“No,” I smiled, shaking my head.
“She sees things,” Isidor added.
“So you are a psychic then,” Elizabeth said. “I have no need for one of those.”
“You’re not married because you don’t wear a wedding ring,” I smiled. “That was the easy part. You haven’t removed one or forgotten to put it on as there is no red mark left on your finger. You are, however, in a relationship with a man who either hasn’t shaved for a few days or has a very short beard. He has travelled with you and is probably waiting for you back at your motel.”
“How can you be so sure about that?” Elizabeth asked me, looking startled.
With my fingertip, I tapped my cheek and said, “Miss Clarke, your cheeks have a rather healthy glow, as does your chin. That might be due to exceptionally good health, but the redness to the chin — no that looks more like a rash of some kind — like you’ve been kissing a man recently who hasn’t shaved. He has travelled with you today as you’ve come a long distance and the rash would have faded by now. The spattering of chalk dust on your right sleeve tells me that you have been writing recently on a chalkboard, which suggests that you are a teacher of some kind. The raised pimple of flesh on the middle finger of your right hand tells me that you like to write a lot — more than just the occasional note or two, so I’m guessing your mark a lot of homework.”
“And how do you know that I’ve travelled a long distance today…”
Before she had the chance to finish her question, I said, “By the fact that you needed to refill your car with petrol — you’ve splashed some on your skirt. You would have only come such a long distance if it was a matter of urgency. For instance, a problem with a family member. I’m guessing by the fact that you are staying in a motel that it is a brother or sister who is working in this area. If it had been a parent, you would be staying with them.”
“How can you be so sure that I’m staying at a motel?” Elizabeth asked.
“Because no one would have left their own home on such a wet night dressed like you are now,” I smiled at her. “When you set off today, you had no idea that the weather would be so bad once you got here and you hadn’t packed adequate clothing.”
“Very good,” Elizabeth said staring at me.
“Good?” Kayla gasped, “That was awesome!”
Not wanting to waste any more time, I looked at Elizabeth. “You said in your email that you’ve been pushed. Please explain what you mean by that?”
With the back of her hand, Elizabeth knocked away one of the loose strands of hair and said, “I saw your advert in the shop window and it reminded me of something my sister used to say.”
“Your sister?” I asked her. “And where is your sister now?”
“What makes you think that she has gone somewhere?” Elizabeth shot back.
“You spoke of her in the past tense,” I smiled. “What was her name?”
“Emily,” Elizabeth said, taking a picture from her pocket and sliding it across the table towards me.
I picked it up, glanced at the photo and said, “An identical twin?”
“Yes,” she nodded. “We were identical in more ways than just our looks. Emily, like me, was a teacher. I’ve taught now for the past two years at a school in Linden.”
“Don’t you mean Lond…” Isidor started and I kicked him under the table.
“Please continue, Miss Clarke,” I smiled at her.
“Emily decided against a career in Linden and decided to teach closer to where we were raised in the town of Wood Hill,” Elizabeth continued. “She was so happy when she got herself a position at Ravenwood’s, a nearby private school. The pay was good and she seemed very happy for a time.”
“So what changed all of that?” I asked her, my interest growing in the case on hearing that Elizabeth’s sister had been working at Ravenwood School.
“The wolves came,” Elizabeth said. “As you well know, we all spend most of our teenage years fearing that the wolves would come to our town to match, but obviously like yourselves, we were lucky and the wolves didn’t choose our home town while we grew up. So we escaped the matching. Like everyone else, we heard the stories and the rumours about the schools and the children where the wolves had chosen. That’s one of the reasons that both Emily and I decided to be teachers, we wanted to try and help those children should the wolves ever arrive at the schools where we taught. I think somewhere deep inside the both of us, we both prayed that would never happen. As you know, it has been more than five years since the wolves came to match and this time around they chose the school where Emily taught. We have always been close even though we have lived apart over the last few years,” Elizabeth continued, and I could see tears standing in her eyes as she recalled her sister. “Within days of the wolves arriving at Ravenwood School, the teachers there started to leave.”
“Why?” I asked, curious to know what had taken place there.
“The wolves arrived, but you must understand that they don’t look like wolves, they look just like us humans,” she explained. “They wear the skins of the children that they matched with years ago. They erected searchlights and towers and covered the tops of the walls with razor wire. Emily called me one night and said that Ravenwood was now more like a prison than a school. She told me that some of the parents had tried to break into the school to free their children, they wanted the treaty that had been agreed to hundreds of years ago ripped up.”
“What happened to these parents?” Potter asked, stepping from the corner of the room.
“Emily didn’t say,” she answered him. “I remember one night that she was very upset and I could tell that she had been crying. A pack of juvenile wolves had arrived wanting to be matched. Emily had been close to all of her students but she had a couple of favourites. Both of these had been chosen for matching and she said that they changed — they were no longer the children that she had once taught. Within days they had left and she never saw them again, nor did their parents.”
“How had they changed?” Kayla asked.
“Emily didn’t say,” Elizabeth said, and I watched as a tear spilled from the corner of her eye and rolled down her cheek. “But I knew she was, at times, terrified of what was happening at Ravenwood. Then, she started ringing me and saying that she had started to be plagued by vivid dreams. In these dreams she saw a different world. At first I thought it was just Emily wishing that things could be different, but she became convinced that the world as we know it had been…pushed…somehow. That’s how she described it, Miss Hudson, just like you did in your advert. Emily started to believe that the world had been pushed off course. She told me that the world had once been different. Where there weren’t any wolves — Skin-walkers. She described a world not too dissimilar to the one we know, but it was a world where children weren’t matched.”
“Where is Emily now?” I asked her, wishing that I could speak with her to discover what else she knew.
“She’s vanished,” Elizabeth said, trying to fight off a stream of tears that were desperate to roll down the length of her face.
“Vanished how?” Isidor gently asked her while handing her a piece of tissue.
“Thank you,” she said, mopping away her tears. “I believe she has been murdered.”
“What makes you think that?” Potter cut in.
“Emily told me that the Headmaster of the school just left or disappeared,” Elizabeth explained. “A wolf by the name of McCain took his place. He was a harsh man and he replaced the teachers with people who wore hoods and gowns. Emily told me that you couldn’t see their faces. These new teachers, if that’s what they were, were cruel to the children. Emily said that on several occasions their cruelness was something close to brutal. She went to McCain and objected at what she had witnessed. McCain told her that if she didn’t like how the school was being run, she was free to leave. But Emily couldn’t — she wanted to stay and protect the children, and besides, like most of the other teachers had, she lived on the school grounds, it was her home.
“Then, one night she called me to say that she had woken the night before to find McCain standing in her room, staring down at her while she slept. She asked him what he wanted and what he was doing in her room in the middle of the night, but he left without giving an explanation. Emily said she was now in fear for her own safety and I begged her to leave. But she told me how she had bought herself one of those tiny video cameras. She explained that she was going to try and capture on film some of the cruelty that the children endured at Ravenwood School and then send it to the press. She was also going to hide the camera in her room at night to see what it was that McCain was doing in there while she slept. Emily feared that he had perhaps been into her room before but she hadn’t woken.”
“And did she capture anything on film?” I asked her, now gripped by the story.
“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said, that red rash on her cheeks now gone. “I haven’t heard from Emily since that
