Storyteller Read online

  ALSO BY

  PATRICIA REILLY GIFF

  FOR MIDDLE-GRADE READERS

  Wild Girl

  Eleven

  Water Street

  Willow Run

  A House of Tailors

  Maggie’s Door

  Pictures of Hollis Woods

  All the Way Home

  Nory Ryan’s Song

  Lily’s Crossing

  The Gift of the Pirate Queen

  The Casey, Tracy & Company books

  FOR YOUNGER READERS

  The Zigzag Kids books

  The Kids of the Polk Street School books

  The Friends and Amigos books

  The Polka Dot Private Eye books

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Patricia Reilly Giff

  Map copyright © 2010 by Rick Britton

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

  Wendy Lamb Books and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at

  www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Giff, Patricia Reilly.

  Storyteller / Patricia Reilly Giff. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Forced to spend months at an aunt’s house, Elizabeth feels a connection to her ancestor Zee, whose picture hangs on the wall, and who reveals her story of hardships during the Revolutionary War as Elizabeth comes to terms with her own troubles.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89744-3 [1. Family—Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 3. United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Fiction. 4. New York (State)—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Fiction. 5. Aunts—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.G3626Ss 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2009048130

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

  v3.1

  WITH LOVE TO WILLIAM REILLY GIFF,

  MY SON BILL,

  FOR MORE REASONS THAN I CAN COUNT

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  elizabeth: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  zee: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  elizabeth: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  zee: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  zee: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  elizabeth: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  zee: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  elizabeth: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  zee: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  elizabeth: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  zee: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  elizabeth: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  zee: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  zee: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  elizabeth: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  zee: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  zee: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  elizabeth: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  zee: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  elizabeth: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  zee: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  zee: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  elizabeth: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  zee: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  elizabeth: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  zee: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  elizabeth: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  zee: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  elizabeth: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  elizabeth

  TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  School’s over; the weekend’s here. Elizabeth heads for home. She’ll put her feet up on the bench in the kitchen, read her library book, and finish off the brownies she and Pop made last night.

  What could be better?

  She trudges around to the back door, passing the living room, then Pop’s workroom. She can see him through the window. He’s long and lanky, his hair a little gray around the temples. He’s leaning over his table, working on one of his carvings. On a shelf above his head, wooden animals march along in a row, and a face mask glares out at her. Weird. She tilts her head, picturing someone wearing that mask; a girl maybe, trying to look fierce. Her name would be …

  Pop spots her. “Elizabeth?”

  She climbs the steps, pushes open the door, and drops her backpack inside. “Hey, Pop,” she calls.

  “What were you doing out there?” he asks, coming into the kitchen.

  “Just …” Embarrassed, she doesn’t know what to say. “Just nothing, I guess.”

  She sees now that he has a line between his eyebrows.

  Trouble. She tries to think about what she’s done, or what she hasn’t done. She grins to herself. Maybe it’s something he hasn’t done. The breakfast dishes are still in the sink; a plate with sandwich crusts is on the table.

  “How about a hot chocolate to warm you up?” he says, taking the milk out of the refrigerator.

  Still that frown. What’s coming? She reaches into the cabinet for a couple of crackers.

  “Listen, Elizabeth,” he says. “I have to go to Australia. I’ve been asked to show my carvings at a university in Melbourne.”

  Australia! A million miles away. She blows air through her mouth. It means staying with Mrs. Eldridge and her fat bulldog with his horrible breath. But she can do that. She’s done it dozens of times before when he’s been away teaching or selling his carvings.

  Pop runs a hand through his graying hair. “I called your aunt Libby. She says you can stay with her.” He reaches for the box of cocoa. “She’s only two or three hours away.”

  Elizabeth stares at him, a saltine halfway to her mouth. Her mother’s sister? Elizabeth has seen her maybe twice in her life. Libby, a scientist, who probably spends her days in a dusty laboratory, working with little dishes of who knows what. She sends odd Christmas and birthday cards, her writing so small you can hardly make it out, and she doesn’t have kids. Of course she doesn’t.

  “Libby!” Elizabeth explodes. “I don’t even know what she looks like. I’ll stay with Mrs. Eldridge.”

  Pop turns away to stir the milk on the stove. “Mrs. Eldridge is moving away.”

  “Alexa, then—she’s my best friend, after all.”

  He pours the milk into a glass. It’s so hot the glass cracks. Elizabeth watches the milk sizzle out across the stove, and thinks about her mother, who died in a car accident so long ago she can’t even remember her.

  Pop stands in front of her. “I might be gone several weeks, Elizabeth. It can’t be helped. I wish it could. I don’t want to go without you. I don’t want to leave you for so long.”

  He hesitates, a dishcloth in his hands. “But it’s time for you to know your mother’s family. I’ve been feeling that for a while. Libby spent a lot of the last few years doing research in Canada, otherwise I’d have asked her sooner.”

  Elizabeth doesn’t answer. She goes inside to turn on the television, pressing up the volume until everything around her vibrates.

  Pop comes to the door. “I’m
sorry, Elizabeth. I’m so sorry. This will be important to us, really. It’ll mean more money, commissions for more carvings.”

  She turns away from him. Libby. A different school. She’ll miss chorus and gymnastics. He’s not worried about her missing school. One time she missed a few weeks. “You’ll catch up,” he’d said, knowing she would.

  It’s so unfair, but she knows there’s no hope of changing his mind. Not by banging her bedroom door shut all week, not by skipping breakfast, not by saying she’s sick and can’t go to school.

  The next Friday Pop brings two duffel bags from the basement. She stuffs almost everything she owns into them while he straightens the house and locks everything up.

  They drive through a spring snow. It coats the windows like feathers; the windshield wipers drum back and forth.

  “If this works out, I’ll go back to Australia next year,” Pop says. “Maybe you can go with me someday when we have more money. This trip I’ll be able to sell some of the old carvings, things I did years ago.”

  “I don’t care,” she whispers, and wonders if he hears her. He turns on some horrible music, and she leans forward to switch to something else, something equally horrible.

  “I love you, Elizabeth,” he says.

  She hums along to the music all the way, as if she can’t hear him.

  At last they stop at a house that’s set back in a snowy garden. Elizabeth hunches her shoulders against the cold, against Pop, as Libby opens the door. She’s tall, thin as a bone, peering at them with sky blue eyes behind her glasses. She’s smiling, a tight smile, but still—

  Good for Libby, Elizabeth thinks. She’s not going to let us know what a horrible imposition this is.

  Imposition. A word her English teacher, Mrs. Thomas, would love. Elizabeth feels a zing of pain in her chest. On Monday she’ll go to a new school where she doesn’t know a soul.

  They drag her duffel bags through Libby’s perfect hall, into her neat living room, and Pop leans forward to kiss Elizabeth good-bye, aiming for her cheek. She pulls back and he grazes her hair.

  He mumbles a few words, and then he’s gone.

  Blotches of red stain Libby’s neck. She moves forward and reaches out to Elizabeth. A hug? But Elizabeth realizes it’s her jacket Libby’s after. Drops of snow are beginning to melt on the carpet.

  Elizabeth has to feel sorry for Libby. She imagines Pop calling on the phone, talking Libby into taking Elizabeth, as if she’s the third duffel bag.

  There’s another sharp zing in Elizabeth’s chest. Maybe something’s wrong with her heart. She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Nothing’s wrong with her heart, of course. Too bad. It would serve Pop right if she keeled over and stopped breathing.

  She pictures it. He’d have to delay his trip while he buried her. She sees him dumping out one of the duffel bags on this shiny floor and sliding her in—

  Elizabeth is alone now with Libby. What can she say to her? But Libby hoists up one of the bags, so Elizabeth takes the other one and follows Libby upstairs.

  “There’s just one bedroom here. Your own bathroom,” Libby says. “You can read in the tub. I’ve put a few books on the table.”

  Fine. Elizabeth tells herself that she’ll hide in the bathroom reading. She remembers having left the water running in the tub at home once, and later, Pop looking up at the kitchen ceiling, water dripping down from the bathroom. Pop shaking his head.

  Now she and Libby stand in the doorway, and instantly Elizabeth loves the room. It’s nicer than hers, nicer than her friend Alexa’s. There’s something cozy about it, something wonderful. If only it were really hers. The wooden floor gleams here like the one in the hall downstairs, and at the foot of the bed there’s a rag rug, blue, red, and green, almost like the quilt.

  Cloth houses are sewn on the quilt. They’re a little crooked, but you could spend hours lying on that bed looking at those houses, pretending to open a door and walk right in.

  The windows overlook the garden. It’s hard to see because of all that snow mounding up over the bushes, clinging to the tree branches. A huge chair’s right there at the window.

  “This was my room when I was your age,” Libby says. “I shared it with your mother for a while.”

  Her mother’s room! But it’s almost as if Libby’s warning her not to get too fond of it. Is Libby thinking about getting her room back to herself, her house back?

  Right, Elizabeth thinks.

  They get through the afternoon, and dinner in the dining room, while Elizabeth keeps trying to think of things to say. At dinner the knives and forks clink loudly; she can almost hear herself and Libby chewing.

  The dinner is terrible—hamburgers dry as dust, French fries with burnt ends—but Elizabeth says, “It’s the best meal I’ve had in a long time.” And to herself, At least since breakfast.

  Afterward, she and Libby watch television in the living room. Then Elizabeth sees Libby raise her hand, a fluttering motion, and Elizabeth follows Libby’s eyes to the front hall. On the wall is a drawing of a girl in a sliver of a frame.

  Elizabeth leans forward to get a better look. The whole thing is a mess. It’s stiff with water stains and fingerprints, but worse is the girl herself. She’s faded, but still you can see she wasn’t pretty, not with those apple cheeks and that tiny round nose.

  But Elizabeth sees what Libby wants to show her. The girl looks like Elizabeth, almost exactly like her. If Elizabeth had been wearing that cap, the kerchief crossed over her shoulders—

  “Who is she?” Elizabeth asks.

  “Her name was Eliza, a name like yours,” Libby says. “The picture belonged to my grandmother, and her grandmother before her, and back before that. The girl was called Zee.”

  Elizabeth thinks, My great-grandmother, then, and her grandmother before her.

  “Done on parchment. It was soft once, made from sheepskin. Zee lost—” Libby stops, her cheeks almost as red as those blotches on her neck.

  There’s something sad about the girl’s eyes. She reminds Elizabeth of herself. “She lost her mother?”

  Libby nods reluctantly.

  There’s more; Elizabeth can feel it. “Her father?”

  “Yes, during the Revolutionary War.” Libby raises her thin shoulders. “Your hair is like your mother’s,” she says. Changing the subject? “Shiny and straight.”

  Elizabeth touches her hair. Those streaks. A mistake to have tried to do them herself, she knows that.

  She keeps glancing at the drawing of Zee from the living room. It’s strange to look like someone who lived more than two hundred years ago. It makes her feel not quite as alone as she might be.

  That night, she hunches deep under the crooked-house quilt, her head covered so Libby, downstairs in her room, can’t hear her crying.

  After a while, she looks toward the window at the snow drifting down. She falls asleep thinking about Eliza, called Zee. Zee, who looks like her. Zee, who seems just as sad as she is.

  zee

  EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  Snowflakes like feathers! I twirled myself around in the field, mittens up, catching them, diamonds in my hands.

  I turned. Mercy, the gate! How did I leave it open? Where did the sheep get to with their woolly bodies and their stringy curls?

  How important those sheep were to us: food all winter, and wool for our clothes. My mouth went dry. What had I done!

  I hiked up my petticoat and ran, breathless, searching. The sheep dotted the fields like mounds of snow. Who could tell the difference between them and the bushes where they sought shelter?

  I stamped my feet, calling, “Weiss, Stern, Clara, where are you? Where are the rest of you?”

  Not one of them came. Not one moved. The poor dumb things with their watery eyes would freeze to death.

  I could imagine Father’s sorrow, my brother John’s anger. If only they hadn’t gone to help Caleb Walker. If only Mother had returned from spinning with Mistress Patchin. I wouldn’t be alone.
/>   But I knew what I had to do.

  The shame of it.

  I stumbled through the drifts, which were becoming thicker, to pull the rope and sound the bell for help. It rang in my ears, deafening. It echoed across the mountains, through the valley, calling our neighbors.

  I didn’t wait. I ran past the henhouse, glancing toward the river with its blocks of ice, and into the back field, looking, calling, remembering how Father had walked for thirty miles to bring home the first pair of sheep years earlier.

  How proud he had been of our growing farm. Small as I was, I’d listened as he’d talked about the Palatinate, the place where he and Mother had grown up near the Rhine River in Europe. “But here we came, to a new farmland, with its own river,” he’d said, “and here we’ll prosper.”

  But he’d never thought he’d have a daughter like me, who would burn the bread, ruin the fat for soap …

  And lose the sheep.

  Neighbors came from different directions: Old Gerard, the Lenape Indian, from his lean-to; Mr. Walker, with Father and John, across the back field; my best friend, Ammy, and her brother, Isaac, with the soft gray eyes, from the path through the woods.

  Miller and Julian, the brothers who laughed at everything, laughed at nothing, came running. “Good men,” Father always said.

  The good men laughed even now, as Miller lifted me, swinging me away from the drifts. I pounded his shoulders. “Useless boy,” I yelled.

  He leaned forward, his face so close to mine that his thick dark hair brushed my forehead. “Who is useless, Miss Zee?”

  Father heard. He turned and our eyes caught. I was sure he was thinking that I was indeed the useless girl who had caused half the valley to tramp through the snow looking for our sheep, rather than tending to their own affairs. Isaac, cheeks reddened from the cold, looked at me sympathetically.

  That night, huddled under my quilt in the loft, I listened to hail pattering against the roof just over my head. Below were the crackle of the fire in the keeping room and Father’s angry voice. He was talking to Mother. “What is the matter with that girl? Couldn’t she take better care of the sheep?”