Darkfall

lunchboxes.

Standing with her back to the whirl of activity, stripping off her gloves and then pulling off her long woolen scarf, Penny noticed that the door of her tall, narrow, metal locker was dented at the bottom and bent out slightly along one edge, as if someone had been prying at it. On closer inspection, she saw the combination lock was broken, too.

Frowning, she opened the door — and jumped back in surprise as an avalanche of paper spilled out at her feet. She had left the contents of her locker in a neat, orderly arrangement. Now, everything was jumbled together in one big mess. Worse than that, every one of her books had been torn apart, the pages ripped free of the bindings; some pages were shredded, too, and some were crumpled. Her yellow, lined tablet had been reduced to a pile of confetti. Her pencils had been broken into small pieces.

Her pocket calculator was smashed.

Several other kids were near enough to see what had tumbled out of her locker. The sight of all that destruction startled and silenced them.

Numb, Penny crouched, reached into the lower section of the locker, pulled out some of the rubbish, until she uncovered her clarinet case. She hadn't taken the instrument home last night because she'd had a long report to write and hadn't had time to practice. The latches on the black case were busted.

She was afraid to look inside.

Sally Wrather, Penny's best friend, stooped beside her. “What happened?”

“I don't know.”

“You didn't do it?”

“Of course not. I… I’m afraid my clarinet is broken.”

“Who'd do something like that? That's downright mean.”

Chris Howe, a sixth-grade boy who was always clowning around and who could, at times, be childish and obnoxious and utterly impossible — but who could cute because he looked a little like Scott Baio — crouched next to Penny. He didn't seem to be aware that something was wrong. He said, “Jeez, Dawson, I never knew you were such a slob.”

Sally said, “She didn't—”

But Chris said, “I'll bet you got a family of big, grody cockroaches in there, Dawson.”

And Sally said, “Oh, blow it out your ears, Chris.”

He gaped at her in surprise because Sally was a petite, almost fragile-looking redhead who was usually very soft-spoken. When it came to standing up for her friends, however, Sally could be a tiger. Chris blinked at her and said, “Huh? What did you say?”

“Go stick your head in the toilet and flush twice,” Sally said. “We don't need your stupid jokes. Somebody trashed Penny's locker. It isn't funny.”

Chris looked at the rubble more closely. “Oh. Hey, I didn't realize. Sorry, Penny.”

Reluctantly, Penny opened the damaged clarinet case. The silver keys had been snapped off. The instrument had also been broken in two.

Sally put a hand on Penny's shoulder.

“Who did it?” Chris asked.

“We don't know,” Sally said.

Penny stared at the clarinet, wanting to cry, not because it was broken (although that was bad enough), but because she wondered if someone had smashed it as a way of telling her she wasn't wanted here.

At Wellton School, she and Davey were the only kids who could boast a policeman for a father. The other children were the offspring of attorneys, doctors, businessmen, dentists, stockbrokers, and advertising executives. Having absorbed certain snobbish attitudes from their parents, there were those in the student body who thought a cop's kids didn't really belong at an expensive private school like Wellton. Fortunately, there weren't many of that kind. Most of the kids didn't care what Jack Dawson did for a living, and there were even a few who thought it was special and exciting and better to be a cop's kid than to have a banker or an accountant for a father.

By now, everyone in the cloakroom realized that something big had happened, and everyone had fallen silent.

Penny stood, turned, and surveyed them.

Had one of the snobs trashed her locker?

She spotted two of the worst offenders — a pair of sixth-grade girls, Sissy Johansen and Cara Wallace — and suddenly she wanted to grab hold of them, shake them, scream in their faces, tell them how it was with her, make them understand.

I didn't ask to come to your damned school. The only reason my dad can afford it is because there was my mother's insurance money and the out-of-court settlement with the hospital that killed her. You think I wanted my mother dead just so I could come to Wellton? Cripes. Holy crimes! You think I wouldn't give up Wellton in a snap if I could only have my mother back? You creepy, snot-eating nerds! Do you think I'm glad my mother's dead, for God's sake? You stupid creeps! What's wrong with you?

But she didn't scream at them.

She didn't cry, either.

She swallowed the lump in her throat. She bit her lip. She kept control of herself, for she was determined not to act like a child.

After a few seconds, she was relieved she hadn't snapped at them, for she began to realize that even Sissy and Cara, snotty as they could be sometimes, were not capable of anything as bold and as vicious as the trashing of her locker and the destruction of her clarinet. No.

It hadn't been Sissy or Cara or any of the other snobs.

But if not them… who?

Chris Howe had remained crouched in front of Penny's locker, pawing through the debris. Now he stood up, holding a fistful of mangled pages from her textbooks. He said, “Hey, look at this. This stuff hasn't just been torn up. A lot of it looks like it's been chewed.”

“Chewed?” Sally Wrather said.

“See the little teeth marks?” Chris asked.

Penny saw them.

“Who would chew up a bunch of books?” Sally asked.

Teeth marks, Penny thought.

“Rats,” Chris said.

Like the punctures in Davey's plastic baseball bat.

“Rats?” Sally said, grimacing. “Oh, ynck.”

Last night. The thing under the bed.

“Rats…”

“… rats…”

“… rats.”

The word swept around the room.

A couple of girls squealed.

Several kids slipped out of the cloakroom to tell the teachers what had happened.

Rats.

But Penny knew it hadn't been a rat that had torn the baseball bat out of her hand. It had been… something else.

Likewise, it hadn't been a rat that had broken her clarinet. Something else.

Something else.

But what?

V

Jack and Rebecca found Nevetski and Blaine downstairs, in Vincent Vastagliano's study. They were going