Change of Climate

Chapter 1

Cheltenham, Massachusetts, was incredibly hot and sticky. And considering it was late October, that was not what London had expected. But it worked out well, because London had managed to get there with only the clothes on her back and the clothes on her back had been for Florida weather, so Cheltenham’s unseasonable warmth was a good thing.

The town looked exactly as London remembered it, even though it had been years since she had been there. She was surprised, actually, how accurately she remembered it. She had been ten when they’d left, and they had only been there a couple of years at that time. But it had been the longest the family had ever stayed in one place and she remembered it as being idyllic, and the town still looked idyllic to her. There was the traditional New England town square, with a white-steepled church and quaint little businesses, and the trees were decked out in their best foliage, and college students were everywhere, chattering, buzzing with energy. London had grown up in college towns and university cities and, with all the moving around she did, the special feel of college students was basically the closest thing she had to a home. They just sounded a certain way.

London got off the bus and stood looking at Cheltenham’s square and felt…

…Like crying. She’d spent most of the bus ride trying not to cry, because she didn’t want to draw attention to herself, and now she was back in Cheltenham and everything was much worse. She refused to look at the gazebo where she and her parents had sat once to watch the Fourth of July fireworks. She refused to be baited by the bookstore still on the corner of the street where they’d celebrated with ice cream when her father’s first book had been published. She adjusted her sunglasses and checked the coil of her heavy blonde hair underneath the baseball cap she’d snagged and started walking.

If someone had asked her to draw a map of Cheltenham, she didn’t think she’d have been able to, but she walked without thinking, letting sense memory draw her along, and before long she had turned down the narrow crowded street she was looking for. Surely the trees were bigger than they had been, because it had been almost eight years, but to London everything looked exactly the same: the maples lining the street, dripping in scarlet and crimson and gold right now; the well-kept colonial houses, tipping up against each other, the bricks of the sidewalks tumbling every which way in the onslaught of the tree roots. London walked along the street, trailing her hand along the fences that lined the way: white picket giving way to wrought-iron giving way to pretty, filigreed wood painted violet. London refused to acknowledge that fence, kept walking, came eventually to the fence she was looking for, simple and white, if you didn’t look at the urns on top of the posts, crowded with carved colonial imagery, oak leaves and fishes. London had been terrified of the fish faces when she had been a little girl. She had hated how accusatory they looked. London still refused to eat fish, she just saw those fish faces in her memory.

London stood by the front gate and looked at the house. It looked a little more rundown than the other houses on the street, and that made sense to her. The Professors Meade had always been more concerned with a million other things that weren’t the upkeep of their house. Maybe this was going to work. Maybe they would still be here.

London opened the little gate, which squeaked, and picked her way around the fallen leaves up the loosening brick walkway. Then she stepped up onto the front porch and took a deep breath and lifted her hand and rapped the bronze knocker, also in the shape of a terrifying fish.

There was a long, long moment of still silence. London thought she was going to have to sit on the step and just cry. She had no other options. She had come all this way only to have no one be home, and she had no idea what to do now.