Aunt Petunia was screaming her head off. Harry instinctively whirled and started the other way, ready to run or hide. Even though it sounded as though the racket was coming from the attic, and he hadn't been anywhere near there and couldn't possibly be responsible, it was always best to play these things safe.
Sure enough, he was way too far from the front door when he heard her feet thundering down the stairs toward him, so he wrenched open the door of the cupboard under the stairs and flung himself onto his bed, trying to slow his breathing and adopt a totally relaxed, innocent pose before she reached him. He had just managed to snatch up a tattered old comic book of Dudley's and open it when the door popped open again and Aunt Petunia stood there glaring at him.
"You horrible little thief," she spat at him. "What have you done with it?"
"Done with what?" Harry saw he was holding the comic book upside down, but Aunt Petunia appeared far too angry to notice. He tried to drop it nonchalantly on the bed.
"You know very well with what."
"No, I don't."
She glared at him for a long moment, but he managed to hold her gaze, even though the butterflies were beginning to flutter in his stomach. Scenes that started like this never ended well.
Finally she snapped, "Come with me." Without waiting, she turned on her heel and started back up the stairs. Heaving a deep sigh, Harry got up and climbed behind her.
As he had expected, she led him to the attic. In spite of the situation, his heart gave a little leap as she pushed open the door and motioned him in, because he never got to come in this room under normal circumstances. Not anymore, anyway.
Back when Harry was small, he came up here a lot. The attic was the one place in the house where he felt at home. As he glanced around for the first time in years, he realized it was probably packed with junk, but to him it had always seemed almost magical, packed full of mysterious treasures. Once he had even found a wadded bundle of blankets, and since Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon were fond of telling him how he had been dumped on their doorstep like a load of dirty laundry nobody wanted, he had wondered if that was the bundle he'd been left in. Even more interesting, there were a couple of other items inside the blankets, including an envelope made of funny paper, addressed to Aunt Petunia in odd, old-fashioned handwriting. He'd been disappointed to find the envelope empty. And then there was a carved wooden stick thing, sort of like a thick knitting needle, and he wondered if his mother had knitted. Maybe she had knitted the little soft blankets especially for him, and there had been a set of her knitting needles included for him to have as a memento, and one had been lost over the years. Harry had been tempted to take the envelope and the needle or stick or whatever it was, but hadn't managed to do it before Aunt Petunia caught him in the attic and started keeping it locked.
Now, she whirled to face him again. "I know you were in here this morning. I know you took it."
"I told you before, I don't know what --"
"The necklace, Harry. The necklace."
"I didn't -- the necklace?" As her meaning sank in, he broke off his protest. "The one with the lily? It's gone?"
"You know very well it is."
"It must be here somewhere. It has to be." He started to pace around the room, peering under tables, opening a couple of boxes and lifting up baskets to look underneath. So absorbed was he on trying to find the pendant, the beautiful silver lily with the sparkling green stone, that he forgot all about Aunt Petunia until she grabbed him by the arm and jerked him around.
"Don't touch anything else! Don't you dare."
"All right, all right." Harry twisted out of her grasp in a deft maneuver he'd perfected over the years. After skittering backwards a couple of steps from her, they stood glaring at one another.
Aunt Petunia crossed her arms tightly. "I know it was you. It had to be you. I keep this door locked and the key in my possession ever since we discovered you were skulking about up here..."
Ever since you found out I actually liked it up here, Harry thought.
"I was in here tidying up just yesterday morning, so I know exactly how things should be."
Harry conceded that was probably true. From what he'd read in stories -- and from seeing the jumbled mess of cobwebs and moldy clothes in Mrs. Figg's attic -- he figured Aunt Petunia was the only person in the world who cleaned and straightened her attic almost as frequently as she did the rest of the house.
She jabbed a finger toward a couple of mugs from her set of old dishes, the ones she used before Uncle Vernon bought her the nice china with the rose pattern that Harry was forbidden to touch. The mugs were lying on an old card table, as though they had fallen from the shelf above, where the rest of the set was neatly stacked. "Those cups were in their proper place on the shelf yesterday morning." Next, her finger pointed toward the floor beneath the table. "And just look at that mess."
Harry bent forward and peered at the floor where she was pointing, but saw nothing. "Where?"
Aunt Petunia rolled her eyes, then grabbed the back of his neck and pushed his face toward the floor. "Don't tell me you can't see that horrible mess."
With his face inches from the floor, Harry finally managed to see a few tiny blue beads scattered about. "You mean those?" he asked her, incredulous. Even by Aunt Petunia's standards, calling this a mess was a bit extreme.
"I swept quite thoroughly in here yesterday morning, and I certainly would not have missed those." As Harry nodded in grudging agreement, she pointed up at an old fringed something-or-other, which Harry knew from former visits featured large peacocks outlined in blue and green beads. It now hung lopsided on the dress-maker's form that stood between the shelf and the card table.
"It's very obvious to me," said Aunt Petunia, "that when you were plundering through things, looking for the necklace, you knocked the mugs down and they practically ruined my grandmother's beautiful opera coat." Her eyes narrowed, signaling danger. "Nothing is missing but the necklace. You heard me telling Dudley last night that he could have some of the old clothes and jewelry from the attic to donate to the school's jumble sale, didn't you?"
Harry nodded without speaking.
"Nothing up here was disarranged before I talked to Dudley last night. But this is what I found when I came to pick out the items to donate."
Harry shook his head. "I haven't been in here for ages. Why do you think it was me?"
"It's obvious you decided to sneak up here last night and take what didn't belong to you before I could give it to Dudley."
"It belonged to my mum, didn't it?" Harry blurted out, before he could stop himself.
"So you admit it!" she crowed.
"No, I don't admit anything. I don't even know where you keep your keys at night." Probably locks them away with a different key, he thought.
"This room was still locked, and the key never left my possession."
Harry threw up his hands. "Then how could I have been in here?"
Aunt Petunia sneered. "We all know about your funny business, don't we?"
"There wasn't any funny business," Harry said through clenched teeth.
Aunt Petunia went almost as red as Uncle Vernon did when he was angry. "Obviously there was." She stretched out her arm, gesturing dramatically toward the doorway. "Go to your cupboard and stay there until you decide to give that necklace back."
"But I -- "
"Go!"
Harry went, stomping his feet so loudly on the stairs that the noise would probably win him another punishment. But right now, he didn't care.
He slammed the door of the cupboard and flopped across the narrow bed, which gave an ominous creak under his weight. Crossing his hands behind his head, he stared at the ceiling and thought hard. Funny business. That's what they called the strange things that seemed to happen around him, like the time Aunt Petunia cut his hair too short and it grew back overnight. And he always got in trouble for the weirdness, as though he were responsible somehow. In this case, however, it didn't even seem to him that there had been any "funny business" at all. At least,not the kind Aunt Petunia meant.
Dudley. It had to have been him, especially since whoever had taken the necklace had done it so clumsily. Harry could just picture his cousin blundering around up there looking for the necklace, like the big ox he was. And Dudley would be the one brave enough to dare sneaking around Aunt Petunia and pinching her keys -- to take them and replace them without her even noticing.
Of course, Harry couldn't quite figure out why Dudley would have done it, especially since Aunt Petunia was about to give him her "junk jewelry" for the jumble, anyway. Harry felt his eyes growing hot at the thought of his mother's necklace being called junk. He swallowed hard and stopped the tears that were threatening to form. No one had specifically said the necklace had belonged to his mum, but through scraps of conversation he'd overheard, he had found out her name was Lily, like the flower on the necklace. And the fact that Aunt Petunia had sent it to the attic as "junk," even though it looked expensive, made him doubly sure it had come from his mother.
Harry jumped to his feet, leaving the shape of his body pressed into the ancient mattress. Who knew why Dudley had taken the necklace? Who knew why Dudley did anything? Maybe he had just figured -- rightly -- that it would get Harry into trouble. It didn't really matter why. Harry wanted to get his hands on that necklace before Dudley disposed of it, if he hadn't already.
With the eyes and ears of experience, Harry listened at the door of the cupboard and determined that Aunt Petunia was still fussing about in the attic. He didn't hear any other sounds, so Dudley must still be at the football match with Uncle Vernon. Now was the time.
On silent feet, he shot up the stairs to Dudley's main bedroom. The door was wide open and obviously unoccupied, so he scooted inside. After wasting time for a moment trying to decide whether to close the door, he finally decided Aunt Petunia would be more likely to notice the closed door than to look inside and see Harry, providing he was careful. Staying as low to the floor as possible and trying to keep the bed between himself and the open doorway, he proceeded to go through Dudley's things. Which provided a lot of nasty surprises, the least of which were bits of moldy sandwiches and wormy, half-eaten candy bars stuffed inside books and videotape boxes.
The worst shock was finding the remote control for the new television stuck inside the toe of one of Dudley's enormous trainers. Bad enough having to stick his hand up in that smelly old thing, but when he realized what he had found, anger flooded through him. Only a couple of weeks ago, Harry had gone without supper for a week for supposedly taking the remote control and hiding it because he was angry that he wasn't allowed to watch the new telly. And Dudley was the one who had done it all along, obviously to get Harry into trouble. He probably hadn't stopped laughing over that one yet. And since it had gone so well, Harry thought bitterly, why not do it again with a necklace that he knew Harry was interested in?
"Whatcha think you're doing?" came a rough voice from the doorway.
Harry jumped, startled, and whirled to find his thug of a cousin glaring at him, his hulking form practically filling the doorway. The look on Dudley's face as he took a step toward Harry should have been terrifying, but the rage pumping through Harry completely drowned out the fear -- and reason. He launched himself at his cousin, regardless of the fact it was highly unlikely that a scrawny boy whose chief survival skill was staying out of the way would suddenly be able to beat up a bully twice his size.
"Where is it?" Harry screamed as he dashed around the bed.
Dudley was putting up his fists and preparing to meet him head on. But they never connected. Aunt Petunia suddenly appeared, stepping between them, her eyes flashing fire. Even through the red mist of Harry's anger, he had enough sense to stop dead in his tracks.
"How dare you!" she demanded. She threw her arms around Dudley, then stepped back to examine him, clucking and fussing as though he'd been attacked by a tiger. "Did he hurt you, sweetums?"
"No, but he was about to." As Aunt Petunia drew the foul boy into her arms, Dudley sniffed and grinned at Harry over her shoulder.
Knowing he wouldn't get to talk much before she cut him off, Harry said in a rush, "I was looking for the necklace. He took it to get me in trouble. I know he did." Realizing he was still holding the smelly trainer, he ripped the remote control out of it. "See? He's done it before. I never took this. It was Dudley all along."
In a gesture almost exactly like Aunt Petunia's from earlier, Dudley extended his arm and pointed at Harry. "That was never there before. He planted it so he could blame it on me."
"I know, sweetheart." Aunt Petunia crooned. "Of course that's what happened."
Harry frankly didn't care what Aunt Petunia thought. He turned to Dudley and demanded, "What did you do with my mum's necklace?"
"Your mum? She didn't have anything. Nothing worth keeping, anyway. Did she, Mummy?"
There was the briefest moment of silence as both Harry and Dudley waited for Aunt Petunia to voice her usual agreement. But her face went strangely blank, and then she straightened her shoulders and appeared to be pulling herself out of a dream. "You can just drop all this nonsense right now," she snapped at Harry. "I have the proof now." She opened her hand and there it was, the intricate silver lily on its delicate chain, its green jewel seeming to wink at him as though they shared a secret. Aunt Petunia was continuing, "I found this in your cupboard, right under your bed. Did you really think I wouldn't find it there?" She dangled the pendant through her fingers, seeming to taunt him with it.
His stomach gave a lurch, and he wanted the necklace so badly -- more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. So much that even though he held himself stiff and motionless, he was fighting to stop himself from jerking it out of Aunt Petunia's hand and running with it. And even as he was battling the urge, the dangling chain tightened and the little pendant, of its own accord, seemed to leap towards Harry.
Aunt Petunia gasped and dropped it as though it were on fire.
Dudley's eyes were bulging. "Mum, did you see that! The necklace, it -- "
"I dropped it, that's all." She jerked it up from the floor, her face looking flushed and flustered. Turning to Harry, she said, "I'm not putting this back in the attic. I'm putting it in my room, in with my other jewelry, at least for tonight. And I'm warning you, none of your funny business."
She started to stomp out of the room, then paused. "Didn't I tell you to stay in your cupboard?" As he nodded glumly, she finished, "Well, now you've earned yourself a night without supper, as well. Go to bed, right now."
Exhausted with hunger and self-pity, Harry dozed for a couple of hours, but when he woke in the middle of the night, he couldn't stop thinking about the necklace. And Dudley. Monday morning, Aunt Petunia would hand Dudley a bundle of old clothes and "junk jewelry" to take to school. Dudley would hold the delicate lily in his foul, sweaty hands. If all went well, it would be lumped in with all the other jumble donations and sold to some stranger. Of course, the necklace would probably never make it to school. Now that Dudley knew just how much it meant to Harry, he would no doubt drop it in the nearest dustbin.
That last thought propelled Harry up, out of bed, and out of the cupboard. He wasn't sure exactly what he was planning to do. Surely he wasn't thinking of stealing into Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon's bedroom, with them lying right there? Well, maybe he would figure something out by the time he got there. Although he would have to think fast. He was about to reach the top of the stairs.
Just as he did, he heard a noise from behind their door, a sort of soft thunk, like a fairly heavy object falling onto the thick carpet of the bedroom. Frozen, he waited, wondering if the noise meant that one or the other of them was awake and about to come through the door and catch him for about the tenth time in that one day.
But instead of hearing his aunt or uncle, he heard something stranger -- a sort of skittering noise, like the claws of a small animal scraping against the inside of the bedroom door. Then, in the dim light from the street lamp, he saw a glimmer of something peeking under the doorway. A glint of silver, a tiny green jewel flashing at him like an eye.
His mouth fell open as first the lily-shaped pendant, then the chain started to inch under the doorway, winding its way toward him like a snake. He took a step backwards, stumbling and almost falling down the stairway.
And then the door did jerk open, and the hallway flooded with light. Aunt Petunia stood in the doorway, her hand frozen on the hall light switch as she gaped at the necklace, still inching its way slowly, slowly across the floor toward Harry.
"Petunia, darling?" came Uncle Vernon's sleepy voice from the still-dark bedroom. "Is anything the matter?"
"Oh no, no. Everything's fine, dear. Go back to sleep." Her trance broken, she grabbed for the door handle and pulled the door shut, so that she and Harry were alone in the hall.
The necklace lay on the floor between them. In the bright light from the electric bulb, its weird movement from a moment before seemed like a dream. It just lay there, like any other piece of junk would, somehow looking duller now. Harry felt his throat tightening and wondered if it had all been a dream.
Aunt Petunia bent down and touched the necklace -- gingerly, at first, then grabbing it firmly and straightening up. She studied Harry for a moment, her lips tight. "This has to stop, Harry. Immediately."
"I don't know what you're talking about. I didn't --"
"Stop it."
He stopped. Something in her voice sounded different.
She took a deep breath. "I know what you think, but this necklace did not belong to your mother."
She seemed to be having trouble choking out the words, which Harry could understand. He tried to remember her ever talking directly to him about his parents.
"The necklace has always belonged to me. However, your mother did give it to me." Now her voice took on a really strange tone, with a softness to it that Harry had never heard before. Well, not when she was talking to him, anyway. "I had no intention whatsoever of giving it to a jumble sale. Do you understand?"
He didn't, but like a robot, he nodded.
"I'm locking it up in my jewelry box." Her mouth twisted into a grimace. "Assuming Vernon can glue the box back together after it leapt onto the floor and broke awhile ago. So I'll expect there to be no more funny business about this necklace, do you understand?"
Again Harry nodded.
For a moment after she went back into the bedroom, Harry just stood there. But finally, he went back to bed, somehow feeling better. At least the necklace was going to stay here. It would be safe, and he would know where it was. But regardless of what he had said to Aunt Petunia, he didn't understand.
He didn't understand at all.