Behind the Attic Wall by Sylvia Cassedy

From the Publisher

At twelve, Maggie had been thrown out of more boarding schools than she cared to remember. "Impossible to handle," they said — nasty, mean, disobedient, rebellious, thieving — anything they could say to explain why she must be removed from the school.

Maggie was thin and pale, with shabby clothes and stringy hair, when she arrived at her new home. "It was a mistake to bring her here," said Maggie's great-aunts, whose huge stone house looked like another boarding school — or a prison. But they took her in anyway. After all, aside from Uncle Morris, they were Maggie's only living relatives.

But from behind the closet door in the great and gloomy house, Maggie hears the faint whisperings, the beckoning voices. And in the forbidding house of her ancestors, Maggie finds magic...the kind that lets her, for the first time, love and be loved.

New York Times Book Review

Intricately woven. . . at once satire, fantasy and tragedy. . .

New Yorker

Unforgettable. . . A beautifully written, very touching story.

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Chapter One

The man waiting at the station when she first stepped off the train was the tallest person she had ever seen. His round black hat moved like a planet above the crowd, and the silver knob of his walking stick hovered just below it like a moon as he made his way toward her on the platform.

He looked her full in the face. "I'm looking for Margaret Ann Turner," he said. "I don't suppose you would have any information on where I might find her?"

No. Yes. How were you supposed to answer a question like that? "That's me," but he was already swinging her canvas duffel bag onto his shoulder, and she realized that he had known who she was all along. She wondered what description he had been given. Brown beret, brown coat, brown socks, ugly face? Bony legs, untied shoes, sandpaper knees, rotten temper? He was examining her carefully now. "You're quite certain that you are Margaret Ann Turner," he asked, "and not someone else with the same name?"

Another unanswerable question.

"It's Maggie," she said.

"Maggie!" he exclaimed. "Perfect!"

Perfect for me is what he means. Drab girl, drab name.

"I love the name Maggie," he went on, and she glanced up at him suspiciously -- nobody loved the name Maggie but his face was serious. "It makes your teeth feel good to say it. Maggie, Maggie, Maggie. It feels like eating peanuts. Try it," and he paused, waiting for her to recite her name aloud.

She turned away, but she did try anyway, to herself, and she felt a surprising tingle around her upper molars. Maybe likeeating peanuts, maybe not; she couldn't really remember what peanuts tasted like.

"I am your uncle Morris," he said. "There is nothing remarkable about the name Morris at all, although I am told there is a chair by that name and also a dance. I can't imagine why anyone looking around for a name to give his chair would finally settle on Morris, can you?"

Maggie said nothing, and stood still, her eyes on the ground, while he continued to scrutinize her. "North Wellington Academy for Girls," he read from the emblem on her beret. "Is that really a girls' school you have on your head?" he asked. "If it is, its architecture seems strange. For one thing, there are no windows."

She would make it clear to him that she didn't enjoy being teased. "It's a hat," she said icily. She removed it from her head and, rolling it into a tube, slid it into her coat pocket.

"Ah," Uncle Morris replied. "A hat. Imagine having a girls' school in a hat."

Maggie made no reply and followed him as he made his way across the station platform to the lot where his car was parked. He laid her duffel bag carefully in the backseat and held the door open for her. As soon as the car began to move, she started to pick out letters of the alphabet from storefronts and billboards, getting quickly from A to I, but it was a while before she found a J, and soon the town was behind them, the signs grew sparser and sparser, and she gave up before reaching K.

"And now, Maggie," Uncle Morris said suddenly, "you must tell me something about yourself."

People were always saying that: "Tell me about yourself." There was nothing to tell. She had been in eight -- no, nine -- places to live and had been thrown out of all of them. Usually for "poor adjustment," which meant kicking people or stealing. Now she was going to stay with some aunts -- great-aunts, actually -- whose names she didn't even know and who lived in a place she had never heard of. Uncle Morris turned his face to her, waiting for her answer.

"I'm twelve," she finally said.

"Twelve!" he exclaimed. "How very nice," and he returned his eyes to the road. "Would that be inches or dollars?"

She glanced up at him. "What?"

"Twelve inches or twelve dollars?"

"Years," she answered.

"Twelve years! As old as that!" He paused for a moment. "How do you keep your hair from going gray?" and he turned to her again, expecting a reply, but this time she didn't answer.

"What else?" he asked.

She looked out the window. "What else what?"

"What else is there to tell about yourself? What do you wonder about? Do you ever wonder, for example, if everything that looks green to you is really everybody else's red?"

Maggie turned from the window and looked at him. She had wondered that once. What if the grass and the trees and the woolen skirt of last year's school uniform, all the things that were called green, really looked red or blue to everybody else? It was a scary idea, crazy really, and it surprised her to hear someone else -- an adult, too -- give voice to it.

"Have you ever wondered that?" he asked again.

"No," she answered, and she moved her knees aside when his hand came down on the knob of the gearshift rising from the floor.

They were in open country now, and Maggie narrowed her eyes until they were nearly shut, making the road ahead jump back and forth and shimmer like a fish.

"Do you keep a diary?" Uncle Morris asked suddenly.

She turned to look at him. How did he know about that? She had kept a diary once. When she was at Mrs. Malloy's. Four schools ago. Five. A black leather diary. Except it wasn't real leather and it wasn't a real diary. And it wasn't hers. It was an appointment book, and she had taken it from the headmistress's desk. Many of the pages had already been filled in, but there were some that remained empty, and she had used those to write on.