“Okay,” said Peter. “So what’s my job?”
“You’re the ADM—assistant distribution manager,” said Wally.
Peter was happy.
The following day Josh himself turned in his cartoon, and Wally took Peter with him to Oldakers’Bookstore. He didn’t tell Peter why he was going, though. He said they were going to look at comic books, but Wally wondered whether he would hear the thumps and scrapes and scratchings coming from the cellar, as he had before. And, if he did, whether he could figure out what they were. And whether Mike Oldaker could tell him now what it was all about.
“How are you doing, Wally?” Mike asked when the two boys walked through the door.
“Okay,” said Wally, alert for the slightest noise coming from below.
There was a story hour going on for younger children, however, and they were all hooting and laughing at the tale, which made softer sounds impossible to hear. While Peter went over to listen to the story, Wally moved slowly down the aisles, looking through books on survival and adventure.
Mike must have known that Wally particularly liked nonfiction. “We’ve got a new book in on early natives of North America, Wally,” he said. “And another one, on the top shelf there, on whales. Both of them are good.”
Well, maybe, thought Wally. But what about a book on ghosts of North America? That would be more like it. What about a story of the haunted bookstores of West Virginia? About owners who kept bones beneath the floorboards?
“By the way,” Mike went on. “Two other boys from your school were in here yesterday. They said they’re going to put out a newspaper too. Calling it the OldTimes Tribune. Just thought you’d like to know you’ve got some competition. Haven’t heard of anyone else doing a paper, though.”
“Are you going to keep a stack of their papers here too?” Wally asked.
“Sure. Why not? As long as they do a good job.” Then Mike winked. “Don’t worry,” he said in a low voice. “Your paper will still get the scoop when it’s time.”
But when would it be time? Wally wanted to ask.
Story hour was over, and the noisy children were spreading out all over the store. Peter came looking for Wally, and they browsed through the comic books, hunting for Peter’s favorites.
When most of the other children had left and the bookstore was quiet again, Wally listened, and sure enough, he heard a faint scratching and clawing from below.
He looked at Peter to see whether he had noticed. Peter had his nose buried in a book.
I know something else is down there, and it’s not just bones, Wally told himself as they left the store and started for home. What if Mike was just feeding him a story—making him think that he’d tell Wally the secret when the time was right, and it turned out that the time would never be right? That he’d never planned to give their newspaper, or any other newspaper, “the scoop”? That when the secret did get out, it would be horrible, and it would also be too late?
Wally didn’t tell his brothers this, of course. He had a different sort of news for them. “There’s another history newspaper now called the Old Times Tribune” he said. “Two guys from our school, Mike said.”
Jake thought it over. “Well, it’s no skin off our nose,” he said. “There could be a dozen newspapers for all we care. We just have to make sure ours is the best.”
“Why?” asked Wally
“Why? Because!” said Jake, as though that were the answer. With Jake, everything had to be a contest. There had to be a winner. And the only possible winner, as far as Jake was concerned, was Jake Hatford.
Wally wanted to tell him not to worry, because they were going to get a big scoop. They were going to get a story that not even the Buckman Bugle would report first. But he couldn’t say a word. About Mike Oldaker. About the scratching and clawing. About the bones in the cellar. Not a word.
Ten
Ghostly Gray
I found one!”
Beth jumped off the bike, dropped it on the grass, and ran over to where Caroline and Eddie were taking turns on the rope swing. The large beech tree in the front yard provided a cool resting place between turns.
“One what?” asked Eddie.
“An old haunted house for my story!” said Beth. “Come and see. It’s just on the other side of the business district.”
Beth had been disappointed in her search for a haunted house. Everyone she had talked to seemed to know of some place that was haunted, but none of those places looked spooky enough, Beth had told her sisters. What was spooky about a bank building, a bookstore, a library, a small brick house? All it took, it seemed, for a place to be called haunted was for someone to die there at one time or another. That hardly made it haunted. But now she’d found one.
“It’s too hot to look at houses now, Beth, and it’s getting hotter,” said Eddie. “Wait till the sun goes down. We’ll walk over after dinner.”
“All right. I’m taking my camera, too. I’d love to get a really spooky picture. Will you put it on the front page?”
“Depends,” said Eddie. “I want to read your story first. Did someone tell you a story about a ghost in that house or something?”
“No, but I’m working on it,” said Beth.
“Well, make sure the house is old. This is supposed to be a newspaper about houses that are historical, not haunted. But of course, if they could be both …”
The girls went over to sit on the porch steps.
“Let’s figure out what we have for the newspaper so far,” Eddie continued. “I’m doing a story on the swinging bridges of Buckman; you’re doing old houses, Beth; Caroline’s doing the Bessie-Tessie Crane story; Jake’s writing up an old college football game; and Josh is doing a cartoon about what Buckman was like before air-conditioning. We’re going to need more, you know, if we expect to fill up three issues.”
“I know!” said Caroline. “I could do a story on the first theater in Buckman, and then tell how a future actress is living here right this very minute!”
“You, of course. Yeah, right,” said Eddie.
“Really, Eddie! I could do a good job with it! We could tie in past and present and future, all in the same article!” Sometimes Caroline was so precocious she surprised even herself.
“Well, go ahead and write it, Caroline, but I won’t promise to print it. Let’s see how it turns out.”
“Eddie!” Mrs. Malloy called from inside. “Jake’s on the phone.”
The girls scrambled up and went indoors. All three listened in.
“Just thought you’d like to know we’ve got some competition,” Jake said. “Wally was at the bookstore and found out that some other guys are doing a newspaper. They’re calling it the Old Times Tribune.”
“So?” said Eddie. “Maybe everybody in the whole class will do newspapers. What do we care?”
Caroline and Beth grinned at each other. The reason Jake cared was that everything he did had to be a contest.
“Listen,” Eddie went on. “Forget the other newspaper. I read your write-up of the football game, and it’s pretty good. You guys want to go with us to see a haunted house after dinner? Beth’s doing a story on old houses of Buckman and she thinks she’s found one that’s haunted.”
“How would you know whether it’s haunted or not?” Jake asked.
“I don’t know. I guess that’s up to Beth. You want to go or not?”
“Yeah, we’ll go.”
“Meet us at the drugstore at eight,” Eddie said.
Caroline had found a picture of the actress Shirley Temple. She had dimples and very curly hair, and she was wearing a necklace of tiny stones. Caroline put on a necklace, unfastened her ponytail, and tried to twist her long hair into curls. She stuck a finger in each cheek to see how she would look with dimples. She didn’t look much like Shirley.
“Caroline, are you coming or not?” Beth called from the front hall.
The haunted house! Caroline put down her brush and clattered downstairs. She wasn’t trying
to look like Shirley Temple, exactly. She was just trying to figure out what helped make an aura. Dimples didn’t seem to help.
“So what are you all fixed up for?” Eddie asked, noticing Caroline’s attempt at curls. “Trying to make yourself look good for Walll-ly?”
“Bleagh!” said Caroline, pretending to throw up.
“Josh? Jake?” Eddie teased. “Or is it Peter?”
“A house won’t care how you look, Caroline,” said Beth.
“None of the above,” said Caroline. “I was just trying on a new look.”
At eight o’clock, the three girls walked up the sidewalk to the drugstore, where the four boys were waiting. Peter was leaping over cracks in the sidewalk, first one way, then the other. From a distance he looked like a jumping frog.
“Wally said I could come too,” Peter told them. “I’m his assistant.”
“Good for you,” said Eddie.
It seemed strange to be going somewhere with the Hatfords, Caroline thought as they all crowded onto the sidewalk and started toward the other end of town.
“The house is perfect!” Beth was saying. “It looks spooky even in the morning in the bright sun.”
“So how do you know it’s haunted?” asked Wally
“I’ve talked with the family next door,” said Beth. “They don’t know who the house belongs to. They’ve never seen anyone go in or out. It’s obviously abandoned, so it might be haunted.”
Caroline could understand her sister’s logic. When Beth got going, she had a wild imagination too, and if there wasn’t a story to go along with that house, she’d make one!
“Wow!” said Peter.
“The grass is unmowed, the windows are dirty! I’ve got fast film in my camera, and hope I can get a good picture,” Beth said. “It sure looks a lot more haunted than some of the other stuff people told me about.”
“ What other stuff?” asked Wally.
“The library, the bank building, the bookstore …,” said Beth.
“The bookstore?” Wally said, turning in her direction.
“Don’t get your pants in an uproar,” said Beth. “Some people think that almost anything over fifty years old around here is haunted.”
“But how do you know it’s really old?” asked Eddie.
“You can tell just by looking. The neighbors said it’s the architecture of the late 1890s,” said Beth.
They crossed at the corner, passed the dry cleaners, and marched on toward the supermart.
“What do you suppose the Old Times Tribune is going to write about?” asked Josh. “I hope they don’t try to steal any of our ideas.”
“They won’t even know any of our ideas, because we’re not going to tell them,” said Jake.
The sun was low, but the air didn’t seem that much cooler. It was humid, and there wasn’t even a wisp of a breeze. Caroline felt a thin trickle of perspiration roll down the middle of her back.
“Okay, now,” Beth said finally, when they had gone almost a mile. “It’s on the next block, the house at the very end.”
The sky was turning purple and gray when the house loomed up before them. It, too, was gray, and the Hatfords and the Malloys simply stood and stared.
This was a part of town that even Jake and Josh didn’t know very well. The houses here were farther apart than they were on the other side of the business district—and old. Definitely old.
The big house with the peeling gray paint sat back from the street. One of the shutters had come loose and hung at an angle. The fence in front was falling down, and old newspapers and leaves had blown up against the remaining posts. No car was parked in the driveway. No light came from any of the windows.
“You’re sure no one is there?” said Josh.
“See for yourself! It’s deserted!” said Beth.
Josh opened the gate. “Let’s go take a look,” he said.
It was a corner house, so there was open space on one side of it. Beth led the way up the crumbling walk to the porch.
“Be careful,” she warned, testing with her foot. “One of these boards is loose.”
The porch creaked as the seven moved over to a window. Caroline could see some furniture inside. A tall upright piano. A worn couch. An old-fashioned lamp. An armchair.
“It looks like one day they all disappeared and left things just the way they were,” said Eddie.
Back down the steps they went so that Beth could take a picture in the fading light, and then they trooped around back. There were cobwebs and more leaves on the back porch, and mice had made a nest in a flowerpot.
“So where does the ghost come in, Beth?” asked Wally “Has anyone seen it yet?”
“I’m still working on that,” said Beth. “But it wouldn’t surprise me if the family moved away because of it. I mean, why else would a family move and not take anything? Why else wouldn’t they tell their neighbors goodbye? If we move back to Ohio, we’ll say goodbye.”
“Beth, you’ve got to have more proof than that!” Eddie said. “You can’t just say there’s a ghost because it wouldn’t surprise you if there was one! Come on. We’d better go.”
Night was coming on fast, as it always did in West Virginia. Once the sun went down behind the hills, it was as though the mountains had swallowed it up. In a little while it would be dark.
They walked around to the front again and started for the gate, but Caroline wanted one more look at the old piano and chair, at the worn velvet couch with a picture above it. She ran up on the front porch and over to the window.
But this time, when she looked inside, she screamed. Because, for just a moment, she saw the ghostly figure of a young girl looking back.
Eleven
Letter to Georgia
Dear Bill (and Danny and Steve and Tony and Doug):
What are you guys doing down there in Georgia anyway that’s so important you can’t move back here till September? I thought that once school was out, you couldn’t wait to get back to West Virginia. You haven’t gone and fallen in love with any Georgia peaches, have you?
So do you know how I’m spending July? I’m a distributor, that’s what. Jake and Josh get credit toward their summer reading list if they put out three issues of a newspaper. It has to be about historical Buckman, and somehow Peter and I got roped into helping out. As if that’s not bad enough, Jake—Jake!—asked the Malloy girls to go in on it with us. Big mistake. Eddie named herself editor in chief, of course, so Jake tricked her and named the paper the Hatford Herald before she knew anything about it. Expect major explosions in the upper atmosphere.
Tonight we went to see a house that Beth thinks is haunted, and just before we left, Caroline says she saw the ghost of a girl looking back at her. Is she crazy or is she nuts? Or… are there things here in Buckman we never knew about?
Mr. Malloy’s gone to Ohio to see if he wants his old job back as football coach. He’d better take it, because they’ve got to be out of your house by the time you guys come back.
It can’t be too soon for me.
Wally (and Jake and Josh and Peter)
P.S. Don’t ever read a book called A Ghost’s Revenge. Don’t ever watch a movie called The Fog People. Not unless you want to be scared out of your socks and underwear!
Twelve
Caroline Pickford
Caroline lay on her bed, a booklet propped up on her stomach. She was learning all sorts of things about auras. The booklet had a drawing of a woman’s head with a sort of halo around it.
An arrow led from the space inside the halo to some print off to one side.
Innermost aura, it read. Natural protection force field.
Beyond the first halo was another. An arrow to the space under that halo pointed to the words Midsection aura: recent emotions and current well-being.
The space beneath a third halo was labeled Early memories and past lives. Each of these three sections had colors, the booklet said. With practice, a person could learn to interpret another person’s mood by t
he color of his aura, and thereby learn to get along better with those around him.
Caroline was not sure she believed in past lives, but if she’d had one, she was sure she had been an actress.
“Caroline!” came Eddie’s voice from below. “Are you going to help out on this newspaper or not?”
Eddie sure was getting crabby lately, Caroline thought. Why did she want to be editor in chief anyway? Just so she could boss everyone around?
“Coming!” Caroline called.
She got up off her bed and went downstairs. The dining room had been transformed into a newspaper office. The long table was covered with notebooks and paper and pencils and scissors. Eddie had taped a piece of paper to the wall, and on it she had written: first issue, July 16; second issue, July 23; third issue, July 30.
“So what do you want me to do?” Caroline asked.
“We need someone to go to the library and get an early map of the city. If this is going to be a historical newspaper, we should have an old map or drawing or sketch or something to put in the paper,” Eddie told her.
“Okay, I’ll go,” said Caroline, noting that Beth was hard at work on her haunted house story.
“Make a copy of the downtown area of any old map you can find and I’ll scan it into our paper,” said Eddie. “And while you’re at it, think of something else you can write about. I’ve got your Tessie and Bessie Crane story, but we still need more. Go ahead and do that story about the first theater in Buckman if you want. We’re really hurting for material here.”
“The article about the first theater in Buckman and the aspiring young actress who happens to be living here right now?” Caroline asked eagerly.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah—just make sure that ninety percent of the article is about the theater, Caroline, and only ten percent is about you.”
At last! thought Caroline. Publicity! The first thing an actress needs, besides talent. She got her book bag and packed paper, pen, paste, scissors, colored pencils, and a heap of photographs of herself so that she could choose the best one.