Dangerous Neighbors by Beth Kephart

Author:Beth Kephart [Kephart, Beth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-60684-290-4
Publisher: EgmontUSA
Published: 2011-01-04T05:00:00+00:00

But then, there was New Year’s Eve, just weeks before Anna disappeared altogether. Katherine was more lonely than one person can survive. That night, when Anna sighed, “Oh, I’d love to see the fireworks,” and Katherine realized that the baker’s boy wasn’t a likely escort, Katherine said, “I’d like that, too,” and they bundled into their coats, and went out.

Katherine and Anna cut through Rittenhouse Square, where the society people had gathered in their wools and silks, hats on the men’s heads, muffs hiding the porcelain hands of women who left their work to others. The banners strung from the upper stories of Walnut Street snapped whenever a wind blew through. The twins had gone out wearing matching gray coats and blueberry silks. In the gaslight, Anna’s hair shone bright as the flesh of a ripe peach, then faded to a glimmer in the shadows. A mist was either falling or rising; in the amber of the gaslight it wasn’t possible to tell. The air seemed bothered.

Already the revelers were out. Masked mummers with banjos thrown across their backs, feathers trailing. Gangs of toughs. Children who ran, squealing, one after the other, in the direction of Independence Hall, their parents and neighbors on the streets behind them, beneath the banners and the flickering lamplight, behind a young man who carried a goat in his arms, a sandy-colored mutt following at his heels. The crowd was thickening. The children taunted one another with the promise of dynamite, with the sight of Mayor Stokley, getting ready to raise the flag. Like everybody else, Anna and Katherine went east—their wraps blown open by the wind, the mist at their feet, Anna scanning the crowd for Bennett, Katherine trying to pretend she didn’t see.

From Ninth all the way to Sixth and north to Chestnut, they went, Katherine trying to tease back Anna’s attention, Anna sometimes unlocking her arm from her sister’s, darting ahead, before Katherine could reach her again. Finally, at Independence Hall, they were stopped with the crowd, and Anna had nowhere to be but beside her sister. One mummer had raised his banjo over his head and was finger-strutting on the strings. An old hag was keeping time with the blunt end of her cane. A boy was daring another with a stick tipped with fire, and the goat in that young man’s arms stayed still. Anna was tied, too, but looking out over the crowd, ready to bolt at any instant.

Now Mayor Stokley was hitching the flag up the pole. Now the flutes began to play, the drums and banjos, clarinets, piccolos, cymbals—not a song, but bass against fiddle against the cries of the crowd, against the hiss of the fire on the one boy’s stick, a wild din. Then the mayor was making an announcement, and the crowd, all in one voice, cheered, and then, piercing and unmistakable, came the steel whine of the first firework—a white wail through the misted night that burst wide open into suspended sparks of color.

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