Hanging by a Thread Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Sophie Littlefield

  Jacket art copyright © 2012 by Weronika Mamot

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Littlefield, Sophie.

  Hanging by a thread / Sophie Littlefield. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When a third person in three years goes missing, presumed dead, July Fourth weekend in Winston, California, sixteen-year-old budding fashion designer Clare Knight uses her gift of seeing visions of people’s pasts while touching their clothing to seek the truth, at risk of her own life.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-98356-6

  [1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Fashion design—Fiction. 3. Psychic ability—Fiction. 4. Missing persons—Fiction. 5. Single-parent families—Fiction. 6. Family life—California—Fiction. 7. California—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.L7359Han 2012

  [Fic]—dc23 2011047773

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For Barbara Poelle

  I couldn’t do it without you—and even if I could,

  it wouldn’t be any fun.

  Acknowledgments

  With many thanks to my editor, Krista Vitola, for turning a lump of ideas into a story and then polishing it to a shine. Thank you, dear family, for carrying on splendidly through one crisis after another so that I could finish my work. My friends: you’re everything to me, never more than this past year.

  And thank you to Maddee James, Web maven and so much more—I can never appreciate you enough.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  THEY SAY OUR HOUSE IS CURSED, and maybe it’s true. It’s been in my mom’s family for almost a hundred years. It was a dress and alterations shop until ten years ago, when my mom and dad poured all their money into restorations so we could live in it. As soon as it was finished, they got divorced and we all moved away. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

  Three weeks ago, my mom and I moved back to town. We were finally getting around to hanging pictures on the walls, and the first one we pulled out of the moving box was of my great-great-grandmother Alma. In the old black-and-white photograph from the 1920s, she’s standing in front of this same house.

  The image is of Alma in her early twenties and very pregnant. She looks pretty in her simple wool serge dress. But she’s overshadowed by the young woman standing next to her, who is wearing a gorgeous wedding gown. Silk voile drapes the bodice and dropped waist, and the Cluny lace veil is accented with small white feather plumes and pearls. If you look carefully, you can detect a darkness, a hint of fear, behind the young woman’s shy smile.

  The day after the picture was taken, both Alma and the young bride were dead.

  I hung the picture while Mom watched, hands on her hips, directing me to move it a little higher, a little to the left. She’s a perfectionist. I’m the creative type. Needless to say, this caused problems in our relationship, but we were treating each other gingerly. The move had caused enough stress already, and we were one sharp word away from a meltdown.

  I wasn’t exactly thrilled about leaving my old high school in the city and coming back to a tiny town where I only had one friend, but I was determined to make the best of it. I’d lived in Winston until I was ten, and I’d kept in touch with my best friend, Rachel, ever since. She’d grown up to be beautiful, popular, and—thanks to her dad’s involvement in several start-up companies that had done well—rich, and she’d promised to get me connected with the in crowd at Winston High.

  This was my big chance to finally fit in. Don’t get me wrong—I’d loved my two years at my private arts high school. It was where I got interested in fashion design, and I’d made some good friends. But I’d had enough of the artistic temperaments competing for attention at the Blake School, enough of the drama and the edginess of the San Francisco art scene. I was tired of sharing a cramped two-bedroom apartment with my mom. I just wanted to know what normal felt like, and a sleepy little beach town with a population of two thousand people seemed like the perfect place to find out.

  My mom wasn’t adapting very well to being back, however. When we’d moved three hours north six years earlier, it was like she decided to put her entire past behind her, not just my dad. She broke contact with all her old friends and threw herself into her new job in the city. As the years passed, she changed. She became more polished, more professional, and more distant.

  When my dad lost his job a few months ago and couldn’t keep up with his child support payments, private school was suddenly no longer an option. Then rents went up in our building, and the accounting firm my mom worked for was hit hard by the economy and she lost some important clients. When my dad offered to sign over his share of the house in Winston, she saw a solution to our problems. She bought out a small accounting firm in town from a man who was retiring, the renters moved out of the old dress shop, and we moved back as soon as school was over.

  “So sad,” she sighed, once I’d hung the photograph exactly where she wanted it, in the small foyer of our house. “Poor Alma.”

  It’s the exact same thing she said when I hung the photo in the San Francisco apartment. I remember because I didn’t know the story back then and I wanted to know what was so sad about it. My mom gave me a watered-down version, but later I got the whole story from my grandmother.

  Back in 1923, Alma was a newlywed herself, excited about the arrival of her first child, planning to quit her job at the dress shop after giving birth. Her last big project was a wedding dress for a beautiful young woman engaged to a violent and jealous man named Forrest Hansen. Hansen had accused his fiancée of secretly seeing another man, an attorney in town, and though she’d denied it, she made the mistake of stopping to talk to the attorney one day when they met in the street. Hansen followed her to the shop that evening, waiting in the shadows outside while Alma made a few final alterations and a photographer took the bridal portrait for the newspaper. After the photographer left, Hansen stormed into the shop, yelling accusations. While the lovers argued, Alma must have tried to intervene, because after shooting his fiancée, Hansen shot Alma too.
>
  She lived long enough for her baby to be taken from her that night. The coroner wrapped the baby in the wedding dress, which was lying nearby on the cutting table, to keep her warm. The baby was a healthy girl—my great-grandmother Josie—who would go on to work in this same dress shop when she grew up.

  Hansen was caught, tried, and executed. But something else happened that night. Amid the terrible storm of jealousy and rage and violence, Alma’s innocent baby was born with a strange gift, one that she passed along to one of her own daughters—my Nana—and eventually, when I was twelve years old, to me.

  “Well, I’ve got to get over to the office,” my mother said, yawning. There was a lot of paperwork she still had to do in order to transition the prior owner’s clients.

  “Rachel and I are going downtown to sell,” I reminded her. Rachel and I had started a business together, selling my one-of-a-kind fashions. We’d done pretty well last weekend, and I was hoping we’d sell even more today.

  “Okay. Good luck. I left you some money on the counter if you want to get lunch in town.”

  “We’re going to the beach tonight.” I said it in a rush, hoping Mom would let it go for once. Rachel’s friends’ standard Saturday night outing was to meet down at Black Rock Beach, build a fire, play volleyball until it was dark, and then sit and talk until midnight. For the last two weeks, she’d invited me along. I lived close enough to walk home—our town was small enough that you could walk from one end to the other in half an hour—but Mom still wasn’t happy about it.

  “Oh, Clare …,” she said, dismayed. “Can’t you guys just go to someone’s house? Or get a pizza or something?”

  “Come on, Mom, it’s only June twenty-ninth. Four more days until the madman strikes again.”

  “That’s terrible—don’t joke about it!” Mom exclaimed. She was more upset than I’d realized.

  “Haven’t you seen all the extra security they’re bringing in for the festival?”

  “Not at the beach.”

  “Well, they don’t want kids hanging around in town while they’re setting up. Where are we supposed to go?”

  “You could always invite your friends here.”

  I rolled my eyes. Yeah, right, like Rachel’s friends would want to come to my house. I was hoping to keep a low profile, and not just because I was the new girl. Our family had kind of a reputation in town. When I was little everyone used to say the old dress shop was haunted by my great-great-grandmother and the young bride who had been killed there. They said the reason my parents got divorced was that the house had cursed them. And when people in Winston got tired of gossiping about the rest of my family, my eccentric grandmother gave them plenty to talk about. I was learning that that was the downside of small-town living—everyone knowing everyone else’s business.

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” I said, with feeling. “Whoever did it, he’s long gone. Besides, this town’s going to be crawling with tourists and cops. It’ll be like the safest place in the state.”

  I held my breath, hoping I hadn’t pushed too far—tourism was still way down since the murders these last two Fourth of July weekends—and after a moment, my mom nodded. “Okay. But make sure you have a buddy when you’re going up and down the path, and don’t go in the water after dark, and—”

  “Mom.”

  She stopped midsentence and gave me a crooked frown, hugging herself. For a moment she looked worried and fearful, nothing like the polished professional I was used to seeing walk out the door in the morning, dressed in her boring power suits, with her heavy bag over her shoulder.

  “I’ll be careful, okay? Promise.”

  Mom hesitated for a moment. I knew she wanted to say something else, but we’d made a habit of not saying some of the most important things. And when she hugged me, her familiar perfume seemed tinged with the scent of regret.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IT TOOK ME LONGER THAN USUAL to get dressed, which is saying something, since I always put a lot of time into choosing what I wear. Not just because I make a lot of my clothes myself, but because someday my look will be my brand. Kind of like Betsey Johnson—if you look at pictures of her from the eighties, you can see the inspiration for everything she’s designed ever since.

  But I’d be downtown, where everyone in Winston could walk by and see me. Did I really want to give them more reason to think our family was different? Maybe I could ease slowly back into my own style after starting out like everyone else. I went through my closet, picking out my most conservative clothes, which were basics I hadn’t gotten around to altering yet: plain black canvas shorts, a gray tank top I layered under other clothes. I dressed and stared at myself in the mirror, hating the way I looked.

  I knew my mom had struggled when she was my age. She didn’t talk about it much, but I got the impression that Nana had embarrassed her, and she’d spent her teenage years trying to simply disappear. It was different for me. I wanted to fit in but not blend in.

  Stripping off the boring clothes, I tried again. I picked a fringed black ultrasuede miniskirt to go with a halter top I’d sewn from blue gauzy fabric that I’d gathered and twisted and then stitched into place. I borrowed my mom’s cameo necklace and added a clip I’d made out of a long blue feather and a few strands of fake electric blue hair.

  Way better. Now I felt like myself again.

  The doorbell rang, and as I went to answer it, I checked myself out in the hall mirror and was satisfied with what I saw. Maybe my look wasn’t for everyone, but it represented what I did best, and it would promote my business. Besides, a few of Rachel’s friends had already asked me if I could make them one-of-a-kind pieces, so I knew there was a market for what I had to offer. Nana had been telling me for years that if I did what I loved, success would follow. It was yet another thing that drove my mom crazy—but then, she’s an accountant, so her motto would probably be something more like “Do what pays the bills, and financial security will follow.”

  I opened the door to find Nana standing there. “I was just thinking about you!” I said, giving her a hug and pulling her inside with a guilty pang. I wanted to get her off the porch so people wouldn’t see her—although the red VW bug covered with bumper stickers parked in front of our house was a dead giveaway.

  Nana was impossible to miss. Her hair was a mass of silver ringlets that came down to her shoulders—unless she put it up to get it out of the way, in which case it burst out of the top of her head in all directions. She was a startling dresser, but unlike me, she didn’t put a lot of thought into her outfits. I think she put on the first thing she grabbed in the morning, but since she had a fondness for bright colors and shiny fabrics and ethnic details and bought most of her wardrobe from the Indian import shop, the effect was usually blinding. And she’d been this way forever; in pictures from when my mom was little, Nana looks pretty much the same, except her hair used to be brown and her face less wrinkled.

  She had a fondness for bright orange lipstick too, and I automatically wiped where she had kissed me, knowing from experience that she left marks. “Mom made coffee, I think. Want some?”

  “Yes, better pour me a cup. She makes the best coffee anywhere—glad she hasn’t given that up too.” Nana loved my mom’s cooking. When my parents split up, Nana told her she ought to become a chef or start a catering business—to do what she loved—which I could have told her would pretty much ensure Mom would never cook again.

  We took our coffee out to the back patio. “I see your mom hasn’t made much progress on the garden yet.”

  That was an understatement. The renters had left the tiny yard and flower beds alone; they were tidy but bare. “That’s your thing, Nana. Mom’s working so much I wouldn’t be surprised if it stays like this for years.”

  “I could put in some bare-root roses this fall. You know what would be great along the fence? Some canna, maybe red ones—”

  “Nana,” I interrupted. “Mom would kill you.”

  She sighed. “I kn
ow, I know, and I’m trying to keep my distance and wait for an invitation. But you know, you’re welcome to come on up the hill anytime, even without your mom.”

  I couldn’t meet her eyes. I’d only visited twice since we moved back, and we both knew I’d been avoiding her. But I wasn’t sure if Nana understood how much rode on this summer, on me making new friends before the start of my junior year. And there was no way for me to explain without her knowing the truth, which was that I didn’t want to be associated with her, at least not in public. Not until I had gotten established here.

  “Are you going to the festival?” I said, changing the subject.

  “Yup, I’m going to be at the loggerheads booth in the morning and then we’re protesting at the dedication of the new gazebo in the afternoon.”

  “Oh, Nana …” My heart sank. Nana and her weird friends had made the papers before, half a dozen old hippie types carrying signs and marching around downtown. “What is it this time?”

  “Have you seen the corporate sponsor list?” she demanded, outraged. “Taking money from big oil? Defiling our most precious resources just so we can spruce up the town for a bunch of tourists?”

  “Okay, okay, I get it,” I said, making a note to be elsewhere during the ceremony.

  “But that’s not why I came over,” Nana said, her expression softening. “Listen, honey, I know you’ve heard it a million times, but you have got to be careful this week. Lock the doors at night, stay in a group, call me or your mom if you need a ride.”

  “Oh, Nana, not you too.”

  “It’s not just me. Everyone in town is worried about you kids.”

  “Nana, that’s all hype. The media just wants to stir things up for ratings.”

  On July third the last two years in a row, terrible things had happened in Winston. Two years ago, a ten-year-old boy named Dillon Granger had been killed. It was made to look like an accident—his body had been found next to his mangled bike on the rocks below a sheer cliff—but forensics revealed bruising and damage to the bike that suggested he’d been pushed. An anonymous 911 caller reporting an accident along the cliff road was considered a suspect, but the recording of the call, made from a local truck stop pay phone, was muffled and unclear. They couldn’t determine anything about the caller’s identity, not even age or gender.