to explain. Secrecy was best for her,
too. Leigh was wrong about Luke. But it would be borrowing trouble to try to
change Leigh’s mind.

Besides, her friendship with Luke was more special this
way—and very difficult. Snow overheard conversations about Luke at school,
opinions voiced by students based on what their parents said. Jared Kilcannon
was a great man, her classmates’ parents agreed. Wasn’t it tragic that he had
such an awful son? No wonder Suzanne Kilcannon left. She must have realized
that being a liar and a thief was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to
Luke’s transgressions. She had discovered him torturing small animals, perhaps,
or setting fires. Maybe the serial killer in the making had even attacked
her
.

The consensus reached at the dinner tables in Quail Ridge was
that Luke’s parents had decided that Jared could handle Luke better on his own and
that for Suzanne’s safety she should leave.

Jared tried to control his wayward son. He even built a
backyard swimming pool for Luke. Like Jared, Luke was a gifted athlete—and
swimmer. But a few weeks before Christmas, as everyone seemed to know, Luke refused
to swim ever again. According to what Jared told another Larken High coach, a
father-son argument ensued, following which Jared drained the pool,
sledgehammered its glass cover, and drilled holes in the bottom for rain to
filter through.

No one had seen the demolished pool. Located behind the
two-story house on Meadow View Drive, it was enclosed by an eight-foot fence.
But it must lie like a glass-filled coffin beneath Luke’s bedroom window, a
symbol that, try as he might, Jared could not manage his delinquent son.

Snow s classmates parroted the contempt they overheard
regarding Luke. And the girls in Luke’s sixth-grade class had assessments of
their own. Luke was
extremely
sexy. They really hoped he would attend
the weekend parties they invited him to, parties when their parents wouldn’t be
around. They would like to be touched by him, kissed by him.

Snow hated the false accusations about her friend. The other
thing they said, that he was sexy, that word bothered her, too.

Snow knew, on faith, that Luke would never hurt an animal. Or
set a fire. Or tell a lie. As for being a thief, or rather
not
being
one, her knowledge was firsthand.

As much as Luke needed money, he didn’t steal. He scavenged
for coins in the parking lots of Quail Ridge and collected cans and bottles to
recycle for cash.

Luke kept his savings in a jar he had found—and hidden—in a
fallen tree trunk. Snow tried to give him the dollar bills she had won during
the mother-daughter “You swore!” game. Luke wouldn’t accept.

Snow gave him food instead. He had confessed his hunger to
her, and its cause. The day he stopped swimming was the day Jared stopped
feeding him. Luke never said what Jared would do to him if he ate any of the
food Jared bought for himself, only that if he wanted to eat he had to find his
own.

School days were easy. His one meal for the day—lunch—was
free. On weekends and holidays, like the Christmas vacation when they met, he
foraged in trash cans at fast-food restaurants and in Dumpsters behind grocery
stores. He had to be careful when he scrounged through garbage. Jared would
ground him if he knew.

Luke resisted dipping into his glass-jar savings to buy food.
But when his body demanded more sustenance than he could find, he bought peanut
butter. That was what Snow gave him. Peanut butter. Jar upon jar.

With her help, both Luke and his savings grew.

“You’re planning to run away,” she said in mid-April as she
watched him add the afternoon’s bounty—eight pennies and a nickel—to the jar.

“I’m planning to walk away.”

Please don’t go!
“When?”

“When I’m old enough to live on my own without people
wondering why.”

“You hate it here that much?”

“I hate parts of it that much.” Luke was looking at the only
part of his life he didn’t hate.

“You hate your father.”

“Yes.”

Snow hated Jared Kilcannon, too. For starving his son. For
making Luke so determined to leave. It wasn’t the starvation that was driving
Luke away. That was recent, and he had been saving pennies for years. “Why,
Luke?”

“I just do, Snow. I’m not going to tell you any more than
that.”

“Is he the reason no one can know about us?”

“That’s right.”

“I understand no one can know. But sometimes, when you haven’t
been at school for days, when you’ve missed all those lunches, I feel like
going to your house to see if you’re all right.”

“You can’t ever come to my house, Snow. I mean it. You can’t
come over, and you can’t call. You have to promise me you won’t.”

“But when I haven’t seen you for days—”